Beyond the Farthest Suns (11 page)

As I turned from wall to wall with delight growing to delirium, Roderick merely stood behind me, arms folded, receiving my awestruck glances with a patient smile. Finally I came to a wall on which hung one small black cabinet with glass doors. Within this cabinet there lay…

Ten sealed decks of playing cards.

I opened this cabinet eagerly, aching to try my new hands, wrists, fingers, on them. I unwrapped cellophane from a deck and tamped the stack into one hand, immediately fanning the cards into a double spiral. With a youthful and pliant fold of skin near my thumb I pushed a single Ace of Spades to prominence, remembering with hallucinatory vividness the cards most likely to be chosen by audience members in any given geography, as recorded by Maskull in his immortal
Force and Suit
.

I turned and presented the deck to Roderick.

“Pick a card,” I said, “any card.”

He stared at me intensely, almost resentfully, and his left eye opened wider than the right, presenting an expression composed at once of equal mix delight and apprehension. “Save it. There is altogether too much time.”

But like a child suddenly brought home to familiar toys, I could not restrain myself. I propelled the deck in an arc from one hand to the other, and back. I shuffled the cards and cut them expertly behind my back, knowing the arrangement had not even now been disturbed. With my fingers I counted from the top of the precisely split deck, and brought up a Queen of Hearts. “Appropriate for your world,” I said.

“Impressive legerdemain,” Roderick said with a slight shudder. He had never been able to judge my lights of hand, or follow my instant sleights and slides and crosses. With almost carnivorous glee I wanted to dazzle this man who controlled so much illusion, to challenge him to a duel.

“It's magic,” I said breathlessly. “
Real
magic.”

“Its charm,” he said in a subdued and musing voice, “lies in its simplicity
and
its antiquity.” He seemed doubtful, and rested his chin on the tip of an index finger. Again a spot of blood. “Still, I insist you need to rest, to prepare. Tomorrow … We will begin, and all will be judged.”

I realized he was correct. Now was not the time. I needed to know more. It was possible, in this unreal futurity, anything I might be able to accomplish with such simple props would be laughed at. Sooner expect a bird to fly to the moon…

With a brief farewell, he departed, and left me alone in the marvelous room. My heart hammered like a pecking dove in my chest.

Nowhere in this room, unique I supposed in all the rooms of the house of Roderick Escher, did there creep or coat or insinuate any of the pale, light-guiding threads or fibers. I was alone and unwatched, unconnected to any hungry external beings, be they kings or slaves…

I fancied I was Roderick's secret.

I undressed and showered. The bathroom filled with steam and I inhaled its warm moistness, returning again to the euphoria I had experienced upon my arrival. I toweled and picked up a thick terry cloth robe, examining the sleeves and pockets. In a table drawer I found needle and many colors of thread, and marveled at Roderick's thoroughness.

Far too restless and exalted for sleep, I began to sew hooks and loops and pockets into the robe, for practice, and then into my suit of clothes. My fingers worked furiously, as agile as they had ever been in my prime.

I turned to the laden walls and spun through a dozen displays before finding clamps, tack, glue, brads, wire, springs, card indexes, and other necessities. I altered the suit for fit as well as fittings. I had long centuries ago learned to be a tailor and seamstress, as well as a forger and engineer.

There were no windows, no clocks, no way to learn the time of evening, if evening it actually was. I might have spent days of objective time in my obsessive labors. It did not matter here; I was not disturbed and did not rest until I became so tired I could hardly stand or clasp a needle or bend a wire.

I removed the robe, climbed into the small, comfortable bed, and immediately fell into deep slumber.

I know not how many minutes or hours, or perhaps years later, I felt a touch on my face and jerked abruptly to consciousness. My eyes burned but my nerves pulsed as if I had just drunk a dozen cups of black coffee. In the darkened room (had I turned off any lights? there were no lights to control!) I saw a whitish shape, tall and blurred. Now came to me a supreme supernatural dread, and I was immediately drenched with sweat.

