The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (77 page)

Suddenly they were whirling with an unbelievable speed, and the gelatins rotated faster and faster.

Render shook his head to clear it.

They were moving so rapidly that they
had
to fall – human or robot. But they didn’t. They were a mandala. They were a gray form uniformity. Render looked down.

Then slowing, and slower, slower. Stopped.

The music stopped.

Blackness followed. Applause filled it.

When the lights came on again the two robots were standing statue-like, facing the audience. Very, very slowly, they bowed.

The applause increased.

Then they turned and were gone.

The music came on and the light was clear again. A babble of voices arose. Render slew the Kraken.

“What d’you think of that?” she asked him.

Render made his face serious and said: “Am I a man dreaming I am a robot, or a robot dreaming I am a man?” He grinned, then added: “I don’t know.”

She punched his shoulder gaily at that and he observed that she was drunk.

“I am not,” she protested. “Not much, anyhow. Not as much as you.”

“Still, I think you ought to see a doctor about it. Like me. Like now. Let’s get out of here and go for a drive.”

“Not yet, Charlie. I want to see them once more, huh? Please?”

“If I have another drink I won’t be able to see that far.”

“Then order a cup of coffee.”

“Yaagh!”

“Then order a beer.”

“I’ll suffer without.”

There were people on the dance floor now, but Render’s feet felt like lead. He lit a cigarette.

“So you had a dog talk to you today?”

“
Yes
. Something very disconcerting about that . . .”

“Was she pretty?”

“It was a boy dog. And boy, was he ugly!”

“Silly. I mean his mistress.”

“You know I never discuss cases, Jill.”

“You told me about her being blind and about the dog. All I want to know is if she’s pretty.”

“Well . . . Yes and no.” He bumped her under the table and gestured vaguely. “Well, you know . . .”

“Same thing all the way around,” she told the waiter who had appeared suddenly out of an adjacent pool of darkness, nodded, and vanished as abruptly.

“There go my good intentions,” sighed Render. “See how you like being examined by a drunken sot, that’s all I can say.”

“You’ll sober up fast, you always do. Hippocratics and all that.”

He sniffed, glanced at his watch.

“I have to be in Connecticut tomorrow. Pulling Pete out of that damned school . . .”

She sighed, already tired of the subject.

“I think you worry too much about him. Any kid can bust an ankle. It’s part of growing up. I broke my wrist when I was seven. It was an accident. It’s not the school’s
fault, those things sometimes happen.”

“Like hell,” said Render, accepting his dark drink from the dark tray the dark man carried. “If they can’t do a good job, I’ll find someone who can.”

She shrugged.

“You’re the boss. All I know is what I read in the papers.

“ – And you’re still set on Davos, even though you know you meet a better class of people at Saint Moritz?” she added.

“We’re going there to ski, remember? I like the runs better at Davos.”

“I can’t score any tonight, can I?”

He squeezed her hand.

“You always score with me, honey.”

And they drank their drinks and smoked their cigarettes and held their hands until the people left the dance floor and filed back to their microscopic tables, and the gelatins spun round and
round, tinting clouds of smoke from hell to sunrise and back again, and the bass went
whump!

Tchga-tchga!

“Oh, Charlie! Here they come again!”

The sky was clear as crystal. The roads were clean. The snow had stopped.

Jill’s breathing was the breathing of a sleeper. The S-7 raced across the bridges of the city. If Render sat very still he could convince himself that only his body was drunk; but whenever
he moved his head the universe began to dance about him. As it did so, he imagined himself within a dream, and Shaper of it all.

For one instant this was true. He turned the big clock in the sky backward, smiling as he dozed. Another instant and he was awake again, and unsmiling.

The universe had taken revenge for his presumption. For one reknown moment with the helplessness which he had loved beyond helping, it had charged him the price of the lake-bottom vision once
again; and as he had moved once more toward the wreck at the bottom of the world – like a swimmer, as unable to speak – he heard, from somewhere high over the Earth, and filtered down
to him through the waters above the Earth, the howl of the Fenris Wolf as it prepared to devour the moon; and as this occurred, he knew that the sound was as like to the trump of a judgment as the
lady by his side was unlike the moon. Every bit. In all ways. And he was afraid.

