The Girl With a Symphony in Her Fingers

by Michael G. Coney

  The engines died and the boat slowed as we came along-side the wharf at Skipper’s Marina. Back at the clubhouse, I dressed and we all had a final drink. Before long we were outside again, the clubhouse locked up and the hovercars hissing away homeward. I hardly remember getting back to the farm; I must have passed out cold once I reached my bed.

  The next morning I called on Heathcote Lambert, the Governor of the Northwest Regional State Penitentiary. He sat alone in his bright office on the top floor of the tallest of the pen buildings.

  Since the growing public concern over the Penal Reform Act—and the Foes’ search for martyrs—the state pen had tightened up on visiting, in general only allowing close relatives of the prisoner to attend. Fortunately, Lambert was a member of the sling-gliding club, so I was hoping to squeeze some concession out of him.

  For some moments I had to listen while, red-faced, he shouted into the visiphone at some Newspocket reporter who wanted an interview.

  At last he relaxed and pushed a button on the desk. “I’m sorry, Joe,” he said. “We’ve been under a lot of pressure here lately—and it gets a man down, you know? All I do here is run this goddamned place the way the Government tells me to—but I’m the one who has to take the rap. Sometimes it seems to me that public opinion is against prisons no matter what they do. People used to object to prisoners being kept in idleness by the State—now under the Penal Reform Act the public object to prisoners being made to work for their keep; they call it slavery.”

  “I think it’s bondage and the Ambulatory Organ Pool that they object to most.”

  He raised his hands in a gesture of despair. “And what the hell can I do about that? Bondage is merely another facet of the principle of Productive Correction, and the prisoner goes into it of his own free will. And as for the Ambulatory Organ Pool … well, that’s Bob Gallaugher’s department, but I have strong views on the matter. The prisoners in the Pool are the worst kind—rape and murder and robbery with violence and armed assault, all life sentences—and they can’t be let out on bondage or work parties; it’s not safe. They’re little better than animals and to my mind they should be punished to the hilt. They have nothing to offer society except their bodies—and to my mind society is entitled to force them to make what restitution they can.”

  “But those sort of prisoners aren’t quite sane, surely?”

  “By our standards they’re as mad as hatters. They reject the norms of society in nearly every way.”

  “Then how can you blame them for their crimes?” I asked. “Obviously a man who rapes little girls must be sick in the head. He isn’t responsible. He shouldn’t be blamed.”

  “So what the hell should we do? Spank him and tell him not to do it again? It so happens that I have a young daughter, Joe—and you haven’t. So you don’t know what you’re talking about. We have no hope of reforming criminals; it just can’t be done. They found that out years ago. Prisoners are here to be punished, they are here to be locked away safely, they are here to be used.”

  Bob Gallaugher entered, a rotund precise man in thick-lensed spectacles.

  “The Foes are staging another demonstration today, remember, Heathcote,” he said.

  “How can I forget that?” He laughed ruefully. “Tell me something good, you bastard.”

  Gallaugher frowned; it seemed Lambert’s request was unreasonable right now. “I wanted to speak to you about Rasmussen. He’s due out next month.”

  “Oh, God!” Lambert turned to me. “This is just the sort of thing we were talking about, Joe. Rasmussen is a murderer; he killed his wife. He drew a long sentence and was requisitioned for a donation last year; he gave a leg and a kidney to one of the victims of the Sentry Down disaster—you remember when that antigrav shuttle failed on liftoff? Next month Rasmussen is due for release.”

  “So he’s atoned for his crime. What’s wrong with that?”

  “For one thing he was a brutal murderer when he came in, and so far as society is concerned he’s still a brutal murderer. Ten years in here haven’t changed that. But now he gets out and he’s free to kill again, and he possibly will—but the Foes of Bondage will make a hero of him. They’ll stick him on a platform and roll up his pants leg and they’ll say: See the way the state pen mutilates a man. They’ll forget the innocent victim of the Sentry Down disaster who can walk again because of the Penal Reform Act, and they’ll forget the wife who Rasmussen carved up with a cleaver. The Foes of Bondage will have a martyr, and that’s all they’re interested in. It’s lucky men like Rasmussen aren’t released too frequently.”

