Electric Forest (6 page)

empty.

Night had evolved outside, smothering the salt beach. A golden rose of dawn had ascended inside, and lit up
every chamber, passage and vista. She had toyed with the toys of his house. Unclothed, she had enjoyed
the naked sensation of silk and velvon, plastase or cool steel brushing her arms, legs, breasts and shoulders. Sensuality was so fresh to her she had no name to give it.

She had penetrated to the kitchen area, thumbed switches and perceived nut-brown toasts and strange sea
food rising from hidden ovens to her plate. She ate, curious. She tasted every bite, chewed with strong
white teeth, maneuvered with a strawberry tongue, swallowed, her creamy throat undulating. And
then the food seemed to lose itself somewhere in die region of her ribs, dissolve, vanish. It was like
e
li
minex but permanent; she had no hunger, though she had an appetite. She could digest perfectly,
without a digestion.

At a touch, music soared, and sank through the house. Trivision flared. There was a Tri-V drama on the twelfth channel, it concerned a woman who would be classified as beautiful. The woman was not as
beautiful as Magdala.

For the first time, (all these first times), she knew the delight of vanity.
She had combed her blue-black hair, bathed her body slowly, slowly.

But she had done everything with a mounting sense, not yet realized, that Claudio was not there.

Finally, the awareness pierced through into her like a thin interminable noise in her ears, Alarm built quietly,
layer on layer. When all the layers were established, each atop the other, her fear fastened on her, her fear
in a revised style.

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Claudio was her mentor, her guardian. He was the magician. He was gone.

The reason for fear came eventually and revealed itself.

She was afraid to be alone, for alone, it seemed that none of this could be. It grew surrealistic. Without
another to verify her condition, it might fade; a blown-out fire, a mirage.

She retreated, room by room, till she reached the room with the five walls. She turned on the mirrors and
sat in the middle of them, glancing from each to each. And the mirrors seemed to exclaim:
Here you are. See! You exist.

This phase lasted a long time.

At length, she heard the striking electro-battery clock which she had switched on in one of the chambers
beneath. It struck twenty-five tones. Each tone thrilled through the house, a brazen tuning-fork. It was
midnight.

Magdala got up. The syndrome of disbelief fell away, and she was abruptly conscious of her nudity. Before, the body had been a garment in itself.

He had deserted her in the computerized house, without preparation and without clothes. At last, with an
acid and reassuring anger, she had analyzed her predicament as another test. Possibly he was not even
absent from the house, but spying from some wily camouflage. Gauging her.

She could move fluidly now, delectably.

I am delectable.

Let him judge her, then. She was not a machine, not a robot. (Did she know what she was? She was his

creation.) She stabbed the remaining buttons on the panel by the door, to see what else the mirror room
would bring her.

The ultimate button brought her a gray cottene bath robe.

A pang of rage shot through her. He was playing with her again. Disappointing her. She put the robe on and

tied it. She had expected silk. She was beginning to think as her body suited her to think. Her aspirations, in this short space, were already being tailored by her flesh: The delectable woman could anticipate
delectable adornment. Maybe it

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was not so new. It was what society had conditioned her to anticipate. (The girls and young men from the
processory, shedding their overalls, stepping forth like peacocks into the sunlight of the city.)

Below her, in the house, she heard someone whistling. Next the sound of ice in crystal, clear as bells
through the pool of silence.

She let the ramp carry her down, then jumped, utterly coordinated, lightly and exquisitely into the room.
The sunrise light had dimmed smok
e
ly, but did not unduly limit vision.

The man in the pneumatic chair was not the man she had reckoned on. It was not Claudio. Though the iced
beaker, a rich man's foible, not glazium but wafer-thin glass, that was Claudio's, and it chimed lethargically, familiarly, in the man's hand as he kissed it to his lips.

Ill

His hair was black, but a black inclined to red rather than blue. Reddish-brown eyes confirmed the bias. His
skin was deeply tanned from a solarium, and the pressure-zipped jacket and trousers were expensive.
Another rich man.

Her immediate inclination was to run to the white room above, where the capsule lay, bald and vulnerable.
She resisted that, confronted by his posture of somehow irreversibly seated indolence. For a moment, then,
she was Ugly. Her body bowed, leaned into a crouch, trying to shield, to efface. But it did not persist, this
spasm. She remembered what she was. Every shiny surf ace in the room was there to assist in reminding
her.

"Who are you?" she said. "How did you get in?" She had been lucky in that. In the Tri-V drama she had briefly watched earlier, the woman had come on an intruder in her

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apartment. ""Who are you?" she had rasped. "How did you get in?" Magdala's imitation was excellent.

"I am a friend/' the man said. He was letting his russet eyes slip down the length of her. "I guess you are also a friend. How do friends get in? They knock and the door is opened."

His scrutiny failed to cause a second trauma. Instead, she basked in it, recalling vividly what he would see. And the recollection, coupled with his long-lidded gaze, excited her. A sentence suggested itself. Again, she had heard other women employ it.

"It seems I interest you."

Her head moved, stirring the blue hair like ink in water. It was becoming intuitive. "Yes," he said, "you do. You're really something."

