Electric Forest (8 page)

"I showed the false I.D. to Irlin. He didn't believe I was your sister."
"You astound me."

"He wants to take me swimming."

"He wants to fuck you. Interested?"

"What did you say to that girl?" Magdala started to eat. Her fear had already died, and a curious depression
was smothering her. Fragments of the books she had read flowed about her mind. She wished she were
alone, hidden, asleep.

"I told her she was tedious. She is. She was. Only you are

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not tedious, my Magdala. You are appallingly, horribly untedious."

Shrieks came from the gold gambling jail above. Someone was winning. Or had lost.

Claudio's suite at Sugar Beach had five rooms and two bathrooms. It was decorated in beige, gold and blue
and cost five hundred and thirty astrads a day. An elevator, exclusive to the suite, negotiated the thirty
fl
oors into the private subground garage pertaining to the suite. Here the great silver car lay beneath a
transparent dust-shield. Built into the under-chassis of the car was a secondary storage compartment,
excavated on the left-hand side by a concealed corridor, two meters in length, one and a half meters in
circumference.

You got into the elevator and dropped down the thirty floors. You raised the dust-shield. In the flank of the car, a panel (similarly concealed) could be opened, a button pressed. In the under-chassis, the otherwise indiscernible corridor was gradually revealed. A second button,
a
nd the corridor's burden emerged: the
stabilized glazium
mummy
case, with its contents.

"Have you read any Grotesque Fiction? The Vampire?" Claudio had said. "He could travel nowhere without
his coffin. Not only do you have a traveling coffin, Magdala, you have a body to go with it."

He had showed her the storage space and how the cylinder fitted inside, about the same time he showed
her the clothes he had purchased for her from exclusive city stores, and the bizarre forgery of the I.D.
card. Her photo-fix was on the card and the name he had evolved for her, plus her index and thumb
prints no longer, actually, her own, but the body's prints, alien. She did not ask how he had arranged the

I.D.-if his wealth could merely buy E.G. government bureaucracy on Indigo, or if his flamboyant skills had

created the card She asked always little of Claudio. He schooled her in what to wear, what to do, and now

and then

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in what to say. He did not school her in the gallery of insecurities and mistrusts which clouded her thoughts. He did not teach her how to stave off madness.

She believed he was mad, after all. Her own lapse into hysteria must follow inevitably. It was all an

insanity. Why not?

At five in the morning, she took the elevator and plunged into the ground. Stepping out into the garage area,
she raised the dust-shield of the car, worked the panel and the buttons, and at length stood beside herself.

Sleep was barely necessary, but sleep would have enabled her to escape. Claudio was gone to gamble in
the all-night casino or to the room of one of the several women who had presented themselves to him
throughout the evening. There had been other men, too, for Magdala, other Irlins, good-looking, mediocre
and unmemorable. The holostet, for some reason, had had more presence for her than these living men. She

could remember the holostet, the red-black hair and red-brown eyes.

She visualized, childishly, the fur cat lying waiting for her in the shut-couch at the Accomat. Her new thumb would no longer activate the lock of her apartment

She forced herself to look into the putty face inside the glazium, wreathed with its wires and its bright head-piece.

The coffin.
II

At ten o'clock in the morning, Irlin called,

"It's a wonderful sunny Blue day. The flowers by the pool are turning blue. Not as blue as your eyes,

Magda."

They regarded each other through the medium of the Call-vision-plates. The apartment behind him was not

as

54

large as any of the five chambers of Claudio's suite. Irlin had
remained unmemorable.

Uneasily he said, "Your brother was with Nada last night. Maybe we were both lonely, you and me. Can I
meet you at the pool?"

"I don't think so."

His was the first of four calls from strangers.

At thirteen, Claudio entered the suite with Nada.

Nada wore a scarlet dress, and the air seemed to catch alight, as she passed through, from her chemical redness. They crossed into one of the bathrooms, and the door shut. A shower was switched on, and
female laughter emanated.

Half an hour afterward, Claudio walked through Magdala's bedroom door. He had changed his clothes,
and his undried hair was dark from the shower, which she could still hear distantly plashing.

"Why didn't you invite Irlin up?" said Claudio. "The suite would relax him after the candy jar he's paying to stay in. But you'll see him at lunch. You can arrange it then."

"Arrange what?" she said. Her voice sounded listless. She stared from the window across the blue beach to
the blue sea. Both blues were spasmodically alive with animated forms.

"I've seen what's happening to you," he said sharply. "It's the second stage. First elation, then withdrawal.
Such things are predictable. But you're coming down to eat a meal and display yourself, whether you want
to or not. You're going to go on with this till I tell you it's finished. Irlin is optional, though I imagine your
Magdalene itch will guide you unerringly in that direction. You are fully constructed, Magda. To the last
detail."

Magdala turned slowly and looked at him.

She held out her right hand, palm open, fingers spread.
"Constructed of what?"

"Oh, God. We don't have to discuss this now. The redhead's in the shower."

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'I feel of skin and muscle. My mouth has moisture, and my eyes. My hair feels like hair.

"Not now.”

"Now!" she said, but she found the cinnamon voice was screaming. "Now! Now!"

He caught her hand. He twisted and gripped the hand and it hurt her. This body, which could be hurt, was her own, was hers. This was all she was. She had dreamed the thing in the capsule.

"Grown skin and grown hair," he rapped out at her. "Cellular growth after a blueprint in a growth tank, inner
organs built like machine parts inside a machine. Put together like a doll. You're a clock, Magda. Vellum outside and tick-tock inside. Tick Magdala. Tick tock. You can do it all, Magdala. You can even screw.
But don't foul it up for me."

"What?" she said.

