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  A pity, she thinks, that his body is so seldom seen in the vids they make now. Preferences of the blessed audience for the psynthe exotic.

  “You look negged,” she says.

  Minstrel turns away as if unfairly poked. “Let me keep my mood,” he tells her.

  Alice moves in, swaying her shoulders, clucking her tongue. “I’ll need all of you in five minutes, and you can’t make me work harder to get it,” she says. “What’s down?”

  “Not my libido,” he shoots back.

  “You’ve cheered me the last hour instead of leaving me to brood over twisted thumbs.” She wraps her arms around him. He pushes her off with what begins as real and angry strength, and ends gentleness and restraint.

  “Is it Todd?” she asks.

  “Todd was a year ago,” Minstrel says.

  Alice nods sympathetically, lips pursed. “I should have known. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I hide, you hide,” Minstrel says, and tries to force more brave wit over what is now a sad and lost face.

  “Poor Minstrel,” she says. “They do not deserve you.”

  “No, they fapping well do not.”

  “So what’s his name?”

  “The little fap’s name is Giorgio and you, dear Alice, will never meet him. He doesn’t deserve to meet you.”

  The wound is seldom far beneath Minstrel’s armor when she is doing the probing; he comes to her, at long intervals, like a dog with a boil, knowing she will hurt him with her lancet; also knowing it will do him good.

  It is now that Francis chooses to blat his awful airhorn.

  Minstrel closes up his cares and assumes a heavy-lidded roué’s smile. “It is never duty with you,” he says, “but whatever it is, it calls.”

  Alice loops her arm through his and they step down the broad railless stairs to the stage, like royalty or Astaire and Rogers making a grand entrance.

  Francis awaits them in the plug room beside the main stage. Here as well as on the stage all is flat gritty black, no reflection allowed as the camera mixes its own glittering fairy-light dreams with the quantized lux of the real. Francis has named this camera Leni. Leni has become much more I than an optical device. She scatters over the stage, feeding images and projections at one end, combining them with backmind layers at the other, a smooth silver and bronze balled and coiled snake.

  Francis is irritated. His AD, scrawny and unkempt—Ahmed, Alice remembers vaguely; Francis goes through four or five ADs each production—hurries to arrange the bottles of nano and their small shiny plastic conduits and dams, to be applied to the occiput of Alice’s skull and to Minstrel’s temple.

  “Alice, fabled Alice, what would you do?” Francis asks as they reach the bottom of the stairs. “I’m two weeks behind, two mill over, I have general fibe and sat release dates in four days—and I’m still layering!” Francis shakes his head. He always appears a little sad and irritated. Alice accepts this in Francis, as well as his fits of temper, only because what he does is unique and, she thinks, good; though Francis is not extraordinarily commercial, working on a Francis vid, even as backmind, can never hurt one’s reputation.

  “You’ve kept us waiting. Plug us and get youth layers,” Alice says matter-of-factly.

  “Echo that,” Minstrel says.

  Francis wags his finger. “Fuck artists shouldn’t bitch.”

  Alice cringes dramatically, pushes his finger back with her own.

  Tiny black and silver machines with tactile fuzzy wheels and bug-jewel eyes crawl around the plug stage. They are little versions of Leni. Alice feels their bright little eyes sucking in her offline words. She hates them. Francis allows these recording arbeiters to roam with absolute freedom, examining whatever they choose; there are many in the audience who lose themselves in the life of the production. Francis makes as much on live behind-the-scenes docs as on the vids themselves. “Fuck artist,” Alice croons to the nearest bug.

  “Francis, the nano’s a little old,” Ahmed says. “It isn’t perking.”

  “No surprise,” Francis says. “We’ll do prep while it sets.”

  “You aren’t going to hook us with stale nano, are you, Francis?” Minstrel asks.

  “No fear. Alice, have you read the text?”

  “Only from the prep you sent. It’s a long book, Francis.” In fact, antique and long and dull.

