The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  “Come and look at me, John,” she said.

  He crossed the floor slowly, forcing himself to move. That instant’s flash of vivid recollection had nearly wrecked his hard-won poise. He tried to keep his mind perfectly blank as he came at last to the verge of seeing what no one but Maltzer had so far seen or known about in its entirety. No one at all had known what shape would be forged to clothe the most beautiful woman on Earth, now that her beauty was gone.

  He had envisioned many shapes. Great, lurching robot forms, cylindrical, with hinged arms and legs. A glass case with the brain floating in it and appendages to serve its needs. Grotesque visions, like nightmares come nearly true. And each more inadequate than the last, for what metal shape could possibly do more than house ungraciously the mind and brain that had once enchanted a whole world?

  Then he came around the wing of the chair, and saw her.

  The human brain is often too complicated a mechanism to function perfectly. Harris’ brain was called upon now to perform a very elaborate series of shifting impressions. First, incongruously, he remembered a curious inhuman figure he had once glimpsed leaning over the fence rail outside a farmhouse. For an instant the shape had stood up integrated, ungainly, impossibly human, before the glancing eye resolved it into an arrangement of brooms and buckets. What the eye had found only roughly humanoid, the suggestible brain had accepted fully formed. It was thus now, with Deirdre.

  The first impression that his eyes and mind took from sight of her was shocked and incredulous, for his brain said to him unbelievingly, “This is Deirdre! She hasn’t changed at all!”

  Then the shift of perspective took over, and even more shockingly, eye and brain said, “No, not Deirdre – not human. Nothing but metal coils. Not Deirdre at all—” And that was the worst. It was like waking from a dream of someone beloved and lost, and facing anew, after that heartbreaking reassurance of sleep, the inflexible fact that nothing can bring the lost to life again. Deirdre was gone, and this was only machinery heaped in a flowered chair.

  Then the machinery moved, exquisitely, smoothly, with a grace as familiar as the swaying poise he remembered. The sweet, husky voice of Deirdre said,

  “It’s me, John darling. It really is, you know.”

  And it was.

  That was the third metamorphosis, and the final one. Illusion steadied and became factual, real. It was Deirdre.

  He sat down bonelessly. He had no muscles. He looked at her speechless and unthinking, letting his senses take in the sight of her without trying to rationalize what he saw.

  She was golden still. They had kept that much of her, the first impression of warmth and color which had once belonged to her sleek hair and the apricot tints of her skin. But they had had the good sense to go no farther. They had not tried to make a wax image of the lost Deirdre. (No woman born who was so beautiful – Not one so beautiful, of all the women born –)

  And so she had no face. She had only a smooth, delicately modeled ovoid for her head, with a . . . a sort of crescent-shaped mask across the frontal area where her eyes would have been if she had needed eyes. A narrow, curved quarter-moon, with the horns turned upward. It was filled in with something translucent, like cloudy crystal, and tinted the aquamarine of the eyes Deirdre used to have. Through that, then, she saw the world. Through that she looked without eyes, and behind it, as behind the eyes of a human – she was.

  Except for that, she had no features. And it had been wise of those who designed her, he realized now. Subconsciously he had been dreading some clumsy attempt at human features that might creak like a marionette’s in parodies of animation. The eyes, perhaps, had had to open in the same place upon her head, and at the same distance apart, to make easy for her an adjustment to the stereoscopic vision she used to have. But he was glad they had not given her two eye-shaped openings with glass marbles inside them. The mask was better.

  (Oddly enough, he did not once think of the naked brain that must lie inside the metal. The mask was symbol enough for the woman within. It was enigmatic; you did not know if her gaze was on you searchingly, or wholly withdrawn. And it had no variations of brilliance such as once had played across the incomparable mobility of Deirdre’s face. But eyes, even human eyes, are as a matter of fact enigmatic enough. They have no expression except what the lids impart; they take all animation from the features. We automatically watch the eyes of the friend we speak with, but if he happens to be lying down so that he speaks across his shoulder and his face is upsidedown to us, quite as automatically we watch the mouth. The gaze keeps shifting nervously between mouth and eyes in their reversed order, for it is the position in the face, not the feature itself, which we are accustomed to accept as the seat of the soul. Deirdre’s mask was in that proper place; it was easy to accept it as a mask over eyes.)

