The Revolt of Aphrodite (57 page)

“Exactly” he said, resuming the flush of enthusiasm which I had cut short by my ill-judged intervention. “While society is happily creating a slave-class of analphabetics,
‘
les
visuels’,
who have
forgotten
how to read and who depend on a set of Pavlovian signals for their daily bread and other psychic needs—surely we have the right to build a model which will be at least as ‘human’ as these so-called human beings? Eh? Whether her limitations of freedom in action will have to be circumscribed for her I cannot get Julian to discuss. He turns a blind eye to the whole matter.

“But if we get what we might—why, we could turn Iolanthe loose one day, kiss her warmly, and say, now you are free—just as if she were being released from Holloway. There is no reason that I can see why she shouldn’t hold her own in the world as it is today. Just release her, as a soap-bubble is flicked off a child’s soap-pipe. ‘Go, my child.’ It’s not an unfair analogy—babies are born this way; but they arrive helpless and have to be passed through the cultural mincer. Suppose ours arrived at the age of thirty—mentally mature;
with all her experience digested? What is to prevent her taking her place with all the other dummies and pushing a lever for her living, her Pavlovian living? A trap door opens and the soup comes in.” He was very drunk indeed in a cold and rational sort of way. His cheeks had a hectic flush. But he wasn’t slurring and when he got up to go to the lavatory his walk was quite steady. “Will she have opinions?” I asked and he replied, “That is up to us; we are building the library of her conditioned responses upon the old graph you drew for Abel. Yes, she will feel certain things. But it’s for us to decide to a certain extent.” He absented himself and I reflected upon this weird assignment with a certain lustful satisfaction. Iolanthe!

“Faustus!”

Marchant, reappearing, said: “On the one hand it might seem complicated, but in fact it’s only terribly detailed and intricate. Our responses are not infinite, from a muscular point of view, though of course they are various and numerous. Speech and so on—again it’s not infinite; your sound analysis was most useful and adapts
perfectly
in the new materials. The voice is particularly successful in my view; here, I will play you a test strip.” He crossed to where his coat hung and eased out a small tape-recorder with a set of fine
earphones.
Through them, and clear above the breathing silence of the machine, I heard the real voice of Iolanthe saying softly, dreamily: “Worlds of memory, worlds of desire, echo will set them both on fire. Three two four, three two four. Answer me. Is there anyone in the room who has seen my, has anyone seen my, seen my …? Darling it could only have happened to us.” It was a little unnerving—no, I’ll go further. The reproduction was so beautiful that I was a bit bloodcurdled by it. On the one hand it was all so remote, Athens, the Nube and all that. But I suddenly felt the wild pang of the Acropolis at dawn with that warm scented little body lying tangled in mine in a sort of holy shipwreck; tasted those pious kisses. “Iolanthe”!

“Isn’t it her to the life?”

“It’s a funny way to put it, but it’s true. I suppose you built up the vocal thing direct from Abel—I had quite a lot to work on.”

“Yes, and her films, for example.”

“The damnedest thing” I said and for no known reason felt a
disposition to laugh out loud. “Muscles powered by tiny
photoelectric
mnemonic cells.”

“That’s it, my boy.” Marchant produced sheaves of
boring-looking
paper and drew out the circuits in very rough specification. “She has five zones of response; her power storage is a new kind of dry cell with a longish life, and is replaceable. We are weaving her from a selection of guts and nylons finer than any fisherman dreamed of, or any violinist for that matter. The hands are extraordinary—utterly beautiful; probably more so than the originals. She travels by the power of light, boyo, light-sensitised cells; becomes a trifle languid at twilight; and fades into sleep at any time you care to name. But of course she isn’t done. It’ll be weeks before it’s all sewed into place and ready to walk down Regent Street.”

“Soliciting I suppose?”

“That is for you to decide.”

“Why me?”

