Budayeen Nights (11 page)

Maryam laughed. “Everybody goes to the fair. Come on, I’ll take you.”

The woman waited while Maryam disappeared into the pavilion again with the breakfast things. She came back out a moment later. “We’re all set now,” she said gaily. “We can get to know each other while we walk.”

They continued around the lake until the woman saw a scattering of large, peaked tents of striped canvas, all with colorful pennants snapping in the breeze. She heard many people laughing and shouting; and the sound of axes biting wood, and metal ringing on metal. She could smell bread baking, and cinnamon buns, and lamb roasting on spits turning slowly over glowing coals. Her mouth began to water and she felt her excitement growing despite herself.

“I don’t have any money to spend,” she said.

“Money?” Maryam asked, laughing. “What is money?”

The woman spent the afternoon going from tent to tent, seeing the strange exhibits and miraculous entertainments. She sampled exotic foods and drank concoctions of unknown liquors. Now and then she remembered to be afraid. She looked over her shoulder, wondering when the pleasant face of this fantasy would fall away. “Marîd,” she called, “what are you doing?”

“Who are you calling?” asked Maryam.

“I’m not sure,” said the woman.

Maryam laughed, “hook over here,” she said, pulling on the woman’s sleeve, showing her a booth where a heavily muscled woman was shaping a disturbing collage from the claws, teeth, and eyes of lizards.

They listened to children playing strange music on instruments made from the carcasses of small animals, and then they watched several old women spin their own white hair into thread, and then weave it into napkins and scarves.

One of the toothless hags leered at Maryam and the woman
. “
Take,” she said in a gravelly voice.

“Thank you, grandmother,” said Maryam. She selected a pair of human-hair handkerchiefs.

The hours wore on, and at last the sun began to set. The moon rose as full as yestereve. “Is this going to go on all night?” the woman asked.

“All night and all day tomorrow,” said Maryam. “Forever.”

The woman shuddered.

From that moment she couldn’t shake a growing dread, a sense that she’d been lured to this place and abandoned. She remembered nothing of who she’d been before she’d awakened beside the lake, but she felt she’d been horribly tricked. She prayed to someone called Marîd. She wondered if that was God.

“Marîd,” she murmured fearfully, “I wish you’d just end this already.”

But Audran was not ready to end it. He watched as the woman and Maryam grew sleepy and found a large tent filled with comfortable cushions and sheets of satin and fine linen. They laid themselves down and slept.

In the morning the woman arose, dismayed to be still trapped at the eternal fair. Maryam found them a good breakfast of sausage, fried bread, broiled tomatoes, and hot tea. Maryam’s enthusiasm was undiminished, and she led the woman toward still more disquieting entertainments. The woman, however, felt only a crazily mounting dread.

“You’ve had me here for two days, Marîd,” she pleaded. “Please kill me and let me go.” Audran gave her no sign, no answer.

They passed the third day examining one dismaying thing after another: teenage girls who seemed to have living roses in place of breasts; a candle maker whose wares would not provide light in the presence of an infidel; staged combat between a blind man and two maddened dragons; a family hammering together a scale model of the fair out of iron, a project that had occupied them for generations and that might never be completed; a cage of crickets that had been taught to chirp the Shahada, the Islamic testament of faith.

The afternoon passed, and once again night began to fall. All through the fair, men jammed blazing torches into iron sconces on tall poles. Still Maryam led the woman from tent to tent, but the woman no longer enjoyed the spectacles. She was filled with a sense of impending catastrophe. She felt an urgent need to escape, but she knew she couldn’t even find her way out of the infinite fairgrounds
.

And then a shrill, buzzing alarm sounded. “What’s that?” she asked, startled. All around her, people had begun to flee.

“Yallahl” cried Maryam, her face stricken with horror. “Run! Run and save your life!”

“What is it?” the woman shouted. “Tell me what it is!”

Maryam had collapsed to the ground, weeping and moaning. “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” she muttered over and over again. The woman could get nothing more sensible from her.

The woman left her there and followed the stream of terrified people as they ran among the tents. And then the woman saw them: Two immense giants, impossibly huge, hundreds of feet tall, crushing the landscape as they came nearer. They waded among the distant mountains, and then the shocks from their jolting footsteps began to chum the water in the lake. The ground heaved as they came nearer. The woman raised a hand to her breast, then staggered backward a few steps.

