IN WHICH LAURA DEPARTS AND
FIONA MAKES A REQUEST
“I want you to know,
darling, that I’m leaving you for another sex robot—and she’s twice
the man you’ll ever be,” Laura explained as she flounced over to
the front door, wafting an alluring aroma of mineral oil behind
her.
Our arguments always
began like that: this one was following the script perfectly. I
followed her into the hall, unsure precisely what cue I’d missed
this time. “Laura—”
She stopped abruptly,
a faint whine coming from her ornately sculpted left knee. “I’m
leaving,” she told me, deliberately pitching her voice in a modish
mechanical monotone. “You can’t stop me. You’re not paying my
maintenance. I’m a free woman, and I don’t have to put up with your
moods!”
The hell of it is,
she was right. I’d been neglecting her lately, being overly
preoccupied with my next autocremation attempt. “I’m terribly
sorry,” I said. “But can we talk about this later? You don’t have
to walk out right this instant—”
“There’s nothing to
talk about.” She jerked into motion again, reaching for the door
handle. “You’ve been ignoring me for months, darling: I’m sick of
trying to get through to you! You said last time that you’d try not
to be so distant, but look how that turned out.” She sighed and
froze the pose for a moment, the personification of glittering
mechanistic melodrama. “You didn’t mean it. I’m sick of waiting for
you, Ralph! If you really loved me, you’d face up to the fact that
you’re an obsessive-compulsive, and get your wetware fixed so that
you could pay me the attention I deserve. Until then, I’m out of
here!”
The door opened. She
spun on one chromed stiletto heel and swept out of my life in a
swish of antique Givenchy and ozone.
“Dash it all, not
again!” I leaned my forehead against the wall. “Why now, of all
times?” Picking a fight then leaving me right before a drop was one
of her least endearing habits. This was the fifth time. She usually
came back right afterward, when she was loose and lubed from
witnessing me scrawl my butchness across the sky, but it never
failed to make me feel like an absolute bounder at the time; it’s a
low blow to strike a cove right before he tries to drill a hole in
the desert at Mach 25, what? But you can’t take femmes for granted,
whether they be squish or clankie, and
her accusation wasn’t, I am bound to admit, entirely
baseless.
I wandered into the
parlor and stood between the gently rusting ancestral space suits,
overcome by an unpleasant sense of aimless tension. I couldn’t
decide whether I should go back to the simulator and practice my
thermal curves again—balancing on a swaying meter-wide slab of
ablative foam in the variable dynamic forces of atmospheric
reentry, a searing blowtorch flare of hot plasma roaring past bare
centimeters beyond my helmet—or get steaming drunk. And I hate
dilemmas; there’s something terribly non-U about having to actually
think about things.
You can never get in
too much practice before a freestyle competition, and I had seen
enough clowns drill a scorched hole in the desert that I was under
no illusions about my own invincibility, especially as this race
was being held under mortal jeopardy rules. On the other hand,
Laura’s walkout had left me feeling unhinged and unbalanced, and
I’m never able to concentrate effectively in that state. Maybe a
long, hot bath and a bottle of sake would get me over it so I could
practice later; but tonight was the predrop competitors’ dinner.
The club prefers members to get their crashing and burning done
before the race—something to do with minimizing our third-party
insurance premium, I gather—so it’s fried snacks all around, then a
serving of rare sirloin, and barely a drop of the old firewater all
night. So I was perched on the horns of an acute dilemma—to tipple
or topple as it were—when the room phone cleared its throat
obtrusively.
“Ralph? Ralphie? Are
you alright?”
I didn’t need the
screen to tell me it was Fiona, my half-sister. Typical of her to
call at a time like this. “Yes,” I said wearily.
“You don’t sound it!”
she said brightly. Fi thinks that negative emotions are an
indicator of felonious intent.
“Laura just walked
out on me again, and I’ve got a drop coming up tomorrow,” I
moaned.
“Oh, Ralphie, stop
angsting! She’ll be back in a week when she’s run the script. You
worry too much about her; she can look after herself. I was calling
to ask, are you going to be around next week? I’ve been invited to
a party Geraldine Ho is throwing for the downhill cross-country
skiing season on Olympus Mons, but my house-sitter phoned in
pregnant unexpectedly and my herpetologist is having another sex
change, so I was just hoping you’d be able to look after Jeremy for
me while I’m gone, just for a couple of days or maybe a week or
two—”
Jeremy was Fiona’s
pet dwarf mammoth, an orange-brown knee-high bundle of hairy
malice. Last time I looked after Jeremy, he puked in my bed—under
the comforter—while Laura and I were hosting a formal orgy for the
Tsarevitch of Ceres, who was traveling incognito to the inner
system because of some boring edict by the Orthodox Patriarch
condemning the fleshpits of Venus. Then there’s the time Jeremy got
at the port, then went on the rampage and ate Cousin Branwyn’s
favorite skirt when we took him to Landsdown Palace for a weekend
with Fuffy Morgan, even though we’d locked him in one of the old
guard towers with a supply of whatever it is that dwarf mammoths
are supposed to eat. You really can’t take him anywhere—he’s a
revolting beast. Not to mention an alcoholic one.
“Must I?” I asked.
“Don’t whine!” Fi
said brightly. “Nobody will ever take you seriously if you whine,
Ralphie. Anyway, you owe me a favor. Several favors, actually. If I
hadn’t covered up for you that time when Boris Oblomov and you got
drunk and took Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s yacht out for a spin
around the moon without checking the antimatter reserve in the
starboard gravity polarizer . . .”
“Yes, Fi,” I said
wearily, when she finally let me get a word in edgewise. “I
surrender. I’ll take Jeremy. But I don’t promise I’ll be able to
look after him if I die on the drop. You realize it’s under
mortal-jeopardy rules? And I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to
protect him from Laura if she shows up again running that
bestiality mod your idiot pal Larry installed on her when she was
high on pink noise that time—”
“That’s enough about
Larry,” Fi said in a voice like liquid helium. “You know I’m not
walking out with him anymore. You’ll look after Jeremy for two
weeks, and that’s enough for me. He’s been a little sulky lately,
but I’m sure you’d know all about that.
I’ll make sure he’s backed up first, then I’ll drop him off on my
way to Sao Paolo skyport, right?”
“What ho,” I said
dispiritedly, and put the phone down. Then I snapped my fingers for
a chair, sat down, and held my head in my hands for a while. My
sister was making a backup of her mammoth’s twisted little psyche
to ensure Jeremy stayed available for future torments: nevertheless
she wouldn’t forgive me if I killed the brute. Femmes! U or non-U,
they’re equally annoying. The chair whimpered unhappily as it
massaged my tensed-up spine and shoulders, but there was no
escaping the fact that I was stressed-out. Tomorrow was clearly
going to be one of those days: and I hadn’t even scheduled the
traditional predrop drink with the boys yet . . .