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Subject: {ASSM} Journal Entry 062 / 0100  [ Embassy Tales: Flags ]  (FM (fur))
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 18:10:04 -0500
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Embassy Tales: Flags

Seren, Sulim 13, 0100

"Can I ask you a question?" Becky asked.

R'Dam grinned. "That is all you ever do of me. I understand that part
of your job is to find out all you can about me but sometimes..."

She kissed his cheek. "I can be a bit too much, can't I?" She smiled
at him. "I'm sorry, sweetheart."

He touched her cheek with his fingertips. She opened her mouth as they
kissed, lingering a little longer than was seemly. The spectacle
caught the attention of the surrounding diners attempting to enjoy
their lunch in the unseasonably warm end-of-March weather. She enjoyed
the attention. "And I'm truly sorry about your job," he said.

"I'll live. The chance to work with you is a bit too much to pass up,
though."

He nodded. "What was your question?"

"There isn't a hint of wind." She pointed across the street to the
Pendorian embassy. "But your flag is flying clearly and calmly. Every
other flag is limp as a rag. Is it just an illusion?"

"No, I don't think so. I never noticed that before. It must be made of
Starkcloth." He glanced over at her, and she was looking at him with
open, curious eyes. "It's a cloth built of microscopic cells. They use
magnetism and the interatomic strong force to deform the cells
internally, just like muscle cells. But they're much stronger. Pressed
into two-dimensional sheets like that, we can stiffen and flex the
cloth at will."

"Is that all?" she asked.

"Starkcloth is one of our miracles," he said. "It isn't a fashion
statement, it's a weapon. Shaped to the body, it can magnify strength
manifold, and when attached to a predictive sensory package can
protect you against bullets, bombs, and some energy weapons. It's the
standard material of our soldiers and bodyguards."

"Oh," she said. "So it's one of those things I don't suppose you'd be
willing to sell to us?"

"Not readily," he agreed with a grin. "I thought negotiating trade
deals was no longer on your list of tasks."

She shrugged. "As much as I enjoy your company, Dam, I'm still
thinking of my world's best interests."

He nodded, eating wholeheartedly from his salad as if it were the
finest in the world. She envied his innocence, his expression of
openness, his lack of inhibitions when it came to, well, anything. He
loved Earth almost as much as he loved Pendor and everything he did
revealed that.

And it confounded her more that, with only a few exceptions, the
Pendorians seemed willing to give away the store. Their access to raw
mineral commodities was astounding to anyone familiar with the
commodities market; Dam had revealed that they could dump on the Earth
as much gold, platinum, palladium, uranium, and other industrially
precious metals as were currently available.

That bothered her. Her speciality in college had been political
economics. The Pendorians had basically said that the ships they had
come in had been the local equivalent of the Nina, the Pinta, and the
Santa Maria; there was a crash research program underway on Pendor to
make ships that were bigger, faster, and more efficient. If their
program was as succesful as the model they had chosen to emulate on
Earth, the development of the diesel engine under wartime conditions,
then in less than ten years they would be sailing between Earth and
Pendor ships that could cross the distance in less than three months,
haul a hundred times the capacity of their current ships, and do so
with a minimal crew or, perhaps, even no crew at all.

It had been a good day so far. They had met in the morning and visited
yet another part of the Smithsonian, this time the Museum of Natural
History. Dam had been fascinated by the dinosaurs, but he said that
little was known about more than 1% of Pendor's surface. He said he
hoped that he would never meet something quite so monstrous on his
world, but that it was also entirely possible that they existed.

That Pendor was an artifical world, one so incredibly massive that its
effective landmass was three hundred thousand times that of Earth's,
had shocked everyone. Given Pendor's population, at this time every
ten people could have their own Earth all to themselves. When Dam had
admitted that they were broken up into four occupied territories, the
largest barely the size of Massachusetts, she had given up trying to
wrap her mind around the idea.

Now they were dining in the little French cafe in the Embassy District
within view of the Pendorian Embassy. It had become a hangout of sorts
for the local alien watchers who spent their days waiting for a
glimpse of someone from another planet. It had also become a favorite
stop for some of the Pendorians, who seemingly enjoyed the attention.
It drove the Secret Service out of their minds. There were also the
feline-like bodyguards, the tall, powerful Uncia who accompanied
certain members of the Embassy staff. There was a rumor that some of
them were actually robots, and the Pendorian admission that they could
manufacture robots that were indistinguishable from living creatures,
at least on the surface, only helped to inflame the rumor. Becky was
convinced that there were no robots among the Pendorian staff.

