Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

Grand Prix SIMON INGS

THE SEA IS OFF-WHITE, BANDED by blue wave shadow. A line of clotted cloud lies between it and the cobalt sky of La Rochelle.

Angèle talks but I’m not listening. I’m building sand castles. First the foundation—a bay. (I wiggle my fingers over the smooth sand for waves.) Its sides make a natural amphitheater, rising to near alpine heights in a succession of tiers. (I have to dig for sand sticky enough to hold together, and still the gradients are too shallow.) For a while I look at it, reluctant to add more. Two hundred years ago, this place was as I’ve modelled it—a natural thing. Rock-strewn fields with a scattering of olive trees.

I sigh, add the Hotel de Paris, the Casino: all the anonymous infrastructure of the Principality. I lie down in front of the model and pick away the square and the Boulengrins with a fingernail. (Behind my eyes I fill the space with formal gardens, tropical trees, and cacti the size of oaks.) I press my little finger at a slant into the model to indicate the tunnel through to the harbor. The finishing touch: I trail sand between my fingers along the edge of the cliff to make the concrete wall Frasange demolished last year when his throttle jammed at 600 km/h.

I follow the route with eyes hijacked by memories; then I trace it with my fingers, plowing the damp sand—my sculptures tumble. For a moment I am a child again, a petulant little god. I ball my fist and obliterate the model. Only the route is left—a drunken O in the sand.

The Monaco Grand Prix is three days away.

Angèle peels off her shirt and heads for the water. Fifty years after Le Pen’s death she’s still the only Arab girl I’ve seen who will bare her tits on a French beach.

I want to join her in the water. The afternoon has steam-ironed my face and my shirt is dripping sweat. I want to dive into sea so cold it churns the gut, but I can’t risk getting seawater in my jacks this close to a race.

It’s sunset. The haze turns brown and rotten before Angèle reaches the diving tiers.

When she falls her silhouette is as sharp and black as the wave shadows, a black slash piercing a hyphenated surface. I think of trajectories, Gs and vectors, fire masks, halogens, wheel jacks and robots, flags like bunting and visors filled with drunken kanji.

The jack behind my anus is itching.

I turn my back to the sea. The twin towers guarding the harbor are peach, grey, black: the colors sharp and entwined like a fractal surface.

We walk back to town along the seawall. The houses have moldings above the door—sextants and galleys scoured to shadows by the salt air.

We try l’Ocean—maybe a room with a view across the harbor? It’s hard to tell which they dislike most: my English or her color. We move on, through the arcades to the market. A man is hosing the forecourt with seawater. The gutters are full of tabloids and endive.

We get a room above a café with a view of the market roof. We fetch our luggage from the station. Angèle lays her PC at the foot of the bed, pulls out the IBCN lead and crawls about the floor cursing. We miss the first five minutes of Danseuses Nouvelles.

They came from Dijon a year ago and they’re top of the TVP ratings. They dance to Salieri and Skinny Puppy, to De Machaut and The Crucial Bridging Group.

They are a women-only company and espouse the politics of the Programme Pour Femmes Fermes—the Agenda for Expressionless Women. Last year the French parliament, outraged by the atrocities of Août ’34, placed a media ban on the Programme. The Amazons of the Sorbonne and the Academie Julienne are silenced now, but Danseuses Nouvelles, whose pieces grew out of their more sober semiotic researches, have never been more popular.

Few have forgotten or forgiven the sack of the Sacre Coeur, the onstage emasculation of Bim Barn’s lead guitarist or the siege of the Jeu de Paume.

And yet—

A glamour surrounds Danseuses Nouvelles. They weave space in strange, half-grasped rhythms. They convey strange messages, performing warped yet familiar roles with an inhuman grace. They are the Programme’s dream in its pure state—a glimpse of the end, uncompromised by violent means.

Their performances whisper of the world the Programme believes is to come: the world of strong women.

After the show Angèle and I make love.

I lay my head on her shoulder. She turns and strokes my hair. I lift her face up and kiss her lips. We sink back onto the bed. My fingers play with the buttons of her bodysuit. I slip a hand under the cloth and stroke her breast.

