He looked over at Mickey. “I’ve heard stories like that, I admit.”
“Me too,” she admitted, “but I don’t know how much to believe. It seems like the company would crack down if it was as bad as Lisa says.”
“The company,” Lisa sniffed. “These old farts just sit around, sythesizing what they can’t grow or build, and let the reports come in and speak for themselves. They know Watanabe’s off her rocker, but they also know she’s a genius who performs for them when they need it and she strokes ’em just right and they let her go. They’ll regret it one of these days. Remember, Watanabe’s the one who broke the two-station computer operating requirement on the 7240. Now she’s trying to lure the best idle computer and mathematical minds to her while building her little religious cult at the same time. If we don’t watch it, we’re gonna wake up one day and find ourselves entirely living in her crazy universe.”
Haller felt a little uneasy continuing this right now. “Well, we’ll leave that for now, huh? I think Ms.—I never did get your name—looks more than capable of making up her own mind intelligently.”
“It’s Kubioshi,” she told him, “but please call me Mickey. Besides, the rumors on why we’re here may redirect us all anyway.”
She seemed pleased by his change of direction and rescue from the diatribe. “Then it’s Toby to you too. You’ve heard what this is all about?”
“Reorganization of the whole world,” Lisa put in. “That’s what it’s about. Putting this place less on a laboratory and more on a home-sweet-home basis. Making best use of its best people. That’s why we three are here.”
“I like the implications of that,” Haller noted. “I kind of suspected a reorganization would be imposed, since two thirds of the technocrats have little to do anymore, but I figured I’d just get the word from on high. They still need landscape engineering, after all, if they want to finish the place.”
Mickey fixed those big, beautiful green eyes on him. “I don’t think they do want to finish it, Toby. At least not for some time. Most of the people here below the top ranks are landscapers. No, the word is that there are going to be several big new projects. Ones not specifically intended for other worldly development, but for here. I have been trying to get some idea of what everyone here has in common, but aside from the fact that we’re all fully certified interfacers on the 7800 series, I haven’t come up with a thing.”
He got a funny feeling all of a sudden. “All full 7800 interfacers? Hmmm. . . . Can I ask you both a question?”
They nodded.
“Ever spend any time in the void except going from here to there on Signals buses? I mean out for any length of time?”
Mickey’s eyes suddenly grew wide. “Oh …!” Lisa, however, did not get it and said as much, frowning.
“Have you ever gone with the flow?” he asked the historian.
Lisa’s expression showed her surprise and disgust at herself. “Sure! That’s it! We’re so damned security-conditioned, it never even occurred to me! We’re all Sensitives! If you are and you are, that’s got to be it!”
Toby looked at his watch. “It’s about when they start having dinner around here. I understand there are actually some good restaurants in this town, thanks to the rank. Care to continue this?”
“Nope—can’t,” Lisa responded. “I got to meet Ralph in—Christ! Half an hour!”
“Ralph?”
“Yeah—my husband, sport. Think I was too much of a bad-ass to land one?”
He chuckled. “He’s probably either a tiger or a mouse. You’d either need a real beast to keep you under control or somebody who’d be your slave.”
“He’s a tiger, believe me. Ask Mickey—she’s met him.”
“He’s pretty—intimidating,” she agreed. “His hobby is sumo wrestling.”
He tried to imagine sex between a-hundred-and-forty-plus kilos of sumo and the delicate Lisa and could not, but he did remember that sumos yelled a lot. “Any—kids?”
“One. Kid weighed four and a half kilos at birth. Damn near killed me. That’s why we haven’t had another yet. Lungs like a thunderstorm and strong as an ox too. Look—I got to go.”
He stood up with her, preparing to leave as well, but Mickey stopped him. “Please, Toby—you don’t have to go on my account. Please stay awhile—unless you have a wife to meet?”
He sat back down. “No. I never did find the right person. You?”
“Same here, I guess.”
“Glad you two could hit it off,” Lisa said to them both. “I’ll send you a bill for matchmaking services if it goes anywhere. Gotta go now though. ‘Bye!” And she was gone.
Toby looked over at the attractive young woman. “Well, the dinner invitation still stands.”
“I’ve had a curry house recommended to me, if you like that sort of thing.”
“Fine with me. There’s a Hindu communal farm just southeast of the capital in Luck that’s been a regular haunt of mine. I’ve gotten a real taste for it.”
