©2003, k.x.
Halfway to the alien habitat, Govinda contacted the spacesuit through the interface net in his cybskin. He thought a series of commands: reverse thrust, line us up for a matching orbit, make sure to bring us in aft of the hab, scan for threats. The suit's non-sentient brain made a course calculation in two picoseconds, then swung the stalks of its thruster pods around to face the slow-growing disc of the bright silver moon. The reactionless motors hidden inside the pods began to push hard against the direction of motion. Govinda, meanwhile, went back to repeating the mantra for remembrance that he'd been saying since leaving the Kunyunese ship. Soon enough, the memories he'd wanted to revisit started to flow again, fragments flowing past his awareness like dead leaves carried on the braided surface of a rushing mountain stream...
***
Indhira's client didn't have a name. But, he or she or it had a face, in the form of an alt.human avatar called gunra-Ciforex. Govinda met the rep in a xanadu in Omkot, and the first thing he thought upon seeing him was, poor godscrewed fatherfucker. Of course, alt.humans, like their cousins the neo-humans, came in all shapes and sizes, everyone was used to that. But gunra-Ciforex was an unusual example of an already adventurous subspecies. Although he had the standard body plan, it was somewhat distorted, with much longer limbs than average, giving him a rather spidery aspect. The outsides of his arms and legs were covered with hundreds of thorny projections, each one dark glossy black against flourescent blue skin. His long, narrow head was topped by a mane of fire-colored hair that waved about the way a diver's hair does underwater. His birth-eyes had been replaced by a pair of metasensory clusters which were like the crowns of pink dandelions. On his forehead, he bore a row of radar-emitters, small hard beads that glistened even in the muted roomlight. On his back, he sported a pair of organic jet tubes which hung down below his knees like enormous, misplaced phalluses. Meanwhile, there was nothing hanging down from his crotch; the only thing he had down there was a ring of red clevermetal sewn with wire thread to his puckered, mottled skin. A terminal, most likely...or perhaps a weapon. In essence, though, gunra-Ciforex wasn't exactly frightening; instead, he was unsettling, disturbing, a mixed-up collection of odd phenotypes that didn't make much adaptive sense, but which definitely communicated a message. Govinda thought the message was: my Boss is crazy; don't cross him (or her, or it). The usual "or else" part was clearly implied as well.
The problem was, although Govinda had no intention of crossing anyone, he didn't see how exactly he was supposed to seal his contract with gunra-Ciforex's boss. He had come here from Guindy Port high above the city, flown down with Indhira after she'd told him his part in the plan for the job (and after they'd had an afternoon of intense make-up sex in an orbital airpod). The job had sounded difficult, maybe too difficult, but he'd agreed, reluctantly, to do the thing he'd been asked to do. It would cost him a lot...but, it would earn him a lot, too, if at least one of his selves lived to come out the other end.
But, usually, when you said "yes" to a contract, you signed it by fucking your client. This time, though...how the hell was he supposed to do that? gunra-Ciforex didn't have anyplace fuckable on him, and Govinda was extremely hopeful that the rep (or whoever was controlling the rep by remote) didn't intend to put one of his jet tubes up his backside. That was a deal-breaker, for sure...unless he could make the tips smaller...
He and Indhira had been standing at one end of an oval soft-hollow, waiting while gunra-Ciforex stood at the other, his head cocked to one side as he listened to an internal voice give him instructions. After a while, he spoke to Indhira in tradertongue, saying, "We have hired a surrogate. She will be here soon. Please, have a drink while we wait." Then gunra-Ciforex waved his large, eight-fingered hand and a serving golem appeared from out of a nearby alcove. Govinda took a cup of orange xiaolao tea off the golem's tray. Indhira took nothing, but instead shared the occasional sip of tea out of Govinda's mouth. He could tell she was getting in a mood to play, which was an infectious mood, despite his recent misgivings about bedding the avatar. Now that he knew a surrogate was coming, he was feeling a little more relaxed.
Then, a few minutes later, when he saw the alt.human surrogate, he wondered once again if he'd made the right decision...
***
A thousand kilometers above Onlo's single great octopus-shaped ocean, in an airpod with transparent walls and circular gravity beds at each axis, Indhira held Govinda close and whispered in his ear. He was still buried balls-deep in her lovely, velvety snatch; their mingled come was still flowing down his shaft and onto her thigh. In-between the aftershocks of her last orgasm, she told him what he needed to know about her "big new job".