Angèle unbuckles my pants and pushes them down. She strokes the well of my erection through damp cotton. Her mouth is on my nipple—a wet, warm pulse over my heart.

I fumble the bodysuit down to her waist and stroke her legs apart. She shifts position on the bed. I slip a finger inside her, and stroke the firm dome of her cervix.

It is love with a fluid rhythm. There is a sweet, shared violence to it. Angèle gasps and clutches at me, the bed, anything; I gaze into her widening eyes. There, in the wet blankness of the pupil, I can see them. I gaze closer, closer—Angèle’s tongue flicks at my chin and I catch it in my lips, my teeth, suck at it like a baby put to the breast. Danseuses Nouvelles—missionaries from the land of strong women—are dancing in her eyes.

Catharine, I remember, used gestures as fluently as words. The first time I met her, she ordered Dublin Bay prawns. She broke their backs with casual, sadistic finesse. When her pointed red tongue scooped out the white pus inside them, she put me in mind of a cat, licking marrow from a rabbit bone.

It was six months ago, in Quimper. I don’t know how she got my number. She told me quite openly who it was she worked for, and since the Programme had never to my knowledge worked with men, I was intrigued at her invitation. Perhaps it was naive of me.

“They say racing drivers talk more and do less about sex than men in any other sport.” She held the orange carcass of her latest victim between finger and thumb and twirled it by its claw over her plate.

I treated her to a bitter smile. The playboy reputation, and its sarcastic flip side, is one we no longer deserve. There is no Baron von Trips on the circuit now, no Count Godin de Beaufort, no Inès Ireland, no Lance Reventlow. Everything has become too competitive and commercial. Indeed, by the nineties the playboy image had all but expired.

“Formula Zero has rekindled our infamy,” I explained. “New cars. New regulations. They want to rekindle the old magic. It’s plastic: packaged. Our sponsors twist incidents into publicity gimmicks. It helps the ratings.”

“It doesn’t anger you?”

I shrugged. “If it didn’t, would I be here?”

The claw broke and the gutted corpse soft-landed in a pillow of saffron rice. It was her turn to smile.

She pushed aside her plate, lifted her PC onto the table, licked her fingers and typed. She read: “Cool, rational, seldom angered, seldom sulks when disappointed—” She gave me a cool glance. “Bisexual, last cruised in Groningen four years ago, in ’42 had a short relationship with hypertext writer, male, in London, longstanding correspondence with lesbian activists in Seattle, New York, and with gays—ex-lovers—in Brisbane, Porto…”

She turned the screen round for me to see.

“Publish and be damned,” I said.

Catharine tutted. “I wouldn’t dream of it. What would be the point? It says here your public image doesn’t interest you.”

“It doesn’t. It interests Havers, of course, and she has a way of buying off the right people before things go too far.”

“You must be quite a headache for her; a ‘new man’ at pole position.”

“Maureen Havers is old,” I said. “Because she’s old, she’s a legend. If a legend runs a company it has an interest in creating subsidiary legends—appropriate legends.”

“So she puts you in the closet.”

“I’m glad of the privacy. If I were Don Juan, she’d use it for a marketing gimmick: I wouldn’t get any privacy at all.”

Catharine stroked her chin. “Is she evil?”

“No,” I said, “she’s sad. She lost her son to Formula Libre in Brazil. Her engineers built a car that cornered too well for him. The Interlagos circuit curves the wrong way round. He wasn’t properly prepared for the G-strain.”

Catharine waved her hand dismissively. “I’m not interested in technicalities.”

I looked at her a long time. I said, “He was still burning when I pulled him out. His visor had melted into his face.”

She had the decency to blush: “I’m sorry.”

“Formula Libre is just what it says”—I went on, ignoring her apology—“a free-for-all, a freak show for fast cars. But Formula One was outdated, and good new designers were turning to Libre rather than be straightjacketed. Havers built up Formula Zero to codify some of Libre’s better ideas. She made it, and dominated it; now, because she’s old, it dominates her.”

“And she is hated, is she not?”

“Havers’ constructors spend half their working lives stabbing each other in the back, but there’s no real power to be had until she goes. But that’s not what you meant, is it?”

