Electric Forest (12 page)

his soul ate hers, as if she had no life at all, save through him.

Northward and farther north the aqua-jet darted, a flung spear of water and noise through the night.

Northward, Fall
had already reached Indigo. Fall when all the blue leaves fell, and the sky deepened and
the pre-winter storms came blowing in like the blue-black whales that had once billowed through the blue
seas, before Earth Conclave had
dispatched
them to five hundred zoos and five thousand research
faculties. There are no longer whales on earth, few animal species of any sort. Mother Gaea. Her sons left her for other worlds: they sent her presents and never went home.

In the second hour of the journey, a storm spoke on the horizon ahead, out across the dance floor of the

sea.

The jet, catching up to the storm, weatherproofed and motored with a peak of pollution-timid clean technology, clove through the waves and the thick wind like a blade through black butter.

The storm remedied her dreary abnegation somewhat, as if its spark touched off some circuit within

herself. But the token thought of her rebellion at this time was merely a hope that Claudio, the scintillant magician, suffered ennui, unentertained in the seat-storage of the car.

The island emerged out of the sea at three in the morning. Its pivot was a tall conical cliff, muffled in a

static cloud of forest. For six or seven kilometers from the base of the cliff to the water, there extended a
uniformly flat plain, featureless but for the blocks and boxes of buildings, and a chain of stalking infra-red

pylons.

As the jet soared closer, Magdala discerned that the flat plain was a reinforced concrete apron, a man-made adjunct to the island which was no more than the conical cliff.

A kilometer from land, the jet swept into a left hand maneuver, turning from the docking basin of the station,
and

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ploughing north westward around the saucerene curve of the concrete foreshore. In less than a minute, the
uncompromising blocks were out of sight. The spindle of the forested cliff towered above the apron, which
itself presently surrendered to a turmoil of sea. Large rocks, outposts of the cliff, clawed from the water,
breakers salivating ferociously between them. The jet shot through a narrow channel, white-winged with surf, and ran up a treated metal ramp.

The motors subsided to an intermediary rumble. But, in the partial silence, the ocean asserted itself, waves
hurled loudly against rock, slithering back with smashed spines, then, healed by immersion, hurled forward

again.

Ahead and above, a metal road plunged off from the ramp and straight up the cliff, burying itself in the

trees.

Magdala heard the jet's storage bay open and Claudio's car drive out. It moved along the flank of the jet
and pulled up on the road, and the door section of the jet lifted.

The sea screamed. The night smelled dank and oddly menacing with salt, as if the ghost of a great ocean
beast moved through it, breathing.

Magdala stepped
down from the cabin and walked toward the car. Once she was off the ramp, it began to

sink, carrying the aqua-jet into some concrete shed underground. This vanishing trick struck her curiously,
with intimations of impermanence. Where the car had halted, a cement pillar had been set beside the road.
A light stammered in the pillar, and, as she came nearer, an ab-human voice demanded dulcetly:
Print and
voice check, please.
She put her hand on the print plate.
Voice, please,
said the pillar,
Voice, please. A
_{fleeting
impulse to offer her own wrong name. Stifled. "Christophine," she said, "del Jan." The blue light}

faded.
Check,
the pillar said.
"Fool"
she thought.
"Fool."

At the base of the cliff, just before the trees smothered the road, huge leprous wounds gaped in the rock,
each an unspeakable invitation into blackness.

Despite the road, the ramp, the checkpost, there was
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nothing civilized about the back door into Marine Bleu. It was a country of caves, decay and supernatural

anger.

She got into the car, and the howling of the sea was muffled. The car started up the fluorescent road,
mounting the dark cone into the roll of the trees.

Claudio, lying in the compartment, at the mercy of her obedience, and of the button that would release him,
which was on the dash. She could savor that. If she wanted, she could talk to him and he would have to
hear.

She did not talk.

The forest was quiet, too. Until a strong wind manifested itself, higher on the cliff. A strong fall wind, the harbinger of the storm the jet had out-paced on the ocean. The fringes of the storm might brush the island, and she wondered how much weather control operated here, and what restrictions applied to it.

Shortly, it occurred to her that the trees were not mitigating the wind, nor did their branches move or their
foliage- the ephemeral leaves of fall shake loose. Soon after, she glimpsed a compact steel unit at the
roadside with the insc
ri
ption: Hoi. Panel Housing 9: Ac
ti
ve. Holostets, ins
ti
gated by electronics. The
forerunner of Claudio's model? But to this, Claudio's model was child to giant. The visual and tactile mirage
of a collective forest, kilometers deep, projected in order to clothe the barren slopes of the cliff. Ornament,
or disguise?

Precisely then, the wing-tip of the storm flickered over the island. There was a bellow of thunder, chalked by lightning.
Magdala cried out.

One moment the world was matte, then, as the white crack of lightning hit the nonexistent tops of the trees,
they exploded into fires.

The holostetic forest was acting as one vast lightning absorber, attracting, defusing and storing the
electricity of the

storm. The process had an outlandish side effect of brilliant color. Fountains of viridian and turquoise and
rose-red light

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poured down the motionless sinews of the trees; magenta convolutions became silent purple snows; blue
coronas broke and fell in lime-green rain.

Unaware, the car shot through it, while, spread on the dash, Magdala's hands gained transparent gauntlets
of violet and crimson; while, like infernal sweets, carnation and quince candied and dissolved on the
polarized windscreen. Between the tree shapes on her left, a concrete bungalow appeared, reflectively
neoned jade, pink, royal blue. And presently, three more bungalows, winking topaz, peacock's eye,
vermilion, mazerine.

