by Greg Bear
With a brief farewell, he departed, and left me alone in the marvelous room. My heart hammered like a pecking dove in my chest.
Nowhere in this room, unique I supposed in all the rooms of the house of Roderick Escher, did there creep or coat or insinuate any of the pale, light-guiding threads or fibers. I was alone and unwatched, unconnected to any hungry external beings, be they kings or slaves…
I fancied I was Roderick’s secret.
I undressed and showered. The bathroom filled with steam and I inhaled its warm moistness, returning again to the euphoria I had experienced upon my arrival. I toweled and picked up a thick terry cloth robe, examining the sleeves and pockets. In a table drawer I found needle and many colors of thread, and marveled at Roderick’s thoroughness.
Far too restless and exalted for sleep, I began to sew hooks and loops and pockets into the robe, for practice, and then into my suit of clothes. My fingers worked furiously, as agile as they had ever been in my prime.
I turned to the laden walls and spun through a dozen displays before finding clamps, tack, glue, brads, wire, springs, card indexes, and other necessities. I altered the suit for fit as well as fittings. I had long centuries ago learned to be a tailor and seamstress, as well as a forger and engineer.
There were no windows, no clocks, no way to learn the time of evening, if evening it actually was. I might have spent days of objective time in my obsessive labors. It did not matter here; I was not disturbed and did not rest until I became so tired I could hardly stand or clasp a needle or bend a wire.
I removed the robe, climbed into the small, comfortable bed, and immediately fell into deep slumber.
I know not how many minutes or hours, or perhaps years later, I felt a touch on my face and jerked abruptly to consciousness. My eyes burned but my nerves pulsed as if I had just drunk a dozen cups of black coffee. In the darkened room (had I turned off any lights? there were no lights to control!) I saw a whitish shape, tall and blurred. Now came to me a supreme supernatural dread, and I was immediately drenched with sweat.
I rubbed my eyes to clear them.
“Who’s there?” I cried.
“It is I, Maja,” the whitish form said in a thrilling contralto.
“Who?” I asked, my voice cracking, for I only half-remembered my circumstances. I did not know what might face me in this unknown place and time.
“I am Roderick’s sister,” she said, and came closer, her face entering a sourceless, nacreous spot of glow. I beheld a woman of extraordinary character, her countenance as thin as the faces of the women in Klimt’s darker paintings, her eyes as large as Roderick’s, and of like cast and color. I could have sworn her high twin-lobed forehead would have blemished her femininity, had it been described so to me, yet it did not.
“What do you want?” I asked, my heart slowing its staccato beat. I felt no danger from her, only a ruinous sadness.
“Do not do this thing,” she warned, eyes intent on mine. I could not break that gaze, so frightened and yet so strong. “It is a change too drastic for the Eschers, a breach, a leap to disaster. Roderick wishes our doom, but he does not know what he does.”
“Why would he wish to die?”
This she did not answer, but instead leaned forward and whispered to me, “He believes we can die. That is his madness. He has told me to go before, to prove certain theories.”
“And you have agreed—to die?”
She nodded, eyes fixed on mine, drawing me in as if to the doors of her soul. In her there was more of the cadaver already than a living woman, yet she seemed sadly, infinitely beautiful. Her beauty was that of a guttering candle flame. The fire of her eyes was a fraction that of Roderick’s, and her body, as a taper, might supply only a few minutes more of the fuel of life. Unlike the brown women, Cant and Dont, who were unreal yet seemed solid and healthy, she was all too real, and I could have blown her away with a weak breath. “I am his twin. He took me from his mind, shaped me to equal him, in all but will. I have no will of my own. I obey him.”
“He made his own sister a slave?”
“It is done that way here. We may create versions of our self that do not possess a legal existence.”
“How bitter!” I exclaimed.
“Oh, I may protest, may try to show him my love by directing his will with persuasion. But he is stronger, and I do whatever he tells me. Now, it is his wish I try again to die. I only hope this time I might succeed.”
Behind her I saw the approach of the solicitous Dr. Ont. The doctor took Roderick’s sister by one skeletal hand, pushed her lips close to Maja’s almost translucent ear, and murmured words in a tongue I could not understand. Maja’s head fell to one side and it seemed she might collapse. Dr. Ont supported her, and they withdrew from the room.
I felt at once a heavy swell of resentment, and a commensurate surge of bluster. “How dare she come here, smelling of death. I’ve left death behind.” But in my declining terror, I was exaggerating. Roderick’s sister, Maja, had exuded no scent at all.
She had smelled, if anything, less intensely than a matching volume of empty air.
I felt I slept only a few minutes, yet when Roderick’s voice boomed into my room, waking me, I was completely refreshed, confident, ready for any challenge. I was no slave of Roderick Escher.
“Dear friend—have you made the necessary preparations?” he asked.
I looked around for his presence, but he was not there, only his voice. “I’m ready,” I said.
“Do you understand your challenge?”
“Better than ever,” I said. I had the confidence of an innocent child, thinking tigers are simply large cats; even the appearance during the night of Maja Escher held no awe for me.
“Good. Then eat hearty, and build up your strength.”
