The Web of Sin

©2003

The invitation came in the form of a nude pseudo-girl made of blue perspex and brushed aluminum. She shimmered into existence while Govinda was having a late breakfast on the balcony of his hundredth-floor apartment. One moment, he was busy peeling a blood orange, then the next moment he was looking up into the large pale eyes of his unexpected guest. She didn't speak or make any gestures, she simply stood there on the edge of the balcony, her black hair flying up in the wind from passing traffic. Govinda said, "Something you want?," and the girl smiled, very slightly, then reached down to her crotch. She spread her feet apart and fingered open her bare translucent vulva. Pulling out a memory stick, she tossed it in the air above the breakfast table, then laughed softly and fell backward into the abyss. Govinda jumped up from his chair, snatched the memory stick before it could fall into his tea, then leapt to the low railing and looked down. The girl was falling slower than she would've fallen if she'd been real. As Govinda watched, her body changed, becoming first a blob of quicksilver, then becoming a mass of blue butterflies, which after a few seconds flew off in every direction, dispersing the girl's pattern into thin air. Govinda shook his head, then studied the memory stick, scanning it with his deepsense. Finding it to be perfectly normal and harmless, he popped the stick into the slot behind his jaw. A message formed in the middle of his vision, blue type on a black velvet background:

msg id: 80947036x.180101.003770100x5269; ex: GevattaHyperstation by c+ metawave; sndr: 081jvx-IMChandamurtha; rcvd: 10.34.10101(PBlocal);

begins:

so, govinda, i'm giving you the place and time: a haradza hab, 48 standard hours from now. generous of me, don't you think? attached is the destination code (don't share it, you bastard, or i'll be cross). find the lock and join the party. then perhaps you can pay me back for that nine-day orgasm on polachuk's slowboat. or perhaps i'll pay you back for choosing atsuko the day after. either way, it'll be fun. oh, and, remember niamey? she's returned from hiryanna space with a brand new toy. curious? well, too bad. you'll just have to wait until you're inside, if you get inside.

your faithful enemy, indhira

att: codeblock.readonly>temp.fax#

:ends

Govinda sat back down and finished his breakfast. Then he spent the rest of the day doing enough netcrime to pay for a full-body fax to Indhira's latest rave.

***

Two days later, Govinda stepped out of a fax booth to find himself in the huge empty lobby of an old-style hotel. Glancing about the place to get his bearings, he recognized certain details: the moss-carpet floor, the scattered groups of fat orange pillows, the black-and-white mosaics of scenes from alien myths along the walls, everything just like the Metropole on Faraway. Except, this couldn't be the real Metropole, because the gravity was lighter and there were stars and black space outside the picture windows instead of lavender sky and platinum clouds.

Govinda turned to look back at the booth and saw that it was a retrofit, set back in a shadowed alcove. When he walked backward a couple more paces, a soligram made of hundreds of puzzle-pieces formed over the face of the booth and hid it from sight. Govinda nodded, then turned around and headed across the lobby toward the reception desk. No one was on duty, of course, but Govinda figured that was where he might find a working terminal he could ask for directions.

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."

Govinda glanced up at the remote, which was Indhira's eye, and said, "You know she's fucking hardcore dreaming. I could screw her for days and she'd never feel it. So, let me release her now, and I'll maybe forget to invite you to a battle arena."

Indhira's holo shivered a moment or two, then glowed a little brighter than before. She said, "Please don't forget that part, Govinda, because I might enjoy kicking your ass. Gods, though, I wonder why I'm being so generous while you're being so rude. It's simple: show me how you make her come and I'll let you have the suit. Otherwise, go fax yourself back home with your tail between your legs."

Govinda looked down at Atsuko and, for one brief moment, considered leaving her there, bound and drugged. Indhira would let her up, eventually, if he decided to return home. But then, a hot spark of anger rose up his throat, and he resolved he would somehow play Indhira's game, at least for the time being. Not that he'd follow all her rules...

***

Letting his cybskin slough off his body and ball itself up into a pillow for his knees, Govinda sank down between Atsuko's spread-open thighs and placed his mouth over the mouth of her sex. He already knew he wouldn't get away with something as unsubtle as shooting her full of antivenin (the remote, hovering lower now, was closely watching his every move with thousands of tiny spider-eyes), but he thought he might know another way to arouse Atsuko out of her trance. He was a professional crime-artist, after all, and had learned a few tricks, here and there, over the centuries.