  She had, Harris realized as the first shock quieted, a very beautifully shaped head – a bare, golden skull. She turned it a little, gracefully upon her neck of metal, and he saw that the artist who shaped it had given her the most delicate suggestion of cheekbones, narrowing in the blankness below the mask to the hint of a human face. Not too much. Just enough so that when the head turned you saw by its modeling that it had moved, lending perspective and foreshortening to the expressionless golden helmet. Light did not slip uninterrupted as if over the surface of a golden egg. Brancusi himself had never made anything more simple or more subtle than the modeling of Deirdre’s head.

  But all expression, of course, was gone. All expression had gone up in the smoke of the theater fire, with the lovely, mobile, radiant features which had meant Deirdre.

  As for her body, he could not see its shape. A garment hid her. But they had made no incongruous attempt to give her back the clothing that once had made her famous. Even the softness of cloth would have called the mind too sharply to the remembrance that no human body lay beneath the folds, nor does metal need the incongruity of cloth for its protection. Yet without garments, he realized, she would have looked oddly naked, since her new body was humanoid, not angular machinery.

  The designer had solved his paradox by giving her a robe of very fine metal mesh. It hung from the gentle slope of her shoulders in straight, pliant folds like a longer Grecian chlamys, flexible, yet with weight enough of its own not to cling too revealingly to whatever metal shape lay beneath.

  The arms they had given her were left bare, and the feet and ankles. And Maltzer had performed his greatest miracle in the limbs of the new Deirdre. It was a mechanical miracle basically, but the eye appreciated first that he had also showed supreme artistry and understanding.

  Her arms were pale shining gold, tapered smoothly, without modeling, and flexible their whole length in diminishing metal bracelets fitting one inside the other clear down to the slim, round wrists. The hands were more nearly human than any other feature about her, though they, too, were fitted together in delicate, small sections that slid upon one another with the flexibility almost of flesh. The fingers’ bases were solider than human, and the fingers themselves tapered to longer tips.

  Her feet, too, beneath the tapering broader rings of the metal ankles, had been constructed upon the model of human feet. Their finely tooled sliding segments gave her an arch and a heel and a flexible forward section formed almost like the sollerets of medieval armor.

  She looked, indeed, very much like a creature in armor, with her delicately plated limbs and her featureless head like a helmet with a visor of glass, and her robe of chain-mail. But no knight in armor ever moved as Deirdre moved, or wore his armor upon a body of such inhumanly fine proportions. Only a knight from another world, or a knight of Oberon’s court, might have shared that delicate likeness.

  Briefly he had been surprised at the smallness and exquisite proportions of her. He had been expecting the ponderous mass of such robots as he had seen, wholly automatons. And then he realized that for them, much of the space had to be devoted to the inadequate mechanical brains that guided them about their duties. Deirdre
’s brain still preserved and proved the craftsmanship of an artisan far defter than man. Only the body was of metal, and it did not seem complex, though he had not yet been told how it was motivated.

  Harris had no idea how long he sat staring at the figure in the cushioned chair. She was still lovely – indeed, she was still Deirdre – and as he looked he let the careful schooling of his face relax. There was no need to hide his thoughts from her.

  She stirred upon the cushions, the long flexible arms moving with a litheness that was not quite human. The motion disturbed him as the body itself had not, and in spite of himself his face froze a little. He had the feeling that from behind the crescent mask she was watching him very closely.

  Slowly she rose.

  The motion was very smooth. Also it was serpentine, as if the body beneath the coat of mail were made in the same interlocking sections as her limbs. He had expected and feared mechanical rigidity; nothing had prepared him for this more than human suppleness.

