To THE LAND OF THE ELECTRIC ANGEL: Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist Author (The Frontiers Saga) Read Free Page A

design, and an individual could live and die without ever actually having to leave any one of the huge buildings. Food, entertainment, and myriad services could be brought to the door by tube, multiplex cable, jets, and electric delivery vans. Many people conducted business by television, using computer and information terminals and rarely leaving their home offices.
    Blake Mason hated the arks. He realized they were needed; and at times he admired them, much as one may admire an efficient riot tank or a piece of well designed machinery. But Blake could not love an arcolog. It was too cold, too impersonal for him, despite the agile machinations of the arks' social designers.
    Blake watched the tiny darting lights of aircabs and the contrails of high-flying jets, a firmament in motion that blotted out the sight of the galaxy. He walked to the edge of the terrace and looked down. The city stretched away – square mile after square mile of building blocks, all at the legal height limit and broken only by the looming bulk of the Christmas-tree-like arks.
    Too many, Blake thought. Millions. Too many, but maybe not too many if out there, somewhere, was that one...
    The memory of that evening at Lady Faring's was still sharp.
    Was Chariot right?
    Blake stroked a plastiwax figurine of the thirty-foot Sensualus sculpture he was going to install in front of the elevator doors on Landau's floor.
    Was Chariot right that night? Did he touch a vital point? Am I obsessed with sex, or rather with the thought of sex? Is this obsession the reflection of my business and my art, or is my art and business the reflection of that obsession? Or is there really an obsession?
    Blake twisted the plastiwax figure he held in his hands, feeling the slightly oily surface, enjoying the sensuality of the dips and curves, letting his imagination flow freely. Thighs and breasts, with nipples hardening. Cool buttocks flexing under gripping hands.
    God, Chariot was right! Blake put the figure down quickly. Why couldn't he just admit it, go with it, flow with it, use it, enjoy it. I can't be a Victorian in the twenty-first century! "I'm not that bad," Blake said aloud. I'm not a prude. If I disapprove of the casualness of sex today, it's on the grounds of taste, not prudery.
    Or is it? a tiny thought spoke as it scampered through his mind.
    Blake picked up the figurine and slammed it down, distorting one soft side. He abruptly turned away and stared for a long moment at the framed sketches for the pleasure dome the Hughes Corporation was building on Silver Mountain. The dome had been a well-received job, with much attendant publicity. The critics, the vidtab faces, and the chic trend setters had all remarked on the effect of the colorquick walls flowing with heat-sensitive crystals in liquid suspension that reacted to body heat and air currents, shifting their colors in rippling waves. There were no straight lines, only organically curved walls. The rooms were warm and soft, with scented air in constant flux, and hidden music helped along by concealed Alpha-wave projectors working directly on the emotions. A bath for the mind, a massage for the soul, a carnival for the body.
    Experienced girls would cater to every wish, every need, real and fancied. They had been picked from the welfare levels of the arks, from orphanages and broken homes. Three months of hypnotraining, of probing psychs, of field training in disciplines known for five thousand years or in others unknown fifty years before – and voila! a pleasure dome girl! There was nothing anyone could teach her about sex.
    But what about love? Blake Mason mused. He ripped his eyes away from the sketches of one of his greatest achievements. In his office he had more offers, more pleasure dome contracts. Bigger domes, the finest yet: Atlantis, beneath the Mediterranean, and soon the new Xanadu, a jet hop away in North Africa. Hirahawa was doing Tokyo's Tanoshimi, and Bentcliffe was doing Seraglio, in