“I thought you’d never ask,” said Penny haughtily.
She linked her arm with his and led him back through the gold columns. The doors closed behind them, shutting off the music and the sound of servants chattering as soon as their masters’ backs were turned.
The room beyond the doors was a circular foyer, not as large as the entrance hall but huge in its own right. The floor was paved with marble. Around the walls roses had been trained into secluded arbors. Light flooded through high windows.
Rolls’ bright sandals whisked on the stone as he led his hostess toward the transparent lift across the room.
Penny glanced down at herself. “How do you like this?” she asked critically.
Rolls paused and kissed her, resting his left hand on her shoulder and his right, caressingly, in the small of her back. In this form, Penny was supple and tall enough that her head reached his chin when they both stood erect.
“Now?” she said, urgent, questioning, hopeful. “Or in the roses?”
She nodded. As she did so, a pair of servants entered the foyer through a door hidden in the foliage, saw their mistress and her guest, and bolted back out of sight.
“No,” Rolls said. He didn’t have to fake the interest in his voice. “I have an idea.”
He led her by the hand to the lift tube, their strides lengthening with each step.
The lift appeared to be an empty three-meter shaft until Rolls and Penny stood on it. The air beneath their feet hardened and they began to rise. A foreshortened figure in pink livery walked across the foyer, unaware of their rising presence.
Penny stroked Rolls’ bulging groin. “I thought perhaps . . . ,” she said, and as she spoke the figure in the air beside Rolls was shorter, slender, and nude except for the necklace.
“Or even—something unusual?” and she was fat, though her breasts were heavy rather than pendulous. Her hair was black for a moment, then blond, and finally a rich chestnut. She cocked an eyebrow at Rolls.
The lift rose through the ceiling of the foyer and into the shaft of the central tower. Individual rooms opened onto a hall which circled the shaft.
There were railings here. The lift was for Penny, her peers, and those whom her whim chose. It was a straight drop to marble for any ordinary human servant who stepped into the shaft.
Rolls leaned forward and kissed one of the dark nipples, letting it swell under his tongue. “No,” he said as he straightened, “I don’t think quite . . .”
Penny licked her lips. She let her body tremble through changes, one after the other, and as she did so her fingers reached under the waistband of Rolls’ briefs.
The lift had risen past the servants’ quarters, though a spiral staircase circled the shaft. The floors at this height were mostly open rooms whose furnishings were decorated with flounces and lace. Balconies bulged from the other walls.
“What I would like,” Rolls said carefully, “is you, Penny.”
They glided to a halt at the top of the tower. The dome was several times the diameter of the spire that supported it. Its floor area was divided into four suites, each with its own door off the lift shaft.
“Well, of course!” Penny said, throwing open a door into a huge bedroom furnished mostly in white fur. The outer wall was crystal and brilliant in the sunlight.
She looked at her companion in sudden surmise. “Oh . . .” she said. “This old thing?”
The woman before Rolls was suddenly a short, slightly overweight nineteen-year-old, with curly blond hair and pale areolae.
Rolls took Penny’s left breast in his hand and kissed her hard on the lips. He stepped back and pulled down his briefs.
“You,” he said. He smiled broadly. “On the balcony. But you, not the necklace.”
Penny’s tongue touched her lips again. Her hands rose and paused around the almost invisibly fine filament that supported the jewel that was all she now wore. Then she lifted it off in a convulsive motion and tossed it toward a dresser whose mirror and cosmetics were needless frills here—like most of this palace, like most of their lives, all of them.