hear from him. She’d invited him and anyone he cared to bring along to a numnum … whatever the hell that was. They’d approached Staff Sergeant Dunne and, after a few frustrating hours of red tape and a lot of questioning, received passes. Garroway had the impression that there were some high-level complications in the request, but he didn’t care about the details. Just so long as they could get out of Twentynine Palms for a few precious hours.
“So who is this Tegan?” Anna wanted to know.
He shrugged. “A friend. I met her down in Hermisillo a few years ago. A few years before I joined the Marines, I mean. She was on winter vacation at a resort down there.”
“Just a friend?” Womicki asked.
“Well, no. More than that.” That had been before he’d started seeing Lynnley.
“I got news for you. She’s too old for you now, son,” Lobowski said. “‘Out of synch,’ huh?”
“Oh, she looks pretty well-preserved,” Eagleton said, eyeing her glowing back as she led the way through a high, curved archway and into the party proper.
“Yeah,” Womicki said. “Almost as well-preserved as us.”
Garroway shook his head. The objective-subjective time difference was taking some getting used to. Cybehibe did not entirely stop aging, but it did drastically slow all bodily processes by a factor of something like five to one. That, coupled with the effects of time dilation, meant that Garroway and his fellow Marines had aged less than a year biologically, while Tegan had aged twenty.
Of course, anagathic treatments were becoming more common and less expensive on Earth. At the base, Garroway had already met people who were over a hundred years old, but who looked no older than fifty. Someday, perhaps, thanks to nanomedical prophylaxis, age might not matter at all.
But in the meantime, it could be disconcerting. Tegan had been a year younger than he when he’d left Earth.
Inside the doorway, the floor dropped away in a large, roughly circular room sunken in the middle, with alcoves and balconies at various levels on all sides. A warm, indirect ruby-hued lighting made walls and ceilings hard to discern, a dreamscape of subtle, sensuously curving forms. Everything appeared to be made of moving red light, and it was tough to see what was solid wall or floor and what was not.
And the place was packed.
The six Marines stopped and stared, their mouths comically open. There must have been hundreds of people present, standing, sitting, or lying a-sprawl on the thickly scattered divans that appeared to have grown out of the floor. Many, men and women both, were nude or nearly so, though most wore bangles and elaborate high-tech helmets that completely masked their faces, and their skin glowed with myriad inner hues. Those not stripped down were wildly dressed up. Garroway wondered if there was a competition under way for the most elaborate and eye-popping costume.
“Is this your home?” Kat asked the woman.
“What? Are you seerse? This is a sensethete, of course! It’s called the Starstruck, and it’s part of the conde. Part of the service, y’know?”
“Take your cloaks?” a gleaming, streamlined machine floating above the floor asked. Garroway and the others removed their cloaks, draping them across the robot’s waiting and multiple arms. “And your clothing, ladies and sirs?”
“I beg your pardon?” Womicki asked.
“When in Rome, Mick,” Garroway said, gesturing at the crowd.
“I think I’ll keep my uniform on, thank you,” Kat said.
Garroway agreed. “We’re fine,” he told the hovering robot. It hummed in what seemed a disapproving manner, but then floated off into the encircling red mist. Casual and social nudity had long been accepted throughout most of the southern and western states, and there was little privacy for males or females in a Marine squad bay or on board ship. Privacy wasn’t an issue.
However, this was different. The other guests weren’t completely bare, but were adorned in myriad ways, with nanoinduced internal lighting, with devices that appeared to be grown into the skin itself and with various items of jewelry. There was, Garroway thought wryly, a large difference between nude and naked. The six Marines would have looked somewhat akin to plucked chickens in this gaudy company, and at least their blue with red and white trim Class A’s gave them some ornamentation.
“You’ll need these, grampies,” Tegan said, returning to them. She held out a pair of delicately shaped and filigreed helmets. A helmed, winged angel with fluorescent violet tattoos and a handsome man wearing a low-cut seventeenth-century ball gown handed them four more.
“What are these for?” Lobowski wanted to know, turning one uncertainly in his hands.
“You don’t viz techelms?” the angel asked. He laughed.
“G’wan!” the guy in the ball gown told them. “Put ’em on and down ’em! You’ll jack!”
Hesitantly, Garroway slipped the helmet he’d been given onto his head. The visor was opaque, blocking all vision. He felt a warm tingle at the back of his skull and at the temples.
And then …
Color and light exploded around him, and he heard a murmuring ripple of multiple conversations in his head. He could see now, despite the opaque visor. Somehow, the helmet was taking in his surroundings and transmitting them directly to his implant. He could see more clearly, more crisply than before, and was aware of a tumbling avalanche of detail.
It was, in fact, a little like being linked into a tactical net in combat, except that this was accompanied by an odd, very deep, and very sensuous inner movement of feeling and emotion. It took him a moment to identify it: pleasure.
“How’s that feel?” Tegan asked him, her voice sliding into his mind like liquid silk. “Nice?”
“It’s … interesting.”
And it was going to take some getting used to. It wasn’t that he minded the sensation of pleasure itself. It was the fact that these pleasurable sensations were coming and going, emerging, building, exploding all without any thought, movement, or input from him.
In fact, the sensation was like what he’d always imagined a nano-induced high might be like, one that involved all of his senses. As he looked about, he realized that the bodies of the people around him were subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—enhanced. The men seemed more handsome, more muscular, more athletic, while the women were slimmer, more beautiful of face, more generous and perky of bosom. The man in the ball gown was now a lovely woman, and the gown itself an explosion of blue and silver starlight. Many of the guests were no longer even human; a radiantly green and golden lion with eagle’s wings stared at them from a nearby dais. Other shapes were more outlandish—zoomorphic, angelic, demonic, or mixtures of the three. Were they real? Or illusion? Or some subtle combination of the two? Some shapes morphed and shifted from one thing to another as he watched.
And he could hear things, conversations he’d not been able to hear before, and it was impossible to tell whether he was hearing actual sound or picking up on a mingling interchange of surface thoughts.
“Oh sure, and
