The Man Who Melted (5 page)

“Carl is not staying,” Mantle said.

“I think, perhaps, I'd better leave,” Pretre said curtly. “Another time.”

“Oh, no, Francois,” Joan said, taking Pretre's arm. “Stay, please.” They made an odd couple: straight, stiff, squarely cut, and uncomfortable Pretre; and Joan, who was tiny, with short-cropped hair, pale, full face, and an air of casual Midwestern sureness, if not sophistication. “Carl is a friend of Ray's. It will be all right, I pledge so.”

Pretre seemed to relax a bit. He looked coyly at Mantle and said, “I do not know your Raymond, except for a momentary glimpse.” It suddenly occurred to Mantle that, like Joan, Pretre was a poseur: the mock motions of fluttering and business, the ill-fitting, crinkle-neat uniform of the obedient convert were all protective guises. He suddenly saw Pretre as a survivor of the riots and burnings and camps.

“Joan, I want to speak with you for a moment,” Mantle said, and he nodded to Pretre and left him standing awkwardly before Pfeiffer.

“You should not have come here.”

“But I wanted to be with you, to share the past, to help you find it,” she said, looking earnestly up at him. “You'll be different after you plug-into the Crier, and I want to be there to begin with you anew.”

“You should have told me what you are. Liar.”

“You weren't ready, and—can't you see?—I'm telling you now, just by being here, everything I've done—”

It was too late. “Does Pretre know why I want to plug-into a Screamer?”

Joan shrugged, her only affectation, and said, “Yes, I told him you are obsessed with the past; that—”

“It was a setup. From the beginning.”

“There was no other way to do it. And it was what
you
wanted.” It was to Joan's credit that she did not shrink from Mantle's stare. Poseur, he thought. User. Of course, subliminal engineers were always in demand, and most churches were evangelistic. Joan had done her homework. Well, he thought. It's fair. Mutual using.

“I don't want you along,” Mantle said firmly.

“I do love you,” Joan said, and, irrationally, Mantle believed her. But Joan was not Josiane. “We both have conflicting loyalties,” she continued, “and secrets to be shared. But don't shut me out, not now, I came to help you, perhaps plug-in and share—”

“You can help me by getting Pfeiffer out of my hair.”

“I don't think Pretre would permit that.” Her voice lowered in register, becoming flat, cold. “He knows that plugging in could be dangerous for you.”

“For
me
?” Mantle asked.

“Well,” she said, shrugging again, then looking at him directly, defiantly, “you
have
admitted to right-brain tendencies…. I'm sorry, Ray. Let's stop this right now. Please, I want to be with you. It's no trick of the church.”

“Is there anything you haven't told Pretre?”

“No,” she said, and accepting the inevitable, turned to Pfeiffer. “Carl, would you like to accompany me to my club for a drink while these two attend to their business?” Pretre gave her a nasty look; unmindful, she took Pfeiffer's arm. Pfeiffer, who seemed interested in Joan, started to say something to Mantle, but thought better of it and said, “All right, but I think we should meet later.”

You won't want to see me later, Mantle thought. He nodded and told them he would join them at the club or her apartment later if he could, although he had no intention of doing so. They didn't need him around to have sex. Mantle looked at Joan. There was a momentary awkwardness, shared sadness and regret, and then she and Pfeiffer left arm in arm, swallowed into the happy crowd as the old-fashioned fireworks boomed and spiraled in the windy air above.

Pretre silently led the way to the nearest transpod station. As they walked, the fireworks died away and the entire quay as far as La Castre became a huge videotecture. Lasers recreated the interior of Amiens Cathedral, which had been destroyed by terrorists; imaginary naves and chapels floated, as if in God's thoughts, above the Festival. People passed through the aisles and holy walls of the holographic structure like angels moving to and fro in heavenly reverie. The crowd was thick near the transpod station, everyone howling and halooing. As if on cue, hawkers appeared everywhere, selling their wares: holy inhalors with a touch of the dust of Palestine, shards of the true cross, magical silver amulets, and bone fragments of the true Christ. There was even an old woman dressed in rags selling dates, halvah, and plastic phylacteries.