  She stood quietly, letting the heavy mailed folds of her garment settle about her. They fell together with a faint ringing sound, like small bells far off, and hung beautifully in pale golden, sculptured folds. He had risen automatically as she did. Now he faced her, staring. He had never seen her stand perfectly still, and she was not doing it now. She swayed just a bit, vitality burning inextinguishably in her brain as once it had burned in her body, and stolid immobility was as impossible to her as it had always been. The golden garment caught points of light from the fire and glimmered at him with tiny reflections as she moved.

  Then she put her featureless helmeted head a little to one side, and he heard her laughter as familiar in its small, throaty, intimate sound as he had ever heard it from her living throat. And every gesture, every attitude, every flowing of motion into motion was so utterly Deirdre that the overwhelming illusion swept his mind again and this was the flesh-and-blood woman as clearly as if he saw her standing there whole once more, like Phoenix from the fire.

  “Well, John,” she said in the soft, husky, amused voice he remembered perfectly. “Well, John, is it I?” She knew it was. Perfect assurance sounded in the voice. “The shock will wear off, you know. It’ll be easier and easier as time goes on. I’m quite used to myself now. See?”

  She turned away from him and crossed the room smoothly, with the old, poised, dancer’s glide, to the mirror that paneled one side of the room. And before it, as he had so often seen her preen before, he watched her preening now, running flexible metallic hands down the folds of her metal garment, turning to admire herself over one metal shoulder, making the mailed folds tinkle and sway as she struck an arabesque position before the glass.

  His knees let him down into the chair she had vacated. Mingled shock and relief loosened all his muscles in him, and she was more poised and confident than he.

  “It’s a miracle,” he said with conviction. “It’s you. But I don’t see how—” He had meant, “—how, without face or body—” but clearly he could not finish that sentence.

  She finished it for him in her own mind, and answered without self-consciousness. “It’s motion mostly,” she said, still admiring her own suppleness in the mirror. “See?” And very lightly on her springy, armored feet she flashed through an enchaînement of brilliant steps, swinging round with a pirouette to face him. “That was what Maltzer and I worked out between us, after I began to get myself under control again.” Her voice was somber for a moment, remembering a dark time in the past. Then she went on, “It wasn’t easy, of course, but it was fascinating. You’ll never guess how fascinating, John! We knew we couldn’t work out anything like a facsimile of the way I used to look, so we had to find some other basis to build on. And motion is the other basis of recognition, after actual physical likeness.”

  She moved lightly across the carpet toward the window and stood looking down, her featureless face averted a little and the light shining across the delicately hinted curves of the cheekbones.

  “Luckily,” she said, her voice amused, “I never was beautiful. It was all – well, vivacity, I suppose, and muscular co-ordination. Years and years of training, and all of it engraved here” – she struck her golden helmet a light, ringing blow with golden knuckles – “in the habit patterns grooved into my brain. So this body . . . did he tell you? . . . works entirely through the brain. Electromagnetic currents flowing along from ring to ring, like this.” She rippled a boneless arm at him with a motion like flowing water. “Nothing holds me together – nothing! – except muscles of magnetic currents. And if I’d been somebody else – somebody who moved differently, why the flexible rings would have moved differently too, guided by the impulse from another brain. I’m not conscious of doing anything I haven’t always done. The same impulses that used to go out to my muscles go out now to – this.” And she made a shuddering, serpentine motion of both arms at him, like a Cambodian dancer, and then laughed whole-heartedly, the sound of it ringing through the room with such full-throated merriment that he could not help seeing again the familiar face crinkled with pleasure, the white teeth shining. “It’s all perfectly subconscious now,” she told him. “It took lots of practice at first, of course, but now even my signature looks just as it always did – the co-ordination is duplicated that delicately.” She rippled her arms at him again and chuckled.

  “But the voice, too,” Harris protested inadequately. “It’s your voice, Deirdre.”

