An Inch of Ashes (39 page)

He looked up again, all humour gone from his eyes. That intensity was back. That driven quality.

‘And that’s your obsession, is it? Food?’

She saw at once that her joke had misfired. In this, it seemed, he was vulnerable. Wide open.

Perhaps that was what obsession was. A thing against which there was no defence. Not even humour.

So
, she thought.
And this is yours. The real.

For a time he said nothing. She watched the movement in his dark, expressive eyes. Sea moods beneath the vivid green. Surface and undertow. And then he looked out again, at her, and spoke.

‘Come with me. I want to show you something.’

Ben’s apartment was to the north of Oxford Canton, on the edge of the fashionable student district. Catherine stood there in the main room, looking about her.

‘I never imagined...’ she said softly to herself, then turned to find him there in the doorway, a wine-filled glass in each hand.

‘You’re privileged,’ he said, handing her a glass. ‘I don’t usually let anyone come here.’

She felt both pleased and piqued by that. It was hard to read what he meant by it.

It was a long, spacious room, sparsely decorated. A low sofa was set down in the middle of the plushly carpeted floor, a small, simply moulded coffee table next to it. Unlike the apartments of her friends, however, there were no paintings on the wall, no trinkets or small sculptures on the tabletop. It was neat, almost empty.

She looked about her, disappointed. She had expected something more than this. Something like Sergey’s apartment.

He had been watching her. She met his eyes and saw how he was smiling, as if he could read her thoughts. ‘It’s bleak, isn’t it? Like a set from some dreadfully tasteful drama.’

She laughed, embarrassed.

‘Oh, don’t worry. This is’ – he waved his hand in an exaggerated circle – ‘a kind of mask. A front. In case I had to invite someone back.’

She sipped her wine, looking at him sharply, trying to gauge what he was saying to her. ‘Well?’ she said, ‘What were you going to show me?’

He pointed across the room with his glass. There was a panel in the far wall. A sliding panel with the faint indentation of a thumb-lock.

‘The mystery revealed,’ he said. ‘Come.’

She followed, wondering why he played these games. In all else he was so direct. So much himself. Then why these tricks and evasions? What was he hiding? What afraid of?

His fingers tapped out a combination on the touch-pad. The thumb-lock glowed ready and he pressed his right thumb into the depression. The door hissed back, revealing a second room, as big as the one they were in.

She stepped through, impressed by the contrast.

For all its size it was intensely cluttered, the walls lined with shelves. In the spaces between hung prints and paintings. A small, single bed rested against the far wall, its sheets wrinkled, a simple cover drawn back. Books were piled on a bedside table and in a stack on the floor beside the bed. Real books, not tapes. Like the one he had given her. Her mouth opened in a smile of surprise and delight. But what really grabbed her attention was the apparatus in the centre of the room.

She crossed the room and stood beside it.

‘Is this what you do?’ she asked, feeling the machine tremble, its delicate limbs quivering beneath her touch.

The scaffolding of the machine was laced with fine wires, like a cradle. Inside lay a life-size marionette, a mock human, no features on its face, its palms smooth and featureless. The morph was like the machine, almost alive, tremblingly responsive to her touch. Its white, almost translucent surfaces reflected the ceiling light in flashes and sparkles.

It was beautiful. Was a work of art in itself.

‘Does it do anything?’

‘By itself, no. But, yes, in a sense it’s what I do.’

She looked quickly at him, then back at the machine, remembering what Sergey had said about him being a technician – a scientist. But how did that equate with what he knew about art? All that intuitive, deeply won knowledge of his? She frowned, trying to understand; trying to fit it all together. She looked down at the base of the machine, seeing the thick width of tape coiled about the spools, like some crude relic from the technological past. She had never seen anything like it.

She circled the machine, trying to comprehend its function. Failing.

‘What
is
this?’ she said finally, looking back at him.

He stood on the other side of the machine, looking at her through the fragile scaffolding, the fine web of wiring.

‘It’s what I brought you here to see.’

He was smiling, but behind the smile she could sense the intensity of his mood. This was important to him. For some reason very important.