“Julian seems to think your word is law in these matters. Myself I think he is playing a dangerous game—with your so-called sense of humour. But it’s not my affair. I’m playing my part as best I can. But I realise now that I’m a mere interpreter of other men’s ideas; you are the real scientist.” It sounded pretty strange to me, put that way. I had always believed the direct opposite to be true. “But Julian” I said “is the real brains. None of us would be doing what we are doing had it not been for him.” Marchant agreed, wiped his teeth in a napkin and replaced them tenderly. “We’ve photocopied the daily life of about twenty women to work out the range of
situation-
responses for Iolanthe. It’s really amazing how monotonous the ordinary range of movements, conversations, stock responses, can be. Even with the total range of thought we can conceivably stock her up with it’s perfectly adequate for most things that happen to most people. Response-provoking through sound and light. She will move about like some huge abstract dolly playing a perfect part in the world of our time.”

“I’m getting to love her already” I said.

“Beware of Julian” said Marchant jokingly. “We’ve built her a set of sexual organs which … but I haven’t done the detailed planning yet. Waiting for you to come in with new ideas. But the
site of the temple is all there and the foundations of the thing are all sound.”

“What temple?”

“Temple of pleasure. I’m too much of a puritan, I avert my face a bit from all that; and Julian supplies no sort of guidance as yet. But if we are to get her as perfect as a real person we can’t deprive her entirely of her sexual response, even if it’s battery-driven.”

It was all very well to joke, but inside I felt rather solemn and
indeed
a little uneasy. Marchant added an afterthought. “You’ll find several old friends down at Toybrook—among them Said, the little one-eyed Christian Arab of your salad days who has been doing the most imaginative and intricate work on the light-sensitisation and the sound. The man who built your ear-trumpet, remember?” Of course I did. An absolutely marvellous artisan in little; the firm was lucky to have such a master craftsman on hand.

“And the corpses will intrigue you, the real ones; it’s funny how things tend to call up other things. Involuntarily, so to speak. Just when we were having the first troubles over anatomy and invoking the aid of the Royal College of Surgeons and so on, Julian was faced with another opening for the firm in Turkey: embalming! I know it sounds strange and of course at first we laughed very much in an exasperated sort of way because really we should have thought of it. It is the most ancient of all cultus ploys and we could have launched it years ago. Now, with the help of the two holy churches, East and West, we got everyone into a huddle and, basing ourselves on a
profit-sharing
scheme, with Rome and Byzantium we launched the whole thing with
éclat.
It was of course preceded with a bombardment of clerical propaganda from the pulpit, specially prepared sermons, telling you that it was wicked for you to leave your nearest and dearest to rot when you could embalm them and stick them on the hall
hat-stand
as we used to stick wild boar or stags or what not. Also a very nice decoration to very old-fashioned pubs might be Mine Host resurrected in this fashion (if ever so slightly glazed).

“Combined with this we got the avant-garde in Paris interested in it as a sort of beatnik curio with fascinating responses from all. They don’t really want to live, the young. They want to be embalmed so that they can impress their friends. Moreover they are prepared to
pay for automatic posthumous embalming as one pays for life
insurance.
The cult went off with a bang; we couldn’t meet the demand. It seems to them, I suppose, the only future guarantee that they had actually been alive. And there’s always the chance of
lending
out your mummy for that perfect party where everyone was so ‘stoned’. In short we were in business. But … on the
technological
side we ran into trouble with the quality of the embalming.

“In Turkey they were using methods unchanged for hundreds of years. The result was a very friable effort which, if removed from the dry astringent desert air and moved into a more humid climate, deteriorated dreadfully. In fact rotted. Of course we moved ‘
Chemicals
A’ over on the job and we are still in the process of wrestling with the formulae for preservatives—it’s more difficult than you can imagine. But while the embalmers were using our brains we were using their dead bodies which can be played about with at will, in order to learn what we needed to know for Iolanthe. So you will find a rather strange Embalming Studio (so called)
che
z
nous.
It’s very useful to us for checking; but they are training to conquer the whole Middle and Far East. Nature, beautiful are thy ways!”

