by Tanith Lee
“Yes.”
“You know where the bathrooms are.”
“Yes—”
I ran into the green bathroom and banged the door. I hung over the pale green lavatory basin, which I matched, but I wasn’t sick at all. Eventually I lay down full length on the marble tiles, not knowing what was wrong with me, or where I wanted to be, or who I wanted to be with. As I lay there, I heard the lift, and the apartment door, and Clovis saying with irritation: “Don’t blow that foul corner-store marijuana over me.”
When I came sheepishly out, Austin had put on a rhythm tape and was gyrating before the window, perhaps hoping someone with powerful binoculars on the other side of the river would see him.
“Shall I call you a taxi?” said Clovis. “There’s a new line running from Jagged’s with human drivers. A gimmick. It won’t last.”
“I’ll take the flyer. There’s one due at the corner of Racine at five P.M.”
“Racine is a rough stop. I shouldn’t like your little blond face to get carved up.”
“I’ve got my policode.”
“Ever called the cops with it? I once did, and it was two whole minutes before they arrived to rescue me, by which time I could have been structurally redesigned.”
Austin giggled, waving his hips wildly.
Everything was normal again. I would be normal. I had already recollected Egyptia, and wondered if I should try to find her, at the Theatra, or her apartment block on The Island, or the Gardens of Babylon where she sometimes sat drinking among the flowery vines. Or I could go off alone, there were a hundred places I could go to. Or I could call Chloe, or Medea. But I knew I wouldn’t do any of those things. I knew I’d go home, just as Clovis anticipated.
Chez Stratos was my security. Whenever anything went wrong, I felt shaky until I got back there. I would go home, and I’d tell my mother what had happened to me—Clovis had merely been a way of putting it off. Already I felt safer, just thinking of telling her, though probably it would turn out that my reactions were suspect.
Anyway, Clovis wanted me to go. He doodled on a pad on the coffee table, drawings of a beautiful young man with long hair and a key protruding from his back.
“Don’t look so stricken, Jane,” he said. “You have it out of proportion. As usual. Go home and relax.”
Austin ran his hands down his body and blew me a kiss.
I didn’t like Clovis then, and I turned on my heel just like the robot and went to the door and out.
It must be odd to live on Social Subsistence. Odd to have to palm print every month and get a sub. check in the mail every week. There are all sorts of training schemes, aren’t there, but mostly they’re dead ends. The colossal boom in robot circuitry, essential after the Asteroid threw everything into confusion, has left all these gaping holes with human beings in them, frantically swimming and trying not to go down. Mother says the creative arts are the safest, there are jobs there. But if robots can start to make music beautifully and expertly, and sing like angels, what then?
And if they can even make love—
I’d been very silly to get sick over that. Was it so revolting? After all, if they could make love, then they must feel of skin and flesh to the touch, feel human, too, in… every way. Only it wasn’t revulsion, somehow. Somehow, it was worse. I sat in the cab I had, after all, dialed from a kiosk, sticking my nails in my hands to stop my recurring nausea from getting a grip.
I’m not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I’m old, perhaps, when I’m thirty—
The cab drove fast on the highway, and the dust spooned up on either side, glowing a lovely gold in the westering sun, that calmed me. The robot driver was just a panel and slot for coins and notes. The flyer costs much less and is much nicer, because it travels a hundred feet above the ground.
The Baxter Empire travels in the air too, one of those old vertical lift-offs. Mother used it in the jungle, its blades smashing the forest roof out of the way as it went up, and portions of severed monkeys falling past the windows. Although I’ve forgotten all the important parts of my early travels, that’s one part I do remember, and I remember I cried. Mother then told me nothing dies ever, animal or human. A psychic force inside us survives physical death, and continues on both in the spiritual, and in other bodies. At the time I thought rebelliously for five minutes she was just making an excuse for killing the monkeys, as if killing them didn’t matter, because they weren’t really dead. But even so, I guessed she was right. It was easier to believe it anyway.