A smile played about her lips. “Touché.”

There’s a lot of bad blood between the Programme Pour Femmes Fermes and Maureen Havers.

When she was young and cared nothing about cars, Maureen Havers revived Psyche et Po, Antoinette Fouque’s 1972 outfit which dominated the French women’s liberation movement into the eighties—all red jumpsuits and internecine foulness and right-wing religious overtones.

The Programme grew up at the same time Havers was wiring Psyche et Po’s corpse to the lightning conductor. Ensuing battles levelled the tactical gulf between the two movements till the main differences were intellectual ones. Psyche et Po read Lacan; the Programme read Lévi-Strauss. Psyche et Po were crypto-Capitalist; the Programme were retro-Structuralist. Psyche et Po played the system; the Programme deconstructed it.

The Programme won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Without intending it, they became not unlike Psyche et Po: an élite with no popular support.

Catharine drained her wineglass. “Ms. Havers is not our prime concern. I don’t suppose she will like what we have in mind but—” She shrugged. “What do you know of the language of dance?”

The link between Danseuses Nouvelles and the Programme wasn’t known then. I was thrown. I muttered something vague about semiotics and felt like an idiot.

She told me about Danseuses. I was privileged: some weeks passed before they leaked the news to La Monde.

“Are they the revolution?” I asked.

“A small part.”

I toyed with my food. “Top ratings eight weeks running. Small?”

She was silent for some while, staring at me. I’d touched something important. “Since when did the man uninterested in publicity read ratings?”

“I don’t. My manager does. Danseuses pushed my profile out of prime time last week. TVP wouldn’t negotiate.”

Catharine said: “Danseuses’s dancer/choreographer is Helene Ritenour. In ’41 she had a curbside altercation with a heavy goods vehicle. Surgeons in São Paulo rebuilt her. Nanotech CNS upgrades saved her from spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair.”

I nodded. “And some.” Helene was—and still is—a good dancer.

I thought about it.

Forty-one. In ’42, Helene and Danseuses went on TV. “Quick work. Programme money?” I knew rushing the São Paulo technique cost a great deal.

“We look after our own,” Catharine replied. “So does Havers. Doesn’t she?”

The jack behind my arse itched.

We catch a train to Nice. It was twinned with Cape Town, once. It boasts a sand beach (imported) and no public telephones.

We eat at Le Safari. Angèle is pissed off and she won’t tell me why. I’d show her the town, God knows I have sufficient plastic in my wallet, but hers is righteous anger, not to be bought off. She’s sitting with her back to the window. Her face is in shadow. I can’t see her eyes.

We haven’t been together long. Catherine gave her to me—a contact and Woman Friday—not two months back. I find it hard to predict her moods.

Maybe it was Catharine’s idea she sleeps with me; maybe she’s got tired of playing the whore. It’s not a thought I want to go to bed with so I try to get her talking.

Like an idiot I mention the Programme.

She screws up her face like she’s swallowed something fatty. “I’ve no time for that,” she snaps. “It’s just play to them. Can’t you just see them wanking off to the press reports after each sadistic little outing?”

“They’re pointing up the language of repression,” I say, wondering all the while at my own arrogance. Angèle doesn’t know these kinds of words. She’s an Arab street kid who was kicked once too often to stay lying down, not a semiotics graduate. “They’re targeting metagrammatic nodes in the cultural matrix—”

Her look is enough to shut me up. Even against the light it’s unmistakable.

“Don’t talk to me about language!” She’s the first woman I’ve met growls when she’s angry. “What do I care that this word and this color and this dress mark the boundaries of chauvinism? What comfort is that to the mother with a drunk for a husband? Or the rape victim or the dyke or the pensioner? Go tell your good news to every lacerated clit in Africa then look me in the eye and say this is worth the money!”

She slams her hand down on the table, lifts it, and there’s a tiny gold wafer winking up at me like the promise of El Dorado, from the marble tabletop.

I pick it up and weigh it gingerly in my hand. It’s a ROM wafer—a packet of hardwired information. It slips into the port between my shoulders—the same kind of port they fitted to Helene Ritenour.