‘Will you trust me, Catherine? Will you do something for me?’

She stared back at him, trying to read him, but it was impossible. He was not like the others. It was hard to tell what he wanted, or why. For a moment she hesitated, then nodded, barely moving her head, seeing how much he had tensed, expecting another answer.

He turned away momentarily, then turned back, the excitement she had glimpsed earlier returned to his eyes, but this time encompassing her, drawing her into its spell.

‘It’s marvellous. The best thing I’ve done. You wait. You’ll see just how marvellous. How
real
.’

There was a strange, almost childish quality in his voice – an innocence – which shocked her. He was so open at that moment. So completely vulnerable. She looked at him with eyes newly opened to the complexity of this strange young man. To the forces in contention in his nature.

Strangely, it made her want to hold him to her breast, as a mother would hold her infant child. And yet at the same time she wanted him, with a fierceness that made her shiver, afraid for herself.

Ben stood at the head of the frame, looking down at her. Catherine lay on her back, naked, her eyes closed, the lids flickering. Her breasts rose and fell gently, as if she slept, her red hair laid in fine, red-gold strands across her cheeks, her neck.

Stirrups supported her body, but her neck was encased in a rigid cradle, circled with sensitive filaments of ice, making it seem as if her head were caged in shards of glass. A fine mesh of wires fanned out from the narrow band at the base of her skull, running down the length of her body, strips of tape securing the tiny touch-sensitive pads to her flesh at regular intervals. Eighty-one connections in all, more than half of those directly into the skull.

The morph lay on the bed, inert. Ben glanced at its familiar shape and smiled. It was almost time.

He looked down at the control desk. Eight small screens crowded the left-hand side of the display, each containing the outline image of a skull. Just now they flickered through a bright sequence of primaries, areas of each image growing then receding.

Beneath the frame a tape moved slowly between the reels. It was a standard work – an original
pai pi
, but spliced at its end was the thing he had been working on – the new thing he was so excited about. He watched the images flicker, the tape uncoil and coil again, then looked back at the girl.

There was a faint movement in her limbs; a twitching of the muscles where the pads were pressed against the nerve-centres. It was vestigial, but it could be seen. Weeks of such ghost movement would cause damage, some of it irreparable. And addicts had once spent months in their Shells.

The tracking signal appeared on each of the eight small screens. Fifteen seconds to the splice. He watched the dark mauve areas peak on six of the screens, then fade as the composition ended. For a moment there was no activity, then the splice came in, with a suddenness that showed on all the screens.

According to the screens, Catherine had woken up. Her eyes were open and she was sitting up, looking about her. Yet in the frame the girl slept on, her lidded eyes unmoving, her breasts rising and falling in a gentle motion. The faint tremor in her limbs had ceased. She was still now, perfectly at rest.

The seconds passed slowly, a countdown on the top right screen showing when the splice ended.

He smiled and watched her open her eyes, then go to shake her head and raise her hands. Wires were in her way, restraining her. She looked confused, for a brief moment troubled. Then she saw him and relaxed.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

Her eyes looked back questioningly at him. Green eyes, the same deep shade of green as his own. She looked quite beautiful, lying there. It was strange how he had not noticed it before. That he had
seen
it and yet not noted it.

‘I don’t understand...’ she began. ‘I woke up and you were sitting next to me at the Café Burgundy. I’d had too much to drink and I’d fallen asleep. I... I had been dreaming. We were talking... something about colours... and then I turned and looked across at the pagoda. You said something about all the birds escaping, and, yes, there, across The Green, I could see that it was so. There were birds flying everywhere. They’d broken out of their cage. Then, as I watched, one flew right at me, its wings brushing against my face even though I moved my head aside to avoid it. You were laughing. I turned and saw that you had caught the bird in your hands. I reached across and...’

She stopped, her brow wrinkling, her eyes looking inward, trying to fathom what had happened.

‘And?’

She looked straight at him. ‘And then I woke up again. I was here.’ She tried to shake her head and was again surprised to find it encased, her movements restrained. She stared at the webbing trailing from her neck, as if it should dissolve, then turned, looking back at him.

