Space Is Just a Starry Night

by Tanith Lee

  Around nineteen, I knocked. No reply.

  Intimidated, I slunk off. I wouldn’t play the septophones, even with the ear-pieces only, even with the volume way down. Might wake Granny. You see, if you could wake her from two hundred years in the freezer, you could certainly wake her after eight hours on a dormadais.

  At twenty-four midnight, she still hadn’t come out.

  Coward, I knocked again and feebly called: “Night, Carla. See you tomorrow.”

  On the couch I had nightmares, or nightcarlas, to be explicit. Some were very realistic, like the one where the trust bonds Carla’s estate had left for her hadn’t accumulated after all and she was destitute and going to remain with me forever and ever. Or there were the comic-strip ones where the fake red-lynx got under the cover and bit me. Or the surreal ones where Carla came floating toward me, clad only in her smoldering hair, and everything caught fire from it, and I kept saying, “Please, Carla, don’t set the rug alight. Please, Carla, don’t set the couch alight.” In the end there was merely a dream where Carla bent over me, hissing something like an anaconda — if they do hiss. She wanted me to stay asleep, apparently, and for some reason I was fighting her, though I was almost comatose. The strange thing in this dream was that Carla’s eyes had altered from copper to a brilliant topaz yellow, like the lynx’s.

  It must have been about four in the morning that I woke up. I think it was the washer unit that woke me. Or it could have been the septophones. Or the waste-disposal. Or the drier. Or any of the several gadgets a modern apartment was equipped with. Because they were all on. It sounded like a madhouse. Looked like one. All the lights were on, too. In the middle of chaos: Carla. She was quite naked, the way I’d seen her at first, but she had the sort of nakedness that seems like clothes, clean-cut, firm, and flawless. The sort that makes me want to hide inside a stone. She was reminiscent of a sorceress in the midst of her sorcery, the erupting mechanisms sprawling around her in the fierce light. I had a silly thought: Carla’s going nova. Then she turned and saw me. My mouth felt as if it had been security-sealed, but I got out, “You OK, Carla?”

  “I am, darling. Go back to sleep now.”

  That’s the last thing I remember till ten A.M. the next day.

  I wondered initially if Carla and the gadgets had been an additional dream. But when I checked the energy-meter I discovered they hadn’t.

  I was plodding to the ready-cook when Carla emerged from the bedroom in her amber reclinerobe.

  She didn’t say a word. She just relaxed at the counter and let me be her slave. I got ready to prepare her the large breakfast she outlined. Then I ran her bath. When the water-meter shut off half through, Carla suggested I put in the extra tags to ensure the tub was filled right up.

  As she bathed, I sat at the counter and had another nervous attack.

  Of course, Carla was predictably curious. Back in 1993, many of our gadgets hadn’t been invented, or at least not developed to their present standard. Why not get up in the night and turn everything on? Why did it have to seem sinister? Maybe my sleeping through it practically nonstop was the thing that troubled me. All right. So Carla was a hypnotist. Come to consider, should I run a histotrace myself, in an attempt to learn what Carla was — had been?

  But let’s face it, what really upset me was the low on the energy-meter, the water-meter taking a third of my week’s water tags in one morning. And Carla luxuriously wallowing, leaving me to foot the bill.

  Could I say anything? No. I knew she’d immobilize me before I’d begun.

  When she came from the bathroom, I asked her did she want to go out. She said no, but I could visit the library, if I would, and pick up this book and tape list she’d called through to them. I checked the call-meter. That was down, too.

  “I intend to act the hermit for a while, Tacey,” Carla murmured behind me as I guiltily flinched away from the meter. “I don’t want to get involved in a furor of publicity. I gather the news of my successful revival will have been leaked today. The tablotapes will be sporting it. But I understand, by the news publishing codes of the ’80s, that unless I approach the Newsies voluntarily, they are not permitted to approach me.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” I gazed pleadingly into the air. “I guess you wouldn’t ever reconsider that, Carla? It could mean a lot of money. That is, not for you to contact the Newsies. But if you’d all — allow me to on your beh — half.”

