The Kaisho (65 page)

Often, in the days since he had let her go, he had felt her close to him—her soft skin, the heady perfume of the flesh beneath her arms, the backs of her knees, the coral folds between her thighs. At first, he was able to convince himself that this connection existed because of what he had taken from her in stealth without her knowing, secreting it inside him as an oyster enfolds its growing pearl.

And like a pearl, the luster of what he had extracted from her sustained his fantasy of what had happened between them as it contained the panic, slippery as an eel, riding just below the level of consciousness.

Neither wild beasts nor necromancy frightened him, but the growing realization of his connection with Margarite certainly did. For one thing, he was no longer alone in the universe; for another, his thoughts of her were often so intense that he forgot everything else. These existential aspects of reality were wholly foreign to him, as absurd and terrifying as the magic he possessed was to others.

His hands came up, making minute adjustments in the fit of the mask. The adhesive, a compound of his own manufacture, had the effect of bonding the polymers to his skin with such perfection that he could touch the skin of the mask and feel it as his own. This was as it should be. What good was a mask unless it changed you?

He stuck his tongue out, seeing it in the mirror. He licked his lips, or the mask’s lips. In any case, Nicholas Linnear’s lips. He would get the information his masters wanted from Linnear, and then he could do with his captive whatever he wished. What a stroke of luck to come upon a Tau-tau adept! The moment Do Duc had discovered Linnear’s true nature he had trembled inside with the thought of breaching the unknown, of taking a path even ancient Ao had shunned.

Do Duc would call upon his familiar, the sacred white magpie, and with its help, open the forbidden Sixth Gate. He would shed his doomed soul and don Linnear’s, sucking it right out of him, leaving behind only a dried husk with Do Duc’s face.

In this way he could annihilate his own history.

But his thoughts of triumph were short-lived as Margarite’s ghostly presence reasserted itself. He fell to his knees. “Ah, Buddha, help me,” he whispered through lips that were not his own. What should he do? All of his power, his magic, was useless in banishing the memory of her. But it was more than memory; he had been struck down by an engine of unknown design.

His need for her transcended lust or desire. This notion alone baffled and enraged him. His infuriating sense of shattered apartness had been replaced by something far more horrifying: a growing intuition that without her he could no longer pull breath into his lungs.

It was time to quit the mirror. He pulled himself to his feet, summoned up all his energy to banish the iridescent vapor of Margarite twining itself about his soul, and moved on wooden legs to the metal cage he had constructed within the robotics factory.

As soon as he had unlocked the door and stepped inside, his mind became filled with the tendrils of Nicholas Linnear’s dreaming brain.

Do Duc switched on the halogen spotlights and, directing them against Nicholas’s face, slapped him hard on one cheek, then the other. No wonder he was dreaming on and off, Do Duc thought. The amount of toxin he had pricked him with in Paris had been enough to bring down a team of water buffalo. But with the power of Nicholas’s mind, Do Duc had felt he had no choice. In this case, overmedication was far better than the opposite.

He placed his fingertips on Nicholas’s forehead and cheeks, checking the fit. It was truly amazing what computers could do these days. A series of photos extrapolated into a holographic image, that three-dimensional icon reduced to a complex formula of zeros and ones, fed into a computer, whose software metamorphosed that formula into a Virtual Reality replica of the real thing, which was then formed into a mask, extruded from the brain of the computer just as, he supposed, Athena had emerged full-blown from the head of Zeus.

The fit was perfect, the bonding agent setting up nicely. There were pores, hair follicles, blemishes, melanin discolorations, the works. The feel and texture was so lifelike even a lover wouldn’t be sure it wasn’t skin. As long as the seal was not broken, you could swim in this thing, take a shower, or make love. It made no difference.

Nicholas’s eyes were fluttering open, beginning to focus, and Do Duc arranged the mirror behind him so that his captive could see his own face.