It’s strange how Angèle can read me so well, even in anger. She leans over and strokes my hand with dark fingers. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I don’t, but it’s the only way I can thank her for tacitly forgiving me.

“It was bad,” I say. “I slid off the track sideways—the near side of the monocoque took the impact. The whole thing failed in tension at the rear bulkhead. The engine and avionics went one way, the rear wheels the other. The heat exchanger was torn off. The steering column broke. The monocoque got crushed on the front offside. All the underbelly ceramics sheared—”

“I didn’t mean the car.”

“So—” Something misfires inside me and the old anger is back. “Tabloids have back numbers.”

She starts back like I’d slapped her. “That wasn’t fair. I’m not a ghoul. I didn’t mean the accident, anyway. I meant the treatment. How you got better. What it did to you.” She rubs her face with her hands. “I want to know you. What am I to you? A friend or a whore?”

Maybe this playboy bullshit is rubbing off on me because I really don’t know. Sorry is the best answer I can come up with.

We sleep in the same bed but we don’t touch.

I want to tell her what she wants to know. I want to tell her about São Paulo, and what they did to me. And why.

I want to tell her it hurt like hell.

She’s asleep.

The Monaco Grand Prix is two days away.

Maureen Havers honestly believed she was doing me a favor. No one spends eight figures sterling on one man without some feeling behind it. She could have left me in a wheelchair. It wasn’t her fault I was in that state, after all—I was the one who crashed.

Instead she saved me, after a fashion.

But she had other ideas too. I remember how flushed she became when Dr. Antonioni showed her the jack in my spine. I swear she made eyes at it. As far as she was concerned then, I was just the meat it plugged into.

Did I resent that? Not at the time. I was still in shock from the accident. I still couldn’t quite get my head round the fact I could walk again—walk with a spine shot in five places.

Imagine you’re lying there with a hospital bed your only future. Then they plug ROM cartridges into your back. On them are programs which teach your brain how to access and control a whole new nervous system. You can walk again, even shit when you want to. It’s a miracle—and it takes a while to adjust.

Then, but too late for it to make a difference, it occurs to you—All that expensive tech, just to get you toilet trained again?

Of course not.

At least when the Programme paid for Helene they let her be her own boss—or so the popular science programs tell us. She uses an expert system, writing her prize-winning solo choreography direct to a ROM cartridge.

Me? I get fresh ROMs sent me every month from Achebi CyberPARC, where they analyze my race data. It helps me drive better. Only they went one stage further.

They built me a second jack, behind my arse. When I strap myself in, I hot-wire myself to the car. I don’t drive it; I become it.

This has its consequences.

My body is a corporate concern. It has no solid boundaries. In short, it is a whore.

One of Formula Zero’s damn few rules states: one car, one driver. Havers has got round that—they saved my spine and in return have turned me into a databus, a way of loading the aggregate wisdom of Achebi’s Research Institute into a racing car; a smart messenger with a spine full of—what? Software? Wetware?

I have a name for it: Slime.

The Casino is fashioned in flamboyant style with towers at the corners and, sitting on the roof, great bronze angels, picked out by floodlighting which extends into the Boulengrins.

Angèle and I walk among the cacti. She is scared. Maybe it’s the race. More likely it’s being undercover, working for terrorists. I wonder how much they’re paying her? She has no respect or liking for them. Her politics are much more homely. Maybe they agreed to fund some rape crisis centers.

“Do you think that wafer will kill you?”

“Maybe,” I reply. Is this part of her job—to frighten me? Test my nerve? She may be right. To cause the world’s best speed driver to die twirling in flames through the bijou houses of Monte Carlo-No. Accidents themselves have their own phallic semiology. No sport on Earth so quickly forgets its widows. Grand Prix’s finest take Death as their bride. Whisper their names in awe: Depailler, Villeneuve, Willy Mairesse.

I do not think the Programme will kill me. Perhaps I lack the cruelty to credit such deception. Perhaps, if I were a woman, I could be that cruel. Perhaps (I look at Angèle, the stoop of her shoulders, her tired eyes, the way she twitches her fingers through her hair)—perhaps I would have to be, to survive.

