"Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age."
—JEANNE MOUREAU
The next day saw the beginning of my "surprise" party, staged in my condo, with wine from my cellar, food from my kitchen, and entertainment charged to my account—all arranged by my dear friends, the Agonists— with mucho assistance from Chad. Winston supplied the psychotropic drugs, though of course I paid for them. About five hundred people stopped by. Sheeba wore pink.
'To celebrate your recovery, beau." She lifted her wrist and shook the heavy new diamond bracelet I'd just bought her. "Sparkly," she said with a smile.
The bracelet didn't seem to please her as much as that antique seashell. I made a mental note: Sheeba likes pearly pink things best.
She was craning her neck, scanning the crowd. "Mega-sublime party."
"Buffet and drinks on even-numbered stories. Dancing on every terrace. Movies in the screening room. Foosball, minigolf, karaoke and gaming on floors thirty through fifty-five. And I think Chad hired a psychic. She's on the ground floor channeling dead people. There's a directory by the elevator. So what'll you have, Shee?"
Sheeba flashed her starry smile. "I'll have some of everything!"
She paraded among my guests in a cloud of wispy pink foam that parted like soap bubbles wherever anyone touched her. Beneath the cloud, her highly visible naked body gleamed a nonbiological shade of iridescent rose. She'd waxed her hair fuchsia—all of her hair—and her eyes were jet-black, which stirred me to speculate if that might be their natural color. Who exactly was this chameleon child, this Sheeba Zee?
Her nudity wasn't the issue. Lots of people came to my party nude. I knew Sheeba sprang from minor executive lineage in some small American Com, that she'd earned top grades at a mediocre school, and that in her short career, she'd jumped from one health church to another almost as often as she'd changed her hair. She hadn't lived long enough to have a past. But thanks to my recommendations, half the geezers in my condo now booked Sheeba's physical therapy sessions. Did she snuggle and flirt with everyone the way she did with old Nasir? That doubt made me watch her all evening.
"To your health." Verinne rested against a window wall, clutching one elbow and sipping an unctuous yellow cocktail. She was always sampling new vitamin drinks. Outside the window, a swarm of adversects bumped steadily against the glass like flies, unable to spray their promo jingles through my security field.
"I see we have the usual crowd." She motioned with her drink toward a group of guests, and to my surprise, mere stood Robert Trencher, my former protege from Provendia.Com. Who had invited that creep? Not me. Two days ago, I'd demoted him for incompetence. Yet here he stood in his glossy white, patent-leather codpiece (padded, I'm sure), with his ashy eye shadow and body rings, his hairless skin the color of bruised lilies.
Verinne wasn't pointing at Trencher, though. She meant the woman standing next to him, a buxom courtesan studded in light-emitting rhinestones. It was one of Winston's ex-girlfriends, a notorious epicuress who surfed parties they way we Agonists surfed war zones. When the woman moved aside, I saw what she had in tow—a child!
I gasped and turned away. Flaunting her young in public. It was beneath contempt. Everyone knew children should be kept decently out of sight, but some execs would break any taboo for degenerate shock value. I stole another look. The child's head seemed disproportionately large on its short, chubby body. With its slick white skin, half-formed features and popping eyes, it resembled a pale amphibious toad.
The woman didn't look rich enough to afford a child. Private crèches charged molto deutsch to bring fetuses to term, and private schools charged even more to bring neonates to adulthood. Hardly anyone bothered cultivating heirs these days. Most executive young were gengineered by commercial DNA banks on spec, then saddled with nurture loans when they reached maturity. I had a feeling this rhinestone woman had "borrowed" her shocking accessory for the evening.
Verinne sipped her yellow cocktail. "Don't act so straitlaced. You were a juvenile once yourself."
"Not for ages," I said, shuddering. "That time is deleted from my memory."
"I doubt it." Verinne wheezed with laughter. Her canted eyes, gray tights and pointy white collar made her look oddly like a Russian nun. "Do you know what, Nasir? Today is my birthday."
"My dear Verinne, I'd forgotten. Let me order champagne. We'll have a toast."