One of the giants turned his head slowly and looked straight at her. He was horribly ugly, with a great scar across one empty eye socket and a mouthful of rotten, snaggled fangs. He lifted an arm and pointed to her
.

“No,” she said, her voice hoarse with fear, “not me!” She wanted to run but she couldn’t move. The giant stooped toward her, fierce and glowering. He bent to capture her in his enormous hand.

“Marîd!” the woman screamed. “Please!” Nothing happened. The giant’s fist began to close around her.

The woman tried to reach up and unplug the moddy link, but her arms were frozen. She wouldn’t escape that easily. The woman shrieked as she realized she couldn’t even jack out.

The disfigured giant lifted her off the ground and drew her close to his single eye. His horrid grin spread and he laughed at her terror. His stinking breath sickened the woman. She struggled again to lift her hands, to pull the moddy link free. Her arms were held fast. She screamed and screamed, and then at last she fainted.

My eyes were bleary for a moment, and I could hear Chiri panting for breath beside me. I didn’t think she’d be so upset. After all, it was only a Transpex game, and it wasn’t the first time she’d ever played. She knew what to expect.

“You’re a sick motherfucker, Marîd,” she said at last.

“Listen, Chiri, I was just—“

She waved a hand at me. “I know, I know. You won the game and the bet. I’m still just a little shook, that’s all. I’ll have your money for you tonight.”

“Forget the money, Chiri, I—“

I shouldn’t have said that. “Hey, you son of a bitch, when I lose a bet I pay up. You’re gonna take the money or I’m gonna cram it down your throat. But, God, you’ve got some kind of twisted imagination.”

“That last part,” said Courane, “where she couldn’t raise her hands to pop the moddy link, that was real cold.” He said it approvingly.

“Hell of a sadistic thing to do,” said Chiri, shivering. “Last time I ever touch a Transpex with
you
.”

“A few extra points, that’s all, Chiri. I didn’t know what my score was. I might have needed a couple more points.”

“You finished with 941,” said Shaknahyi. He was looking at me oddly, as if he were impressed by my score and repelled at the same time. “We got to go.” He stood up and tossed down the last slug of his soft drink.

I stood up, too. “You all right now, Chiri?” I put my hand on her shoulder.

“I’m fine. I’m still shaking off the game. It was like a nightmare.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I got to get back to the club so Indihar can go home.”

“Give you a ride?” asked Shaknahyi.

“Thanks,” said Chiri, “but I got my own transportation.”

“See you later then,” I said.

“
Kwa heri
, you bastard.” At least she was smiling when she called me that. I thought maybe things were okay between us again. I was real glad about that.

Outside, Shaknahyi shook his head and grinned. “She was right, you know. That was a hell of a sadistic thing. Like unnecessary torture. You
are
a sick son of a bitch.”

Maybe, I thought as we headed back to the station house. But if ever I decided that I no longer liked my true personality, there was an almost unlimited supply of artificial ones I could chip in.

I leaned back in my seat and stared out the window. I’d managed to heal the bad feelings between Chiri and me, and I was getting a handle on this cop business. All that remained was Angel Monroe, and a solution to that problem would occur to me soon. I was sure that Laila had a Perfect Mother moddy in her shop. Of course, my mom’s skull wasn’t amped like mine, but I could take care of that for her, even if I had to wire her brain myself with a jackknife and a coat hanger.

See? Life is hard, all right, so you’ve got to take help wherever you can find it. I thought about that as I scratched my scalp around my corymbic implant. As Shaknahyi swung the patrol car into the garage, I thought, what’s the point of sexy new technology if you can’t find some way to pervert it?

Slow, Slow Burn

One of George’s best stories, it was one of a number that he sold to Playboy magazine over the years. The version printed here, from his own file copy of the story, differs slightly from the way it originally appeared in
Playboy,
and is his preferred version.

In a way the whole story is a logical extrapolation of Georges theory about the relationship of technology and pornography: If sex moddies do exist, there has to be someone who makes the best—and what does the use of sex moddies do and mean to the consumer, the producer, and the artist. And at the back of all the technology there’s still someone, some single human being, whom everyone in the world now fantasizes about.

From start to finish of the story, Honey Pilar remains as opaque as the image in the moddy. look at me, touch me, have sex with me,
BE ME WHILE I’M HAVING SEX…
marry me…But you still don’t know one single solitary thing about me
.

A capsule version of how women appear to men?

