"Your old pal Zimivic."
A laugh frothed with wicked pleasure.
"First, a few 'found' Vaddums. High prices. Ever more improbable discoveries. And then the man himself, wandering out of the desert and wrapped up like a patent." Reginald laughs again.
"A good strategy," she encourages.
"And all the warehoused Vaddums plummet in value. Zimivic ruined!" he brays.
She allows herself a smile at the old fart's unrepentant evil. What a philistine.
"A waste of money," Reginald concludes. "But it's sheer masturbation. I'll do it. And if it's a hoax, we'll just spread the rumor anyway! Zimivic will be shitting every bite he takes."
"You're a genius."
"Absolutely. But can Darling keep a secret?"
"I'll make him promise."
"Make him swear."
Chapter 4
STARS IN A POCKET
The woman Mira led him through the cobblestone streets with a purpose that was almost brutal against their winding plan. She sometimes paused at intersections, as if receiving silent instructions. Soon, at the derelict end of a quiet, unappealing street, they reached a skywall. It opened as she reached out toward it, revealing a cramped portal scaled for a service drone.
They stepped from the torchlit, starlit, indirect world of the medina into a blank and featureless hallway. The aperture closed hastily behind them, as if an invisible host wanted to hide this unfinished back room from the public. Mira strode purposefully ahead. Darling looked into the few sparse rooms they passed. They were not truly behind the scenes yet, rather in the marginal spaces where one went to retrieve lost property or pay a trivial fine: officious and evenly lit, the rooms with numbers instead of names.
The hall took them to an elevator, decorated only with marks of wear, large enough to carry heavy equipment. It dropped quickly, and Darling's human companion had to steady herself in the abrupt acceleration. There were two course changes along the way, the axes x, y, and z all accounted for.
He wondered what quaint attraction this was all leading to. A giant bay of exotic cargo? A personal cutter carried in stowage? He hadn't asked about the woman's profession, but she had the disinterest of the very rich in the face of the ship's many spectacles. And now this unexpected access.
The elevator opened onto an airlock changing room. Two hard vacuum suits waited for them, hanging lifeless, one scaled for his inhuman size. Darling watched as Mira let her robe flow onto the floor, its shape's resistance to gravity revealing some hidden intelligence in its fibers. She had the wide hips and large breasts that many women of her diminutive height were born with; they revealed no signs of surgical alteration. She met his motionless stare as she climbed into the suit.
"Don't tell me you're vacuum-capable," she protested.
"Except for a few peripherals," he answered, removing elements of the jewelry around his loins, a UHF emitter from his forehead.
"Old-fashioned, aren't you?" she asked.
"Merely two centuries."
She whistled, the sound blurring oddly with the hissing seal of her suit. He knew what she was thinking: Bootstrapped. He had achieved his personhood before real artificial rights, before developmental minders and childhood protection protocols and SPCAI proctors with their monthly Turing tests.
But his annoyance quickly evaporated. Her naked breasts were still visible beneath the translucent material of the vac suit, a few years shaped away by its semi-rigidity. He allowed himself to make comparisons between Mira and a lover from long ago.
"That explains a couple of things," she said. Her voice came now in direct interface, matching the movements of her condensation-misted lips, but oddly without direction. He heard a sub-vocalized command, as intimate in DI as if she'd whispered it in his ear.
The lock cycled, and the sudden pressure drop triggered a few of Darling's internal alarms. The great portal across from them opened...
... onto madness.
A maelstrom aurora bombarded the full range of his senses in a great informationless howl, a raging hurricane as tall and wide as his sensory parameters extended. A terrific white noise (if noise can encompass gamma, X-ray, visible, radar, microwave, and on down: an uninterrupted gamut of sheer presence) blared from a quintillion suns trapped inside the infinite and expanding non-place of the ship's engine core. Here was a pocket universe in all its glorious obscenity: an artificial cosmos surging against the metaspace bonds that held it to this reality, trying to escape into the utter disappearance of its own realm, the ship bleeding the vast energies of its endeavors like some omnipotent god-leech.
Mira, visible only as the faintest of shadows in the torrent of radiation, had opened herself to the cry of this fearsome engine: arms and legs spread wide, mouth agape, fingers grasping as if the storm of energy were palpable. Darling unfurled his sensory strands to drink in the constant howl, extending his filaments until they reached the airlock's floor, ceiling, walls. With the array fully deployed, he was a glowing statue caught in some monster-ous spider's web.
There was a long time like that, sovereign and changeless, marked only by gradual cycles in which his comprehension of what was happening stabilized, only to be overturned by a fresh wave of disbelief. This drive was not unlike Darling's own AI core: an artifical cosmos, a collapsing singularity held forever in the Common Universe. It was this technology that underlay faster-than-light travel, unlimited power production, and the personhood of AIs, and which had made the Expansion possible. But he had never seen one before - not in the flesh.
It was very big.
And then the portal closed, and the world cascaded into a sudden and awesome silence. Only the measured hiss of returning air registered the continued existence of the universe.
Mira moved first, settling down onto her heels again. She peeled back the head of her suit and gasped a breath of air. She sat heavily upon the changing bench: an exhausted athlete, a firefighter grasping a few moments' rest.
She watched Darling with heavy eyes as his filaments furled, suddenly shy snakes disappearing into the voluminous robe.
"Touche," he said.
"Stars," she said. "God's fires."
Later, in his cabin, he patiently explained the possible complications of his sexual apparati. They had been accumulated across two centuries of travel, among branches of the human family that had been weathered and roughened by alien environments, xenophobia, xenophilia, rates of mortality that the Home Cluster hadn't seen since the Expansion began. Practices that had originated when the original human equipment had failed through some trick of radiation or diet, or from temptations borrowed from species intelligent, adaptable, and likeable, but spawned in utterly different seas.