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  The lights point the way to the back of the house. Another master suite opens, and it is here the—

  Mary halts, her eyes taking it in with human reluctance—

  Here the bodies are. She remembers the scattered butchered bodies of Emanuel Goldsmith’s victims in a comb apt in LA, frosted like these, but at least—

  Nussbaum takes her suited arm—

  —they were human, even in disarray.

  Closest to her, at the foot of where a bed should have been, where now stand four surgical tables sided by fixed surgery arbeiters, lies what was once—she guesses—a woman. Now she is a Boschian collage, wasp-waisted and Diana-breasted, vaginas on each thigh and some unidentifiable set of genitalia where the legs meet, her head elongated, the melon baldness shaved but for long stripes of mink fur, her eyes staring and fogged with death and cold, but clearly slanted and serpentine.

  Mary feels a tug of wretchedness at every eye-drawing detail.

  Nussbaum has advanced to the tables, stands between them. On the second table rests a small body, no larger than a child but fully mature in features, also sporting custom sexual characteristics. Mary’s gaze returns to the body nearest her, with which she forces herself to become familiar, disengaging all of her revulsion. She asks, Why is this a victim? and is not even sure what her question means.

  “They can have it all,” Nussbaum says. “Whatever they want can be shaped for them out of electrons or fitted up on prosthetutes. But that’s not enough. They demand more. They suck in the untherapied down-and-outers, fill them with cheap nano, shape them like lumps of clay…”

  Mary bends beside the first body. There are orchid-enfolded bumps on the corpse’s cheeks. Extra clitorises, waiting to be licked. Mary closes her eyes and steadies herself with an out-thrust hand.

  There is something unaesthetic and unintentional about the hands and feet. The limbs in general seem distorted, if she can separate the deliberate, sexual distortion of a psynthe from what might be pathological The fingers are swollen. On closer inspection, she sees that the eyes bulge. A pool of beige fluid has formed behind the elongated head, now frozen.

  The skin appears purplish.

  “She’s been cooked,” Mary says softly.

  Nussbaum turns and glances down at the body. “Nano heat?”

  She stands and walks to the tables. All of the arbeiter surgeons are slack, powered off. They could still function in this cold if they had been left with power and logic on. “They must have abandoned the… women, and fled. But first they turned off the surgeons. The women weren’t supervised… something was going wrong.”

  “They’re just as the first team found them,” Nussbaum says. Mary catches a glimpse of his face and knows that he too wants out of this house.

  The clitorises on the cheeks. To give her a cousinly safe kiss… never have that. Everything sex forever. Fuck fuck fuck.

  And suddenly, for Mary that aspect fades like a wrong note. She is numb, but her well-trained defenses go to work, letting the distressed strawboss of her consciousness have a moment’s rest.

  She checks the bottles of nano on a nearby shelf. Supplies of nutrients; delivery tubes, dams and nipples; a new regulator still in its box, not yet installed, on the shelf beside the nano it is made to supervise; memory cubes on a small folding table; scraps of plastic like shavings, blood drops brown as gravy on the tile floor.

  Mary picks up a bottle, reverses it to read the label. All the labels have been turned to the wall. She knows why. The label confirms her suspicions. Somebody had a small remnant of conscience, or did not want the subjects, the victims, to know.

  “This isn’t medical grade,” Mary says. “It’s for gardens.”

  “Gardens?” Nussbaum asks, and leans to see the label. “Christ. Distributed by Ortho.”

  “Any real expert could reprogram it,” Mary says. “Apparently, they didn’t have a real expert”

  “Gardener’s nano,” Nussbaum says. “Sweet Jesus H. Christ. Mary, I’m sorry. You can’t possibly understand this any more than I do.”

  “No need,” Mary says flatly.

  “Things started going wrong and the bastards left them here to cook,” Nussbaum says. “So very, very sorry.” Behind the plastic, his face is milky and drawn.

  Mary does not know to whom he is apologizing.

  SEXSTREAM

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  6

  RAZOR DANCE

  Jack Giffey thinks about getting some food at the Bullpen in downtown Moscow just as the republic’s office workers decide to end their lunch break and take a few minutes of sun. The air is still cold and a little snow fell earlier, but now, at one, the sun is bright and the blind blue of earlier in the morning is more intense and cheery.

  Giffey walks between ranks of folks dressed in loggers—padded vests, denim pants, plaid or checkered shirts. Nobody is more into the Sour Decades than Green Idaho, and among the republic’s workers, they’re practically a religion. After all, the eighties and nineties bred the root troubles that led to the Weaverite Insurrection and the Green Idaho Treaty. And Green Idaho government workers are among the highest paid and most protected in the nation.

  Giffey blows his nose and takes a turn on Constitution Avenue to find the Bullpen.

  There, in the sunlit comer of a window booth, his butt planted firmly on an antique pine bench, sitting before real pine-veneer table, a beer calms him, but his face is still red and his thoughts a little jagged.

