by Paul Kenyon
The answer came during the entree, a passable gigot d'agneau with flageolets that Le Sourd had taught his Arab cook to prepare. The food and candlelight and impressionistic music had made him voluble, and Penelope had used every feminine trick she knew to draw him out still further. He was talking about Debussy's use of the wholetone scale, when she noticed his hands.
The gestures were peculiar. Not the normal Gallic hand gestures.
She watched his hands, thinking hard, and then she had it.
Deaf-and-dumb language.
The gestures were half-formed, aborted — done unconsciously. Probably because his mind was racing ahead of his words at the moment. But they were unmistakable. There was the raised finger for a D and the bunched fist for the E of Debussy's name.
He suddenly realized what he was doing as he saw her staring at him. He hid his hands under the table, and his mouth twisted ironically.
"Ah, yes," he said. "I was born deaf. I was deaf until I was six years old."
"How awful for you," she said carefully.
His mouth twisted again. "Both my parents were deaf, in fact," he said. "That's probably where the family name came from — some remote ancestor with the same genetic defect. Sign language was what we spoke at home."
"And what happened when you were six?"
"A mastoid operation for an acute infection. It must have opened something up."
"It must have been a shock, hearing for the first time."
"More of a shock than anyone realized, including the doctor. You see, my hearing turned out to be — unusual."
She looked at the two devices that resembled hearing aids. "Yes, you said that your hearing was more sensitive than most people's."
"Sensitive, yes. Loud noises were agony. Ordinary conversation a torment. But there was something else, too."
She could almost guess. "Go on," she said.
"I found I could hear far above the ordinary human range. Well into the ultrasonic region, in fact."
"How extraordinary!"
His hands were back on the table. He looked at them and held them still with an effort.
"Yes," he said. "At the time I didn't realize there was anything abnormal about that. I thought everybody could hear that way. So I never bothered to mention it to the doctor, or any other adult. And certainly not my parents."
"How high can you hear, Octave darling?"
"I've tested myself, of course. Normal human beings can detect frequencies up to twenty thousand cycles per second. Mine extends well past one hundred and fifty thousand cycles per second. That's within the range shared by bats and porpoises and certain night-flying moths. A dog whistle is as audible to me as a flute is to you. It sounds rather low, in fact."
"What a marvelous gift!" she exclaimed.
"More of a curse than a gift," he said. "Especially coming from a deaf household, as I did. The people in my little village thought I was queer, and a little retarded. I had a habit of wincing and covering my ears. That didn't help my reputation."
"Poor Octave! You must have been a very lonely little boy!"
"There were consolations. I engaged in solitary pursuits. I made friends with bats, for example. There were plenty of them living under the thatch of our cottage, and later I used to sneak out after dark to the church belfry and wait for them to fly out hunting for insects. I could follow the sonar echoes when they located a mosquito or a moth, and sense their excitement as they chased their prey. It was exciting for me, too. Like other boys watching dogs hunt rabbits."
She made what would have been the expected feminine response. "I'm terrified of bats, darling. I've always been afraid of them getting tangled in my hair."
Le Sourd looked amused. "Not a chance. A bat sees with its ears more clearly than you see with your eyes. They can fly through a pitch-black room strung with piano wires and never hit one. You, my dear Penelope, exist in a world of sight. Bats exist in a world of sound." He paused and looked directly at her. "As I do."
"You're very handsome, Octave darling. Bats are ugly."
"I owe them a great debt. Bats are what got me interested in ultrasound."
"Oh, from belfry to laboratory, was that it?"
"Not quite," he said. "First I took a detour. My parents died, and I was sent to a charity home. I was twelve years old at the time."
"My goodness! What a hard life!"
His eyes narrowed. "Quite hard. You see, our village was in a remote rural area. A place called Aïeux in Normandy. The only available local institution that could serve as an orphanage happened to be a home for deaf children."
"What a bizarre coincidence!"