  She chuckled like a lioness with her throat full of gazelle. The hair rose on my neck as she slunk closer. When her big, warm, elegant hand curved over my skull, I shuddered.

  “No, Tacey. I don’t think I’d care for that. I don’t need the cash. My estate investments, I hear, are flourishing.”

  “I was thinking of m — I was thinking of me, Carla. I cou — could use the tags.”

  The hand slid from my head and batted me lightly. Somehow, I was glad I hadn’t given her the Toledo knife after all.

  “No, I don’t think so. I think it will do you much more good to continue as you are. Now, run along to the library, darling.”

  I went mainly because I was glad to get away from her. To utter the spineless whining I had, had drained entirely my thin reserves of courage. I was shaking when I reached the auto-lift. I had a wild plan of leaving town and leaving my apartment with Carla in it, and going to ground. It was more than just inadequacy now. Hunter and hunted. And as I crept through the long grass, her fiery breath was on my heels.

  I collected the twenty books and the fifty tapes and paid for the loan. I took them back to the apartment and laid them before my astonishing amber granny. I was too scared even to hide. Much too scared to disobey.

  I sat on the sun-patio, though it was the weather control day for rain. Through the plastase panels I heard the tapes educating Carla on every aspect of contemporary life: social, political, economic, geographical, and carnal.

  When she summoned me, I fixed lunch. Later, drinks and supper.

  Then I was too nervous to go to sleep. I passed out in the bathroom, sitting in the shower cubicle. Had nightcarlas of Carla eating salad. Didn’t wake up till ten A.M. Checked. All meters down again.

  When I trod on smashed plastase, I thought it was sugar. Then I saw the cooled-water dispenser was in ninety-five bits. Where the plant had been, there was only soil and condensation and trailing roots.

  I looked, and everywhere beheld torn-off leaves and tiny clots of earth. There was a leaf by Carla’s bedroom. I knocked, and my heart knocked to keep my hand company.

  But Carla wasn’t interested in breakfast, wasn’t hungry.

  I knew why not. She’d eaten my plant.

  You can take a bet I meant to call up the Institute right away. Somehow, I didn’t. For one thing, I didn’t want to call from the apartment and risk Carla catching me at it. For another, I didn’t want to go out and leave her, in case she did something worse. Then again, I was terrified to linger in her vicinity. A lapse, the medic in charge had postulated. It was certainly that. Had she done anything like it at the Institute? Somehow I had the idea she hadn’t. She’d saved it for me. Out of playful malice.

  I dithered for an hour, till I panicked, pressed the call button, and spoke the digits. I never heard the door open. She seemed to know exactly when to — strike; yes, that is the word I want. I sensed her there. She didn’t even touch me. I let go the call button.

  “Who were you calling?” Carla asked.

  “Just a guy I used to pair with,” I said, but it came out husky and gulped and quivering.

  “Well, go ahead. Don’t mind me.”

  Her maroon voice, bored and amused and indifferent to anything I might do, held me like a steel claw. And I discovered I had to turn around and face her. I had to stare into her eyes.

  The scorn in them was killing. I wanted to shrivel and roll under the rug, but I couldn’t look away.

  “But if you’re not going to call anyone, run my bath, darling,” Carla said.

  I ran her bath.
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br />   It was that easy. Of course.

  She was magnetic. Irresistible.

  I couldn’t —

  I could not —

  Partly, it had all become incredible. I couldn’t picture myself accusing Carla of houseplant-eating to the medics at the Institute. Who’d believe it? It was nuts. I mean, too nuts even for them. And presently, I left off quite believing it myself.

  Nevertheless, somewhere in my brain I kept on replaying those sentences of the medic in charge: the occasional lapse in the behavioral patterns…a mood, an aberration…. And against that, point counterpoint, there kept on playing that phrase the beautiful black medic had reeled off enigmatically as a cultural jest: But what befalls a soul trapped for years, centuries, in a living yet statically frozen body?

  Meanwhile, by sheer will, by the force of her persona, she’d stopped me calling. And that same thing stopped me talking about her to anybody on the street, sent me tongue-tied to fetch groceries, sent me groveling to conjure meals. It was almost as if it also shoved me asleep when she wanted and brought me awake ditto.

  Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

  Twenty days, each more or less resembling each, hurried by. Carla didn’t do anything else particularly weird, at least not that I saw or detected. But then, I never woke up nights anymore. And I had an insane theory that the meters had been fiddled, because they weren’t low, but they felt as if they should be. I hadn’t got any more plants. I missed some packaged paper lingerie, but it turned up under Carla’s bed, where I’d kicked it when the bed was mine. Twenty days, twenty-five. The month of Carla’s post-resuscitation tests was nearly through. One morning, I was stumbling about like a zombie, cleaning the apartment because the dustease had jammed and Carla had spent five minutes in silent comment on the dust. I was moving in that combined sludge of terror, mindlessness, and masochistic cringing she’d taught me, when the door signal went.

  When I opened the door, there stood the black medic with a slim case of file-tapes. I felt transparent, and that was how he treated me. He gazed straight through me to the empty room where he had hoped my granny would be.

  “I’m afraid your call doesn’t seem to be working,” he said. (Why had I the notion Carla had done something to the call?) “I’d be grateful to see Mz Brice, if she can spare me a few minutes. Just something we’d like to check for the files.”

  That instant, splendid on her cue, Carla manifested from the bathroom. The medic had seen her naked in the frosty box, but not a naked that was vaguely and fluently sheathed in a damp towel. It had the predictable effect. As he paused transfixed, Carla bestowed her most gracious smile.

  “Sit down,” she said. “What check is this? Tacey, darling, why not arrange some fresh coffee?”

  Tacey darling went to the coffee cone. Over its bubbling, I heard him say to her, “It’s simply that Doctor Something was a little worried by a possible amnesia. Certainly, none of the memory areas seem physically impaired. But you see, here and there on the tape —”

  “Give me an example, please,” drawled Carla.

  The medic lowered his lashes as if to sweep the tablotape.

  “Some confusion over places and names. Your second husband, Francis, for instance, who you named as Frederick. And there, the red mark — Doctor Something-Else mentioned the satellite disaster of ’91, and it seems you did not recall —”

  “You’re referring to the malfunction of the Ixion II, which broke up and crashed in the Midwest, taking three hundred lives,” said Carla. She sounded like a purring textbook. She leaned forward, and I could watch him tremble all the way across from the coffee cone. “Doctor Something and Doctor Something-Else,” said Carla, “will have to make allowances for my excitement at rebirth. Now, I can’t have you driving out this way for nothing. How about you come to dinner, the night before the great day. Tacey doesn’t see nearly enough people her own age. As for me, let’s say you’ll make a two-hundred-year-old lady very happy.”

  The air between them was electric enough to form sparks. By the “great day” she meant, patently, the five-channel Spatial event when her four thousand and ninety confreres got liberated from the subzero. But he plainly didn’t care so much about defrosting anymore.

  The coffee cone boiled over. I noticed with a shock I was crying. Nobody else did.

  What I wanted to do was program the ready-cook for the meal, get in some wine, and get the hell out of the apartment and leave the two of them alone. I’d pass the night at one of the all-night Populars, and creep in around ten a.m. the next morning. That’s the state I frankly acknowledged she had reduced me to. I’d have been honestly grateful to have done that. But Carla wouldn’t let me.

  “Out?” she inquired. “But this whole party is for you, darling.”

  There was nobody about. She didn’t have to pretend. She and I knew I was the slave. She and I knew her long-refrigerated soul, returning in fire, had scalded me into a melty on the ground. So it could only be cruelty, this. She seemed to be experimenting, as she had with the gadgets. The psychological dissection of an inferior inhabitant of the future.

  What I had to do, therefore, was to visit the ready-set hair parlor, and buy a dress with my bimonthly second W-I check. Carla, though naturally she didn’t go with me, somehow instigated and oversaw these ventures. Choosing the dress, she was oddly at my elbow. That one, her detached and omnipresent aura instructed me. It was expensive, and it was scarlet and gold. It would have looked wonderful on somebody else. But not me. That dress just sucked the little life I’ve got right out of me.

