Electric Forest, page 11
“On paper,” said neat dark Doramel, “it works. Doesn’t it, M. del Jan? And on the computer it works, too. But we get this. We make the transfer. They stick. We can’t get them re-aligned with their original subject bodies, and we can’t get them to work their transfer bodies. Emilion was the unit’s solitary partial success. He could actually eat and drink and count up to thirty-three. I admit, that always puzzled me, that counting up to thirty-three, no further. But we all admire the labor and skill you’ve put into this, M. del Jan. I’m sorry.”
There was a distant walled-off bellowing.
Somewhere near, Emilion was gouging his steel cranium on the conveniently hard walls.
As they watched, the flickering lights on the capsule panel erupted. Then blacked out.
A series of emergency stimulators took over within the glazium. Oxygen spouted. Air bursts pounded on the heart, blocked the nostrils, forced the lungs to fill and let them sag. Adrenaline canceled the analgens in the feed. But the plaque of lights stayed vacant, and so did Emilion.
Presently a thin whining issued from the life-support maintenance systems as they switched themselves off. There was nothing left to maintain.
Valary wiped his forehead in the outer room.
“Autopsy,” he said to the young man. “Code X.6: Emilion K. Diascope and X-ray section. Set up sterilization.” He would not glance in Magdala’s direction. “All right, Christophine. Do you want to carve the joint, or shall I?”
Bile came into her throat. Even though it could not, it did. But it had a clinical taste, dispassionately clean.
“You do it,” Magdala said.
“Very well.”
She had been able to notice, the true body in the capsule and the simulate body were perfectly alike, twins. In this instance, there had been no requirement to improve on the frame of this particular subject.
Valary had moved up to her in the cell. Lowering his tone, he said:
“Of course, you reckoned you’d make your name with Emilion. Rotten luck, Christa. Suits you.”
Magdala brushed by him, and started to move across the room.
He had sensed her distress, and without guessing its well-spring, fastened on it voraciously. Loudly he called after her, “You know who we need? We need Claudio Loro.”
Magdala seemed to meet a barrier in her path. Unable to progress, she turned about.
“What?”
Valary’s face flushed, but he had gone too far at last to retreat.
“I shouldn’t mention him? My apologies, but he was the king, wasn’t he? Too much cash, and too clever. We’d have this in the bag by now, if Loro had stayed with the project.”
There was a thick, listening, emphatic stillness in the room.
“Wait a minute,” Magdala said. She walked back toward Valary slowly.
But again came one of those non-physical utter collapses.
“Hell, Christophine. I’m out of line. Forget I said it.”
“I want,” she said, “you to go on telling me about Claudio.”
She was slipping further and further from her role, yet preposterously, again her phraseology was wrongly translated as sarcasm and menace. Valary changed tactics startlingly. He held up his hands in mock terror, the sweat of disappointment, fury, and intimidation glistening above his dry moist eyes. Even in her intolerable condition, Magdala spotted the double game—his parody of self-defense which let everyone see Christophine’s grip crumbling.
“Val,” she said, “I recommend you get on with the work at hand. I’m returning to the bungalow. If you have an inspiration, you can call me.”
She turned once more and entered the elevator.
She remembered the progression of the rooms and got through them, and through the polite greetings of their occupants.
She left Two Unit and stood there in the enormous phosfix-smelling cavern, wondering how to reach the surface. When an auto-cab drove toward her and lifted its side to let her in, she complied without any impulse whatsoever. But the cab had remained programmed to her probable locations, the unit and the bungalow. Without any further guidance it drove her on to the metal pad, ascended into the surface compound, and proceeded through the station.
She sat in the cab, dazed, her eyes repelled by concrete vistas. No human figures were visible. She had only a curious perception of blue sky, blue sea; blue mortifying edgings to a bloodless gray concrete mass, incapable of caries.
She cried in the cab, not knowing why. And as the car parted the holostetic forest, she thought of the shut-bed in the Accomat, and Magdala Cled sprawled on it, ugly and misshapen, nursing the toy cat, fear just a shallow water at the bottom of her life.
II
IT WAS NOON, thirteen hours, when, by use of her Christophine thumb print, she walked into the columen bungalow.
She had nowhere else to go.
She had become accustomed to insecurity and craziness. Insecurity and craziness had become familiar and normal. In an existence where nothing offered her safety, no one thing seemed any more dangerous than the rest.
There had been an insistent, half-drawn notion, occurring on the road up the cliff. It had something to do with getting off the island, returning to the mainland—seeking shelter in the city, or some other populated zone. The notion, of course, was absurd. She could not escape, not without her own glazium capsule and its contents.
She had been caught out, again, supposing the sum and total of herself to be this body she seemed to occupy. Being . . . Christophine.
She felt an actually spiritual weariness as she entered the bungalow.
A blaze of sunshine from the window walls, dazzling powdery, confused her senses. But she took three or four steps away from the elevator at the room’s center, and realized that sun and spirit alone were not responsible. Her ears sang insidiously to her; her lungs stopped. She stumbled another step and fell to her knees.