"'The other children soon discovered that they could torment me by clapping their hands and making other loud noises. Children are thoughtless and cruel. My life became hell."
"You must have had a strange opinion of the human race. First a deaf child in a world full of people who could hear. Then someone with hearing — incredibly sensitive hearing — in a world of the deaf."
He nodded in agreement. "I was finally rescued from the institution by the village music master. A kind old man named Lumiere. He was the headmaster's brother-in-law. He discovered that I wasn't deaf or retarded. He found that I had musical talent. A rare musical talent, it must have seemed to him. I could do things musically that he couldn't explain. He took me under his wing. I went to live in his house, and he gave me violin lessons. He arranged for me to study at the Paris Conservatoire. That's where I got the Professeur in front of my name. At the age of twenty-two. I'm a professor of music, not physics."
He was toying with the lamb on his plate, his eyes far away.
"But I was unable to make a musical career for myself," he continued. "I lost my job at the Paris Opera, because I couldn't bear to play louder than pianissimo. And of course there was the disgrace of my fainting during that performance of Manon. I took my violin and found other work. But nothing lasted. I was forced out of one chamber music group after another for not being sympathique."
A look of scorn crossed his face. "I could hear sounds the other musicians in the group were not aware of — the inaudible range above twenty thousand cycles. They performed beautifully in the audible range, of course. But they were not aware of the ugly discords they were producing in the ultrasonic range." He shuddered. "All that cacophony in the upper partials. I, of course, controlled my own upper partials the way an ordinary violinist controls the harmonics he can hear. But unless there are other freaks like me, there is no one who can appreciate my performance. I'm my own audience of one."
He paused, and Penelope could hear the Debussy through the loudspeaker: it was Afternoon of a Faun. A thought occurred to her.
"Your hi-fi recordings! You've altered them to eliminate those ultrasonic overtones!"
"More than that. I've replaced them electronically with vibrations that are pleasing to me. I feel sorry for you, Penelope. You can't possibly know what I'm hearing at this moment. No one can."
"Except a bat," she said.
He laughed. "Except a bat."
"Well, if you couldn't make a living as a violinist, what did you do next?"
"I became a sound engineer. Naturellement. My first job was with the Ministry of Defense, working with highly experimental sonar equipment for the navy. I learned of the experiments of Langevin and his underwater high-frequency sound generator. I learned about porpoises, and the way they produced echoes in the ultrasonic range, just like bats. I became fascinated."
"Then what?"
He shrugged. "I began conducting research secretly, on my own. It had nothing to do with the Ministry of Defense project. But I used their equipment, cheated on my time. I was discovered, and the Ministry fired me. But by that time I had developed the basics of my technique for prospecting for oil through ultrasonic vibrations. The big oil companies would have nothing to do with me. They thought I was crazy. But I came to the attention of Mr. Shirazi, the Emir's Rome agent. The Emir was anxious to break free of his d
ependence on Western oil companies. He hired me. He gave me a free hand. It's been very lucrative for both of us."
Penelope spoke slowly. "And now he's subsidizing your other research in ultrasound. That medical thing that shows the inside of your body. And that terrifying thing that drills holes in steel. But darling, why?"
She'd gone too far. She could see it in his face. She made her expression a little more vapid, and turned her attention to the tray of fruit and cheese that a servant was holding out.
Le Sourd turned thoughtful. He was staring at her neckline again. She wondered what he was sensing at this moment, with those keen ears of his that were more important to him than his eyes. She fiddled nervously with her pearls. Almost, she imagined that she could feel a tingling warmth deep within her breastbone. But that was nonsense.
The moment passed. Le Sourd became hearty. He helped himself to the fruit and cheese, and said, "We'll have to call it a night pretty soon. I'll have to get up early tomorrow. The Emir's day of mourning will be over, and I'm due to go out into the desert and do some prospecting."
"I'm rather tired myself. I think I'll stay in bed tomorrow and read."