“. . . The plain, the direct, and the blunt. This is Winchester Cathedral,” said the guidebook. “With its floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge tree
trunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces: the ceilings are flat; each bay, separated by those shafts, is itself a thing of certainty and stability. It seems, indeed, to reflect
something of the spirit of William the Conqueror. Its disdain of mere elaboration and its passionate dedication to the love of another world would make it seem, too, an appropriate setting for some
tale out of Mallory . . .”

“Observe the scalloped capitals,” said the guide. “In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif. . .”

“Faugh!” said Render – softly though, because he was in a group inside a church.

“Shh!” said Jill (Fotlock – that was her real last name) DeVille.

But Render was impressed as well as distressed.

Hating Jill’s hobby, though, had become so much of a reflex with him that he would sooner have taken his rest seated beneath an oriental device which dripped water onto his head than to
admit he occasionally enjoyed walking through the arcades and the Calleries, the passages and the tunnels, and getting all out of breath climbing up the high twisty stairways of towers.

So he ran his eyes over everything, burned everything down by shutting them, then built the place up again out of the still smouldering ashes of memory, all so that at a later date he would be
able to repeat the performance, offering the vision to his one patient who could see only in this manner. This building he disliked less than most. Yes, he would take it back to her.

The camera in his mind photographing the surroundings, Render walked with the others, overcoat over his arm, his fingers anxious to reach after a cigarette. He kept busy ignoring his guide,
realizing this to be the nadir of all forms of human protest. As he walked through Winchester he thought of his last two sessions with Eileen Shallot. He recalled his almost unwilling Adam-attitude
as he had named all the animals passing before them, led of course by the
one
she had wanted to see, colored fearsome by his own unease. He had felt pleasantly bucolic after boning up on an
old Botany text and then proceeding to Shape and name the flowers of the fields.

So far they had stayed out of the cities, far away from the machines. Her emotions were still too powerful at the sight of the simple, carefully introduced objects to risk plunging her into so
complicated and chaotic a wilderness yet; he would build her city slowly.

Something passed rapidly, high above the cathedral, uttering a sonic boom. Render took Jill’s hand in his for a moment and smiled as she looked up at him. Knowing she verged upon beauty,
Jill normally took great pains to achieve it. But today her hair was simply drawn back and knotted behind her head, and her lips and her eyes were pale; and her exposed ears were tiny and white and
somewhat pointed.

“Observe the scalloped capitals,” he whispered. “In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif.”

“Faugh!” said she.

“Shh!” said a sunburned little woman nearby, whose face seemed to crack and fall back together again as she pursed and unpursed her lips.

Later as they strolled back toward their hotel, Render said, “Okay on Winchester?”

“Okay on Winchester.”

“Happy?”

“Happy.”

“Good, then we can leave this afternoon.”

“All right.”

“For Switzerland . . .”

She stopped and toyed with a button on his coat.

“Couldn’t we just spend a day or two looking at some old chateaux first? After all, they’re just across the channel, and you could be sampling all the local wines while I
looked . . .”

“Okay,” he said.

She looked up – a trifle surprised.

“What? No argument?” she smiled. “Where is your fighting spirit? – to let me push you around like this?”

She took his arm then and they walked on as he said, “Yesterday, while we were Calloping about in the innards of that old castle, I heard a weak moan, and then a voice cried out,
‘For the love of God, Montresor!’ I think it was my fighting spirit, because I’m certain it was my voice. I’ve given up
der Geist der stets verneint. Pax vobiscum!
Let us be gone to France.
Alors!
”

“Dear Rendy, it’ll only be another day or two . . .”

“Amen,” he said, “though my skis that were waxed are already waning.”