The whole interior of the car was dyed and re-dyed a hundred variables of color. Then, the frenetic

patterns distilled, faltered. There had been no further lightning. The glowing fires of Hell were seeping back into the cliff. Almost as suddenly as it had commenced, the display ended. Dyes dying out on every side.
Retinas jangled, still stippled with after-images, Magdala beheld a fourth bungalow, showing its prosaic dun format in the headlamp.

The storm, sucked dry of its inshore violence by the hungry holostetic shield, crumpled away with dim boomings into the slavering sea. The wind failed.

The fourth bungalow slid behind like the others, as night collapsed on the forest.

"You missed something then, Claudio," Magdala said aloud. "But probably you've seen it all before. "

The sparks of the storm had again ignited her, precipitated her. But her fear, reborn, smote on the pliable insecurity within her. She had come through rainbow flames that did not burn, among trees that were not trees, and she at their heart, not who she seemed either, nor
what
she seemed.

Nothing is to be relied on,
Claudio had said to her, at the beginning. It had turned out to be the litany of
their enterprise.

Five minutes later, out of the black, a fifth bungalow,

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columen-built The pre-programmed car slowed, swam toward the bungalow. Christophine's bungalow.

It was quite unlike the previous structures, and not only because the electric suffusion of color was gone.
The earlier buildings
had had the prefabricated boxed
style of the blocks in the Research Station
compounds.

The columen bungalow was upheld on its steel columns at a height of four and a half meters, the central

support being a drum-shaped garage faced with copper cladding. The living area sat on its stilts, an octagon
up in the air, with the dome of a solarium roof above. The car headlamp shone wetly black on the one-way
glazium, which might or might not shine an equally opaque gold if somebody were home.

The car stopped.

Magdala sat in the car, her attention fixed on Christophine's bungalow.

Entry to the bungalow could be procured via the garage. Entry to the garage through an activating key in

the car of Christophine del Jan. The magician, however, could no doubt effect entry by other means.

The time had come, therefore, to button up the back seat and allow the magician to return into the world.

It was like having a virus trapped in a sealed jar. A beautiful, aesthetic, seductive virus. A plague. A

malediction. Satan. A wonderful irrationality, devoid of concession, bathed her nerves. "Can you still hear
me, Claudio?" she said. "I am debating with myself whether to let you out. Or not. Of course, I suppose I
could leave you there indefinitely. That would be rather awkward for you, would it not? Would rather spoil

your plans."

She shut her eyes and imagined Claudio's face eclipsed by panic as she had seen it the night before. And

then she became aware that he never would have trusted her in this. She was aware even before she heard
the slight hiss of contained atmosphere escaping from the back seat as it lifted. He had his own device for freeing himself when the hour of

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freedom arrived. How had she ever dreamed it could be otherwise? The split seconds of autonomy, as
ever, evaporated. She did not look about.

For his part, he did not speak to her, but reached by her to the panel to raise the rear side section of the

car.

She watched him walk between the steel columns, under the bungalow, to the garage. She could picture the
silver rectangle with which he had effortlessly got into her apartment at the Accomat. On this occasion, she
was not shown what he used, but the curving slide-door of the garage retreated, leaving the way open.

He came back to the car, into the front beside her, and drove forward into the garage.

"There's also a print-lock which will think it recognizes your thumb, and let you in," he said, conversationally. Just as conversationally, she inquired: "Will you leave the car here?" "No."

She was surprised he had bothered to answer. "Where then?"

He had stopped the car, and the garage door was closing. A white light bloomed in the garage. Claudio half-turned, half-looked at her. His eyes seemed capable of hypnotism.

"No more questions," he said. "See the elevator over there? It connects the garage with the bungalow. Well take the elevator and go up. f 11 make love to you on her bed."

Magdala's heart jumped in its pseudo, totally mortal fashion, blurring her sight, making her catch her breath. Not even touching him, she already writhed at his touch, the downhill race already begun inside her lungs,
her loins, her skull.

"My reward for compliance?" she asked. "Well, you'll feel rewarded. Won't you?" She said: "Christophine's
simulate on Christophine's bed. Why did you bring me here?"

"Still questioning? Disobedience cancels the reward," he said coldly.
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But she saw the pulse in his throat, his temple. Not beating as fast as hers, yet beating, beating. She leaned
forward. Her hair swung to enclose both their faces. She brushed his lips with hers and said to him: "But
I'm Christophine, darling." She moved her hand down his body. She did it cunningly. She had learned
method from him. "You're already much too excited at the idea of Christophine's bed. Aren't you, darling?"

Ten minutes later, the sequence begun in the car was completed on a strange swaying, couch, slung

hammock-wise from four flexium suspensors.

As the bed swung like a huge pendulum, and she flung herself through all the glistening cascades of

physical emotion, Magdala wondered how many times he had made love to Christophine. A sensation of
being partially out of her body came over her, so that her climax was a separate thing, observed almost
dispassionately. She heard her own voice rising thin and wild, like the voice of someone in another room. She sounded as though she were being hurt. Which obscurely puzzled her.

She regained herself in stages, and lay in the dim room, where just one shadowy light had spontaneously lit
itself, with her enemy beside her. Already the music discs were in his ears, churning out their hackneyed and saccharine formulae.

"What now?" she said.

He could not have heard her, though he registered that she had spoken.
"Shut up," he murmured. "Shut up."

Plangently, Christophine's bed swung beneath them.