  Francis is preparing a deep-layered vid of The Faerie Queene. He smiles proudly. “A real challenge, to fade the wonderful Spenserian stanzas into a Yox.” His face glows with the subject. “The Red Cross Knight is subject to such temptations, Alice. He is traveling with an Eastern queen named Una. A dragon has ravaged her land, and she hopes the Red Cross Knight will—”

  “It’s set, Francis.” Ahmed shows him the bottles of translucent nano, now fully charged with nutrients. The liquid within is turbid and finally perks; it appears restless. Alice regards it with misgivings. She has plugged over a hundred times, on various jobs, and she has never trusted the process—but she has never been seriously injured even when, as now, the hook is administered by a nonmedical.

  “The knight will rid her land of the dragon. So far, the Red Cross Knight has vanquished the hideous monster Error and all her progeny. A truly horrible scene, and I’ve layered it brilliantly. Now they are in a place of great temptations—Una and the knight. You’ve read the cues.”

  “We’re all primed with ghostly passions,” Minstrel says.

  “Alice, my pride, you give me the most haunted libido I’ve ever recorded, when you’re on point.”

  “I hope that’s a compliment,” Alice says.

  “It is. Una and the Red Cross Knight have strayed into the workshop of the evil Archimago, who appears as a godly and kindly Hermit. It is a place of terrible temptations. You are a haunted spright, a succubus created by Archimago to torment and delude. You feel the deepest need for this young, handsome, and virtuous knight, but if you have him, you destroy him—and you know he will never fall for your illusion. However, by appearing in the form of the chaste Una, and engaging in lewd revels with fellow phantoms, you will mislead him into thinking this Eastern Lady has succumbed and is wallowing in lust. You must feel the False Una’s passions as if she were actual souled flesh, not a demonic illusion. Many curious eyes and fingers are sure to want to plug into that layer.”

  “Specks like you’re going for broad appeal, this time,” Minstrel says, picking at something between his teeth. He inspects his finger.

  “I’d like to pay some bills, yes,” Francis barks back. “You’ll go direct into Leni while we run the set piece on stage. You’ll be layering over seven emotional records from other fluffers, so I need everything clean and clear.”

  Fluffers. Alice hates that word even more than fuck artist, though it is commonly used. It was once applied to women who kept actors erect or lubricious in old erotic movies. The comparison is inapt, at best; what Alice and Minstrel will provide is a layer of raw emotional experience, straight from their minds into the camera. Leni is only little less than a large set of eyes with a brain behind them. Francis guides Leni, cajoles her; theirs is not the relation of artisan to tool, they are more like partners.

  Ahmed brings up the little dams and shapes them to Alice’s head first, then Minstrel’s. He syringes a dollop of warm nano into the dams as they sit still. Alice is used to this method of creating a broadband plug; it’s common in the cheaper Yox.

  A few minutes pass. A microscopic lead of conducting material has passed through the interstices of her skin, bone, and brain, into her deep amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus; into the seats of her judgment engine, the Grand Central Terminal of her self. She feels nothing.

  Ahmed applies transponders to the little silver nipples of nano, no larger than a thumbnail. He takes readings for several minutes from the camera, Lights flash agreeably. “Hooked,” he tells Francis.

  Alice removes her robe. Minstrel is already naked. Francis makes a butterfly gesture with his hands then clasps
his fingers.

  “Here come the Sprights and Archimago. Taking,” he says. “Click one.”

  Ahmed labels the backmind layer. The camera hums.

  Francis quotes from memory:

  “Thus well instructed, to their work they hast,

  And coming where the knight in slomber lay,

  The one upon his hardy head him plast,

  And made him dream of loves and lustfull play,

  That nigh his manly heart did melt away,

  Bathed in wanton bliss and wicked joy…”

  Francis beams. “How like your own career, sweet Alice. How many men have you haunted?”

  Alice ignores this.

  On the stage behind them, in translucent and sketchy 3D workprint, the evil sorcerer Archimago leads the Red Cross Knight through dreams of dark chambers filled with writhing bodies in silken robes. Hanging tapestries are pulled aside by the incredulous Knight, who sees false Una’s flesh revealed in intimate posture with an equally false Spright made a Squire, Alice ignores most of this. What she and Minstrel will provide has little to do with the plot.

