Thurlow stood momentarily alone as a short, stocky, partly bald man in a blue suit appeared in the spotlight glare at the street doors of the Murphey Building. The man threw one hand across his eyes as the spotlights centered on him and the strobe light flared. Thurlow blinked in the glare of light His eyes watered.
Deputies engulfed the man at the doors.
Lee darted off to one side, lifted the camera overhead, pointing it down at the milling group. “Let me see his face!” Lee called. “Open up there a little.”
But the officers ignored him.
Again, the strobe flared.
Thurlow had one more glimpse of the captive—small eyes blinking in a round florid face. How curiously intense the eyes—unafraid. They stared out at the psychologist, recognizing him.
“Andy!” Murphey shouted. “Take care of Ruthy! You hear? Take care of Ruthy!”
Murphey became a jerking bald spot hustled along in a crowd of hats. He was pushed into a car off near the corner on the right. Lee still hovered on the outskirts firing his strobe light.
Thurlow took a shuddering breath. There was a sense of charged air around him, a pack smell mingled with exhaust gasses as the cars were started. Belatedly, he remembered the cylinder at the window, looked up in time to see it lift away from the building, fade into the sky.
There was a nightmare feeling to the vision, the noise, the shouted orders around him.
A deputy paused beside Thurlow, said: “Clint says thanks. He says you can talk to Joe in a coupla hours—after the D.A. gets through with him, or in the morning if you’d rather.”
Thurlow wet his lips with his tongue, tasted acid in his throat. He said: “I… in the morning, I think. I’ll check the probation department for an appointment.”
“Isn’t going to be much pretrial nonsense about this case,” the deputy said. “I’ll tell Clint what you said.” He got into the car beside Thurlow.
Lee came up, the camera now on a strap around his neck. He held a notebook in his left hand, a stub pencil in his right.
“Hey, Doc,” he said, “is that right what Mossman said? Murphey wouldn’t come out until you got here?”
Thurlow nodded, stepped aside as the patrol car backed out. The question sounded completely inane, something born of the same kind of insanity that left him standing here in the street as cars sped off around the corner in a wake of motor sounds. The smell of unburned gas was sharp and stinging in his nostrils.
Lee scribbled in the notebook.
“Weren’t you pretty friendly with Murphey’s daughter once?” Lee asked.
“We’re friends,” Thurlow said. The mouth that spoke the words seemed to belong to someone else.
“You see the body?” Lee asked.
Thurlow shook his head.
“What a sweet, bloody mess,” Lee said.
Thurlow wanted to say: “You’re a sweet, bloody pig!” but his voice wouldn’t obey him. Adele Murphey…a body. Bodies in crimes of violence tended toward an ugly sameness: the sprawl, the red wetness, the dark wounds… the professional detachment of police as they recorded and measured and questioned. Thurlow could feel his own professional detachment deserting him. This body that Lee mentioned with such avid concern for the story, this body was a person Thurlow had known—mother of the woman he’d loved… still loved.
Thurlow admitted this to himself now, remembering Adele Murphey, the calmly amused looks from eyes so like Ruth’s… and the measuring stares that said she wondered what kind of husband he’d make for her daughter. But that was dead, too. That had died first.
“Doc, what was it you thought you saw up by that window?” Lee asked.
Thurlow looked down at the fat little man, the thick lips, the probing, wise little eyes, and thought what the reaction would be to a description of that thing hovering outside Murphey’s window. Involuntarily, Thurlow glanced up at the window. The space was empty now. The night had grown suddenly cold. Thurlow shivered.
“Was Murphey looking out?” Lee asked.
The man’s voice carried an irritating country twang that rasped on Thurlow’s nerves.
“No,” Thurlow said. “I… I guess I just saw a reflection.”
“I don’t know how you can see anything through those glasses,” Lee said.
“You’re right,” Thurlow said. “It was the glasses, my eyes—a reflection.”
