Read Online Mercenary by Piers Anthony - Free Book Online

(Acey-Deucy), dice, dominoes, and marbles. Naturally the troops generally ignored these and concentrated on the unauthorized entertainment: the feelies.
    The feelies were special programs played through headsets. Electrical currents were fed through the head in the form of trace magnetic fluxes, stimulating programmed visions. Some were benign, such as a tour of an Earthly zoo or a swim through ice water in a fissure on Europa. Most were sexual, ranging from normal Tail-type through sadomasochistic, which last extreme the Navy frowned on. This sort of thing did not appeal to me, either, but I was surprised by how many others professed to enjoy it. There were several brands that circulated, and it seemed some were better than others. Periodically there were crackdowns on the feelie-chips, but there were always more of them, and it was evident that the Navy did not take the matter seriously.
    “Hey, Hope, you should try this one!” a platoon-mate called to me. “It's got your name on it!”
    “Hubris?” I asked, suspecting this was a joke. “No, Hope,” he said. “Here, try it! You'll see!” Still wary, I borrowed his headset and set it over my own head. The front of it came down to cover my eyes, and the sides covered my ears. Sight and sound came, three-dimensional and binaural, seeming to put me in a different world. The touch and smell sensations took longer to manifest, as the currents did not immediately align with those of the brain; the participant had to cooperate, to get himself into the mood, and I was not doing so. I was just looking.
    I seemed to stand on the hull of a bubble in space, with the pale illumination of the sun highlighting the curve of it. Before me was a bag or package. From it poked a human arm, and the hand reached toward me. “Here is what you need,” a voice said in my ears. But the hand was empty.
    Then my vision panned around, and I saw the name printed on the surface of the bubble: HOPE.
    I removed the helmet, controlling my reaction. “So it is,” I said as I returned the headset to the other recruit. “What's it all about?”
    “You okay?” he asked. “I thought you were going to fall over for a moment there!”
    “I thought you were joking,” I said quickly. “It was a shock to see my name on that spacecraft.”
    “I guess it was. I'm only a little way into this one. It's a reverse-role experience—pretty hot stuff, I'd say.”
    “Reverse-role?” I asked blankly. “You mean where the man's passive and the woman dominant?”
    He laughed. “Naw, that's tame! Hell, you can get that in the Tail, if you ask for it. This is where it's keyed to a man, but he's in a girl's body. I played through one the other day. It's really something, getting felt up when you're a girl. Feeling things happen to anatomy a man doesn't even have. Drove me crazy, till I caught on. Penetration—” He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Some freaks really go for this stuff, though.” He set the helmet firmly on his head and settled back in the chair.
    A man's awareness in a woman's body. While that woman underwent the experience of sexual stimulation and culmination. That was surely not on the authorized list!
    I read the label on the chip container projecting from the top of the helmet. Each chip was protectively encased, but the cases plugged into the helmet socket. It was easy to use. This one said EMPTY
    HAND—HOPE.
    I went to my hammock and closed my eyes, feigning sleep. We had already passed morning inspection, and it was a weekend, so my gear no longer needed to be reserved for display and could be used for its theoretical purposes. I wanted a chance to think without being disturbed.
    When my family had fled Callisto and traveled toward Jupiter in a bootleg bubble, using gravity shields somewhat the way the ancients had used sails on ships of the seas, our toilet tanks had filled up and had had to be evacuated. My fiancée, Helse, and my sister, Spirit, had gone out with me onto