The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (17 page)

Anna thought back to that first night of the street dancers. So
that
was why his green and purple polka dot academic gown had first seemed white!

At his gesture, she stopped and stood with her humped back barely touching the mass of scented buds. The arched entrance was a scant hundred yards to her right. Out in the Via an ominous silence
seemed to be gathering. The Security men were probably roping off the area, certain of their quarry. In a minute or two, perhaps sooner, they would be at the archway, guns drawn.

She inhaled deeply and wet her lips.

The man smiled. “You hope I know what I’m doing, don’t you? So do I.”

“I think I understand your theory,” said Anna, “but I don’t think it has much chance of working.”

“Tush, child.” He studied the vigorous play of the fountain speculatively. “The pigment should never harangue the artist. You’re forgetting that there isn’t really
such a color as white. The pointillists knew how to simulate white with alternating dots of primary colors long before the scientists learned to spin the same colors on a disc. And those old
masters could even make white from just two colors: a primary and its complementary color. Your green dress is our primary; Violet’s purple dress is its complementary. Funny, mix ’em as
pigments into a homogeneous mass, and you get brown. But daub ’em on the canvas side by side, stand back the right distance, and they blend into white. All you have to do is hold Vi’s
dress at arm’s length, at your side, with a strip of rosebuds and green leaves looking out between, and you’ll have that white rose you came here in search of.”

She demurred: “But the angle of visual interruption won’t be small enough to blend the colors into white, even if the police don’t come any nearer than the archway. The eye
sees two objects as one only when the visual angle between the two is less than sixty seconds of arc.”

“That old canard doesn’t apply too strictly to colors. The artist relies more on the suggestibility of the mind rather than on the mechanical limitations of the retina. Admittedly,
if our lean-jawed friends stared in your direction for more than a fraction of a second, they’d see you not as a whitish blur, but as a woman in green holding out a mass of something purple.
But they aren’t going to give your section of the park more than a passing glance.” He pointed past the fountain toward the opposite horn of the semi-circular path. “I’m
going to stand over
there
, and the instant someone sticks his head in through the archway, I’m going to start walking. Now, as every artist knows, normal people in western cultures
absorb pictures from left to right, because they’re laevo-dextro readers. So our agent’s first glance will be toward you, and then his attention will be momentarily distracted by the
fountain in the centre. And before he can get back to you, I’ll start walking, and his eyes will have to come on to me. His attentive transition, of course, must be sweeping and imperative,
yet so smooth, so subtle, that he will suspect no control. Something like Alexander’s painting,
Lady on a Couch
, where the converging stripes of the lady’s robe carry the eye
forcibly from the lower left margin to her face at the upper right.”

Anna glanced nervously toward the garden entrance, then whispered entreatingly, “Then you’d better go. You’ve got to be beyond the fountain when they look in.

He sniffed. “All right, I know when I’m not wanted. That’s the gratitude I get for making you into a rose.”

“I don’t care a tinker’s damn for a
white
rose. Scat!”

He laughed, then turned and started on around the path.

As Anna followed the graceful stride of his long legs, her face began to writhe in alternate bitterness and admiration. She groaned softly. “You –
fiend!
You gorgeous,
egotistical, insufferable, unattainable
FIEND!
You aren’t elated because you’re saving my life;
I
am just a blotch of pigment in your latest masterpiece.
I hate
you!
”

He was past the fountain now, and nearing the position he had earlier indicated.

She could see that he was looking toward the archway. She was afraid to look there.

Now he must stop and wait for his audience.

Only he didn’t. His steps actually hastened.

That meant . . .

The woman trembled, closed her eyes, and froze into a paralytic stupor through which the crunch of the man’s sandals filtered as from a great distance, muffled, mocking.

And then, from the direction of the archway, came the quiet scraping of more footsteps.

In the next split second she would know life or death.

But even now, even as she was sounding the iciest depths of her terror, her lips were moving with the clear insight of imminent death. “No, I don’t hate you. I love you, Ruy. I have
loved you from the first.”