  Alice looks directly at Minstrel. As always, the angle of Minstrel’s dark brown eyes and the sharpness of his nose, the assurance of his professional smile, impresses her. They have real and reliable chemistry.

  “You will always be the most beautiful woman on Earth,” Minstrel murmurs to her, and she knows he means it. He prefers men, but Alice affects him as much as he affects her, reliably, predictably. If they lived together, their contradictions would burn them out in a year; but in this professional capacity, they’ve stretched their time.

  Francis is watching the camera, his Leni. She seems happy.

  What Alice feels first is the yearning warmth, not dissimilar to what a baby feels for its mother; she wishes to be closer. Minstrel touches her face with the back of his hand, stroking her cheek, holding this off. He responds as nearly all men respond to her, given a chance: she notes the flush on his chest, the close focus of his eyes, the beginning rise. Often, the rise amuses her; men seem off-balance when aroused, would topple like cranes without her support. But Minstrel’s rise is a delightful shock.

  The delicious pain of expectation meeting an inner self-doubt drops her back in the first sopping yet dry-mouthed experiments of youth (“Love for sale, appetizing young love for sale—” Billie Holiday singing Cole Porter), amazed at success and delighted by it.

  They kiss first, leaning forward to avoid other contact: soft-roughness of lips like nubbled silk, oily smoothness of tongues.

  “Good,” Francis says. He is recording none of the tactile, not of the surface; only the deep surge, the pulse of yearning from the sympathies, the letting down of vascular tensions by the parasympathies, the message of intense well-being issued by the judging amygdala; all of which Alice is aware of, but not conscious of.

  Her thighs seem large and obvious; she might topple too. I am all thighs. Minstrel wraps her, presses forearms against her back, then withdraws them until his fingers rub her ribs, just above the threshold of a tickle. Tongues plunge. For a moment this is too much and she breaks the kiss and noses the hollow of his neck, shuddering.

  Minstrel is not the most lovely and stimulating she has ever had, but she is so astonishingly consistent with him. Surprise, warmth, expectancy, and then the final salt: Minstrel prefers men. Alice has a special command, a leave he gives few other women, if any. She specks him with his male lovers, wonders whether she would have the same effect on them; likely not, doesn’t matter, the warm fantasy is well away now, sailing with courses full.

  They clasp tight from breasts to knees. He intrudes between her thighs and friction again becomes oily smoothness, but he does not press or angle. Minstrel knows her times and frequencies. He is an instinctive lover. She might shiver a muscle here, under his palm, and he adjusts the momentary mix of pressings and withdrawals to suit her as a horseman adjusts to his mount.

  The comparisons are becoming more and more basic, the sweetest and deepest of clichés. She will ride, float, flow, sit in the waves, feel the high warm sun; all images in her mind, most from past joins, some never real, all falling like drowsy rivers of fine hot sand down her spine.

  “Why, Cuntia,” he murmurs. “So long lacking?”

  “Shh,” she says into his ear. Their motion more pronounced. Francis forgotten, hooks ignored, though she makes sure not to rub the transponders loose as she brushes her temples against his chest. She disengages, though she wants him all within, wants to hide him, knows how to ramp her own surges by withholding. She rubs him down his stomach with her cheeks, lips, high sensual definition against the tight skin.

  “Good,” Francis says.

  Close-up, curls and the sweetly ugly rise, more beautiful than kittens; she adores him. Minstrel is all-valuable, all-honored; she suffers no disgrace by doing anything for him. She does not know what willingness he will take advantage of. Sometimes he assumes brusque anger, a delicate but dominant brutishness that toes a thin thread yet never goes beyond earnest play. But today Minstrel is infinitely gentle and this also falls within her range of surprise and expectancy.

  “Wicked as Lucrezia,” he says.