So they did that, and on the morn of the third day, when she spoke to him of castles in Spain, he reflected aloud that while psychologists drink and only grow angry, psychiatrists have been
known to drink, grow angry, and break things. Construing this as a veiled threat aimed at the Wedgewoods she had collected, she acquiesced to his desire to go skiing.

Free! Render almost screamed it.

His heart was pounding inside his head. He leaned hard. He cut to the left. The wind strapped at his face; a shower of ice crystals, like bullets of emery, fled by him, scraped against his
cheek.

He was moving. Aye – the world had ended as Weissflujoch, and Dorftali led down and away from this portal.

His feet were two gleaming rivers which raced across the stark, curving plains; they could not be frozen in their course. Downward. He flowed. Away from all the rooms of the world. Away from the
stifling lack of intensity, from the day’s hundred spoon-fed welfares, from the killing pace of the forced amusements that hacked at the Hydra, leisure; away.

And as he fled down the run he felt a strong desire to look back over his shoulder, as though to see whether the world he had left behind and above had set one fearsome embodiment of itself,
like a shadow, to trail along after him, hunt him down and drag him back to a warm and well-lit coffin in the sky, there to be laid to rest with a spike of aluminum driven through his will and a
garland of alternating currents smothering his spirit.

“I hate you,” he breathed between clenched teeth, and the wind carried the words back; and he laughed then, for he always analyzed his emotions, as a matter of reflex; and he added,
“Exit Orestes, mad, pursued by the Furies . . .”

After a time the slope leveled out and he reached the bottom of the run and had to stop.

He smoked one cigarette then and rode back up to the top so that he could come down it again for nontherapeutic reasons.

That night he sat before a fire in the big lodge, feeling its warmth soaking into his tired muscles. Jill massaged his shoulders as he played Rorschach with the flames, and he
came upon a blazing goblet which was snatched away from him in the same instant by the sound of his name being spoken somewhere across the Hall of the Nine Hearths.

“Charles Render!” said the voice (only it sounded more like “Sharlz Runder”), and his head instantly jerked in that direction, but his eyes danced with too many
afterimages for him to isolate the source of the calling.

“Maurice?” he queried after a moment. “Bartelmetz?”

“Aye,” came the reply, and then Render saw the familiar grizzled visage, set neckless and balding above the red and blue shag sweater that was stretched mercilessly about the
wine-keg rotundity of the man who now picked his way in their direction, deftly avoiding the strewn crutches and the stacked skis and the people who, like Jill and Render, disdained sitting in
chairs.

Render stood, stretching, and shook hands as he came upon them.

“You’ve put on more weight,” Render observed. “That’s unhealthy.”

“Nonsense, it’s all muscle. How have you been, and what are you up to these days?” He looked down at Jill and she smiled back at him.

“This is Miss DeVille,” said Render.

“Jill,” she acknowledged.

He bowed slightly, finally releasing Render’s aching hand.

“. . . And this is Professor Maurice Bartelmetz of Vienna,” finished Render, “a benighted disciple of all forms of dialectical pessimism, and a very distinguished pioneer in
neuroparticipation – although you’d never guess it to look at him. I had the good fortune to be his pupil for over a year.”

Bartelmetz nodded and agreed with him, taking in the Schnapsflasche Render brought forth from a small plastic bag, and accepting the collapsible cup which he filled to the brim.

“Ah, you are a good doctor still,” he sighed. “You have diagnosed the case in an instant and you make the proper prescription. Nozdrovia!”

“Seven years in a gulp,” Render acknowledged, refilling their glasses.

“Then we shall make time more malleable by sipping it.”

They seated themselves on the floor, and the fire roared up through the great brick chimney as the logs burned themselves back to branches, to twigs, to thin sticks, ring by yearly ring.

Render replenished the fire.

“I read your last book,” said Bartelmetz finally, casually, “about four years ago.”

Render reckoned that to be correct.

“Are you doing any research work these days?”

Render poked lazily at the fire.

“Yes,” he answered, “sort of.”

He glanced at Jill, who was dozing with her cheek against the arm of the huge leather chair that held his emergency bag, the planes of her face all crimson and flickering shadow.