"No." She grabbed my arm** when I tried to signal a waiter. "I don't celebrate anymore. Nasir, this will be the last one."
The amusement had drained from her face. She gazed out the window wall, where Nordvik's heavy evening traffic streamed in ragged air lanes among the towers. Reflections from their brake lights flickered against the underside of the white city dome.
I took her hand. "Cara mia, you're sad. Birthdays are difficult, but they always pass. Put down your drink, and we'll do a cha-cha, the way we used to."
When I tried to steer her toward the dance floor, she pushed me away and nearly overturned a nearby sculpture. Verinne didn't usually show so much emotion. But she was the oldest of our crew, over 270. No cosmetics could hide the tiny cracks stretching around her mouth.
"Nasir, I'm dying."
"What? That's nonsense, love. You need another treatment. Don't—"
"I'm dying," she said again.
Verinne was not one to exaggerate. Her dry eyes glittered huge in her sunken sockets.
"When?" I whispered.
She drained her glass. "Within a year. Don't tell the others. Nasir, there's one thing I want to do before I go."
"Yes, cara. Anything."
"I want to surf Heaven."
"Oh." I stepped back. "You don't know what you're saying. There are things about Heaven. . .things I can't tell you."
A group of drunken revelers stumbled against us and shoved us apart "Think about it." Verinne raised her husky voice. "Heaven."
"But you don't understand—"
One of the guests caught me in a bear hug, separating me farther from Verinne. Next, the lot of them insisted on lifting me up on their shoulders and traipsing around the dance floor. I didn't see Verinne again for hours.
Winston had ensconced himself in my library with an entourage of females and a steamer trunk of psychotropic diversions. I found him enthroned in an armchair like a high church deacon, dispensing pills, powders and skin patches to a line of supplicants. His wavy auburn hair framed his head like a lion's mane. The sight struck me as hilarious because Winston had, in fact, once been a deacon in the Nordvik Church of Acute Oncology. During his long career as a physician, he'd racked up a fortune even larger than mine. But he lost most of his money somehow. Perhaps he forgot where he put it.
"Nasty Nass, name your poison. How would ya like to feel tonight?" Intoxication slurred his consonants and elongated his vowels.
I lifted my hands like a stagy tragedian. "I want to feel heroic."
Winston grinned. "Uh-huh, yeah. Slip that under your tongue." He handed me a glossy black capsule. "You'll think you're the risen Krishna."
Time swirled in euphoric friezes after that, and I seem to recall riding up and down the elevator for hours. At some point, I discovered Kat binge-eating in my private pantry. She wore black fur, red skin dye and diamonds, and among her glittery choker necklaces dangled a silver key on a chain. The sight of that key half-eradicated my drug high. It was Kat's heart key. Should she experience cardiac arrest, we were supposed to insert mat key in her chest port, turn it three-quarters clockwise and stand back. Preter-creepy.
But Kat didn't seem in danger of heart attack at the moment Her tall lacquered hairdo had slipped to one side, and her face was smeared with chocolate sauce. "Darling." She flung a frozen éclair at my head.
"Dearest, for me?" I snatched the pastry from the air and took a bite.
Kat hated to be caught in one of her secret feasting sessions. "These things are stale, Nass. You're such a tightwad. When things get old, you should throw them out."
"Katherine, I wouldn't know where to begin."
She saw I didn't intend to leave, so she tore open another box of frozen pastries and crammed her cheeks full. The sight reminded me of something dark and frightening, something from the distant past. Lychee nuts. Long ago in my youth, I remembered cramming my cheeks with handful after handful, until I nearly choked. For two months, I survived on nothing but lychee nuts canned in sweet juice. Quickly, I swallowed another mouthful of éclair to block the memory.
"We're going to Heaven" Kat said through the half-masticated food.
"No we're not." I finished off the gooey éclair and took another.
"Don't be a stupido. Of course we're going. You're a lot of things, Nass, but you're no lily-liver."
"Kat, don't push it. There's more to Heaven than you'll find on the Net."
She swallowed a gulp so large that it made her eyes water. 'Tell me. Don't be so freaking mysterious."