It was peculiar thinking of the monkeys now, over ten years later. What was the connection between them and the red-haired robot outside the Theatra? I wanted to stop thinking about him. But I wouldn’t be able to until I’d told mother. That was peculiar, too. Even when I hadn’t wanted to bother her with things, with my problems, or events which had unnerved me, I never could deal with them until I’d discussed them with her. Or rather, till I’d told her and she’d told me what to do. Doing what my mother says makes life, which I find so confusing, much simpler. Like adopting her opinions, and so thinking on a sort of permanent tangent that’s probably wrong so doesn’t matter. My living is like that, too. I do what she says, and follow her advice, but somehow my life—my true response to life—goes on quite differently and somewhere else. How strange. Until I wrote it here, I’d never thought about it before.
After about twelve minutes, the slim steel supports of the house appeared. But not even a ghost was visible of the house now, in the thickening light. I paid the cab the balance, and got out and walked up the white concrete approach between the conifer trees. The house lift is in the nearest support, and when I speak to it it always says: “Hallo, Jane.” When I was a little girl, all the mechanisms in the house would speak to me. I was, am, very used to intelligent mechanical things, totally at home with them.
Until today.
The lift went up, smooth as silk, and gaining terrific momentum until its gradual slowing near the top of the support, neither of which processes can be felt at all. I’d thought perhaps my mother wouldn’t be home yet. She’d been addressing a meeting somewhere, or giving a talk. But there had been a faint scent of pear-oil gasoline vaguely noticeable on the approach, the gas the Baxter burns. And the conifers had the slightly sulky backcombed look they get from the down-gale of a VLO. Even so, I might be mistaken. Once when I was eleven and very upset, and had rushed home, I smelled the Baxter’s gas though my mother had been away. I tore into the house, and found she still was; it had been a psychosomatic wish-fulfillment odor. My olfactory nerves had made it up to kid me she was there when I needed her, and she wasn’t, and didn’t come back for hours.
When the lift stopped and the door slid away, however, I also caught a faint, faint whiff of her perfume: La Verte.
When I was a child, the scent of La Verte could make me laugh with pure happiness. Then one morning, I poured it all over the carpets and the cushions and the drapes, so the whole house would smell like my mother. She sat with me, and explained my psychology to me, very carefully, and meanwhile everything was de-odorized. My mother never hit me, never smacked me, or ever shouted at me. She said this would be a sign of failure. Children must have everything explained. Then they could function just as concisely as adults.
The funny thing is, I think I was more mature as a child than I am now.
The lift opens on the foyer, which is, apparently, imposing. (“How imposing!”) Egyptia said that when she first saw it, it seemed to be made of frozen white ice cream, which would devour her. But really it’s white marble with tawny veins. Pencil-thin pillars rise in groups to discs which give a soft light at nighttime. But during the day, the light comes in from round high portholes. They’re too high, actually, to see much out of, just a glimpse now of the goldening sky—probably I shouldn’t make up adjectives, but it was. In the middle of the foyer is the openwork lift to the next floors. Mother had it designed like something she saw in
an old visual once. Leading from the foyer is a bathroom suite, and door to the robot and mechanical storage hatches under the house, a kitchen and servicery, and the wine cellar. There are also two guest apartments with two more bathrooms in an annex to the east. When you get in the house lift and go up, you pass a mezzanine floor with more things like guest rooms, and a tape-store which locks itself and which only the spacemen can open. The tapes are house accounts or business records, or else very precious and ancient documentation. Only mother goes in there. There’s also a book library, with a priceless globe of the world as it used to be before the Asteroid altered it. One of the balcony-balloons runs off from the library, and sometimes I sit there to read, but I never do, because the sky stops me from concentrating.
The top floor has mother’s suite and study and studio on the north, all together, and these are soundproofed, and also locked. The rest of the floor is the Vista, a wonderful semicircle running almost all round the outside of the house, and blossoming into huge balcony-balloons like great crystal bubbles with the sky held in them. When you come in, the sky fills the room. One is in the sky, and not in a room at all. To make sure of the effect, the furniture is very simple, and either of glass or pale white reflective materials, which take on the colors of the upper troposphere outside. We’re not really up into the stratosphere, of course, that would be dangerous. Even up where we are, the house is pressurized and oxygenized. We can’t open our windows either. Nor do we ever close the drapes.