At that instant a blue-hot ball of pain began crawling slowly up within her body, along her spine, and then outward between her shoulder blades, into her spinal hump. The intensity of that pain
forced her slowly to her knees and pulled her head back in an invitation to scream.

But no sound came from her convulsing throat.

It was unendurable, and she was fainting.

The sound of footsteps died away down the Via. At least Ruy’s ruse had worked.

And as the mounting anguish spread over her back, she understood that all sound had vanished with those retreating footsteps, forever, because she could no longer hear, nor use, her vocal
chords. She had forgotten how, but she didn’t care.

For her hump had split open, and something had flopped clumsily out of it, and she was drifting gently outward into blackness.

The glum face of Ruy Jacques peered out through the studio window into the night-awakening Via.

Before I met you, he brooded, loneliness was a magic, ecstatic blade drawn across my heart strings; it healed the severed strands with every beat, and I had all that I wanted save what I had to
have – the Red Rose. My search for that Rose alone matters! I must believe this. I must not swerve, even for the memory of you, Anna, the first of my own kind I have ever met. I must not
wonder if they killed you, nor even care. They must have killed you . . . It’s been three weeks.

Now I can seek The Rose again. Onward into loneliness.

He sensed the nearness of familiar metal behind him. “Hello, Martha,” he said, without turning. “Just get here?”

“Yes. How’s the party going?” Her voice seemed carefully expressionless.

“Fair. You’ll know more when you get the liquor bill.”

“Your ballet opens tonight, doesn’t it?” Still that studied tonelessness.

“You know damn well it doesn’t.” His voice held no rancour. “La Tanid took your bribe and left for Mexico. It’s just as well. I can’t abide a prima ballerina
who’d rather eat than dance.” He frowned slightly. Every bit of metal on the woman was singing in secret elation. She was thinking of a great triumph – something far beyond her
petty victory in wrecking his opening night. His searching mind caught hints of something intricate, but integrated, completed – and deadly. Nineteen equations. The Jacques Rosette.
Sciomnia.

“So you’ve finished your toy,” he murmured. “You’ve got what you wanted, and you think you’ve destroyed what I wanted.”

Her reply was harsh, suspicious. “How did you know, when not even Grade is sure? Yes, my weapon is finished. I can hold in one hand a thing that can obliterate your whole Via in an
instant. A city, even a continent would take but a little longer. Science versus Art! Bah! This concrete embodiment of biophysics is the answer to your puerile Renaissance – your precious
feather-bed world of music and painting! You and your kind are helpless when I and my kind choose to act. In the final analysis Science means
force –
the ability to control the minds
and bodies of men.

The shimmering surface of his mind was now catching the faintest wisps of strange, extraneous impressions, vague and disturbing, and which did not seem to originate from metal within the room.
In fact, he could not be sure they originated from metal at all.

He turned to face her. “How can Science control all men when it can’t even control individuals – Anna van Tuyl, for example?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “You’re only partly right. They failed to find her, but her escape was pure accident. In any event, she no longer represents any danger to me or to the
political group that I control. Security has actually dropped her from their shoot-on-sight docket.”

He cocked his head slightly and seemed to listen.
“You
haven’t, I gather.”

“You flatter her. She was never more than a pawn in our little game of Science versus Art. Now that she’s off the board, and I’ve announced checkmate against you, I can’t
see that she matters.”

“So Science announces checkmate? Isn’t that a bit premature? Suppose Anna shows up again, with or without the conclusion of her ballet score? Suppose we find another prima?
What’s to keep us from holding
The Nightingale and the Rose
tonight, as scheduled?”

“Nothing,” replied Martha Jacques coolly. “Nothing at all, except that Anna van Tuyl has probably joined your former prima at the South Pole by this time, and anyway, a new
ballerina couldn’t learn the score in the space of two hours, even if you found one. If this wishful thinking comforts you, why, pile it on!”

