Symbiography (3 page)

Sondak slowly repeated the number under his breath, tapping it out on the keypad set into the arm of the control seat. The walls shimmered, an instant silver rainfall as the strict confines of the projection-booth gave way to distant, snow-bright mountains and Sondak found himself and his padded chair on the bank of a crystalline lake, facing Omar Tarquille under the scented boughs of a wind-stirred spruce.

“Morning, Par,” the Executive said, intent on the legs of the hostess as she wandered off among the pines. “You’re looking fit.”

“How can you tell?” Sondak laughed to see Tarquille’s momentary, throat-clearing discomfort. “Still fond of alpine scenery, I see, Omar.”

“A placid setting is best for conferences, don’t you think?”

“Oh, I’m not so sure. Perhaps more would be accomplished in crisis; on the deck of a sinking ship, let’s say.”

The Executive chuckled pleasantly. “Been dreaming lately, Par?”

“Every night for a month.”

“Glad to hear it. Must feel good to be back in action. How long will this one run, do you think?”

“Final mix is still a long way off, but I’d estimate at least ten hours.”

“Perfect, Par, absolutely perfect. You’ve got a lot of fans here in the City waiting for a new one, you know.”

“That’s reassuring to hear.”

“The name Sondak still draws an audience, never mind statistics telling you Direct-Experience-Modes outsell Dreams four-to-one in the preference-ballots.”

“Figures are meaningless to me, Omar.” The Dreamer yawned behind the back of his hand.

“How old are you now, Par, anyway? Over two-hundred?”

“No, just a hundred-and-five.”

“Ah, still a young man.” The Executive fingered his chin and raised an eyebrow, in imitation of the sage he thought himself to be. “Much too young to be off hiding in the wilderness like a hermit. You belong here in the City, where decisions are made. Do you good to be among men, keeping up with the times. When you get to be a four-century-old fart like me, why then you can hole up in a crypt out in the middle of nowhere.”

“I like it here out in the middle of nowhere.” The Dreamer stared across at the image of a lake where rising trout disrupted the reflected mountains.

“It would be different if you had some company, Par. Someone young and athletic, like that little hostess in here a minute ago; or a boy, depending on … preferences. But to be alone is unnatural, and if you don’t mind an old-timer like me butting in, I’ll say that too much solitude is bad for your work.”

Sondak did mind an old-timer butting in. He liked being alone, and said so.

“Surrounded by Nomad savages, how can you stand it?”

“I was watching a group of Nomads this morning at breakfast. First I’ve seen in over a year.”

The Executive nodded politely and changed the subject, saying he was anxious to spend a night soon with Sondak’s new dream.

“I’ll put a mode on the waves as soon as final mix is in.”

“Very good. Can I get you anything from the City? Landermann has a new Dream, a regular nightmare, I’m told.”

“No thanks. I’ve too much work.”

“All right. If something comes up I’ll arrange a conference.” Omar Tarquille smiled, gave a slight wave, and vanished from the lakefront. In the distance, a quail called sharply.

The Dreamer punched the off button. The mountains melted and shrank like a reflection on water seeping into sand. Par Sondak was back in his projection-booth. He pushed his bulk out of the chair and started for the door, eager for fresh air. Although the booth was a favored play-thing with City-dwellers, where space was at a premium and the only open country was on mode, Sondak preferred sitting on his patio or roaming in the garden to any of his vast file of electronic voyages. The computer still scheduled theatrical events in the booth each week, but Sondak seldom went. Conferences were all he used his booth for these days.

The Dreamer was smiling as he stepped onto the patio. “Imagine Omar offering up Landermann’s new dream.” Sondak never played the dreams of others. He had no interest in them. His dream-table was a piece of equipment he used even less often than the projection-booth. Dreams were not his kind of diversion.

Buick of the Cincinnati clan crouched in the shade of the dead tree, watching. A warrior since the age of twelve, when his father was killed in a skirmish with the Lafayette County people and care of the family gun passed to him as eldest male, Buick wore the name-brands of six slain enemies sewn on leather thongs to his belt. No spoils were taken from his father’s body; his own people had the victory that day, and the grief-stricken boy hammered the ancient brass emblem into the carved stock of the family gun, continuing his mourning fast well beyond the ceremonial three days after the dead man’s charm-bag was secretly buried. Buick believed this token brought him luck; more luck than any of the talismans in the snakeskin pouch hanging from his belt; he fingered his father’s name-brand:
JEEP,
worn smooth and shiny from constant rubbing.

