GRYCHN RONMARTHA-WILLIAMS was already bored with the party.
She stood by herself on the patio, amid scattered garments, watching some of the other guests frolicking naked in the swimming pool. She was average height for a standard Terran, one hundred seventy cm, and slender, with a mass of seventy kilos. Her hair was white and cut as short as ermine fur; her eyes were ocher. She had lithe arms and legs, a narrow waist, and breasts unrestrained by gravity. She wore a single strand of singing pearls around her neck and matching earrings. Her skin was brown and smooth and taut in the right places–from appearances she could have been twenty years of age. In fact, she was almost a hundred, and at that, was one of the youngest people at the party.
The naked bathers splashing in the pool all looked uniformly young. Some of them were nearing their millennium. Most were over five hundred years old. All still had the vibrant vitality of apparent youth.
Grychn ignored them when they shouted for her to join the fun. She was dressed appropriately enough for water sports in a sheer chemise and ruby slippers, with nothing else underneath. It certainly would have been easy for her to slip out of both and jump into the pool. Her jewelry was waterproof. But for some reason, she just was not in the mood. She was bored and a little depressed.
Not that there was anything wrong with the party itself. The other guests certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves, partaking of the usual diversions: peptide, mnemone, dream-games, sex. Grychn knew that the problem was within her own psyche; she had been bored since coming back to Earth. Her ennui had started even earlier, when Detrs became a legitimate businessman–crime was more exciting than commerce. But now she was also having more and more frequent attacks of melancholia. Her twin boys, age eight, were her only real interest, and she would not have them much longer. Lady Blue would be coming to take the boys away from her any day now. She had not figured out how to save them from Lady Blue. With them gone, she would have no reason to live.
She had thought she had been hurt as much as possible when she ran away from Ceres and Marc Detrs, taking the two baby boys with her. Now she knew she could be hurt even more.
A servbot approached with a tray of drinks. Grychn selected a glass of white wine and went into the house and wandered about. She seemed vaguely out of sorts with the party, as though she had arrived in the middle and had never become integrated into its chemistry. Part of it was that the parties seemed more and more like the parties her father used to have, the ones he made her attend as a child for the amusement of his guests. She had run away from home to escape such humiliations. But she had been feeling the same way in other situations lately. She knew she should go to a psychomat and take a little hypnotherapy to iron out the wrinkles that had developed in her psyche, but even that took more effort than she could muster.
A sudden anxiety sent her downstairs to the playroom. Three boys were hunched over a holographic game board, each wearing a psihelmet. The tiny figures of combrid Ghost Cavalry fought with Marindians on the board. They looked up as she entered. After a quick, “Hi, Grychn,” they went back to their game. A nandroid stood by dutifully. The boys were safe.
The twins, Craig and Christopher, were Grychn’s sons. The other boy, Alix, was the Saralter’s son. He was half a year older than the twins. They were second cousins, but could have been brothers by their appearance. All were towheads with hair as white as Grychn’s, blue eyes, and brown skin. They were becoming gangly with the awkward angularity of a preadolescent growth spurt. They were inseparable and usually took turns spending the night at one or the other’s houses. Grychn loved all three of them more than she had once thought would be possible, as much as she had once loved Detrs. Losing them would be harder than running away from Detrs had been. She tried not to think about how short a time was left.
Although the twins looked identical enough that even Grychn had trouble telling them apart, their personalities were really quite different. Craig was more assertive, the leader, while Chris was content to follow his lead. Craig was manipulative and devious, Chris open and sincere. Craig was always worried about something, while Chris never worried. It was almost as though when the zygote cleaved, the halves were different parts of the whole. Grychn sometimes thought Chris should have been a girl–his mannerisms seemed feminine, his personality more female. She would have loved it if he had been her daughter instead of her son. Alix was different from both Craig and Chris–he was more a loner and could entertain himself. He did not open up easily, keeping his feelings hidden. Lately all of them had been acting peculiar. Grychn could not figure out what was wrong with them. The twins were waking up with nightmares. They seemed to be taking an unhealthy interest in sex–once she had caught them masturbating each other. She had said nothing then, deciding it was normal curiosity. They seemed to know more about sex than they should, even though she had not told them of it yet. There were some things you still needed a father to provide.
