“Joanne.”
She stepped from the blackness and smiled at me. “Hello, Joe. I didn’t hear you come in. I’m afraid Carioca’s gone out for a while, but she’ll be back in about half an hour, I expect.”
“I came to see you, Joanne.”
I had been too direct. A flicker of alarm crossed her face. “Whatever for?”
“I see Carioca’s bought you a new orchestrella.”
“It’s not mine. It’s Carioca’s. She’s playing again. The one she smashed was hers too; I’d like you to understand that.” She looked around the expensive room. “Everything’s Carioca’s. Everything.”
“Don’t be so goddamned humble, Joanne. She’s not a goddess. It’s not a privilege for you to work for her. She’s just an ex-star, a has-been. You’re worth a dozen of her. You’re young and you’re very pretty. You could be a star yourself, if you had half the luck she had.”
“Look, Mr. Sagar. There’s nothing wrong in Carioca’s having been successful. I don’t like to hear people running her down because she isn’t maybe … working so much these days. Look at it this way. She could have been just another married woman, an average housewife. Would you say a married woman was finished—a has-been—just because she’s decided not to have any more children? The only person who knows if Carioca is finished is herself; and judging from the way she is I’d say she’s OK, she’s fine. She used to be a 3-V star but now she’s changed her angle. She’s moved to the Peninsula with plenty of money; she doesn’t need to work, and now she’s well on her way to becoming a pillar of local society, a person who people want to know because she’s famous and interesting. How many people seek you out, Mr. Sagar? How many people make an effort to get to know you?”
I wondered why she was talking like this. I’d seen no evidence of Carioca’s sudden popularity. It seemed that everything had gone wrong. I shouldn’t have come. “That’s not fair, Joanne. Maybe I don’t want people to seek me out.”
“Hey, but you wouldn’t mind, would you, Joe? You wouldn’t mind people pointing you out to each other and saying, ‘There goes Joe Sagar, the world-famous slithe-farmer.’“ Suddenly she was laughing. “Oh, Joe, why the hell didn’t you choose a more impressive name, and job?” She looked at me, face flushed, and she was incredibly beautiful, infinitely desirable.
I put my hands on her shoulders. “I’m happy the way I am. I don’t think Carioca is. I’m on an even keel but she’s on the way down. But I’d rather not talk about her.”
I drew her gently toward me. She disengaged herself and walked back to the semidome.
“I’ll play for you, not with you, Joe,” she said.
When Carioca arrived she found us just like that. I was standing, listening to the music and watching Joanne’s hands, because that was all I could see of her.
Two weeks later the slithes shed their skins, and a week after that Carioca Jones’s dress was finished. I had a female state prisoner in the factory at the time who was about Carioca’s size, so we gave her the dress to try on. When she reappeared she was smiling and radiant, and the dress was a warm, uniform pink. The seams were invisible and the fit perfect; the dress seemed almost to blend with the girl’s own skin. She looked a hell of a lot, better in it than Carioca would—and she knew it.
“Betty, you look fantastic,” breathed Dave, popeyed with admiration.
Eventually we had to get the girl and the dress separated. I supervised the packing; I didn’t want anything to go wrong at this stage. I had previously packed my personal gift to Joanne and I sat looking for some time at the small box, wondering what the hell to write on the card.
I hadn’t seen either Carioca or Joanne for over two weeks and had, in fact, been getting nervous over the order for the dress. There had been no answer to my calls and on the one occasion I summoned up the nerve to visit the house, it was all locked up. I couldn’t understand why Carioca hadn’t told me she was going away.
Then, a few days before the dress was complete, her face had appeared on the visiphone screen.
“Terribly sorry, Joe darling, but I had to go away for a couple of weeks. Rather nasty, actually. Everything’s all right now, though.” In the background I caught sight of Joanne moving about, and felt a huge relief.
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Oh, such a silly thing. I was feeding Wilberforce and he bit me, and I had to have shots and surgical treatment and all sorts of stupid things.”
