Mira waved these warnings aside, as casually as signing a release before taking a ride on a grav-sled or a leap down a fric-tionless slide. She even invoked the ship's avatar to witness a blanket statement of consent - far more than he'd asked for; he'd only meant to create a measure of anticipation. But when she was done waving off his cautions, he realized he could have legally killed her then, that first time they had sex.
Never a temptation; it was simply an unfamiliar token of trust extended from her in an evening of extraordinary gifts.
Later, he wished he'd taken her there in the airlock. He would ask himself why the blaze of an imprisoned universe hadn't been enough to level any reticence. Why they'd talked instead.
"What do you do?" she asked. "What brings you so far Out?"
"I'm an originals dealer."
She shook her head. The term clearly meant nothing to her. A filmy layer of trapped sweat blurred the transparency of her vacuum suit. He longed to taste it, the bodily expression of her ecstasy a few moments before. He would have traded another look at the maelstrom for a drop of it.
"I deal in artwork: paint, sculpture, representations and installations. But I only buy and sell prototypes. Not the fabricated copies, virtuals, or sensory recordings. Just the one-and-only."
She nodded, pealing the vacuum suit down to her waist, the trapped moisture beading exquisitely in the cool air of the lock. "Of course. You get a lot more, don't you, if you've got the first one?"
"More than any fee for a reproduction license, yes. Sometimes by a factor of billions."
She paused at this, thumbs wedged into the suit's tight seal around her hips, eyes in the middle distance as if to confirm the orders of magnitude there. Her lips parted to make a noncommittal sound.
"So you buy and sell 'originals. " She said the word like so many did in the age of synthplants: a novel concept. Or possibly, a quaintly ancient one.
"I don't buy, actually. I don't like hanging onto things," he answered. She ran all ten fingers through her hair, which had been compressed by the suit. Her raised arms lofted her breasts a little in their wake. "I'm more of an agent," he continued. "I assess the authenticity of beautiful objects. I assess their value."
He could have used filaments so thin that they wouldn't have triggered a gag reflex, but he wanted her to feel it. The finger-thick cord of strands pushed her lips apart, registered the complex motions of her tongue, let her offer the sweet pressure of suction for a few moments. But the strands moved greedily inward.
There were already slender filaments touching the surface of her belly, soft and attentive. When the muscles there began to clench, the cord in her throat reacted. A miniscule gland at its tip sprayed a reflex-suppressant, a substance he had customized for her body chemistry from evidence supplied in saliva, sweat, even the flickers of her eyes. The substance - half topical, half invasive - caused a host of reactions. The sense data coming from Mira's inner ear was neatly severed from her kinesthetic awareness, causing not the nausea of dizziness, but the unsure orientation of zero-g. Her anus dialated slightly, with the cool sensation of relief, as if a dangerous accident had been narrowly averted. Her eyes closed in grim concentration as the cord pushed further.
Deep in her throat, the cord parted into separate strands, some no wider than nerves. Two bloodlessly penetrated her lungs, opening a channel of pure oxygen that Darling could control in nanoliter increments. Another filament took up residence in her stomach, where it brandished the sensations of nervousness, of panic, of awe. The remaining dozen strands snaked cautiously to various stations of Mira's heart, where, with the most minute of electrical shocks, they could seize control of its beating.
Now, with the tributaries of that one delicate member established, he moved to cover her.
"You have me at a disadvantage," he had complained after her robe was back on, the vacuum suit already claimed by a drone. Already, he wished he had seized the moments after they had seen the engine core. But the whole thing had been so sudden: the explosive, unexpected sunrise of a universe.
"What brings you Out this far?" he finished.
She smoothed the garment against her skin, giving rise to the shape of her breasts again. "I'm an agent, too, I suppose. But I don't broker objects; I perform tasks."
He frowned, the design of his mineral features made it a slow, grave motion. Often in the manifold and multiplex economies that blossomed throughout the Expansion, it was necessary to describe one's profession abstractly. The specifics of any job could become meaningless outside the context of planet and culture. But Mira's answer seemed deliberately obtuse. The mode she'd used in Diplomatique didn't forestall him asking, though.
"What sort of tasks?"
She cocked her head, her eyes watching his hands replace the genital jewelry he'd removed to protect it from the hard vacuum around the core. "I hearby declare this airlock to be my legal residence, temporary," she announced.
He had to chuckle. She knew the law and its fictions. Anything she said would now be beyond subpoena, even if the ship were watching, which, he felt sure, it was. And her statement confirmed his suspicions that she was no tourist.
"My tasks are extra-legal."
More vagueness, he thought.
"Whom do you work for?"
"World-class minds, or ships, sometimes. But older, wiser ones than this." She splayed one hand to indicate the Queen Favor, adding the barest of smiles for his benefit. "I make sure certain concepts are never fully realized."
He nodded. A sort of industrial spy, he supposed. Or saboteur. That was all he wanted to know, frankly. Probably all he could understand. It was a story as old as history: any profitable franchise (or guild, or cartel, or operating system) had to protect itself from developments that might result in it being superseded. The future always held bad news for someone. Of course, Mira and her employers were merely stop-gaps. As his own bootstrapped personhood showed, sooner or later the new toys always won.
Her tone had grown more guarded, even in the fiat-secrecy of the airlock. But he didn't want further details. The specifics didn't interest him. He hadn't paid attention to the world of business and investment, outside his own rarefied profession, for a hundred years.
But another question boiled up inside him with uncharacteristic suddenness and intensity. Maybe the result of artificial intuition, the old legend. He didn't think before asking.