Satisfied that nothing was amiss with the boys, Grychn went back upstairs.
She walked through the sitting room. It had become the official “peptide parlor” of the party, where the pepheads congregated. By now most of them were sprawled naked on the floor, lost to the euphoria of neuropeptide. Saraltr, Grychn’s cousin and hostess of the party, was being a good hostess indeed, holding a liter bowl of peptide between her hands. She too was completely naked. She had long amber hair that cascaded past her waist and eyes as blue as frozen topaz. A singing sapphire pendant hung between her breasts. She dipped her tongue in the bowl, lowered it over the open eye of a pephead, and let the peptide-laden saliva drip into his eye. She repeated the ritual with each pephead. They began stirring back to life: penises stiffened, nipples hardened, glands exuded. Blue fire burned from their eyes. The pepheads began a frantic sexual coupling with one another.
Grychn knew that Saraltr had switched from endorphin to endocaine and endosterone–speed and sex steroids. That was one of her favorite tricks at parties.
Grychn left the room as Saraltr accepted the sexual ravages of her frenzied guests.
Other diversions were taking place in other rooms. Immortality lent perversion a certain legitimacy.
Petraltr, Saraltr’s legal husband, had hired the best pedimorphs their Guild had to offer. Grychn had seen them arrive, strutting in with cocky arrogance, proud of their androgynous build, shiny yellow curls, up-turned button of a nose, big blue eyes, and pouting lips. She did not even glance into that room. She did not have the stomach for pederasty, even if it was with legal hybrid surrogates. But she knew most of the guests would visit a pedi before the evening was through.
A seance was taking place in one room. A psiber crystal stood on a pedestal in the center of the room. Ghosts hovered above it, trapped in the warp the crystal created in the psiberfield. The ghosts appeared as shimmering vortices of multicolored light and represented the persona of one of the living brains of cybermind. These personas could travel out in the psiberfield at night, to prowl about the psychic ether. (Sunlight disrupted their energies too much for them to become manifest during the day.) It was considered great sport to catch these wandering ghosts and tease and taunt them until they begged to be released. That the captive ectoplasm might have been a friend or relative made the sport that much better.
Another room was devoted to the disciples of pain. Grychn watched them writhing in their shackles, as a whipsman flailed them with an alphalash. More subtle humiliations would soon come. A splendid dominatrix with raven-black hair, dressed in chains and leather, gestured for Grychn to join the fun. She laughed and shook her head and walked away. She knew eventually she might come back to that room, but not just yet.
Grychn was still bored. One could find the same amusements at any of the parties going on elsewhere that night and every night. It had been the same for the past seven years she had been back on Earth. She was tempted to leave Earth again. Though she hated to admit it to herself, she would have liked to have seen Detrs again. Sex with him was the best she had ever had. Maybe it was because he was the first.
She wandered upstairs. A dream-game was in progress in the upstairs parlor. Grychn stopped to watch, although there was not much to see. A dozen guests lay on the floor wearing psihelmets, connected to a central macroprocessor by criss-crossing red lasewires. The same lax expression could be seen on each face: eyes staring open, mouths agape, tongues protruding. Each player’s mind was inside the macroprocessor, engaged in a role-playing fantasy game. Each player’s score, based on his success at manipulating his role within the game, was automatically tabulated by the DPU. Huge wagers had no doubt been placed on the outcome.
Dream-games could last indefinitely. Usually a timer was set within the dream-processor to terminate the game after a predetermined interval. Otherwise, players had been known to starve to death before the conclusion of a game.
Dream-gaming had attracted quite a cult-following among Earth’s immortals. Grychn had not yet tried it here.
She had spent six months as a tiderider playing the dream-games of the mind-casinos of Chronus. Although that had been seventy-five years ago, she had not forgotten the experience. She was afraid if she got started again, she would not want to return to reality.
She was not that bored yet.
