Electric Forest (2 page)

In answer to her index print, figures rose on the miniature screen. Today was pay day. Two hundred

astrads had already been registered, and the rent, food bill and tax on her apartment deducted and claimed by the Accomat computer. However, there was an impressive balance building up in her name at the
central city bank. The figures showed

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just over five thousand astrads. She had only to index print and dial that figure to receive the corresponding check, which could then be cashed at any Bank Computer Station in the city. Instead, barely glancing at the screen, Magdala
dialed
a check for ten astrads.

On pay days, once a month, Magdala bought a meal in the Accomat Cafeteria. Once a month, that was
thirteen times every year, Magdala slunk into the darkest corner booth of the bright and busy eating area,
and ate the fresh meat, fresh vegetables and fruit that the cafeteria could supply. The rest of the year, she
relied on her food-dial, which dispensed plastic containers of revitalized frozen stuffs, vitamin capsules and
various fluids.

To visit the cafeteria, despite the dark booth, was nevertheless an ordeal. Generally each restaurant served
the inhabitants of its own apartment block, who were permitted to exchange and cash their pay-dial checks there, when ordering food. Most of the dwellers in the fifth block knew Magdala by sight, and scrupulously avoided her. Sometimes, however, outsiders would come in to eat, and they might see Magdala for the first
time, registering the event explicitly.

The elevator sang gently as it flew like a bird up twenty stories.

Magdala stood in the elevator, her face its normal waxy blank. But even as her stomach tightened, aware
of the coming meal, her mouth dried with an automatic inner cringing. She felt fear constantly but seldom
revealed it, for she was used to being afraid, perpetually and instinctively tensed for the attitudes of the
people about her. She often wished, positively and with no hint of childishness, that she might become
invisible. Sometimes her fear rose to an extreme pitch. Otherwise, it merely breathed steadily within her,
like the continuous steady breathing of the city.

The elevator stopped. Its door slid aside.

Magdala pulled herself out into the luminous sunlit space beyond, and began her arduous progress to the
counter.

The two counter attendants leaned by the menu screen.
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One pointed Magdala out to the other. "Here's the cripple, like I said. She always comes in on processory
pay days." She caught the words with ease. Swiftly she selected from the menu screen and the attendant
tapped out her order to the mechanical kitchen. Magdala kept her eyes down. In this position, both lids
drooping, her eyes seemed almost acceptable. The second
attendant had submitted her ten
astrad check
and returned now with her change. He skimmed it across to her, not touching her hand.

She was twenty-six. Since her birth, no one had ever willingly touched her, beyond the impersonal doctors at the state home and the children who had tortured her.

She took her tray and started toward the darkest booth. She was nearly there before she realized that
someone was already seated inside.

Magdala was briefly confused. Today, the cafeteria was two-thirds empty and nobody took this booth when
so many others, with access to the polarized sunny roof and glazium windows, were available. Then a new,
more startled confusion overtook the first, for the seated figure in the booth was the pale-haired young man

who had passed her on the street.

His profile, blond like his hair against a somber ground, was so fine, so perfectly made, it seemed machine

f
f
inished
. The long-lashed eyes shone translucent yet metallic. A glazium beaker of red alcohol on the table before him had been encircled by a notable, hard, flexible and long-fingered hand, that appeared almost alive of its own volition. The silver music discs were no longer inside his ears.

Magdala threw her body hurriedly into retreat, commencing the turn which would carry her to safety.

"Don't run away."

Magdala halted in the midst of her turning, listened for what would come next. Nothing came. Magdala completed the turn and assayed a step.

'Why do you persist in running away, when I just told you not to?"

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The voice was cool and virtually expressionless.

Again Magdala had involuntarily halted. She did not look about. She sensed rather than saw the young man, full face to her now, waiting, his arm casually draped across the back of the booth.

"Sit down," he said.

Something galvanized Magdala. She was able to move again, and did so. He said nothing further as she
walked gradually along the line of vacant booths.

She was not sure why her fear had sharpened with such vehemence. Surprise, maybe. Perhaps this man
was one of those who sometimes burst out into speech with her, sickly fascinated into uncontrolled
conversation. But he had not spoken in that way at all. And control did not seem to be, at the moment, his
problem.

Magdala entered a booth and laid out her tray. Her wrists were trembling. She put a mouthful of food
between her lips, chewing carefully. When the mouthful had been swallowed, she introduced another.

She had been eating for five minutes when his shadow fell across her tray.

He moved around the table and sat down facing her.

This time, her eyes flickered once over his face. She could not help that. Then she dropped her head lower
over her plate. She kept eating, but she could not taste the food. He sat, immobile, watching.

Long ago, she had been warned that she might meet those who took an unwholesome interest in her condition. Those who might wish to harm her, eradicate her

From three or four short glimpses, he had been recorded in great detail on her retina. The bleach-colored
hair appeared natural, and naturally striped through with curious subsidiary streakings: dun, gold, gray. The
eyes, seen close to, like the hair were multitudinously blended, striped, flecked, which amalgam, from a short distance, formed two extraordinary lenses of polished greenish brass.

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His proximity was truly terrifying. Not because of any previous warning. Not even because of his

frightening uniqueness. But because of some unseeable, totally lethal thing. As if he were radioactive.

"What's your name?"

