Out on Blue Six by Ian McDonald

a bowl and reconstituted it with water in the dispenser. A nonsocialised i ntroversion level 6 winger with Grade 3 narcissistic tendencies doesn’t do this .
    “Haven’t got much,” she said in spite of herself, “I use these, you see.” She tapped the bulbous green thing clinging to her wrist. And because he had not looked disgusted as everyone else looked disgusted when they learned what it meant, she explained the fleech to him. She hoped it would disgust him, too. “It pumps liquid food into my bloodstream while I’m tapheading.” She stroked the distended bag of flesh. “When I’m under, I can easily go for hours, days even, without eating, the taphead experience is so intense. Fleechie here keeps me alive. It’s quite smart really. It can feed itself from the dispenser and it’s keyed to my pheromone pattern so it can always find me wherever I am in the house.”
    But he hadn’t been disgusted. He just hadn’t understood why anyone should have their neural pleasure centers wired to a button where their left nipple should have been.
    “Because I’m a tapheader,” she said, but he knew nothing of nonsocialised introversion level 6 Grade 3 narcissistic wingers. “Don’t you even know what a winger is?” And when time had passed, she would come again to him as she always came, the fleech clinging to the nape of her neck, the left breast proffered. And because he had not yet learned the nature of self-hate, he would reach out to stroke the plastic nipple. As she spasmed in her synthetic ecstasy upon the stroking villi of the carpet, his understanding of the new universe unfolded like a rose in the bud. As her body arched and warped, he felt himself drawn to the small alcove amidst the tangles of heating ducts and power conduits where the air was clean of the heavy scent of sexuality and self-absorption. He loved to sit in the gathering darkness and finger the little magpie-bright trinkets BeeJee had deposited there: bauds and beads of junk jewelry bought for a song from Mr. Yoshizawa’s barrow on Narrow Lane; tiny plastic figurines, bean-eyed and reposeful, extruded from street slot-machines; miniature rubber genitalia, scraps of fur, leather, and spun-glass baubles that chimed when he tapped them.
    “The butsudan?” asked BeeJee &ersenn. “What about it? It’s dedicated to Janja—she’s the Celestial of my caste—and to YamTamRay, the house spirits. They watch over me, they care for me, they know everything I do.”
    But touching his fingers to the crude clay image of the straddle-legged Venus, he sensed something different: a questing, a questioning, an impatience that seemed to reflect his own incomprehension and hunger for history. Each time he sat in the green glow of the spirit lamp, he felt a disquiet, a need to go onward, outward, to embrace an entire universe within his arms. Thus, he said one day, quite unexpectedly, “I think I will have to go very soon.”
    “Why?” Questioner and questionee reversed.
    “There is something I must do, but it is not here.”
    “Then where is it?”
    “I do not know.”
    “What is it?”
    “I do not know.”
    She came to him one last time before he returned himself to the rain. She was cat-nervous, almost fearful of him. She came to him and offered him her plastic nipple.
    “One final question,” he said. “What is it you want from me?”
    “Pleasure. Joy without ending,” she whispered, as if she sensed that this man could somehow grant her her heart’s desire. She closed her eyes as he reached out to stroke the plastic. BeeJee &ersenn cried aloud. Blue holy lightning burned along her pleasure circuits. And fused the nipple switch, the joyswitch, the key to her heart’s desire, shut forever.
    He pulled on the heavy waxed raincoat she had bought for him and let himself out of the glass bubble among the pipes. Rain slanted across the bustling street, and he turned his collar up against it. He thought of names as he walked away from the glass