  “Are you trying to say he should never be released?” I asked, alarmed at these views from a prison warden.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. And what’s more, I feel that he should be painlessly destroyed, once he’s donated every useful organ in his body.”

  Lambert spoke with such transparent feeling that I was forced to conclude he was serious—and that quite possibly he had a point. Gallaugher spoiled the effect, however. “Sometimes I’m at my wit’s end to know where the next organ is coming from,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the shortage. It only needs an accident like Sentry Down and we’re all out of stock, and have to apply for reinforcements of longterm prisoners from other pens.”

  I stared at him.

  “You’re speaking to a member of the public, Bob,” warned Lambert. “You must be careful how you phrase these things. Joe—remember this. These are criminals, man, criminals. They’ve forfeited their human rights.”

  I didn’t argue. I felt suddenly sick, and I could feel the sickness all around me. Lambert and Gallaugher were sick too; they were possibly honest men, they possibly believed in what they were doing—but they had become coarsened by the coarseness of the criminals around them, and had likewise lost their moral sense. I spoke to them of generalities for a while, then asked if I could see Joanne. Sensing my mood, Lambert agreed readily and rang for a guard to escort me.

  Joanne and I sat on opposite sides of a mesh fence in a long room, at either end of which stood an armed guard. It was sad and awful, just like the movies, and I wondered if perhaps I’d made a mistake coming here.

  “Hello, Joe,” she said quietly, smiling. “It was good of you to come. How have you been? I haven’t seen you for ages. How’s Carioca?”

  “The same as ever. Are they, uh, treating you well?”

  We talked for a while. She wore a short-sleeved dress and I could see where the flesh of her arms merged into the steel of her wrists and hands. The hands glittered in the harsh light and she gestured with them while talking, making no attempt to hide them. As she smiled and chattered it seemed she almost mocked me with those damned hands.

  But it was good to see her face again. She looked so pretty, with her snub nose and freckles and blue, blue eyes; and even the rough prison uniform could not conceal the beauty of her full breasts. “I’ll be out of here in September, you know that, Joe?” she said brightly.

  It was unreal. She should be unhappy and vicious and vindictive but she wasn’t. I said, “It’s a shame Carioca sent you back here.”

  “Oh, but it’s really the best thing, Joe. This way, Carioca can join the Foes of Bondage and fight against the Penal Reform Act—and once Carioca starts a fight, she never gives up. She’s trying to get me an early release as well, you know that? She’s really very good to me.”

  “Joanne,” I said impulsively, “when you get out of here I want you to come and live with me, right? We’ll get right away from this goddamned Peninsula and all it stands for. We’ll get married and sell the farm and buy a boat and go south; would you like that?” I finished breathlessly.

  She smiled quietly. “I appreciate that, Joe. We’ll just have to see what happens, won’t we?”

  The white walls and the black guards and the hopelessness seemed to close in on me until even Joanne looked unreal on the other side of the wire. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t getting anywhere with Joanne, and I neve
r would, and I don’t know why the hell I tried. She was smiling, telling me about the food or some goddamned thing. It seemed to go on forever until at last the guard loomed over me, touching my shoulder, and led me away. I looked back, but Joanne wasn’t watching me go. She was talking to a female guard.

  As I stepped out of the prison gates the sun hit my eyes, and I found a great crowd of women before me, screaming hatred into my face.

  7

  The Peninsula dressed for spring and April came and went. I settled into a routine again, spending my days at the slithe farm, my evenings and weekends at the club except once a week when I tortured myself by visiting cool sweet Joanne at the state pen. The state of armed neutrality between Carioca Jones and me softened into something akin to our old relationship of cautious friendship allied to business awareness on my side, and effusiveness on the side of Carioca. This mitigation of tension was largely due to Joanne who, in her quiet way from behind the mesh fence, seemed to place personal importance on the relationship between the ex-3-V star and me. Meanwhile Carioca, by all accounts, was spending considerable time and money in her efforts to secure an early release for Joanne on the grounds of a satisfactorily completed bondage.