It certainly was like the old days, Mantle thought.

“Come on, hurry,” Pretre said, obviously disgusted with the goings-on around him. A car was waiting inside the small, glassite station, and a transpod rut descended into the ground a few meters away. The transpod looked like a translucent egg; it was computer controlled and driven by a propulsion system built into the narrow rut.

Pretre punched in the coordinates, opaqued the walls for privacy, and with a slight jar, they were off.

“Where is the ceremony taking place?” Mantle asked after a few moments to break the awkward silence. Pretre seemed to be lost in contemplation, as if he were deciding whether to take Mantle to the funeral after all.

“Near Plage du Dramont,” Pretre said, “South of here.”

A long pause, and then Mantle asked, “Has Joan told you why I want to attend the ceremony?”

“Yes,” Pretre said matter-of-factly. “She told me of your lost wife, Josiane. A terrible thing, but a common problem these days.”

“If you know that, why are you taking me to the ceremony?”

“So that you can see and believe that, but by the grace of our Screamers, as you call them, we have not only found a new faith, but another, higher form of consciousness,” Pretre said.

“And if I remain an unbeliever?”

Pretre shrugged. “Then at least you will owe us a favor. Perhaps you will regain your memory, perhaps not. Perhaps this dying Crier can take you to your wife's thoughts, perhaps not. But I'm reasonably certain that you would not want to make public what you see tonight, as we could certainly affect your position with the newsfax. Given your previous record and your incarceration after you left New York…”

Mantle held back his anger; it would not do to spoil his chance at a plug-in now.

“We still have a bit of a ride,” Pretre said. “If you like, I can give you a blow-job.” That was said in his matter-of-fact voice, which was now without a trace of an accent.

“Why did you bring Joan?” Mantle asked, ignoring Pretre's polite suggestion.

“That was for your own safety. It was her suggestion—she's concerned for you. You know the chances of getting lost in another's mind, or you should. You might become a Crier yourself.” Pretre smiled, enjoying the irony. “The presence of a familiar, sympathetic mind could help you, should you lapse into fugue. Now you take your chances. Whatever you might think of Joan now, she does love you, and has for quite some time. Of that I can assure you. I thought you treated her rather badly. Of course, that's none of my business….”

“That's right,” Mantle said. “It isn't.” But Pretre was right: Mantle had treated her badly. He had always treated her badly. And now he was afraid of being alone. Suddenly, everything seemed hard, metallic, hollow. Mantle remembered his first experience with enlightenment drugs; how the trip reversed and he scammed down into the stinking bowels of his mind, through the hard tunnels of thought where everything was dead and leaden.

He might become lost inside the Screamer and still not find Josiane. At the thought, his insides seemed to open up, his heart began to pound, and he had a sudden rush of claustrophobia. Where was Joan to protect him…?

“If you don't mind, I'm going to transparent the walls,” he told Pretre as he pressed the appropriate stud.

“Are you all right?” Pretre asked.

“A touch of motion sickness, that's all.”

They were above-ground now, near the city's edge. In a cold sweat, Mantle watched the tiers of fenestrated glasstex whiz past, studded with sunlights. The city blazed like noon under a night sky. A few moments later, they were rushing through darkness again, along the coast, through the ribbon of country. City lights were a mushroom glow behind them, stars blinked wanly overhead. Mantle's claustrophobia was replaced by vertigo.

“Some of the Esterel is still untouched by the cities,” Pretre said, staring eastward in the direction of the ocean. “This used to be a beautiful country, full of flowers and grass and cathedrals.”

Mantle smiled (did Pretre think cathedrals grew out of the ground like orange trees?), and then remembered his own country, remembered Binghamton and its hilly surrounds. As a boy, he had vision-quested for four days and three nights atop a hill near his home. How different that had been from his experience with enlightenment drugs. But that was a lifetime ago, before new Route 17 and the furious urbanization around the mechanized highway. That old vision-quest hill had been leveled as if it had never been. But the movement of the transpod calmed him, and Mantle fancied that he was a passenger on an old railroad train—he was riding the ancient Phoebe Snow, and he was heading into Binghamton.

