Electric Forest (10 page)

It was Claudio's voice, just behind her. Smoothly he added, "Cash your chips, Magda."

"Not yet," she said. Her own voice was as smooth as his.
"Meme"
she called to the spinner.
The lever clanged.

Watching the whirling silver balls, she could visualize the pallor of the man behind her, the raging pallor, the
eyes cold as glycerine. Both her arms were jewelessly bare. Five magnets transfixed five spinning balls. The gambler at Magdala's elbow exclaimed. They had both won.

"Your luck rubs off." He brushed her naked shoulder with his finger and licked the finger.
"Rouge et Vert. Remporte et remporte. Encore?*

"Changer, "
said Magdala and reached toward the basket.

"Pas encore"
said Claudio. With finesse he pinioned her wrist, making it look casual, friendly; hurting her.
"I said, cash your chips."

"Oh, my God, don't take my luck away," remonstrated the man who had won on the green. With her free hand, Magdala showed and dropped a hundred batch of yellow in the basket.
"Meme"
said the man beside her. "Like the lady."

"Where is the bracelet?" Claudio said in Magdala's ear.
The lever clanged.

Claudio, still in possession of her wrist, craned forward

across the table, scrutinizing the spin.

₆₇

There was an extended and bitterly satisfied groan all about the table. The balls subsided.
"R
i
en, "
said the spinner.

"So much for luck," said the man who had won on the green.
"Encore'
inquired the spinner.

Magdala set her hand on her scoop to lift a third batch of white chips, but Claudio said loudly:
"Pas

encore.
My sister is playing against my account. I cancel. She's already lost me two hundred astrads."

The table murmured.

Claudio shifted his grip to her waist, and marched her away from the spin table. He returned the eight
hundred chips to the kiosk, and guided Magdala graciously onto a descending stair.

"Where's the bracelet?"

'Which bracelet?"

He was not pale after all, but his face was a carving, immutable and threatening.

"This is the third phase, is it? Elation followed by withdrawal followed by idiocy. Where did you learn to

play spin?"

"I read about it in books. I’ve
seen it on Tri-V. I could never play before," she said blankly.

"I quite see that." Alone with her on the escalator, he hugged her near, bending to her ear like a lover. "The
bracelet."

"You want the recording tape in the clasp, not the bracelet," she said.
He stiffened slightly.

"You're becoming pedantic, Magda. Yes, the tape. Where?"

She felt him start to tremble, whether in his rage or in consternation she was unsure. She was afraid, but
with the new fear, different from the old. They traveled down the escalator, jammed together and
chained there by his trembling iron hand on her waist.

68

"At the bottom, we get
off. We take the elevator, we go
to the suite and you fetch the bracelet."

"Perhaps it isn't in the suite."

They were ten flowing steps from the ground.

"Magda," he whispered, "it would be so simple for me to kill you. Those leads and wires...
. You're so very

vulnerable, don't risk yourself with me."

Their feet
leveled
with the ground. They moved, still linked, toward the elevator.

"It must be very important. What Paul Hovak said to me. He called me Christa."

The polished steel door gaped. They were in the elevator and the elevator shot upwards.

"Why," she said, "did he think I was someone called Christa? Do I resemble someone called Christa?" She half turned in the vise of his arm. "You believed, because I was ugly and deformed and sickening to look at, you believed I was a moron."

The elevator deposited them. They went along the corridor. Claudio used the tag to open the door to the
suite. They were inside, and the golden lights flooded beautifully into their night-time auspices.

"A moron," she said. "If you only knew," she said, "how much I hate you. All of them. But most of all, you,
Claudio."

He swung her around. Her hair cast itself in a shimmering blue-black veil across her face. Her heart
throbbed. The thing within her was more vital than her drunkenness had been, and more assured.

His hands were clamped on her skin. Hovak had held her like this. This was, however, different.
"The last time," Claudio said. "Where?"

"The last time," Magdala said.
"Find
it."

He shivered. (Irlin had shivered, not the same.) There was a dark flickering in Claudio's eyes. He had been

too

confident in his mastery over her. Rebellion had him at a loss.

69

She was not interested in why he needed the recording tape this desperately. Only in thwarting him.

"I would say," she said gently, "you can't damage me very much as I am. As for killing me well, you might never get the bracelet then."

"What do you want?" he said.

"I want to see you as you are right now panic-stricken/'

He thrust her away and began to rip the room apart. He whirled the cushions from the chairs, deflated the
pneumatics of the chairs themselves, crashed wide all that would open and slung it from him. He passed
into her bedroom and tore the dresses from their plastase and their racks. He tipped the carton of perfume
sachets on the floor. He dashed the covers from her bed. He rent their seams, and thermo quilting spilled
like snow.

His search had already grown systematic, thorough and sadistic. He vandalized whatever had become hers,
all he had given her.

When this was done, he straightened and said to her, his voice fragmentary as the items he had shredded,
"Can it be you were sufficiently stupid to hide it in my room?"

