Fish Swim in the Lake

Part 4.2 | And I guess, but I just don't know

"I could ask you the same," said Colin Michaels.

"Get the brains off your shoes?"

The mentech shrugged. One of his shoulders was a little higher than the others and twisted like a tree branch. "Nothing a few microwaves couldn't sterilize. So why are you here? Doesn't seem like your turf exactly."

"You get to know a lot of people in my line of work," alphaDana said vaguely. She rubbed her back against the cool stone like she was a cat. She forced herself to focus on simple sensations: the rough wall she leaned against; the smooth round glass in her hand; the way Lola's sculpt pulled her body into an unfamiliar hyperfeminine shape. Her breasts and hips were exaggerated and essentially bare, but smoothed and desexualized into flesh safe as elbows. She might have been an angel: sound and solid yet pointlessly beautiful.

"I'm off duty, you know. I'm not going to report your going to a party." The mentech laughed, twice.

Read: if she kept playing cagy he could find out anyhow. She said, "I'm here with Lola Saxover and Tony the Greek. What about you?"

"Vlad's my brother."

"Vlad Michaels?" alphaDana said stupidly.

"Vlad Mikhailovitch. Our sister, she's the oldest, was a mail order bride. She married a rancher named Brad Warloon in Kamloops, British Columbia. Our parents refused to speak to her after she left, but she kept in touch with Vlad. When I was born she sponsored me and later I sponsored Vlad. Would you like to meet him? Vlad, I mean? Most women do, because they want to sleep with him, in hopes of gaining power over his operations. It's impossible to influence him that way though. He doesn't like women. He doesn't like men either. He has wuffs specially gene-spliced just for him. He gets jacked up on King's English and goes into a room with his little tailored wuffs and sometime we don't see him for days and days and then sometimes his lieutenants loose their cool and that's when neighborhoods get shot."

He smiled at her expectantly.

Eventually she said, "why are you telling me all this?"

"Because I agree with the Catholics in that confession is relaxing. It's really quite soothing to babble without a care -- say, a care that you're recording what I'm saying, which you're not. So I can say anything I want and you can't do anything with it."

"What if I verify it independently? Now that I know?"

Colin smiled indulgently. "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "No one would admit to this sort of thing on the record."

Posted by gtaylor at April 30, 2002 08:21 AM