“José,” he said. “Toughest of them all, most handsome of them all, sharpest thinker of them all,” he said. “Loved by Julie, leader alongside Anne, popular with everyone from senior citizens to little children. What do you suppose is your role in the Realm of Summer?”
Big Langoni gave José a light kiss. The lips, teeth, tongue, and heat of the giant were overwhelming. It was like being kissed by a lion. José felt the fortifications of his self-assurance crumble. Tears ran down his face.
The giant watched with amusement as José sobbed. “Oh, dear,” he said. “It’s too early for that, José. Look!” He pointed at the mask of Little Langoni embedded in José’s chest. “Don’t you recognize this face?”
José pulled himself together somehow and looked at the boy’s face. Its structure was subtly changed. Yes, he did recognize it … He stared at it again, and then understood.
The face was his own as a young boy.
A different Langoni, the Langoni who affected the mien of a Spanish gallant, took a drag on his hand-rolled cigarette as he stepped onto the ocean terrace. The heels of his flawless, gleaming shoes rapped smartly on the hard timber floorboards. The men on the terrace turned to look at Langoni with astonishment. They had not been expecting the arrival of an eccentrically attired stranger, especially not now.
“Hey there, gentlemen,” said Langoni, enjoying the fearful wariness of their stares. He raised his blue-shaven chin and smiled. “I’ve come to finish you off.”
A large woman rose swiftly to her feet. The airy lightness of the movement spoke to the power and suppleness of her muscles. The emotions of the men on the terrace all circled around her. She was the one they were counting on.
“You Anne?”
“Yeah.” Anne cleaned her ear with her little finger. “And you are?”
“I’m Langoni. Boss of the Spiders.”
The terrace erupted with murmuring. The fishermen, and Bernier too, surrounded Langoni with murder in their eyes. Like trained dogs, Langoni thought. Let’s throw them a bone, then.
“I’ve taken care of the front entrance. You’re next on my list.”
Fear, anger, then fear again. The powerful emotions coursing through the Terrace were as pleasant as the sea breeze. But Anne alone remained calm.
“Think you can take us, do you?” she said, throwing her shoulders back with a grin.
“One way to find out,” Langoni replied, rolling up his sleeves.
For him, this was pure theater. His direct interface to the Realm’s frame creation engine gave him the powers of a god.
“Take your shot, then,” Anne said. She lowered her arms and stood stock-still, towering over him.
Langoni pounded his fist into the side of her face.
Anne’s head snapped to the side, but the damage, Langoni knew, had been minimal. And, indeed, she immediately turned her head back to face him again.
“That all you got?” she asked.
He punched her in the pit of her stomach next. This time he clearly felt her tough abdominal muscles absorb the blow. He would have to hit with perfect accuracy to have any effect on her. Well, she was the woman who’d felled a Spider with a harpoon and her bare hands. Langoni began to warm to this game.
“My turn now,” Anne said, catching Langoni on his cheek with a fist that audibly hummed through the air. The blow scrambled the contents of his head with its force. He could have sent the impact right back into her fist, but chose to savor the pain his Realm body felt instead. He had to admit—this was fun.
“You pulled that one,” Langoni said, and spat out an incisor.
“Now why would I do that?” Anne said, grinning again as she took a step to the side. The two of them began circling each other like boxers. Langoni considered the situation, enjoying the need to think. Anne surely didn’t believe she could take him down with her fists alone. What did she have planned? And how should he finish off this ocean terrace?
“Hey, Langoni,” Anne said, her pupils contracted into cruel-looking beads.
“Yeah?”
“Were you the one who kidnapped José?”
Anne’s smile had vanished now. Langoni felt a wave of coldly murderous intent wash over him.
“One of me was,” he admitted.
“Don’t suppose you’d give him back? He’s a friend.”
“No way.”
Anne tackled Langoni suddenly with her shoulder, her 110-kilogram frame hitting him like a cannonball. Langoni staggered.
“Ouch!” he said. “Agile, aren’t we?”
“I always had a thing for delicate, retiring men.”
“Oh? That’s something to think about. Of course, I know why a catch like you is still on the market.”
One of Anne’s eyebrows twitched warily, just for a moment.
“Why a child lover like you isn’t married and pumping out kids of your own.”
Anne circled him silently, her back not as straight as it had been.
“So, Anne Cachemaille,” Langoni said. “If you’re so wild about José, why be so coy about it? You’re a big girl. Just come out and say it. ‘José, will you marry me?’”
“Hey!” The hoarse shout was Bernier’s. “That’s enough, kid. One word more …”
“And what?”
Anne tackled Langoni again, with a power that made the first time seem like a gentle nudge. Down low and off-balance, Langoni felt her legs knock his feet out from under him. He felt himself in midair. But he did not feel himself fall.
He had been caught in a net thrown by the other fishermen. A fishing net woven of Spider-web and studded with tiny Glass Eyes. The very Glass Eyes that had once adorned the terrace like fairy lights.
He was strung up between them like a monkey caught in a snare.
“Fishermen know how to use a needle, you know. Threw this together out of leftover web and a few Eyes we were using for lighting.”