Very slowly Jacques put his wine glass on the nearby table. He washed his mind clear with a shake of his satyrish head, and strained every sense into receptivity. Something was being etched
against that slurred background of laughter and clinking glassware. Then he sensed – or heard – something that brought tiny beads of sweat to his forehead and made him tremble.

“What’s the matter with you?” demanded the woman.

As quickly as it had come, the chill was gone.

Without replying, he strode quickly into the centre of the studio.

“Fellow revellers!” he cried. “Let us prepare to double, nay, redouble our merriment!” With sardonic satisfaction he watched the troubled silence spread away from him,
faster and faster, like ripples around a plague spot.

When the stillness was complete, he lowered his head, stretched out his hand as if in horrible warning, and spoke in the tense spectral whisper of Poe’s Roderick Usher:

“Madmen! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”

Heads turned; eyes bulged toward the entrance.

There, the door knob was turning slowly.

The door swung in, and left a cloaked figure framed in the doorway.

The artist started. He had been certain that this must be Anna.

It
must
be Anna, yet it could not be. The once frail, cruelly bent body now stood superbly erect beneath the shelter of the cloak. There was no hint of spinal deformity in this woman, and
there were no marring lines of pain about her faintly smiling mouth and eyes, which were fixed on his. In one graceful motion her hands reached up beneath the cloak and set it back on her
shoulders. Then, after an almost instantaneous
demi-plié
, she floated twice, like some fragile flower dancing in a summer breeze, and stood before him
sur les pointes
, with her
cape billowing and fluttering behind her in mute encore.

Jacques looked down into eyes that were dark fires. But her continued silence was beginning to disturb and irritate him. He responded to it almost by reflex, refusing to admit to himself his
sudden enormous happiness: “A woman without a tongue! By the gods! Her sting is drawn!” He shook her by the shoulders, roughly, as though to punish this fault in her that had drawn the
familiar acid to his mouth.

Her arms moved up, cross-fashioned, and her hands covered his. She smiled, and a harp-arpeggio seemed to wing across his mind, and the tones rearranged themselves into words, like images on
water suddenly smooth:

“Hello again, darling. Thanks for being glad to see me.”

Something in him collapsed. His arms dropped and he turned his head away. “It’s no good, Anna. Why’d you come back? Everything’s falling apart. Even our ballet. Martha
bought out our prima.”

Again that lilting cascade of tones in his brain: “I know, dear, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll sub beautifully for La Tanid. I know the part perfectly. And I know The
Nightingale’s death song, too.”

“Hah!” he laughed harshly, annoyed at his exhibition of discouragement and her ready sympathy. He stretched his right leg into a mocking
pointe tendue
. “Marvellous! You
have the exact amount of drab clumsiness that we need in a Nightingale. And as for the death song, why of course you and you alone know how that ugly little bird feels when” – his eyes
were fixed on her mouth in sudden, startled suspicion, and he finished the rest of the sentence inattentively, with no real awareness of its meaning – “when she dies on the
thorn.”

As he waited, the melody formed, vanished, and reformed and resolved into the strangest thing he had ever known: “What you are thinking is true. My lips do not move. I cannot talk.
I’ve forgotten how, just as we both forgot how to read and write. But even the plainest nightingale can sing, and make the white rose red.”

This was Anna transfigured. Three weeks ago he had turned his back and left a diffident disciple to an uncertain fate. Confronting him now was this dark angel bearing on her face the luminous
stamp of death. In some manner that he might never learn, the gods had touched her heart and body, and she had borne them straightway to him.

He stood, musing in alternate wonder and scorn. The old urge to jeer at her suddenly rose in his gorge. His lips contorted, then gradually relaxed, as an indescribable elation began to grow
within him.

He could thwart Martha yet!

He leaped to the table and shouted: “Your attention, friends! In case you didn’t get all this, we’ve found a ballerina! The curtain rises tonight on our premiere performance,
as scheduled!”

Over the clapping and cheering, Dorran, the orchestra conductor, shouted: “Did I understand that Dr. van Tuyl has finished The Nightingale’s death song? We’ll have to omit that
tonight, won’t we? No chance to rehearse . . .”