Electric Forest (7 page)

3. The Proving-Ground

i

There was still summer grass at Sugar Beach, though it was blueing. Just a faint sheen as yet on the edges
of hills that sloped down like baked ginger biscuit in the dusk to the sky-color talcum of the sand. Sand which sloped a farther four hundred meters to the sky-color rollers of the sea.

Between the hills and the beach rested the hotel complex, its flashing glazium windows beginning to turn

their blank, one-way gold eyes upon the ocean, its three stabilized and incorruptible piers stretched out into
the water. The transparent revolving restaurant that was its centerpiece, had started the evening carousel.

Five hundred cars were drawn up in the subground park. Fifty more allegedly lay in the private garage of
particular guests, accessible from the individual apartments above. There was specific space for seven
hundred vehicles. Every sunset the cars poured into the hotel. They sped from the research plants,
laboratories, fish farms and experimental stations that lay within the vicinity, the eight hundred and
forty-two kilometers that constituted the coastal strip and sporadic inland salt basin of Sapphire Flats.
There were

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other resorts, but Sugar Beach was Sugar Beach, if you could afford it. Near dawn, most of the cars
poured out again, as the tide poured out from the shore.

The roof of the revolving restaurant had been peeled open in segments like those of a grapefruit. Light
balled upward, wiping out the stars.

In its gold-work jail, a casino balanced between floor and sky. The first bouts of the night were

commencing, Soleil Noir, Baccarat and Spin. Below, the circular ring of tables descended in tiers to the

orchestrated funnel of a dancing area where a tri-visual sea, photo-refracted up from receptors sunk in the
banks of the hotel piers, convincingly, swirled, alive with fish, about the slowly syncopating couples. The
current dance was the Cling, which supplied three basic steps and the pressure of torso on torso. It was the
dance of a society that used its energy and intellect in other ways, a dance of relaxation, the discreet
prelude to sex.

There was not a defective face in the enormous room, and no slack bodies. De-calorized foods and

callisthenic
machinery abetted persons already bred initially by mathematical selection, gene with gene. Yet the universality of pleasing features produced an oddly flavorless effect, only here and there relieved by those whose pre-conceptional selection match had resulted in some high point of attraction. It was,
however, apparent that selection very rarely gave rise to sheer beauty. Beauty, it seemed, like ugliness, was
normally an accident, something unplanned, the biological collision of chromosomes.

Heads were certainly turning as the man and the woman walked down the tiers toward their table. But if
their looks might be one cause, the second had to be their obvious wealth.

To be rich was not unheard of. But to be as rich as this was eye-catching. Astrads subtly sang around them
like heat on the air. Foremost, the fabric of their garments: off-planet imported materials. There was a silk stripe in the blond man's white evening clothes, his shoes were white leather

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with toe-caps of durascened flexium silver. And silver links fastened the front of the violet shirt together,
replacing the ubiquitous invisible pressure-zip. On the man's left wrist was a heavy copper timepiece,
antique and probably handcrafted. For her part, the black-haired woman seemed to have been dipped into a
black and starry night, into the starry night of space itself. The dress described her body, made love to it,
and the stars were phosphor diamonds. She had no additional jewelry, apart from her nails, each of which
was capped with thin, shaped amber. Neither man nor woman wore cosmetics, and neither needed to.

Their faces were smooth with the indefinable maquillage of introspection.

One of Sugar Beach's uniformed attendants ushered them into their seats. Three waiters approached.

A lamp above the table dissolved languorously from rose to purple, purple to blue, blue to green to yellow to
rose. Bathed in its ichors, the duet chose their meal and wine was ordered. The man seemed indolently in
command, the woman sublimely quiescent.

Two pale emerald bottles of archaic glass were brought to the table, covered with frost.

Covertly, the tiered ring watched. Dancers coming up or descending to the fishy funnel of the tri-visual sea dance floor, glanced with swift impaling glances. The gamblers in their golden cage above now and then
glanced down between the crack of spins, the whir of the wheel, the dry slap of plastic cards and the drier
rattle of plastic chips.

"You're doing well," Claudio said, as they drank the ice-green wine. His unremitting scrutiny was like a
scalpel. It dissected everything she did, each movement, each breath she took. Tension held her rigid, but
the rigidity did not infect her bodily articulation. She could do all things fluently, while her mind shook and
her instincts calcified. Casually, deliberating, as if watching mercury rise or fall, he asked her: "How do you
feel?"

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"How do you suppose I feel?"

He seemed to like and not to like her knack of handling language sparely and defectively, an ability which became more pronounced with use.

"You're frightened," he said. "Naturally. Home in that encapsulated brain of yours, among your tangle of
wires and values and pretty lights. That's where your fear is. It doesn't show here, but here you feel it."

Her antipathy to him had improved her poise. Obedience to him removed the vacillation that might

undermine the effect of this poise. She was turning in a finished performance. It did not perplex him, but
plainly it affected him in some oblique way.

"Your reactions interest me. Especially when you strive to check them," he said, with a dangerous placidity.

