Free Acts of Conscience by William Barton Page B

span thing.
    A slight sense of something like impatience from the house. As if to say, What the fuck do you want ? Sorry. Sorry I’m such an asshole, dear old house. The pornode menu was displaced by classified listings, by phonebook pages. Live shows, at theaters in the habitat parts of L1(SE). Sure, that’d be cool. I haven’t done that in a long time. Private shows in booths. All right. That too.
    Flip the page.
    Long, long listings of whorehouses, all kinds of whorehouses, fancy ones and cheap ones, houses for general trade and specialty spots. We can suck it for you here, whatever it is, for a price...
    Call girls, much more expensive, available by the hour for such and such a price, grouped by the districts they worked. Girls from houses who’d come to you wherever, at a somewhat higher price. And then, of course, the private contractors.
    I had the menu re-sort itself by price and looked at the top of the list. Camilla Seldane. Whole nights only. £500 — discounts for longer engagements. No groups... What the hell could a woman possibly do for me, in a single night, that might be worth five hundred livres? A couple of days ago, I’d’ve called that just shy of five months pay.
    Before I knew what was happening, I found that I’d loaded my credit code and address and made myself a date. Then I sat back in my chair and held tight to my drink and felt an attack of the willies come on. My God.
    When the house AI whispered, You have a visitor, Mr. du Cheyne, I felt my asshole clench. Tell her to go back... tell her to go away... tell her... I was on my feet, walking across the room, empty glass still clutched tight in my hand, when the door slid open, admitting harsh, institutional light from the hall.
    A man and a woman. Woman slim, pale-haired, with dark blue, fathomless eyes, standing closer, closer than the man, man somehow lost in shadow. She turned to him and said, “All right, John. You can pick me up in the morning, at the usual time.”
    Emerging from the shadows. “I... think I’ll wait for you, for just a while, down in the lobby...” Looking at me, mean faced, scowling, big, thick-necked man with a handgun holstered at his hip, not a stungun, something deadly, ID patch on his shoulder, branding him with the name of a licensed security agency.
    She stepped across the lintel and the door slid shut behind her.
    Silence.
    Then a slow grin, secretive, letting me in on the secret, the grin of a friend. A very close friend, someone I’d known, perhaps, for...
    She stepped closer, no more than a meter from me now, taking those deep blue eyes off mine, looking around at the apartment, then looking back, locking me in again. “So, Mr. du Cheyne. Someone die and leave you a bit of money did they?”
    I swallowed past a long dry spot in my throat, tried to lift my empty glass toward my lips, forced myself to let it dangle. “Um. Sort of.” “Sort of...” She swept past me, into the rest of the apartment, turning round, looking at... things. Pirouetting. For me? I...
    Not an astonishingly beautiful woman. That pale neutral-color silk dress, clinging just so to the curve of breast and hip and buttock... very flattering, supremely flattering, a thousand-livre dress, but... Garstang would’ve looked better in it, I...
    Something about the scent of her as she brushed by me. As if she’d... touched me somehow. Not perfume, no. Nothing I could put my finger on, you see. Just...
    She stepped closer, smiling into my eyes, looking at me. Only at me. As if there were nothing else, no one else, right now, in the entire universe, but me. Nothing in the universe but me, right now, maybe for ever. Nothing but me, until the end of time... That tremor in my chest must be the beating of my heart.
    She took the empty glass out of my hand, brought it to her nose, sniffed delicately, smiled and made a tsk-tsk sound, put it aside, though there was nowhere to set it down, empty glass bouncing noiselessly on the carpet, rolling