"Oh, Claudio," she said, "haven't you considered the disposal mechanism of the lavatories?"

With startled objectivity, she beheld again his brand upon her; Tri-V dialogue had given place to Claudio dialogue. Even the tone was his. Her inventor.

He trod almost delicately through the wreckage of her clothes. In one sinuous, irresistible movement he lifted her off her feet.

She found herself in contact with him once more, plastered to him through both their succession of

garments. He carried her to the window, maneuvered her. The window slid upwards even as Claudio slid
her outward. The air gushed up like water over her face, her neck, her shoulders, her arms. She was
hanging hooked backwards from her bent knees, the rest of her fallen suddenly into nothing but atmosphere. Below, the sea laved the shore, steel on steel and

70

sixty meters down. She could glimpse the piers like gleaming threads stretched taut to some invisible bobbin. She herself was anchored merely by Claudio's grasp on her calves.

"Recollect/' he said. "An efficient pain cipher can cause your death, 1 swear I will let you go unless you tell

me where the recording tape is. No, I don't accept that you destroyed it. You're enjoying this too much not

to be in possession of the ace card."

In the arms which kept her from the abyss, she felt also the tremor of his rage or distress. And, at the same
moment, a recalcitrant terrible strength, which would never slough her. Even as he pushed her from the
brink, he clung to her.

"Let me up, Claudio," she said, "and I'll tell you."
"No," he said, "oh, no."

She relaxed, gave her weight over to him. It was an abandonment of extraordinary proportions.
"Then, let me go."

She hung there in the silence. If I fall, she thought, it will be for an instant, like flying.

When he drew her slowly and awesomely back, over the ledge of the window, to crumple inside the room, she discovered her eyes had learned to make tears.

He was not breathing. He kneeled in front of her, staring at her.

"The bracelet," she said quietly, "is pinned inside the fringe of the dress I'm wearing."

He started to breathe again, rapidly, as if he could pull chunks of solid oxygen into his lungs.

Magdala parted the undetectable surfaces of the pressure-zip, crossed her hands inside the fringe and
sprung the pins. She offered the bracelet to him.

The sapphires dripped into his hand, and now he stared at these. When he lifted his head, his face had
divested itself of everything, or very nearly. Only his youth, his handsomeness, remained in his face, like things stranded in the wake of the storm, things no longer relevant, or alive.

71

"Magdala," he said, stumbling sluggishly over the name, as if trying to remember it.

The window was automatically and leisurely sealing itself against the cold night, transparent sections striving toward each other in an imperative slow motion.

In the same slow motion, Claudio leaned toward her. His fingers made their contact with her pensively,

almost idly, tracing her throat into her jaw, gliding her skin with awakened nerves. As if he explored some

unguessed object in a void, dependent on tangible evidence alone, he sent his hands over the surfaces of her
skin, her dress, her hair. In the total quiet, their breathing seemed to emanate from a single pair of lungs,

prolonged intent gaspings, quite in unison. And, between each gasp, she heard the distant sea.

The window fused. His hands tightened, dragged her. She responded, swimming to him, pulled through deep water; falling into the abyss despite rescue. They met; it was like sanctuary, now, to reach him.

His hands moulded her into his body, she could hardly bear the exquisite sensations that attended their

passing and re-passing. She shut her eyes to entomb herself in blackness with her pleasure. Filling her

mouth with his, he banished the last finite portion of reality. She became a mindless, craving, oceanic beast,
deaf and sightless, aware merely through every iota and micro-atom of its flesh. Even her bones seemed to
echo his touch. A cave inside her loins opened, opened to the pit of her skull.

They had subsided under the window, twisted among the shattered materials of his search. Something ground in her side the sapphires.

He had moved her own hand discriminately to discover him. The pulsing tower of his sex beneath her hand increased. Its action fascinated and alarmed her. But he slid her hand from him like a glove. She fell back,
clinging to him, as he sheathed himself within her. Invaded, instinctiv
ely she struggled, and a golden
note resonated through her, a vast shock-wave, spreading to the extremities of her limbs and hair.

72

She opened her eyes then, seeking the cause of the effect.

They rose and sank together in an identical sea. Their faces too were probably identical. It disturbed her to
see him. Again she closed her eyes, but with the memory of his face imprinted on her lids, the huge tide began to flood her in a succession of mounting, tumultuous breakers.

"Inside its glazium coffin, the vile deformity has just experienced the sexual crisis your present framework conveyed to it. Neural circuits have engaged, and your brain has relayed that crisis in return to the

pseudo-system of your present simulate body. Orgasm by proxy. Odd," Claudio commented softly. "I never
once recalled it was
that
I was making love to. But you
mustn’t
overlook the fact, Christa-Magda, that you are, to coin a phrase, neither here nor there. Don't worry. I won't let you forget. The devil in the box has
climaxed and the wires are singing/'

She had not wanted him to speak. Exposed, the biting edge of his words scalded her, as plainly it was meant