Cautionary Tales (2 page)

So I walked my persona to the coffin and pulled on the handle on its lid. The lid swung up and back, forming a padded horizontal table. And in the depths of the coffin lay a handsome naked human man. No pointed elven ears, no vampire fangs, no nothing supernatural. There was no doubt of this because everything was laid out to view.

“You're it?” I asked, disappointed.

“Aren't I enough?” He sat up, then lifted himself out of the coffin. He turned to bend over it, presenting me with his small bare masculine buns, and hauled the base up so that it snapped into a continuation of the padded table.

“That depends,” I said. “You must be something really special, to be Forbidden.”

“Of course I'm special,” he said. “I have remarkable lust and stamina. Get that dress off and I'll demonstrate.”

I realized that I was still in the wedding dress. “Uh, you're naked,” I said somewhat belatedly.

“Indeed. Get naked yourself, and lie on this altar of erotic expression. You and I are about to have a memorable experience.” He touched his genital, which lengthened.

I backed away, not easy with this. “I think I don't want to play anymore,” I said.

The man fixed me with a disconcerting stare. “I think you will play my game, girl. You may call me Lucifer.” His genital expanded ominously.

This was definitely alarming. I lifted my hands to the helmet, as any girl would. The helmet didn't show in the game, but the gesture was unmistakable.

“Listen, girl,” he said. “You have forsworn yourself three times to reach this chamber. You claimed to be at least eighteen, when in fact you are only ten. The arrangement by which you entered this game has no validity, because of those misrepresentations. If you quit now, you will be charged with the crime of illicit entry. a penalty fee will be assigned, and you will be arraigned for disciplinary proceedings. Not only will your family be impoverished by the assessment, you yourself may be removed from what is obviously an unsuitable home and assigned to a reform school for an indefinite period. Are you sure you want to let yourself in for that?”

I stared at him, dumbfounded as any girl would be. I did not speak, but neither did I continue my motion toward the helmet.

“You thought you couldn't get in trouble when no fees were charged?” he inquired rhetorically. “That no fees meant no record? Girl, those records are there regardless. They just aren't publicized. We can produce three game scenes showing your persona swearing that you are what you are not. You lied, girl, committing perjury, and thereby criminalized yourself. The law is now your enemy.”

I found my voice. “But I only wanted to—”

“To go where you knew you were forbidden to go. To do what was forbidden. And you did. Now you are locked into your situation as surely as your persona is locked in this chamber. You can hardly claim you weren't warned.”

I began to cry, as any girl would. “Please, I didn't mean any harm! I was just curious. Let me go, and I'll never tell.”

Lucifer smiled. “Now we are making progress. I shall be glad to let you go, and to guarantee that no news of this is ever bruited about. Your secret is safe with me. If.” He looked meaningfully at me.

I tried twice before I got the question out. “If—if what?”

“If you remove that dress and lie on this bed. There is no need for any of this to be unpleasant. Indeed, you should enjoy it.”

“But—but you want me to—to—”

“Exactly.” He fondled his member again, which was now enormous.

“But I'm only ten years old!” I wailed.

He shrugged. “So?”

“It—it's against the law.”

He laughed. “Le me clarify something for you, girl. What we do here is purely in simulation. There is no physical component. Neither of us is actually here. There is thus no violation of law. But what you have done
is
against the law. You lied to break into a game you knew was forbidden to you. You did it three times. You said you were of age, adult, and that you knew this was an adult game. And that you were sure you wished to play this game. You know that ‘adult' is a code for sexual expression. You volunteered for this, girl. Now you will get what you wished—or face the penalties for your crime. It is your choice.”

I stared at his erect member in the manner of a hapless bird at a snake. “You'll let me go? If I—?”

“I will let you go, with nothing on your record. No one will know, if you don't tell. It will be our secret.”

Still I hesitated. “How can I be sure that---?”

“Certainty is impossible, of course. Still, if you please me, I shall have no reason to do you any mischief. I will simply go on to the next innocent girl.”

“Why—why don't you get a—a woman? Wouldn't she be better? For what you want?”