Just as Nicholas’s dark eyes settled on him, Do Duc felt a disorienting bout of vertigo, and he dug his fingers into his captive’s biceps in order to keep himself from again falling to his knees. All he could smell in his nostrils was Margarite, as if she were a horse into whose winter coat he had buried his face. Consumed by a vision of her, he gritted his teeth, exerting the mental discipline Ao had taught him, and bound her intrusive image to a tree in the forest of his mind. If someone had plunged a blade into his chest at this moment, he would be in less pain than he was experiencing now. He felt himself a creature who looks in a mirror only to discover that he has become a rotting corpse.

In an agony of horror he said in Nicholas’s voice, with Nicholas’s face, “Now that you’ve realized you’re alive, it’s time you see who you have become.” He shifted half a step to his left to reveal the reflection of Nicholas in the computer-generated silicon-polycarbonate mask.

He felt the galvanic response go through Nicholas just as if he had put a live wire to his testicles. The spasm of the muscles in the grip of his hands calmed him, affirmed the place he had made for himself in the universe, for the moment sprayed black ink onto the magnificent face of his terror.

He bent his face low so it hung with the force of a god at the periphery of Nicholas’s gaze.

“See who you’ve become.” His whispered voice echoed like a hawk’s piercing cry over the treetops. “Can you believe it? Yes, believe it. You are me and I am you.”

He could scent like perfume the perspiration forming on Nicholas’s skin, feel his own palms slippery with it. Putting his ear to his victim’s warm rib cage, he could hear the flurry of the heartbeat like a wild bird trapped against a pane of glass. The sound warmed him to his bones like the first break of spring sun after a long, cold winter.

Then Nicholas passed out again and Do Duc was alone with the robots, the black ink melting like snow in sunlight off the image of Margarite, revealing her closer to him than he had thought possible.

He remembered a story his mother had told him when he was very small, of a young farmer who met and fell in love with the woman of his dreams, a girl of ethereal beauty, an orphan from a neighboring village. They were wed and lived a joyous, perfect life until she contracted a winter illness and, despite all the farmer’s frantic efforts, died. He buried her himself beneath a cherry tree, its bare, pale branches scraping a cloud-swept sky.

So overcome with grief was the farmer that he was certain he would die without his love. Darkness came, and ignoring the entreaties of his friends and family, he curled up beside the newly dug grave of his wife. He could not bear to leave her, and he wept bitter tears through the darkest hours of the night.

Then, in that pearly hour just before dawn, when the world is composed of mist and silence, he heard a small stirring at the edge of the woods. In a moment, he saw emerging from the damp shadows a magnificent red fox.

The fox was so delicate, so mysterious and magisterial, with its coat glazed with cloud and hoarfrost, that for an instant the farmer forgot his misery and ceased his weeping. All at once, the fox’s ethereal beauty reminded him so piercingly of his dead wife that he burst into tears again.

The fox sat with its forepaws crossed in peculiarly human fashion and, looking directly into the farmer’s eyes, asked him why he wept.

The farmer, brought up on stories of the magic of the foxes of this region, answered him.

“You speak of your wife as if she were love itself,” the fox said.

“And so she was,” the farmer replied in a sigh. “Love died with her, and without love I surely cannot survive.”

“Love is all around you,” the fox assured him, but the farmer only shook his head in misery.

“Not for me.”

“Then you must have your wife back, so that you may learn all there is to know of love.”

“But that is impossible.”

The fox raised one of its forepaws as if in strange benediction. “Sleep now. Dawn comes soon, and with it, your wife.”

At the fox’s urging, the farmer put his head on his arms, certain that he would not sleep. But strangely, the moment he closed his eyes, he fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.

He awoke with the new day’s sun in his eyes as it slanted through the branches of the cherry tree beneath which his wife’s body was buried.

The farmer blinked, sat up with a start, his heart beating fast in his breast. He was alone, the fox was gone. Had he dreamed its appearance, the fantastic dialogue he’d had with it? That must be it, he thought as he picked himself up, dusting leaves and twigs off his trousers and shirt.

Then he felt her, not beside him, but in his mind. His beloved wife was alive! He hadn’t dreamed the fox’s existence. It had come and worked its magic on them.

He felt his wife’s spirit moving in his mind, and he was overjoyed, anticipating a kind of intimacy he could not have imagined when they were both flesh and blood. How wonderful life would be with their love wrapped inside him, never to be lost again!