"That's very wise," he said. "If you're tired, that is."
He escorted her to the door. The young eunuch whom she'd met guarding the harem was waiting outside to take her back to her suite. They didn't like her wandering alone around the palace, she'd noticed.
"By the way," Le Sourd said, "you might be interested. The stable master says that when he gave El Fahda his grooming after the hunt, he noticed that there was a crust of semen on the sheath. He says it looks as if El Fahda had been servicing a mare."
She looked him coolly in the eye. "I can't imagine how he managed it, darling," she said. "He wasn't out of my sight for a moment."
She turned and followed the eunuch down the corridor. It seemed a very long walk.
* * *
She was between the satin sheets, the lights out. That wouldn't matter to the ultrasound waves that were flooding her bedroom, she knew. Any more than darkness mattered to bats. She was wearing a lacy nylon nightgown. That wouldn't matter either. If Le Sourd could see her bones and blood vessels, he could see her skin. She'd never felt so naked in her life.
She touched the Band-Aid on her throat, the meaningless gesture of someone trying to fall asleep.
"Did you get it?" she said.
Sumo's voice whispered in her ear. "I got it. It's all on tape. Inga's studying it now, looking for psychological clues — looking for anything!"
"It's hard to believe, isn't it, Tommy?"
"Maybe not. If bats and moths and porpoises can do it, maybe the capacity is somewhere there in the human race. The structures are there in the skull, waiting for a chance mutation that will develop them. Maybe Le Sourd has a whole extra loop of cochlea, with supersensitive membrane. Maybe there's an extra bone in his ossicles. Maybe there are extra nerve cells in his Organ of Corti, transmitting sounds to his brain that never get past in the rest of us."
"Tommy, I've got to follow Le Sourd into the desert tomorrow. What can we do about it?"
The elfin voice tickled her eardrum. "I may have an answer. Le Sourd gave me a clue when you had your arm in that tank of his. I've got it all on tape."
"Work on it, Tommy."
"Hell, I'll work all night."
The Baroness never worried about anything she couldn't help. There was no percentage in it. She closed her eyes and took three deep breaths. By the fourth, she was asleep.
12
"How long do I have to stay in bed, Tommy?" the Baroness said.
"Another half-hour should do it," Sumo said. "That should give me enough of a loop to fool Le Sourd's computer with."
She was propped up against the pillows, wearing a sexy peignoir, her hair piled atop her head. Inga had taken the tray from the servant at the door and served her breakfast in bed. Now the Baroness was reading, turning pages of a thick dynastic novel that was guaranteed to keep you busy all day. From time to time she nibbled at the dish of candy at her bedside. She was the very picture of fashionable indolence.
Inga, arranging cut flowers in a vase, subvocalized into her own throat mike. "Am I in the picture, Tommy?"
"No," Sumo's tiny electronic voice whispered. "You're on live. Don't get closer than two feet to the bed, or Le Sourd's screen will show a slice of you disappearing."
"And don't let anyone in the suite all day," the Baroness said. "If the Emir sends a servant, tell him I'm indisposed."
A half-hour later she was sitting cross-legged on the bed, the peignoir discarded, wearing a beige body stocking the color of desert sand. Her black hair was tucked under a kerchief, and the vivid red of her lips had been muted by a pale lipstick. The little survival kit in its suede case was clipped to her waist, and the elastomer canteen that shrank as it was emptied was slung across her shoulder. That was all she was going to take with her.
Sumo had been ingenious. He'd cannibalized the quartz timers from a couple of encoders and their electronic wristwatches, adapted the high-density tape from the miniature recorders and plucked components right and left from the bugging equipment. He'd come up with a battery of little diaphragms that could pulse in the ultrasonic range, above one hundred and fifty thousand cycles per second, setting up an interference pattern for the waves that were being fed into Le Sourd's computer. The interference pattern was on tape, an hour's worth of the Baroness turning the pages of a book and eating bonbons, played over and over again.