And the beauty of the story is that by its end, we know that Honey Pilar is more than a match for any of the men who think they know who she is and what she’s about. Did she get rid of Husband #4 because of the quarrel, or because after five years’ trial she decided his control of her career is what’s causing her sales to decline? Is it Kit (as in, “put together from a—“) who’s having the slow, slow burn, or is it Honey, the real woman observing from behind that sweet and stupid facade?

George both loved women and liked them, and was, I think, fascinated by them: Honey is a marvelous creation.

—
Barbara Hambly

ALL RIGHT, THIS IS THE WAY I PICTURE IT: WE’RE IN
a busy midtown brass and fern bar, okay? Maybe at a table on the sidewalk, under an umbrella says Cinzano on it, we’ll see. Two women poking at salads, glasses of white wine. They’re dressed very nice, expensive but not flashy, they pay attention to details, they accessorize, you know what I mean? Maybe a bag or something in the shot with a very exclusive name on it, sets these women up as fashion-conscious, upscale, the best taste in everything. One’s older, see, she’s the younger woman’s mother, though there’s no real noticeable age difference. They could be sisters. Make ‘em both blondes. The older one’s got kind of a suit on, she’s the dynamic woman-on-the-go. The daughter sort of mirrors that, a subtle thing, she’s got a nice blouse or shirt on with a jacket that says she’s shopping the right stores and she’s never more than fifteen minutes out of style. Whatever these women talk about, the people at home are gonna know they could make their own croissants from scratch if they felt like it, and they don’t live in no trailer park, either. This is like ‘Beauty Hints of the Idle Rich’ or something. The older woman smiles and says something like, ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the villa. I knew you and Ramon would find it pleasant.’

“So the girl is toying with her radicchio, see, and she puts her fork down and goes, ‘Mother, may I ask you a personal question?’

“Mom says, ‘Of course, darling.’

“Daughter looks down at her plate, she’s just a little bit embarrassed. That’s good, that makes her human. Audience will relate to that. She looks back up and goes, ‘Mother, have you ever used—‘pause for effect’—modular marital aids?’

“Big smile from the understanding old bitch. Maybe she, you know, reaches out and pats the kid’s hand. Like: There, there. She says, ‘Let me tell you a secret, dear. Your father and I have the biggest collection of sex moddies in the diocese.’ She laughs. The daughter laughs. Then Mom reaches into her bag, see, and what do you think she takes out? Take a guess.”

Two account executives have flown all the way from America to talk with Honey Pilar, who everyone agrees is the most desirable woman in the world. Even account executives want her, though their motives are mixed, and that’s why these two anxious men have come from New York to Honey’s walled estate in the south of France. She is sitting at a long table made of polished limba, an exotic hardwood from the Congo Basin that not even the architectural magazines know about yet. Beside her is her husband, Kit, who likes to think of himself as her manager. One of the admen is speaking; his throat is very dry because he is desperate that Honey Pilar likes his proposal, yet he is too self-conscious to sip from the fluted glass of Perrier-Jouet in front of him. He glances quickly at his associate, but it is easy to see that he can expect no help from that quarter.

Kit stares at the account executive, but he’s not going to say anything. The silence goes on and on. The hopeful smile the adman is wearing begins to vanish. He looks at his associate, who is still no help whatsoever.

“On the phone, I think we discussed the kids’ market,” says Kit wearily. He purses his lips and turns to Honey, who is sipping Campari and soda through a straw. “She doesn’t like it. I don’t like it. Come back with something else.”

The adman lays his sweating hands on the beautiful, glossy tabletop. “Miss Pilar?” he says hopelessly.

“Kit like doing business,” she says, and shrugs. When she smiles, both account executives are inspired with possible new approaches. The sound of her voice, they tell themselves, is enough reward for their failed labor. The opportunity to meet with her again will motivate them to find just the pitch she and Kit are looking for. “You have nice flight,” she says.

Kit is in the control room watching his wife on the bed with a seventeen-year-old Italian boy. Kit watches them through the grimy glass, wishing he’d worn a shirt because he is sweating heavily in the hot, stale air of the studio, and his naked back is sticking to the black vinyl padding of the chair. He peels himself away and leans forward, checking meters and digital readouts that don’t really need checking. Honey is a consummate performer. It’s as if she has an accurate internal clock ticking behind her forehead, cuing her: 00:00 initiate encounter, 00:30 initiate foreplay with passionate kiss, 00:45 experience preliminary arousal…. They are seven minutes, ten seconds into the thirty-minute recording. By the outline on Kit’s clipboard, Honey is supposed to begin oral stimulation at 07:15, and goddamn if she isn’t already sliding down the boy’s tanned body. No cue cards, she doesn’t even need hand signals. Kit pretends to check the levels again, then turns away from the big glass window.

