Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [8]
“And templating me was just another exercise? Building me into your machinery was just a way to practice. I’m just raw material.”
“It’s not you, Di,” he said, wishing that he could make her understand that he really meant it. “It’s not your shadow, certainly not your soul. It’s just an appearance. When I use it in my work I’m not using you.”
“Oh no?” she said, giving the helmet she’d been using one last smack with the white knuckles of her right hand. “When you put your suit of armor on and stick your head into one of those black holes, you leave this world way behind. When you’re there—and you sure as hell aren’t here very often—the only contact you have with me is with my appearance, and what you do to that appearance is what you do to me. When you put my image through the kind of motions you’re incorporating into that sleazy fantasy it’s me you’re doing it to, and no one else.”
“When it’s finished,” Damon said doggedly, “it won’t look or feel anything like you. Would you rather I paid a copyright fee to reproduce some shareware whore? Would you rather I sealed myself away for hours on end with a set of supersnoopers and a hired model? By your reckoning, that would be another woman, wouldn’t it? Or am I supposed to restrict myself to the design and decoration of cells for VE monasteries?”
“I’d rather you spent more time with the real me,” she told him. “I’d rather you lived in the actual world instead of devoting yourself to substitutes. I never realized that giving up fighting meant giving up life.”
“You had no right to put the hood on,” Damon told her coldly. “I can’t work properly if I feel that you’re looking over my shoulder all the time. That’s worse than knowing that I might have to duck whenever I come through the door because you might be waiting for me with a deadly weapon.”
“It’s only a kitchen knife. At the worst it would have put your eye out.”
“I can’t afford to take a fortnight off work while I grow a new eye—and I don’t find experiences like that amusing or instructive.”
“You were always too much of a coward to be a first-rate fighter,” she told him, trying hard to wither him with her scorn. “You switched to the technical side of the business because you couldn’t take the cuts anymore.”
Damon had never been one of the reckless fighters who threw themselves into the part with all the flamboyance and devil-may-care they could muster, thinking that the tapes would make them look like real heroes. He had always fought to win with the minimum of effort and the minimum of personal injury—and in his opinion, it had always worked to the benefit of the tapes rather than to their detriment. Even the idiots who liked to consume the tapes raw, because it made the fights seem “more real,” had appreciated his efficiency more than the blatant showmanship of his rivals.
Because most of his opponents hadn’t cared much about skill or sensible self-preservation Damon had won thirty-nine out of his forty-three fights and had remained unbeaten for the last eighteen months of his career. He didn’t consider that to be evidence of stupidity or stubbornness—and he’d switched to fulltime tape doctoring because it was more challenging and more interesting than carving people up, not because he’d gone soft.
Unfortunately, the new business wasn’t more challenging or more interesting for Diana. Watching a VE designer working inside a hood wasn’t an engaging spectator sport.
“If you’re hankering after the sound and fury of the streets,” Damon said tiredly, “you know where they are.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but it startled her. Her fists unclenched briefly as she absorbed the import of it. She knew him well enough to read his tone of voice. She knew that he meant it, this time.
“Is that what you want?” she said, to make sure. Her palms were bleeding; he could see both ragged lines of cuts now