Free Electric Forest by Tanith Lee

when you've sobered up. What's your room number?"
    Irlin hit him. It was a tutored, text-book blow, infallible though sloppy in delivery. The man dropped at their
feet.
    "Christ," said Irlin. He stumbled up the pier, pulling Magdala beside him. Ill
    Irlin asked no questions. Yet he was nervous. He seemed to believe the second rich man who had accosted them on the pier was some ghost from her rich-girl's past.

    Nobody else approached. Public arguments and fights

    59
    would be part of the entertainment at Sugar Beach, to be taken in from a safe spectator's vantage. "Where now?" Irlin said.
    Recklessly, she said: "Not the hotel. Get your car and drive me somewhere." "Where?"
     

     
     
    "Surprise me."
    She was becoming inventive with the Tri-V dialogue, and her drunkenness was delicious. What did it matter about the black-haired man?
    Irlin led her to a small slick car. They climbed inside. He activated the robot-drive and punched in the
    program buttons. When the car started up, he slouched unrelaxedly, and watched the shooting gray ribbon of road erupt before the windscreen.
    She was exhilarated by the speed. It seemed to complement the alcoholic high. Leaving Claudio's silver house, she had seen him switch off the holostet trees inside the wall. One moment they existed, then they did not. Her fear was like that. Her fear, which had seemed so palpable, had been switched off.
    They drove into the blued-over, gingerbread hills, to an isolated run-down bar, and sat on the glazium veranda, drinking synthetic wine. She did not get any drunker, but the momentum did not lapse.
    Not many people came to this cheap bar. Another couple had gone up into a room. The air-wash was faulty, and the reversible windows open. Presently Magdala heard the girl noisily producing an orgasm.
    Alone with her on the veranda, Irlin's nervousness seemed to increase his concern to touch her. He ran his hand over her shoulder, along the inside of her arm against her breast. She turned to him and allowed him to kiss her. The kiss was like the blow tutored, calculated, effective, and unclever.
    "Don't be plastic," he said into her mouth. "Come with me, baby, come with me." His hand went on moving down and down the slopes of
    her. His fingers wadded aside her skirt, kneaded the unclothed skin of her thigh. "You're so lovely," he said.
    As suddenly as it had swamped her, as if at a signal, her drunkenness ebbed away. She tried to keep it from leaving her, but without success. She sank after it. Hie blue on the hills became dismal, the day sodden with heat, his hand damp and insistent and no longer compatible.
    She was afraid. Alone with a stranger, and afraid.

    She was ugly, crippled, deformed, and a young man was rubbing his hands all over her and sighing in her
    ear.

    She pushed at him.

    "No more."
    "Please, Magda--" "No."

    He complied, shivering.

    She rose, and picked her way off the veranda, toward the car-park. Soon he followed her, hanging his head, his eyes raw with a loathing he could not or would not express.
    "You do it with your brother," he managed eventually, and opened the car for her. They drove back to the hotel.
     

     
     
    The sun was burning the western sky and the crenellated tips of the sea. She fidgeted in Irlin's car, watching the sun. There was no sign of the black-haired man.
    "What I said," Irlin muttered. He stared at her, the loathing in his eyes, troubled by propriety, "I made a mistake."

    "Never mind," she said foolishly.
    She got out of the car and ran into the hotel, and into the elevator which bore her upwards. When the door of the suite widened she experienced an almost immediate relief. Then she saw Claudio.
    He sat facing the door. He was serene, immaculate.
    "Poor Irlin," he said. "The lady hadn't thawed after all."

    Abruptly, her descent from the alcoholic high was complete, and with a wretched rationality she understood.
    "I couldn't be drunk," she said. "The neurons can relay stimuli by proxy from my brain and