The young Nomad was in need of luck today. All his childhood long, he listened to cooking-fire tales of the magic places where men lived like Gods. At the clan chants, he thrilled to the epic songs of Texaco, the Firechief, mounted on his flying horse, how he stole the light-that-never-dies from the citadel of the Lord Citizens. Until this morning, only a handful of the Elders had ever seen the enchanted gardens, their recollections, hoarded like treasure from the past. And yet, these same boastful old men squawked now of the All-Powerful One’s wrath and demanded a girl-child be sacrificed to protect their long, white beards. Let them all scamper bowlegged into the brush, Buick of Cincinnati was a warrior and carried the family gun; he was battle-tested and would admit to fearing no man, not even the favorites of the Gods. From the moment he first saw the serene silver towers rising out of the unbelievable green of the surrounding oasis, he knew that he could not rest until he walked in the shade of those magic trees and plucked the fruit from their forbidden limbs.

One room in Par Sondak’s mechanical house was unlike the others. The walls here were panelled in walnut, with carved Ionic pilasters and egg-and-dart molding. There was a real fireplace framing brass andirons and birch logs. In place of extruded plastic furniture were wingchairs upholstered in dark green leather and on the floor, the swirling blue lotus buds of a hand-knotted Kirman. Above the mantel hung the Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent X. It was a stately, secluded room; silent as a meditation garden; a sanctuary. With the exception of the unused Public Reading Room at the City-Center, it was the largest library left on Earth.

Par Sondak sat in an armchair by one of the tall leaded-glass windows, a calf-bound volume of Gibbon’s superb history open on his knees. Around him, in alcoves along the walls, were shelves ranked with books, rising to the ceiling in rich strata of red, green and maroon morocco. The Dreamer gazed out the window at the sculpted hedges delineating his gardens, unable to read. An irritation remained from this morning’s conference: the tone in Omar Tarquille’s voice when he mentioned the popularity of Direct-Experience-Modes. Sondak wondered how much of a threat was intended by the crafty Executive.

Ten years before, the complexities of the encephalograph probes and neural receptors were miniaturized to a near-microscopic wafer, and Sondak had known there would be no shortage of rogues and daredevils volunteering for surgical implantation; but what he never guessed at the time was the size of the audience that would be attracted to participating in hand-to-hand gladiatorial combat or one-man rocket races to the moon and back. D.E.M.s of assassination and torture were even available. Every space drifter and mercenary killer in the City wore a mini-probe under his scalp, ready to double the take from a hazardous assignment by selling the modes to the highest bidder.

Suicide and murder remained the two highest contributors to the deathrate in the City, with accidents a paltry third and disease only a memory. A near-eternal life-span froze the eminent in a static hierarchy, like prehistoric mammoths preserved in a glacier’s epochal crawl. Par Sondak was a very rich man. In the City he would be an easy target for the ambitious. The Dreamer’s gentle, retiring nature was a distinct liability in a society which encouraged ruthlessness and cunning. Sondak knew whenever his dreams failed to score appreciably on the preference-ballot (and the inevitable day was coming when large-cast D.E.M.s would be as extravagantly staged as any hologram spectacular), his credit-rating would no longer support his isolated and independent life and he would be forced to give up the peace of his library for the sophisticated power-struggle within the stately corridors of the City.

The young Nomad paused at the bottom of the hill to check the primer in the frizzen-pan of his musket and wind the wheel lock back until the action was cocked. He concealed his bed-roll and saddlebags between two large stones and took only what he would carry into battle: shot and powder, a goat-skin waterbag, his bone-hilted cutlass and the protective magic of his charm-bag. His hair was tied back in a warrior’s top-knot. His name-brand hung around his neck on a braided cord, flashing in the sun; a challenge to anything he might encounter.