Kit had his own brain wired long before he met Honey Pilar. If he wanted, he could jack into a socket on the board and feel just what the Italian boy is feeling, or he could jack into another socket and eavesdrop on Honey. Kit doesn’t need to peek on the boy’s responses because he’s been married to Honey for five years, and she’s every bit as good live-in-person as she is on a module. Honey Pilar is still, at the age of forty-five, the most desired woman in the world. One out of every eight moddies—of all kinds—sold through the big modshop chains is a Honey Pilar sex moddy. Kit has never been her partner on any of them.

At 14:20, Honey and the boy curl together on their sides. Honey’s eyes are closed, her face flushed. She is only wearing some kind of white cotton peasant-looking blouse and rope sandals. The boy is naked except for a pair of black matte-finish sunglasses. Drops of sweat glisten on his hairless chest. Kit stands up and turns away again. He leaves the control room, sure that nothing out of the ordinary will happen. He wanders down the long hall. He kicks off his deck shoes and feels the pile carpet warm on the soles of his feet. There is the strong odor of stale beer in the hall, as if several cans had soaked the floor recently and no one had cared to do anything about it. None of the windows are open, and it is even hotter in the hall than in the control room. Kit pushes open the scarred blond wood door at the end of the hall. He is in another control room. He chases a green lizard the size of his hand from the padded chair and sits behind the board. He stares at meters and digital readouts. They are all flickering at safe levels.

Beyond the glass, a young woman in a torn T-shirt and a bikini bottom sits at a microphone, clutching a sheaf of printed pages. Kit knows that she works for some revolutionary organization, but there are too many even to begin to guess which one. She reads the pages in a slow, husky voice. Kit thinks her voice is pretty damn sexy. He likes everything about this girl, what little he knows. He likes her bikini bottom, her torn shirt, her rumpled black hair, and the way she talks. After a moment, Kit hears what she is reading. “Achtung, Achtung,” she says. Her voice has no accent, neither German nor otherwise. She herself has brown skin, pale full lips, and Oriental eyes. “Achtung, drei hundert neun-und-siebzig. Fiinf-und-zwanzig.” Then she begins reading a list of five-digit numbers. “39502, 95372, 01814, 66589.” She reads twenty-five groups of digits, meaningful only to the certain audience listening to her frequency, reading the key to her code. “Ende,” she says. A moment later, after shifting to another frequency, she begins again in Spanish. “Atencion, atencion.” More numbers, more signals. Kit would like to buy the brown-skinned girl a drink, look into her black eyes, ask her if she herself knows who might be listening to her broadcast.

Kit leaves her control room. She has never looked up, never known for an instant that he was there. Kit walks back down the stifling hallway. As he enters the small room, he sees Honey Pilar astride the Italian boy. Kit checks the clock on the board, checks the script. The recording is still precisely on schedule. He hasn’t been missed. Just as the girl at the microphone did not know he was there, Honey does not know he has been gone.

Kit sits in the black vinyl chair. He takes a moddy from a stack on the control board. He doesn’t care which moddy it is. He reaches up and chips it in. There is a moment of disorientation, and then Kit’s vision clears. He is Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in
North by Northwest
, suave, well-dressed, and certainly in command of his feelings. He allows himself a moment of sadness for Honey Pilar, whose life could never be as interesting as his. After all, he is Cary Grant. His future will be better than good: It will be amusing.

“Twenty-six years ago, I was a young feature reporter for EuroUrban Holo on my first assignment, to interview Honey Pilar. I was sitting cross-legged on the rough wooden pier down the hill and across the beach from her walled estate. The sparkling Mediterranean waves lapped rhythmically at the pilings. I remember the bright morning sun making me squint a little into the camera. The ragged cries of sea birds punctuated my lead-in. ‘Here in her palatial estate,’ I said, ‘Honey Pilar reigns as the superstar of the sex moddies. In five years she has risen from talented newcomer to both critical acclaim and commercial supremacy. Let’s take a quick look behind the scenes and find out what Honey Pilar is like in her unguarded moments.’ My cameraman and I went to the main gate but we were not allowed in, although my news service had confirmed our appointment for that morning. Honey had changed her mind.

