Electric Forest (9 page)

"Surprise me."

She was becoming inventive with the Tri-V dialogue, and her drunkenness was delicious. What did it matter about the black-haired man?

Irlin led her to a small slick car. They climbed inside. He activated the robot-drive and punched in the

program buttons. When the car started up, he slouched unrelaxedly, and watched the shooting gray ribbon of road erupt before the windscreen.

She was exhilarated by the speed. It seemed to complement the alcoholic high. Leaving Claudio's silver
house, she had seen him switch off the holostet trees inside the wall. One moment they existed, then they did not. Her fear was like that. Her fear, which had seemed so palpable, had been switched off.

They drove into the blued-over, gingerbread hills, to an isolated run-down bar, and sat on the glazium veranda, drinking synthetic wine. She did not get any drunker, but the momentum did not lapse.

Not many people came to this cheap bar. Another couple had gone up into a room. The air-wash was
faulty, and the reversible windows open. Presently Magdala heard the girl noisily producing an orgasm.

Alone with her on the veranda, Irlin's nervousness seemed to increase his concern to touch her. He ran his
hand over her shoulder, along the inside of her arm against her breast. She turned to him and allowed him to kiss her. The kiss was like the blow tutored, calculated, effective, and unclever.

"Don't be plastic," he said into her mouth. "Come with me, baby, come with me." His hand went on moving down and down the slopes of

her. His fingers wadded aside her skirt, kneaded the unclothed skin of her thigh.
"You're so lovely," he said.

As suddenly as it had swamped her, as if at a signal, her drunkenness ebbed away. She tried to keep it from
leaving her, but without success. She sank after it. Hie blue on the hills became dismal, the day sodden with
heat, his hand damp and insistent and no longer compatible.

She was afraid. Alone with a stranger, and afraid.

She was ugly, crippled, deformed, and a young man was rubbing his hands all over her and sighing in her

ear.

She pushed at him.

"No more."

"Please, Magda--"
"No."

He complied, shivering.

She rose, and picked her way off the veranda, toward the car-park. Soon he followed her, hanging his head, his eyes raw with a loathing he could not or would not express.

"You do it with your brother," he managed eventually, and opened the car for her. They drove back to the
hotel.

The sun was burning the western sky and the crenellated tips of the sea. She fidgeted in Irlin's car, watching the sun. There was no sign of the black-haired man.

"What I said," Irlin muttered. He stared at her, the loathing in his eyes, troubled by propriety, "I made a
mistake."

"Never mind," she said foolishly.

She got out of the car and ran into the hotel, and into the elevator which bore her upwards. When the door of the suite widened she experienced an almost immediate relief. Then she saw Claudio.

He sat facing the door. He was serene, immaculate.

"Poor Irlin," he said. "The lady hadn't thawed after all."

Abruptly, her descent from the alcoholic high was complete, and with a wretched rationality she
understood.

"I couldn't be drunk," she said. "The neurons can relay stimuli by proxy from my brain and into it, to trigger
neural

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circuits, but drink is different. It's like food taste, scent, texture only. Unless my
physical
body were

drunk. Then I'd feel it wouldn't I?" She waited, straight and stony, challenging him. "'What did you do?"

"A little spirit distilled though the feed-drip in your maintenance capsule. Harmless. Arranged to coincide
with the progress of your own pseudo-drinking. I did it when you and the redhead went down to the pier."

"

Y·
^/'

"As always. To manipulate you and revel in the enchanting result."

No turmoil began in her. She was aware of a great alteration in herself. She was aware of anger, like an
unlit fuse, anger and hate and power, all in abeyance. In herself, she was stilled.

"There was a man on the pier," she said. "He apparently knew me."
"A familiar gambit."

"He was the original of the holostet man you used in the house."

Claudio's eyes and mouth widened into childlike shock. He flung out his arms stiffly, hands upheld in incredulity like a puppet. The deliberate overacting was frankly intended to negate her.

She went by him, into her bedroom, into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She stripped and offered
herself to the stinging spray, tepid, then hot, then cool.

She sensed him leaning by the bedroom door.

Presently he said: "His name is Paul Hovak. He's ostensibly on E.G. government payroll, a coordinator for
twenty or so subsidiary chemical research projects on Indigo. He's wealthy, mostly anonymous, and almost certainly has political affiliations outside E.C. He has learned a lot of jargon about the basics of subchem, and a lot more about wheels within wheels and strings that work strings-which the luckless hard-hitting Irlin will discover when he's fired next oneday."

She did not reply. She listened to the shower, rinsing her body, not thinking. She was still switched off, like

the electric trees of Claudio's holostet forest.
She sensed Claudio shift beside the door.

"When you dress, put on the present I've left you."

She sensed him go away. She sensed the suite empty of him as if of its air. Through the vacuum, she stepped from the shower into the drier.

In the bedroom, the dress hung ready, released from its plastase dust-resister: auburn satin with a coal-blue fringe of crystals across the shoulders. The matched coal crystal nails rose like thorns from their box, and beside them, a three-chain bracelet of black sapphires.

Without thinking or considering, she had become fully alert. She lifted the bracelet, and ran her thumb along it. The telltale vibration was in the middle clasp. A micro-recorder, three hours worth of miniaturized tape,
already active.

She dressed and fastened the bracelet on her arm. Obediently.
She was not wondering about anything.

She was still switched off, like the electric trees.

When the switch re-engaged, what would happen?