“Do you mean to tell me you have been poking about in corpses with a notebook in one hand, Marchant?” By this time he was extremely drunk but not at all shaky; I mean one would have had to know him quite well to divine that he wasn’t sober. Also he gave me a funny feeling of being a bit scared. Anyway he gave a great earwig chirp of laughter and said: “My dear chap, all that I know of the human anatomy is based on the dead. I could not play around with the living, and I’m no surgeon, as you know. But the dead have been of enormous help, specially while they are still fresh, while the motor responses are still working. The
rigor
mortis
buggers them up from my point of view—at least on the suppleness and response factor. But it is most instructive and delightful to see them taken apart as clockwork is, bit by bit, and then pieced together into the sort of doll we are contemplating.

“In fact one has to stop and ask oneself from time to time ‘Who is doing what, exactly?’ I’m damned if I know. But anyway right next to us we have this vast embalming studio run by the Americans which provides us with models galore. Of course the American
market was already very advanced when all this happened; Europe is terribly backward in some ways.” We both cackled with the
old-fashioned
laughter which nowadays would merit a pistol fired through the skull. “But the Middle East” he said “is going in for this with a vengeance, and Julian has already financed a couple of films based on the subject to orient public opinion towards the notion.” He paused. “Always Julian” I said.

“I must go” he said, but he still sat on for a while cupping his brandy in a warming hand and staring at me. Then he continued with remorse, “My God, I’ve done nothing but talk; I haven’t asked you a thing, how you feel, how you are, whether you are keen to take this business on or not…. Forgive.”

“I’m glad. I would have been incapable of answering any of your questions. I’m newly convalescent and very newly wed, if I dare to believe it, to a re-upholstered ghost called Benedicta. I am just
feeling
my feet, as they say, but very uncertainly. But whatever the state of things I’ll come to Toybrook and look over the set-up with you. Would you like Monday? I’ll be there betimes if you think that it would suit?”

Marchant drank off his glass and rose. “Yes” he said. “Monday. I must let you hear a lecture by the top embalmer. You will hardly credit your senses. All good sense mind you. Ahem!”

I took the Tube back, crushed in among my fellow-countrymen who looked on the whole rather nice, after such a long absence from them. But it was like travelling in a parrot’s cage, I was all but deafened when I finally crawled up the steps of Claridge’s. I walked into the room and said: “Mark, Benedicta, Mark!” She jumped up, radiant. “Thank goodness you said that; I was thinking it. It’s the sorest place of our many. So many thorns to be taken out of each other’s paws, but Mark…” I sat down: “What brought it on was the discovery that the place where I am working is very near….”

“Yes. I see.”

She lit a cigarette and marched up and down for a moment. “We must try and incorporate him, relive him a little bit inside ourselves. It’s very selfish in a way, but I fear that if he goes on inside us like a suppurating thing, the memory of a bad act, then things will not grow right between us as they might. Mark still stands at the
cross-roads 
between you and me.” She sat down thump in a chair and still smoking furiously gave a gulp which was as much rage and
frustration
as just tears of regret. I, too, could have beaten my head against a wall and yelled, but not being of that sort of minting I did damn all. I tried as hard as I could to yawn, look natural, that sort of thing. Tried to light a cigarette, burnt my finger, got a fit of coughing. Went off to the lavatory to do a pee and swear quietly at the way things are arranged.

When I came back she was standing in the centre of the room, very composed and with a fine haughty kind of determination in her eye. “We must go back to every place where we have been hurt, or where we have inflicted hurt on each other, and systematically
exorcise
the memory—what do you think of that?” I jumped at it. “But now” I said. “This very night.” And she nodded. “Otherwise it will be no good.”

It did not take long to raise a car and alert the housekeeper—nor truth to tell to drive down through the roads which were horribly empuddled and the countryside looking devilish sad. We didn’t exchange a single word. I had organised a thermos of coffee and some repellent ham sandwiches. The night was cold. It blew. I suppose the same sort of thing was going on in her—I mean for my part I was rehearsing the whole past of this period in that horrid garish
mansion;
it was less like a bad dream than an old abandoned tunnel into which one had fallen and been rescued. But now one had to go back and clear it of fallen debris. I thought too with a pang of Iolanthe’s island cottage. Ghosts, they need meat too!