This evening, when I came into the Vista, the room was gold. Gold carpets, gold chairs, a dining table in a balloon-bubble seeming made of palest amontillado sherry. The chemical candelabra in the ceiling were unlit, but had gold fires on them from the sky. The sky was like yellow plum wine. I walked into one of the western bubbles, dazed, and watched the sunset happen there. It seemed to take weeks, as it always does so high, but as soon as the sky began to cool I crossed over into an eastern bubble and watched the Asteroid appear. It looks like a colossal blue-green star, but it pulls the winds with it, and the sea tides answer it in huge heaves and buffetings. It should have hit the Earth, but some of it burned off as it fell, and then the moon’s gravity also attracted it; it shifted, and then it stabilized. I think I have that right, don’t I? Men have walked on the Asteroid. Jason and Medea stole the bit of blue rock we had that came from it. It’s beautiful, but it killed a third of all the people in the world. That’s a statistic.
At the southern curve of the room is another little annex, and a small stair that goes up to my suite. The suite is done in green and bronze and white to match my physical color scheme. It has everything a contemporary girl could want, visual set, tape deck and player, hairdresser unit, closets full of clothes, exotic furnishings, games, books. But, though there are windows, they aren’t balcony-balloons, so I tend to stay in the Vista.
I was just wandering over to the piano, which was turning lavender-grey now, with the sky, when my mother came into the room.
She was wearing the peacock dress, which has a high collar that rises over her head and is the simulated erect fan of a male peacock, with staring blue and yellow eyes like gas flames. She was obviously going out again.
“Come here, darling,” said my mother. I went to her and she took me in her arms. The gorgeous perfume of La Verte enfolded me, and I felt safe. Then she eased me away and held me, smiling at me. She looked beautiful, and her eyes were green as gooseberries. “Did you look after Egyptia, darling?”
“I tried, Mother. Mother, I have to tell you about something, ask your advice.”
“I have to go out, dear, and I’m already late. I waited in the hope of seeing you before I left. Can you tell me quickly?”
“No—I don’t—I don’t think so.”
“Then you must tell me tomorrow, Jane.”
“Oh, Mother,” I wailed, starting to cry again.
“Now, darling. I’ve told you what you can do if I’m not able to be with you, and you’ve done it before. Get one of the blank tapes and record what happened to you, imagining to yourself that I’m sitting here, holding your hand. And then tomorrow, about noon, or maybe one P.M., I can play it through, and we’ll discuss the problem.”
“Mother—”
“Darling,” she said, shaking me gently, “I really must go.”
“Go where?” I listlessly inquired.
“To the dinner I told you about yesterday.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s because you don’t want to. Come along, Jane. Let go of my sleeves. You’re intelligent and bright, and I’ve encouraged you to think for yourself.”
“And to talk to you.”
“And we will talk. Tomorrow.”
Although as a baby she had taken me everywhere, as a child, she had sometimes had to leave me, because my mother is a very busy woman, who writes and researches, is an expert perfumier and gem specialist, a theologian, a rhetorician—and can lecture and entertain on many levels. And when she used to leave me, I never could hold back the tears. But now I was crying anyway.
“Come along, Jane,” said my mother, kissing my fore-head. “Why don’t you go to your room and bathe and dress and makeup. Call Jason or Davideed and go out to dinner yourself.”
“Davideed’s at the equator.”
“Dear me. Well I hope they warned him it was hot there.”
“Up to his eyes in silt,” I said, following her from the room and back toward the lift. “Mother, I think I’ll just go to bed.”
“That sounds rather negative.” My mother looked at me, her long turquoise nail on the lift button. “Darling, I do hope, since you haven’t yet found a lover, that you’re masturbating regularly, as I suggested.”