I winked and drew a line across my lips, to rile her. Then I grabbed a couple more pastries and left her alone with her banquet.
"Where's Sheeba?" I asked Chad.
He'd been keeping tabs on her with the house security cameras. "She's in the thirty-third-floor library, boss. She's talking with some of your younger guests."
I decided to drop in. She and her friends had pushed my furniture aside to lounge on the floor, and for a while, I stood in the doorway, listening to their nonsense. Sheeba was giving them some kind of lesson about healing.
"The dark is barbarous. It's the source of birth, pain, passion. It's destructive and creative at the same time." She sat cross-legged on a cushion, jouncing and frisking like a hyperactive pup, shedding far too many pink bubbles.
"Yeah, cosmic," said one of her sophomoric disciples. "The primal wildness," said another fool. They'd formed a circle with Shee at their center. Were they ogling her charms, or were these young turks actually paying attention to what she said?
She rocked with excitement. "We've been estranged from the dark, and we miss it. We need its healing violence to rip us apart and remake us."
"So valid." "I hear that." They responded like a chorus.
"We have to find it again." Her voice rose with mystical ardor. "The dark canal is the path."
Juvenile fizz. One of her faith-healer gurus had probably cooked it up—that smarmy Father Daniel, for instance.
With a dramatic flair, Sheeba pulled an e-book from my library shelf and held it up: Advanced Physiology. Then she thumped it savagely against the floor. What the heck? My book!
"This is what scientists call enlightenment Vicious trash. It's heinously askew." She cracked the book's electronic spine, and its indicator lights went dead. "These authors treat the human body like a machine. They totally miss the animating spirit"
"That's an expensive book," I said, but the cheers and clicking mini-lites from her audience drowned me out.
Then she dumped my valuable e-book in the waste can, threw her head back and sighed. "It doesn't matter what they record in their books. Light can never touch darkness. It can only pass through."
I decided to retire before I said something rude. After all, no one expects a delicious young girl to be rational.
Winston's copious stock of drugs kept the party going well into the third day. When the uppers ran out, my guests either had themselves driven home or collapsed in comatose mounds on my carpet Shee fell asleep in the small bedroom—from exhaustion—she didn't like drugs. I knew she was sleeping alone because Chad kept the security cameras trained on her bed and streamed the real-time images to my wrist-watch. I stole frequent glimpses of her curled pink body via the tiny screen.
Grunze sneaked up behind me and goosed me in the ribs, then leaned over my shoulder and grunted at the screen. "What's with you and that cagey call girl?"
"Call girl? Sheeba's a highly skilled physical therapist"
"She's a hooker. She's tricking you, Nass. I see her better than you do."
"You're wrong. Try her therapy sometime if you don't believe me."
Grunze rolled his shoulders and scoffed. He wore a white thong and body oil, and his skin looked like brown film shrink-wrapped over bulging muscles. For him, girls were a sideshow, a brief diversion from the main event. In our long years of friendship, sexual orientation was one of the few areas where we diverged. I didn't take his words about Sheeba seriously.
"Have you heard Katherine's latest nonsense?" I said. "She wants to surf Heaven. If I didn't know better, I'd say she's premenstrual."
Grunzie's good mood returned. "Kat's a lunatic on the subject. Totally unzipped." He loved taking potshots at Kat.
"Verinne wants to go, too," I said sadly. "We have to talk them out of it."
"Why? It might be a sleek surf. I never knew you to duck a little scary fun."
I shook my head. "Help me, Grunze. We have to change their minds."
He moved closer and bumped me with his hip. "What are you hiding, sweet-piss? You own that sugar factory."
Grunze was right. I held a majority interest in Provendia.Com, the owner of the orbiting factory nicknamed Heaven. Not only did I sit on Provendia's board, but thanks to my whopping investment, they'd elected me chairman emeritus. I knew all about Heaven. If Class One was a lazy stroll, and Class Ten was a death trip through hell, then Heaven was Class Twenty. But the details were too private to explain, even to my bosom pal Grunze.
I said, "Nondisclosure, Grunzie boy. My lips are zipped. But take my word, Heaven is the last place you want to be."
