Electric Forest (4 page)

shawl of breakers smashed the stars all over the shore.
The car kept on, speeding parallel to the bay.

A high wall came from the dark beyond the lamp and the car eased its pace. Seven seconds passed as
Claudio held down a key on the dash. Then the wall opened and the car leaped through.

They plunged deep among trees, toward a thing which shone. There was a house within the wall. An old
house, three stories high, a house that was a metallic brick. Soft as fall rain, the starlight slithered on its
mercurial zed
cladding, where no windows showed. A faceless house, shining amid trees, amid the pale hoarse bellowing of the ocean.

"Get out," Claudio said to her, just as, thirteen hours before, he had said, "Get in." They stood on a driveway, and the car sank into the earth

23

on a slice of steel, and the driveway joined over it. The night was wind-blown, but the trees about the mercury house never shivered.

There was no print-lock. They waited there as the house woke within itself, recognizing Claudio by autocular mechanism. When it was satisfied it let them in.

Dawn began to flood the house immediately when they entered. The illumination came by delicate degrees,

Flushing
rouge-gold through the walls, heightening, brightening, till the ceiling was suffused.

Claudio removed the music discs from his ears and threw them away. The air seemed to catch them, lower
them into a catchment of air. They settled on a table like blown leaves.

"Magnetic beams," he said, "and the light's a sunrise fitment. I mentioned I was rich. More?" He stroked a
panel, and the walls were gone. The sea and the night plastered their black fires over the room. Each whole
wall was a oneway reversible window, invisible from outside. "Rich and- did I say? clever. Don't you
think I'm clever, Magdala? But you have yet to see the cleverest thing of all."

His expensive whiteness gleamed in the house. He was so right for the house. He led her on to a velvet
carpeted ramp which bore them upward. He operated gadgets en route, the show pieces of the house, but
his face was frigidly set. Pink snow showered; a fountain glittered without fluid or substance. Portions of walls spread and retracted like the petals of flowers in a solarium.

"Two years," Claudio said. 'Wasted. I used to go hunting, searching. For someone like you, my Magdala.

But you're unusual, my dear. A freak. Hard to come by. And it had to be someone like you. A genetic
mistake. An atrocity, crawling about its hopeless round. Devoid of normal self-preservative wariness.
Mewing, inside its warped little soul, for rescue. Not quite human. Here we are." The ramp had drifted
them up to the third story and grown still. He

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gripped her clumsy paw in his well-made icy hand. A door shifted for them. They walked into a small white

area.

A panel of keys and unlit lights was set in one wall.

Between the panel and the door, a cloudy crystal pillar, two meters high.

"Prepare yourself/' Claudio whispered. His eyes were watering slightly, nervously, as if with tears.

Magdala said nothing. The song of her fear had mounted, but she seemed divorced from it. She seemed,

indeed, alone on a huge markerless plain. Even fear could not keep her company there. And the man at her

side was like a prologue to the voice of a storm. To the voice of God.

He crossed to the pillar and did something to it. The crystal started to uncloud.
"Yes," he said, "look at her all you want."

There was a woman in the pillar. She would appear to be about twenty-two or three years of age. She

would appear to be
alive,
but surely could not be. Naked, she was like some glowing incandescent

substance. Her open eyes were dark blue neons. Lustrous hair, a fierce blue essence of blue-black,

altogether nearly more blue than black, almost navy in color, poured back from her forehead. The hair was
cut precisely level with her shoulders, the heavy, mathematically straight mass of it just framing their
witness. But she was not any sort of a mannequin. She had nails, lashes, a fine bluish blush of down
beneath her navel, leading into black at the pubes. The fawn nipples on her breasts were like furled buds.
And she was dusted all over with a pollen of faint fawn freckles. She was beautiful. Beautiful.

"Yes," Claudio murmured again. "Look all you want, Magdala. Memorize her. This is what you are going to
be.

2. Venus Rising

i

In the day time, the
mercurial zed
cladding of the house burned up in a drastic dry white fire. The tall trees
that massed about it inside the wall seemed to make vain attempts to douse the fire with their blue stems.
But there was something wrong with the trees. Tactile, fertile, conveying vague drifts of scent, they grew in
the unnourishing rock of the shore above the salt flats of the salty sea. When their blue leaves fell, which
sometimes they did, it was not in answer to the wind and Magdala could not afterward find the leaves upon
the ground. And when the blaze of the house or of the sun itself moved behind them, the trees dissolved.

The trees were not real.

She was still dutiful to Claudio's commands. He had commanded her to sleep and handed her a pill to

enable her to do so. She had swallowed the pill and slept. This morning he had told her to walk among his
trees. She had come out and walked. Soon he would call her to go in, and she would do that also. Then
terror would begin, but she would continue to obey him. Through all the terror.

He had shown her. Terror had come then, too. When he

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had told her his plan, (without explanation): terror. But not terror alone. The buried anguish had gushed to
the surface of her brain, her anger and her bitter, bitter despair. And from the depths of her, in the wake of these emotions, a scream of passionate demand.

She had no reason not to believe in the impossible. Desperation was always ready to pray for miracles.

He called her. By some sophisticated system of loud-hailer, she heard his voice, evenly pitched and modulated, as if he stood at her side.

"It's time, Magdala."

