Electric Forest (11 page)

to. The aberration had come and gone. He controlled her again, that was all. Despite the preface, he had
claimed from her the most abject obedience.

Besides, in the aftermath, dulled and extinguished, she had reasoned.

"In any case," she said now, "Christa, whoever Christa is, was who you wanted and what you had. I must
be very like Christa."

He stood up, disheveled, drained and bored. The sapphires swung from his fingers.

"Like?" he said mildly. "It's more than that. You're her induced genetic reprint. Deliberately, and literally,
her double."

4. Crossing the Line
i

Ifs sevenday of the first Dek of the second month of the third quarter,
said the calendar-dial.
Today is
Federation Day on Earth Conclave Planets Cassandra, Cane and Pharo. Ifs the Independence
Carnival on Out-Conclave Planet Peace. And on Earth, ifs Easter sevenday.

On Indigo, those who practiced Modernist Christianity would be in their white rectangular churches. The

religion of the State Childrens Home had been M.C. and one seven-day of every Dek the children had been
ushered into the church. Recorded music would play and golden light swell through a false window. The
Gregorian letter T, such was the M.C. device, had been photo-processed into the walls and floors. While
they sang, the other children had inflicted surreptitious hurts on Magdala, and she had never been able to
concentrate. Christ took no notice, which was not surprising, for he too, apparently, was a good-looking

man.

Claudio was not in the suite, and she wondered if he were in some church in the hills, praying before the letter T. She knew really nothing about Claudio, but certain aspects of

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him she might predict, and religious fervor did not suggest itself as one of them.

She did not like to think of him. She could think of him only in two ways his face above her as their bodies worked beneath the window; the words which followed.

Magdala imagined he had by now listened to the micro-tape in the bracelet and gleaned the expected

information. She did not want to reason any further as to what he might wish or what his plans might be.
(Perhaps he had made a mistake and some vital clue had not been persuaded from Paul Hovak. Claudio
had been very anxious to avoid a personal meeting with Hovak. So anxious, he had trusted to Magdala's presumed ignorance and slavishness. But in the end, that had paid off, had it not?)

She had slept last night, seven hours, an unusually long slumber for her current needs. Which gave rise to

the oppressive idea Claudio had tampered again with her body in the capsule, feeding in narcotics as he had
fed in spirits. But even this line of questioning she closed off from herself.

Not prone to sleep or hunger, she lay on her pneumatic bed among the torn thermo covers, while all about,
the hotel vaguely hummed with the activity of its human and mechanical life.

In the afternoon, she watched a Tri-V drama. One man had murdered another for his wealth, but the

murderer's new finances availed him nothing, as he was relentlessly tracked down by an intelligent officer
of die detection squad, an archetype who earned only six hundred astrads a month. The undercurrent
panacea of the drama was obvious the erosion of the unfairly favored by the working class was a balm
to cash-jealousy.

Claudio entered the suite as the rich murderer, his ambitions ruined, shot himself with an ivory-inlaid
delectro.

Claudio blacked the screen.

"The rich men must die," he remarked. "The first murdered by one of his confreres, the second hounded to self-destruction by a man of the people. Sometimes the beautiful

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are required to die, too. You would have liked that best, wouldn't you Magda?"

He came and sat by her, and as she nervously lifted herself, ran his hands across her body. Her reaction was immediate, neither could she hide it from him. She felt his indifference even as her blood which was
not blood-burned up within her.

"And now," he said quietly, '1 can make you do whatever I say. Can't I?*

Her heart, complement to its physical counterpart, was violently beating, and he cupped her breast, only to
measure the gallop of the heart, interested. He was not seeing her as Christa now, but as something he had
constructed. All this she felt, as she panted like an animal which had been hunted, and lay against him,
unable to pull away.

"
Can’t
I?" he repeated. "Very well. You needn't answer. You
are
answering, whether you speak or not."

Presently, he left her, and walked to the window. She balanced her equilibrium precariously, and he gave
her, mockingly, the space.

When he resumed talking it was in the same clinical voice he had used for the recorded lesson at the silver house. Thus enabling her to realize that here was another lesson.

"I suppose, from the beginning, you may have had some notion that my experiment with you was not

altruistic, not because I liked you or meant to bring you happiness. And now, having ploughed through all
manner of troubles, you may dream I am about to expose the truth to you unequivocally. Make you a
mistress of all these dark secret things that seem to be gathering on your life like flies on the jam. But I'm
not, Magda. It's a facet of my scheme, your incomprehension. It's already proved an infallible bait with
Hovak. What did I want from Hovak? Shall I tell you? Perhaps you can guess. No? Firstly, evidence of his
continued collusion with the woman you appeared to him to be, and his preparedness to come running at her
call. And what else, I wonder?"

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He seemed to be prompting her. Magdala said wearily: "Something he said that the tape recorded/'
"Nearly, but not quite/'

He had stopped prompting. He would not enlighten her. She did not care. Suddenly he said:

"The most entrancing thing of all was his disgust at confronting the drunken mad lady he supposed was
Christophine. By the way, that's her name: Christophine. Not Christa. Christa is the pet abbreviation her
colleagues and lovers attempted to reduce her to. Her I.D. reads Christophine del Jan. Try it on for size.

You may have to grow into it."

"Whatever you want me to do next," she said, "I might refuse/'
"No, you won't." He swung back and smiled at her. "You wont.