  Often in the spring evenings I would stroll across to the Skipper’s Marina and watch the bonded men working on their bosses’ boats. I would chat with them as they scraped, painted, and varnished, and try to discover what made them tick. In general they were a cheerful crowd, unlike many bonded men I could mention, and it was rarely that a man would openly admit he was dissatisfied, or that he wished he’d never elected for bondage. At this time it didn’t occur to me to question my own growing interest in the penal system.

  Perhaps the most interesting of these characters was Charles Wentworth, Doug’s man. Even at weekends I would see him there, scraping and painting, preparing the boat for the coming season while the freemen and their loud, made-up wives wandered about the slipway and the wharves, grotesque marine pets flopping at their heels. These weekends had become social events, each man trying to outdo his fellow in hearty commendation of his own sleek boat, while the wives vied over such niceties as minipile cookers and autoflush heads.

  Even Carioca Jones appeared on occasion; once she was wearing the slithe-skin dress I’d made for her, and the skin turned a faint pink as our eyes met, and we both thought of Joanne. Her young hands rose to her vulture’s throat almost of their own accord, while her hard black eyes watched me carefully.

  “I must say I’m surprised to see you still come here, Joe, knowing your views,” she greeted me.

  “I like to look at the boats.”

  “Yes, but all these … people, darling. Aren’t they just terrible?”

  “No worse than anyone else, I guess,” I said, wishing she would move on.

  One Friday afternoon in May I left the farm in Dave’s hands and again visited the marina. By now the boats were in good shape, most of the paintwork having been completed; and the S. P. men were working on the decks and below, polishing brass, overhauling engines. About twenty hydrofoils stood in line abreast on their insect legs, looking virile and rakish.

  Charles Wentworth was working on the outside of Doug’s boat, lubricating the heavy rollers of the eye. I walked over and greeted him. He looked up from his work.

  “Hi there, Joe,” he said. That was one of the things I liked about him. He was able to treat me as an equal, and whenever I was talking to him, I forgot he was a state prisoner and I a freeman.

  “When are you going to get her in the water?” I asked.

  “About three weeks’ time, I reckon.” He wiped his hands on his coveralls and gripped the huge steel loop of the eye in both hands. He pulled, extending it on well-greased runners until it projected some eight feet from the hull of the boat—a giant polished metal D. He grinned at me and tapped it with a small hammer; it rang like a bell.

  Rumor has it that an eye fractured in use down south somewhere last summer, although it was hushed up. A sling-glider must have complete confidence in his equipment. Satisfied, Charles gave the eye a seemingly gentle push. Six hundred and twenty pounds of glittering steel-titanium alloy rolled smoothly back into the hull of the boat, the flat upright of the D—the outermost part of the eye—fitting so snugly with the contours of the hull that the cracks could hardly be seen.

  Charles turned his attention to the whip, which lay on the slipway beside the boat and stretched to a small mooring buoy out in the water—a total length of some eighty yards. This year everyone had bought new Ultrafiber-X whips; they lay rigid across the surface in parallel green lines.

  “What do you think about, Charles?” I asked curiously. “When Doug’s up in his glider, when the hook hits the eye, what thoughts occur to you?”

  He grinned, kneading grease into the attachment where the whip joins the pilot’s harness. “There’s no time to think. I’m too busy pinning down the whip, rolling out the eye, trying to control the boat at the same time as I’m listening to some idiot observer panicking in the stern. But you want me to say I worry about Doug getting hurt, don’t you?”

  “It must occur to you.”

  “It doesn’t.” Charles stood over six feet, blond and weatherbeaten; he looked the sling-glider type, although hardly the state prisoner type. Not for the first time, I wondered about his sentence for rape, which was apparently the result of some incident on board his boat. Personally, I thought the whole thing sounded very unlikely—and although the compitrator found Charles guilty, he only got four years. Doug Marshall had known him slightly in the past, and agreed to take him as a bonded man.

  I remember thinking: The sling-glider is entirely in his steersman’s hands.