  “The voice isn’t only a matter of throat construction and breath control, my darling Johnnie! At least, so Professor Maltzer assured me a year ago, and I certainly haven’t any reason to doubt him!” She laughed again. She was laughing a little too much, with a touch of the bright, hysteric over-excitement he remembered so well. But if any woman ever had reason for mild hysteria, surely Deirdre had it now.

  The laughter rippled and ended, and she went on, her voice eager. “He says voice control is almost wholly a matter of hearing what you produce, once you’ve got adequate mechanism, of course. That’s why deaf people, with the same vocal chords as ever, let their voices change completely and lose all inflection when they’ve been deaf long enough. And luckily, you see, I’m not deaf!”

  She swung around to him, the folds of her robe twinkling and ringing, and rippled up and up a clear, true scale to a lovely high note, and then cascaded down again like water over a falls. But she left him no time for applause. “Perfectly simple, you see. All it took was a little matter of genius from the professor to get it worked out for me! He started with a new variation of the old Vodor you must remember hearing about, years ago. Originally, of course, the thing was ponderous. You know how it worked – speech broken down to a few basic sounds and built up again in combinations produced from a keyboard. I think originally the sounds were a sort of ktch and a shooshing noise, but we’ve got it all worked to a flexibility and range quite as good as human now. All I do is – well, mentally play on the keyboard of my . . . my sound-unit, I suppose it’s called. It’s much more complicated than that, of course, but I’ve learned to do it unconsciously. And I regulate it by ear, quite automatically now. If you were – here – instead of me, and you’d had the same practice, your own voice would be coming out of the same keyboard and diaphragm instead of mine. It’s all a matter of the brain patterns that operated the body and now operate the machinery. They send out very strong impulses that are stepped up as much as necessary somewhere or other in here—” Her hands waved vaguely over the mesh-robed body.

  She was silent a moment, looking out the window. Then she turned away and crossed the floor to the fire, sinking again into the flowered chair. Her helmet-skull turned its mask to face him and he could feel a quiet scrutiny behind the aquamarine of its gaze.

  “It’s – odd,” she said, “being here in this . . . this . . . instead of a body. But not as odd or as alien as you might think. I’ve thought about it a lot – I’ve had plenty of time to think – and I’ve begun to realize what a tremendous force the human ego really
is. I’m not sure I want to suggest it has any mystical power it can impress on mechanical things, but it does seem to have a power of some sort. It does instill its own force into inanimate objects, and they take on a personality of their own. People do impress their personalities on the houses they live in, you know. I’ve noticed that often. Even empty rooms. And it happens with other things too, especially, I think, with inanimate things that men depend on for their lives. Ships, for instance – they always have personalities of their own.

  “And planes – in wars you always hear of planes crippled too badly to fly, but struggling back anyhow with their crews. Even guns acquire a sort of ego. Ships and guns and planes are ‘she’ to the men who operate them and depend on them for their lives. It’s as if machinery with complicated moving parts almost simulates life, and does acquire from the men who use it – well, not exactly life, of course – but a personality. I don’t know what. Maybe it absorbs some of the actual electrical impulses their brains throw off, especially in times of stress.

  “Well, after awhile I began to accept the idea that this new body of mine could behave at least as responsively as a ship or a plane. Quite apart from the fact that my own brain controls its ‘muscles.’ I believe there’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They make them out of their own brains, really, a sort of mental conception and gestation, and the result responds to the minds that created them, and to all human minds that understand and manipulate them.”

  She stirred uneasily and smoothed a flexible hand along her mesh-robed metal thigh. “So this is myself,” she said. “Metal – but me. And it grows more and more myself the longer I live in it. It’s my house and the machine my life depends on, but much more intimately in each case than any real house or machine ever was before to any other human. And you know, I wonder if in time I’ll forget what flesh felt like – my own flesh, when I touched it like this – and the metal against the metal will be so much the same I’ll never even notice?”