“Wilberforce?”
“You know him, my land shark. He’s such a pet really, and so good-tempered.”
“You ought to have the bastard put down.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. Anyway, I thought I’d better call and tell you everything’s all right here. And my dress. Is it finished?”
“Almost. Just two or three days.”
It was, in fact, four days later when I called and told her it was ready. She went into hysterical transports of delight and insisted that I bring it over right away for a ceremonial trying-on. By then it was four o’clock in the afternoon, so I washed and changed and left. Dave instructions to close up. As I drove over to Carioca’s place there was a tingling knot of nervous anticipation centered around my solar plexus. I hadn’t seen Joanne for three weeks. I wondered if she’d thought of me during that time. I wondered if she would like her present. Then I managed to think business again to the extent of hoping Carioca liked the dress.
The lights were on in the house when I arrived and I could hear the soft sound of the orchestrella. Twilight was all around me as I hurried across the wet grass, then up the crunching gravel path to the front door, clutching the boxes. The air was chill and damp and I started at a rustling in the bushes; it was probably the carnivorous Wilberforce on a foraging expedition. The front door was ajar; I stepped inside.
“It’s me!” I called.
There was no reply so I entered just the same, sure of my welcome now the dress was finished. The vast living room echoed to the glorious tones of the orchestrella and a drink stood on the table near the semidome. This was something of a royal welcome; obviously Carioca meant me to make myself at home while she slipped into something easy to slip off again. I took the glass and strolled over to the semidome, watching Joanne’s pale, beautiful fingers working gently as she changed subtly from the buoyant tones of the welcoming music into the melody of a tender love song.
For a while I just stood and listened, trying not to think about Carioca and the fact that she had told Joanne what to play; instead I said to myself—this is for me. Joanne has chosen this song herself, for me, because she loves me.
And the way she was playing it, so softly, so expressively, I could almost believe she did. It was not a matter of technical perfection; in fact, I’d heard her play more correctly. It was an emotional thing; the occasional uncertainty, hesitancy, only serving to heighten the spell—the endearing tremulousness of a young girl in love. She played it how it is.
At last the slender fingers were still and she was finished. She was waiting for me to say something but I didn’t know what to say.
“Hello,” I murmured at last. “That was beautiful.”
A pale shadow appeared within the light-absorbing semidome as she stood. She stepped forward and the room lighting fell upon her black hair, accentuating harshly the wrinkles about the eyes, the hard lines of the mouth.
“Hello, Joe darling,” said Carioca Jones. “You never believed me when I said I could play.”
Just for an instant the room seemed to shake itself about me and my stomach gave one single, great throb of horror and disgust. I turned away so that she couldn’t see the shock in my eyes, and clutched at the boxes on the table. Dumbly I handed the larger one to her.
She took it in her young, soft hands and began to undo the wrappings with little squeals of delight, while I watched in fear, seeing the thin scars around her wrists.
Dimly I heard Joanne’s voice behind me and dragged my gaze away.
“Joe! How
nice to see you again. Carioca tells me you’ve had a present made for me. You shouldn’t have, you know.”
Joanne was walking across the room, smiling at me; then she turned and watched affectionately as Carioca went into paroxysms of delight over the dress. She looked at me again.
“Well, aren’t you going to give it to me?”
Of course, I should have guessed. I should have known that Carioca would have a bonded S. P. girl, and I should have guessed that neither the friendless ex-star nor the female state prisoner would advertise the fact.
I was still clutching the small box. I suppose I must have blinked and half pulled myself together, tried to smile, and offered it to her.
Joanne reached to take it.
With glittering, steel prosthetic hands.
4
Winter came to the Peninsula and the sling-gliders were dismantled and stowed away in the clubhouse, and the racy hydrofoils were winched up onto the slipways to stand poised on their stilt legs like greyhounds in the traps, waiting for the start of the first race of the season. The chill rain drove across the flatlands and low scrub, and the November gales pounded the shore. It became uncomfortable to drive the hovercars in the sweeping crosswinds and most people stayed at home, relying on the flymart for supplies, wishing they had gone south before all this happened. There were News-pocket reports of starving fish prowling the bush.