Grychn was the daughter of Lord General Williams, a founding member of Earth’s War Lords, who directed the successful suppression of the most recent Hybrid Rebellion. Her mother was the Lady Ronmartha, the famous cyberneticist. “Father” and “mother” were legal terms and only meant she had been gestated from the same lot of gametes as they had–her genome was a different blend of their genes. Neither the Lord nor the Lady had ever had actual sex with the other, as far as Grychn knew. A hundred years ago carnal procreation was considered imprecise, as well as a little vulgar. Fertilization was achieved in vitro. Her prenatal life had been spent in an artificial womb succored by a synthetic placenta. Her birth had been an expulsion from the sterility of the fake womb into an even less friendly world. Her infancy was spent in the care of mechanical nursemaids, and her childhood shuttling back and forth between “father” and “mother,” to both of whom she was only of brief and occasional interest.
She had run away at an early age and had become involved with off-world revolutionaries. A fourteen-year-old girl could easily be seduced by the intense camaraderie of a guerilla cadre, especially one who had been deprived of real love. At the age of sixteen, she was one of the most famous terrorists in the system. The high-energy sex and violence of a terrorist group was like a narcotic–one’s perceptions were dulled to the point it was difficult to return to a rational life-style. Grychn still had fantasies of those years, especially when she was having sex. Sometimes she had to resurrect images of rape and rampage in order to have an orgasm. She felt guilty about her fascination with violence, but had not sought therapy. She did not want to lose the thrill it brought.
She had first met Marc Detrs when they were children. The Lord General’s estate bordered that of the Detrs’. Her father was too busy plotting the war to spend much time with her, but she found a second home at the Detrs’ estate. Grychn spent more time there than at home, preferring a live playmate to the company of household androids. She had been drawn into the dark insanity of Marc’s parents’ drug-fueled sexual abuse, and had helped him kill them and disguise their murder to look like an accident. She could have run away with him, but was afraid to then. A few years later, she ran away herself and learned to enjoy killing.
She met Marc Detrs again on Titan. He was a combat hybrid at a garrison there, and she was a terrorist revolutionary fighting with the Elves. Detrs was the trooper who captured her for the spooks of Corps Intelligence.
They met again as tideriders in the mind-casinos of Chronus. Grychn had been put there by the spooks as bait, to help them follow Detrs in his quest for a chronotropic crystal. He and Grychn found the crystal on Iapetus, and Detrs made the mistake of looking into it, which gave him a certain capacity for precognition. They left the crystal and Kramr, the spook who followed them, buried in an ice cave beneath a glacial avalanche.
The next seventy-five years had been mostly happy for Grychn, especially the first few decades. She had stayed with Detrs while he used his precognitive ability to amass a considerable fortune, first as a pirate, then as a gambler and financier, and finally as a legitimate businessman. She loved their years as pirates and criminals-the thrills were almost as good as being a guerilla. Being legitimate was not as much fun. She missed the excitement of violence. They traveled throughout the solar system, visiting the nicest resorts and staying at the finest hotels. They had built homes on most of the planets and moons.
Starting about ten years ago, Detrs had become moody and withdrawn. He began to have nightmares and would awake in the night screaming. During the day he mumbled to himself. He lost interest in his businesses and established trusts to manage them. He decided he was a Prophet and his precognition was a divine gift, which should be shared. He seemed to lose interest in Grychn as well. She had hoped the birth of the twins would help their relationship, but it had deteriorated even more, until she could no longer stand it. The final fission had come when Detrs founded the monastery on Ceres. Being the consort of a wild-eyed religious oracle was more than Grychn could tolerate. If not for her babies, and if she had known where to start looking, she would have tried to find a guerilla group to join. Instead, she had taken the twins and returned to Earth. Now she was not sure that had been the right decision. Maybe she should have stayed with him and tried to work things out. Maybe he would have come to his senses if she had stayed.
Coming back to Earth had been a mistake though. She missed the life-style of the Outer Moons.
Life on Earth had changed a lot in the past century. The only humans left on the planet were the immortal aristocracy, numbering a few million. The common classes, once numbering in the trillions, were now completely gone, depleted by a combination of a millennium of emigration to the colonies and conscription into the Foreign Legions. Earth’s legions were themselves becoming depleted from lack of new recruits, and the ranks were increasingly being filled with units of hybrid personnel. Terra’s glory was dimming, her power fading. Without replacements for her troops, the next hybrid rebellion might well succeed.
Earth’s Lords and Ladies had bravely tried to replenish the population, even to the point of attempting “natural” procreation in the old vulgar manner, but without success. They had waited too long. Their DNA was fatigued, defective–beyond the repair of the cleverest genosurgeons. Their children did not live past adolescence. Grychn’s own twin boys were nearing the critical age.