“Grown women know too much. They are not innocent. Sex is just a process to them. They grow cynical. But a virginal child is something else. The experience is all the world to her. She will never forget it. That is that I crave: that first experience, that defloration of innocence. There is just nothing else like it.”

“You—you
want
a child?” I asked, appalled. “Instead of a woman?”

“Yes. Now will you come to me, understanding the nature of the deal?”

“I—don't know,” I said, my hands hovering near the helmet. “It's so awful!”

“I trust that you have considered that you will be subjected to similar indignities in reform school,” he said smoothly. “The main difference being that those are physical rather than merely in emulation. The male instructors take their pick of the girls or boys, who are completely in their power, and of course other girls have their tastes.”

“Other girls?” I asked blankly.

“You can't escape them, in the barracks. I understand the perverts work in teams, if there is resistance. One holds you down, another pries your legs apart, while a third wields the—”

“No!” I screamed, clapping my hands over my ears.

But his words came through anyway, because the ears of a persona have no physical reality; like the rest of the images, their aspects are only for convenience of orientation. “I apologize for causing you discomfort, girl. I have no wish to appall you. I merely wish to be certain you understand the alternatives. Do you?”

I stood for a moment, my eyes blank. I shuddered. Then, slowly, I pulled off my fancy dress. Persona naked, I went to the bed and lay down on it. Lucifer didn't seem to mind that I was weeping continuously as he proceeded to do with my body what pleased him, indefatigably. It was all in simulation, but the mirrors made it quite clear what was happening in great variety. I couldn't close my eyes to it; he required me to look, to see every detail. If I looked away, he did it again, and again, until I watched. Because the sound and sight was all there was; if I didn't see it, I didn't react, and he wanted the reaction of a child. I had a total course in normal and aberrant sexual expression. Every time I tried to demur, faintly, as he perpetuated some new outrage, he said that it was almost done, and reminded me of the alternative, and I let it continue. It became a dullness, a series without meaning other than amazement, horror, and disgust. I was almost beyond shock, and it showed—which was what he wanted.

At last his disgusting passions were exhausted; he had acquainted the innocent girl with so much that she would never thereafter find any novelty in any sexual act. Nothing, pleasant or unpleasant, remained to be learned. He had, as he put it, thoroughly deflowered her innocence.

I got up, put my hands to my helmet, and lifted it off my head. The game scene vanished. I blinked, reorienting to reality as I tore off my gloves and socks. I was in the bedroom of our house, and I stood beside our bed.

My husband left his portable console and stepped toward me. “Are you all right? Some of the things you were saying—”

I held up a hand in a stop gesture. “Please don't touch me,” I said. “It will be a while before I—before I'm ready for that. I'm still thinking like a ten-year-old girl, after making such an effort to identify with Nettie. Even as an adult, I found some of it mind bending. That monster had notions I never dreamed of! They
knew
she was ten.”

“They
wanted
underage girls? It wasn't just random?”

“And underage boys,” I said, my disgust brimming. “Did you get it all?”

“Completely,” he said. “Everything has been recorded. Every image, every word, every motion, every identity. I saw the indications as we locked on to the perpetrators, thanks to this special equipment, and every member of the audience who paid to watch. I believe we shall have a clean sweep of this live-action virtual porn ring, and no child will have to testify. The Interact white slavers will be finished. But of course I couldn't see the actual images while I made the electronic record. When you started crying I wasn't sure how much of it was acting. How bad was it?”

“Very bad,” I said. “A dreadful tissue of hints, distortions, threats, and outright lies, yet fiendishly persuasive to a child. He led her on mercilessly, coercing her into cooperation. It could have destroyed Nettie. Children today may know more of life and sex than earlier generations ever did, but this—this is something else. Now we know why children have been committing suicide in such numbers.”

“And with no record of anything untoward on the Interact,” he said. “And to think how readily our daughter could have been the next. It was just our fortune that she had the wit to mention that ad for the Bluebeard game.”