Just then Pretre unnerved him by asking, “Your original home is Binghamton, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Mantle replied, wondering for an instant if Pretre had read his mind. Coincidence, and his thoughts turned to Joan. She had told Pretre everything, he knew that. She was probably sitting down at a table with Pfeiffer at her club right now. He imagined that Pfeiffer would be holding forth about poor Raymond, what a waste, and Joan would listen intently and nod her head. Later, she would take him home to bed.

Until now, Mantle hadn't been possessive with Joan; he had not had those feelings since Josiane. Joan had always had other relationships, and Mantle even encouraged them.

It was Pfeiffer. He could not imagine her wanting to have Pfeiffer. The fat fucking fisherman! But that was another deception, and Mantle new it. He was simply afraid of losing her. It was the old, old anxiety surfacing.

Well, fuck her, he thought. She was loving me for the church. I must have sensed it, he told himself. Maybe that's why we made love so rarely. He felt himself getting an erection. Now he wanted her when it was too late.

“You look nervous, my friend,” Pretre said. “Would you like a tranquilizer? It will calm you, but not affect your thinking. And it will wear off by the time we reach the beach.” Pretre was staring at him intently, which did make Mantle nervous.

“No, thank you,” Mantle said as he looked at the dark shapes and shadows whisking past like specters in a dream of falling. “I don't take any drugs if I can help it.”

“Ah, since your incarceration, perhaps?”

“It has nothing to do with that.” You faggot sonofabitch, Mantle thought. He still had an erection.

Pretre took another tack. His voice became louder, more hollow-sounding and the accent returned. “Binghamton was blessed with Criers, wasn't it? Consumed, as it were, by the Singing Crowds.”

Mantle grimaced as he remembered returning to his old neighborhood, which had been ravaged by the Screamer mobs. They had killed his mother in her bed. Yes, he thought, again feeling a rush of anxiety and guilt, Binghamton was certainly blessed.

“But that should not have happened,” Pretre continued, “because according to your theorists, the population density was nowhere near Beshefe's limit. Beshefe was his name, I think.” The sarcasm in his voice was as thick as his accent.

“People become Screamers as a reaction to stress,” Mantle said. “There are many ways to measure social stress, all approximations. Beshefe was a social scientist, not a physicist.”

“Do you also believe our Criers are just schizophrenics?” Pretre asked. “Joan once believed that.” He smiled, obviously toying with Mantle, who was in no mood for it.

It will soon be over, he told himself, while his thoughts darted from the past to present, back and forth, like fireflies in the darkness of his memory.

He remembered his first newsfax assignment in Washington, although it was hard to imagine that there were mobs and riots before the Screamers. He had worn a riot-cowl and had packed a small stun weapon that was little more than a toy. He had been so afraid that he'd kept saying “Jesus Christ” into his recorder. He could remember it as clearly as if he were still standing there in burning College Park, choking on the stink of explosives and burned flesh, listening to people scream. Like horses, they had tried to bolt, but everyone was trapped in the crowd. He remembered Dodds, who had been standing beside him and shouting into his recorder until half his face was blown away; and how for one eternal heartbeat they had stared at each other before Dodds fell and died. In that last moment, Mantle had felt nothing but surprise. But deep inside was one thought: that it would soon be over. One way or another.

I'll find Josiane, he told himself, confirming it.

“Well?” Pretre asked. “What do you think?”

“Schizophrenia is a reaction to stress,” Mantle said. “But it's also a function of an individual's biochemistry and early environment. The Screamers are somewhat different, obviously.”

“Ah, somewhat different,” Pretre said. “Now tell me how they are different.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mantle said. “They're bicameral, they hallucinate instead of think, they're telepathic. You must know what I think about Screamers. Certainly Joan has told you. She's told you everything else.”

“She doesn't know
everything
about you.”

Mantle held back his anger; only his balled fist betrayed him. Was Pretre a Screamer? he asked himself. If not partially bicameral, he was certainly schizo—

“You probably think I'm mad, don't you?” Pretre asked as he stared vacantly ahead, his head cocked as if he were trying to hear something distant.

Mantle felt a chill. More than schizophrenic, he thought.