"Hey, R'Dam," she said, "What's the inside of the Embassy like?"

"Are you just curious?" he asked, teasingly.

She returned his grin. "Of course I'm curious. I'm always curious.
I'll probably get grilled about what I see, where they can put
microphones, that sort of thing." That her role' as a "spy" had always
been out in the open hadn't stopped either one of them from enjoying
the time they had together.

"Well, I can show you around the public portions, if you like. It's
not very impressive. We like to do things traditionally."

"I still want to see it."

He flagged down the waiter. "Come on, then. I will show you around."
He paid the bill and they left. She gleefully held his hand as he took
her through the front gate of the Pendorian Embassy, a single, cubical
box of silvered windows. Unlike many of the other embassies in the
area this one lacked the forest of antennas on the roof. Instead,
there was a simple quad of white boxes, each on an independent gimble
mount, that tracked unseen and undetectable objects in the sky. There
was consensus among the Pendor watchers, professional and otherwise,
that the boxes were lasers, bouncing signals off stealthy satellites
that kept the Pendorians in touch with their teams planetwide. The
most common number cited for the satellites was twelve, given that
there were four lasers and line of sight could only provide coverage
of at most a third of the world at any given time. That the U.S. Air
Force said they couldn't find any such satellites, while at the same
time they were tracking a lost glove still in orbit from the Gemini
missions, did nothing to lift the rumors.

Inside the walls, there was the usual courtyard, this one with some
sort of modern sculpture in the front, an unrecognizable mass of
marble that reflected the Springtime sun. "I don't understand it
either," he confessed to her as she puzzled over it. What was striking
about the front yard was the lack of guards. It was something
much-commented on by the pundits, but the Pendorians had thus far
steadfastly refused to comment on it. Every nation had representatives
of its military within the grounds of its embassy. Every nation except
Pendor.

Did Pendor qualify as a "nation?" The most common description of it,
even from the Pendorians, was "a well-run anarchy supported by an
automated industrial base that satisfies the basic needs of the
individual. Luxury goods are hand-made goods." When asked how
Pendorians organized to do things like research projects and starships
to Earth, Dam had said, "The way the human body knows to fix an
injury. It's not hierarchal. An idea is proposed, argued about, and so
on. If it's good enough to get the industrial attention needed, it's
started. We work on it until we're done."

"That doesn't make sense," she argued. "How is it paid for?"

"It just is," Dam said.

"How are the people paid for?"

"They pay themselves. Or they wouldn't be there."

Becky had given up.

They entered the embassy, only to encounter a human woman sitting
behind a circular desk. To Becky's eye, something was distinctly amiss
with the desk and the receptionist. It took her a few seconds to
realize that there were no telephones, keyboards, typewriters,
displays, monitors, or intercomms. The desk was bare except for a
nameplaque loose on top of the dark blue marble ring in which she sat.
The nameplaque was in both English and the delicate Pendorian script,
and the English read "A.I. Athena."

Becky looked up, startled. The woman behind the desk smiled, but her
appearance could best be described as a generic receptionist,
unremarkable and only averagely attractive. Her age was somewhere in
the late 30's to early 40's. "I thought..."

"Yes?"

"I thought you were a computer."

Athena grinned. "It's nice to meet you too, Rebecca. Lean over the
desk and look closely."

Becky stood up on her toes and did as Athena suggested. She saw a
human torso emerging from a platform mounted to the floor; there was
nothing below the waist but machinery. "You're a robot?"

"No, this is just an animatronic interface. I'm actually down in the
basement. If you want, Dam might even be able to show you what I
really look like. Not that I'm much to look at even there." She
grinned and handed up from somewhere behind the desk a very
commonplace pass on a necklace, a thick white card with her
photograph, name, and a green stripe along the bottom. "This is only
necessary for other people in the Embassy. We have a small staff here,
less than twenty Pendorians and about a hundred Terrans right now, and
everybody knows everybody else. You should get some interested looks,
but the fact that I'm here letting you wander around without a couple
of hulking security robots will reassure the Pendorians. The Terrans,
however, feel more comfortable with something more visible than my
tacit permission."

