The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [68]
Ramona stares at me, until I can feel her inside my head, watching herself through my glamour-ensnared eyes. “Okay, monkey-boy: you want it, you got it.” Her voice is flat and hard. “Just remember, you asked for it.”
She lets go of the anchor of the glamour she’s been clinging on to. The constant repulsive force emanating from the concrete countermeasure emplacement we’re standing on blows it away, like a hat in a hurricane—and I see Ramona as she truly is. Which gives me two very big surprises.
I gasp. I can’t help myself. “You’re one of them!” I meet her clear emerald gaze. And, quietly: “Wow.”
Ramona says nothing, but one perfect nostril flares minutely. Her skin has a faint silvery iridescent sheen to it, like the scales of a fish; her hair is long and green as glass, framing a face with higher cheekbones and a wider mouth, rising from an inhumanly perfect long neck, the skin broken by two rows of slits above her clavicle. Her breasts are smaller, not much larger than her nipples, and two tinier ones adorn her rib cage beneath them. She raises her right hand and spreads her fingers, revealing the delicate tracery of webbing. “So what do you think of me now, monkey-boy?”
I swallow. She’s like a sculpture in quicksilver, created by inhuman sea-dwelling aliens who have taken the essence of human female beauty and customized it to meet their need for an artificial go-between who can walk among the lumpen savages of the arid continental surfaces. “I’ve met half—sorry, the sea-born—before. At Dunwich. But not like, uh, you. Uh. You’re different.” I goggle at her, my mouth open like a fish. Different is an understatement and a half. The glamour she customarily wears doesn’t make her look unnaturally beautiful to human eyes; rather, it conceals the more exotic aspects of her physiognomy. Strip it away and she’s devastating, as unlike the weak-chinned followers of St. Monkfish as it’s possible to imagine.
“So you’ve met the country cousins.” Her cheek twitches. “Yes, I can understand your surprise.” She stares at me, and I’m not sure whether she’s disappointed or surprised. “So do you still think I’m a monster?”
“I think you’re a—” I grind to a stop, before I can push my foot any further down my throat. “Um.” An inkling comes to me. “Let me guess. Your people. Go-betweens, like the colony at Dunwich. And you were given to the BC and they dropped the, your daemon on you to control you. Am I right?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny anything to do with my employers,” she says with the flat-voiced emptiness of a necromancer’s answering machine, before snapping back into focus: “My folks lived off Baja California. That’s where I grew up.” For a moment her eyes overflow with a sense of loss. “The Deep Ones did . . . well, they did what they did at Dunwich. My folks have been go-betweens for generations, able to pass as human and visit the depths. But we’re not really at home among either species. We’re constructs, Bob. And now you know why I use the glamour!” she adds harshly. “There’s no need for flattery. I know damn well what I look like to you people.”
You people: Ouch! “You’re not a monster. Exotic, yes.” I can’t look away from her. I try to pull my eyes away from those perfect breasts and I keep looking down and there’s another pair—“It just takes a little getting used to. But I don’t mind, not really. I’ve already gotten over it.” Down in the Laundry compound at Dunwich they’ve got a technical term for human employees who start spending too much time skinny-dipping with a snorkel: fish-fuckers. I’ve never really seen the attraction before, but with Ramona it’s blindingly obvious. “You’re as attractive without the glamour as with it. Maybe more so.”
“You’re just saying that to fuck with my head.” I can taste her bitter amusement. “Admit it!”
“Nope.” I take a deep breath and duck under the water, then kick off towards