Roderick did not enter my room, but breakfast appeared on a table. The apparatuses I had chosen the night before lay beside the plates of warm vegetables, broth, breads. I put on my robe, manifested an Ace of Spades in my right hand, and threw it at the stack of toast. The card pierced the top slice of toast and stuck out upright.
I lifted the card, retrieving the toast with it, and took a bite, chewing with a broad smile. All my fears of the day before (if indeed a day had passed) had faded. I had never in my first life felt so confident before going on stage, or beginning a performance.
As I ate, I wondered at the lack of meat. Had the world’s inhabitants suddenly and humanely ended the slaughter of innocent animals? Or did they simply distance themselves from the carnal, as most of them had assumed the character of frozen meat in chilly refrigerators?
Were there any animals left to eat?
In truth, what did I know about Roderick’s brave civilization? Nothing. He had not prepared me or informed me any farther. Yet my confidence did not fade. I felt instinctively the challenge that Roderick was about to offer—to compare the overwhelming and undeniable magic of this time, against my own simple legerdemain, as Roderick had called it.
Roderick visited me in person as I finished my breakfast. “Did you enjoy yourself?” he asked as he entered through the door. His arm rose slowly to indicate the changeable wall of glass cases, now frozen at the apparatus associated with cards. He walked to the case, opened it, and removed a reel manufactured by my inspiration, Cardini, who had died just after my first birth, but whose effects I had learned by heart. “Did you know,” Roderick said, holding the tiny reel in his palm, “that a century ago, children played with dollhouses indistinguishable from the real? Little automata going about their lives, using tools perfect for their scale, living dolls sitting on furniture accurate in every way … And these houses were so cheap they were made available to the poorest of the poor?”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
Roderick smiled at me, and for the first time on this, my second day in my new life, I felt a narrow chill
iness behind my eyes, a suspicion of the unforeseen.
“Yet we have advanced beyond that time as the gods reach beyond the ants,” he said. “All pleasures available at will. Every nerve and region within the brain—and without!—charted and their affects explored in endless variations. Whole societies devoted to pain from injuries impossible in all past experience, to the ghostlike exertion of an infinite combination of muscles in creatures the size of planets, to the social and sexual dalliances of phantoms conjured from histories and times and places that never were.”
“Remarkable,” I said stiffly.
“An audience of such intense discernment and sophistication that nothing surprises them, nothing arouses their childlike amazement, for they have never been children!”
“Extraordinary,” I said with some pique. Did he wish for my defeat, my failure, to enjoy some petty triumph over an inferior? I steeled myself against his words, as I might have armored against the complaints of an older and better magician, criticizing my fledgling efforts.
“There are audiences of such size that they dwarf all of the Earth’s past populations,” he added.
I saw my bed fold into itself until it vanished into a corner. The wall of cases shrank into a narrow box the size of a book, leaving me with only the table and the apparatus I had chosen the night before.
“Prepare, Robert,” he said. “The curtain rises soon.”
Then his voice took on a shadowed depth, betraying a mix of emotions I could not comprehend, relief mixed with heavy grief and even guilt, and something else beyond my poor, unembellished range. “Dr. Ont came to me last night. Maja has succumbed. My sister is no more. Ont certifies that she has truly died. She has even begun to decay.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s a triumph,” he said quietly. “She goes before …”
I put on the suit I had tailored and adjusted, and inwardly smiled at its close fit and how it flattered my pudgy form. I have never been handsome, have always lacked the charm of magicians who combine grace and artistry with physical beauty. I compensate by simply being better, faster, and more ingenious.
Roderick looked around the room. Fibers grew from the floor, climbing the walls like mold, until they shrouded everything but me and my table and cards. I seemed surrounded by a forest of fungal tendrils, glowing like swarms of fireflies.
“Billions of receptors, hooked into webs and matrices and nets reaching around the Earth,” Roderick said. “Tiny little eyes like stars that have replaced any desire to leave and venture out to real stars, to other worlds. We have our own interior infinities to explore.”
I made my final arrangements, and stood in the center of the lights, the tendrils. “Tell me when I’m to begin.”
“We’ve already begun, except for the time you’ve spent in this room,” Roderick said. “Even Maja’s protests to me, and her death, have been watched and absorbed. I’ve used the drama of my own war to stay at the top of the ratings, my preparations and agonies. Even the five, the antitheticals—I have made them part of this!”
The same nacreous light that had bathed Maja’s face now surrounded me, and the fibers arranged themselves with a sound like the rubbing claws of chitinous sea-creatures.
Roderick backed away until he stood in shadow, then lifted his hand, giving me my cue.
I had never had such a draw in my life—nor felt so alone. But was this really so different from appearing on television? I had done that often enough.
“Once upon a time,” I said, focusing ahead of me at no space in particular, and smiling confidently, “a young man on a luxury cruise was caught in a horrible shipwreck, stranded on a desert island with nobody and nothing but a crate of food and water, and a crate of unopened packs of playing cards.”