“You ought to be stuck in a place that thinks monkey on a stick is a delicacy,” she responded. “Come on.”
There was a natural tendency on the part of both of them to be wary, not only because of being bitten in the past, but also simply as a reaction to Lisa’s matchmaking. But the fact was that they did hit it off rather well right away. They explored the town a little, finding several nice bars, some of which had dancing. He protested that he hadn’t danced in twenty years, but she promised she wouldn’t complain about being stepped on and that night, in fact, was the best time he’d had in recent memory.
They’d stayed away from the high joints, but both of them were high as they went back to their suites from the mixed drinks they’d had during the evening. She invited him in and fixed them both a nightcap, then sat down with him and did not resist when he put his arm around her.
The fact was, she reminded him a hell of a lot of Connie as she might have been, or could have been, if she’d just taken proper care of herself and let herself go a bit. He found himself telling Mickey about her, although he wasn’t sure why.
She listened, then asked, “Is that why you never married? You were in love with her, weren’t you? And you still blame yourself for what she did.”
The comment startled him. Guilt he had, but now, for the first time, he realized she was right. He had fallen in love with the crazy programmer, but with the job so complicated and so pressing and taking every single day and half the nights to complete in the face of one crisis after another, he’d just never been able to pursue it.
“I—I guess I did,” he admitted, not only to Mickey but to himself. “Maybe that’s at the heart of it. Maybe if I had just told her . . .”
Mickey shook her head. “It wouldn’t have done it, Toby. Your male ego’s a bit too big, I think. She didn’t do it for unrequited love. Not without making some move on you first. Particularly not after you’d fucked her brains out in Flux, if you’ll pardon me.”
He’d told her about that as well. It was part and parcel of it, after all. “Well, I still think that whether she loved me or not, I weaved a spell or cast a program that set her off.”
“That may be true, but you only set off what was waiting to detonate anyway. It would have, sooner or later. Would it shock you if I told you that I think I understand her completely? That there were times when I might have done the same thing as an alternative to slitting my wrists?”
“I had it, too, in the early days. So did a lot of men and women I knew and worked with. There were more suicides in the early days than you know. It was pretty well hushed up.”
“I never felt—”
“You were a workaholic giving birth to your own baby,” she said, cutting him off. “And in those years after it was all done and before they reactivated your section, you went out with the Signals boys and played in the void to keep from being bored out of your mind. You had the rank and assets to do that. Most of us didn’t.”
She sighed. “Me, I coped the way some other coped. I used my computer to rough out the edges, make me what I am today. Does that shock you?”
It surprised him, but didn’t shock him.
“Nothing really dramatic,” she told him. “I just took a build more like Lisa’s and put the curves in exactly right, and I shaved a whole lot off my height. I used to be tall and it seemed to really turn the guys I was most interested in off. I had a bunch of skintight outfits whipped up, had the supply computers get me some open-toe shoes with heels, put on some jewelry, cosmetics, and perfume, and I couldn’t keep ’em away with a stick, even the ones who knew who I was and what I’d done who’d never given me a glance before.” She looked suddenly very determined. “I gave those suckers the door too. It was crazy, but it worked. Daytimes I was still the boss and still working hard, but nights I’d allow myself to be taken out by all sorts of people and I really slept around. Funny thing was, I probably could have slept around with half those people without changing anything, but the new image made me more, well, adventurous. I can’t even explain why. I didn’t touch my brain at all.”
He looked at her. “Tell me—were your eyes green to begin with.”
She chuckled. “Yes, as a matter of fact, they were. Dad was of pure Japanese ancestry, but Mom, well, she was sort of Hawaii. Her dad had been a Swedish sailor, I think, who married a Samoan student in Hawaii and they both just stayed there. I always thought that Swedes had blue eyes and that brown eyes dominated, so maybe somebody was fooling around. I don’t know. But they’ve always been green.”
“Well, I’m New Zealand born and bred,” he told her.
“Old stock, as New Zealand goes—that’s anybody whose ancestors date from before the start of the twentieth century. British stock pretty well through. The past hundred and fifty years or so it’s been either high-tech or sheep for New Zealanders, and I’ve always hated the stupid woolly bastards.”
They laughed at that. Finally, she said, “You’ve got the meeting at ten hundred?”
He nodded. “Yeah. In—seven and a half hours. Bleah!”
“Want to stay over here tonight and we’ll both go over there together?”
“And I was going to ask if you believed in kissing on the first date.”
“I’m serious!”