  His father and mother were killed by Weaverites in the Secession Standoff of July 2020. Citizens’ Repossession Army Brevet General Birchhardt ordered the execution of thirty Forestry Service employees and the adult members of their families at Clearwater, in retaliation for a shoot-out with National Guard troops the week before.

  Giffey remembers Birchhardt, square-faced and eagle-nosed, with dead eyes and a nervous mouth. A regular John Brown and just as sentimental. The general patted young Jack on the head as the children were led out of the compound before the massacre. Jack remembers the natural gas pickup trucks, the single captured helicopter, and the motley soldiers of the general’s army, clad in three different kinds of camouflage—arctic, desert, and lowland jungle, all handmade or stolen.

  Birchhardt and his troops were handed over to the Federals in November of that year by the newly elected governor of Green Idaho. Birchhardt was tried and convicted and given forcible therapy. He later worked as a propaganda chief for Datafree Northwest, which targeted the cut-off communities in the Idaho panhandle for ten years thereafter, until Raphkind cut the funds and the Federals gave up.

  Later, Birchhardt and his new wife and infant son died in his home in Montana, all victims of gunshot wounds to the backs of their heads. Some thought they were murdered by disgruntled Weaverites, too s
tupid to understand the implications of really forceful “therapy.”

  Giffey’s father was a tough brave man but his mother had been fragile and frightened as a deer when the big bearded men had moved into the compound and separated them.

  Giffey never forgives. Giffey hates them all. He hates the Federal for encouraging the world to change so quickly in the late twentieth, for encouraging the nano revolution throughout twenty-one, for being insensitive to the pressures these changes put on the poor inflexible survivalists and orthodox Christians. Those denominations and parties unable to accept so much change simply went insane.

  Many migrated to the central states, unable to tolerate the ribbons and corridors and top spin financial hothouses of the coasts and big cities; they chose Northern Idaho as their sanctuary, and dared Federals to come and get them. And so the tiny brutal little war began.

  Giffey understands them, but he still doesn’t like them.

  He orders a corned beef sandwich from a cute brunette and looks at the antique neon beer signs in the window over his booth. Some of those beers he remembers his father drinking.

  Giffey’s anger is ramping down now. He grinds his teeth one last time, then opens his mouth wide and tries to persuade his jaw muscles to give it up. A little wriggle of the mandible crosswise, a twist of the head, and he is back where he had been this morning: cool and thoughtful and once again in charge of himself.

  For the first time he really notices the waitress as she comes to his table with his sandwich. She is about twenty years younger, with wavy brown hair, a sharply pretty face with a prominent nose, wide hazel eyes, strong hands with chewed fingernails painted over in dark red polish. Green, Idaho is a place of waitresses, actresses, aviatrixes, authoresses, congress-ladies, perhaps even doctresses, if any self-respecting male in the republic will let a woman examine his private parts. Despite the fact that the republic’s president is a woman, they are positively and proudly mid-twentieth in their language. No doubt about the sex roles here, and no doubt in Giffey’s mind that he can read this woman’s life like an open book.

  She is handsome, young, her body is slender and probably very fertile, her breasts are naturally generous and (he judges from years of experience) slightly but not grossly pendulous, very womanly. Giffey is not fond of the prevalence of the nineties cannon-shells so many of the women in Green Idaho affect. Surprising how much plastic surgery the women go for in this God-fearing, independently governed but non-seceded state republic. Men strong enough to be afraid of, women eager to keep them happy and calm. Paradise on Earth.

  The waitress gives him a quick look that Giffey instantly categorizes. He has never been inordinately fond of the chase, regarding women as decent creatures deserving of more stable and supportive partners than he can ever be. But there’s something, in her look—a half-buried homesick yearning—that Giffey knows and, in all kindness, will not let go without some further exploration.

  “Hard week?” he asks.

  The waitress smiles thinly.

  Giffey lifts his sandwich and smiles back, “I am a connoisseur of fine beef,” he says. “And very well served.”

  “Anything else?” she asks blandly.

  He knows her now, to a seventy-percent certainty. She’s not married but lives with a fellow gone most of the time looking for work outside of town. She’s no more than twenty-five but looks thirty. Her face has already taken on a patient dullness. The partner male is vigorous and quick in bed and will not let her start a family “until the republic’s situation settles.” It never will. Green Idaho is an economic backwater and what flows through here is State Bank paper money, much grumbled over, or treaty minted specie, not data. But he is straying from his focus.

  “Pretty slow, after lunch,” he observes. “I’d love it if you sat down and talked with me. Tell me about yourself.”

  The woman gives him a look as hard as she can make it. But his face is sympathetic, he is older and probably unlike any man she’s known, he looks solid and wise but a little on the untamed side with his smooth gray hair down to his neck, and in truth maybe she’s thinking of her father: her ideal father, not the real one, who was likely a disappointment. But she loved him nonetheless… She knows she is a good girl.

  The hard look shifts and she glances around the restaurant It is indeed quiet, empty but for Giffey; the government workers have all gone back to their buildings, and there isn’t any other trade at this time of day in Moscow.