We return to the Hotel de Paris. We have a suite overlooking the Casino. Tomorrow Angèle will sit on our balcony; she will see the cars as they stream into the square and snake down the hill.

Perhaps she will think of me.

We watch Danseuses Nouvelles. There are only five dancers in the company, including Helene. If I didn’t know better, I would say there were at least twenty. This is the heart of Danseuses’ enduring novelty. The way they dance alters their appearance. They toy with the semiology of movement, with their audience’s stereotypic racial and social expectations. They move in a way we expect certain kinds of people to move, and they become those people. The eye is tricked by the conditioned expectations of the brain. The government is outraged by the Programme’s violent acts. But I suspect they fear this quiet revolution far more. They can handle terrorism: but seduction?

The credits spool and I undress. I sit cross-legged on the bed. Angèle pushes the wafer into my back.

In a while the headache clears. Two green circles appear, one above the other, center-vision. In an eyeblink they are gone. They are the first and last I will see of the Programme’s system. It will perform its acts regardless. I will have no opportunity to intervene.

“It’s all right now,” I say.

Angèle turns on the light. She looks at me and she is afraid.

Inside me, something flexes.

Formula Zero is a race for cars, not drivers. It is a vicious testing bed for crackpot ideas, the way Formula One used to be till the 1970s and the iron rule of Jean Marie Balestre.

Formula One’s rule book ceased to reflect technical progress around that time. Formula Zero was conceived in the nineties as a way round the rule book and into the twenty-first century.

Anyway, crashes are good for business.

My eyes are full of lignocaine. Underlids count off the seconds. I tense my arse and spool the revcounter into the red, just out of my line of focus. I pop the clench plate into my mouth and bite down. The throttle glows green. I blink. The visor snaps down. It’s made of kevlar. A projector micropored to my head beams eight external views onto the inner surface of the visor then settles for center-forward.

Eight seconds.

At -7.2 the car handshakes the processor behind my lumbar jack. Point nought nought one seconds into the race the handshake is complete and all this touch-and-blink gear takes second place to Achebi’s direct-feed wizardry.

Four seconds.

I smile a special smile. Engine status icons mesh and flow behind my eyes.

Zero.

I’m in a different place. A green hillside. Rock-strewn fields and olive trees, the way it was. The track is a smooth black nothing under my wheels, swirling round the hill. I follow it with cybernetic eyes. Gentry in the Ferrari is a blue icon on my near side. He cuts me up on the first corner. I’ll use him as a pacemaker. I’m so far ahead of the league table I’d be happy to let him win. But if I don’t pass the post first, then Catharine’s meme-bomb sits in me, waiting for the next victory. It only triggers if I’m race champion.

A sick fascination is driving me. That and a hope that the Programme’s attack on the machismo-oriented Grand Prix might dovetail with my own wish for vengeance on Maureen Havers.

My tires are the sort that go soft and adhesive in the heat of acceleration. I have five laps’ advantage over the opposition, five laps glued to the road, before they lose their tack and I slip into something more hard-wearing.

There’s the sea—a grey graphic nothing. My eyes spool white prediction curves and hazard warnings. I take Gentry on the skid in a maneuver that shortens my tire life by a lap. I feel the difference, the loss of traction. I’m picking up sensory information from every stressed member of the vehicle, directly, through my spine. I am the car—and the car is feeling queasy. At the pit robots tend me, probing and swapping and inflating the things that make up this surrogate body of mine. My wheels feel tight and warm again, hugged near to buckling by fresh, high-pressure tires.

I scream away from the pit. The Longines people send me a stop time and ETF. It flashes on my underlid for half a second and disappears. They’re counting me down for the World Record—a special etherlink tells me how I’m doing.

The real danger now is the back-markers don’t have the decency to pull in for me. They do not like me: Havers and Achebi have made me far too good. With me around, no one else can hope to get near the championship.

By next season, I reckon FISA will rule against my kind of driving for the good of the sport. Then I’m back to clench plate and dataskin and honest dangerous driving. And in another twenty years Formula Zero will have accreted its own four-inch-thick Yellow Book and the whole process will start over again. A new breed of Formula Libre.