“I’ve a lot more questions, Doc,” Lee said. “You wanta stop up at the Turk’s Nightery where we can be comfortable. We can go in my car and I‘ll bring…”
“No,” Thurlow said. He shook his head, feeling the numbness pass. “No. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Hell, Doc, it is tomorrow.”
But Thurlow turned away, ran across the street to his car. His mind had come fully to focus on Murphey’s words: “Take care of Ruthy.”
Thurlow knew he had to find Ruth, offer any help he could. She was married to someone else, but that didn’t end what had been between them.
Chapter 6
The audience stirred, a single organism in the anonymous darkness of the storyship’s empatheater.
Kelexel, seated near the center of the giant room, felt that oddly menacing dark movement. They were all around him, the story cadre and off-duty crewmen interested in Fraffin’s new production. They had seen two reels run and rerun a dozen times while the elements were refined. They waited now for another rerun of the opening scene, and still Kelexel sensed that threatening aura in this place. It was personal and direct, something to do with the story, but he couldn’t define it.
He could smell now the faint bite of ozone from the sensimesh web, that offshoot from Tiggywaugh’s discovery, whose invisible field linked the audience to the story projection. His chair felt strange. It was professional equipment with solid arms and keyed flanges for the editing record. Only the vast domed ceiling with its threads of pantovive force focusing down, down onto the stage far below him (and the stage itself)—these were familiar, like any normal empatheater.
But the sounds, the clicks of editing keys, professional comments— “Shorten that establishment and get to the close-up…” “Hit the olfactory harder as soon as you have light…” “Soften that first breeze effect…” “Amplify the victim’s opening emotion and cut back immediately…”
All this continued to be discord.
Kelexel had spent two working days in here, privileged to watch the cadre at its chores. Still, the sounds and voices of the audience remained discord. His previous experience of empatheaters had always involved completed stories and rapt watchers.
Far off to his left in the darkness, a voice said: “Roll it.”
The pantovive force lines disappeared. Utter blackness filled the room.
Someone cleared his throat. Clearing throats became a message of nervousness that wove out through the dark.
Light came into being at the center of the stage. Kelexel squirmed into a more comfortable position. Always, that same old beginning, he thought. The light was a forlorn, formless thing that resolved slowly into a streetlamp. It illuminated a slope of lawn, a curved length of driveway and in the background the ghost-gray wall of a native house. The dark windows of primitive glass glistened like strange eyes.
There was a panting noise somewhere in the scene and something thudding with a frenzied rhythm.
An insect chirred.
Kelexel felt the realism of the sounds as pantovive circuits reproduced them with all the values of the original. To sit enmeshed in the web, linked to the empathic projectors, was as real as viewing the original raw scene from a vantage point above and to one side. It was, in its own way, like the Chem oneness. The smell of dust from wind-stirred dry grass permeated Kelexel’s awareness. A cool finger of breeze touched his face.
Terror crept through Kelexel then. It reached out from the shadowy scene and through the web’s projectors with a billowing insistence. Kelexel had to remind himself that this was story artistry, that it wasn’t real… for him. He was experienc
ing another creature’s fear caught and preserved on sensitive recorders.
A running figure, a native woman clad in a loose green gown that billowed around her thighs, fled into the focus on the stage. She gasped and panted as she ran. Her bare feet thudded on the lawn and then on the paving of the driveway. Pursuing her came a squat, moon-faced man carrying a sword whose blade like a silvery snaketrack glittered in the light of the streetlamp.
Terror radiated from the woman. She gasped: “No! Please, dear God, no!”
Kelexel held his breath. No matter the number of times he had seen this, the act of violence felt new each time. He was beginning to see what Fraffin might have in this story. The sword was lifted high overhead.
“Cut!”
The web went blank, no emotion, nothing. It was like being dropped off a cliff. The stage darkened.
Kelexel realized then the voice had been Fraffin’s. It had come from far down to the right. A momentary rage at Fraffin’s action surged through Kelexel. It required a moment for the Investigator to reorient himself and still he felt frustrated.
