New Worlds

by Edited By David Garnett

  He thrust his hands deep into his pockets for the reassuring warmth. Disoriented. Dizzy. “You realise, where I come from, people like you and your friends are thought to be imaginary.”

  She studied him, as though considering his sincerity.

  “Be easy,” she said. “We are.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Miz Lourat knows some very clever people.”

  Gypter managed to find a rock to sit on. The stories about the Lourat Association and its researches had often been bizarre. Market analysts scoffed at the more orthodox speculations. What would they make of this situation?

  “Just how clever? Genetic metamorphing? Asurgical melds? Semimentive prosthetics?”

  Any of those, blue-sky babbling though they were, made a lot more sense than creatures from ancient Greek folk tales.

  She laughed. “Oh, none of that. Be more direct.”

  Instinct warned him to duck and run. Experience demurred, goaded by curiosity. Too late, both argued. Go on. Or under.

  He closed in.

  “These clever people, would they do business with friends of Miz Lourat?”

  “They would consider it their bounden duty.”

  “Even to major lawbreaking?”

  She gave a slow nod. Hair flowed in across her face, hiding it. “Yes,” she whispered.

  Gypter brushed aside her hair. His fingers tingled.

  “We must be clear on a few points.”

  She raised her face again. He lowered his hand.

  “There are laws—good and necessary ones—which prohibit certain kinds of research. The punishments for breaking them are hideously severe. Does Lourat understand this?”

  A nod.

  He hesitated. “And you, are you an android?”

  Gently, she nestled a hand in his. “You decide.”

  Her skin was soft and warm. No question, she felt the real thing. Tantalisingly so. With difficulty, he drew away.

  “Think of prosthetics,” she said. “Or clothing.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “You’re a suit of clothes?”

  She laughed merrily. “Some ideas do sound funny, at first.”

  “Yah, right,” Gypter said.

  I’m talking to a Something with a weird identity problem, he thought, keeping his face straight. Stay? Or make my excuses—and lose touch with some incredible technology...

  Easy one.

  “Me,” he said, “I don’t care what you are. My worry is that Lourat plainly could end her money problems in a zipped minute by licensing these discoveries. If she keeps them secret, punitive seizures by the government could cost her everything. To opt for risk, instead of easy wealth and safety, she has to be crazy.”

  The dryad smiled sadly. “Crazy indeed. Crazy with love.”

  “Love of what? Look, at Lourat’s age, execution and penury may hold few terrors. But her clever people, what keeps them so loyal? Doesn’t she feel any responsibility?”

  “As to that, you must ask Miz Lourat.” She settled herself beside him on the rock. “But it could be useful to recall that love and loyalty are not always bedfellows.” Shading her eyes from the sun, she admired the scenery.

  Allowing me time to think, he realised.

  “If I came in on this deal,” he said, “would I regret it?”

  She toyed with the hem of her garment.

  “Would I?”

  “Who can trust the future?” she said, at last. “But I don’t believe you ever would.”

  “There are secrets here,” he suggested.

  “No outsider can be allowed to know.”

  Gypter thought about the mad old woman, watching her wealth drain away, increasingly fearful that her last beloved scrap of unsullied planet would fall into the clutches of despoilers. One day she, or people loyal to her, had made a discovery that reeked of money. Ironically powerless to exploit it, in her desperation she sought him out for help. Him, of all people.

  “The ones in the House, they depend on you, Sir Henry.”

  To fix the hash they’ve made of things. Quite believable.

  “Henry,” he corrected automatically.

  “As do we. Miz Lourat knows your weakness, you see.”

  “Which weakness?” He ran his eyes down her.

  “Not that one,” she said. “The streak of altruistic romance you try to hide. When you were younger, you might have sold us out for what you could make. Now that you have more money than you know what to do with, well, we were hoping you might like to have some place you could visit, now and then, when the world out there becomes too sordid to be tolerated.”

  Words seemed superfluous. For a while they sat together on the rock in the hot sun. Then they walked back to the aircycle. As he was about to close the door, she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek.

  “Take a cheerful thought with you,” she said. “Back to your world of dead houses with roofs on them.”

  ~ * ~

  By the time Gypter had garaged the aircycle and regained the privacy of his apartment, the flying bugs had all found roosts. Checking only that they responded to signals and were recording, he moved to the desk in the office, where a bundle of partnership papers, tied in the customary red ribbon, waited for him.

  He scanned the text quickly by eye, then fed it through his document analyser. Within seconds the link back to his corporate noeton had returned confirmation that there were no semantic or legal traps. Appended was a demotic reduction of the tortuous legalese from which the agreement had been constructed. This he took to a window seat, where he relaxed while digesting all the proposals.

