Wingrove, David - Chung Kuo 02 (77 page)

"I eat,"
she said, making him laugh again at the assertiveness of her simple
statement. "But I still don't understand you."

"Ah,"
he said. "Then the answer is no."

She shook her
head, annoyed with him again, but in a different way. He was teasing
her. Being unfair.

He looked down.
"It's strange what becomes important. For no apparent reason.
Things take hold. Won't release you."

He looked up
again, all humor gone from his eyes. That intensity was back. That
driven quality.

"And that's
your obsession, is it? Food?"

She saw at once
that her joke had misfired. In this, it seemed, he was vulnerable.
Wide open.

Perhaps that was
what obsession was. A thing against which there was no defense. Not
even humor.

So, she thought.
And
this is yours. The real.

For a time he
said nothing. She watched the movement in his dark expressive eyes.
Sea moods beneath the vivid green. Surface and undertow. And then he
looked out again,
at
her, and spoke.

"Come with
me. I want to show you something."

* *
*

ben's APARTMENT
was to the north of Oxford Canton, on the edge of the fashionable
student district. Catherine stood in the main room, looking about
her.

"I never
imagined . . ." she said softly to herself, then turned to find
him there in the doorway, a wine-filled glass in each hand.

"You're
privileged," he said, handing her a glass. "I don't usually
let anyone come here."

She felt both
pleased and piqued by that. It was hard to read what he meant by it.

It was a long,
spacious room, sparsely decorated. A low sofa was set down in the
middle of the plushly carpeted floor, a small, simply molded coffee
table next to it. Unlike the apartments of her friends, however,
there were no paintings on the wall, no trinkets or small sculptures
on the tabletops. It was neat, almost empty.

She looked about
her, disappointed. She had expected something more than this.
Something like Sergey's apartment.

He had been
watching her. She met his eyes and saw how he was smiling, as if he
could read her thoughts. "It's bleak, isn't it? Like a set from
some dreadfully tasteful drama."

She laughed,
embarrassed.

"Oh don't
worry. This is"—he waved his hand in an exaggerated
circle—"a kind of mask. A front. In case I had to invite
someone back."

She sipped her
wine, looking at him sharply, trying to gauge what he was saying to
her. "Well?" she said, "what were you going to show
me?"

He pointed
across the room with his glass. There was a panel in the far wall. A
sliding panel with the faint indentation of a thumb-lock.

"The
mystery revealed," he said. "Come."

She followed,
wondering why he played these games. In all else he was so direct. So
much himself. Then why these tricks and evasions? What was he hiding?
What afraid of?

His fingers
tapped out a combination on the touch-pad. The thumb-lock glowed
READY and he pressed his right thumb into the depression. The door
hissed back, revealing a second room as big as the one they were in.

She stepped
through, impressed by the contrast.

For all its size
it was cluttered, the walls lined with shelves. In the spaces between
hung prints and paintings. A small single bed rested against the far
wall, its sheets wrinkled, a simple cover drawn back. Books were
piled on a bedside table and in a stack on the floor beside the bed.
Real books, not tapes. Like the one he had given her. Her mouth
opened in a smile of surprise and delight. But what really grabbed
her attention was the apparatus in the center of the room.

She crossed the
room and stood beside it.

"Is this
what you do?" she asked, feeling the machine tremble, its
delicate limbs quivering beneath her touch.

The scaffolding
of the machine was laced with fine wires, like a cradle. Inside lay a
lifesize marionette, a mock human, no features on its face, its palms
smooth and featureless. The morph was like the machine, almost alive,
tremblingly responsive to her touch. Its white, almost translucent
surfaces reflected the ceiling light in flashes and sparkles.

It was
beautiful, a work of art in itself.

"Does it do
anything?"

"By itself,
no. But yes, in a sense it's what I do."

