Chapter 6

THE FIRST DREAM

"Do you require medical attention?" the ship's voice came again.

"Fuck off," she replied, still hoarse. It had asked her this three times now. The first time when she had urinated, her piss a metal-smelling, menstrual pink from her wounds. The second when she had voice-ordered a glass of cool water, her ghastly croak alarming the serving drone. The third time was just now, when she had put on her robe, its sensors finding various cuts and abrasions sufficiently disturbing to alert the ship.

"Perhaps that's good advice," Darling said.

She looked at him. He sat across the room, seeming almost human-sized on the huge furniture of his cabin. Still naked, his legs crossed, he looked like some sated, megalithic buddha.

"Maybe later," she answered. "Certainly later. But I don't need all those machines running around in me right now."

He looked offended. Was it the word machine?

"All I mean, Darling, is that I'm enjoying my own reactions to all this. The adrenalin, the endorphins, the… calm after the storm."

She rubbed her shoulder muscles with both hands. What was this foul-smelling shit on her neck?

"I don't want the Queen Favor's medical minions neutralizing all this," she continued. "I'm happy."

For the moment, anyway. She had a dozen distinct muscle-pulls, her skin was raw, her joints ached from some sort of immune reaction, and every breath felt like the air in the cabin was set to Venusian noon. But it wasn't so bad as long as she could just lie here. The braying chorus of pains was dwarfed by the vast, thunderous resonance of having been pleasured by this fuck-machine, this juggernaut, this monster.

She shifted a little on the hard bed to face him better, but was stopped by a sudden firebolt of agony in one nipple. She closed her eyes until the pain receded, rejoining the shouting parliament of bodily inflammations. The only thing that didn't seem to hurt was her vagina. It felt glorious if strangely cool, an oasis on the wasted expanse of her body. She suspected, however, that this reflected some magic trick of Darling's rather than its actual state.

"So this is what you do? Travel around dealing art and collecting fuck-implants?"

"A very slow sort of collecting, actually," he replied. "I've undergone roughly only one sex-related body modification per decade."

"For two hundred years. Evolution's darling, aren't we?"

"Possibly," he admitted. It was a phrase popular among artificial intuitionists, who believed that AIs were naturally privileged beings: evolution's darlings, because they could evolve—literally, physically—within the span of one lifetime, while biologicals were trapped on that slow wheel of generations.

"Of course, I collect ideas as well as hardware," he added.

"And lovers?"

He cocked his head, the barest phosphorescence dancing in one shoulder.

"Do you collect lovers?" she asked again. "A fuck in every port of call?"

He paused a moment, as if stalling, or perhaps parsing the turn of phrase in some archaic first language still baggaged in his head.

"No," he answered. "As I said, I don't like hanging onto things."

She snorted, which stabbing pains in her chest and throat made her immediately regret.

"So you don't want to do this again?" she asked. "I mean, assuming I recover."

"Of course I do," he responded. "I'm sorry if I implied otherwise. I was merely trying to be accurate, I suppose."

She laughed at that, a deliciously painful experience and a dire sound indeed. "Okay. No offense."

She grinned at him, and he at her. It was the first time she'd seen so obvious an expression on his face. It made him look like a children's character. A friendly giant, or a happy mountain.

"How long are you on the Favor?" she asked.

"I'm afraid my employer wishes that kept confidential. You?"

She leaned back against the headboard, lifting the condensation-beaded glass of water to her forehead. She had a firm and insistent ringing in her ears now, and she didn't think it was from the sex. Rather, it was the resounding and disturbing knowledge that part of her wanted to pull back now. To return to being a shadow on the surface of this journey, a patient, elemental figure, waiting to get the job done. But that wasn't going to happen. She was stuck with this man now, for a while.

"The same restriction applies," she said.

He nodded at these words, as if he'd been expecting them.

Later, in the oversized bed again, Mira was pleased to find that Darling had set his skin to the temperature of sunwarmed stone. She draped herself sleepily across him, listening for a heartbeat in his chest. The sound within the stone was more of a cyclic rise and fall, like the waves of a distant ocean.

Mira felt her aches subside a little in Darling's swells. Maybe she could sleep through an entire night tonight, the inverted siesta vanquished.

She felt a veil of heat across one side of her face, like a flush of embarrassment. It was like the pressure of sunlight, bright enough to burn the skin. She smelled the salt of her own sweat.

Opens her eyes…

The sea stretches away from her in a great arc, distance-hazed mountains puncuating the spurs of land at either end of the ocean's crescent. In the sky, pink kite-parasols flutter in the grasp of their tethers, casting a mottled net of shadows across the beach. The sun winks in and out as the shimmering kites sway above her, translucent so that they glow like a burning pink flower for the instant they occult the sun. She remembers that the kites are alive, engineered for this very purpose. Confectionary beings.

Behind her is a city, high and glass-fronted residential buildings crowded up to the beach's edge, steep as a cliff. Mira knows that she lives in one of them. She shades her eyes with both hands and looks out into the deep harbor.

A storm is coming, black on the horizon. The wind has already started to pick up, bathers collecting themselves and drifting toward the city.

They'll be reeling in the kite-creatures soon. But there may be time for one last swim.

Mira wakes up, as easily as sliding into bath-warm water.

Completely real, that dream. Completely new, like some suppressed but photographic memory, a brighter coin for its lack of circulation.

And it wasn't from one of her missions for the gods. It was from… before. Her childhood, so long missing.

She feels the wounds of her lovemaking with Darling, the stony warmness of him lying awake (he's old-fashioned, doesn't sleep) next to her.

How strange that from this battered sleep she would awake so fresh. How odd that she would dream this now.

Maybe Darling is the key; the brutality, the cranial shock therapy, the utter intrusiveness of his fucking. Has that got her remembering her lost childhood? A strange benefit at the fringes of this golem's love.

"Darling?"

"Yes?"

"Again."

"Are you sure? Your injuries."

"Again. Harder. Then let me sleep some more."