Electric Forest (15 page)

anyway."

"There's no choice," Valary snapped. His dry eyes had grown moist; wet flints. "Jesus Christophine."
"Do you want to inspect the subject capsule, M. del Jan?" the girl inquired.

Magdala gasped. "Why not."

The girl did something to the desk console, and a door gaped. Magdala apprehended she was meant to go
through into the cell beyond.

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In the cell, a safe had been pulled from the wall. On the horizontal of the safe lay a transparent lozenge. A
girl bowed to it, as if in worship.

"Doramel, M. del Jan's coming through."

Doramel straightened. Neat and dark she offered Magdala a tiny bow.

Magdala walked into the cell, and lowered her eyes till they rested on chill glazium.

The capsule was just like her own, just like the glazium "coffin" Claudio had put her in when she was Ugly.
And the arrangement was sufficiently similar so that she could see no disparity. Wires, tubes, coils, a panel
of lights, (flickering now, not entirely like hers, after all). Yes, and the man in the capsule was different too.
He was young, and he was normal. Straight limbs, regular features. On his head was a silver cage.

Magdala put her hand over her face. She was not sure why. The gesture did not ease her. She went on
seeing behind her shut lids.

She could not debate. She struggled with a nonsensical, all-pervading horror. The research project special to
Two Unit was that identical project Claudio had successfully effected through herself. The transfer of
mental consciousness from a human body to a simulate. And, unlike Claudio, Two Unit had failed.

"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.

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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. Adrenalin 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?"

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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,
li
stening, 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 Cladio.”

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 die 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

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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.

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

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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 shin-

ing 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

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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, die dress she had cut in two portions.