I missed most of this, because old Doc Lang recommended me to take a long vacation. “You need a change, Joe,” he said, after I described symptoms which ranged from headaches and indigestion to bouts of screaming in the night. I can laugh about it now, almost, but at the time I reckon I must have been pretty sick. The very fact that I can remember so little of those months must prove something.
“I can’t leave the farm,” I think I said.
“If you don’t want to end up in the funny house you’ll have to leave the farm,” he replied, drinking my scotch.
Later I approached Dave Froehlich. Despite the cold, the animals were all fit and well in their heated quarters, and the factory had orders for several weeks ahead. Everything was running smoothly; the question was, would it all fall apart as soon as my back was turned?
“Dave, I’m taking off for a spell. I don’t know how long. Will you be able to cope?”
“Yes,” he said shortly, evincing no surprise.
“You won’t forget about the new consignment of breeding stock? They arrive at Sentry Down on the fourteenth. And Mrs. Lambert’s stole; I promised delivery in two weeks. Those animals in pen E are for—”
“Just get the hell out of here, will you, Mr. Sagar? I’ve been running this business almost as long as you and I reckon I ought to know how to handle things by now.”
It would be nice to record that this was said with manly gruffness which failed to conceal a deep concern—but this was not so. It was my bonded man Dave Froehlich speaking, and he spoke with cold dislike. I looked in on the S. P. girls in the factory, was about to say good-bye to them all, then thought better of it. Soon enough, they would notice that I was not around.
Doc Lang had been eager to suggest a place for me to hole up in; it seemed he knew a small hotel down south where, I suspect, they understood people who suddenly and inexplicably began to cry into their soup, or stand on high ledges. It was called Dingle Dell, which in itself gave me cause for suspicion, with its undertones of coziness, of sympathy. “I’m sure they can fit you in,” he said.
So I loaded the hovercar and caught the early ferry to the mainland. It was a rough crossing with high seas and a stiff breeze, but the huge old hovercraft rode the steep waves well. I sat in the restaurant during most of the voyage, watching the weather outside, and all the time the thought of my hovercar down in the car deck was nagging at me. The thing was a responsibility, and I didn’t want responsibilities. I would have to collect it, and drive it off, and find parking spaces, and observe speed limits.
The waiter brought me another coffee and by the time I had finished it the matter of the hovercar had become an obsession. I took out my Newspocket portovee and tried to concentrate on the news items but there were road warnings here and accidents there, and it seemed that anyone who drove a car at this time of year was even more insane than I. There was snow in the mountains and floods in the valleys. I began to wish I was back at home on the farm.
By the time the ferry docked I had made up my mind. I contacted a porter, gave him instructions to have the car taken back to Roberts Bay at my expense, and caught the bus south. I left all my possessions in the car, apart from my wallet and the clothes I wore, and as the bus nosed through the traffic I began to feel better.
I stayed for a few days in several towns, but something always happened to make me move on again. Either the weather was foul, or the hotels full, or I would see a paraplegic being wheeled down the street. On one occasion I found myself in the midst of a Foes of Bondage convention. I met a few of these people in the bar of the hotel; they seemed to be mostly women with burning eyes and incessant cigarettes and a rabid hatred of the Penal Reform Act and all it stood for.
It was a pity. Although I was in sympathy with much of what they stood for, I couldn’t stand the individuals themselves. They seemed to be suffering from a bad case of oversell; if I’d admitted to them that I had a bonded man who was running my farm right now, I think they would have strung me up on the spot.