Their food came, and she ate. It was simple for her body to swallow and eradicate the food, even though her throat seemed locked. She had only to let the body act out its clever role. She could rely on that. There
were hundreds of other eyes upon her, eyes which were not Claudio's. These eyes were terrifying. The
myriad looks, stares, gazes drenched her, and she had been afraid she might forget, believe herself once more Ugly, crouched in the darkest booth of the Accomat Cafeteria. But she did not forget, not now. The lovely hands with their jewelry nails were there to reassure her, and the space-fabric frock, curled about her feet, and her silk hair brushing her cheeks and neck.

And the hundreds of eyes which had fastened on her could reassure her too. They were mirrors, blind as
mirrors. None of them knew her secret, knew where it lay, the hideous dwarf in its glazium box. Only
Claudio knew. Only Claudio was careful to remind her.

He had ordered four courses. As the second was cleared by one of the uniformed waiters, a couple, man
and girl, approached the table.

Magdala stared back at them, and panic began to pour through into her. It never reached her face. At the

exact

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summit of this peak of her, she saw, unalienated, her effect upon the human race.

The girl had hair the soft red of synthetic fire, and she went directly to Claudio, as if to some lost object she
had been continually searching for.

Magdala had drearily envied others their normalcy. To regret the unobtainable was irresistible. But more than envy, she had hated them. Now, surprising her, there was still an impulse to hate.

"Claudio," stated the girl. He rose, and she placed her hands lightly on his shoulders. "Where have you been
all summer? Why did you never call me?"

"I think I see why/' said her companion, the man.

"My sister," Claudio said. "Magda, make yourself gregarious."
The man took Magdala's hand and kissed her palm.

"My God, you're beautiful," he said. His eyes waited for her response. How could he know she had
learned?

"Ami?" she said.

"Sister, did he say?" the man asked.
"If he says so."

Claudio turned to Magdala and the girl said, cutting across him: "Well, well. Kith and kin."

Blond Claudio, clad in a white suit, his eyes yellowish metal tinged by verdigris, indicated the woman with
her blue-black hair, blue eyes, star-dusted black gown and freckle-dusted luminous skin. "Don't you see the
family resemblance?"

"Now that you mention it," the man said, "maybe I can. I'm Irlin. Do you do the Cling, Magda?"
"I don't dance."

"Claudio does," said the girl. "Come on, dance me, Claudio."
"Why not?" said Claudio.

He went away with the girl, down the steps, into the sea funnel. Magdala watched them begin to move together. Their bodies suitably clung, and the three steps came and

₅₀

went with a fluid carelessness. Tri-V fish swam between them and the other dancers. The red-haired girl
stretched to meet Claudio, mouth to mouth. The sea covered them, they disappeared.

"I guess I've lost my partner," said Irlin. "Are you sure you don't dance?"
"No."

He edited his hand over hers.

"You know what they say. If you dance on a floor, you can do the same in bed."
She looked at his hand on hers.

If you found out what you were touching, Irlin.

"Is he really your brother?" said Irlin, caressing her hand.

"Of course. If he says so."

"Oh. You want me to leave you alone?"
"No. I want you to tell me about Claudio."
Irlin blinked, and called her bluff.

"You're kidding. Surely you know your own brother."

Magdala drew her hand aside, opened her purse and took out an identity card. She displayed it. The name on the card was Magda Loro.

"We're seldom together," said Magdala. She was still using Tri-V dialogue, since the apposite celluloid
phrases somehow could elicit replies. "I like to hear about him. He's reticent. I expect you noticed."

"I've only met him twice," said Irlin. "The girl I'm with, Nada, she and Claudio had a couple of nights before
the summer. But he's a blank screen to me. A rich man he doesn't work, he hasn't any fads or ties.
Lily-of-the-field astrad-types; butterflies. And you're the same. What do you do on the planet?"

"I live," she said.

"Christ. I've seen. Sorry, forget it. What I mean is, I'm staying at Sugar, six and sevenday of this Dek.
Come swimming."

"I don't swim."

"You know what they say," repeated Irlin dogmatically.

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"Still, maybe you don t do that, either. I could teach you," said Irlin.

'To swim."

"Anything. Anything you'd like to learn. You really are beautiful."

Magdala turned to him and tried to see him. He looked like everyone else. Attractive, ordinary, healthy. The picture wouldn't gel, and she realized she would forget the instant he was gone. Over his broad shoulder,
she saw Claudio returning from the sea funnel, the girl Nada ahead of him. Her lids were wet and her face,
under its pearly powder, white. She stalked to the table.

"Leave it," said Nada to Irlin.

Irlin seemed irritated. His eyes lingered on Magdala, but Nada seized his arm. "Leave it, I said. Or stay, and
I'll call an autocab back to the plant."

"Excuse me," said Irlin, and followed Nada away.

Claudio sat down, and the three waiters came at once with the third course of their meal.
"Was it fun?" Claudio asked.

"You should have watched."
"I had other business."

"They don't know," said Magdala, "that you are a scientist.

"They aren't intended to. Money can buy obscurity as well as a false I.D. for one's friends."