I rubbed my eyes to clear them.

“Who's there?” I cried.

“It is I, Maja,” the whitish form said in a thrilling contralto.

“Who?” I asked, my voice cracking, for I only half-remembered­ my circumstances. I did not know what might face me in this unknown place and time.

“I am Roderick's sister,” she said, and came closer, her face entering a sourceless, nacreous spot of glow. I beheld a woman of extraordinary character, her countenance as thin as the faces of the women in Klimt's darker paintings, her eyes as large as Roderick's, and of like cast and color. I could have sworn her high twin-lobed forehead would have blemished her femininity, had it been described so to me, yet it did not.

“What do you want?” I asked, my heart slowing its staccato beat. I felt no danger from her, only a ruinous sadness.

“Do not do this thing,” she warned, eyes intent on mine. I could not break that gaze, so frightened and yet so strong. “It is a change too drastic for the Eschers, a breach, a leap to disaster. Roderick wishes our doom, but he does not know what he does.”

“Why would he wish to die?”

This she did not answer, but instead leaned forward and whispered to me, “He believes we
can
die. That is his madness. He has told me to go before, to prove certain theories.”

“And you have agreed—to die?”

She nodded, eyes fixed on mine, drawing me in as if to the doors of her soul. In her there was more of the cadaver already than a living woman, yet she seemed sadly, infinitely beautiful. Her beauty was that of a guttering candle flame. The fire of her eyes was a fraction that of Roderick's, and her body, as a taper, might supply only a few minutes more of the fuel of life. Unlike the brown women, Cant and Dont, who were unreal yet seemed solid and healthy, she was all too real, and I could have blown her away with a weak breath. “I am his twin. He took me from his mind, shaped me to equal him, in all but will. I have no will of my own. I obey him.”

“He made his own sister a slave?”

“It is done that way here. We may create versions of our self that do not possess a legal existence.”

“How bitter!” I exclaimed.

“Oh, I may protest, may try to show him my love by directing his will with persuasion. But he is stronger, and I do whatever he tells me. Now, it is his wish I try again to die. I only hope this time I might succeed.”

Behind her I saw the approach of the solicitous Dr. Ont. The doctor took Roderick's sister by one skeletal hand, pushed her lips close to Maja's almost translucent ear, and murmured words in a tongue I could not understand. Maja's head fell to one side and it seemed she might collapse. Dr. Ont supported her, and they withdrew from the room.

I felt at once a heavy swell of resentment, and a commensurate surge of bluster. “How dare she come here, smelling of death. I've left
death
behind.” But in my declining terror, I was exaggerating. Roderick's sister, Maja, had exuded no scent at all.

She had smelled, if anything, less intensely than a matching volume of empty air.

I felt I slept only a few minutes, yet when Roderick's voice boomed into my room, waking me, I was completely refreshed, confident, ready for any challenge.
I
was no slave of Roderick Escher.

“Dear friend—have you made the necessary preparations?” he asked.

I looked around for his presence, but he was not there, only his voice. “I'm ready,” I said.

“Do you understand your challenge?”

“Better than ever,” I said. I had the confidence of an innocent child, thinking tigers are simply large cats; even the appearance during the night of Maja Escher held no awe for me.

“Good. Then eat hearty, and build up your strength.”

Roderick did not enter my room, but breakfast appeared on a table. The apparatuses I had chosen the night before lay beside the plates of warm vegetables, broth, breads. I put on my robe, manifested an Ace of Spades in my right hand, and threw it at the stack of toast. The card pierced the top slice of toast and stuck out upright.

I lifted the card, retrieving the toast with it, and took a bite, chewing with a broad smile. All my fears of the day before (if indeed a day had passed) had faded. I had never in my first life felt so confident before going on stage, or beginning a performance.

As I ate, I wondered at the lack of meat. Had the world's inhabitants suddenly and humanely ended the slaughter of innocent animals? Or did they simply distance themselves from the carnal, as most of them had assumed the character of frozen meat in chilly refrigerators?