She looked
quickly at him, then back to the machine, remembering what Sergey had
said about him being a technician, a scientist. But how did that
equate with what he knew about art? All that intuitive, deeply won
knowledge of his? She frowned, trying to understand, trying to fit it
all together. She looked down at the base of the machine, seeing the
thick width of tape coiled about the spools, like some crude relic
from the technological past. She had never seen anything like it.

She circled the
machine, trying to comprehend its function. Failing.

"What is
this?" she said finally, looking back at him.

He stood on the
other side of the machine, looking at her through the fragile
scaffolding, the fine web of wiring.

"It's what
I brought you here to see."

He was smiling,
but behind the smile she could sense the intensity of his mood. This
was important to him. For some reason very important.

"Will you
trust me, Catherine? Will you do something for me?"

She stared back
at him, trying to read him, but it was impossible. He was not like
the others. It was hard to tell what he wanted, or why. For a moment
she hesitated, then nodded, barely moving her head, seeing how much
he had tensed, expecting another answer.

He turned away
momentarily, then turned back. The excitement she had glimpsed
earlier had returned to his eyes, this time encompassing her, drawing
her into its spell.

"It's
marvelous. The best thing I've done. You wait. You'll see just how
marvelous.

How
real"

There was a
strange, almost childish quality in his voice-—an
innocence—that shocked her. He was so open at that moment. So
completely vulnerable. She looked at him with eyes newly opened to
the complexity of this strange young man, to the forces in contention
in his nature.

Strangely, it
made her want to hold him to her breast, as a mother would hold her
infant child. And yet at the same time she wanted him, with a
fierceness that made her shiver, afraid for herself.

* *
*

BEN STOOD at the
head of the frame, looking down at her. Catherine lay on her back,
naked, her eyes closed, the lids flickering. Her breasts rose and
fell gently, as if she slept, her red hair lay in fine red-gold
strands across her cheeks, her neck.

Stirrups
supported her body, but her neck was encased in a rigid cradle,
circled with sensitive filaments of ice, making it seem as if her
head were caged in shards of glass. A fine mesh of wires fanned out
from the narrow band at the base of her skull, running down the
length of her body, strips of tape securing the tiny touch' sensitive
pads to her flesh at regular intervals. Eighty-one connections in
all, more than half of those directly into the skull.

The morph lay on
the bed, inert. Ben glanced at its familiar shape and smiled. It was
almost time.

He looked down
at the control desk. Eight small screens crowded the left-hand side
of the display, each containing the outline image of a skull. Just
now they flickered through a bright sequence of primaries, areas of
each image growing then receding.

Beneath the
frame a tape moved slowly between the reels. It was a standard
work—an original
pat pi
—but spliced at its end was
the thing he had been working on, the new thing he was so excited
about. He watched the images flicker, the tape uncoil and coil again,
then looked back at the girl.

There was a
faint movement in her limbs, a twitching of the muscles where the
pads were pressed against the nerve centers. It was vestigial, but it
could be seen. Weeks of such ghost movement would cause damage, some
of it irreparable. And addicts had once spent months in their shells.

The tracking
signal appeared on each of the eight small screens. Fifteen seconds
to the splice. He watched the dark mauve areas peak on six of the
screens, then fade as the composition ended. For a moment there was
no activity, then the splice came in with a suddenness that showed on
all the screens.

According to the
screens, Catherine had woken up. Her eyes were open and she was
sitting up, looking about her. Yet in the frame the girl slept on,
her lidded eyes unmoving, her breasts rising and falling in a gentle
motion. The faint tremor in her limbs had ceased. She was still now,
perfectly at rest.

The seconds
passed slowly, a countdown on the top-right screen showing when the
splice ended.

He smiled and
watched her open her eyes, then try to shake her head and raise her
hands. Wires were in her way, restraining her. She looked confused,
for a brief moment troubled. Then she saw him and relaxed. "How
are you?" he asked.

Her eyes looked
back questioningly at him. Green eyes, the same deep shade of green
as his own. She looked quite beautiful, lying there. It was strange
how he had not noticed it before. That he had
seen
it and yet
not noted it.

