Electric Forest (17 page)

"No." Magdala placed the word once more directly against Christophine's last word. An echo effect. Was that what made it so pleasing?

"Don't do that," Christophine said.
"What?"

"That. Fitting what you say to anchor the periods of my sentences. It's probably instinctive, but Claudio

would delight in it. I suspect Claudio of re-inventing the Narcissus principle for my benefit. Yes, that makes
sense. He would think me capable of that. Don't say 'Narcissus?' An Earth-european myth. An unusually attractive boy saw his reflec-

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tion in a pool. He lay down and stared at the reflection, unable to look away. He never looked away again.
Generally interpreted as an allegory of homosexual love, or a vulgar illustration of ego-mania. Why am I
talking so much? Of course. I feel I know you. I do know you. But you haven't answered my question.

Pause before you say *What question?' Don't anchor me again."

Magdala paused. She said, "I remember the question."
Christophine suddenly walked forward.

Magdala found she had automatically copied the action. With about half a meter between them,

Christophine stopped, and Magdala stopped. With no warning, and no prologue, Christophine struck her
across the cheek, a biting, accurate blow. (Claudio had struck her.)

"That is for your petty impersonation of me," Christophine said, but her face was expressionless. "I can't
imagine how he persuaded you. I don't really care very much. He was handsome and he was rich. One or
the other, or both, got to you. But did he explain
why?"

Magdala paused as she had been requested to do, and her face stung like bruised human flesh.
"Hatred," she said eventually.

"Because of what?"

"He never told me."
"Then, I'll tell you."

Christophine pushed her, and Magdala fell backward into one of the uninjured pneumatics. (This far,

Christophine had made no comment on the torn room, the shredded clothing, dismissing them presumably as Claudio's malevolence, or Magdala's in the capacity of Claudio's robot.)

Christophine did not sit. Her strategy was plain and admirable. She had deployed a fundamental difference
in posture between them, to offset their hypnotic sameness. Other deployments followed. She took a long
blue cigarette from a box beside the drinks bubble. Systematically she shut the box, drew on the cigarette to
light it.

As she talked, smoking the cigarette in rapid breathless

drags that carried the inhalation no deeper than her throat, she also paced, tiger-like, the whole length of the
room and back again.

"Claudio and I," said Christophine, her words visible as silver smoke, 'Thad a flying start in life. We were
born glamorous and rich. One helps the other, you see. Not just a good cheap genetic pre-conception
match. A privately paid-for delineated match. Leading to children with exceptional looks and exceptional
brains. Coupled to wealth, who would lose? Claudio lost. He grew up and acquired another thing.
Eccentricity. You would like to hear where we met? Naturally you would. We met here, at Marine Bleu,
which is where the whole C. T. Project was begun. Conjure up an image of us. Two talented pretty people
in a monochrome landscape. We were magnetized. We touch. Let me unveil Claudio Loro, the mysterious
genius. Claudio Loro is so rich he never had to work at anything. Science was is his pastime. His only
motive in becoming a scientist has been to stave off boredom. When we met, he had many more astrads
than I. That was all right. He could be magnanimous and kind to me. He could give me things. Then he
found out that not only did he have more astrads, he had a few less brains. Are you able to accept that?
No. How can you? Claudio's the most brilliant, most dynamic, most exotic creature you've ever come
across. Even for me. It took me two years of the C. T. Project with Claudio, and two years of bed with
Claudio and fights with Claudio, to realize. Beautiful Claudio hates what is superior to beautiful Claudio.
While he is just a little more rich, a little more beautiful, a little more clever, he will love you. He hates me. I
accept that. It's logical. I am too clever for Claudio.