She accepted the stale accolade. She was not aware that she nodded in agreement. But the man laughed a

little. He said: "Where do you come from? What's your name?"

Suddenly, she saw no need to render him anything beyond the sumptuous image of herself, powdered with
the smoky light. "You should ask Claudio."

"But Claudio's not here for the moment."

"Oh, I think he's here somewhere. But if you're a friend of his, no doubt you're used to the games he likes
to play."

"You tell me," the stranger drawled, "about his games. What games does he play with you, for example? I'd be fascinated."

For a second she was afraid. Sex was an unknown country, and this verbal exchange along its borders

seemed all at once dangerous and unpleasant. At the same moment, she knew herself aroused, and a silly
humorousness added itself to the medley of her emotions, that she had been equipped, even for this.

Her heart was speeding, not because it had to, but presumably because her mood induced it to act in
complementary physical rhythm. She wondered how near Claudio

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was, and if he spied on this, too. She wondered if he might be affected as she was becoming affected.

The man was attractive. She could likely seduce him, as the women in the Tri-V dramas generally did with
men. Or the men with the women. Indigo was a world of
untrammeled
lust, from which, she had been
trained from childhood to realize, she was excluded. But now, no longer excluded. Now she was Venus,
goddess of love.

"Games interest you, do they?" She let herself topple in an appalled delirium. "Let's play one."

And as she said it, she noticed that the man cast no shadow, and that where his arms rested along the arms
of the chair, the form-cushioning plastase had not altered its shape.

The wild scared heat in her throat and groin went cold. Cold froze her eyes and mouth. She had stumbled,
as she always stumbled, into yet another of Claudio's traps. She could not make her voice come for half a
minute. Then she got it out, hard and jagged.

"When the leaves fall from the trees outside, they disappear. A millionaire's holostetic forest, turned on or off by a switch or a button. How much did the man cost to design and project, Claudio? Is he sufficiently realistic that he can put his arms around me? Or will I need a sensit head-set for that?"

The man winked out like a lamp; even the glass disappeared. Claudio walked from a wall, clapping.
"Good," he said.
"Good. "

She averted her face, but he came and stood over her.

"Holostets have their limitations," he said. "The tress are fine. They work strictly to a pre-program, without
variety. But a holostet that seems to react must be controlled, and from a distance of not more than ten
meters. And to get the damned thing to talk calls for feasts you would scarcely credit. But you. You work
very nicely on your own, don t you? Quite a display. You must take a
ft
er your mother, Mary of Magdala. A
thoroughbred whore."

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The oddly anachronistic gibe struck her as ludicrous. She glanced up and met his eyes, and the tide within
her changed direction, though Tri-V still ordered her vocal chords. She had remembered how she had
envisaged him, the voyeur, spying on her own arousal; the choice of words he had given the holostet

illusion.

"Well," she said, "you've paid my price already/* And waited, her body emotively unbreathing, for his reply.

"Me?" he smiled, wide-eyed. "My apologies, Magdala. I assure you it was just a test-run on your

unconsidered retaliation to an event. Preparation for the world outside. Nothing else. You forget, I know
what you actually look like. No thanks."

She
shriveled
. And, even as she shrank from him, she smelled his cruelty, pungent as burning wires. It was
another first. For the first time, she was attempting to investigate the motives of those who wounded her.

"Don't cry over it," he said. "You shouldn't find tears easy, as you are. You'll need to practice that, too." But
she had not cried in sixteen years. She was a desert, and in her desert she had the leisure to begin to hate
him, an efficient
chiseled
hatred, new to her as everything.

The sunrise fitting spilled in his blond hair and down his well-dressed, slim, young-man's body. His beauty was like a razor's edge.

Even now that he had made her equally beautiful, it could comfort her to hate Claudio Loro.

"I suggest you go back to your room," he said. *Go and sit with the mirrors."

He had dropped the silver discs into his ears.

She went.

She read from the electrobook screen through the remainder of the night. The library was vast. She spun
the dial at random, and read random sections, spinning the dial again if she grew uninterested, or if the
tumult of her thoughts in-

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traded; also to mislead him, for he was probably keeping track of everything she did.

The window wall faced north across the bay. The sun rose on the right side of the house, and the sky and
the agitated waves lightened, distracting her. There was a mist, and through it the sea resembled blue milk.

When she turned back to the electrobook screen, the page had melted, and a trivisual image of Claudio was
there instead.

Charmingly, and extraneously, he informed her:

"I'm afraid you can't keep me out. The house does exactly as I tell it. You have no privacy. However, I
thought you should know. The enchanting dummy-run last night, with our holostet visitor, wasn't pointless.
In a couple of days' time, we're traveling a hundred kilometers down the coast together, into the thick of a
crowd. I'm curious to observe how you cope. I don't offer you a choice, by the way. You're obliged to
come with me."

There was a silence.

"Yes," she said. She was trembling, but the trembling was metaphysical and had not reached her body. Somehow, she was able to prevent its doing so.

"Ill discuss details with you later," he said.

His image darkened, and the page of the book she had been reading replaced it.
The new ache of her hatred did not interfere with her obedience.
Hating, she sat and read his books.