Becky nodded and pulled the pass over her head. The admission that
there were robots inside the embassy, and that they were used for
security, she quitely filed away. She adjusted the pass under her hair
and let it fall over her blouse. "There."

"You look just like another member of the staff. The green is for
'guest,' of course."

Becky took a good look at the foyer. "Dam? Where did you get all this
darkened hardwood? I thought your people had been insistent about not
using woods that came from threatened forests, which I think one of
your people said was the entire planet."

Dam grinned. "Not quite, but close. Actually, the wood you're seeing
came from a building in Detroit that was scheduled to be demolished.
Two of the people on our staff are master carpenters and we encouraged
them to recycle anything they might find from demolition projects.
We're expert recyclers. We have you as an example of what happens when
we fail."

Becky frowned. She didn't like the sound of that. "So Earth serves
only as a bad example to you?"

"No, no, nothing of the sort. You have a wonderful, dynamic cultural
basis here, Becky, the likes of which we on Pendor have never seen.
We've never known the privations that your people have suffered, and
so we don't really have that mother of invention, necessity. We have
only it's stepparent, curiousity."

She grinned. "Still, it sounds to me like you'd rather avoid what we
go through."

"I think we would."

She nodded. "Where to?"

"What do you wish to see? There isn't much to see, actually. There are
a few rooms I could show you, like the astrogation room, or Athena's
home."

"Then show me those."

He led her to an elevator. The doors closed behind them and without
the press of a button or the speaking of a command the elevator
dropped downwards. The doors opened. "Left," Athena's voice said as
they walked out.

"Blueline, please," Dam said. A line of blue lit up on the featureless
beige carpet, leading them away from the elevator. They followed it
around two corners and through a door. Another door stood before them,
a sign on it in in six different languages: "WARNING. AI Repository.
Tampering with the effects herein constitutes assault and attempted
homicide or actual homicide of a Pendorian Citizen, and persons guilty
of such will be shot."

Becky gulped. "That's serious."

"Athena is a person in her own right. We mean to keep her as safe as
we keep ourselves. Safer, perhaps; she is the glue that keeps us all
together." He opened the door.

Becky wasn't sure what she had expected. It turned out to be more
mundane than she had thought. It was a very clean room, the walls done
in the kind of white usually reserved for the insides of microchip
manufacturing facilities, which should not have surprised her. In the
center was a grey workstation, complete with video screens and a
keyboard marked in symbols she didn't recognize. There was also an
outlet of sorts, massive compared to the parallel ports she had seen
on her office computers. Next to it was a tall cylinder of a
milky-grey color, and it appeared to be moving. "Athena?"

"That's me, in the flesh, so to speak."

"What are you?"

"I'm a radical design in modern Pendorian artificial intelligence. I'm
made up of billions of almost microscopic units working in parallel
that change in accordance with outside data, resulting in massively
parallel computing. It's a design that works at room temperature,
making it useful in environments where power and cost would make
systems that need to be cooled prohibitive. The system works with
nearly 100% efficiency. The tiny failures are due to indeterminate
events at the quantumn level and interference from high-energy cosmic
rays that prevent the molecules that make up my thinking from
interacting completely deterministically. Whether or not this gives
rise to a consciousness, as some people claim it does, is a matter of
philosophy. In real terms, I'm indistinguishable from you as a
conscious being." There was a distinct sense of pride coming from
Athena's voice.

"Wow. You said 'radical design?'"

"Yeah. Most Pendorian systems are based on interatomic interactions.
Harder to track, but easier to initialize and can be compressed to
much smaller sizes. Liquid intermolecular systems like myself are
easier to design up front and we can be scaled to incredible sizes
without much loss of parallel processing efficiency. And the
cryooptical systems, which are the original Pendorian AIs, tend to be
less introspective, more mechanistic. We're still trying to figure out
why. Anyway, thanks for visiting. I hope this information is useful to
the guys at the Agency."

Dam laughed, and Becky managed a smile. They were so casual about her
being coopted by her own government to report on people she liked, and
yet she found herself resenting those very people that she was
reporting to. The whole project stank, she thought, and she wanted to
get out of it.

Dam interrupted her thoughts. "Come on, I'll show you the astrogation
chamber." He led her into another room. This one was an eggshell white
in color, with rounded corners. "Okay, Athena, give us the tour."