Grychn knew the human race was dying. But because those who were left were immortal, their death chant would last for a long time.
And the death throes were pleasant enough. Earth’s bioengineering factories produced androids to perform mundane tasks, controlled by a massive electronic/neurologic computer called cybermind. Crystalyst-mediated matter annihilation meant unlimited power was available for Earth’s now scant population. Automated factories produced abundant supplies of consumer goods, food, and other comestibles. Tribute of all kinds still flowed to Earth from her colonies.
Earth was a paradise. Sprawling cities had been razed, the rubble groomed into parkland. Her air and water were clean and pure. Her industry was all underground, carefully out of sight. Her immortals were healthy and wealthy, with the vitality of perpetual youth. What difference did it make if they could no longer breed? They had an eternity of leisure to enjoy.
So Grychn had thought when she had come back to Earth.
But now she was bored.
Almost bored enough to be tempted to play the dream-game again.
“Did you arrive too late to play the game?” someone asked.
Grychn turned to see who had asked the question. A sailor stood behind her–a real Asteroidian sailor, with coal-black skin, silver nictitating membranes over his eyes, suction-cups on his fingers and toes. “You look as though you wished you were playing.”
“I’m not a devotee.”
“But you were once, a long time ago.”
“How did you know?”
He smiled sadly. “I lost six months in the mindcasinos once. I saw a familiar look in your eyes.”
“You too,” Grychn said in a low voice. “But you also escaped. Not many of us have.”
“I was lucky. A friend rescued me.”
Because sailors looked so much alike, Grychn looked at him closely. But she did not think she recognized him. “I haven’t seen you at any of the parties. I’m Grychn Ronmartha-Williams.” She held out her hand.
The sailor shook it. His suction-cups tugged at her skin. “Damiel Bwaman. You haven’t seen me before because I’ve been out of circulation for the past few years. I just got back to Earth today.”
“What have you been doing for the past few years?”
His answer was a second too late in coming. “Racing in the twelve-meter trials for the Ceres’ Cup.”
“Do you own your own boat?”
“The Kalispel Condor.”
The name meant something. “Oh!” Grychn said, remembering, “You’re Lord Bwaman.”
“Of course.”
“The expatriate Terran War Lord who had himself hybridized into a sailor.”
“At your service.”
“You knew my father, Lord General Williams.”
“Of course. How is he?”
“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen him lately. Our relationship is somewhat distant. He hasn’t forgiven me my youthful excesses.”
Damiel laughed. “Interplanetary terrorism is a little more than youthful enthusiasm.” He smiled at the look that came to her face. “Don’t be surprised I remember who you were. You were quite infamous for a short while. A lot of us still remember your exploits. I’m surprised you were allowed back on Earth.”
Grychn laughed. “I’m supposed to be harmless now. Besides, ‘interplanetary terrorism’ is dead. Almost all of us were captured and hypnoed back to normal with operant lobotomies. I wouldn’t even know where to find a guerilla cadre anymore. The War Lords felt so secure in their victory that they granted a general amnesty after the last rebellion collapsed. Earth’s prodigal sons and daughters were forgiven. Would you mind if we left here? I’m becoming a little uncomfortable.”
“Of course not.” He took her arm and they walked away. “Still tempted sometimes?”
“To dream or blow up buildings?”
He laughed. “Either one.”
“Of course I’m tempted by the dream-game. Aren’t you?”
“Sometimes. How about blowing up buildings?”
“That too.”
They walked down a hall and out to a balcony overhanging the patio and pool. The pool party was still in full swing below. The sounds of laughter and splashing could be heard plainly. Grychn and Damiel sat at a small table on the balcony. They could see naked bodies coupling below-some in the water, some on cushions along the pool’s apron.
A servbot found them and left a glass of wine and a mnemone stick.
“You don’t drink?” Grychn asked as Damiel sucked acrid fumes into his lungs.
“Not on Earth. Out there,” he waved his hand upward, “I drink Earth wine, because it helps me remember home. Here, alcohol just makes me sleepy. Mnemone has less of an effect on sailors. We stay functional under its influence.”
“Why did you become a hybrid–a sailor?”
