Broken Angels

She made a restless motion. “Not really. OK, sure. Tell me. Why not. Tell me something I haven’t heard before.”

“She said wars are fought over hormones. Male hormones, largely. It’s not about wi

I closed my eyes and thought back to Harlan’s World. A safe house in the hills above Millsport. Stolen bioware stacked in a corner, pipes and post-op celebration wreathing the air. Idly arguing politics with Virginia Vidaura and her crew, the infamous Little Blue Bugs. Quellist quotes and poetry bantered back and forth.

“You in pain?”

I opened my eyes and shot her a reproachful glance. “Tanya, this stuff was mostly written in Stripjap. That’s a Harlan’s World trade tongue—gibberish to you. I’m trying to remember the Amanglic version.”

“Well, it looks painful. Don’t knock yourself out on my account.” I held up a hand. “Goes like this:

Male-sleeved;

Stop up your hormones

Or spend them in moans

Of other calibre

(We’ll reassure you—the load is large enough)

Blood-pumped

Pride in your prowess

Will fail you, fuck you

And everything you touch

(You’ll reassure us—the price was small enough)”

I sat back. She sniffed.

“Bit of an odd stance for a revolutionary. Didn’t she lead some kind of bloody uprising? Fight to the death against Protectorate tyra

“Yeah. Several kinds of bloody uprising, in fact. But there’s no evidence she actually died. She disappeared in the last battle for Millsport. They never recovered a stack.”

“I don’t really see how storming the gates of this Millsport gels with that poem.”

I shrugged. “Well, she never really changed her views on the roots of violence, even in the thick of it. Just realised it couldn’t be avoided, I guess. Changed her actions instead, to suit the terrain.”

“That’s not much of a philosophy.”

“No, it isn’t. But Quellism was never very big on dogma. About the only credo Quell ever subscribed to was Face the Facts. She wanted that on her tomb. Face the Facts. That meant dealing with them creatively, not ignoring them or trying to pretend they’re just some historical inconvenience. She always said you can’t control a war. Even when she was starting one.”

“Sounds a little defeatist to me.”

“Not at all. It’s just recognition of the danger. Facing the facts. Don’t start wars if you can possibly avoid it. Because once you do, it’s out of any sane control. No one can do anything except try to survive while it runs its hormonal course. Hold on to the rod and ride it out. Stay alive, and wait for the discharge.”

“Whatever.” She yawned and looked out of the window. “I’m not very good at waiting, Kovacs. You’d think being an archaeologue would have cured me of that, wouldn’t you.” A shaky little laugh. “That, and. The camp—”

I stood up abruptly. “Let me get you that pipe.”

“No.” She hadn’t moved, but her voice was nailed down solid. “I don’t need to forget anything, Kovacs. I need—”

She cleared her throat.

“I need you to do something for me. With me. What you did to me. Before, I mean. What you did has.” She looked down at her hands. “Had an impact I didn’t. Didn’t expect.”

“Ah.” I sat down again. “That.”

“Yes, that.” There was a flicker of anger in her tone now. “I suppose it makes sense. It’s an emotion-bending process.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Yes, it is. Well, there’s one particular emotion I need bending back into place now, and I don’t really see any other way to do that than by fucking you.”

“I’m not sure that—”

“I don’t care,” she said violently. “You changed me. You fixed me.” Her voice quietened. “I suppose I should be grateful, but that isn’t how it feels. I don’t feel grateful, I feel fixed. You’ve created this. Imbalance in me, and I want that part of me back.”

“Look, Tanya, you aren’t really in any condition—”

“Oh, that.” She smiled thinly. “I appreciate I’m not exactly sexually attractive right now, except maybe—”

“Wasn’t what I meant—”

“To a few freaks who like starved pubescents to fuck. No, we’ll need to fix that. We need to go virtual for this.”

I struggled to shake off a numbing sense of unreality. “You want to do this now?”

“Yes, I do.” Another sliced-off smile. “It’s interfering with my sleep patterns, Kovacs. And right now I need my sleep.”

“Do you have somewhere in mind?”

“Yes.” It was like a children’s game of dare.

“So where is that exactly?”

“Downstairs.” She got up and looked down at me. “You know, you ask a lot of questions for a man that’s about to get laid.”

Downstairs was a floor about midway up the tower which the elevator a

“We doing this out here?” I asked uncomfortably.

“No. Closed chambers at the back. Come on.”

We passed through the forest of stilled machines, lights flickering up above and amongst them, then flickering out again as we moved on. I watched the process out of a neurasthenic grotto that had been growing up around me like coral since before I came down from the roof. Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There’s this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disco

The cure for this definitely is not more virtual time.

There were nine closed chambers, modular blisters swelling out of the end wall under their respective numbers. Seven and eight were cracked open, spilling low orange light around the line of the hatch. Wardani stopped in front of seven and the door hinged outward. The orange light expanded pleasantly in the gap, tuned into soft hypnomode. No dazzle. She turned to look back at me.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Eight is slaved to this one. Just hit ‘consensual’ on the menu pad.”

And she disappeared into the warm orange glow.

Inside module eight, someone had seen fit to cover the walls and roofing with empathist psychogram art, which in the hypnomode lighting seemed little more than a random set of fishtail swirls and spots. Then again, that’s what most empathist stuff looks like to me in any light. The air was just the right side of warm and beside the automould couch there was a complicated spiral of metal to hang clothes.

I stripped off and settled on the automould, pulled down the headgear and swiped the flashing consensual diamond as the displays came online. I just remembered to knock out the physical feedback baffle option before the system kicked in.

The orange light appeared to thicken, taking on a foggy substance through which the psychogram swirls and dots swam like complex equations or maybe some kind of pond life. I had a moment to wonder if the artist had intended either of those comparisons—empathists are a weird lot—and then the orange was fading and shredding away like steam, and I stood in an immense tu

In front of me, more of the orange fog boiled up out of a vent and shredded into a recognisably female form. I watched fascinated as Tanya Wardani began to emerge from the general outline, made at first entirely of flickering orange smoke, then seemingly veiled in it from head to foot, then clad only in patches, and then, as these tore away, clad in nothing at all.