Becky gasped as she found herself plunged into darkness. "This is the
universe that we know," Athena said as stars appeared all around
Becky, even in the space between her and Dam. "Here is Earth, and
here, Pendor." Small arrows appeared to float in midair, pointing at
two stars. "We have sent several small, automated probes out to the
more promising looking stars, but there isn't much to go on and many
of the systems we've explored have had only a few gas giants and
airless rocks. To date, nothing like the Earth or Pendor has been
found within the eight light year sphere that Pendor has explored.

"The pace of our exploration is slowed by the need for manned ships.
AIs, it seems, do not do well alone, although there are a few
exceptions and there is now a crash course in discovering what it is
about interstellar travel that makes AIs susceptible to erratic
behavior. Pendor does not as yet have many manned vessels, but we're
building new and better ones even today."

The world seemed to tilt and whirl as she watched the approach of the
Pendorian vessels to Earth. She saw them slow down as they approached
the Earth, shedding their velocity with incredible efficiency,
dropping off parts of their ships that would make a six-month run
around the sun, collecting as much energy as they could and using it
to make tritium before they came back to Earth, fully refueled, ready
to take the Pendorians home.

The lights came back up slowly, as they would in a planetarium. Becky
had found it all fascinating. "It's not really meant for this," Dam
said. "Our intention when we installed it was to make this a useful
navigation tool fifty years from now when we need to go places other
than the Earth. But for now, it's a good projector. And we
miscalculated its utility. Athena, please load Arctangent One."

The lights brightened momentarily, and suddenly Becky found herself
standing... outdoors? She looked around. There was no wind, nor was
there any sound. "Athena surprised us when she showed us that she
could produce this scene so accurately. One of our carpenters is
considering installing speakers to add to the effect so that will
probably happen soon. Wind machines might be a bit much."

Becky looked around. Overhead the sun (the sun? A sun, she decided)
blazed down upon... she was standing on what must have been the roof
of an incredibly large building. A glance behind her told that it
might be some kind of aircraft carrier. There were two white, gleaming
aircraft, military by their look although they had no obvious missiles
installed. They were handsome looking machines, rakish in profile. She
watched as the rear nozzles on one extended back, then rotated to
almost 45 degrees, then executed a perfect circle. In concert, they
promised a craft that could perform almost any maneuver.

She looked past the planes and realized that this must be an image
from Pendor itself. The land shot out in front of her, straight on
forever until it curved upwards into a milky haze where the clouds
blocked her view of the land. Looking even further up she saw the land
clearly again, now with a good view of the clouds soaring over that
landscape as if she were above it. She realized that her eyes were
looking at the land across millions of miles. The implications
staggered her. "Turn it off, Dam."

The vision went away. "Are you okay?"

"It was... too much to take in. How... how much of Pendor could I see
there?"

"About a third. A hundred thousand terrs, or Terran surface areas. A
lot of it."

Becky gasped. "A hundred thousand times the surface area of the
Earth?" Dam nodded. "And you have less than three million people?" Dam
nodded again. "My God, no wonder you people are so different. You have
the playground to yourself and the power to defend it."

"That's what we're afraid of," Dam said. "Complaceny. Jealousy.
Misunderstanding. We want to be more like you, Becky, not less, but we
don't want all the other things that come with being like you."

"I know, Dam, but... God. You people. I can't help it."

Dam smiled. "Come on. It's been a busy day. I'll show you to my
office."

They spent a short time in Dam's office. Becky enjoyed the view,
looking out across the Embassy District, and enjoyed talking to Dam as
he plowed through paperwork without a hint of holding back. Not that
he told her anything at all about what he was working on. It was all
in a squarish form of the Pendorian script anyway, which she couldn't
read. She had the strangest feeling, though, watching him, that he was
somehow doing more than merely shuffling paper. There was something
else going on, something in the way he seemed to be grinding his teeth
as he worked.

"Done," he finally announced. "Nothing terribly important, although I
have to go to France next week. Would you like to come?"

Becky was flattered. "I'd like to, Dam, but you know I can't afford
something like that."

"I can. I'm permitted one companion on my budget. You could be that
person. Better you than someone from the staff, someone whose very air
I shared for six months while trapped in a spinning steel ball."

Becky smiled. "Merci', then," she said. "I accept."

"Athena?"