“Fifteen years later I was working for Visions/Rumelia, and once again I stood by the high, gilded gate. ‘What secrets does this young beauty know,’ I said on that occasion, ‘that maintain her position as the world’s premier moddy star?’ My story didn’t go on to reveal any actual secrets, of course. Honey Pilar never tells her secrets. But she did make a rare personal appearance and answered some mild questions about her favorite foods and her thoughts on the world situation. She was tanned and smiling and, well, perfect. A week before that interview, a poll had announced that sixty-eight percent of the seven billion people on earth could identify her face. Eighteen percent could identify her naked, unaugmented breasts.

“Today, Rio Home Data has asked me to begin this series it calls
Honey Pilar: A Quarter Century of Fascination.
Never in the history of the personality module industry has one performer so dominated the charts. Since her now-classic first moddy,
A Life in Lace
, she has turned out thirty-eight full-length recordings and nine of the ‘quickies’ that ABT experimented with and then abandoned. Her total sales top one hundred and twenty million units, and every one of her recordings remains in print. As of last week, she has eight titles on the Brainwaves Hot 100 Chart, with two in the Top Ten.

“The question always arises, what has this remarkable success cost the young woman who became Honey Pilar? A Life in Lace was recorded when she was only fourteen years old. Has her career been at the expense of her happiness? She’s been married four times, and she lives a private, almost reclusive existence. She rarely grants interviews, and in keeping with that, she refused to appear with us on Rio Home Data. Her legions of fans want to know: Just what kind of woman invites the whole world to listen in on her private sexual experiences? Is Honey Pilar providing surrogate passion to millions of people dissatisfied with their own love lives, or is she merely pandering to an emerging taste for high-tech titillation? We can only speculate, of course, but next time, in a highly personal way, I’ll tell you how this reporter sees it.”

Kit and Honey are having dinner in a small, dimly lighted cafe near the ocean. There is a tall white taper burning on their table and, shining through their wineglasses, it is casting soft burgundy shimmers on the linen tablecloth. Across the narrow room there is a stage made of scuffed green tiles. Lively North African music, distorted and shrill, is playing too loudly through invisible speakers; hovering just an inch or two above the stage is the holographic figure of a demure-eyed, big-hipped belly dancer. There are streaks and scratches on the woman’s face and body, as if this recording has been played many times over many years.

Honey Pilar sips some of the wine and makes a little grimace. “How are you thinking?” she asks in a soft voice.

“It was all right,” says Kit. He looks down at his broiled fish. “What do you want me to say? It’s always all right. It’ll sell a million; you outdid yourself. Your climaxes made the dials go crazy. Okay?”

“I never know you telling me truth.” She frowns at him, then picks up a delicate forkful of couscous and eats it thoughtfully.

Kit tears a chunk of the flat bread and puts it in his mouth, then takes a gulp of wine. Communion, he thinks, I’m absolved. Time for new sins. “You don’t believe me when I tell you it was all right? You don’t take my word for it? If you didn’t believe me a minute ago, what can I say or do that will make you believe me now?”

Honey looks hurt. She puts her fork down carefully beside her plate. Kit wishes the shrieking Arab music would die away forever. The cafe smells of cinnamon, as if teams of bakers have been making sweet rolls all day long and then hidden them away, because nothing on their plates or on the menu contains the least hint of cinnamon. Kit knows that Honey wants desperately to go back to the house in Provence. She’s not comfortable in strange places.

Kit finishes his glass of wine. He reaches for the bottle, tops up Honey’s glass, then fills his own. He takes out a beige pill case from his shirt pocket, finds four yellow Paxium, and drinks them down with a Chateau L’Angelus that deserves better. “What next?” he says.

“What next now?” asks Honey. “What next tonight, what next tomorrow, or what next we make another moddy?”

Kit squeezes his eyes shut and lets his head fall back. He opens his eyes and sees black beams made of structural plastic crossing the space overhead. He wishes that something, anything, with Honey Pilar could be simple, even dinner, even conversation. So she’s the most desirable woman in the world, he thinks. So she makes more money in one year than the CEOs of any ten major corporations you’d care to name. So what. His private opinion is that she has the intelligence of three sticks and a stone. He lowers his gaze and forces himself to smile back at her. “What do you want to do, sweetheart? Stay here, go back home, take a trip? You’ve earned a vacation, baby. We’ve got your next blockbuster in the can. The world is at your feet. You name it, chiquita. Someplace exotic. Someplace you’ve always wanted to go.”