“No, Claudio,” she said aloud, to the mote-powdered air, the room with its civilized coffee shadings, the emptiness. Her voice was charged with rage. “No.”
Her eyes shut.
She lay on the floor, hating him, hating him, a lullaby of hate and love, how she loved the touch of his hands and how lovely it was to go to sleep on the warm cushion-floor with the scent of her own freshly shampooed blue-black hair close about her face. Face it, Magdala, there isn’t any way out—out there a real tree moving in the wind—
The drug he must have fed into the veins of her true body in the capsule wiped her brain gently clean with a furry coffee-color floating fist.
But just before she submerged, there came a bright scintilla of thoughts: I might have been in Two Unit when he did that. Or does he know where I am? Has he somehow kept track of me all this time—sight and sound? Tracked me, but not told me he could. And why do this now? Simply experimenting?
She woke up in blackness. It did not seem to matter. Then it mattered a great deal.
She struggled to her feet. She did not feel sluggish and had no occasion to. This pseudo flesh she was oriented in was not itself suffering the aftermath of any drug.
Why were there no lights? One subtle light had, she remembered, automatically activated in the bungalow at a night-time human presence.
Her hand brushed through something rustling, papery, yet sinuously humid. She looked at the ceiling, and saw, through the domed glazium, a black sky patterned with large white stars which here and there became wine-red or olive-green behind petals of stained crystal.
She was in the solarium, atop the bungalow and nocturnally darkened for the benefit of the plants which towered around her. But it was not utterly black, the stars were shining dully on the bronze elevator head in the middle of the room.
Awake, she had not come to the solarium. Somebody had brought her there. Only Claudio would want to engineer events in such a way. To ensure that alarm was grafted upon alarm.
Did he require any other impetus?
She hesitated. Was Claudio still in the bungalow?
She did not, in any case, know which of the multiplicity of buttons on the panel would summon the elevator.
Presently, she pressed a knob at random, and it began to rain in the solarium. With a strange tin-foil noise, the plants stirred, advancing their leaves to the water. Magdala stood in the rain, intimidated and profoundly afraid, as if the induced weather and reciprocal noises of the foliage were sinister token of other irremediable threats.
Finally, she stabbed at the knob once more, and the rain ceased. She tried a second button with reckless anxiety, for everything had taken on an aspect of dreamlike derangement.
And sure enough, the result was aptly deranged. The underfoot paving of the solarium dissipated, and Magdala was rootless in the air, three and a half meters above the floor of the bungalow.
Her deductive process reassured her instantly. The paving of the solarium was merely another reversible window that could be rendered transparent, offering, as a bird’s eye panorama, the apartment below. Her senses were not, however, able to accept this deduced fact for some moments.
The bronze shaft of the elevator passed straight downward beneath her into the lower room. Apart from the overhead screening of the bathroom unit, everything else could be seen, even by the yellow crepuscule of the solitary lamp burning in the bungalow. Suspended couch-bed, pneumatic loungers, contrachorda at its northern window-wall. The glazium chimney, spangled with its cherry un-fire, another source of dim illumination. The kitchen space was also to be seen, the beautiful units, the culinary apparatus, the rack of archaic knives.
One knife lay on the floor where she had dropped it. Beside the knife, the dress she had cut in two portions.
She became aware, then, of the other things, as if through the medium of the dress. Somehow, she had not noted them before, as if their incongruity had made them invisible. Or perhaps she had not wanted to see.
To see the additional dresses lying shredded in an oddly structured almost ornamental trail between the kitchen and the raised closet. To see a broken vase, splintered against the mahogany stem of the contrachorda. To see the bolsters disemboweled of their golden embroidery birds. One of the pneumatics had been melodramatically stabbed. Its entrails, too, spilled on the ground.
While she had lain unconscious, Claudio had returned, had taken up his own chosen knife, and loosed his own frenzy with it. She recalled the night at Sugar Beach when he had searched her hotel room for the micro-recorder—the slashed coverings, the deflated chairs.
She recollected hanging from the window, sixty meters above the beach, in his arms.
He was mad, and she had known it almost from the beginning. But why this thing, this foolhardy daylight re-crossing of the island, this ecstasy of ripping and rending that seemed to have been inspired by her own isolated (but also insane?) action with the knife.
Share it with me, he had said. My hate for Christophine.
She understood quite suddenly. And, in the second of understanding, the ultimate confirmation came from the night and the holostetic forest.
The soft roar of a car, and the roar dying.
And a little pause.
Down in the garage, where Claudio had left the elevator at his departure, doors opened with an infinitesimal hum. She might have imagined it.
But not the whisper of the car as it drove forward and shut itself off. Not the whisper of the elevator as it flew up into the bungalow.
Not the crisp tap of Christophine’s first footfall.
III
THIS WAS THE core of the nightmare.
To lie, body and face pressed to a transparent dense nothing, staring downward. Severed from reality, yet hopelessly snared in it. As yet unfound, unknown. But vulnerable, accessible. To be reached in five seconds by the ascending elevator. And nowhere to hide. No method of evasion.