"Got it," a voice said from out of nowhere. Athena had been listening
the whole time and Dam had never once mentioned it. That was what it
was like, living with the Pendorians. Becky thought she could get used
to it. She also thought that she would like to get out of there, get
Dam someplace a little more private, and have her way with him. Or let
him have his way with her. Something like that.

Becky took Dam's hand as he led her out of the Embassy. With eager
smiles they walked back to her aparment, keeping the late- afternoon
habit they had fallen into so very quickly and easily. Becky had come
to appreciate just how casual Dam was about sex. With her. He made it
seem easy, and for her that was a first.

Inside the door, he drew her into his arms and kissed her. She gave a
little sigh of pleasure at the touch of his arms around hers and the
press of his knee against her thigh. There was nothing at all
threatening about this half-man, half-cat. There was just strength.
Becky surrendered to it, betrayed her upbringing to it, allowed
herself to be swept away by R'Dam's welcome touch. There was nothing
to stop her, now, not work, not family, not even the pressures of her
future. This would end someday but she hoped in would not be ending
too soon. She liked the priveleges of it, the pleasure of him.

Dam took her hand and led her to her bed. What had been tentative two
months ago was now passionate. He kissed her throat, his fingers
expertly at work on the buttons of her blouse. In seconds he had her
chest exposed. The fur that covered his arms, usually hidden by the
tailored suits he wore, now stroked at her breasts.

And she was permitted by his very freedom to participate, to respond
to his needs with her own. His own moan greeted her as her hands
slipped inside the belt of his trousers, sliding along the fur of his
belly until she found his semi-erect cock and its furred, completely
retractable prepuce.

Releasing him, Becky lay back on the bed and let Dam do the work of
removing his clothes. She watched him as he stripped, warm assurance
in every gesture, an indescribable grin of anticipation on his lips.
He had never said he loved her and she didn't care. She didn't think
she loved him either. Instead, she liked him. They were immune to each
other; he couldn't impregnate her, they couldn't share diseases. There
was nothing to hold them back from giving one another pleasure, and so
they did, as much as they could.

As he removed his clothes and put them aside, he exposed his chest,
furred white with a ring of orange at the sides and across the
shoulders. He lowered his pants and then his undershorts-- boxers, of
course-- revealing his erection to her. She was always fascinated by
it, almost completely human in appearance, the thin fur at the base
thickening as it deepend into his belly and thighs.

Dam crawled onto the bed, covering her body with his as he stepped,
hands and knees, over the sheets, over her. She reached up to caress
the fur on his chest. It was like petting a cat, a cat with a hard-on,
intelligence, and desire for her. His face was human, though, and even
his eyes were rounded, although he had said that there were Satryls
with slitted eyes. He kissed her neck, her breasts. She liked the way
he plastered her body with kisses, covering her in little circles of
coolness that faded with the summer heat.

Her hands were on his body, stroking his cock. "Oh, yes," he moaned as
she wrapped her hands around it. "Yes, Becky, wow." She looked into
his eyes and felt connected to him. He was just warming up and already
they were getting into that groove.

He turned, peppering her belly with his kisses, his mouth lingering
longer below her navel, kissing his way into the thicket of hair she
had around her pussy. He kissed the mound at the top, then dipped his
head between her thighs and kissed at her lips. She felt a surge of
warmth right where his lips touched, and a tiny trickle of fluid
between her legs.

Her hand stroked his cock and balls almost absently. She took her time
examining the lightly-furred scrotum and bare cock of pale skin. She
liked the way he looked, and although she had never had an
uncircumsized lover she had quickly come to love what he could do with
his cock. She stroked it, touched it, loved the loose skin around the
head.

She shifted her shoulders to get underneath him, struggling to fit her
head under his legs, to reach that incredible cock with her mouth. The
smell of him-- musty, feline, not at all like a man-- was something
she had grown to love in the short time they had had together. She
reached up with her mouth and kissed the head of his cock. His moan,
muffled by her sex, told her that she was doing well. She licked at
the head, teased the underside. Her tounge played with the small
stretch of skin that seemed to anchor his foreskin.

She wrapped her lips around his cock, sucking him down. He responded
with a playful nip of her vulva. She squealed. "Cheater!"

His laugh was light and as wonderful as always. She returned to his
cock, sucking him into her mouth, playing with the head. A pearl of
precome hovered at the tip of his cock and she licked it playfully. In
was salty and sweet. She sucked down hard on him, wanting more. The
sounds coming from between her legn told her she was doing well.