His voice had not altered. Still cool, unhurried and flat.
Magdala ate, eyes on the food.

"I said, what's your name?"

Magdala ate, and found she could not swallow.

"What's the matter? Are you afraid of me? There's no need."

Magdala managed to swallow. She had had to, she wanted to say something. She said: "Please leave me
alone."

"I want to know your name," he said.

"Why?" Now that she had communicated with him, it was difficult to resume silence.

"You won't tell me your name because you're patently afraid to. But, as you see, I followed you from the commercial area, and a minor inquiry led me to anticipate your visit here, even your chosen booth. I can probably locate your apartment as simply. In fact, withholding your name won't prevent me from
discovering as much about you as I wish."

Magdala dragged herself along the seat and upright. Leaving her meal unfinished, she walked toward the

elevator. She could not travel fast. Any moment she expected his shadow to slant again across her path, his
inexorable voice to jerk her to a standstill. He could catch up to her with no trouble. But he did not.

She entered the elevator with several men and women who were vacating the cafeteria.

Between their bodies, and across all the sun-glowing tangle of booths, tables and human movement, she
saw his beautiful and horrifying face staring straight back at her. And even as the door slid to and the
singing elevator dropped softly toward the earth, his face remained, painted upon the skin of the air.

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II

She walked along the edge of the park, keeping to those spots where trees and plants were most thickly
massed. From inside a tunnel of shadow, she gazed out and beheld the park dotted sparsely by people,
swimming in the pool, feeding the black and white doves. Later, she walked through the narrow back
streets, behind the blocks of old stores, second-hand precincts of curios and paper books, virtually deserted.
For two hours she read in a cubicle at the electro-library. They were used to her there, and offered no
comment. But as the machine whispered the pages into view on the screen, she barely saw them.

The warm blue day began to roll downhill into a fiery sunset behind the slender glazium towers. Like a

f i
rework display on the crimson sky, a million little green shocks emitted from the high roofs and the upper links as the solar generators of the city closed their circuits against the night.

Under the igniting street lights and checkerboard of blank yellow or black windows, Magdala, a ghastly lurching shape, moved homeward along the boulevards.

The elevator carried her to her floor. Her door dashed wide at the touch of her thumb. Before she could

check herself she had entered her apartment. Windowless, it should therefore be black now as a hole in the
ground, till her entry triggered its lamps. But the apartment was already full of light, its lamps already
triggered. And in the center of the light, like its sun and its source, stood the man.

Somehow, she had known. Known that, impossibly, he would be waiting for her here. Not once during her
afternoon wandering had she glanced over her shoulder. Not once had her fear risen to its extreme pitch,

out Oil the street.

is

Yet no stranger could enter through a print-lock, a lock whose function was to respond to one print alone: that of its owner.

The young man showed Magdala a silver rectangle lying in his hand.

'It's not magic," he said. 'This takes a sensor-reading of your print from the lock. I press the little switch,
and the reading is played back into the lock. The lock obeys. Earth Conclave government has possessed
similar gadgets for years. Nothing is to be relied on, M. Cled. Believe me."

Omnipotent, he had discovered her name. He must have asked one of the Accomat staff, then located her
apartment number from the registration screen in the foyer. He had been very thorough, very determined.

Behind her, the door had automatically shut. In the tiny, near-featureless room, he blazed and burned like a
star. She could not take her eyes off him finally, staring up at him, hypnotized, her brain struggling.

"Magdala," he said musingly, "Magdala Cled. Let me see. Cled is a composite name, is it not? Your

mother's initials, or your father's, or a combination of both, preceded by C, the initial of the State Orphanage
where you were brought up. Am I right? Magdala, however. Now that
is
interesting. Let me hazard a
guess. Your mother was a licensed whore, and State Orphanage C had a reformatory whim. Yes, that
would have to be it. Mary of Magdala, the repentant prostitute of Modernist Christianity."

Magdala had not properly listened to what he was saying. A part of her was convinced that he had come
here to kill her and would now do so. She waited, desperate, dazzled; numbed by lack of resolution.

But he made no move toward her. The reverse. He buttoned down one of three folding seats from the wall,
and sat on it. Idly, he threw the silver door opener up into the air, caught it. Threw it, caught it.

"I suppose," he said, soft as cold snow falling on her mind, "you think I am a horrible maniac, bent on

removing every

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last crippled lady from Indigo. I'm not, dear hideous crippled lady, anything of the sort."

Magdala's twisted shoulders met the wall. She pressed herself against it. "Please," she said, "please go

away."

"We've been through that before. Obviously, I've no intention of going away. You can assume I want
something from you. Why don't you amuse us both by guessing what it is?"

"Cash,"
she said. Her heart surged. I’ll
dial it for you. Five thousand astrads. Then you can go."

"How interesting. Yes, that's a possibility. But don't worry. I could fix your pay-dial as easily as I did the

door. If I wanted your astrads I'd have gotten them already. So that eliminates theft and murder. What else
would it be? Perhaps I'm a pervert aroused only by the obscenely unwholesome. Sorry, your luck's out. Not
that, either."

"Please-" she said again.

"I suggest you stop pleading with me to go. Don't you like me? Don't you think I'm rather decorative? Most
people do"

She had edged all the way along the wall. Her right foot rested over the plate in the floor that worked the
door from inside. But the door did not open.