He smiled, twisting her hand into a knot of white-hot pain.

"My expe
ri
ment. My Deus ex machina. My Frankenstein. Don't foul it, monster."

He let her free exactly as the door opened. The red-head burned through like a thin intense fire which
closed doors could not deny.

"Are we going down, Claudio?"

"Call Irlin to join us. Table fifteen on Pier Three
"Irlin'
the girl snapped.

"Do it"

She walked out and pushed buttons on the Call.

"Are you ready?" Claudio asked Magdala.
"Yes."

"When she's settled Irlin, you and Nada will go down together, do you understand? I'll follow you."

She moved by him, not answering, her eyes unfocused. He snatched her hair, holding her a second. "Just,"
he said, "get it right."

In the descending elevator, Nada unnecessarily re-pearlized her face before a compact mirror, and did not

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utter. Irlin stood waiting for the two women at the edge of
the beach.

The end of Pier Three spread into a wide railed platform. One of the thermostatic hotel pools, its water

colored a mild yellow, opened in the center and flowed under the translucent plexiglaze floor. A poppy-red canopy flapped above the tables in the warm sea wind.

Claudio had placed the silver music discs in his ears. It was like eating lunch with a deaf man. Sometimes
he smiled at them with absent-minded courteous rudeness. He heard nothing, yet seemed to miss nothing

either.

Frustrated, the red girl grew sullen beneath the red canopy, and dumb to rival Claudio's deafness. Irlin was clearly embarrassed. He broke into wisecracks which slumped leadenly dead.

They had a lot to drink with lunch, frothy aperitifs and several long glasses of spirits with the meal.

Magdala uninterestedly swallowed these liquids, for the drink could not work upon her new system, only on her palate; she was incapable of intoxication. Then, quite suddenly, she was floating.

The disoriented buoyancy horrified her. She had never been drunk in her life, her actual life. She had believed she could not now become drunk. It did not make sense-She looked at Claudio.

"Mm," he said, through the music playing in his head, "my sister
is
thawing under the influence of lunch.
Take her fishing."

Magdala's fear was trying to secure her attention, but the euphoric separation the alcohol had produced shut off her fear from her. She groped after the acrid savor of it.

Irlin grinned foolishly.

"Fishing?"

"I can't hear you/' said Claudio.

"Would you like to go fishing?" Irlin asked Magdala.
Her voice would not come. She nodded, frowning.

₅₇

She did not understand. She did not care that she did not understand.

Irlin took her arm, and they left the table and walked back along the pier. Near the shore, a concrete apron extended westward. Here men and women sat with steel rods and treated gut lines, enjoying a barbaric pastime, the sun on their backs. There was rarely a catch. The eternal motion and noise on the three piers
warned off the fish, along with the shadows thrown ink-blue into the water.

Magdala leaned on the rail above the apron. Her hair fanned and pleated in the warm wind. She could feel her own beauty, her slenderness, her own curves pressed into the rail. She closed her eyes, stunned by
what she behel
d in her mind of her manifested.

"Magda," said Irlin huskily. He fondled her shoulder; his hand pleased her, stroking her moodily,

symmetrically, in tune with the peculiar tides that were running through her. "I wish I was rich. Again, I
wish I was rich. Are you a beautiful snob, Magda?" She could hear, dimly, that he was a little drunk too.
"Butterfly," he said, 'Tight on me, butterfly. Beautiful, freckled butterfly."

There was a scuffle, a cry. Magdala raised her lids.

"Someone's got a fish," Irlin said distractedly.

It was a fact. Reeling in frantically, two men jerked up the gut from the ocean, and the fish was dragged
after to land violently on the apron. It was a double-tailed cody, the edible variety. Sea-bright, blue-silver, it
flung
itself along the concrete. White blood splattered from its mouth around the hook. The crowd on the apron laughed and shouted as they waited for it to die.

Magdala turned quickly away, her back now to the rail.

Across the width of the pier, twelve meters from her, a man had halted, looking at her.

She identified him. The red-black hair, the tanned skin. The holostetic man Claudio had tricked her with.

But it could not be a holostet. Not here. Instinctively, her eyes sought for a shadow at his feet, and found

it. He wore a

₅₈

white zip top and fawn trousers. A thick silver wristlet on his left arm snagged the sun into her eyes. He
was real.

He came toward her and stopped half a meter away.
"What are you doing here?" he said flatly.
Magdala said nothing.

Irlin stirred at her side.

"Who's this, Magda?"

The man showed his flawless teeth.

"Oh, Magda, is it? Well,
Magda,
you know who it is, don't you?"
"No," she said.

"Don't you, Magda? But I saw you recognize me," the man said innocently. It was nightmarishly apt. "Anyway, can I assume it was you sent me the stelex to meet you here?"

She gazed at him, and the pier seemed sliding from beneath her. She was drunk, and the man before her
was the figment of some hallucination, except that Irlin saw him too.

"Take a walk on the water," Irlin now said. "The lady doesn't know you." The man reached out and patted Magdala's cheek.

"You're cut, aren't you?" said the man. 'We'll settle it when you've sobered up. What's your room number?"

Irlin hit him. It was a tutored, text-book blow, infallible though sloppy in delivery. The man dropped at their
feet.

"Christ," said Irlin. He stumbled up the pier, pulling Magdala beside him.
Ill

Irlin asked no questions. Yet he was nervous. He seemed to believe the second rich man who had accosted
them on the pier was some ghost from her rich-girl's past.

Nobody else approached. Public arguments and fights

₅₉

would be part of the entertainment at Sugar Beach, to be taken in from a safe spectator's vantage.
"Where now?" Irlin said.

Recklessly, she said: "Not the hotel. Get your car and drive me somewhere."
"Where?"