Electric Forest (13 page)

Ill

The octagonal bungalow was about fifteen meters in diameter, mostly open-plan in design. A boxed-in bathroom

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unit ran along the large southeast section of the octagon, and a boxed-in eating area and kitchen occupied
the western section, equipped with facilities for creative cooking Magdala had never seen before, save in
Tri-V movies.

The suspended bed hung in the southern portion of the octagon. You could lower it to the highly glossed cushion floor, or elevate it a full two meters.

The bronze lift shaft ran straight through the room at its center, giving access to the garage below, or the
solarium above on the roof. The solarium was filled with tawny summer plants and the dark blue plants of the Blue season. It could be flooded by the sunlight of solar batteries and it could be made to rain at the loosening of a valve. There were panes of colored glass in the dome.

The colors of the bungalow were predominantly coffee, shades ranging from a roasted milkless black to caf
creme. On this coffee scheme, blue sugars had been scattered, azure bolsters embroidered with golden
birds, and cyanide vases. A glazium chimney near the east wall would burn decorative deflaminate
f i
_{res blue for summer refreshment, red for winter cheer. Nothing in the bungalow was purely functional.}

All the window-walls looked out upon the forest, but could be rendered opaque, as in Claudio's silver house.
On investigation, Magdala had found only the northern wall set as a window. Before this window stood a
piece of gigantic mahogany furniture, mirrored panther-black in the burnished cushionings beneath: a
contrachorda. Magdala opened the button panel in its side and thumbed down the release button. The f
ore-lid pleated back to expose a translucent ivory keyboard. The upper lid rose, lifting the strings, in their
trough of hammers, from the instrument's interior. When the strings were stretched, she pressed the tuning
button and observed their pliant surfaces slacken and tauten, like wings exercising. And then, she could do
no more than paddle her fingers up and down the keyboard, seeing the silver hammers hit the golden

st
ri
ngs,
li
stening to the

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clear pitched notes, detonated like crystal beads into the room. She could not play, had never been tutored.
This hybrid of the harps and pianos and celestinas of Earth remained mute, or at least incoherent, under her
hands.

Throughout all this, Claudio lay on the bed, awake, deaf and reticent.

She sat on the stool before the contrachorda, in the minimally lit bungalow, whose lights could be switched on and off at will. She compared, irresistibly and precisely, how the woman Christophine lived, and how
Magdala Cled had lived. An Accomat apartment, four by three meters, with a bathroom cubicle half that
size, and a food-dial on the wall the only way of fixing food.

And a fur cat for company in a bed that unfolded from the wall.

She slept and woke and dawn was seeping through the holostet forest.

Claudio sat, regarding her. His face was sharp. The music discs were not in his ears. Like Christ, he had come back out of the wilderness to teach her her path. But not like Christ. Not at all.

"Do you hate her yet?" This was the first thing he said to her. "I mean, do you hate Christophine del Jan?
All these items in her possession which you never had. You hate
me
for my possessions, don't you?" His
voice was lazy. Again and again it seemed he read her thoughts. Could he? His creature . · . 'Hate her,
Magda. She has the ultimate item which you should covet. The duplicate of your flesh. Speaking of flesh,

you'd better go down to the garage and clean out your cage."
She stared at him.

"Well, go on. You know how the chassis-storage works. It's the eighth day of the cycle. The instructions are on the side of the capsule."

She got up stiffly and walked to the elevator.

When she returned twenty minutes later, her eyes were

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wet and her hands shook. He registered her demeanor with intrigued irony.
"Salt in the wound, was it?"

Despite that most intransigent evidence before her eyes that her present body was not her own and that her
insides were therefore stable, she had been retching. Retching as she energized the simple systems in the
capsule, to cleanse and sustain. She had gazed at herself a mere three nights before, at Sugar Beach, gazed
with a sort of morbid derision. The intimacy of service to the form in the capsule, however, obviated her aloofness. She was shocked at her own reaction.

"Now you can really hate Christophine," he said. "Her skin's her own. How about it?"

She found she hated Christophine. A terrified primordial hate. To evade the issue, she said: "You don't know when she'll be here. Or do you?"

"I don't. Exhilarated by the prospect?"

"But you knew she wouldn't be here now."

"I knew that. Shall I let you in on the secret? I shall. Christophine is interested in my whereabouts. So I sent
her a stelex.
Claudio,
it unequivocally said,
is in Saint Azoro.
No doubt Christophine is in Saint Azoro this
minute, hunting me up and down the boulevards, snarling like a tiger.
Don’t
ask me why."

"And when she doesn't find you, she'll come back to the island."

"Let's not burden ourselves with hypotheses."

"Claudio-" she said.

"Yes?" Amenable, amiable, he beamed at her, and all initiative withered.

"What am I supposed to do here," Magdala whispered, "now I am here."

"Have fun. Play with Christophine's objets d'art. Amuse yourself."

"But," she faltered, 'what will you do?"

"I? Oh, I'll be about. Going to and fro, walking up and

go

down. Take no notice of me. All I request is that you don't forget I shall have taken the car and secreted it somewhere, and in the car is your worse half under lock and key. Insurance."