"I mentioned the C. T. Project. C.T. stands for Consciousness Transferal the thing Claudio has achieved
with you. What Two Unit has been struggling to achieve for ten years. What I have been personally
struggling with for three years. Did Claudio inveigle you into Two Unit? I think that he did. Then you'll have seen the mess we're in. Emilion I

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can judge from your face. Emilion's dead, is he? I won't waste time on comments. He is another heir to the
long line of potential mishaps and heartbreaks. By which you know we've failed. We have no apparent
excuse. From the start, we've had full E.C. backing. Of course, the advantages of Consciousness
Transferal are sufficiently blatant that Earth Conclave had no choice. A score of out-Conclave planets
might have picked up our line otherwise, and financed us. Initially, C.T. looked set to be a winner. Five
years: that was the estimate for a breakthrough. And a breakthrough was urgent. Spare-parting and implant
medication have been at a terminus for a century. The rejection factor has never been adequately solved.
Plastic surgery and its adjunct, bionics, tend to degenerate. Even successes are tied to a hospital routine.
There's no mechanical replacement that can institute a totally normal life-style. C.T. solves all of that. Any

whole brain can be aphysically salvaged from any damaged body. No surgery is necessary, no

hospitalization is necessary. Capsule care is the only linking factor. Otherwise, the C.T. beneficiary is free,
and in a superior physical condition to that of the average human subject. I'm lecturing you, incidentally,
because I doubt if Claudio bothered to detail any of the vital intention of this struggle of ours. He's used the
ideology of Two Unit as a backdrop for his own warped and theatrical passions. Just as he's used you. As he'd like to use me. No, as he has used me."

II

Christophine had concluded her pacing. She stood at the northeastern window. She seemed to be looking out at the soulless perpendiculars of the forest.

"One night," said Christophine to the forest beyond the window, "Claudio and I were working alone in the

com-

puter lab here at Bleu. It was nearly midnight. We were no longer lovers, he and I, and barely colleagues.
But a certain equation had been fed to the computer at twenty-four o'clock, and certain surprising results
were coming out. We stayed there in that white-lit room, drinking coffee from plastic beakers, not talking,

waiting. And then the computer produced the answer. The computer is God. You resent it but you worship.

God has the last word. This last word was what Two Unit had been praying for. It was the rundown by

which C.T. could be achieved. You understand, I'm giving you nothing technical, nothing you can't grasp.
That's important. I want you to know, Narcissa, just what you've gotten yourself involved in.

"The result was the computer's. But the stimuli, the qualified data which produced the result these were

mine. Not Claudio's. Mine. Can you imagine what that would do to Claudio? You must know him, to some

extent. You must have learned that everything must progress according to the laws which Claudio
stipulates.

"Does Claudio seem to you unbalanced? Even demented? That night Claudio was out of his mind."
Christophine turned from the window, glowing against it, gazing at Magdala.

"Claudio went to the console. He snapped the plastase strip from the channel, coiled it and put it in the zip
pocket of his coat. While he did so, he blocked off the screen of the console from me. Then, he leaned
sideways and did something to the panel-bank. Claudio was always astute with machinery. There wasn't a sec-lock in the building he couldn't override. And now he overrode the computer. There is a key to erase
superfluous experimentation, but the computer will analyze whatever it's asked to erase, and, in the event of
error, will retain the material. Claudio somehow bypassed the analysis system. He coerced the computer
into a position where it erased not only the result of the data, but the data itself. No tabular records had
been kept, except by sonogram, which had been stored in the computer itself. When

Claudio pressed the key, everything went. Months of calculation, days of computation. The answer. And
Claudio leaned there, the snapped-off plastase that represented the answer in his pocket. He grinned and
said, 'Now, shall I swallow it?* You can envisage him, can't you, saying that. Just then, one of the leads
from the panel-bank shorted out. Claudio's override had had a dramatic bonus. I'm sure it thrilled him,
sparks and fire going up all around his Lucifer party-piece. I ran to the console and hit the emergency
button, and in twenty seconds more the sprinklers were on. By then, Claudio had gone. I thought it was
another crazy game of his, but it wasn't. He headed for the north-side jet sheds. He stole an auto-aqua,
reprogrammed it, and got over to the mainland with his car in the storage bay. Bleu security never stopped
him. Two things that never stop Claudio -machines and conscience. We got the jet back, but not Claudio.
I assume he drove the car out of the jet bay and kept on driving, until he arrived somewhere he wanted to
be. He had nothing with him clothing, rare books from Earth, paintings everything was left behind in his
apartment on the station. He only took the car and the plastase strip in his pocket/'

Christophine dropped her cigarette into a bronze-beaked disposer near the window. Her face seemed to
swim in the darkness at her back; she looked withdrawn and disciplined to a point of inhumanity.