Lights came on revealing the rising wedge of seats converging on the disc of stage. Kelexel blinked, stared around him at the story cadre. He could still feel the menace from them and from that empty stage. What was the threat here? he wondered. He trusted his instincts in this: there was danger in this room. But what was it?
The cadre sat around him row on row—trainees and off-duty crewmen at the rear, probationers and specialist observers in the center, the editing crew down near the stage. Taken individually, they appeared such ordinary Chem, but Kelexel remembered what he had felt in the dark—the oneness, an organism bent on harming him, confident of its ability to harm him. He could sense it in the Chem empathy, the all-one-life they shared.
There was an old stillness to the room now. They were waiting for something. Far down near the stage heads bent together in inaudible conversation.
Am I imagining things? Kelexel wondered. But surely they must suspect me. Why then do they permit me to sit in here and watch them work?
The work—that violent death.
Again, Kelexel felt frustration at the way Fraffin had cut off that scene. To have the vision denied him even when he knew how it went… Kelexel shook his head. He felt confused, excited. Once more he swept his gaze over the cadre. They were a gaming board of colors in the giant room, the hue of each uniform coded to its wearer’s duties—red patches of flitter pilots, the motley orange and black of shooting crewmen, green of story continuity, yellow of servicing and repair, purple of acting and white of wardrobe, and here and there the black punctuation marks of Manipulators, subdirectors. Fraffin’s inner circle.
The group near the stage broke apart. Fraffin emerged, climbed up onto the stage and to the very center, the bare circle of image focus. It was a deliberate move which identified him with the action which had occupied that space only moments before.
Kelexel bent forward to study the Director. Fraffin was a gaunt little figure down there in his black cloak, a patch of ebony hair above silver skin, the gashed straightedge mouth with its deep upper lip. He was suddenly something from the shadowy marches of a far and perilous realm that no other Chem had ever glimpsed. There was an arresting individuality to him.
The sunken eyes looked up and searched out Kelexel.
A chill went through the Investigator then. He sat back, his thoughts boiling with alarm. It was as though Fraffin had spoken to him, saying: “There’s the foolish Investigator! There he is, ensnared in my net, trapped! Safely caught! Oh, certainly caught!”
Silence gripped the empatheater now like a held breath. The intent faces of the cadre focused on the image stage.
“I will tell you once more,” Fraffin said, and his voice caressed the air. “Our aim is subtlety.”
Again, Fraffin looked up at Kelexel.
Now, he has felt terror, Fraffin thought. Fear heightens the sex drive. And he has seen the victim’s daughter, a female of the kind to snare any Chem—exotic, not too gross, graceful, eyes like strange green jewels. Ah, how the Chem love green. She is sufficiently similar to other non-Chem pleasure creatures that he will sense new physical excitements in her. Ah, hah, Kelexel! You will ask to examine a native soon—and we’ll permit it.
“You are not keeping the viewer sufficiently in mind,” Fraffin said. His voice had turned suddenly cold.
A shiver of agitation swept up through the empatheater.
“We must not make our viewer feel too deep a terror,” Fraffin said. “Only let him know terror is present. Don’t force the experience. Let him enjoy it—amusing violence, humorous death. The viewer must not think he is the one being manipulated. There is more here than a pattern of intrigue for our own enjoyment.”
Kelexel sensed unspoken messages in Fraffin’s words. A definite threat, yes. He felt the play of emotions around him and wondered at them.
I must get one of these natives to examine intimately and at my leisure, Kelexel thought. Perhaps there’s, a clue that only a native can reveal.
As though this thought were a key to the locked door of temptation, Kelexel found his mind suddenly filled with thoughts about a female from Fraffin’s story. The name, such an exotic sound—Ruth. Red-haired Ruth. There was something of the Subicreatures about her and the Subi were famous for the erotic pleasures they gave the Chem. Kelexel remembered a Subi he had owned once. She had seemed to fade so rapidly, though. Mortals had a way of doing that when paced by the endless life of a Chem.