"I don't
understand . . ." she began, "I woke up and you were
sitting next to me at the Cafe Burgundy. I'd had too much to drink
and I'd fallen asleep. I... I had been dreaming. We were talking. . .
something about colors. . . and then I turned and looked across at
the pagoda. You said something about all the birds escaping, and,
yes, across the Green, I could see that it was so. There were birds
flying everywhere. They'd broken out of their cage. Then, as I
watched, one flew right at me, its wings brushing against my face
even though I moved my head aside to avoid it. You were laughing. I
turned and saw that you had caught the bird in your hands. I reached
across and . . ."

She stopped, her
brow wrinkling, her eyes looking inward, trying to fathom what had
happened., "And?"

She looked
straight at him. "And then I woke up again. I was here."
She tried to shake her head and was again surprised to find it
encased, her movements restrained. She
stared at the webbing trailing from her neck, as if it should
dissolve, then turned, looking back at him.

"I
shouldn't be here, should I? I mean, I woke up once, didn't I? So
this. . ." confusion flickered in her face and her voice dropped
to an uncertain whisper, "this must be a tape."

He smiled.
"Good," he said softly. "That's just what I wanted to
hear."

He moved around
her and began to unfasten the connections, working quickly,
methodically, his touch as sure and gentle as a surgeon's.

"I don't
follow you, Ben. Which was which. I mean, this is real now, isn't it?
But that part in the cafe . . ."

He looked down
into her face, only a hand's width from his own.

"That was
the tape. My tape. The thing I've been working on these last four
months."

She laughed,
still not understanding. "What do you mean, your tape?"

He undipped the
band and eased it back, freeing her neck. "Just what I said."
He began to massage her neck muscles, knowing from experience what
she would be feeling with the restraint gone. "I made it. All
that part about the cafe."

She looked up at
him, her head turned so that she could see him properly, her nose
wrinkled up. "But you can't have. People don't make tapes. At
least, not like that. Not on their own. That thing before—that
cartoonlike thing. That was a
pai pi,
wasn't it? I've heard of
them. They used to have dozens of people working on them. Hundreds
sometimes."

"So I've
been told."

He moved behind
her, operating the stirrup controls, lowering her slowly to the
floor. Then he climbed into the frame above her, untaping the lines
of wire and releasing the pads from her flesh one by one, massaging
the released flesh gently to stimulate the circulation, every action
carried out meticulously, as if long rehearsed.

"I don't
like teams," he said, not looking at her. Then, squatting, he
freed the twin pads from her nipples, gently rubbing them with his
thumbs. They rose, aroused by his touch, but he had moved on, working
down her body, freeing her from the harness.

"I set
myself a problem. Years ago. I'd heard about
pai pi
and the
restrictions of the form, but I guess I realized even then that it
didn't have to be like that. Their potential was far beyond what
anyone had ever thought it could be."

"I still
don't follow you, Ben. You're not making sense."

She was leaning
up on her elbows now, staring at him. His hand rested on the warmth
of her inner thigh, passive, indifferent to her, it seemed. She was
still confused. It had been so real. Waking, and then waking again.
And now this—Ben, crouched above her, his hand resting on her
inner thigh, talking all this nonsense about what everyone knew had
been a technological dead end. She shook her head.

His eyes focused
on her, suddenly aware. "What's the matter?"

"I still
don't understand you, Ben. It
was
real. I
know
it was.
The bird flying at me across the Green, the smell of coffee and
cigars. That faint breeze you always get sitting there. You know, the
way the air circulates from the tunnels at the back. And other
things, too."

She had closed
her eyes, remembering.

"The faint
buzz of background conversation. Plates and glasses clinking. The
faint hum of the factories far below in the stack. That constant
vibration that's there in everything." She opened her eyes and
looked at him pleadingly. "It
was
real, Ben. Tell me it
was."