She returned, through the unreal, millionaire's holost
e
tically projected trees, toward the fiery furnace of the
house.

The glazium capsule was one and three-quarter meters long, one and a half meters around. It rested slightly
backward, tilted at a thirty-degree angle by an arrangement of the flexium steel support which had lowered
it into position through the ceiling of the white-walled room. The capsule had been opened, then closed, and
to its transparent exterior had been affixed the panel of keys and unlit lights, detached entire from the wall.
A variety of wires and connecting leads proceeded from the apparatus in the capsule and passed, via

apertures in the glazium, through into this panel. The apparatus itself cradled the distorted form of Magdala
Cled.

"Can you hear me?" Claudio asked her.
She nodded.

"Shall I describe the picture you present?" he said. "A nightmare by Bruegel. Have you heard of Bruegel?
Never mind."

It was comfortable inside the capsule, despite the tubes and coils, the things which had been attached

painlessly and intimately to her, the delicate cage which clasped her skull. He had seen to everything with
absolute indifference, keeping up, nevertheless, a cruel rhetorical banter. He detailed for her, meticulously, her ugliness. Contrastingly, he reas-

27

sured her she would not be hurt. "Nothing to cut or slash," he said sweetly. "I am a scientist, not a surgeon."

The creature in the crystal column watched them sightlessly all the while from her blue neon eyes. These
eyes, never blinking, never shut, remained limpid. Claudio had let Magdala look closely. She had seen the
miniscule pores in the skin, the tracery of veins. Then he had raised the column and guided Magdala's hand to the flesh itself and the navy hair.

"I said I was clever," he kept reiterating. But he himself did not handle the warm satin flesh. "You would
swear she was alive," he said. "Static but animate." But he had already told Magdala that the woman was
not alive and not animate. Every part of her had been constructed, in a tank, by hand and by machine, by his
hands and his machines. Yet you stroked her and saw her and breathed the carnal perfume of her, and
forgot.

"Not,
my dear Magdala, a mechanized robot. Not that mythical being, an android. Decidedly not human.
Like you, my ugly one. A freak."

After that, he let down again the crystal cylinder, trapping his creation like an orchid under glass.

Magdala lay in the capsule, and the unwoman gazed through her. Drugs had quieted Magdala's nerves and
organs to an analgesic sponge. Her drugged terror was theoretic, meaningless. Magdala stared in return in
the blue neon eyes.

"Yes," he said. "Number her freckles, the hairs of her head."

Then he pressed the master switch of the panel. All but one key responded. The lights exploded into many
colors.

Magdala felt a new thing. Far off and anesthetized, the action of the attachments and wires upon her and within. Her cradle, now alert, would feed her, evacuate her, breathe for her, at certain times stimulate and
exercise her limbs, her heart, lungs and intestines. The little glittering tubes, sipping and nurturing,
cosseting
,
nursing, would maintain

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indefinitely her supine framework, in perfect health. She was giving herself over to the most tender care,
(his words). Her cradle would treat her better than she had ever treated herself. And better, much better,
than the intemperate world. And now she could say goodbye to herself. To her deformed, flattened and twisted body. She was no longer responsible. She was leaving home.

"Are you ready?" he said. His pale face through the glazium glared in at her. He, too, was afraid,
presumably, playing God. Doing it more successfully than God.

She inclined her head once more.

(Surely his promises were lies. He was mad. She would die. He the murderer, she the consenting victim,
mesmerized by his madness.)

He grinned and pressed the last key down into the panel.
He had warned her. It was worse than the warning.

Fires rained through her head and went out. Catapulted into nothing, she fought to regain her equilibrium,

fought to regain her body. The urge was instinctive. In the blind and infinite ocean of un-ness, she screamed without a voice. Had he killed her? Was this her death?

Then his voice came through the deaf clamor of breakers.
"No," he said.
"No.
Do as I told you.
Do
it*

She struggled, toward the shore now. She knew the shore. She had been shown it, had caressed it, breathed

it in.

She broke the surface of the sea. He had not lied.

As if from a great distance, she saw again his face livid and horrified. She watched it change, grow
whiter, yet relaxing, relaxing to the point of flaccidity, becoming idiotic. She knew why. Confronting the woman under the crystal pillar, he had seen her blink.

Magdala blinked a second time.

Carefully, uncertain, she moved her right hand to meet the switch inside the cylinder. Her right hand was
graceful, beautiful. Freckled. She felt the impression, finger-tip on switch, felt it exactly. The cylinder rose.

"My God," he said. "Pygmalion."

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He was laughing. Then abruptly he turned and went out. She heard him start to vomit before the rush of running water smothered it.

She remained motionless, afraid to take a step till he came back.

Presently he returned, and sat on the floor, leaning his spine against the wall. He looked sick still, and still
amused.

"Say something," he suggested.

She had to think to make her lips open. Then no sound would come.
"Goddammit, orient yourself.
I’ve
told you how."

She thought of speaking. She could speak. Draw a breath, let the breath hit the voice box. Let her lips
sha
pe a sentence. She spoke. It isn’t
t easy.

She had never heard this voice before, this lovely cinnamon voice. She filled her lungs that were not
lungs.

"I want to see," she said, "I must see myself."

"Oh frailty," he said, "thy name is woman. Get down off your pedestal then, and I'll conduct you to a

mirror."