"I didn't reveal what he had done," she said unemphatically. "Can you credit that? Yes, obviously you can.
To run out on E. C. Research was a dangerous enough thing for him to do. If they'd known he had the key
to the Two Unit C. T. Project in his pocket when he ran, they would have hounded him
li
ke a plague rat.
So I said nothing. They thought the computer had malfunctioned spontaneously. I didn't tell them what had
gone before. With that much data lost, no one was amazed at Claudio's desertion, or that the project itself

was put back five months.

"I thought," Christophine said, "he'd use what he'd got.

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Any moment I expected the news to explode. From some out-Conclave planet, perhaps, or from Claudio in
person, claiming mastery in the field of private research. But it's taken him a long while to unravel the

computer's cryptography. Three years. I'd considered he might be dead. Then the Saint Azoro stelex. And

then ... then you. I wonder," Christophine said, "what he means to bring about, this way. Plainly, he wants
to frighten me, undermine me. I could never reproduce that former line of data Claudio destroyed. It was
one of those inspired accidents of the mind that never came to Claudio. Besides, I've had to preserve the

subterfuge that we never got the answer that night, in order to shield him, protect him from an E.C.

government witch-hunt. That must make me a fool, I suppose. Just what he always wanted me to be. Is
that what he's trying to say, sending me you? What reaction does he anticipate? What is he hoping will
happen? He could be watching us, using your transfer body as some sort of relay device. My God, with
your internal android structuring, you could be a walking Tri-V set. I hazard you wouldn't have been
informed. But no, that can't be the case. Mechanisms at that power level would have activated alarms all
over the station. I'll conjecture your body contains some simple contrivance whereby he can ascertain your
whereabouts nothing more."

Magdala was awash in the sea of information Christophine had released to engulf her. Flotsam rose to a

swirling surface the description of Claudio beside the console, the essential plastase strip in his pocket; the
idea that she herself might be rigged with mechanized implements for Claudio's convenience. Under and about everything, the duality she shared with Christophine. There was, too, the residue of questions she had
not formulated, for example, a question concerning the man Paul Hovak, and what his role might be in this tangle of chiaroscuro, declarations, vitriol, e watched her drowning.

Christophine said calmly, "Whatever else we differ on, Narcissa, I think you will agree that Claudio has
obtained

Christophine

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the upper hand. You and I, we're the ones who are lost in the wood/"

In the chimney, the un-fire blazed, cherry red. Outside the trees loomed. A wind was blowing through the
.

"Narcissa," said Christophine. She was lighting another cigarette, pouring herself another drink. She offered neither to Magdala. "What is your name, by the way?"

Magdala opened her mouth. As twice before, no voice would come.

"I assure you of this," Christophine said, "you can't have my name. Whatever Claudio Loro promised you. Perhaps I should call you Claudia. Merely the feminine version of your master."

"Magdala," Magdala said. The regeneration of her voice caught her sharply, like a cough.

"Well, Magdala, have you decided what you want to do? Are you going to make Claudio happy by trying to
hurt me?"

Magdala stared at her. Nothing seemed substantial the fire, the room; and the forest was not substantial.
Only Christophine.

"He didn't think you would be here this quickly," Magdala said. She was attempting to convey her own

notion that Claudio had, by some as-usual unspecified sciento-mechanic means monitoring of the

check-posts, perhaps? discerned the instant of Christophine's return. That he had, therefore, rushed to the
bungalow and ripped her clothes and furniture, as a last display of malignity. That he had then deserted the
island, and Magdala, leaving chaos to work itself out.

"But he did. He would comprehend I could hardly be away long," Christophine corrected her. "He's here on
the island, anticipating. He may well believe you will feel sufficiently endangered by my appearance to
attack and kill me. Had you considered that?"

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"No."