  As Lourat had said, there was nothing to which he cared to object. It was a damn good deal. He would have the controlling interest for life, in exchange for a specified input of funds now and his continuing administrative expertise.

  Hmm. For life. He leaned back to regard the ceiling, where a flourish of plaster cherubs cavorted with maidens amid a sylvan setting.

  The creatures in the woods, and the secret they represented, were a whopper of an asset. Beside them, the estate was by no means nothing; but the one did somewhat overshadow the other.

  And whatever Lourat had, her backyard was full of it. Them. Vibrantly alive. More than human. But hiding from humanity, reluctant to be embroiled in its doings. Okay, no need to bother these ones. But the technology underpinning them would be worth a fortune, one day soon. Instinct insisted it was so.

  Control of that kind of potential could tempt a lot of folk.

  Time, he decided, for a chat with Lourat.

  ~ * ~

  He found her on the sunny south side of the mansion.

  A broad patio was littered with fatuously elegant wrought iron garden furniture. Someone had smothered the iron in pink enamel of painful hue before infecting it with gilt measles and padding the seats with bloated mauve cushions. Candy-striped umbrellas cast shady pools, in one of which sat Lourat, swaddled by green polyester lace. The debris of a snack lay on the table beside her. Dark glasses with fluorescent orange butterfly-wing frames masked her eyes as she watched a group of stockholders and ecofreaks at play on the adjacent croquet lawn.

  She raised her head to regard him as he approached.

  “Henry,” she murmured. “Did you have a pleasant walk?”

  He sat down heavily, allowing his chair to scrape noisily. A couple of the players scowled. He ignored them, focusing on Lourat.

  “Pat,” he said, “I rather think you know I did.”

  “And the papers? Are they acceptable?”

  “Very.”

  “But...?”

  “Got to tinker with the phrasing. If I die unexpectedly, it could be, um, awkward. There’s a clause in my will requiring the most exhaustive of post-mortems and formal inquiries...”

  She raised a hand and smiled indulgently.

  “Please, Henry. Make whatever changes you wish. In the end it will come down to trust. You trust us, we trust you.”

  “Yah, right,�
�� he said. His eyes strayed to the lawn, where one of the ‘freaks was on her knees, gauging a shot. “And them?” He indicated the players. “Do your supporters know what you’ve got hidden in the woods?”

  Lourat removed her sunglasses and fixed him with her bright gaze. “More to the point, Henry, do you?”

  He thought about it. “Not really.”

  “Some lunch while we talk?” She glanced towards the clutter of used tableware. Salady stuff, mostly.

  “Yah, sure. And a chilled white wine, if you have any.” Gazing about the patio, he asked, “Do we send smoke signals?”

  “Swanson will be along shortly.”

  About thirty seconds later the footman rounded the corner of the building, a tray balanced on one hand. Gypter whistled and waved.

  Swanson ignored the hail. Advancing at an unbroken pace, he reached the table and began unloading a selection of items, which together duplicated what Lourat appeared to have had.

  Plus one glass of chilled white wine.

  Gypter considered the wine. Swanson departed. Lourat set her glasses on her nose and delicately pushed them into place with a fingertip.

  “Bit of a mind reader,” said Gypter. He sipped the wine.

  It was excellent.

  “Dear Swanson,” said Lourat, dreamily, “such a treasure.”

  She had not misunderstood.

  “And the girl in the woods?”

  “A construct.”

  Wood clacked against wood, out on the lawn, and players cheered. Their chattering faded into distance. On the patio was a stillness. At such moments, worlds change.

  “She seemed very real.”

  “One of our best.” Lourat laughed. “Oh, wait until you meet the others.”

  “Centaurs and all?”

  “Whatever you want, we can build it.”

  “Realistic, but not truly real.”

  The old lady grinned. “Henry,” she purred, “is that you doubting their lifelike qualities?”

  He knew he was losing control. A hot flush filled his face. Too soon to blame it on the wine.

  “And Swanson?” he demanded.

  “Nobody could be that perfect,” she giggled, settling back in her chair.

  “Or that insufferable,” he agreed. “How did you solve the problem of personality?”

  “In Swanson’s case, we inscribed an artificial one. Machine generated, apparently. The details are utterly beyond me. That sort of thing I leave to my clever people.”

  Instinct was yammering at him to shut up, not to ask the next question. Yet, not knowing would be...

  “You are wondering,” said Lourat, “about the girl.”