She selected a perfume sachet, and squeezed its liquor into her palm. To the fragrance of Earthindian
Sandalwood, like an accompaniment, the door buzzed.

Not Claudio. Claudio and she possessed the plastic insert tags which unlocked the door from outside.
Perhaps Nada, or Irlin. But she comprehended who it was.

She would not answer, then.

On her arm, the recorder in the bracelet faintly, faintly.
Yes, she was meant to answer.

She opened the door, and the black-haired man stood there. Paul Hovak.
"Let me in,"' Paul Hovak said. So she let him in.

He strolled deep into the room.

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"Pleasing," he said. "Of course, your salary is adequate. Or is someone keeping you?"
"Someone is keeping me," she said.

"Then I trust he's away right now."

And briskly he went to every door of the suite, opening them, glancing inside, even into the two bathrooms.

She remembered the conversation in the silver house, when she had supposed she spoke to this man and did not. His real voice, his real attitude, were quite unlike those of the holostet. The actual Paul Hovak was
crisp in his approach. He had not referred to the scene on the pier. His bruised jaw had been salved and
showed no mark of its injury. Satisfied they were alone, he now seated himself. His demeanor conveyed
the impression that all former business had been an error he had eradicated, and they could begin again, on
this occasion operating efficiently.

In perfect unenlightenment, scenting both the sinister and the makeshift in this charade, Magdala said, Tri-V
style:

"Will you have a drink?"

"No, I don't think so. I don't think you will either. Let's get to the point. You sent me an innuendo-packed

stelex, unsigned. I was to meet you. I am here. What's the news?"

Claudio, the magician. He had sent the stelex to this man. He had formed the holostet in this man's likeness
in order that she exhibit a show of recognition. Claudio was manipulating both of them. Evidently, the man's
assumptions were intended to shatter on her own ignorance of the situation. (The deduction was casual.) Possibly, having been informed of the man's name, she was meant to use it.

"M. Hovak or do I say Paul," she said. "What news?"

"I'm tired of this," Hovak said. "I haven't the space to waste my time. Do you have anything, or not?" "I would say ... not."

His face coalesced and darkened. There was sweat on his forehead and upper lip.

He said, "What's the matter with you?" He left a lacuna for her interjection. When none came, he said, "All
right. I'll

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assume this is just an exercise in insecurity on your part. You're making sure I'll be prompt when you do
have results. When do you go back?"

"Back to where?"

"To Marine Bleu. Where the hell else?"

"Is that where I'm going?"

He rose and strode across the room to her. As he loomed, the switch clicked on inside her. She reverted to
absolute terror as his hard, real-life hands clamped down on her shoulders and his dry hot breath scoured
her face.

"I'm not in the market for clowning," he said. His voice stayed crisp as his fingers gouged the fringes into

her arms. "Don't clown, Christa. Just get the goods you promised. The goods you're taking such a goddam
long time over delivering. Hear me? The very next call I have from you is going to be
The
Call. Yes?"

She had to stop him.

"Yes," she said, "whatever you say."

He let her flesh and dress out of his grasp. He and she fell away from each other, breathing thickly. Paul Hovak shook his head as if he had emerged from water.

"Your nerves are in a bad way," he said. "That's a warning. Don't crack up on me. I want this thing, and

I'm betting on you, Christa." He walked to the door. "I'll be leaving in half an hour. When did you say you're due back at Marine Bleu?"

She closed her hand over the three chains of the bracelet.
"Three days."

"O.K. Get some rest. And lay off the syrup."

The door slid sideways and he went through it and along the corridor.

Whatever Claudio had wished for had presumably been accomplished, and was audibly captured on the

tape in the bracelet. The sapphires glowed warm under her fingers. With a wooden thoroughness, Magdala
unsnapped the triple clasp, and as she did so, her passivity faded.

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IV

She made certain of Hovak's departure at the foyer desk registration screen, then took the moving stair and
stepped out into the great gold casino suspended high above the restaurant.

"May I buy chips against my brother's account?"

"Yes, M. Loro. Of course."

They brought her one thousand white chips in a scoop.

Below, she could not see Claudio's platinum head, though her scan of the tiers was brief. Down in the sea
funnel, the tunes which radiated from the speakers were different, but couples were still dancing the Cling.
Overhead, through the peeled roof, the stars, dimmed by lights and substantially the same, revolved as
always to the rhythm of the restaurant. Only she seemed capable of metamorphosis.

They made a place for her at the circular table. She shone there in her auburn dress, lighting them with her shine, feeling how she was to them. Their faces were her mirrors, would always be.

She tossed a hundred chips into the basket and spoke her color. The uniformed spinner plunged the lever

home and the twenty silver balls exploded from their pan to rocket about the curved walls of the table, spurl, and tumble away, spent.

"Rien"
said the spinner. He glanced about
"Encore?"

Around her, hands threw batches of colored chips into the basket. Magdala threw another hundred white. The lever plummeted, the twenty balls raced. This time three struck the magnets.

"Rose. Jaune. Et Blanc. "

Magdala had won. A little applause from the table, the gambler's vicious and taunting tribute to beginner's
luck

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"Encore?”

"Changer"
Magdala said. She was now entitled to choose up to a hundred chips of an alternate color from the basket. She showed and dropped back a batch of red.

The lever clanged on its spring, the magnets released their catch, the twenty balls leaped like water from a
faucet.

"Rouge et Rouge. Double remporte"

A small teasing cheer this time. A man at Magdala's elbow said, "Lady Luck herself."

"Not quite."