Buick stepped forward into the rain, stooping as if he were entering a tent. Outside, the empty desert burned under a raging sun, but beyond the gentle enclosing waterfall stands of elm and oak and maple billowed like deciduous cumuli. Buick removed the homespun shirt, his sacred number, 66, patched on front and back, and wrapped it around the lock of his musket, held muzzle downward against the fine, mistlike rain. He felt drunk and giddy with so much unfamiliar greenness.

At the edge of the woods were fruit orchards and a snarl of blackberry brambles in the open clearing. The Nomad crouched behind a tree trunk, smelling the sweetness of windfalls fermenting in the wet grass. With the musket cradled in his arms, Buick rolled onto his stomach, head low as he began to crawl. Through the even rows of trees, beyond the surrounding gardens, he saw the turreted rooftop where a disk-mounted sound-intensifier began to pivot.

In the library, a tall Hepplewhite pendulum clock with hanging brass weights and the phases of the moon in a hand-painted procession around the age-stained pasteboard face chimed the hour. Par Sondak closed the volume of Gibbon; at the sideboard, he filled a tulip-shaped glass with blackberry brandy distilled from fruit he had picked himself. He remembered the thorn scratches on his soft white hands with considerable pride. What would they say in the City about such hands, berry-stained and bleeding, hands that had done work?

As a rule, the Dreamer wandered naked in the house, adding only a conical hat to protect his tender scalp from the sun in the gardens; but, for the library, he wore a long, shot-silk gown, cut in the flowing style of a medieval cassock. The current fashion for men in the City, ballooning knee-britches and short metal-scaled vests, struck Sondak as ridiculous, like the costumes trained bears wore in the ancient circuses. He thought of the portly Gibbon, unable to rise from his knees after proposing marriage; could his own age boast such a droll genius? Was there someone to record the decline and fall of the Utopian Era?

The computer interrupted the Dreamer’s musing. “Excuse me, sir,” the modulated, unhurried voice never varied; the computer announced good news and bad alike with the same laconic indifference. “The sensors report the presence of an intruder on the grounds. A Nomad, sir.”

“Where is he now?”

“The last fix placed him on the edge of the south orchard.”

“Have the arrangements all been made?” “Everything according to your specifications.”

“Good.” The Dreamer finished his brandy in a single swallow. “Very good. It’s only a matter of time and he’s ours. See if you can pick him up on holo; I want to watch from the control room.” Sondak’s face was flushed. He left the library, lifting the skirt of his long gown above his ankles like an anxious priest as he hurried up the gleaming corridor.

Buick kneeled beside the base of one of a dozen fluted marble columns surrounding an ornamental pond. Only a broad swath of immaculate green lawn separated his hiding-place from the curving crystal and silver minarets of the house. He never planned on coming this far. Simply to have stolen some fruit would have been sufficient triumph; to risk this much was madness. But Buick was following a scent which lured him still, past any thought of danger. He was intoxicated by the wind-borne aroma of roasting meat. Now he was close enough to hear the sizzle of melting fat and see pennants of white smoke reaching through the rain from below the circular terrace.

Buick covered the distance to the stairs in five long strides, nearly slipping on the wet flagstones before he reached the shelter of a carved balustrade. He started down, one step at a time, his back pressed against the rough ashlar masonry of the terrace wall. At the bottom, out of sight of the house, stood a hidden pavilion and under the blue and gold awnings, a spitted calf turned, glazed and dripping, over a bed of coals.

Of all the wonders seen today, the splendor of food in such profusion was by far the most magical and bewitching. The Nomad wandered spellbound in front of a long cloth-covered table, trying to associate trout jellied in aspic, terrine of pheasant, grilled spring lamb, fruit heaped on silver platters with his own memories of eating roots and porridge, when a bit of dog or an occasional rat trapped among the grainsacks was a prize addition to the stewpot.

The rain whispered against the taut canopy of the pavilion; the coals hissed and snapped. Buick waited, barely moving. There wasn’t much time. The banquet table was prepared, the guests must not be far behind. Although his every instinct told him to hurry, Buick approached the feast with the dignity of an invited God.

A hind-quarter from the broiled calf stood on a thick wooden salver. The Nomad leaned his musket against the table and cut a slice with a surgically keen carving-knife. He had never tasted anything so good. He would take as much meat as he could carry. The knife, too. It was a beautiful knife; no one else in the clan owned such a knife. He leaned forward and cut another slice.