I blushed. Of course, I knew it was idiotic to blush, so I didn’t lower my eyes.
“Oh. Yes.”
“Your physical type indicates you’re highly sexed. But the body has to learn about itself. You do understand, darling, don’t you?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Good-bye, darling,” said my mother, as the lift, a birdcage with a peacock in it, sank away.
“Good-bye, Mother.”
In the ethereal silence and stillness of the house, I just caught the thrum of the white Chevrolet as it was driven out of the second support pillar. And I could just see the tiny dazzle of its lights as it ran away into the darkness. I strained my eyes until I could see the dazzle no more.
• 3 •
I fell asleep in my sunken bath, and my bathroom video telephone woke me. I turned off the video and answered it. It was Egyptia.
“Jane, Jane. They accepted me.”
In the background were noises like a party.
“Who?” I sleepily asked.
“Don’t be stupid. The Theatra Concordacis drama group. They responded to the interview. It was as if we’d known each other always. I’ve paid my subscription. I’m giving a party in the Gardens of Babylon. It’s a wonderful party. Champagne is flowing, simply gushing, down the terraces.”
I recalled my mother’s advice.
“Can I come to the party?”
“Oh,” Egyptia’s voice was more distant.
I didn’t want to go anyway. The bath was cold, I was depressed. But my mother had thought it was best for me to go out.
“It isn’t really the sort of party you’d like,” said Egyptia.
Normally, I would retreat at that. I had before, quite often. Why was it that Egyptia always wanted me to herself? She wasn’t M-B. Was it that she was ashamed of me? Something made me say: “I’m unhappy. I can’t bear to be alone.”
Sometimes, by sounding like Egyptia, I could evoke a reaction. I realized I’d done this intuitively before, not knowing I did it, but now it was calculated. I didn’t want to go to the party, but I didn’t want to be alone.
“So unhappy, Egyptia. When that man upset you on the Grand Stairway, I was so shocked. I couldn’t bear to go with you. I was afraid for you.”
“Yes,” she breat
hed. I could imagine her eyes swimming, reliving it all.
And I was lying. I shouldn’t be lying like this, not consciously, not for something I didn’t even want.
“Egyptia, I want to come to the party to see you. To see you’re all right. To see you happy.”
“It’s on the third tier, under one of the canopies…”
Probably she was paying for the party. Of course she was, and the whole horrid Theatra group battening on her misguided euphoria. Why did I want to go?
But the most extraordinary thing was happening. I was hurrying. Out of the bath, into the wardrobe. I was even singing, too, until I recalled how awful my singing is, and stopped. I stopped again, briefly, when I had put on green lingerie and a green dress, to look at my wide hips. I don’t really like being a Venus Media type. Once, when Clovis was drunk, he told me I had a boyish look. “But I’m a Venus Media.” Clovis had shrugged. It’s possibly my face, which is almost oval, but has a pointed chin with an infinitesimal cleft—like that of a tom-cat?
I tried to put up my hair myself, but despaired, and combed it down again. I made up, using all the creams and powders and shadows and heightenings and mascaras and rouges and glosses. Until I looked much older and more confident. Sometimes I’ve been told I’m pretty or attractive, but I’m never sure. I wish I were someone else really.
I got the automatic on the phone to fetch another cab, and at nine P.M. I drove back into the city, which I think is amazing by night. The buildings seem made of thousands of little cubes of light that go up and up into the darkness. In the distance, they look like sticks of diamante. But I expect that’s a bad analogy. The jewelry traffic goes by on the roads, and clatters past overhead, punching out rosy fumes. I felt excited. I was glad I’d come back.
I felt at least twenty-five as I paid off the cab, and stepped on the moving stair that flows into Babylon, among the hanging mosses and garlands lit to liquid emeralds by the neons under the foliage.
The autumn night was soft. The lights in the bushes melted in the softness, and were only hard where they streamed out from under the canopies with the hard music of orchestras and stereophonics. Under the Theatra-Egyptia canopy, the light was hardest of all, but that may only have been the hard, beautiful makeup everyone was wearing.
