Black Glass Read Free

Candle.
    He’d penciled this bedding into a busy schedule and he didn’t want to waste it. Lisha was expensive—everything about her. Even her face, which he’d paid for: Grist was in bed with himself.
    Lisha had been surgically altered to have his face—stylized female, girlish pretty, sure, but it was Grist’s face, nano-surgically reproduced. Not too much of a stretch: he’d always had “pretty boy” features, slender, almost fawnlike; not a transexual face but it could have been the gender-bending visage of a rock star from the last century. Lisha’s variant of his face wasn’t virtual, no; virtual was cheap bullshit. Lisha was flesh and blood, face-formed and paid for. She was a high-priced contract wife—very pricey indeed, her agent had been damned good. She’d pretended to like her new face from the moment the form-case was removed, using the acting skills that had been part of her training at the agency. She knew she could get it switched back, or altered to another face, fairly easily.
    “Narcissism got a bad rap,” he had said to her, as they looked at her new face in a mirror, a year ago. “The ego really is all there is of a man, or a woman. There is no soul; there is nothing but the ego, and memories. The me-trix, we call it, my dear, in the semblant trade. And if you want to be my wife enough, my pampered wife, be my sweet, feminized mirror reflection and be happy.”
    Today, in his bedroom, four digicams multiplied him on the surround-screens. Vapors of mild, designer-stimulant enhanced the high-oxy house environment, disposing him to stonily muse: Here he was complete, two identities dovetailed into one, and what an expression dovetailed was, considered just now, the tail of a dove, the white bird who ...
    What about Candle? If that pit-bull of an ex-cop ...
    His attachment to the moment’s pleasures melted away. He felt he was falling away from Lisha, falling right through the bed into a cold aloneness.
    A side effect of the vapors, he told himself. You’re not alone. You’re surrounded by those who work for you.
    Candle ... Maeterling ...
    What was left of his erection ... went.
    “What’s uh matter?” Lisha said muzzily, smothering a yawn.
    “I just ... I remembered something, an emergency. Business. . . emergency. Off ... please.”
    Lisha dutifully rolled off, casually and professionally, like a friendly restaurant worker clearing a table.
    Grist sat up, reached for the cut-class bottle next to the bed, decanted brandy into a crystal balloon, drank off half of it and felt a little calmer. He went into the next room, closed the door, stood over the smart table, activated it, whipped his fingers over the selector window for Targer; left the most basic message possible. “Targer? See who you can pay off. Keep Candle inside. Do what you have to. Or arrange an accident with his ... machinery. I don’t care who his friends used to be.”
    Get your mind off Candle ...
    But Candle had found out about Grist taking advantage of the skim-scam that Maeterling had cooked up. He’d found out after he’d taken the rap for his brother, right before the UnMinding. Too late. No more cop empowerment. No access to those accounts. But Candle had found out from Maeterling. Former Grist employee. The little weasel had tried to make a deal with Candle ... too late. “I’m pretty sure Mr. Grist waited before informing the cops of my skim and used it himself. If you can get proof we can blackmail him ...”
    Grist had gotten rid of Maeterling. And Candle had to take the UnMinding to cover his brother. No time to do anything else. Should have had Candle taken care of while he was UnMinded—but Candle had friends in law enforcement who put out the word: Any accident befalls Candle in prison, they’d investigate.
    And now Candle was getting out.
    Feeling cold, though the rooms were exquisitely temperature-controlled, Grist returned to Lisha.
    He sat on the bed, tapped the smart table next to the bed,