The sound echoes inside Janis’s skull, and a headache grows, and the shells of her ears burn as if abused by the clapping hands of her vicious sister, and though she’s standing up, she feels the weight of her long-ago tormentor on her chest.
In the foyer, she jerks the girl around to face her and is satisfied to see stark fear instead of arrogance. “You listen to me, you worthless little slut. Damn if I’m going to have my brain spun up in a control web because of you. I’d as soon kill you as spit on you, so the time for trickery is over. It’s over. I’m going to cut the zip-ties, and I’m taking you out there on the porch, and you’re gonna tell these stupid shitkickers you were wrong to call them. Tell them you didn’t understand what was really happening here. You’re going to give the performance of a lifetime, and don’t tell me you can’t, because I know your kind. You’re just like her. Deceit is woven through your bones. Your tongue is a filthy, licking lie machine. You can be as bratty as you want and get away with it because of what you do for your daddy, like what she did for ours, the sleazy little whore. I know the truth, I saw them that one time, and I know you. You’re going to stand close to me, lean against me, like you feel safe with me and I’m your best friend ever, stay close so no one can see I’m holding you by the back of your belt. You’re going to smile and charm and lie your ass off. You’re going to send these shitkickers home, or I swear I’ll draw my gun and shoot you in the head, right there on the porch, blow your rotten whore brains all over the damn porch.”
22
CHRIS ROBERTS DOESN’T REALIZE that Janis has come out of the house with the girl, Laurie, until the helicopter copilot sweeps the bright beam away from the line of agents and splashes light across the front veranda.
Disaster.
Whatever the hell Janis thinks she’s doing, it’s going to end in disaster.
Something’s wrong with her. She’s always ardent, intense, edgy, but this is not that Janis. This Janis is a human grenade with her pin half pulled. Her shoulders are drawn up, head turtled down. Her alluring body is shorn of curves, by tension shaped into the crossed staves of a scarecrow. Her eyes appear sprung in their sockets like those of some goggle-eyed jack-in-the-box. Her smile is a ghastly slash, and if her face contains any color, the searchlight bleaches it to the pallor of a corpse.
The child beside Janis stares out from among wild tangles of disarranged hair. She stands with hands fisted at her sides. Her posture is that of a shocked ledge walker who missteps and is supported for a microsecond by thin air, who stands in the splinter of an instant between the end of the ledge and the beginning of the plunge.
As one, every member of the crowd falls silent, and there is just the beating of the chopper’s blades, like the tolling of a lead bell.
Janis raises her voice. “Laurie Longrin wants to apologize.” She punctuates her announcement with a smile like a sickle.
23
FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA …
With her left hand, Janis Dern grips the little whore’s belt, preventing her from making a break for the crowd. The thumb of her other hand is hooked on her own belt, at her right side, so that in an instant she can push her sport coat out of the way and draw the pistol from her hip holster.
The searchlight shouldn’t be either hot or cold. It’s merely a light. But it makes the painted porch floor glisten like ice, and it chills Janis. It cuts at her eyes. She can’t look directly at it.
By the time she and the punk reach the porch steps and stop, the crowd of would-be rescuers falls silent. They stand expectant, some with their mouths open, their faces as dull as those of cattle. They are all as common as dirt, and Janis can never be one of them; never has been, never will be. She has known herself to be above the ruck and rabble since she was nine, since the day she saw Francine on her knees, submissive and servicing that bastard in the way that he preferred, both of them as base as barnyard animals. In that instant, she knows she is not of their blood. The story of their family is a lie. Surely she was born to parents unknown, a husband and wife of the highest station, and soon after birth was kidnapped, sold into this squalid household, for the use and amusement of base and cruel people. Shortly after seeing him with Francine, Janis is alone with their so-called father, and though he doesn’t come on to her, she tells him that if she is in line behind her sisters to do what Francine does for him, she will bite it off, bite off what she can and spit it out and bite off more. She doesn’t belong in that family. She doesn’t belong among these people here tonight, either, and she is too high-born ever to belong among the “adjusted people” who have in their heads a web of a thousand filaments with which their betters manipulate them through the puppet theater of their lives.
Now she smiles at the girl beside her and smiles at these upturned faces.
This duplicitous little bitch has the skill to deceive the finest lie detector. The brat better con these cretins and send them home to their beds, because if this crisis can’t be smoothed away, there is a brain implant with the name Janis Dern on it. Janis will not tolerate being injected, reduced to the condition of property. At thirty, she is perhaps too old and not sufficiently beautiful to be stocked in one of the Aspasias, but she will not allow herself to be made property of any kind, for any purpose.
Aspasia is the name of the mistress of some famous mayor of Athens 2,400 years ago, and it is what they call the palatial, highly secret, membership-only brothels in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and D.C. where the Techno Arcadians with the greatest wealth and power go to indulge their most extreme desires. Not common whorehouses. Mansions of exquisite architecture. Decorated with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of art, antiques, and furnishings. Palaces of style and refined taste that make it possible for the members of the club to tell themselves that their sickest and most degrading desires are in fact as elevated as the elegant environment. The girls are stunning, each one as beautiful as the most striking supermodels, each one a perfect daughter of Eros. Totally submissive. Ready to satisfy the most extreme desires.
There is no demand they will refuse. Charming, seeming to be happier than angels, they live in Aspasia and never leave, never even have a desire to leave, not one passing impulse to be free. The injections administered to them are different from those used to make “adjusted people.” This ultimate nanoimplant deletes every last one of the girl’s memories. Deletes her entire personality and installs a new and much simpler one. She becomes a living toy. The process cannot be reversed. Who she was is gone forever.
Janis has been in the Aspasia that is outside Washington, D.C.
Because she is judged to be a fervid revolutionary, beyond all doubt devoted to the cause, she was allowed to go there as a guest of a man who is a member.
The experience haunts her dreams and motivates her to rise in the hierarchy of Techno Arcadia until she is beyond any risk of being punished with injection.
Now she smiles again at the girl beside her and again at the upturned faces of the rescuers, who seem almost to be a different species from her own.