And reminded her that he was hard at play down there. Distracted for a
moment, she let herself be swept away by pleasures that must have been
building for quite a while. She wondered how she could not have
noticed them as they stormed into her, occupying her attention. She
made an half-hearted attempt to wrench her attention back to him but
it was too late; he had her, as he always had her by now, her orgasm
coming on strong, thundering through to her soul.

She was spent from that but stil she wanted even more from him. "Dam,
get inside me. Please?"

With a grin he turned around in bed, lifting her legs until her feet
were pressed against his shoulders, and in one swift motion thrust
himself completely inside her. Becky rolled her head from side to
side, unable to control herself as the thrill of his thrusting cock
within her kept sending wave after wave of pleasure through her.

Dam was a true cocksman. She had read stories about men who, by their
cocks alone, could give incredible pleasure, and she had never
believed it. Dam had proven it to her. His cock was an amazing
instrument, backed by a hard body that could go on without pause, and
he liked it that way. He could go fast, then slow, hard, and soft,
that beatuiful smile on his lips, his eyes glazed like someone in the
throes of his own religious ecstacy, communing with her lust. They
pressed against each other, each thrust forceful and loving.

"My God, Dam, you're... more..." She was whimpering, begging to feel
that shaft keep thrusting within her, in and out, in and out. "More,"
she whispered until her voice was gone and then, "more," her lips
would form without breath. Between gasps her body would act, her legs
around his hips, pulling him into her, tilting her hips to him.

She could tell when he got closer. His whole body would start to
quiver like a harpstring, holding back the energies that he had
created with his lovemaking. She could feel it inside him, feeding
him, and feeding her, as it built incontrollably towards his climax.
He came with a shout of joy in a language she didn't even know and
didn't need to. She knew "yes!" when she heard it.

Dam held himself up, a tiny bead of sweat just about to fall off the
tip of his nose. He looked down at her and smiled. She smiled back. He
let go a laugh of pure joy, and she joined him in a final celebration
of their adventure together. "Oh, Becky," he sighed. "And it is only
getting better."

"Yeah," she said. "You are getting better."

He chuckled gently. "Magnificent." He turned over and collapsed onto
the bed, his demeanor confessing that, for once, he was spent.

Becky sighed, profoundly content. This was one part of their
relationship that she had no questions or qualms about, although it
was certainly the part of her relationship that confounded her
"handlers" the most. They had agreed on that; she had told them that
he was completely, and like all Pendorian species deliberately, built
to be compatible, and that it was none of their business what she did
with him in the privacy of her bedroom. They had reluctantly agreed to
take her word that she would faithfully report anything he said that
was of interest to national security.

"Mmmm..." she moaned. "What is it with you? I've never felt anything
like what you drive me to." She felt between her legs, running her
fingers over her pubic hair. It was sticky, predictably, but it also
felt warm, there. Fulfilled.

"I don't know," he answered, sounding honestly bewildered. "There's
something special about you, too, Becky. I can't put it into words but
when I'm making love with you I feel... content. Happy."

She turned over and rested her head on his shoulder. "I love the fact
that you don't hold back, Dam. When you want to make love, you do it
like it's the most important thing in the world."

He smiled. "It is."

"I know. Lots of people say that. But it's not. Not really. They're
afraid that the other person will think bad of them, think they're a
whore or something because they cut loose. The way you do."

"Is that why you're sometimes so quiet? Because you're afraid I will
think less of you? Or is it because of the people recording us?"

"WHAT?"

"Your people, they put microphones in this room. I assumed you knew."

Becky's outrage kept her from putting together a coherent sentence for
a moment. "They're listening? Right now?"

"Yes, right now. I assumed you knew."

"No, I did not know. In fact, I explicitly told them not to listen in
here, and I wanted my privacy respected!" She seethed angrily.

"Just a moment them." Dam went curiously quiet, his eyes losing their
focus for a moment. "There," he said as his eyes retrained on Becky.
"The listening devices have been disabled."

"What did you do?"

"I asked Athena to turn on the masking devices our people put with the
listening devices. We wanted to make sure that we could turn them off
at any time. Although Pendorians are used to being part of a mutual
exchange environment all the time, Terrans are not part of our system
and we're not about to treat them the same way."