I brought out a deck of cards and peeled away the plastic. “I was that young man. I knew nothing of the magical arts, but in three solitary years I taught myself thousands of manipulations and passes and motions, until I felt I could fool even myself at times. And how was this done? How does a magician, knowing all the methods behind his effects, come to believe in magic?”
I swallowed a lump in my throat and leaped into the abyss.
“In those three years, I learned to make cards confess.” I riffled the deck of cards and formed a rippling mouth, and with one finger strummed the edges.
“We spoke to each other,” the cards said in a breathless stringy voice. “And Cardino taught us all we know.”
I produced another deck, opened it with one hand, removed the cards and arranged them on my palm, and made them speak as well, in a female voice: “And we taught him all that we know.”
I squeezed both decks up in a double arc and caught them in opposite hands. From the top of each deck I produced a Queen of Hearts, and clamped the two cards together in my teeth. “I learned the secrets of royalty,” I said through clenched jaws. Holding the decks in one hand, separated by my pointing finger, I plucked the cards from between my teeth and revealed them as two jacks. “The knaves whispered to me of court intrigues, and the kings and queens taught me the secrets of their royal numbers.”
In my hands, the two cards quickly became a pair of threes, then fives, then sevens, then nines, and then queens again. “Finally, I was rescued.” I riffled the decks together, blowing through them to make the sound of a ship’s horn. “And returned to civilization. And there, I practiced my new art, my new life. And now, having returned from that island called death, where all magic must begin—”
I looked around me, unsure what effect my next request would have. “I call for volunteers, who wish to learn what I have learned.”
The overgrown chamber whispered and lights passed among the fibrous growths like lanterns on far shores. Five figures appeared in the chambers then: Wont, Cant, Shant, Mustnt, and Dont. Cant approached first, smiling her most wistful and attractive smile. “I volunteer,” she said.
Roderick, standing in the background, his feet almost rooted to the floor by thick cables of fiber, lifted his hands in overt approval. Why encourage those he loathed—those who shackled him with so many strictures?
Was he flaunting the strength of his chains, like Houdini?
“Am I a physical person?” I asked Cant, dismissing all questions from my thoughts.
“Yes,” she said. “Very.”
“Am I the last untouched human on this world?”
“In this house, to be sure.”
“Do I have a connection with any of the external powers that can make things appear and disappear, make illusions by wish alone?”
“You do not subscribe to any services,” Cant said. “This we guarantee, as antitheticals.”
I hesitated just a moment, and then took her hand. She felt solid enough—like real flesh. “Are you real?” I asked.
“Who can say?” she replied.
“Is your form solid enough to forego false illusions, illusions of will isolated from body?”
“I can do that, and guarantee it,” Cant said. Her companions took attitudes of rapt attention.
“It is guaranteed,” they said as one.
I began to get some sense of what their function was then, and how they constrained Roderick. What would they do to constrain me?
“If I told you there were cards rolled up in your ears, what would you say?”
“All things are possible,” Cant said musically, “but for you, that is not possible.”
I held my hand up to her ear and drew out a rolled-up card, making sure to tap the auricle and the opening to the canal. She reacted with some puzzlement, then delight.
“You have doubtless been told that in the past, illusion was possible only through tricks. Tell me, then—how do I perform such tricks?”
“Concealment,” Cant said, prettily nonplused.
I showed her my hands, which were empty, then re
moved my coat, dropping it to the floor, and rolled up my sleeves. I pulled another card from her other ear, unrolled it, showing it to be ruined as a playing card, then converted it to a cigarette by pushing it through my fist.
“Everyone can do that,” Cant said, her smile fading. “But you—”
“I can’t do such things,” I said with a note of triumph. “I am an atavism, an innocent, an anachronic … A lich.” I held out the cigarette. “Does anybody smoke anymore?” I asked. The five did not speak. Roderick shook his head in the shadows. “I didn’t think so. King Nerve needs no chemical stimulants. All drugs are electronic. There is no one else on this planet—or in this house, at least—who can make the world dance, the real world. Except me—and I was taught by the cards.”
The remaining antitheticals came forward. Musnt, as it happened, unknowingly carried a deck of cards in the pockets of his solid but unreal dinner jacket. Producing a fountain pen, I had him mark his name on the edge of the deck, grateful that these phantoms could still write, and blew upon the ink to help it dry. “These cards have friends all over the world, and they tell tales. Have you ever heard cards whisper?” I patted the deck firmly into his hands. “Hold these. Don’t let them go anywhere.” I borrowed his jacket and put it on Dont, helping her into the sleeves with courtesy centuries out of date. The cuffs hung over her hands.
“Hold up your deck of cards, please,” I said to Musnt. He lifted the cards, his face betraying anticipation. I was grateful for small favors.
“I believe you have a set of pockets on the outside of your jacket,” I told Dont. “Investigate them, please.”
She reached into the pockets and removed two cellophane-wrapped decks of cards.
“Sneaky devils, these cards. They go anywhere and everywhere, and listen to our most intimate words. You have to be discreet around playing cards. Open the decks, please.”
She pulled the cellophane from one deck. On the edge of the deck was the awkward scrawl of Musnt, written in fountain pen. Musnt immediately looked at his deck. The edges were blank.
