But, the wide glass surface of the desk was empty, save for a square piece of cleverpaper the color of an aroused vagina. Govinda touched a fingertip to a corner of the square, and an arrow made of thick black brushstrokes appeared on the paper's surface. Govinda picked up the paper and held it in front of him, and the arrow spun about like a compass needle, pointing him toward a window at one end of the lobby. Slightly impatient by now, Govinda slapped the stud on the hip of his cybskin that activated a repeller field, then he opened the jet vents all along his spine and flew across the lobby to take a look outside.
What he saw when he reached the window was a star pattern his cybskin couldn't identify. It looked rather crowded to one side, thin on the other, which probably meant he was on the edge of a globular cluster. Then, when he swept his gaze upward, he noticed the backlit limb of a gas giant hovering above a pair of small bright moons. Govinda looked at the square of cleverpaper in his hand, which was now flashing green and yellow. The arrow had changed into the pictograph for "magnify". So Govinda asked his cybskin to scan for a habitat, which it found within seconds. The hab showed up in his metavision, an ovoid mass about the size of a minor asteroid, following a high orbit above the smaller moon. Enhancing the image, Govinda took note of the myriad vanes and spines standing out from the hab's mottled dark skin. Definitely a Haradza design, one they'd built maybe a hundred thousand standard years ago, then abandoned a few millenia later, when the whole species left realspace for good. Govinda also noticed that local space was full of c+ ships, hundreds of them spread out across his entire field of view, transportation for Indhira's many guests.
The problem for Govinda was, he'd arrived by fax, and his cybskin wasn't made for space (after all, it could be massively expensive to fax heavy equipment across the Galaxy). So, what to do? He knew there was no way Indhira would've invited him here without a way to get across to the hab. But, he also knew she wouldn't make it easy for him. They had a long and complicated history, and Govinda knew how almost better than anyone how much she liked to play games.
He decided that this ship he'd faxed into must belong to one of Indhira's lovers. Apparently, an extremely wealthy lover. Not that this bothered Govinda, for he had been rich before and would undoubtedly be rich again, someday, if he lived long enough, which wasn't a problem. Of course, the version of Govinda who was floating before a window in replica hotel lobby was a copy of the original, and would be dusted as soon as he'd uploaded his experiences back into the "real" Govinda, who was right now asleep in his apartment on the world called Pale Blue. But, these days, everyone was used to thinking of themselves as sometimes singular, sometimes multiple, and the faxed person always felt completely authentic. So, if the Govinda at the window felt a spark of optimism about his future, it didn't matter much that the future he looked forward to actually belonged to another body.
Breaking off his reverie, Govinda decided all he could do was search the ship for a way across to the hab. Once there, he'd have the problem Indhira had mentioned in her message, the one of trying to open the Haradza lock on the Haradza hatch. Without help, it wouldn't be easy, but he figured, one problem at a time. He didn't once consider it might not be worth the trouble, for, no matter how thorny his relationship with Indhira, her raves were never dull. And, besides, many of her friends were his friends, too, and he hadn't seen some of them in a long long time.
Jetting back across the lobby, Govinda passed the hidden fax booth and the empty reception desk and headed for the bank of lifts at the other end of the room. In the real Metropole hotel, the lifts took guests to and from rooms all up and down the tower block, but these lifts presumably allowed access to the rest of the ship. Govinda suspected there might be a few decks turned into faux-hotel suites, but he doubted the whole ship had been redecorated to match the lobby. Even if the owner would've liked to convert the whole ship, the artificial minds that controlled the soligram assemblers would've almost certainly vetoed such a waste of energy. There was only so much human folly they could stand, after all.
Arriving at the lifts, Govinda looked one last time at the square of cleverpaper in his hand and saw that it had gone dark. He crumpled it up and tossed it into a trash slot, then reached out to press the Up arrow beside one of the lift tubes. A bell chimed and the Up arrow turned pink, a color that meant the same on Faraway as green meant on other worlds. Govinda entered the lift and was immediately whisked up into the center of the ship. If he could get into the Commons, he could scan the whole ship without having to personally visit every deck.
***
An hour later, Govinda found what he'd been looking for. His cybskin told him there was a working spacesuit in a locker down in the foreward hangar. But, when he'd jetted down the ship's axis and into the wide-open space of the hangar, he'd discovered the second of Indhira's little jokes. The spacesuit was behind a barrier field, and the control for the field was nowhere to be seen. That was merely annoying. However, in front of the rippling dark curtain of the barrier field, there was a wooden table, and upon the wooden table was the nude figure of his ex-lover Atsuko, tied down with silk cords at her ankles and wrists. That was worse than annoying; Govinda was beginning to get mad at Indhira, although he well knew he should police his emotions, since anger was exactly what Indhira wanted him to feel.
When Govinda had floated closer to the table, he turned off his cybskin's repellers and landed gently on the moss-covered deck. He noticed the red metal ball of a remote hovering overhead, but he ignored it as he bent down to take a closer look at Atsuko. She was awake, but drugged, possibly with chaft, since her eyes were black and her lips were blue, the classic signs of a deep chaft trance. Still, she was lovely as ever, with dark olive skin that Govinda had kissed thousands of times in thousands of places, and gorgeous small breasts tipped with nearly-black nipples, each one pierced with a thick silver ring. Her pudenda was bare as ever, except for the tattooed red flame emerging from the folds of her sex. Govinda stroked her short magenta hair and whispered in her ear, asking for some sign that she recognized him. But, all Atsuko could manage was a low moan, the same sound she had often made in the past, when recovering from a huge orgasm.
The thing was, Govinda knew that her senses would be somewhat suppressed from the chaft in her system, and that therefore she probably couldn't feel his lips on her earlobe or his hand cupping her breast. Some drugs enhanced the senses, but this drug, made from the venom of a semi-sentient male of the Tiktik species, was designed, in fact, to isolate the user, to make her numb on the outside. Meanwhile, on the inside, it performed subtle manipulations on the cybvirus in the brain of a neo-human, and allowed her to experience incredibly detailed, extremely intense waking dreams. You could still have orgasms that way, but they were entirely in your head. Govinda had tried chaft once himself, a few hundred years before, and hadn't liked it much. He'd dreamed of being fucked in the ass by a giant elephant with porcupine skin, which wasn't among the usual array of Govinda's fantasies. But, Atsuko had enjoyed it, now and then, since her dreams usually involved much more imaginative scenarios. Even so, Govinda doubted she'd volunteered to get left behind on this ship while the rest of the in-crowd flew on over to the Haradza hab. She certainly wouldn't want to be tied up if there wasn't anyone else around to play with.
So, Indhira was playing rough, which was not an uncommon thing with his first love. Well, Govinda thought, time enough to deal with that later. For now, he had to get Atsuko out of her restraints and perhaps inject her with some antidote from his cybskin's medkit. He reached down to untie the complicated knot at Atsuko's right wrist, then stopped when he heard someone laughing behind him. Turning around, he saw a holo shimmering a few meters away, an image of Indhira in a lacy black simsuit and a hairdo that was like a dark waterfall running uphill. She stopped laughing, but kept a mischievous smile on her lips, then said, "Oh, Govinda, don't you get it? I want to watch you make her come. I want to see what it is you enjoy about her goddamn cunt so much."
