He Who Shapes (11 page)
you?"
The white robot crawled back and the other swiveled his
wrist around and around, a lighted cigarette between the
fingers. There was laughter as he pressed it mechanically to his
lipless faceless face. The silver robot confronted him. He turned
away again, dropped the cigarette, ground it out slowly,
soundlessly, then suddenly turned back to his partner. Would
he throw her again? No . . .
Slowly then, like the great-legged birds of the East, they re-
commenced their movement, slowly, and with many turnings
away.
Something deep within Render was amused, but he was too
far gone to ask it what was funny. So he went looking for the
Kraken in the bottom of the glass instead.
Jill was clutching his bicep then, drawing his attention back
to the floor.
As the spotlight tortured the spectrum, the black robot raised
the silver one high above his head, slowly, slowly, and then
commenced spinning with her in that positionarms out-
stretched, back arched, legs scissoredvery slowly, at first.
Then faster.
Suddenly they were whirling with an unbelievable speed,
and the gelatins rotated faster and faster.
Render shook his head to clear it.
They were moving so rapidly that they had to fallhuman or
robot. But they didn't. They were a mandala. They were a gray-
form uniformity. Render looked down.
Then slowing, and slower, slower. Stopped.
The music stopped.
Blackness followed. Applause filled it.
When the lights came on again the two robots were standing
statue-like, facing the audience. Very, very slowly, they bowed.
The applause increased.
Then they turned and were gone.
Then the music came on and the light was clear again. A
babble of voices arose. Render slew the Kraken.
"What d'you think of that?" she asked him.
Render made his face serious and said: "Am I a man
dreaming I am a robot, or a robot dreaming I am a man?" He
grinned, then added: "I don't know."
She punched his shoulder gaily at that and he observed that
she was drunk.
"I am not," she protested. "Not much, anyhow. Not as much
as you."
"Still, I think you ought to see a doctor about it. Like me.
Like now. Let's get out of here and go for a drive."
"Not ,yet, Charlie. I want to see them once more, hub?
Please?"
"If I have another drink I won't be able to see that far."
"Then order a cup of coffee."
"Yaagh!"
"Then order a beer."
"I'll suffer without."
There were people on the dance floor now, but Render's feet
felt like lead.
He lit a cigarette.
"So you had a dog talk to you today?"
"Yes. Something very disconcerting about that . . ."
"Was she pretty?"
"It was a boy dog. And boy, was he ugly!"
"Silly. I mean his mistress."
"You know I never discuss cases, Jill."
"You told me about her being blind and about the dog. All I
want to know is if she's pretty."
"Well . . . Yes and no." He bumped her under the table and
gestured vaguely. "Well, you know . . ."
"Same thing all the way around," she told the waiter who
had appeared suddenly out of an adjacent pool of darkness,
nodded, and vanished as abruptly.
"There go my good intentions," sighed Render. "See how you
like being examined by a drunken sot, that's all I can say."
"You'll sober up fast, you always do. Hippocratics and all
that."
He sniffed, glanced at his watch.
"I have to be in Connecticut tomorrow. Pulling Pete out of
that damned school . . ."
She sighed, already tired of the subject.
"I think you worry too much about him. Any kid can bust an
ankle. It's a part of growing up. I broke my wrist when I was
seven. It was an accident. It's not the school's fault those things
sometimes happen."
"Like hell," said Render, accepting his dark drink from the
dark tray the dark man carried. "If they can't do a good job I'll
find someone who can."
She shrugged.
"You're the boss. All I know is what I read in the papers.
"And you're still set on Davos, even though you know you
meet a better class of people at Saint Moritz?" she added.
"We're going there to ski, remember? I like the runs better at
Davos."
"I can't score any tonight, can I?"
He squeezed her hand.
"You always score with me, honey."
And they drank their drinks and smoked their cigarettes and
held their hands until the people left the dance floor and filed
back to their microscopic tables, and the gelatins spun round
and round, tinting clouds of smoke from hell to sunrise and
back again, and the bass went whampl
Tchga-tchga!
"Oh, Charlie! Here they come again!"
The sky was clear as crystal. The roads were clean. "The snow
had stopped.
.Till's
breathing
was
the
breathing
of
a
sleeper.
The
S-7
arced across the bridges of the city. If Render sat very still he
could convince himself that only his body was drunk; but
whenever he moved his head the universe began to dance about
him. As it did so, he imagined himself within a dream, and
Shaper of it all.
For one instant this was true. He turned the big clock in the
sky backward, smiling as he dozed. Another instant and he was
awake again, and unsmiling.
The universe had taken revenge for his presumption. For one
reknown moment with the helplessness which he had loved
beyond helping, it had charged him the price of the lake-
bottom vision once again; and as he had moved once more
toward the wreck at the bottom of the worldlike a swimmer, as
unable to speakhe heard, from somewhere high over the
Earth, and filtered down to him through the waters above
the Earth, the howl of the Fenris Wolf as it prepared to devour
the moon; and as this occurred, he knew that the sound was as
like to the trump of a judgment as the lady by his side was
unlike the moon. Every bit. In all ways. And he was afraid.
Ill
". . . The plain, the direct, and the blunt. This is Winchester
Cathedral," said the guidebook. "With its floor-to-ceiling
shafts, like so many huge treetrunks, it achieves a ruthless
control over its spaces: the ceilings are flat; each bay, separated
by those shafts, is itself a thing of certainty and stability. It
seems, indeed, to reflect something of the spirit of William the
Conqueror. Its disdain of mere elaboration and its passionate
dedication to the love of another world would make it seem,
too, an appropriate setting for some tale out of Mallory . . ."
"Observe the scalloped capitals," said the guide. "In their
primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a
common motif . . ."
"Faugh!" said Rendersoftly though, because he was in a
group inside a church.
"Shh!" said JiU (Fotlockthat was her real last name)
DeVille.
But Render was impressed as well as distressed.
Hating Jill's hobby though, had become so much of a reflex
with him that he would sooner have taken his rest seated
beneath an oriental device which dripped water on his head
than to admit he occasionally enjoyed walking through the
arcades and the galleries, the passages and the tunnels, and
getting all out of breath climbing up the high twisty stairways
of towers.
So he ran his eyes over everything, burnt everything down by
shutting them, then built the place up again out of the still
smouldering ashes of memory, all so that at a later date he
would be able to repeat the performance, offering the vision to
his one patient who could see only in this
manner. This
building he disliked less than most. Yes, he would take it back
to her.
The camera in his mind photographing the surroundings,
Render walked with the others, overcoat over his arm, his
fingers anxious to reach after a cigarette. He kept busy ignoring
his guide, realizing this to be the nadir of all forms of human
protest. As he walked through Winchester he thought of his last
two sessions with Eileen Shallot. He recalled his almost
unwilling Adam-attitude as he had named all the animals
passing before them, led of course by the one she had wanted to
see, colored fearsome by his own unease. He had felt pleasantly
bucolic after honing up on an old botany text and then
proceeding to Shape and name the flowers of the fields.
So far they had stayed out of the cities, far away from the
machines. Her emotions were still too powerful at the sight of
the simple, carefully introduced objects to risk plunging her
into so complicated and chaotic a wilderness yet; he would
build her city slowly.
Something passed rapidly, high above the cathedral,
uttering a sonic boom. Render took Jill's hand iri his for a
moment and smiled as she looked up at him. Knowing she
verged upon beauty, Jill normally took great pains to achieve it.