Electric Forest by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

tailored by her flesh: The delectable woman could anticipate
delectable adornment. Maybe it

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    was not so new. It was what society had conditioned her to anticipate. (The girls and young men from the processory, shedding their overalls, stepping forth like peacocks into the sunlight of the city.)
    Below her, in the house, she heard someone whistling. Next the sound of ice in crystal, clear as bells through the pool of silence.
    She let the ramp carry her down, then jumped, utterly coordinated, lightly and exquisitely into the room. The sunrise light had dimmed smok e ly, but did not unduly limit vision.
    The man in the pneumatic chair was not the man she had reckoned on. It was not Claudio. Though the iced beaker, a rich man's foible, not glazium but wafer-thin glass, that was Claudio's, and it chimed lethargically, familiarly, in the man's hand as he kissed it to his lips.
    Ill
    His hair was black, but a black inclined to red rather than blue. Reddish-brown eyes confirmed the bias. His skin was deeply tanned from a solarium, and the pressure-zipped jacket and trousers were expensive. Another rich man.
    Her immediate inclination was to run to the white room above, where the capsule lay, bald and vulnerable.
She resisted that, confronted by his posture of somehow irreversibly seated indolence. For a moment, then,
she was Ugly. Her body bowed, leaned into a crouch, trying to shield, to efface. But it did not persist, this spasm. She remembered what she was. Every shiny surf ace in the room was there to assist in reminding her.
    "Who are you?" she said. "How did you get in?" She had been lucky in that. In the Tri-V drama she had briefly watched earlier, the woman had come on an intruder in her

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    apartment. ""Who are you?" she had rasped. "How did you get in?" Magdala's imitation was excellent.

    "I am a friend/' the man said. He was letting his russet eyes slip down the length of her. "I guess you are also a friend. How do friends get in? They knock and the door is opened."
    His scrutiny failed to cause a second trauma. Instead, she basked in it, recalling vividly what he would see. And the recollection, coupled with his long-lidded gaze, excited her. A sentence suggested itself. Again, she had heard other women employ it.

    "It seems I interest you."
    Her head moved, stirring the blue hair like ink in water. It was becoming intuitive. "Yes," he said, "you do. You're really something."
    She accepted the stale accolade. She was not aware that she nodded in agreement. But the man laughed a
     

     
     
    little. He said: "Where do you come from? What's your name?"
    Suddenly, she saw no need to render him anything beyond the sumptuous image of herself, powdered with the smoky light. "You should ask Claudio."
    "But Claudio's not here for the moment."
    "Oh, I think he's here somewhere. But if you're a friend of his, no doubt you're used to the games he likes to play."
    "You tell me," the stranger drawled, "about his games. What games does he play with you, for example? I'd be fascinated."
    For a second she was afraid. Sex was an unknown country, and this verbal exchange along its borders
    seemed all at once dangerous and unpleasant. At the same moment, she knew herself aroused, and a silly humorousness added itself to the medley of her emotions, that she had been equipped, even for this.
    Her heart was speeding, not because it had to, but presumably because her mood induced it to act in complementary physical rhythm. She wondered how near Claudio

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    was, and if he spied on this, too. She wondered if he might be affected as she was becoming affected.
    The man was attractive. She could likely seduce him, as the women in the Tri-V dramas generally did with
men. Or the men with the women. Indigo was a world of untrammeled lust, from which, she had been
trained from childhood to realize, she was excluded. But now, no longer excluded. Now she was Venus, goddess of love.

    "Games interest you, do they?" She let herself topple in an