She looked beyond him, at the window, but he said, "Firstly, the capsule. I can block your access to it any

time I wish. Through its maintenance systems, I can reduce you to a mindless stupor with alcohol or dope. I

can also kill you. That's one sound motive for your doing everything I ask. But then, there's the other
motive, is there not?"

At which, he came straight to her, and took hold of her, spreading her flesh against his. She tried to push
him away, but she had no strength to do it. The textures of him, the scent of him, his mouth and hands and
body elicited a scale of terrifyingly unavoidable responses, as if she were some pre-programmed machine

set going at the pressure of a key.

Within seconds, she was already flying, blind and helpless, on the wild and downhill race of sex, to be
mortally wounded in a collision of light at its finish.

When he let her go, she dropped back and lay immobile and nauseated.

"That's why you'll do what I ask," he said. "And now I'll tell you the very small amount you need to know, and the even smaller amount you'll need to understand."

He told her in a couple of sentences, then slipped the two

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silver music discs into her ears. She lay there and listened, as they soaped the inside of her mechanical skull with an M.C. religious harmonic for Easter sevenday.

II

North Point stretched three kilometers into the ocean. A concrete causeway, fenced with concave steel

stanchions against the breakers, ran out to a block-built quay. Along the receding shores east and west, the
faintly fluorescent pylons marched, emitting their nocturnal pulses of infra-red visible only to the robot
guidance of sea traffic.

Elsewhere, beyond the dimmed headlamp of the car, the night was black: black sea, black with a seasonal

overcast painting out the stars.

There had been five or six M.C. Easter bonfires on the beaches as Claudio drove across the last six

hundred and eighty kilometers of Sapphire Flats. But, on the open country rising from the Flats and empty of resort hotels, only the beacon of a single hydraulic powerhouse had leavened the blackness.

The untreated steel stanchions of the causeway had rusted. The quay appeared derelict and seldom used.
Yet it was the embarkation point for the place known as Marine Bleu. Claudio had told her what Marine
Bleu was, both literally and allegorically. "An E.G. government-sponsored station dedicated to oceanic
research. Within this unit, a second unspecified unit. Top secret.
Christophine
. But in fact, I perceive Marine Bleu is Circe's island. Where the blue-haired enchantress turns men into beasts."

The car hummed melodiously, poised on the causeway. "Now we wait, briefly," said Claudio, "until the jet arrives. Meanwhile, it's time for your catechism."

"I remember," she said, through the dark inside the car.

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"Maybe you do. Repeat it a
ll
the same. Who are you?*'
"Christophine del Jan."

"When the jet comes, what do you do?"

"The passenger door and storage bay will open when the autocular mechanism recognizes me. I switch the
car to robot-drive and leave the bay to guide it inside. The jet is entirely automatic."

"And isn't that lovely? What about when you reach the island?"

"Any checkposts will respond to my voice and print. The car is pre-programmed to drive me."
"To drive you to the witch's house."

He had requested the aqua-jet from the island by stelex, using Christophine's name. There had also been a
code, which Claudio produced and used off-handedly. Demonstrably, Claudio knew Marine Bleu well, its
geography, its requirements, its governmental mystique, yet he meant to travel under cover of his fake
Christophine, himself in hiding, shut into the back seat-storage compartment of his car. He intended to
penetrate the island unseen and unrecorded, like a devil in the dark.

Through the sea-smoothed stillness, the roar of the aqua-jet broke suddenly, prefacing form or lights.

"Only remember, your capsule is locked away and I retain the key. Tomorrow you'll need to service the life-support systems. You've been told what will happen if you're prevented. I stress this, just in case you
become skittish. Now, you're on your own."

He depressed the button on the dashboard which raised the back seat of the car, and stepped, with an

actor's coordinated economy, into the storage compartment with its interior illumination and washed-air. She
recalled how she had floundered into that same compartment on the way north from this city, how she had
lain there, sensually possessed, even in her hideousness, by the magic of Claudio's power over her, her
power over Claudio. She closed the seat on him now, as he had closed it on her.

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She sat in the gloom behind the headlamp. Inside five minutes more, the lights of the aqua-jet burned up from the sea.

When it came in over the ramp of the jetty, with a gush of reducing speed, she switched the car to
robot-drive, buttoned up the side and got out.

The great jet was black as the night, but with luminous red I.D. panels on both sides. The letters ECSORNI
glowed above.

The aqua motors sank abruptly in decibels, and the rear and fore sections of the jet opened together.
Uncannily, the empty transport yawned there, waiting for her.

She leaned through and activated the starter of the car, shutting the side as she did so. With delicacy, the car drove itself down the ramp and into the rear section of the jet.

Magdala walked to the jet, climbed through and settled herself in the passenger seat behind the automatic
instrument board. The side of the jet dropped down and sealed with a velvet thud. The ozone of the
washed-air percolated the cabin, the motors thrust and the jet rose on its gas cushion.

Moments after, it plunged into the sea, vents sucking up water, evacuating water in a strong white wake. The speedometer danced through fifty, one hundred, two hundred, kph.

There were red letters to the left of the panel, the same letters as on the external I.D.: ECSORNI. She
knew what they stood for: Earth Conclave Station, Oceanic Research, Northern Indigo.

She thought of Claudio, shut in the storage compartment, her companion; yet not her companion. Vaguely, she liked the idea of Claudio impotently trapped in this way, at the mercy of her obedience.

But, alone in the dark as the jet carved the night into a deeper darkness, and the polarized screen grew

_{flecked
with black liquid drops, she began to think only of Claudio, as if}

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