Electric Forest (3 page)

"Yes, I've tampered with that, too. I'm clever as well as ornamental, you see."

Suddenly, he ran his hand down the button panel next to his seat. Instantly, all the furniture unfolded from
the walls. The two other seats, the couch, the table, the cabinet with its magnetized shelves. The room was
jammed by a mob of white plastic fitments. And thus revealed in the midst of it, were the hidden aspects of
Magdala.

She understood that he had already done this once, earlier, before she returned. He had seen everything.
The twenty paperback books, the minute deck of music
cassettes
, the limpid seashell from Sapphire Flats,

the jade bead from Earth. And on the bed, somehow more naked than anything

else, the sleek-furred simulate cat -a child's toy.

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His eyes flickered over her secrets, registered the imprint of her soul, just as the cunning device had

registered her thumb-print in the lock. Then he rose, picked delicately between the unfolded furniture, and lifted her toy cat by its forepaws.

"So it's true," he remarked, "we all need something to love."

To get between the furniture was harder for Magdala, but she succeeded. Reaching him with a quickness
that surprised both of them, she flung up one hand to seize the cat. The other she drove against his ribs. She
had not been tortured by children without learning from them, and her spatulate hand appeared to hurt him a

lot. He swung aside in the narrow space with a ragged gasp of pain.

Nevertheless, she became aware in that moment that he had provoked her for his own reasons, and that
she had followed his leads as he must have predicted to himself she would.

She stood with the toy cat in her arms, betrayed into self revelation.

"Congratulations," he
murmured
"you're human." He passed one long hand rhythmically across his side,
where she had jabbed at him. "I was beginning to wonder. You don't, of course,
look
human. I expect
you'd like to. Would you?"

She had crossed some peculiar line within herself. Her voice came from her throat, rough and strong:
"Would I like what?"

He half-turned, and demagnetized one of the paperbacks. He opened a page, and held up before her the
photo plate
of the long-limbed Venus, her underwater flesh folded in yellow hair.

"How would you like," he said distinctly, "to be beautiful?"

Her heart stopped. Laughter began instead. She had never really laughed before in her life. Somewhere in
the middle of this laughter, she lifted the white shell from its

shelf, raised it above her head, and cut with its pointed cusp at the young man's face.

Whether he expected this second blow was not clear. Frantically he deflected it, his arm darting to protect
his face. The point of the shell slit his hand. The impact whirled the shell aside. It brushed the wall and
broke in fragments.

Magdala's mouth, mobile with laughter, contorted and closed. She regarded the broken shell, her eyes

swelling as if to cry, yet without moisture. The habit of tearlessness prevailed. When he lifted his uninjured
hand and struck her across the head, she rocked back, righted herself like some grotesque rubberized doll.
She had braced herself for his retaliation and took no interest in it.

And then, a bizarre dawning of amazement filled her. Physically, although in violence, they had touched.

Blood dripped from his skin. He was gray. It came home to her, a profound truth, that he loved his own looks, and feared greatly to be robbed of them.

"I take it from your display," he said, "that the thought of being beautiful does capture your imagination, somewhat." His voice was shaking, no longer cool or flat.

"You can't alter me," she said. "No one can." His shaking voice, his youth, (a little younger than she,
perhaps?) his very flawlessness, gave her abruptly a sense of power. After all, she was the one with
nothing to lose. "Besides," she said, '1 have only five thousand astrads. It costs a lot, surgery. Are you a
medic? Is that it?"

But then he smiled again, and her brief confidence abandoned her. His smile was like a white door sliding
ajar upon an alien world.

"I'm not a medic. Nor do I require your pathetic astrads. I'm rich, dearest revolting Magdala. And I can
make you beautiful."

"You're crazy," she said.

"Beautiful," he repeated. "Beautiful. Beautiful."

They stood and looked at each other in a long and utter quiet.

18

III

Beyond the city, the blue-pastel morning mist of Indigo's Blue season lay thick and sweet-smelling over
twenty sweeping highways of concrete and shining steel. Here, by day, the traffic ran above ground, fast,
driverless auto-buses and fish-gleaming cars. The highways waited for dawn, noiseless under the fragrant
fog.

At six o'clock the sun began to rise, and the first auto-bus of the morning, jeweled in a constellation of lights, raced down the western freeway.

Blue through the blue mist filter, the world illusorily fled from the bus. Flying embankments fringed by trees
with sun-sketched limbs and speed-smoking crests. Far away, dim blocks and domes, the out-city refineries
and plants, their hydro canals like bubbling glazium. And now the rush of a golden rocket, a passing bus
fl
inging itself cityward in the opposite direction. The deformed woman, crouched at her window, watched it
all.

Her scanty fellow passengers were indifferent, even to her, it seemed.

Some had inserted in their ears the enamel discs that connected to the tape-music of the bus. Some slept.

The bus stopped twice in the initial fifty kilometers. The third regulation stop, one hundred and forty

kilometers from the city, loomed up sharply solitary by the highway. Around the stop poured merely a

landscape, uncultivated and oddly primeval in the levelly climbing sunlight and the evaporations of the mist.

Moments after Magdala had descended, the bus was gone along the highway, melting into the vast azure
parasol of the morning.

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Presently, she went into the stop shelter, and seated herself.