Becky felt a strange chill run up her back. She sat up straight. "What
is a mutual exchange system?"

"I thought I explained. From anywhere on Pendor you can find and read
any book, see any movie, hear any story being told. The AIs make this
possible. And they respond to our requests because they are listening
all the time. Athena is part of that."

"You mean to tell me that Athena is listening to us now?" she asked.

He nodded.

Becky shivered. "Big Brother for real."

"You may look at it that way. Look at your own culture. What I imagine
is important to you-- what you read, what you wear, what you eat-- is
all knowledge stored in the records of your credit cards, records
anyone with enough time and money has access to. Your neighbor could
know everything important about you, if he cared to dedicate time to
finding out-- whether you read pornography, or the Communist
Manifesto, or the Bible. But he would probably not know if someone
were brandishing a knife on you one night. This difference
distinguishes the AIs on Pendor. They keep private when it is not our
business to inquire, and raise the alarm when it is in our best
interests to make knowledge public."

"So, how did you ask her?"

"I just spoke it quietly, subvocally." He pointed to his throat. "I
have small implants in my jaw and ear that make it posible for me to
talk to and hear her whenever I want to. She can also hear everything
going on around me."

Becky felt her mouth fall open. She hadn't realized that the man--
mel, she habitually reminded herself-- who she had cuddled up to so
often in the past two months had been allowing his supercomputer to
listen in on their every word, every act, and recorded it all. And
that the radio itself was inside his body; it couldn't be taken out,
couldn't be turned off.

Growning colder by the moment, she got out of bed and grabbed her
clothes, pulling her pants on in a hurry. All of the wonders of the
past hour forgotten, she ignored his protests as she buttoned her
shirt and, without her socks, stepped into her shoes and fled. In a
fast but controlled walk she left his residence, fled down the stairs
and out into the street. She continued walking until she saw a bus
going by. She boarded it and allowed it to take her away from R'Dam.
 ________________________________________________________________

Becky groaned as she rolled over and stared up at the ceiling.
"Another day," she sighed. Another day to enjoy a healthy income
without actually doing anything and without anything to do. The CIA
had agreed to pay her through the year, and then she would be free to
pursue whatever career she wanted, although probably not one in
government. Still, she had had a good career in the State Departement;
as long as her private life stayed out of her resume' (as if that were
possible) almost any company in the world would want her as an
international customer contact. Financially, she was set for life as
long as she found something to do.

But her body ached for R'Dam's patient hands. She couldn't help but
close her eyes and wish for his loving mouth against her lips. She
dreamed of his strong body against hers. Her fingers strayed down
between her thighs even as she thought of him. "Oh, Dam," she sighed.
Finally, she knew that nobody was listening to her, because there was
no part of her life that anyone cared about. Not anymore, not now. Her
fingertips pressed against the swell of her vulva, touching between
her lips. Her body was already rehearsing where it would go if Dam
were to mysteriously show up on her doorstep. It encouraged her, asked
more of her. She bent her knees and drew her feet up, allowing the
flower of her vulva to open. Fingers, her fingers, brushed her already
liquifying pearl. Small and obscene shudders flowed through her
thighs.

R'Dam's phantom mouth touched her breasts, his hands upon the outsides
of her hips. As her own fingers began to circle in on her pearl she
dreamed of his cock, average in size but so talented in action,
entering her, knowing where it should go, knowing what inside her it
should touch. Her insides began to melt at the intensity of the
memories, at the strength of her own caresses of her inflamed pearl. A
hard moan filled the room with her climax.

Even before the tremors completely subsided, Becky sat up. Kneeling,
she turned around and lifted the venetian blinds over her bed. She
looked out onto the narrow, brownstown-lined street that had been her
home for the past six years. She would be leaving it all soon. She
would go someplace where nobody listened. She wanted it that way.

She turned away from the window and wept silently.
 ________________________________________________________________

The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et. al., and Related
Tales are Copyright (C) 1988-2002 Elf Mathieu Sternberg. Distribution
limited to electronic media not-for-profit use only. All other rights
are reserved to the author.

The complete Journal Entries collection is available at:
http://www.drizzle.com/~elf

--
Elf M. Sternberg, rational romantic mystical cynical idealist
http://www.drizzle.com/~elf
EAC Department of Corrective Phrenology

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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