  “What’s to tell?” she asks, as she sits in the booth and folds her hands in front of her. “And why do you care?”

  “I like to talk to women,” Giffey says. “I like the way you look. I like the way you brought me my sandwich.”

  “It’s hard for Al to get good corned beef,” she says, pointing. Giffey will take a bite soon, but needs his mouth uncluttered for a couple of minutes.

  “Don’t I know it,” he says. “How many times have you thought about heading south for Boise, or west?”

  The woman sniffs. “Our roots are here. People fought and died so we could live the way we want.”

  “Indeed,” Giffey says. He nods west at the great Outside.

  “Where are you from?” she asks.

  “You first, then me.”

  “Billings. My dad brought me here fifteen years ago. He and his girlfriend home-schooled me, and I got top honors in the Clearwater Scholastic Competition when I graduated. Now—you?”

  “I’ve done all sorts of things, some of them a little shady,” Jack says with a grin. Not a bold grin, but a shy one, a little out of place in that beard.

  “Let me guess,” she says. “You worked out of country.”

  “Bingo,” Giffey says. “My name’s Jack.”

  “I’m Yvonne,” she says. Jack stretches his hand across the table and she shakes it. Her grip is warm and dry and her fingers have a utility roughness that he likes. “Where out of country?” she asks.

  “Africa and Hispaniola, after I got out of the federal army.”

  Yvonne’s eyes widen. Federal army folks, if they come to Green Idaho at all, usually don’t admit their history.

  “I served five years with Colonel Sir John Yardley’s boys in Liberia and Hispaniola. Left when he started getting snake’s eyes and took over the country.”

  “Oh,” she says. She’s interested, and not just in history.

  “Married for five years, no kids, divorced.” Something flickers in his memory; the faces of two women. One of them is like a pin-up queen, the other… ghostly. “Now you.”

  “I live with a forager. Not married yet, but soon. He’s up north working in a pulp mill. Making fine papers for art books, you know. Sometimes they even pay on time.”

  Giffey nods. “Must be tough.”

  “It really is,” Yvonne says, looking out the window. “He doesn’t want to get married until we have enough in the state bank to get a little repair business going. But you know, even here, those little nano repair stations—everybody’s using them. I just don’t know how we’re going to do it. Al’s his uncle. It’s nice how everybody helps everybody else here.”

  And nice how Al doesn’t have to pay much in the way of specie to his nephew’s girlfriend.

  Giffey makes up his mind. Yvonne deserves better than she’s getting, at least for the short term. He strongly suspects she’s never been in bed with a man who knows anything besides the standard plumbing specs.

  “Damn, that is sad,” he says.

  “What?” She seems ready to take offense.

  “You’re smart, you could help Al turn this place around if he’d just listen to you…” All of this, Giffey knows, is both true and has seldom if ever been said to her. “Besides, you’re a true beauty.”

  Yvonne reacts as she must to that signal word, beauty. She’s suspicious. She starts to get up. The red on her cheeks is pale but genuine.

  “Sorry,” Giffey says. “I’m just too damned blunt. I speak my mind. If you have to get back to work…”

>   Yvonne looks around. The Bullpen is truly, proudly empty. She sits again and stares at him, hard. “You’re throwing me a line, aren’t you?”

  Giffey laughs. He has a good, solid laugh. Yvonne blushes again at her unintentional double entendre.

  “Was that well put, or what?” he asks.

  “Damn you,” she says, not unkindly.

  “I’m not a youngster and nobody calls me handsome, and I still like the attention of a beautiful woman,” Giffey says. “I am an honorable man, in my way. And the truth is, I’m lonely. I’d be proud to buy you a good dinner someplace at six or seven this evening and listen some more.”

  Yvonne considers this with half-defensive bemusement, and then turns aside to do her inner calculations, hide all the whirrings and turnings of her centers of sexual judgment.

  Then comes the downward glance at the table. All her current figures tot up to a big dull zero. Jack’s figures come in marginally above that. Giffey’s been through it many times before. He has never been an instant heart-throb, but he has rarely failed to impress a woman upon more extended acquaintance.

  “All right,” Yvonne says. “You’d better eat that good sandwich, Jack.”

  “I will,” Jack says.

  “Make it seven. I’ll meet you on the corner of Constitution and Divinity. I have a dress I want to finish.”

  “Seven.” He takes his first bite of the sandwich, and Yvonne goes away without a backward glance.

  He gives her even odds of showing up. It’s going to be cold in Moscow at seven tonight.

  Do you remember?

  Fibes and satlinks, all the dataflow river, used to be called the Media and the Internet. Slow and primitive, but the shape was clear from the beginning. You can poke all the way back up the tributaries to the Internet Archives, and catch holo snaps of the Sour Decades… Frozen in time, the murmurings and mutterings of tens of millions of folks now mostly dead, all their little opinions, and so many of them unknown to us, even today. Because they preferred to hide, to remain anonymous, to conduct their little crusades and investigations from behind hunters’ blinds.