Just tasting his ex-lover made him hard, even if her scent wasn't quite the scent of arousal. Govinda smiled a hidden smile to himself, knowing Indhira would be distracted some by the sight of his erection. He let it grow, but didn't reach down to touch it, not just yet. Instead, he slipped his hands under Atsuko's ass and lifted her up from the table. Then he stroked the cool skin of her labia with his tongue, knowing he'd never open her up this way. It didn't matter, though. Soon enough, his cybskin would send a tendril up into his leg, and inject him with a small dose of chaft, then his tongue would close a circuit with Atsuko's nervenet, and he might then be able to see what she was seeing in her dream. If he was really lucky, she might even see him, and they could finally communicate, despite the drug. He doubted Indhira knew this was even possible; he'd learned about it on an artifact planet out past the Mourning Veil, long before he'd come across the Galaxy to Pale Blue. It was the kind of information you picked up and filed away, never knowing if it would ever be useful. And, for all Govinda knew, it still might not work. But, having decided to stay, he had little choice but to try. So, he licked Atsuko the way she'd liked in the old days, and hoped for the best.

He traced the outlines of her flame tattoo with the pointed tip of his tongue, then he made his tongue leaf-shaped and lapped at her smooth vulva. Keeping one hand under her ass, he freed the other and reached up to her soft breast, and kneaded her nipple as he kissed the hollows of her hips. His erection was pulsing by now, and dripping precome all over the moss-carpeted deck. Out of the corner of his eye, Govinda could see Indhira's holo looking at him with a mixture of lust and envy and quiet rage playing across her face. Out of the corner of his other eye, he watched the remote hover even lower, so it could show Indhira an up-close view of his hardon. It occurred to Govinda that he could probably reach out and swat the remote down before it could react. But, part of him took perverse pleasure in being watched by one ex-lover while he ate out another. If it made Indhira squirm, so much the better. Anyway, it was her game, not his.

After several minutes, Govinda at last felt the first wave of ice-cold numbness rush up his thigh. He'd mentally ordered his cybskin to give him only a small dose of chaft, nowhere near enough to put him into a trance. Still, it was enough drug to make him feel a little distanced from his own body. Once the drug reached the cybvirus in his head, it would help him set up an empathic link with Atsuko, but wouldn't make him start dreaming dreams of his own. Or, at least, that was the plan. He just needed to get near where she was, not dive in the deep end.

Meanwhile, he continued to caress her sleeping pussy with his lips and tongue and nose. He found that it wasn't as unpleasant as he might have thought, attempting to wake her up this way. Atsuko's dark skin tasted of honey and vanilla, her navel smelled like a flowering morningstar, her nipples were satin-soft. If she had been truly asleep and not in a trance, she might even have started to warm up a little by now, her cunt swelling, her cleft opening out under Govinda's encouraging tongue. But, as it was, his foreplay was supremely unsuccessful, although his own body was responding to Atsuko's beauty as if it somehow thought there was a chance he might get inside her...which, he might just do, after all.

Govinda rolled his tongue around his mouth to cover it with saliva, then he lapped at Atsuko's still-hidden clitoris, hoping to make his connection there. He mentally opened up the access ports in his nervenet, and began sending out molecular greeting codes, trying to get Atsuko's attention, or at minimum the attention of one of her sub-systems. Meanwhile, he put on a show for Indhira's remote, reaching down with both hands to stroke his erection. He would have preferred to play with Atsuko's ass and tits, but, right now he wanted to distract Indhira as much as he could. He knew that, even though she was as thoroughly bisexual as any other neo-human, she was a little more fond of watching cocks than pussies. Indeed, the remote was now below the table, hovering near the engorged tip of his manhood, while Indhira's holo had one hand down the open front of her simsuit. She wasn't exactly masturbating, yet...but her eyelids were heavy and her nipples were fully erect, so it wouldn't be long before she pulled the hood back from her clit and went to work in a serious way. Of course, Govinda meant to deny her any satisfaction.

When he at last felt Atsuko's nervenet respond to his hails, he quickly established a link and uploaded a ghost of himself into her inner awareness. Then he dropped the link, which had at most lasted seven or eight picoseconds. The ghost could operate autonomously while the flesh-and-blood Govinda continued kissing Atsuko's crotch and thighs and belly. Which he did, with growing enthusiasm.

To be continued.