But she could handle files and recorded messages just fine, thank you, and she knew how to use access codes. She’d been looking over his shoulder once when he’d keyed in the word “Sphinx” to get a locked file. He’d known she was there at the time, but in his usual arrogant way, he’d probably thought that she had no idea what he was doing.
She’d done this a number of times in the past, and it always gave her a small, guilty flush of excitement, the feeling she imagined a spy must have breaking into the enemy’s computer database.
Well, she was a spy, in a sense. It was the only way she had to get at the truth, the only way she knew of finding the ammunition the Church needed. Reverend Blaine had told her last Sunday that what she was doing…what was it he’d said? It “transcends mere human law, in the eternal service of the Ancient Divine Masters of the Cosmos!”
So there, David!
Anyway, whatever it was she was doing, David had it coming!
She’d first started taking sneak peeks at David’s files and correspondence several weeks after his return from Mars. He’d been gone one day, she couldn’t get him on his PAD because he was busy in a meeting and refused the call, and she’d needed to find his government disbursal number for the tax forms she was filling out. Armed with the password she’d seen him type in once—Sphinx—she opened his private files and almost by accident discovered a saved vidcast.
It was one of the people at his new office—what was her name? Teri, she thought. Teri something-or-other. “Hiya, good-lookin’,” the woman had said, leaning forward and smiling into her E-room’s vid pickup. She was naked.
Well, the old taboo against public nudity was one of those aspects of modern society that was changing fast, had been changing since the turn of the century. Lots of people went nude these days, at home or when gathered with a few friends. It didn’t mean anything, she knew. Even in public, on hot days lots of people wore shoes and UV block and nothing else but a wallet strap; with global warming and all it was just more comfortable that way.
But the way that Teri person had smiled and moved and said “Hiya, good-lookin’” had rankled. Damn it, it was inappropriate, it just wasn’t proper for her to act and talk that way to a married man, especially when that man was her boss!
“Hey, Teri!” David’s voice had answered. “What’s up?”
“Oh, lots of things, I’m sure. What I’m calling for, though, is to find out about the trip to LA.”
Liana had watched the whole sordid recording, wondering all the while if David was sleeping with that woman. The rest of the message was innocuous enough—her asking about details on the speech he was scheduled to give in LA, and his voice replying matter-of-factly, without any leering or flirting or innuendo. But the way, at the end, she’d stood up and slinked closer to the pickup, closing out with the words, “Okay, honey. See you…later…” had shocked her. At that moment, she was certain that David had had sex with Teri, was having sex with her on a regular basis. The fact that David had saved that damned message instead of deleting it was proof enough.
She wondered how often he played it back, with HER up there two times larger than life on that damned big wall screen. Yuck.
Liana sighed. Nudity taboos weren’t the only aspects of society that had been changing lately. Marriage, for instance. Nowadays, the institution was pretty much whatever people said that it was. There were so many new kinds of marriage and social groupings now that simply hadn’t been around when she was younger…or at least, no one had talked about them, things like line marriages with several men and women all married to one another.
That sort of thing had never been for her, not the way she’d been raised!
And…and divorce was so easy, now! All you needed was for both parties to agree that it was over, and that was it, unless the initial contract specified something more enduring.
The thought made her uncomfortable. She knew that David wanted a divorce; they’d talked about it several times, but she’d simply not been brought up that way. Stacy might be able to shake off the way they’d been raised…but not her. “What God has brought together, let no man put asunder” her mother had always said, and while Liana had lost much of her once fiery Baptist faith during the past few years, especially since she’d started going to Reverend Blaine’s church, she hadn’t lost the upbringing that had come with it. If marriage vows meant anything, they were holy vows to be kept, and kept forever!
Even if she now believed that Jesus had been the genetically manipulated child of a woman artificially inseminated by extraterrestrial visitors. Her mother, dead now for six years, would have thrown a fit if she’d known.