Were there any animals left to eat?

In truth, what did I know about Roderick's brave civilization? Nothing. He had not prepared me or informed me any farther. Yet my confidence did not fade. I felt instinctively the challenge that Roderick was about to offer—to compare the overwhelming and undeniable magic of this time, against my own simple
legerdemain,
as Roderick had called it.

Roderick visited me in person as I finished my breakfast. “Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked as he entered through the door. His arm rose slowly to indicate the changeable wall of glass cases, now frozen at the apparatus associated with cards. He walked to the case, opened it, and removed a reel manufactured by my inspiration, Cardini, who had died just after my first birth, but whose effects I had learned by heart. “Did you know,” Roderick said, holding the tiny reel in his palm, “that a century ago, children played with dollhouses indistinguishable from the real? Little automata going about their lives, using tools perfect for their scale, living dolls sitting on furniture accurate in every way … And these houses were so cheap they were made available to the poorest of the poor?”

“I didn't know that,” I said.

Roderick smiled at me, and for the first time on this, my second day in my new life, I felt a narrow chilliness behind my eyes, a suspicion of the unforeseen.

“Yet we have advanced beyond that time as the gods reach beyond the ants,” he said. “All pleasures available at will. Every nerve and region within the brain—and without!—charted and their affects explored in endless variations. Whole societies devoted to pain from injuries impossible in all past experience, to the ghostlike exertion of an infinite combination of muscles in creatures the size of planets, to the social and sexual dalliances of phantoms conjured from histories and times and places that never were.”

“Remarkable,” I said stiffly.

“An audience of such intense discernment and sophistication that nothing surprises them, nothing arouses their childlike amazement, for they have never
been
children!”

“Extraordinary,” I said with some pique. Did he wish for my defeat, my failure, to enjoy some petty triumph over an inferior? I steeled myself against his words, as I might have armored against the complaints of an older and better magician, criticizing my fledgling efforts.

“There are audiences of such size that they dwarf all of the Earth's past populations,” he added.

I saw my bed fold into itself until it vanished into a corner. The wall of cases shrank into a narrow box the size of a book, leaving me with only the table and the apparatus I had chosen the night before.

“Prepare, Robert,” he said. “The curtain rises soon.”

Then his voice took on a shadowed depth, betraying a mix of emotions I could not comprehend, relief mixed with heavy grief and even guilt, and something else beyond my poor, unembellished range. “Dr. Ont came to me last night. Maja has succumbed. My sister is no more. Ont certifies that she has truly died. She has even begun to decay.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“It's a triumph,” he said quietly. “She goes before …”

I put on the suit I had tailored and adjusted, and inwardly smiled at its close fit and how it flattered my pudgy form. I have never been handsome, have always lacked the charm of magicians who combine grace and artistry with physical beauty. I compensate by simply being better, faster, and more ingenious.

Roderick looked around the room. Fibers grew from the floor, climbing the walls like mold, until they shrouded everything but me and my table and cards. I seemed surrounded by a forest of fungal tendrils, glowing like swarms of fireflies.

“Billions of receptors, hooked into webs and matrices and nets reaching around the Earth,” Roderick said. “Tiny little eyes like stars that have replaced any desire to leave and venture out to real stars, to other worlds. We have our own interior infinities to explore.”

I made my final arrangements, and stood in the center of the lights, the tendrils. “Tell me when I'm to begin.”

“We've already begun, except for the time you've spent in this room,” Roderick said. “Even Maja's protests to me, and her death, have been watched and absorbed. I've used the drama of my own war to stay at the top of the ratings, my preparations and agonies. Even the five, the antitheticals—I have made them part of this!”

The same nacreous light that had bathed Maja's face now surrounded me, and the fibers arranged themselves with a sound like the rubbing claws of chitinous sea-creatures.

Roderick backed away until he stood in shadow, then lifted his hand, giving me my cue.

I had never had such a draw in my life—nor felt so alone. But was this really so different from appearing on television? I had done that often enough.