From São Paulo, maybe.

My shoulder blades itch. There’s something strange in my nervous system.

I wonder what it does—

I’m tearing towards the tunnel (look no hands) when there’s the most appalling jolt. The gearbox tears its guts out and my ribs try straining themselves through the crash-webbing. The strap across my visor slips. I round the bend along the harbor road and my neck isn’t up to the G-strain.

I slide into the pit and nausea overtakes me. The car realizes I’m going to throw up. The helmet snaps open and the clench plate grows hot to make me spit it out. I throw up over the side of the car. A valet trolley wheels over and scrubs off the mess, revealing a smeared ELF decal.

My whole body burns green fire.

Every nerve sings with power.

Achebi’s unmistakable Go signal. I scrabble under my seat for the clench plate. Its taste of sour saliva is nauseating and I wonder idly if I’m going to be sick again on the circuit. My helmet slams itself down and the graphics blink on.

It only takes a moment to become a car again.

But this time it’s different. This time, I’m way down the field and will be lucky to be placed. This time—the first time this season—I will have to race.

I may not be able to live with what the Programme does through the medium of my flesh. But I know I cannot live with it buried in me—I cannot live in ignorance. I am compelled. What atrocity have they given me to perform?

Will I karate the neck of the president of FOCA? Will I tear Maureen’s eyes out—or my own—in front of a billion couch potatoes?

Some of Angèle’s special anger flows through my veins and into the car.

It feels good and dangerous, like the Grand Prix I remember. The difference is, back then I knew when I was stretching the car to its limits. Now I can feel it. I’m an athlete with a steel body, a middle distance runner doubling speed on the last five laps.

My arrogance is rewarded.

The car starts falling apart.

It’s not anything you can see. Even though they’re wired up my back, I nearly miss the signs—ticks and prickles and a hot metal taste in the back of my throat.

I don’t have time for another pit stop. I hope to God they don’t show me the black flag.

I’m an athlete, pushing my body and doing it damage and before long my knees are crumbling, my toes are burning away, my lungs are full of acid phlegm. I’m screaming cybernetic agony into my helmet as I come in sight of the prize pack. They are jockeying for position with all the cumbersome grace of whales. My scream becomes a roar. I think of the horror dozing fitfully in my spine, I think of the hurt behind Angèle’s eyes, and every hurtful stupidity under the sun—and I hurl myself forward. Danger icons spill blood behind my lids.

Four and Three concede with grace and let me past. I run tandem with place Two—Ashid in the GM. I know from old he’s no gentleman. We hug wheel-space through the square.

Odds-graphics blink on by my field of vision. Data chitters through me. I take hold of the wheel. I want to be ready. If this goes wrong it might crash my systems. The wheel recognizes my grip and unlocks, shaking me boisterously like an overfriendly scrum half.

I watch the odds-window, turn the car in, Ashid jerks sideways and back and already I’m wheeling past him. Our back wheels kiss and make up, then I’m running for pole.

Martineau leads and he is Havers’ Number Two. If I can get within five lengths of him he’ll slow down like a good boy and let me win.

All of a sudden I have a pacemaker to get me there.

I left Gentry behind at number three. Why Gentry—why not Ashid? The GM is still sound, my icons tell me—which is good because even a kiss can send an unlucky car tumbling—so maybe Ashid’s nerve’s gone, ’cause he’s more than a match for this prick. I think Gentry must have popped a pill.

I let him come alongside. I know he rides with a clear visor so I let go the wheel and wave to piss him off.

Then I change gear.

This is easy. Achebi sussed this months ago. A simple algorithm—car on road. No obstacles, no other drivers, a full complement of feedback systems to make allowances for where the car is fucked.

Time for my 550 kph Sunday drive.

Longines sends regrets. The record is safe.

But my mind’s on something else—

Martineau is tootling towards the line. I’d ride a dignified half length ahead of him only Gentry’s been driving like a madman behind me for the past two minutes and I’m too hyped to slow down.

