LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Ignore it, Rog,” Garroway told him. “We’re guests here, remember?”

      “Besides,” Kat added judiciously, “they’re obviously talking about someone else. We’re not Army.”

      Garroway took a cautious couple of steps, feeling for the deck beneath his feet. It was, he thought, like stepping into a dream, one where nothing was quite as it seemed.

      “Here,” someone said in his mind. “Groz this, grampie.”

      A silver and black metallic sphere was placed in his hand. As he looked at it, trying to get an idea of both what it was for and what its true form might be, it twisted itself in his palm, opening itself. A thick lavender mist spilled out and he caught the tang of cinnamon. And … something else. As he inhaled, he felt the rush exploding out of his lungs and throat and tingling all the way down to his toes and back up his spine to the crown of his head. The helmet took the sensation, amplified it, twisted it … and fed it back to him in rippling pulses of feeling.

      “Is this stuff legal?” he heard Lobowski say.

      “What a ridic question!” a woman’s voice replied, a sensuous gliding of thoughts. “This is a numnum, mem?”

      Garroway tried to meditate on this self-evident truth, but was having some trouble focusing.

      “What the hell happened to the floor?” Eagleton asked.

      Good question. When Garroway looked down, he could see the floor beneath his feet as swirling patterns of rainbow-hued pinpoints of light. Each hesitant step he took sent out widening ripples of flickering color, ripples that interlaced with other ripples in spectacular moving moirés of colored light.

      And the voices. Something similar was happening with all of the voices in the room. Garroway could no longer be sure which were voices he was hearing in his head, and which were actual, audible sound. He was hearing more and more, however, and the words and sentences seemed to be weaving together into an incoherent yet meaningful whole. Behind it all was … was that music? Not quite. It was a kind of rhythmic pulse or ticking, but with something else unidentifiable beneath, a kind of deep and somehow musical longing without any actual notes.

      That was interesting. Several couples were engaged in sex play on a round divan off to one side of the sunken room. Garroway found that when he watched them, he could actually feel some of what they must be feeling … touches and caresses and warm, moist, sliding pressures. The helmets, he realized, were somehow letting everyone in the room share in an overpowering gestalt of emotion and sensation.

      The blending of heightened sensations was having a marked physiological effect on him, as well. Garroway could feel a familiar pressure building in his loins, and an intense and unscratchable itch.

      But more, his feelings were oddly jumbled, melding one into another and transforming as they did so. Deliberately turning his back on the lovemaking tableau so he could concentrate, he tried to tap into his implants for a download on what was happening, but couldn’t access his system. At that, Garroway began to feel genuine alarm.

      “What the hell’s going on here,” he heard himself say, his voice sounding very far away.

      “What’s the downskaff, grampie?” A woman hovered in front of him, hugging-distance close. How had she gotten there? “Don’tcha rax with it? Isn’t it a flittering rish?” Her voice curled sensuously through his brain.

      Garroway wasn’t certain whether it was whatever had been in the sphere or the helmet—or both working together—but he was beginning to feel as though all of his senses were blurring together. He was seeing sound, hearing color, tasting the pressure of his feet on the unseen floor and of his uniform on his skin. The conversation swirled around him, caressing him, a living thing experienced rather than merely heard.

      “You’re del says you were actually, like, in the body on another planet,” the woman’s voice continued in his mind. “Is that, like, for real?”

      Funny how that one voice stood out from the others, obviously addressed to him, yet somehow intertwined with all of the other conversations going on. It was like being both an individual and some kind of communal, many-in-one intelligence.

      “Sorry … ‘del’?”

      “You know! Download! From your implant!”

      The woman was staring at him with eyes brilliant as blue-white stars. Who was it? Not Tegan … someone else, someone he’d not met before. He tasted her hand on his shoulder. She was gorgeous, an ethereal creature of radiant light.

      “So? Howz’bout it? Were you really on another planet?”

      “Uh … yeah. Ishtar. I was there.”

      “Ishtar … yeah? What a zig! I been there too!” A rapid-fire barrage of images flickered through Garroway’s mind—scenes of Ishtar, with Marduk vast and swollen in a green sky; of the native An, like tailless, erect lizards with huge golden eyes; of the stepped pyramids of New Sumer so reminiscent of the ancient Mayan structures in Central America; of the vast and eerily artificial loom of the mountain they’d called Krakatoa; of a claustrophobic sprawl of mud huts and city walls, of dense purple-black jungle.

      “Wait a minute. What do you mean, you were there too?” This glowing woman was neither a Marine nor a scientist, of that he was sure. She hadn’t been onboard the Jules Verne, either, and no other ships had returned from Ishtar since the original voyage of discovery thirty years ago.

       “Sure! In sim, y’know? Most of the folks here grozzed a simtrip to Epsilon Eridani right here just last week!”

      “Oh. A sim …” Well, that made more sense. With the right hardware and AI programming and decent sensory records of the target, a direct download to your cerebral implants could make it seem as though you were actually there … at the bottom of the ocean, walking the deserts of Mars, or exploring the jungles of distant Ishtar.

      “Well, yeah,” the woman said. She sounded exasperated. “Why vam it in the corp, y’know? And it takes so long. A numnum feed is much better. Don’t send the mass. Just send information, reet?”

      He was beginning to gather that numnum must be a corruption of noumenon. The techelms, apparently, allowed everyone wearing them to share not only surface thoughts, but emotions and sensations as well.

      He must have been broadcasting some of his bemusement. “Don’t you Army types groz numnum feeds?” she asked.

      “Not … Army …” he managed to say. Speech was difficult. “Marines. …”

      She shrugged. “Whatever.”

      “No, damn it. It’s important. Marines.”

      What were they doing to him? Reaching up, he fumbled with the helmet, then pulled it off.

      Instantly, the falsely heightened colors and sensations dropped away. The woman of light was now … just a woman, a bit overweight and sagging despite the efforts of some decades, he thought, of anagathic nano. She was wearing nothing but sandals, jewelry, and a silver techelm. Without the light show she was not as disconcerting to look at, and from what he could see of her mouth and hair, he guessed she was rather plain behind that opaque visor. He actually liked her better this way.

      But she was already turning away, losing interest.

      Where were his friends? Funny. He’d thought they were still right there next to him, but they appeared to have dispersed through the crowd.

      He slipped the helmet back on, hoping to spot them. The explosion of color and thought hit him again, but he found he was now able to zero in on their location.

      “I wasn’t talking to you, creep! Back off!” Was that Anna’s thought? It sounded like her. He tried

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