  His languor is reward enough for the minute she thinks she has. Sure enough, at the end of a minute, he takes her head between his palms and removes her, and she leans back on the stiff pallet, knowing she need do nothing but react, and that none too vigorously. Among the men she has had, the many hundreds of encounters long and short, professional and personal, Minstrel needs the least indication of her fulfilled desire. He already feels what she feels from the shivers and twitches of her knees and the texture of the skin of her hips and ribs and the muscles beneath.

  “Good,” Francis says.

  “Under Labia’s disguise, Glans finds shy Clitoris,” Minstrel whispers into her ear. His weight is a surge of southern air; his breath and sweat musk. She can smell his body, a whiff of zoo, nervous but not weak; this is the part she savors most, reaching a man’s deep concerns. After all their years, Minstrel wonders whether she will approve. Since she knows she will approve, his concern is a delight. Poor good men, all the good lovers, always this stretch of nerves before the partaking. A laugh even of delight might be misunderstood. Seconds pass before she shows anything other than complete and unquestioning acceptance.

  “Good,” Francis says. “And…”

  She clutches Minstrel, presses his butt down with her nails, feels the slipping entrance, sucks in him and an uneven breath, simultaneously.

  Francis quotes again:

  “With sword in hand, and with the old man went;/ Who soon him brought unto a secret part;/ Where that false couple were full closely ment/ In wanton lust and lewd embracement;/ Which when he saw, he burnt with gealous fire,/ The eye of reason was with rage yblent,/ And would have slaine them in his furious ire,/ But hardly was restrained of that aged sire…”

  Minstrel shudders.

  “Enough. Cut.”

  He holds, withdraws. Alice’s eyes dart around the stage. “What?” she says.

  “Focus,” Francis commands. “Disappointment. You cannot have the Red Cross Knight. You are a Spright, a Succubus, not a true female. Everything you do is a false sin, never delight, always duty. Enough.”

  Minstrel lies back, flushed. Alice wants to climb onto him but that would not be professional. Of all things in her life that would keep her from him, it is this isinglass membrane of her working self-respect.

  Francis monitors Leni, his eyes glazing over. Alice looks on the camera as a kind of dragon, a ravenous audience suspended in a line through all future time behind the camera’s many senses.

  “Perfect, both of you,” Francis says, returning and smiling. “Good enough to earn a credit. Your followers will love this.”

  Minstrel smiles back wearily. The muscles of his jaw tighten. The spell is broken and he is thinking of the sooty world.

  Minstrel leans over her. “Glans would ask dear Cuntia to marr
y him,” he says, “but the pressures of royal life… you know how it is.”

  “Cuntia would accept,” Alice replies.

  “We shouldn’t leave this unfinished,” Minstrel says.

  Alice is puzzled. “No.”

  Francis shouts for the stage to be cleared.

  “But we have to.” Minstrel smiles. “Better for the next time.”

  This is their third dry embrace in the past six months. They are nearly always in shadow, backmind layering now; never up front in the fulfilled lux.

  “I’ll be waiting,” Alice says, and Minstrel strokes her cheek before climbing the stairs to get dressed.

  Ahmed stares at her, flushed and awed.

  “You’re new, aren’t you?” Alice asks too sweetly. She puts on her robe and climbs the stairs after. At the top, she hears her pad chime in a loop of her street clothes. Minstrel is half-dressed. Times past, they might have finished their business up here, neither of them believing pent-up passion to be healthy, but she can see Minstrel’s heart and mind are elsewhere.

  The courtesies have fled. They’ve peaked and both know it.

  She pulls the small pad from her purse and takes the call. “Alice here.”

  “I couldn’t leave a message or let our homes talk to each other. This is Twist.”

  Twist is younger than Alice by six years but already a veteran. They met two years ago and took a quick liking to each other. Twist—if she calls at all—treats Alice as a kind of mother.

  “Hello, Twist. I’m just getting off a plug for Francis.”

  “Something’s queer, Alice.”

  “What?”

  “I’m acting really queer. I need to see somebody.”

  “How queer?”

  “I’m obsessing all over the place, about David.”

  Fuck artists, like most sex care workers, take on so many partners, Alice cannot immediately remember just who David is. She thinks they might have met once, at Twist’s apt in Ballard.