Spacetime Donuts Read Online Free Page B

from her air mask and passed it to Vernor, her lips parted in a slowly bubbling smile. He followed her streamers forward.
    Passing the mask back and forth, and with fishies swarming between their legs, they had sex down there, the pleasure enhanced by nudges and occasional nips from the tiny fish. The bubbles from their breathing mingled to form a silver curtain around their heads. At the last instant, Alice pushed Vernor away and he came into the water, his sperm jelling into an opalescent, gauzy network.
    They swam up, dressed and went out on the street again, Alice pausing to pick up something at the entrance desk.
    "What's that?" Vernor asked.
    "It's a Hollow infocube of us doing it down there," Alice giggled. "I wanted to have some nice pictures of us, so I phoned ahead to arrange it."
    "And that's why you pulled back so I'd come in the water?" Vernor asked, "So that your grandchildren would know it wasn't a fake?"
    "Oh, Vernor, don't be like that. I just felt like giving you a shove. For fun," She looked at him warmly. "We can watch it in bed tonight."
    They walked along in comfortable silence for a few minutes, not a thought in their heads. Soon, however, Vernor felt the familiar boredom coming back. He wanted to consume.
    "You want to get something to eat?" he asked Alice.
    She smiled and shook her head.
    "How about going over to Waxy's?" That would be good. Some weed and a few beers.
    "And watch you get stoned out of your mind as usual? No thanks."
    "Aw come on, Alice, I just want to see my friends."
    "I'm your friend, aren't I?"
    "Look, Alice, we've talked about this before. I can't spend my whole life with you." How he longed to be in the pleasant darkness of Waxy's. "Look, I just remembered, I told Mick I'd meet him to work on some new ideas." This was bullshit, and Alice could tell. Hopelessly, Vernor continued. "You better not wait up for me."
    Alice stopped walking. "Again?" she asked angrily. "Why can't you and your addict friends do something serious? I thought you wanted to be a scientist, Vernor. But now you just get stoned and let that horrible machine suck out your energy. You think you're a genius, but geniuses do something with their lives."
    This line of attack had become overly familiar to Vernor over the last few weeks. It was especially annoying to hear since he knew that what she was saying was basically true.
    "What is matter? What is mind?" Alice said, mimicking Vernor. When he had started out as an Angel he had thought that his sessions with Phizwhiz would help him to answer these questions, and had often bragged about this to Alice.
    He still discussed these questions with the other Angels, and there were times when it seemed that they had arrived at genuine answers . . . but the "answers" they found were always a little unsatisfying when he wasn't stoned in one way or another. Doing the actual hard grinding work necessary for really scientific investigations no longer seemed possible to Vernor, now that he was plugging in to Phizwhiz once a week. Why break your ass working out the field equations for a hypothetical energy configuration when you could plug in and do the problem in your head in seconds. The drawback of this procedure was that once you unplugged from the computer, you weren't likely to remember the specific mathematical solutions which you had obtained with the machine's aid. It was not merely that the solution was too complex to remember, it was that it would have been obtained so rapidly that it was never permanently fixed in the mind.
    So Vernor had the feeling of great mental prowess without having anything concrete to show in the way of achievement. He knew that he wasn't really getting anywhere, with science, with philosophy, with Alice, and when she reminded him of this again on the street near the Inquarium it was too much to take.
    "Go to hell, Alice," he said, wanting to stop as soon as he began. "I've had enough crap from you, you stupid bitch." Why was he saying