“I wanted to win the Ceres’ Cup. No Terran craft had won it for five hundred years.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“I was bored with life on Earth. The Hybrid Rebellion was crushed, peace and stability had returned to the system. There was not much excitement for a War Lord, just the endless parties and sex and peptide. Besides, cybermind had taken over most of the real planning. We just rubber-stamped its decisions. I was ready for a change.”
“I’m bored myself,” Grychn said.
“Become a sailor. Or a sphinx. You would look good as a cat-woman.”
“Do you think so?” Grychn bared her teeth and growled. She leaned over and bit Damiel’s hand.
He did not pull it away. Human teeth could not hurt a sailor’s skin. He laughed. “See, I told you you’d make a good sphinx. You already have cat mannerisms.”
Grychn turned him loose and smiled. “I’m afraid of hybridization. When I was a rebel, the Elves and the Marindians and the sphinges all wanted me to become one of them. But I wanted to be myself. I still do. I’m standard Terran. True human. That should be enough.”
Damiel snorted. “Look at them,” he said, pointing to the pool. “Those are what remain of your true humans–jaded hedonists who can no longer enjoy the pleasure they seek. You are a dying breed, you true humans. You will either have to change into something else or die.”
“Nobody dies anymore except by accident. Have you forgotten the anti-agathic genes?”
“No, I haven’t. It’s been a thousand years since the first “immortal” was produced. A thousand years is about as long as one can cheat entropy.”
“You mean the anti-agathic process is limited to a thousand years?”
“Generally speaking. There are other ways to cheat entropy its due.”
“What other ways?”
“Hybrid vigor. Mix a little xeno-DNA into the genome.”
A knowing look appeared on Grychn’s face. “So that’s why you became a sailor.”
Damiel smiled. “One of the reasons, anyway. I thought it would be better than psychic integration into cybermind.” He laughed. “Now I find I think like a sailor. I have the desires of a sailor. I am tempted too much by the up and out.”
“What else tempts you?” Grychn asked, rubbing her foot on his leg beneath the table.
“What do you mean?” Damiel knew what she meant.
“What other games do you play? What diversions do you prefer? Pedis? Pain? Peptides?”
Damiel laughed. “I’m just a simple sailor now. Completely unsophisticated. I prefer the simple pleasures.”
“Like sex?”
“That would do nicely.”
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
“A man after my own heart.” Grychn pulled him up from the table, along the hall, and through a darkened doorway into a bedroom. She kissed him and pulled him down on a bed of wombskin.
“You seem to know your way around,” Damiel remarked.
“I’ve been here before.”
As she received his thrusts, Grychn once more had to fill her mind full of images of fire and blood, before the parasympathetic release would come.
Later, after making love, they lay together in bed. A servbot had found them again and offered them refreshments. It would not leave until they had taken something. Servbots were persistent in their duties, if nothing else.
Grychn sipped another glass of wine. Damiel sucked mnemone.
“What are things like out there now?” Grychn asked. She was thinking of Detrs.
“On the surface, peaceful and stable. Underneath, I think trouble is brewing. The legions are spread too thin and are understaffed. I don’t think we could suppress another rebellion.”
“Will there be another rebellion?”
“Who knows? Maybe. If the right leader comes along who can unite all the hybrid races.”
“Which side will you be on?”
Again, his answer was a second too late. “Earth’s, of course. I’ll always be a Terran at heart, even though I know it’s a lost cause. And you?”
“Neutral, I suppose. I don’t think I could fight again.” Grychn knew she was lying. Nothing would give her more pleasure than spraying an autopulser into a troop of combrids, seeing blood splatter the crystal trees of Titan, watching flesh give up its oxygen in fire to methane air. She told another lie: “I lost too much innocence in the last rebellion.”
“You were on the wrong side then. Maybe your side will win this time?”
“I suppose. But I’m going to sit out this one anyway.”
“If war comes, you might not have a choice.” “What do you mean?”
“The War Lords might draft you into their service.” “Me? A Lady? They can’t.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. There aren’t any more commoners and they won’t trust hybrids. Lords and Ladies are all they have left to conscript.”
She rolled over and kissed him, stroking his penis hard, then straddled him, rocking up and down with her pelvis.
“Don’t say anything for a while,” she said.
“OK,” he agreed.
This time the images came unbidden.