She sat down beside the contrachorda. He had shut the two lids. She leaned her cheek on its planed and
silken wood.

Claudio rose and approached her through the northern spotlight of the dawn window.

"Hate," he said. "Worlds have been conquered on the strength of that. Hate me, Magdala, but hate her

more." He put his hand gently on her head. Gently he said to her, "Share it with me, Magdala. My hate for
Christophine."

"Why?" she said,

"I informed you, you must not ask why, or what. You are my marionette. Dance for me, and keep your mouth shut. Or I won't be nice to you any more."

The idea of his being, of all absurdities,
nice,
made her laugh, but the laugh, as if also his slave, was silent.

The light clasp of his hand upon her head was shortly released. He left her, and soon she heard the growl of
the car as it drove away into the steel-blue morning.

By nine-thirty the sun was over the lower trees of the forest. She had cleared the glazium of the

northeastern and eastern walls of the octagon to let daylight into the bungalow. The holostets of the higher
trees fenced the sun but could not impede it. It slashed them wide and spilled through, a round of brilliance,
and no shadows barred the polished floor. But she had made an odd discovery: a solitary bona fide tree
grew on the bungalow's northern side. Its leaves had long since blued and abandoned it. Its trunk had
reverted to the pale tan color of winter, spring and summer. Its shadow ran along the ground. The rest of
the trees, the false trees, were inexorably a dark sullen murmur of the solar generator on the solarium roof.

Claudio was gone. He had taken her clothes, all those ex-

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pensive dresses and separates which he had bought for her. He had taken her clothes in order that she
would have to wear Christophine's.

She showered, and shampooed her hair. In the middle of shampooing, she visu
alized the monster in the coffin
, and herself in a robot body. A doll, bent to the basin, suds in its hair. She imagined all of the navy hair depilating in the basin. But it did not. She knew it would not, having shampooed it before. She was a
doll which could be bathed, with washable tresses. She was a doll who could walk and talk, and eat and
drink and sleep, and have orgasms.

The clothes closet was in the floor near the bed, raised by a key in the panel next to the south window-wall. The closet rose and its door sank. Here hung the garments of Christophine, like a line of flayed skins.

She did not want to wear Christophine's clothes.

She wanted to

She wanted to rip them. She wanted to rip and tear-Not only the clothes, the bungalow.
Christophine.

The revelation was flamboyant. She had been stalling, avoiding whatever oblique retaliation Claudio had
designated for her. Claudio wanted her to hate Christophine so that she would fulfill some yearning of
Claudio's own. But Magdala's hate was indigenous to Magdala. She hated them both and her criteria were
personal.

Cautiously, she drew the nearest dress from its plastase. It was a burnt-sienna dress of shepra wool. She
carried it into the kitchen area and laid it down. Taking one of the
bizarrely
antique and very sharp cook's knives, Magdala slit the dress in two segments.

As the blade parted the final threads, a voice floated through the open plan of the bungalow.

Someone is here. Someone is here.

Magdala dropped the pieces of the dress and the knife.
She crept from the kitchen area.

An eyelet of light was flashing off and on in the bronze el-

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evator shaft. Above the light, in a little panel, a picture had formed. It showed an unknown man standing
between the steel stilts of the bungalow and the black stilts of the forest. He was looking up eagerly,
waiting to come in.

5. Secundo

"Christophine," the man said, looking up. "Christophine. Hello?"

There was a chance that if she ignored the man he would leave. The two-way switch beside the vision

plate was off; the visitor could not see into the bungalow. Could not see her standing there, naked, petrified,
staring at him.

How did he know she was here? Christophine was
not
here.

"Oh, come on, Christa," said the man impatiently, resorting to the abbreviation Claudio had dissected in such
detail. "Christa" indicated a colleague. Or a lover. "I do know you're in," said the man, as if he had read her
mind. "I saw your lights last night. You're back sooner than I expected. Satiety? Or was it a hunch?"

Below the two-way switch was a button marked
Voice.
Magdala discovered she had pressed it in.
'That
is
you, isn't it, Christa?"

"Yes," she said. And felt dizzy, revolted. Yet again she had fallen, been pushed, or voluntarily leaped from the precipice. Probably pushed. She was certain that Claudio could have

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foreseen this, and had perhaps gambled on it, for his own unorthodox reasons.

"Are you coming down, or do I get asked up?"

She did not want him to enter the bungalow. The feeling was instinctive but irrational.
"Give me a minute. Ill come down."

He shrugged.

Perforce then, Magdala donned Christophine's clothes, her lingerie, a white zipless dress, shoes. In a

drawer within the closet were perfume sachets, identical to those Claudio had bought her. Magdala avoided
them.

Claudio, leaving, had sent the elevator up again. She stepped into it and descended to the garage. The silver car, of course, was gone. The garage door opened as she went toward it.

Outside, the day was palely warm, folded in the blue wrapper of the spurious trees. The man stood smoking
in the sunlight. Close to, he was not remarkable, possessor of the usual ordinary, attractive face, but his