‘I shouldn’t be here, should I? I mean, I woke up once, didn’t I? So this...’ confusion flickered in her face and her voice dropped to an uncertain whisper, ‘this must be a tape.’

He smiled. ‘Good,’ he said softly. ‘That’s just what I wanted to hear.’

He moved around her and began to unfasten the connections, working quickly, methodically, his touch as sure and gentle as a surgeon’s.

‘I don’t follow you, Ben. Which was which? I mean, this is real now, isn’t it? But that part in the Café...’

He looked down into her face, only a hand’s width from his own.

‘That was the tape. My tape. The thing I’ve been working on these last four months.’

She laughed, still not understanding. ‘What do you mean, your tape?’

He unclipped the band and eased it back, freeing her neck. ‘Just what I said.’ He began to massage her neck muscles, knowing from experience what she would be feeling with the restraint gone. ‘I made it. All that part about the Café.’

She looked up at him, her head turned so that she could see him properly, her nose wrinkled up. ‘But you can’t have. People don’t make tapes. At least, not like that. Not on their own. That thing before... that cartoon-like thing. That was a
pai pi
, wasn’t it? I’ve heard of them. They used to have dozens of people working on them. Hundreds sometimes.’

‘So I’ve been told.’

He moved behind her, operating the stirrup controls, lowering her slowly to the floor. Then he climbed into the frame above her, untaping the lines of wire and releasing the pads from her flesh one by one, massaging the released flesh gently to stimulate the circulation, every action of his carried out meticulously, as if long rehearsed.

‘I don’t like teams,’ he said, not looking at her. Then, squatting, he freed the twin pads from her nipples, gently rubbing them with his thumbs. They rose, aroused by his touch, but he had moved on, working down her body, freeing her from the harness.

‘I set myself a problem. Years ago. I’d heard about
pai pi
and the restrictions of the form, but I guess I realized even then that it didn’t have to be like that. Their potential was far beyond what anyone had ever thought it could be.’

‘I still don’t follow you, Ben. You’re not making sense.’

She was leaning up on her elbows now, staring at him. His hand rested on the warmth of her inner thigh, passive, indifferent to her, it seemed. She was still confused. It had been so real. Waking, and then waking again. And now this. Ben, crouched above her, his hand resting on her inner thigh, talking all this nonsense about what everyone knew had been a technological dead-end. She shook her head.

His eyes focused on her. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I still don’t understand you, Ben. It
was
real. I
know
it was. The bird flying at me across The Green, the smell of coffee and cigars. That faint breeze you always get sitting there. You know, the way the air circulates from the tunnels at the back. And other things, too.’

She had closed her eyes, remembering.

‘The faint buzz of background conversation. Plates and glasses clinking. The faint hum of the factories far below in the stack. That constant vibration that’s there in everything.’ She opened her eyes and looked at him pleadingly. ‘It
was
real, Ben. Tell me it was.’

He looked back at her, shaking his head. ‘No. That was all on the tape.’

‘No!’ She shook her head fiercely. ‘I mean, I saw you there. Sitting there across from me. It
was
you. I know it was. You said...’ She strained to remember, then nodded to herself. ‘You said that I shouldn’t be afraid of them. You said that it was their instinct to fly.’

‘I said that once, yes. But not to you. And not in the Café Burgundy.’

She sat up, her hands grabbing at his arms, feeling the smooth texture of the cloth, then reaching up to touch his face, feeling the roughness of his cheeks where he had yet to shave. Again he laughed, but softly now.

‘You can’t tell, can you? Which is real. This or the other thing. And yet you’re here, Catherine. Here, with me. Now.’

She looked at him a moment longer, then tore her gaze away, frightened and confused.

‘That before,’ he said, ‘that thing you thought happened. That was a fiction. My fiction. It never happened.
I made it
.’

He reached out, holding her chin with one hand, gently turning her face until she was looking at him again. ‘But this... this is real. This now.’ He moved his face down to hers, brushing her lips with his own.