He shrugged his massive shoulders and left to find the sauna.
Some uncounted hours later, only the Agonists stayed awake talking. Win had saved a private stash of Peps to keep our brains at the appropriate altitude, and we retreated to my observatory on the eightieth floor—the official Agonist clubhouse. The decor suggested a tree dwelling, a construct dimly recalled from my childhood. Lots of bio motifs, leaf patterns, green velvet and polished synthetic wood. Chad had been wanting to update this tree-house theme for years, but I didn't like to keep changing things— it cost too much.
My condo tower stood near the northwest arch of Nordvik's city-spanning dome, and my observatory bubbled outside the dome like a small blister. High-powered telescopic equipment poked out through my window walls. Some peered at the smoggy Norwegian sky while others tilted inside the dome toward neighboring condos. On a wide-screen Net node, Verinne showed us her latest research—she was always scouting out new wars. I sat on a moss green ottoman, half-crocked, swaying gently back and forth and gazing sloe-eyed at my comrades.
Winston sprawled across my sofa with one bare leg thrown over the armrest. He balanced a liter of frozen daiquiri on his chest, and its dripping moisture ringed the front of his orange robe. Now and then, he snored. Grunze sat on the floor, playing with Kat's toes, trying to annoy her. Kat had commandeered my floral chaise lounge, where she sat lotus style with a notebook spread in her lap, sawing a strand of scarlet hair between her large front teeth. Verinne perched on the edge of my desk, working a handheld remote to scroll her research data. I glanced casually at my wrist-watch to check on Sheeba—and had to grip my wrist to hold the screen steady. One of my male guests was entering her bedroom.
"We're going to Heaven?' Winston sat up with a jerk and barely caught his tilting drink.
"Forget that," I mumbled, glowering at my wrist. Who was that guy in Sheeba's room?
"Heaven's only the nickname because it smells so sweet. It's a sugar factory." Kat flicked her stylus steadily against her knee, hyper as usual.
"I hardly think it has a smell, Katherine." Verinne cleared her throat. "The satellite orbits in hard vacuum. Its official name is Provendia A13, and it produces protein-glucose base. Not sugar."
Kat flushed and glared. When Grunze tugged one of her toes too hard, she kicked him in the teeth.
"We're not going to Heaven." My words came out garbled.
"It's in outer space? Fan-fuckin-tastic." Winston slurped frozen daiquiri through a straw and accidentally snorted a little out his nose.
"Heaven's rated a solid Class Ten. Some of you guys may want to sit this one out," Kat said provocatively.
Everyone protested. "Fuck that." "No way." "I'm up for it."
Everyone except me. I sat grinding my teeth, staring at my wrist-watch, split between this aggravating conversation and the unknown male whose shadow fell across Sheeba's bed.
Grunze pointed at me. "Nasir knows all about Heaven. Tell us, sweet-pee."
Tell you what? I could barely pronounce my own name. The man on my wrist screen was touching Sheeba's knee.
"Artificial gravity," I mumbled.
"What the fuck is that?" Grunze crossed his legs and made his thigh muscle jerk at me.
"The factory spins," Verinne answered, "and centrifugal force creates an effect like gravity."
On my tiny screen, the intruder leaned over Sheeba's pink body and nudged her awake. "Beast," I snarled. Then I fell off the ottoman.
"Sweet-pee, you're the one who's spinning." Grunze kneed me in the ribs.
"Nassssty Nas, you slipped off your stool." Winston giggled like a half-wit.
Verinne logged a note in her laptop, while Kat inhaled another line of Peps and fastidiously cleaned her nose.
On my wrist-watch, the stranger was crawling into bed with Sheeba. I staggered to my feet. "Excuse me. Something I have to . . . Downstairs . . . I'll be . . ."
Kat snarled. "The cultured Mr. Deepra can't admit when he needs to piss."
"Don't let the toilet lid fall on your wanker," Winston added. "I did that once."
Winston was describing this emotional incident as I stepped into my elevator. "Seventy-eight," I said. The small bedroom lay two floors below my observatory, and as the elevator dropped, I fought to keep from retching. After three days of partying, quite a few mood swingers bopped through my bloodstream. Quickly, I whipped out my mirror and adjusted my hair.
