jaw. “Now, I want you to take me through your little part in our operation. Don’t leave anything out.”
There was no sign of Magyar. I wondered if she was somewhere grinding her teeth.
Eventually, Hepple got bored and left Paolo alone to pick up the pile of rushes he had had to abandon. I walked up behind him. The support strap that stretched between his shoulder blades was vibrating slightly, and I could smell his stress sweat. I wanted to lay a hand on his thin back, but did not.
“Paolo?” I said gently. “Paolo?”
“I’m fine,” he said, stuffing rushes jerkily into a sack. He did not turn around.
“I’ll talk to Magyar. She might be able to do something.”
He whirled. “I said I’m fine.” Something about his pale, thin face reminded me of Tok. A muscle at the corner of his mouth jumped. His eyes were almost black with anger and humiliation.
“I could—”
“I don’t need a woman to fight my battles!” His voice was clotted and violent and I could not have been more surprised if he had hit me. We did not speak for the rest of the shift except when I monitored the viability of the microbes and gave him the figures to take to Hepple.
“He’ll be sorry,” he swore. “You’ll all be sorry.”
When I got home, it took me a long time to fall asleep. I dreamed of the loading yard at Hedon Road, of trucks screaming through puddles, trying to run me down.
Lore and Spanner came back from the Polar Bear and the windows of the shop under their flat were bright behind the shutters.
“What do they sell there?” Lore asked, remembering the people coming and going that first night she had spent in Spanner’s flat.
“Tired old porn. Want to see?”
They went inside. The lighting was bright and cheerful, as were shelf after shelf of plastic products: purple silicon dildos, bright pink things that looked like modern abstract art and took Lore a moment to recognize as artificial vaginas. Several screens were running two-minute demo loops. Lore watched one. Spanner was right. The porn was old and tired, almost laughable. The characters moved jerkily and in several frames the skin color of the man’s body did not match his head. “I can do better than that.”
“Yeah. Anyone who isn’t blind could probably do better than that.”
“Does this stuff actually sell?”
“I suppose.”
“I want to see some more.”
A woman with huge, meaty arms and several chins came out from behind the counter. “Then you have to pay for it.”
“You’re kidding,” said Spanner. “No one would pay for this garbage.”
“Lots of people do. You want it or not?”
Spanner looked at Lore. “No.” The woman shook her head in disgust and lumbered back behind the counter.
“Look at this one,” Lore said. Spanner glanced at it cursorily. “The sea in the bottom of the frame is a different color to that at the top. That’s just sloppiness.”
“The people who watch these things aren’t looking at the sea.”
“Maybe not, but it only takes a couple of minutes of programming to get the whole picture to mesh. I could do better than this with one hand tied behind my back.”
Spanner peered at the screen. “He seems to be doing pretty well with both arms tied behind his back.”
“And see that shadow on his thigh? Looks like it’s noon. But the sun’s setting.”
Spanner looked. “I always wondered why these tapes seemed so odd.”
“I was doing better work than this three years ago.”“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m serious. Let’s get out of here.”
Later, in bed, Lore was just drifting off to sleep when Spanner spoke into the darkness. “What would you need to make those porn pictures?”
“More equipment than we could afford.” Lore turned over, feeling sleep curling up along her backbone like a warm cat.
“Tell me anyway.”
The next shift was even worse. Paolo was strung as tight as piano wire. Hepple appeared every forty minutes, asking about this or that, wasting our time, making everyone jumpy. My stomach began to ache. At one point, I thought Paolo was going to hit Hepple. At the break, someone turned the net volume up high, and what talk there was consisted of surly, one-syllable grunts. Everyone was tired and tense; I was almost glad to get back to work. I saw Magyar only once, two hours into the shift, and gave her a duplicate of the figures I was getting for Hepple. It made me feel better, somehow, that he wasn’t the only one with the information. She