Shadowplay

Chapter 4. Crazy in a can

It was a small oval room, womblike, warm, almost claustrophobic. Shadith saw it through the Pet's eyes; they seemed to work better in semidarkness-as if his brain reconfigured the shape of his retinas to eliminate his myopia once the sun went down.

The curved walls were a matte black that sucked up light with an avid hunger, even the ghastly blue-purple glow from lusotorches programmed to sink near extinction at random intervals, then flame up into a painful glare, all the while producing gouts of illusory gray black cottoncandy smoke without stink or sting. Incense wafted about on programmed drafts, pungent and not quite pleasant. When a drift came his way, the Pet sneezed and scrubbed at his nose with his forepaws. The small sounds he made were lost in swelling sonorous music that set Shadith's teeth on edge and made him fold his ears tight against his head.

Bossman knelt in the center of an elaborate mandala, lines of silver laid into the tarblack floor, raying outward from a silver disk with words and obscene drawings written in silver wire between the rays, shimmering alive and sinking into murk once more as the torchlight shifted. He chanted in a high thin voice, supported by Ajeri the Pilot who knelt at his right hand and Puk the Lute who kept at his left. The Pet was chained high on a wall beside one of the flambeaux; between attacks of incense, the beast sank into a lethargy that came from too much familiarity with the room and the goings on there. Shadith had to keep pinching at him to wake him up so she could look through his eyes and follow what was happening.

The chant went on and on, but the music changed; the smoke spun into dancers-slender, childlike female forms hidden and revealed by drifting draperies of black gauze. Flinging themselves through a turgidly erotic dance, they dipped and bowed, leaped, turned and twisted round and round the mandala.

For some time Shadith couldn't see their faces. When she did, she gasped.

They had her face. All of them.

They were her. Deliberately her. Holo-shapes programmed to repeat HER over and over, called into being by that… that obscenity of a man. He was using her, using her body, her face for… for… She writhed on the cot, then forced herself to calm. She was losing the link with the Pet.

It wasn't because of their eroticism that she found the dance and dancers so deeply disturbing. Reacquiring the capacity for sensual pleasure of all sorts and degrees was one of her strongest reasons for abandoning disembodied immortality. No, the dance and the dancers were troubling because their-eroticism was so distorted.

Ginny Bossman, Puk the Lute, Ajeri the Pilot, they shaped the dance and the dancers, bled their own lubricity into the smoke, their passions were there under the surface, seething and burgeoning-and distorted and denied, denied, denied in their hatred and fear of those passions. Watching simulacrums with her face and body

52 Jo Clayton moving through that dance made her sick. Yet she couldn't look away, she couldn't bring herself to break the connection with the Pet.

The dance grew more and more intense.

The lusotorches blew out more gouts of smoke, thickening the dark; the light sank to a vague purple glow and stayed low for several minutes-then flared in a blast of harsh brilliance that seared the Pet's eyes and started him whimpering.

Puk and Ajeri were bound face inward to a pair of X-shaped bodyframes.

Ginny Bossman threw off his robe and stood naked in blinding, blue-purple light that turned his skin corpse white, his lips black, and sunk his eyes into bottomless holes. The flesh mask stripped off, he had a gaunt, deeply lined face; the lines were wounds, the shadow in them a harsh black like dried blood. He stripped fauxskin from his left hand, baring the metal beneath, twisted his thumb and extruded razor claws.

The music swelled, the dancers sang a wordless howling song and pressed in on the mandala.

Tumescent and sweating, Ginny walked with heavy slow steps to the X:frames. He sank his claws into the black cloth of the Pilot's robe and tore it away, exposing her narrow back, drawing lines of black blood on the pallid waxy flesh. He dropped the swatch, took a step to one side, and repeated with the Lute's robe. "Praise Her," he cried out suddenly, his voice a strident screech. He manipulated the metal arm just above the wrist; a limber metal-cored whip at least two meters long unreeled • from inside the arm. He closed his metal fingers about the stock, swung, the whip up. "Praise Her," he cried again and opened a long cut in the Pilot's back. "Praise Her." He flicked the tip across the Lute's hard taut shoulders.

The dancers had whips in their hands, lines of light, force lines; each time Ginny cut at Puk and Ajeri, they laid into him, back and belly, thigh and shoulder, the holo-whips raising real welts on his body. When the dancers with Shadith's face and form beat him, it was as if SHE beat him. For a few minutes she laughed and cheered them on, then she understood what was really happening in there and the elation drained out of her. Her smoke clones were pleasuring him, whores of pain.

She broke away, deeply dismayed by her reaction to that ceremony and insulted by Bossman's use of her-and she was frightened by the implications of what she was seeing. What's he mean to do with me? He said something about drama. If that's his idea of drama, that, that thing! Gods! There's no way m going to… Kiskai. I've never heard of it. I suppose it's another of those out the back of beyond places where they grow weirdness like a cash crop. I'm supposed to be something called the Nikamo-Oskinin, the virgin singer. Virgin. Talk about your wasted opportunities, I should've teased Swar into… well, it's too late for that now. Besides, that gorbellied old goat doesn't really give a shit about a meensy flap of flesh, it's my bodyage that's got him dizzy, that blasted twitch he's got about girls. You better watch your feet, woman. It could be you in that blackroom playing the penitent if he gets snarky about something you do. Penitent. Gods!

Her mind in turmoil, it was several hours before she managed to sleep.