  Come the big night (before the big day, for which the countdown must already have, in fact, begun), there I was, done up like a New Year parcel, and with my own problematical soul wizened within me. The door signal went, and the slave accordingly opened the door, and the dark angel entered, politely thanking me as he nearly walked straight through me.

  He looked so marvelous, I practically bolted. But still the aura of Carla, and Carla’s wishes, which were beginning to seem to be communicating themselves telepathically, held me put.

  Then Carla appeared. I hadn’t seen her before, that evening. The dress was lionskin, and it looked real, despite the anti-game-hunting laws. Her hair was a smooth auburn waterfall that left bare an ear with a gold star dependent from it. I just went into the cooking area and uncorked a bottle and drank most of it straight off.

  They both had good appetites, though hers was better than his. She’d eaten a vast amount since she’d been with me, presumably ravenous after that long fast. I was the waitress, so I waited on them. When I reached my plate, the food had congealed because the warmer in the table on my side was faulty. Anyway, I wasn’t hungry. There were two types of wine. I drank the cheap type. I was on the second bottle now and sufficiently sad I could have howled, but I’d also grown uninvolved, viewing my sadness from a great height.

  They danced together to the septophones. I drank some more wine. I was going to be very, very ill tomorrow. But that was tomorrow. Verily. When I looked up, they’d danced themselves into the bedroom, and the panels were shut. Carla’s cruelty had had its run, and I wasn’t prepared for any additions, such as ecstatic moans from the interior, to augment my frustration. Accordingly, garbed in my New Year parcel frock, hair in curlicues, and another bottle in my hand, I staggered forth into the night.

  I might have met a thug, a rapist, a murderer, or even one of the numerous polipatrols that roam the city to prevent the activities of such. But I didn’t meet anyone who took note of me. Nobody cared. Nobody was interested. Nobody wanted to be my friend, rob me, abuse me, give me a job or a goal, or make me happy, or make love to me. So if you thought I was a Judas, just you remember that. If one of you slobs had taken any notice of me that night —

  I didn’t have to wait for morning to be ill. There was a handsome washroom on Avenue East. I’ll never forget it. I was there quite a while.

  When the glamorous weather-control dawn irradiated the city, I was
past the worst. And by ten a.m. I was trudging home, queasy, embittered, hard-done-by, but sober. I was even able to register the tabloes everywhere and the holoid neons, telling us all that the great day was here. The day of the four thousand and ninety. Thawday. I wondered dimly if Carla and the Prince of Darkness were still celebrating it in my bed. She should have been cold. Joke. All right. It isn’t.

  The door to my apartment let me in. The place was as I’d abandoned it. The window blinds were down, the table strewn with plates and glasses. The bedroom door firmly shut.

  I pressed the switch to raise the blinds, and nothing happened, which didn’t surprise me. That in itself should have proved to me how far the influence had gone and how there was no retreat. But I only had this random desultory urge to see what the apartment door would do now. What it did was not react. Not even when I put my hand on the panel, which method was generally reserved for guests. It had admitted me, but wouldn’t let me out again. Carla had done something to it. As she had to the call, the meters, and to me. But how — personal power? Ridiculous. I was a spineless dope; that was why she’d been able to negate me. Yet — forty-one medics, with a bevy of tests and questions, some of which, apparently, she hadn’t got right, ate from her hand. And maybe her psychic ability had increased. Practice makes perfect.

  …What befalls a soul trapped for years, centuries, in a living yet statically frozen body?

  It was dark in the room, with the blinds irreversibly staying down and the lights irreversibly off.

  Then the bedroom door slid wide, and Carla slid out. Naked again, and glowing in the dark. She smiled at me, pityingly.

  “Tacey, darling, now you’ve gotten over your sulks, there’s something in here I’d like you to clear up for me.”

  Dichotomy once more. I wanted to take root where I was, but she had me walking to the bedroom. She truly was glowing. As if she’d lightly sprayed herself over with something mildly luminous. I guessed what would be in the bedroom, and I’d begun retching, but, already despoiled of filling, that didn’t matter. Soon I was in the doorway, and she said, “Stop that, Tacey.” And I stopped retching and stood and looked at what remained of the beautiful black medic, wrapped up in the bloodstained lionskin.