But within the month, the farmer’s family found him dead, slumped over his wife’s grave, his bloodless fists gripping a hunting knife he had plunged into his belly. Curiously, the ground over the grave was greatly disturbed by deep, frenzied slashes. The local police puzzled over this. They agreed that it was as if the farmer had been trying to reach his wife’s corpse in the last moments before he took his life. They further agreed that the farmer had been driven mad by his grief and sadly buried him beside his beloved wife before they went on to other, more pressing matters.

In the months that followed, relatives visited the graves once a week to leave small gifts and to pray, but otherwise the place remained deserted. Except on the night of the full moon, when a fox appeared from the snowy shadows of the forest to pad about the stone markers with a grave and canny face.

And perhaps it was only the fox who knew the truth: that the farmer had learned more about love than he had ever wanted to know. Loving someone was a far cry from having them steal through your thoughts and memories like a wraith in the night. Sharing a household was wholly unlike sharing a mind, where there were no secrets, no respite, and never, with two people sharing it, any silence at all.

Silence and the shallow sounds of robots being assembled, the same ticks, squeaks, and hums night and day, in numbing procession, were Do Duc’s only companions now.

Why had he recalled that unspeakable story now? How it had terrified him as a child. Each night, afterward, he would try but fail to sleep, imagining that when he did, someone he might have loved would have secreted themselves in his mind like a demon. Finally, in desperation, he would crawl into the Frenchman’s bed, unmindful if the Frenchman was sleeping alone or with a female companion. The Frenchman had allowed Do Duc to snuggle against him, cradled in safety, and had never said a word about it.

Why didn’t I go to my mother?
Do Duc asked himself in the amniotic glow of the robotics factory.
Why did I go to the Frenchman?
He stared at his own face adhering to Nicholas’s before he could ask himself the next and final question.
Why did I kill the one person who had offered me
—

He turned away from his victim and, grabbing blindly for the bars of the cage, pressed his forehead against the metal until bright stars of pain exploded behind his eyes.

Could he articulate the word, even to himself? How could he? Didn’t the story of the farmer’s wife prove the ultimate danger of it? Didn’t all the hard, bloody lessons he had learned growing up prove it, too?

Love was death.

Yes. But he loved Margarite.

There, he had said it, and now surely he was damned. He moaned, despite himself.

Beyond him, outside the cage, bodies slick with oil were being formed, extremities being tested and attached to sockets with ball-bearing fluidity. Infrared eyes glared into infinity, seeing beyond time and space into another reality free from pain and terror. And love.

Nicholas, damn his soul to hell, was unconscious, wholly unaware of Do Duc’s terror, his sense of helplessness in the face of the Margarite of his mind. Like the farmer’s wife, her essence refused to let go despite distance or the passage of time. She held on with tenacious talons, inside him, picking through the mire of his past, peering at his sins, loving him still.

He could not bear it.

He threw his head back, uttered a hoarse, inarticulate cry filled with pain and anguish. Outside the cage, the steel servants were being born at intervals as regular as clockwork.

Then he gripped Nicholas’s shoulders, tried to shake him awake. When that didn’t work, he leaned forward, bit viciously into the flesh of Nicholas’s upper arm. Nicholas stirred, his eyes snapped open. The sapphire light arced and flickered.

Do Duc said, “Wake up! It’s time to die!”

“That sonuvabitch Munch,” Lillehammer said.

“Save your ire for someone who can feel it.”

With an effort Lillehammer kept himself from shivering. With the air-conditioning turned up full it was as cold as the arctic tundra in here. Lillehammer, who missed the heat and humidity of Southeast Asia, had a difficult time keeping his lips from turning blue during these interviews.

The Red Queen leaned back in his swivel chair, shot the barrel cuffs of his Turnbull & Asser orange-and-blue-striped shirt so that they extended a half inch beyond the sleeves of his cashmere blazer. “I haven’t pulled a trigger on a long gun in quite some time. Tell me, how did it feel?”

You could see the little clouds of their breath, for Christ’s sake. Their images were reflected in so much stainless steel Lillehammer could believe he was in the cold room of a morgue.