And as I pass the line I realize: I’m no different. I too am wedded to danger, which is a longer name for death. Achebi made me fast, yes, but they also made me safe. I don’t hate Maureen Havers, or what she did to me. I hate Achebi for protecting me. I hate the doctors for repairing me. I’m like all the others. A life-hating thing—a phallus-cocoon finding new ways to die. Why else did I let the Programme infect me? What have I done to myself?

Whisper their names. Depailler, Villeneuve, Willy Mairesse.

Me.

My helmet snaps up on a view of a hundred thousand cheering would-be suicides. I smile and wave; the sun and the wind dry my tears.

I pull the jack out and adjust my flight pants and get out of the car.

Next stop the champagne.

Maureen Havers is up on the podium. Her grey hair sparks on the wind. She has a smile like death and I envy it. A nude girl hands me the champagne magnum. It’s very hot here.

My hands are shaking.

It gets dark.

I look up at the sun, puzzled.

A blood spot on my retina, receding fast…

I wake up in my hotel room. Catharine is sitting by the bed. I look round. Angèle’s not here.

“Is it over?”

Catharine smiles. “It’s over.”

“Did I do—what did I do?”

“Rest first.”

“No!” I sit up in bed and it feels like I just shoved my head in a coffee grinder. I take a deep breath. “Show me now.”

She lights up Angèle’s PC.

Where is she?

We watch the rerun.

I see what a billion TV addicts have lived for all season.

Me.

I don’t believe it. There, on the podium, in front of them all—

I’m masturbating. I’ve got my hand inside my overalls and I’m…

It’s terrible. I don’t know whether to laugh or throw myself out the window. When it’s over my voice is high with hysteria. “How did you—how could you—I didn’t—I—” I force myself to stop. Tears of rage heat my cheeks.

“You didn’t do anything. Look again.”

My eyes are drawn to the screen.

She is right. I don’t do anything, but by the end of it I’m shaking afresh with disgust and self-loathing and fascinated revulsion. It’s worse than the act itself could ever be. The power of suggestion…

“I can’t believe I did that—didn’t do—” I’m babbling again. I turn to Catharine. Angèle must have told her I like Irish. She’s pouring me a tumblerful.

“You didn’t. Our ROM wafer did. It took you through a very special dance. Helene’s been working on it for months.”

“A dance.”

“Yes.” She hands me the tumbler.

I drink it down in one. “A repulsive dance.”

When I calm down she sits beside me and says, “The Grand Prix. A phallocentric institution, wouldn’t you say? But will men ever be able to draw that kind of strength from it, now its figurehead has lampooned it so ably—so cleverly?”

The truth clicks home. “You fucking bitch, I’ll never race again.”

She shrugs. She is prepared for my reaction.

I feel vivisected.

“There are other ways to drive,” she says. “When Havers sacks you, as she surely must, we have other games for you to play. Networks. Security systems. Stock exchanges.”

Through a veil of shock I sense the potential behind her words. I glimpse the power that is mine as a servant of the Programme, the riches my skills and my serviceable nervous system might yet yield—for me, and for the women of Brazil, Africa, the whole twisted world.

But. “How will I ever show my face again?”

“Which face?” She gets off the bed, and walks over to unplug the IBCN lead, and as she walks her legs grow stocky, her hair lengthens, her skin grows dark and when she turns to me, her mouth is more full, her forehead less pronounced, her cheeks have swollen a little—and Angèle smiles. It is beautiful.

“Everything has its place in the matrix of signification,” Angèle says, in a voice I do not recognize. “You claim no prejudice, no chauvinism—yet a gesture, a turn of the head, a way of lowering the eyelids, all of that plays on your stereotypic view of things. See how the white bitch becomes the dusky whore.”

“Oh no,” I murmur. “Not now. Not anymore.” I slip off the bed and walk clumsily toward Angèle and hold her in humility and run my hand over her back. I feel for the first time the ROM port between her shoulder blades. Her disguise hid that, too, till now. What a clever dance Helene has written for her!

My heart jolts up into my mouth. “Helene?”

“Hello.” Her tongue is hot on my cheek.

She laughs, and her laughter is a promise: peace… riches… revolution…