"Stay low till you get to the door," Sumo's voice chirped inside her head, "and move in a straight line. I've set up a corridor of ultrasound interference that'll keep you invisible."
She moved, her muscles rippling under the beige skin of the body stocking. At the door, she paused to look back at the rumpled bed. It was strange to think there was a ghost in it — a ghost that only Le Sourd's ultrasonic apparatus could see, an image formed of molecules of air vibrating at incredible speed.
Then she was out in the corridor, a ghost herself, slipping from pillar to pillar, archway to grille, potted palm to hall furniture, without being seen.
She had to get past the harem entrance. She poked her head around the corner and pulled it right back again. Ebrahim was there in a gorgeous gold-and-silver costume with a ceremonial scimitar, standing guard. The young eunuch whose tongue had been cut out was posted on the other side. There seemed to be a lot of in-and-out traffic this morning; as she watched, an elderly harridan who had "midwife" stamped all over her sailed through the archway, trailed by three veiled servant girls. Perhaps this was the morning that the Emir was going to be presented with his three hundred and forty-eighth child.
She ducked behind a brocade couch at the sound of boots. A squad of soldiers tramped down the hallway, keeping their eyes averted from the harem door. The palace was getting busy. She couldn't stay here much longer.
As soon as they'd passed, she drew the Spyder from its thigh holster. The vaulted ceiling was fifty feet above her, its carved intricacies lost in shadow. She fired, and the gossamer thread licked upward and caught. She tugged to make sure it would support her weight, then began to climb.
No one came by while she walked up the wall. She climbed in short, deliberate steps, flicking her wrist upward each time to give the Spyder's powerful clutch a couple of feet of line to work with. The incredible alloy spring in the butt reeled in the slack instantly, tugging her along.
She reached the curve of the arch and perched for a moment on the lotus top of an ornamental column. Fifty feet below, Ebrahim was giving instructions to another tongueless eunuch who had emerged from the harem. All she had to do now was travel a hundred feet down the length of the corridor and get around the next bend without being seen.
She grinned. So far she'd been a spider. Now she'd be a fly.
She stretched one long leg upward and pressed the sole of her desert boot firmly against the ceiling. She could just reach the little tab at the ankle. She pulled at
it and it came off.
Her foot stuck to the ceiling.
She tried to tear her foot loose. She couldn't. The single drop of instant-drying epoxy was strong enough to support an elephant. It had once done just that in a television commercial.
She extended her other leg and touched the ceiling with her sole. She pulled the tab. She was stuck. She couldn't be pried loose from the ceiling now without tearing her feet off.
Now came the tricky part. She swung her bottom off the top of the column and let herself hang, head down, from the ceiling. She bent at the waist and grasped her ankles with both hands. She waited for a moment, heart pounding. She'd tried it once before in the gym in her villa in Florence, but there had been a net under her then. This was for real.
With her right thumb she pressed the little sealed packet of solvent sewn into the boot just above the instep. A capillary tube carried one drop of solvent to the site of the epoxy.
Her foot came free. For a moment she was standing crazily upside down on one foot. She took a step and planted her right foot against the ceiling again. It stuck.
The solvent, not the epoxy, was the key to the whole trick. Without it, she'd have been permanently welded to the ceiling. It was a refinement the commercial users of the epoxy didn't know about. Wharton had concocted it for her.
Clutching her ankles, she walked backward, step by step, across the ceiling. Once she caught the rhythm, her progress was fast and smooth. Press foot. Stick. Release solvent on other foot. Take a step. Stick. It was as easy as walking right side up.
She passed directly over Ebrahim. She looked down at the top of his gold lame turban, the huge foreshortened belly, and almost laughed. It was delicious to be up here, hovering over all those unsuspecting people, like a childhood dream of flying. Delicious, as long as no one looked up.
And then she was past the group at the harem door, inching her way backward down the long colonnaded passageway, turning the corner to the outside gallery.