  I looked at Charles. Surely he must think something while Doug was in the air, in that flimsy glider.

  He worked on impassively, talking technicalities as he checked and greased Doug Marshall’s harness.

  It is difficult to define an air of suppressed excitement. It can be observed most easily, perhaps, in the way people will suddenly address strangers, asking their views on whatever is causing the furor. Such an air was in evidence at Skipper’s Marina during those last few weeks before the start of the sling-gliding season, as freemen talked competitions and freewomen spoke of the clothes they would wear at the President’s Trophy; while at their feet, brought into unaccustomed proximity, land sharks fought barracudas, octopuses devoured micropekes.

  The sloping landscape of the long slipway was busy every day and crowded at weekends; on the last Sunday before the season began Carioca Jones came again to the marina, spectacularly dressed, with Wilberforce flopping at her heels. The brute was growing fast; he was now over eight feet long. Doug Marshall was bent double and sweating as he adjusted the shear-pin on one of the props, when the land shark undulated across and lay beside him, watching him coldly and stinking like a fishmarket, oxygenator pulsating unpleasantly. Doug caught sight of the fish suddenly, straightened up, and cracked his head on the keel.

  He had never liked Carioca Jones, and now he exploded. “Get that bastard away from me,” he yelled, “before I put this drill through its skull.” He brandished the whirring power tool like a rapier.

  Carioca hurried over and laid her hand on her pet’s collar. She was wearing slithe-skin gloves and I noticed they had turned mauve in sympathy with her temper. “Wilberforce is quite harmless.” She spoke coolly enough. “There’s no call to lose your temper with him, Mr. Marshall. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

  “Wrong!” Doug was massaging his scalp. “The swine nearly fractured my skull for me!”

  “Come now, Mr. Marshall. A great big brave sling-pilot shouldn’t be frightened of a mere fish, should he now?”

  Doug recovered, swallowed hard, and spoke carefully. “Miss Jones, that fish is a menace. He’s been allowed to grow too big. Look at those teeth. He could have your leg off without batting an eyelid. You ought to have him put down.”

  “Put down?” Carioca’s gloves were
purple and trembling. Doug met her stare levelly. She looked elsewhere for a scapegoat, and as I was edging out of the scene, Charles descended the ladder from the cockpit and glanced at the protagonists with interest. He was wearing his state pen coveralls. Carioca’s gaze lit on the letters S. P. and her eyes flashed. “Oh, so you have a slave here doing your work for you.”

  The quick change of subject foxed Doug. “What the hell’s that got to do with it?” he asked. “Anyway, Charles is my bonded man.”

  “Oh, a bonded man, is he? I might have guessed. No wonder you love sling-gliding. Who wouldn’t, with a Spare Parts man standing by?”

  Doug’s eyes widened; he looked at Charles, who seemed to have been struck speechless. I couldn’t think of much to say myself; arrant rudeness has that effect on me. Fortunately, help was at hand in the unlikely guise of the club secretary, who happened to be passing. He stepped in quickly.

  “Miss Jones, did I hear you rightly?”

  “Who are you, you strange little man?”

  Bryce Alcester flushed. “I think I heard you use an expression we don’t like around here, Miss Jones. Was I right? Did you use such an expression?”

  “Of course you don’t like the expression, because it’s true. How else can men like you summon the nerve to go up in those nasty little gliders, answer me that.”

  “I must ask you to leave the premises, madam. I must also remind you that you are not a member.”

  “And I must remind you that the Foes of Bondage will picket the President’s Trophy next week. You haven’t heard the last of this, not by a long way.”

  Reluctantly, with Alcester’s hand on her arm, she began to move away. Her eye caught mine. “Frankly, Joe, I can’t think why you associate with such cowards.”

  After escorting her from the premises Alcester hurried back to us. There was a tear in the leg of his pants where the land shark had taken a snap at him. “I’m terribly sorry, gentlemen,” he fussed. He looked at Charles, swallowed, and said awkwardly, “And, uh, I would like to apologize to you, uh, Charles, on behalf of the club.”