And mesmerized. Transfixed.
Look in the mirror. The mirror image assumes an actuality of its own. It emerges from the mirror. It lives.
Below, in the crystalline tank, the sumptuous fish swam through its world, thinking itself unique.
Magdala panted as she lay on the dense transparent nothing. She gripped at the nothing with her hands. All over her she was aware of Christophine’s lingerie, her woolen dress, her shoes. And by her cheek, heavy silk, grown from her skull, Christophine’s hair. And looking through their lids, Christophine’s eyes.
Christophine del Jan, entering the bungalow, had paused. Seen as she was from above, she was undisclosed, save by stance and gesture. The pause demonstrated that she had noted immediately the wreckage in the room. Yet somehow the lines of her, as she began to move again, did not suggest fear; not even surprise.
She walked directly to the kitchen area, stepping lightly and accurately, without fuss, over the torn garments. The navy blue head was turned. She examined the kitchen, and came out. The bathroom was next.
Christophine was searching for the intruder.
. . . I sent her a stelex. Claudio . . . is in Saint Azoro.
Presumably she had gone to trace him, as Claudio had said. Not succeeding, she had come back. And now, could she tell this was the work of Claudio? Claudio, the only enemy who could break in at the locked door and leave his claw marks within, disappearing like smoke—for he was gone. She had checked the bathroom. She had checked everywhere, and now stood for a moment, motionless.
Her body gave no sign. She did not glance upward. But she must think of the solarium.
Magdala had not yet seen into her face. The foreshortened frame was threatening, but the face—the face was the last terrible fragment of the nightmare. While Christophine did not raise her head, Magdala could endure. She could pretend, if she wished, that Christophine had the face of someone else.
Christophine began to walk, leisurely, meditatively, toward the elevator shaft.
Christophine walked into the cage, out of sight.
Magdala waited for the whisper of the elevator, rising. She could not unglue herself, however, from the floor of the solarium. She did not believe the plants could conceal her. They were Christophine’s plants.
She lay plastered to the paving, which had already dried itself after the rain, lay like a rug for Christophine to tread on. If Magdala kept her head pressed to the paving, her eyes tight shut—Christophine might drop dead before she reached her. Or Indigo might revolve from its orbit. Too late. Christophine remained the original. Alpha. Omega.
The whisper of the elevator did not come. Instead, Christophine reappeared from the shaft. This time she carried a traveling bag, which she placed by the raised closet near the bed. With a leisured slovenliness, she began to remove her clothing, letting it fall on to the ground, just as the torn dress, bolsters, vase, had been allowed to fall.
Naked, a blur of warm whiteness, she opened the bag and drew out a lounge robe of maroon velvon, scattering other items as willfully as her clothes.
Pressing together the edges of the robe, she touched the button panel next to the south wall. The closet did not sink, but a polarized bubble arose, packed with bottles and goblets. Christophine poured herself a drink. She tilted her head slightly, stylized, as she drank, but not enough so that Magdala could really see her.
The goblet was like the glassware belonging to Claudio, expensive and fragile, as the broken vase had been.
And with an easy nonchalant swing, Christophine tossed the glass against the southern window-wall, and the glass smashed.
The performance was explicit and effective: Destruction of any sort leaves me unscathed. For I too can destroy.
The man-made bones in Magdala’s spine clicked together as a frantic wincing ran down the whole length of her.
Still stretched on the solarium paving, she watched Christophine move to the contrachorda, button lift the lids and the section of strings, and operate the tuning device.
Far off as bells beneath the earth, the notes of the instrument, birthed, failing, born again.
Soon, Christophine, in her maroon robe, seated herself before the contrachorda and began to play.
Curiously, she played music which Magdala knew. Sadrés’ “Variations on a Theme by Prokofiev” pierced up through the ceiling-floor like silver wires and thin crystalline rods. They sewed into the solarium, sewed in and out of Magdala’s ears and womb. The plants seemed to tremble as the fine needles went through and through them, magically not scoring their leaves. A web of percussion was spun from wall to wall. And Magdala, the fly caught in the web, rather than paralysis, felt herself impelled to get to her feet.
She arrived at the elevator head, tranced, and pushed the third button on the panel.
Christophine went on playing, her back to the shaft.
She expected Claudio. She was spinning the music for Claudio.
Magdala was in the falling elevator.
Five seconds later, she was deposited inside the octagon.
Above, the ceiling was an opaque cobalt lid over the one-way seeing eye of the solarium. Across the wide space, Christophine at the contrachorda, back turned, faceless, playing even now.
Then through the surge and pulse of the music, Christophine spoke.
“Did you reckon on shocking me? I’m not very shockable, my dear. You should know. I checked out the stelex because I like to be thorough, but I never thought I’d find you that way. It had to be something like this—childish, with the cunning and inventiveness of a child. I’ll admit, I’m intrigued as to how you got through the security check-posts without a current print and voice-match. Some gadget? Always so amazing with the gadget. But, yes, you have been rather wonderful. You have everything on the boil. But really, Claudio, you can’t expect to have me on the boil, too.”