“And that we had the wit to be suspicious, and to contact the Interact proprietors, who were looking for a way to verify their suspicions,” I agreed. The numbness was gradually abating, though I know that I would never be able to abolish every vestige of the horror of the virtual encounter. If I, a grown, experienced woman, had been halfway freaked out by those sexual acts, how much worse for a child! “So that we could set up this little sting operation.”

“And that she was willing to let us use her game persona and identity, so they could verify her authenticity, and use it to blackmail her into submission,” he said. Then he frowned. “If it's as bad as it evidently is, what about our deal with Nettie?”

I shuddered. “To let her view the full video recording? We can't do that! I hope she
never
sees some of those perversions.”

“But what kind of parents are we, if we renege? We made a deal, and she honored her part of it. She would never forgive us.”

“Oh, she'll forgive us,” I reminded him wanly. “You are forgetting the escape clause.”

He knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “That if we don't show her that video, we must pay a consequence of her choosing, without limit. We thought that was academic.”

“Well, it isn't,” I said. “We will suffer the consequence.”

“What could a ten year old girl demand? A ton of ice cream? An end to all curfews? An annual pass to Mouse House?”

“Let's hope it's that innocent,” I said, dreading it. Because Nettie had a diabolical imagination. Almost like that of Lucifer, in her fashion. We were in for it.

Note:
In 1995 Charles Platt, who had been my editor at AVON, was guest editing an issue of the leading British Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine INTERZONE. He asked me for a story. I had a notion of his tastes, so wrote a provocative one relating to the then early Internet phenomenon, illustrating one of its dangers. My effort is dated now, but I think the intervening years have amply vindicated my prophecy, and not just with child porn. Do you know what your child is doing online? “Bluebeard” was published in the April 1995 issue.

Caution: biographical essay

2. Root Pruning

What makes a creative writer? It is obviously something other than intelligence, imagination, or ambition, though these surely help. I have pondered this question often, and tentatively conclude that it is root pruning.

You know what regular pruning is. Trees or plants are cut back to smaller size, and they then may bush out more thickly and look prettier, as man imposes his aesthetics on nature. It's a regular thing with gardeners, though I always wince at how it must feel to the plants. Which suggests another quality of effective writing: empathy. A person who feels the pain of others seems more likely to be able to write effectively about it.

But there's another kind of pruning, typically used with small trees. They prune back the roots so as to make a ball, so the tree can be transported and transplanted. The roots grow out again from that ball in the new location, and all is well. The pain of the tree is invisible. I had to do it with a small volunteer mulberry tree that grew by our driveway. Probably a bird dropped the seed, randomly. The location wasn't ideal, as the soil was mostly gravel, but it was gamely trying, with its intriguingly curvaceous leaves and brightly orange roots. Picture the Ace of Clubs: the leaves were roughly like that. Picture a fresh carrot: the root color. It was about six feet tall, rather thin and rangy. But then trucks were running over it, pushing it flat, breaking off branches, including the main stem, about four feet off the ground. So I rescued it by transplanting it to a safer site near our house. But I had to cut back the reaching roots to do it. I gave it fresh soil and plenty of water, but the loss of some branches and roots was hard on it. For a week the poor little tree wilted and shed its leaves, suffering, and I feared it would not survive. Then I found one single smallest leaf that remained, and buds along the trunk and branches for other leaves. It was making it! Since then, two years, it has branched and leafed splendidly. One day it will make a fine tree. I hope it understands that I damaged it in the clumsy transplanting in order to save it.

But what about root pruning a person? That is, stripping back the intellectual and emotional basis and transplanting him elsewhere? I believe I understand, because it happened to me. I was born in England in 1934. My parents were active in the British Friends Service Committee, feeding starving children during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. It was too dangerous for their own children, so we remained mostly in England until 1938, with our maternal grandparents, cared for by a nanny. Then when I was four we rejoined our parents in Spain. In 1940 my father was arrested by the dictatorship, without a basis, and rescued only by dint of a smuggled-out post card and the threat of withdrawal of significant British aid. So they let him out, but on condition he leave the country. Thus we came to America in August 1940, on the last passenger ship out, as World War Two raged in Europe. I had my sixth birthday on the ship, with a cake made of sawdust, because the war made pastries scarce. I have been in America ever since.