When the elevator opened, I rushed down the hall, burst into Sheeba's bedroom and found Robert Trencher massaging my love's rosy thighs. His jaded eyes swiveled. Picture me tottering in the doorway, red-faced, clutching the jamb, breathing in snorts.
"Nasir." Sheeba sat up in bed.
She hadn't been fully awake until that moment. I could sense this by the way she instantly jerked apart from Trencher and drew the covers up to her chest. Clearly, I'd rescued her just in time.
"Sheeba darling, we need you upstairs. I'm not interrupting, am I?" Though the words caught in my throat like clotted mud, I tried to sound urbane.
She pushed waxy fuchsia locks out of her eyes and sighed—with relief, I'm sure. "Give me a minute, Nass."
'Trencher." I nodded in sullen greeting.
"Deepra." He nodded back, equally grim.
When Sheeba and I were alone in the elevator, I ground my false dental implants and plotted revenge against Trencher. The worst of it was, I'd hired him. The guy had showed so much potential, I'd treated him as a friend. Now look, the dirtbag was sneaking around with my Shee—in my own condo.
Sheeba smoothed her waning pink foam to cover more of her body. "Who needs me upstairs?"
Frankly, I hadn't considered why anyone might need Sheeba upstairs, but necessity is the mother of lies. "We're planning a surf. You want to understand why we do it, so I thought you could listen in."
"Oh." She brightened and bounced on tiptoes, then stooped to kiss my cheek. "Thanks for remembering, Nass. You are totally sympathic."
I kissed back, but in my woozy state, my lips missed her and sucked empty air.
In my absence, Verinne had rastered a virtual screen across the domed observatory ceiling, and the Agonists lay supine on couches and floor mats, gazing upward and arguing. The screen displayed a schematic view of A13, the orbiting satellite we surfers called Heaven. Blood rushed to my cheeks. Why couldn't they forget that place? When Sheeba said, "Hello," they sat up and scowled.
"Private session," Kat said. "No outsiders allowed."
Sheeba glanced at me, and her disappointment twisted my musty old heart inside out She said, "Pardon, I thought I was invited."
"Screw you, Kat." I drunkenly nudged Sheeba forward. "Shee's my guest."
"Sheeba's a-okay with me." Winston lifted his glass and sloshed daiquiri on my carpet.
"Too risky. This is a Class Ten surf, and she's a freakin' newbie." Grunze lay back and laced his fingers behind his head.
Kat nodded. "Don't take this to heart, Sheeba dear, but if you screw up, you'll put the entire crew in danger."
Sheeba lowered her voice. "I'm not your danger, Kat."
"Leave her alone. She'll do just fine," I said without thinking. Never had it occurred to me that Sheeba might join our war surf. I'd brought her here to listen—to get her away from that Trencher slime. But I'd had too much to drink, and when my friends started razzing her, of course I took her side. "Sheeba's in"
"Beau." She pushed my weaving hand away. "If they don't want me—"
"But I want you, dear. Please stay."
As she tilted her head back and studied the projection on the ceiling, her eyes got that twinkly transcendent gleam, and I knew more spiritual fizz was about to bubble forth. Sure enough, she breathed almost reverently and said, "This may be the dark canal."
I glared at the crew. "Sheeba's my guest. Any objections?'
My challenge was potent, because they were all my guests, eating my food, drinking my booze—not just at this party but at all the parties. I played host every time. My condo was the staging ground for all our surfs. Not only that, I underwrote our Web site and paid for our teleconference minutes. The others were cheapskates.
Kat flushed purple and lay back to study the ceiling screen. "It's a stupid idea, Nass. Whatever happens, it's on your head."
Grunze was already drawing laser highlights on the schematic, tracing our proposed route. In a sour tone, he said, "Just keep her outta my way, sweetheart."
Verinne said, "You'll have to outfit her. She doesn't have any gear."
Winston patted a spot on his sofa. "Lie here, Sheeba girl. This is nice and comfy"
"No." I steered her to my personal futon. "Sheeba stays with me."