Langoni felt a fierce negative pressure. His body seemed about to be torn into shreds and sucked into countless different Eyes. For the first time, he felt fear.
“Better hurry up and give José back before the net pulls you apart.”
Langoni’s finely made outfit was already so damaged it looked like decrepit rags. Patches of his skin had turned waxy and begun to flake off. It seemed that this net’s function was to degrade and break down whatever was caught in it.
“You’ll never get José back without me,” he said.
Anne laughed. “I’ll make the threats around here,” she said. “Don’t misunderstand your situation.”
“Shit!” It was the first time the gallant had cursed. He appeared to have abandoned his pose of self-assurance. “Let me out of here!”
Langoni tore at the net, but it repaired itself in an instant. Soon the nails peeled off his scrabbling fingers. His hair, once thick and black, was now straggly and thin, clearly revealing the dome of his skull. His face itched powerfully; when he scratched it, his fine nose came off, and his fingers snapped like crayons. He couldn’t breathe. Langoni was nearing the end.
“I’ll say it once more,” said Anne. “Give José back right now.”
Then she blinked. Something was off.
She blinked again, and realized what it was.
She was in the net now.
“‘Give José back,’ eh? Big talk.”
She heard Langoni’s voice from outside the net.
Anne finally understood the situation. Langoni had somehow switched places with her. The other fishermen were frozen.
Langoni raised a long knife to eye level and ran his thumb over the blade. “Why don’t you let them know why you always carry this?” he said. It was the knife Anne kept at her waist. Langoni thrust its point through the net and slit Anne’s T-shirt open at the neckline. Her hard, proud, coppery breasts fell out. The net repaired i
tself once the blade was removed. This was the trap Anne herself had set. The blade flowed like water as Langoni cut open her knee-length pants to the waist. There was her rocklike stomach, there her chiseled navel, and there was her dense, dark bush.
“Nothing there,” said Langoni with a sneer. “Isn’t that right, Anne Cachemaille? You have no genitals.”
Anne’s expression remained unchanged.
“See?” Langoni said, thrusting his hand in to grope. “Nothing there.”
“You—!”
Behind Langoni, Bernier raised a poker wrapped in Spider-web and Eyes. Langoni turned and glared. Bernier froze, dropping his weapon. Then he fell onto his back.
Wintry smile still directed at Bernier, Langoni stabbed the knife deep into Anne, right where his hand had been.
Anne twisted in the net like a shark, but remained silent.
“Admit it, Anne,” Langoni said. “You like this.”
He pulled the knife out. No blood came. The wound had already closed. He slashed the place open a second time, a third. Anne writhed at every blow, but did not make a sound.
“Admit it. This is the key to opening up your senses. You’re forced to accept the sensation, whether you want it or not. Those guests, eh? Who can understand their tastes?”
Leaving the long blade in, Langoni drew another knife from Anne’s waist. Her whole body was flushed, slick with fragrant perspiration.
“And you carried this around wherever you went,” Langoni continued. “Must have been a whole lot of guests snickering to themselves when they passed you in the street.”
Anne finally turned her face away.
“Never did tell José, did you? Never said you loved him. Well, the time for confession is now. I mean …this is it for you.” Langoni jabbed a finger at her eyes. “You’re going to die.”
A book of poetry fell from Anne’s torn T-shirt. It had swollen with perspiration. No bookcase remained to return it to.
“I mean, you’re unnecessary. You’re interfering with my plan. Just like Jules. Time for you to take your leave. There’ll be no one to listen to you then. Those priceless feelings of yours—gone. You hoarded them like jewels for a thousand years. Scream them out, just once, before you die.”
Face still turned away, Anne shook her head in refusal. A thin sound escaped from her throat, like a sob that couldn’t be stifled. Her eyes seemed to film over.
“Does it feel that good?” Langoni asked. “Or was that out of sadness?”
He stabbed the second knife in alongside the first. Anne struggled inside the net, roaring like a wild beast, overpowered by exploding sensation.
A rare hint of emotion flickered deep in Langoni’s eyes.
“Goodbye, Anne,” he said. “My little Hercules.”
The net’s functionality was reactivated. Anne’s screams hoarsened and ended in moments as her lungs and vocal cords became fragile as old tracing paper and ruptured from the stress of vocalization. The ligaments in her jaw stretched and deformed like old rubber bands. Her body turned an ashy white, and her exposed breasts and square shoulders crumpled like dry papier-mâché. Her hands were ground right off her flailing arms, crumbling into dust as they rubbed against the net.
Her writhing gradually slowed, dwindling to a barely perceptible shudder.
The toughest, most beautiful body in the Realm had become a wretched old blob.
Rising to his feet and turning away, Langoni destroyed the terrace.
He deftly manipulated the net that had held Anne, using it to bring the men on the terrace into the same state as their fellows at the front entrance.
And then the pain began to stream in.
The ferocious mood had Jules about to explode.
It was burned into the room like the smell of incense.
A fierce, shameless desire. So powerful that it threatened to destroy (his partner) Julie—indeed, actively relished the prospect.
Jules didn’t even notice Cottontail rolling off his lap.