But the weather improved as I traveled south by hoverbus and monorail and hoverbus again, until eventually I wound up at Halmas. It was literally the end of the road, a small hot ancient village on a rocky promontory with a sandy beach, and there was no place else to go; there didn’t need to be. I climbed down from the bus to the dusty street and I didn’t see a land fish anywhere; in fact the only living creature in sight was an old man sitting in the dirt outside what looked very much like a bar.
Several beers later I knew I had found what I was looking for. I checked in at the little town’s only hotel and spent the next few days lying on the beach in the sun; and gradually I began to feel better. I didn’t forget the events of the past months on the Peninsula because, strangely, I hadn’t properly been able to remember them for some time. I merely found that my amnesia didn’t worry me so much.
The hotel was simple and comfortable, and the owners pleasant. I think they were excited at having a foreigner in the place and they spoke English for me and would have cooked northern food for me, but I insisted that I would rather eat the local dishes. Their names were Aldo and Jinny Carassa and they had a son named Jon, a swarthy Latin-looking lad of twenty who looked as though he knew how to use a knife. They also had a daughter whose name, oddly enough, was Marigold.
The scene was therefore ripe for the development of the type of situation common in many of the early Carioca Jones movies. During the fall season the local 3-V station had rerun several of these classics and I had been amused by the style of melodrama, and interested by the dark beauty of the young Carioca who appeared to spend her time being ravished by a succession of strangers in town. The ravisher was in due course dispatched by a thrust from the knife of Carioca’s brother of the time. The brother was then executed by members of the Nordic subrace. The father took to drink. The mother committed suicide. Meanwhile Carioca became pregnant and a nun, in that order.
It was all terribly sad and I didn’t want it to happen to these good folk, so for a time I kept my hands off Marigold. This was not always easy, since it was her habit in the evenings to walk abut the hotel in scanty night attire, invariably meeting me in some narrow, twisting corridor.
Added to which she would frequently wake me as I lay dozing on the beach, and I would find her kneeling over me, falling out of her bikini. “Wake up, Joe, and speak to me more about the Peninsula,” she said one day in her strong accent.
“Marigold, would you mind sitting back a bit? Your brother’s over there.”
“You don’t like my—” She looked down at herself. “How do you say it?”
&
nbsp; “I don’t say it.” I couldn’t decide whether she was totally innocent or totally carnal, and I didn’t intend to find out. “What do you want to know about the Peninsula?”
I had already told her everything I knew, described every square mile, told her about Louise and the beached liner, the state pen, the Peninsula Sling-gliding Club, Pacific Kennels—and she was still hungry for more. It was sad that she should regard the phony sophistication of the Peninsula as some sort of romantic heaven—to the detriment of the beautiful, real simplicity of Halmas.
I once told her, joking, that when she came to visit me there would be no need to meet her at the ferry terminal. She would be able to find her way to my house blindfold.
She stretched out her leg and examined it, stroking the brown flesh. She had a small star-shaped scar on the big toe of her right foot; the result of an accident with a spear-gun, she told me. “Tell me all about the sling-gliders.”
“I’ve already told you all about them.”
“You tell me what they do, but you don’t tell me what they are. It seems they risk their lives for fun, is that not so?”
“Well, yes, but they don’t think of it like that. I mean, you don’t keep thinking a shark will get you, when you’re out spear-fishing, do you?”
“I fish for food, not fun. It is not the same thing. These pilots, do they not fear being broken up?”
“That’s half the fun, Marigold. And if they do get hurt—”I hesitated; suddenly the Peninsula seemed a long way removed from this warm beach. “If they do get hurt they might have a bonded man. If not, we have a thing called the Ambulatory Organ Pool, where they can get replacement parts for themselves.” Images began to flicker through my mind.
“Please tell me what is the matter, Joe.”
“It’s nothing to do with you, Marigold. Can I tell you something? I love you.” I laughed so that she wouldn’t take me seriously, because I didn’t love her for herself. I loved her for the life she stood for.
I had remembered my own life. It still hurt, but I could face it now, here on this beach.
The Girl With a Symphony in Her Fingers Page 4