Apart from the road, nothing man-made was visible- neither complexities of buildings nor any further

traffic. Trees had spilled close across an eastern rise. Magdala, accustomed to the perpetual purring of the
city, listened to the trilling of winds and the faint cry of birds in the wood. The novelty of these sounds
combined in a frightening ambience with the novelty and strangeness of her situation. Anything might

happen.

The happening occurred.

A silver mote materialized on the eastern horizon, became a shooting flame like light running over silk. A great silver car,
like
an incredible aqueous beast, swam to a halt beside her.

She stared at the car until, impatient, it roared at her from some bronze vocal-apparatus within. Then she
got up and went to it meekly. She carried no bags, was empty-handed as she had been instructed to be.

He sat at the wheel, intolerant of the robot-drive. Pale as ice, he looked at her without friendship through
the wine-dark polarization of the windscreen.

"Get in,* he said. The rear side section lifted to admit her. Awkwardly, Magdala hauled herself into the
ozonized interior. "How many saw you?"

"The people on the bus. No one I ever met."

"And you brought nothing with you? No astrads?"
"No."

"And not your toy cat, I trust."

She did not answer. He could observe she had followed his instructions. "We must make you seem to

vanish," he had said, carelessly, imperiously. "Ugly Magdala, disappearing into thin air. You'll like that, won't
you?" So her bank-balance had been left uncashed, and her possessions had been left in her apartment. No statement of absence had been sent to the processory, no statement of vacancy to t
h
e

20

Accomat. Nothing. She had made her exit before sunrise, mostly unwitnessed.

She had not questioned his insistence on deceit. Perhaps he meant to kill her after all Was this just his joke, with death at the end?

She thought of the shell, and lunging at his handsome face with it. His shaking voice, her fatalistic brief grasping of power.

Today, he was expensively dressed. Today, she could see he was rich. There was not even a mark on
his hand where the shell had torn him: he could buy the best cosmetic sealing ointment on the market.

He touched a button in the dash panel. The car seared into an avid vibrancy of life, and slipped forward into motion as into water. Once more the world was sent reeling off from her.

In fearful stupid pleasure, she watched it go.

"My name is Claudio Loro. It intrigues me that you've never asked. You have none of the veneer of

social behavior, do you, Magdala? When we reach the city state line, in about fifteen minutes from now,
I want you to get into the seat-storage compartment and let me seal you in. Otherwise, they'll ask your
reason for crossing through with me, and you don't really know what it is, do you?*'

They had been traveling west then north for three hours. He had not spoken to her before. The silver
discs were in his ears; sometimes he sang to the unheard melody in his head. His voice was beautiful,

effortless, contemptuous and banal. Magdala had exhaustedly dozed, lulled by his voice and the flight of
the big car.

The city state line ended at the river. Beyond, old pre-colonial roads splayed between the hills. The

industrial and urban development of the city had not moved in this direction yet. Far over the hills
lay Sapphire Flats, with its out-planet independent research stations, its resorts and fish farms, and a
sapphire northern sea boiling on its shores.

21

When he buttoned up the back seat, she climbed gracelessly into it and he closed her inside. But a muted
lighting came on, and washed-air bathed the compartment. All the while, she had had intimations that she
was part of some plan of his, that it was the plan which demanded stealth. And here was proof in this
preparation and concealment. She was to be his experiment. He meant no one else to know of it, which
indicated the experiment was dubious, probably illegal, possibly fatal. But die slow internal music of her fear
played only softly. She did not really care. She did not really care that she was shut into the rear seat, that
she was in danger, that she sensed his madness like the ozone in the atmosphere. Without her, he would
founder.
She
had generated all this action. That was her true power over him. Over
Claudio.

When they paused at the city state line check point, she heard muffled voices, a few words, but it appeared no one wanted to examine the car. Fortunate for Claudio? But then, the car was the undisputed possession
of a rich man an exquisite extension of Claudio himself. Only the human thing under the seat would have marred his image, had it been discovered.

Soon, the vehicle sprang forward into the subway beneath the river. But they were ten kilometers into the hills before he let her out of the storage compartment.

Shortly after releasing her, he gave her an eliminex lozenge, the high classification drug which negated the functional needs of elimination for up to twenty-five hours. She pondered incuriously how he had got hold of
it. "I don't intend to stop for anything else," he said. '
I’
ve wasted enough time.
I’
ve wasted two years, did
you but know it, my hag-like passenger."

During the afternoon they ate from a food-dial and drank wine, blue-bloomed as its parent grapes. The car, switched to robot-drive, sped along the ancient asphalt roads on its pre-programmed course.

22

She did not ask him anything, not even their destination. He told her nothing. Once or twice he spoke to her,
a comment on the swirling terrain beyond the windows, or an instruction. She obeyed his instructions.
Tense, she traced his comparable tension, ticking in the car. Never in her life before had she shared

anything with anyone.

Even if he killed her, they would share her death.

She had no measure by which to judge either his behavior or her reactions to it. Like the speed of the car, this thing bore her with it. She no longer knew whether she was afraid or glad.

They had driven for thirteen hours, when night came down like a leisurely black shutter. Unveiled by city lights, stars blazed, uncountable white holocausts against the black.

The road dropped suddenly, the hills divided. Full in the single broad headlamp of the car, Magdala saw a blue salt beach cascading to the jaws of the sea.

Only in a sensit theater, long ago, had she ever beheld the sea, tasted its winds, touched her feet in its

coldness. The sensit had faded. Reality stunned her. The sea was the sky, but the sky in motion. A flung