Perhaps I could examine this Ruth, Kelexel thought. It’d be a simple matter for Fraffin’s men to bring her to me here.
“Subtlety,” Fraffin said. “The audience must be maintained in a detached awareness. Think of our story as a form of dance, not real in the way our lives are real, but an interesting reflection, a Chem fairy story. By now, you all must know the purpose of our story. See that you hew to that purpose with proper subtlety.”
Fraffin drew his black cloak around him with a feeling of amusement at the showmanship of the gesture. He turned his back on the audience, stalked off the stage.
It was a good crew, Fraffin reminded himself. They would play their parts with trained exactitude. This amusing little story would accumulate on the reels. It might even be salable as an interlude piece, a demonstration of artistic deftness. But no matter; it would serve its purpose if it did no more than lead Kelexel around—a fear here, a desire there—his every move recorded by the shooting crews. Every move.
He’s as easy to manipulate as the natives, Fraffin thought.
He let himself out through the service tube at the rear of the stage, emerged into the blue walls of the drop hall that curved down past the storage bays to his quarters. Fraffin allowed the drop field to catch him and propel him past the seamless projections of hatchways in a gentle blur.
It’s almost possible to feel sorry for Kelexel, he thought.
The man had been so obviously repelled at first confrontation with the idea of single violence, but oh, how he’d lost himself in the native conflict when shown it.
We identify with individual acts of violence so easily, Fraffin thought. One might almost suspect there were real experiences of this kind in our own pasts.
He felt the reflexive tightening of the armor that was his skin, a sudden turmoil of unfixed memories. Fraffin swallowed, halted the drop at the hatchway outside his salon.
The endlessness of his own personal story appalled him suddenly. He felt that he stood on the brink of terrifying discoveries. He sensed monsters of awareness lurking in the shadows of eternity directly before him. Things loomed there which he dared not identify.
A pleading rage suffused Fraffin then. He wanted to slam a fist into eternity, to still the hidden voices gibbering at him. He felt himself go still with fear and he thought: To be immortal is to require frequent administrations of moral anesthesia.
It was such an odd thought that it dispelled his fear. He let himself into the silvery
warmth of his salon wondering whence that thought had come.
Chapter 7
Thurlow sat smoking his pipe, hunched over the wheel of his parked car. His polarizing glasses lay on the seat beside him, and he stared at the evening sky through raindrops luminous on the windshield. His eyes watered and the raindrops blurred like tears. The car was a five-year-old coupe and he knew he needed a new one, but he’d fallen into the habit of saving his money to buy a house… when he’d thought of marrying Ruth. The habit was difficult to break now, although he knew he clung to it mostly out of perverse hope that the past year might yet be erased from their lives.
Why does she want to see me? he wondered. And why here, where we used to meet? Why such secrecy now?
It had been two days since the murder and he found he still couldn’t assemble the events of the period into a coherent whole. Where news stories mentioned his own involvement, those stories read like something written about a stranger—their meaning as blurred as the raindrops in front of him now. Thurlow felt his whole world invaded by Joe Murphey’s psychotic ramblings and the violent reactions of the community.
It shocked Thurlow to realize that the community wanted Murphey dead. Public reaction had struck him with all the violence of the storm which had just passed.
Violent storm, he thought. A violence storm.
He looked up at the trees on his left, wondering how long he’d been here. His watch had stopped, unwound. Ruth was late, though. It was her way.
There’d been the storm. Clouds had grown out of a hard gray sky with rain crouched low in them. For a time the eucalyptus grove around him had been filled with frightened bird sounds. A wind had hummed through the high boughs—then the rain: big spattering drops.
The sun was back now, low in the west, casting orange light onto the treetops. The leaves drooped with hanging raindrops. A mist near the ground quested among scaly brown trunks. Insect cries came from the roots and the bunchgrass that grew in open places along the dirt road into the grove.
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