He caught Julie’s face in both hands. A violent impulse rose within him to squeeze like a vice. To undercut the urge, he kissed her instead.
The inside of her mouth was unexpectedly large, and filled with desire that matched his own. Saliva and tongues boiled hotly. Jules licked every bit of the inside of Julie’s mouth. Their teeth clashed. They bit each other’s lips. One of his hands moved from her face and groped for her fish earring, tried to rip it out. Julie’s hand reached up to help. The thrill of complicity flared.
With a tiny jingle, the earring tumbled onto the floor.
The two of them fell back on the sofa, squirming and entwining themselves with each other like fish caught in a net.
They enjoyed this lascivious dance. They fled, taunted, gave chase, caught.
Jules took Julie’s ear into his mouth. He tasted blood where they had pulled out the earring. He rubbed that taste against his neck, his chest, his stomach. He bit her underarm hair redolent with sweat, thrust his tongue between her tight, small buttocks. But he could not get inside her. Her identity boundary remained closed. Doing this kind of thing without open identity boundaries was a new experience for Jules. It was irritating. Frustrating.
He wanted to tear through.
He wanted to merge.
He wanted to taste every pixel of her.
But her boundary would not open.
His impatience stoked his ferocious, broken drive to new heights.
He saw that all hesitation would have to be abandoned. They smashed against each other bodily, bit and sucked each other all over. Let stifled cries slip into each other’s ears. Their behavior was awkward, unseemly, brutal, utterly lacking in elegance and restraint.
Julie was crying. Jules wondered if he might be too.
He did not know why.
But he felt what he thought was a shudder at the sweetness of living within the frustration of never quite coming together completely.
Perhaps this isn’t AI sex at all.
Could this be human sex?
The question sank out of view, bobbed back; sank and bobbed back.
Is it really Julie that I have pinned down?
Is it really me, here, doing these things?
Another place, another time, another couple’s feelings were overlaid on them.
Jules pushed into the boiling heat.
Julie wrapped her arms around his neck and welcomed him.
This room, the Clements’ room… It must be a powerful magnetic field for emotion and acts. The whole place is stamped with feelings from long ago.
We’re under that field’s control, too, like iron filings forming pretty patterns around a magnet …
Tracing those emotions, those acts …
Jules understood what was happening clearly.
It was not, however, unpleasant.
The emotions imprinted on the room were deep and hot, bitter and lonely, but they were also unquestionably true.
Depth and loneliness like the color of a lake spread out in the woods.
Bitterness like the first taste of a medicinal herb finally arrived at a sickbed.
Heat like that of the blood spilling from the mouth of a wild beast devouring the sweetest part of its prey.
He might never meet this woman again.
If so, he wanted to kill her. She was so precious to him that he would destroy her without a trace if he could.
If a moment can change a whole life, how he felt now was the priceless fruit of one such moment.
Jules clung to Julie’s writhing body and, moving fiercely himself, abandoned himself to that feeling and the swell of pleasure that bore him up.
On the sofa where the geologist and Régine had loved each other just once, Jules and Julie spasmed and arched countless times before finally reaching their end.
The Mineral Springs Hotel was dying.
The leaf-vein hand growing at the entrance engulfed AIs and segments of the TrapNet one after another. Once it had completely surrounded the hotel, it began its penetration of the interior.
It was a perfect agglomerate of pain. Nothing like it had existed before in all the world.
It continued to swell, taking in all the pain it could, ceaselessly changing its form as it sought to strangle the hotel. The hotel began to crack and scream as the soft but merciless vegetable force bore down. Windows, exhaust vents, drains—fingers of meat squirmed in wherever possible, expanding, growing. Thick leaves grew as densely inside the hotel as on its exterior. The leaves were shaped like human palms, human ears. Here and there fruit hung on the vine. Some of the fruits were dense and hard, like dried scrotums or anklebones; others were heavy and greasy and looked just like breasts.
Tendrils came into the kitchen through the air vents and moved as if groping across the still-lit gas stove. The human body parts at their tips—Denis’s eyes, Pascal’s left thumb—sizzled and fried in the blue flame, but the vines showed no sign of caring. This pain, too, was spice to savor. Joël’s face in the frying pan found its place in the network of pain.
The tendrils that invaded the library opened wide like mouths to devour the mothers and children crowded into the room. The countless mother-child pairs gnawing and chewing each other were chomped up and swallowed, pain and grief and all. Anne’s children, Odette: all drowned in the sea of pain.
Pain, pain, pain.
The net sought it out.
At first it was trying to dilute its own pain, but by now increasing the total volume of pain had become a goal in itself.
The TrapNet survived only in fragments. Strands of Spider-web and Eyes lay here and there, cut off from the Chandelier and bereft of function. The pain net busily took these cold, ignored remnants, weaving the web into the vines’ fabric and conveying the Eyes carefully inward to put to new uses.
The real work was finally about to start.
The words came on voices that blew through the pain net like the first signs of fever.
Peel the hotel’s surface off.
Bring it all to light. Everything hidden under the stairs, beneath the carpets, behind the mirrors. All of it.
The Thousand Year Beach Page 24