His target was a block of code buried inside a secure cache on an artifact planet called Ghoveshet. You don't need to know what the code's for, she said, you just need to copy it and deliver the copy to the client's rep in Omkot. She linked with his cybskin, which was balled up in the small of his back. A holomap sprang open in his dataview: Ghoveshet, marked with a blue-green X, was in a system in an open cluster four thousand lightyears west by northwest of where they were now. A text box near the X unfolded like origami in reverse when he focused on it: Ghoveshet, terrestrial, near-standard gravity, inhabitants mostly retro-humans, politically non-aligned, primary business: datahaven services. Its system server had large sections walled off, all of them doubleplus private, owners unknowable. A few big clients possibly true-alien, not some species of human. You could tell from the usage data, the traffic pattern going in and out, much of it indicating a flow between Ghoveshet and a Haradza habitat far outside the Settlement. The clients wouldn't be Haradza, of course, since they were all long gone, maybe to otherspace, maybe beyond. But, habs could be taken over and used by just about anybody. And that far out on the edge of The Edge, the squatters were more likely alien than anyone from inside human space. The only thing was, no one knew of any non-human species in that direction. The closest were the enigmatic Tsunkatsa, and they weren't close at all.
Govinda was curious, but he knew not to ask any questions about Indhira's client's interest in the code. Even though his cock was still filling up his boss's cunt, intimacy didn't imply liberty; in fact, it implied just the opposite. Many months later, on board a slowboat on the other side of the Galaxy, he would learn by accident what it was he'd helped steal away from Ghoveshet. Then, feeling something akin to guilt for the first time in his life, he would leave Indhira for Atsuko, then would leave Atsuko to drift far and wide, ending up at last on Pale Blue, his head a mess from knowing too much. And there he would stay, keeping himself apart from all his old friends for a long, long time...until the morning when a nude pseudo-girl would bring him an invitation to an encrypted fax address.
But, all of that was in the future, and in the airpod in orbit above Onlo, when Indhira told him how the plan would work, he wasn't thinking about much of anything else but how good she felt wrapped around his hardon...
***
The first part was simple: he stepped into a fax booth at Omkot Rapid Transit, then, several minutes later, five freshly-minted Govindas stepped out of fax booths on five distant worlds. At each destination, Govinda sought out and found an out-of-the-way hotel in a big city. Then he settled in and waited, doing the usual touristy things to make himself blend into the background. On Gevorah, he attended staged reenactments of Torture Cult rituals; on Idoko, he wandered for long hours through the diverse entertainments of the Perpetual Carnival; in Kirhadoun on Pirchakty, he played complicated sexgames with the adepts of the Mysteries; in the orbital city called Chalice, high above the hellworld of Vorn, he visited art galleries and museums full of alien biotech; on Kest, he fought in the battle arena against all manner of golems and machines and alien beasts. Meanwhile, back on Onlo, the original Govinda slept for days in a big bed in a shielded xanadu far beneath Omkot. And in his sleep, he dreamt long and hard about Ghoveshet and how best to get inside and back out again. For he knew, the second part wouldn't be simple at all...
***
The surrogate was, if anything, more odd-looking than gunra-Ciforex. But, this time, it was the good kind of oddity, even if it took a little while for Govinda's libido to adjust to her appearance. Tall and well-muscled, she had bright red skin everywhere except on her face, which was mint green under fine white fur. At the moment, she wore her cybskin rolled up into a thick collar around her long, slender neck, and Govinda admired the way subtle shadows played all about the furrows and curves of her nude body. Her glossy black hair was waxed and sculpted into a complex style that Govinda knew was popular on Yedovazra, the sister planet to Yedyevo a hundred lightyears south of Onlo. But, unlike the other natives of that system, she didn't have hedgehog quills growing out of the mound of her sex. Or, at least, she'd resorbed them, or plucked them out, just for tonight. Govinda thought, lucky me.
gunra-Ciforex said, "Kivrin will be my agent in this matter. I will observe and record. Please enjoy her. And, if you need anything, let me know."
Indhira stepped down into the soft-hollow, pulling Govinda down beside her. Kivrin smiled at them both, then joined them on the scattered fat cushions at the bottom of the pit...
***
After he'd been asleep long enough to devise a strategy for invading Ghoveshet, Govinda woke himself and sent burst-messages by very fast radio to his other selves. As soon as they assimilated the messages, they would know what to do and when. Govinda then asked a house golem to send for a jumpjet, which arrived topside a few minutes later. The self-piloting 'jet flew up and out of Omkot, and took him across grassland and marsh and ocean to an island in the middle of nowhere. There was an old house on the island, built in the style of Onlo's first human settlers. Made mostly of milk jade vitrex and hexagons of terra-cotta tile, it was shaped like a squat obelisk with boxy wings on two sides. The house belonged to gunra-Ciforex's boss/controller, and was mantrapped from its foundation to the sharp apex of its roof. But, the house's ghost had been instructed to let Govinda inside, which it did, after a quick deepscan at the clevermetal door. If anyone else approached the door, it would dust them with its nano-gun.