  Gypter nodded.

  “Henry, I have no idea who she was. In this tragic world of ours, death happens, unremarked, all the time. My people went looking and they found her. How it works—”

  “Yah, don’t tell me, the details are utterly beyond you.”

  Gulping the rest of the wine, Gypter set the empty glass on the table and flicked it away from the edge. Instead of sliding to safety, it toppled and rolled along an arc. Calmly he watched it teeter on the brink, then smash onto the paving.

  Lourat remarked, “Swanson will be most unhappy.”

  “Good. Having some kind of emotion should be an interesting experience for him.” Gypter fought to control himself. “Gods, woman, why did you invite me into this mess?”

  “As I said yesterday, you want control, we want survival.”

  It was a truth he could not deny. The reassurance of being the one who wields power, in a world wherein being powerless was to be miserable beyond measure, was worth more than money. To be free to choose one’s future, know that another’s whim would not moderate the morrow. To survive. Yes, he understood.

  So why did his heart flinch from this opportunity?

  The salad, he noticed, was drying out. And the players had finished their game and had slipped away.

  We all lose our freshness. One by one, we all slip away.

  Lourat was watching him.

  “If I became part of that ‘we,’ what then?” he asked.

  “We take care of our own,” she said.

  ~ * ~

  In his dreaming that night, Gypter awoke.

  Someone was knocking on his door. Softly, irresistibly, the sounds summoned him from the refuge of sleep, unwilling yet obedient. Despite himself he called for entry.

  The door swung wide. Swanson stood there. In one upraised hand he bore what seemed to be a coat hanger—but the garments arrayed on it were wrongly textured, horribly malformed, tucked and folded in suggestive ways.

  “Sir,” he said, “the mistress instructed me to bring to you this more suitable apparel.”

  The hand held out its burden. And a sleeve of the proffered garments came untucked. Sliding free with the rubbery grace of a deflated inner tube, it flopped and swung heavily in plain sight, so that Gypter could make out the human thumb and human fingers with which it was tipped.

  ~ * ~

  He was glad to escape the place. The signed papers sat in his case like a primed bomb, awaiting validation and registration with the regulatory authorities. Concern enough, of itself. But the lingering shock of his dream hung upon him too, like a heavy cloak of grief, as if he knew he should be in mourning, without knowing what for. Unable to shake the sensation, he sat dazed in his seat, watching the ground fall away and the mansion dwindle into the scenery, aware only of the apprehension of some threat.

  The cause was not the deal. Now that he knew what he must bring to market, business should proceed like any other he had shepherded to success in his time: hide connections; ensure exploitation was seen to proceed as the world expected while the real development went on covertly; set up parallel operations, slush funds and subornments; buy politicians; infiltrate pressure groups; change whichever ‘freak’, church- and/or union-inspired laws required changing. Refashion prejudices. Remake a world.

  The prospect should have delighted him.

  As a distraction, he opened his case and began scanning bug channels. The comms monitor had been logging activity within the mansion and quickly brought him up to date.

  The thought came to him, suddenly, that the bugs had been a waste of effort. From the start, Lourat had been eager to hand him the farm on a plate, simply in exchange for his help.

  It was just as well. The only recorded voices were his own and those of people who had been in his presence.

  He frowned, requested reanalysis. The result was confirmed: except when he was nearby, no one had spoken around the mansion since the bugs had infiltrated themselves.

  But...

  A channel carried voices now.

  “Swanson.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Signal our friends in the forest. Inform the contact unit that we are pleased with her performance. Advise the rest it is safe to emerge. Remind the fairies not to show off.”

  “At once, ma’am.”

  “And Swanson.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Have the buildings swept.”

  “Thoroughly, ma’am.”

  A closing door. And silence.

  Soon after, all bugs stopped sending, nearly simultaneously. Gypter did not care. He was picking his way through a thornbush of additional unease which the brief conversation had inspired.

  Someone was conning someone, above and beyond the deceits a wise person took for granted. It seemed Lourat had known of his bugs, expected him to be listening. He had been sent a message.

  Why should she seek to spice a deal, already settled, with redundant talk of the creatures in the woods? She knew he knew about them.

  A horrible suspicion formed in his mind.

  He had been told much. He was an insider now. But much had not been told him. Precisely what did Lourat want him to deduce in addition, unaided?

  And then another link connected itself for him, as an icy blast of fear scoured his soul.

  Lourat’s message t
o him was not in her words.

  Her message was the fact of the message.

  See, Henry, your bugs are working; but I only speak aloud when I must.