For dessert, after the sybaritic excess of the main course, Peter brought in the simplest of fruits. Two magnificent grosse mignonne peaches, ripened to perfection, cut in half and stoned. Dee bit through the soft, purplish skin, into the firm white flesh. Juice, sweet and melting ran down her chin and over her white skin, into the valley between her breasts. Peter made her giggle by leaping to his feet and coming round the table, opening the front of her shift dress and licking up the sticky liquid, nuzzling his tongue under her chin and, finally, kissing her hard.
‘Only one drink to follow peaches, and that’s Southern Comfort. You remember how much you like it. Dee?’
The meal had been so rich and so filling, that Dee didn’t think she had any room for a drop more of anything and she told Peter so. She was surprised that he seemed so upset, and pressed her to try this drink. It didn’t seem that important, and she told him so.
‘No, of course it’s not that important, but we always share this particular drink after we’ve had a nice meal, and I can’t see why we still shouldn’t. Now, come on love. Just to please me.’
‘I’m sorry, darling, but I just don’t feel a bit like it. I’m absolutely full up. You have one.’
‘No. I won’t have one unless you have one as well. Honestly, Dee, don’t spoil what’s been such a lovely day ... it has been a nice day, hasn’t it? Well then. There? Now I’ve poured it out you just have to drink it.’
Still Cordelia refused. And Peter got really angry, which was something she’d never seen before. He even went as far as to threaten her. Or, it seemed as though he had been about to threaten her, when he suddenly stopped in mid-sentence and fell silent. There was a pause of nearly a minute when he didn’t speak, then he dropped the subject and started talking about the garden. The drink that he’d poured out for her remained untouched.
For the next hour or so, Peter made every effort to remove the unease that still lay between them. He played music and read to her—silly little poems and bits of things to cheer her up. Gradually, the tension crept away from them, and Dee found herself lying across her husband’s lap on the sofa, listening to what he had told her was a symphony called the ‘New World’.
Quite unexpectedly, as the music ended, Peter sat up and walked over to the dining table. The plates were still left there from their sumptuous last food, though the candles were guttering to the end of their brief lives. He picked up the full glass of liqueur and carried it over to where Dee lay.
‘It’s getting very late, and you really must have a nice drink to help you to sleep.’
She pushed the glass away, spilling some of the heavy amber liquid on the floor. ‘Peter, will you take that stuff away. If you’re worried about me sleeping, then why don’t we go straight to bed now.’ She touched him tenderly. ‘Come on. I’m ready for bed. Ready for some more of your love to finish off the day.’
She blushed at her own forwardness.
He knocked her hand aside with an angry gesture. ‘You must drink it! You must drink it!! You must drink it!!!’
Dee shrank back from his shouting rage; the blood ran from her face, leaving it as pale as parchment ‘Peter. Quiet, you’ll wake...’ in her anxiety she couldn’t even remember their names,’... the children. Please love. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go and look at the children. Come on.’
She reached out and tried to take his arm, but he just stood there, the fight drained from him, impassive and still.
‘It’s no good. Not now. It’s too late. Let her go.’
The voice was different. Not like Peter’s. Flatter, with less roundness to it. A cold, impersonal voice. And who was ‘her’? Dee ran towards the stairs with a steel claw gripping her heart. She burst into the children’s room, slamming the door back so it chipped the wall-paper. Bright paper, patterned with designs of space-ships interwoven with grinning dinosaurs.
The room was quiet. Dee stopped at the foot of their bunk beds, trying to still her own heart, fluttering in her breast like a caged dove. Not a sound except for the quiet breathing of the children. The shouting from downstairs hadn’t woken them. Dee smiled tremulously and walked back to the door, pausing to listen again to the regular rhythm of their breathing.
Which had stopped!
Completely!
She shook her head disbelievingly. Ran to their beds and leaned over their sleeping forms and strained her ears. Nothing.
Mewing to herself in shock she pulled the blankets off the figure in the top bunk. It was the boy. The boy. His body lay quite still, eyes closed, arms lying loosely at his sides. Dee picked him up, cradled him in her arms, shook him, kissed him, stroked his cool cheeks, laid him back on the rumpled pillow.
Cried.
The girl, Belle, in the lower bunk, was the same. No movement. No breath. No life.
Dee mumbled incoherently to herself as she half-fell down the stairs, grabbing at the bannisters, her nails splitting and tearing to the bloody quick. She slipped as she ran into the living-room and then stopped. Peter stood silently facing half away from her. His eyes were glazed and screened and he seemed to be communing with himself.
‘Peter! Peter, they’re dead! Can you hear me? The children. They’re both dead.’
Slowly the android—a perfect human—turned to look towards her, but did not see her. Gazing over her head it said quickly, it’s voice so soft and dull that it hardly stirred the air: ‘Over. End. Self-terminate.’
And that was all.
* * * *
The men came in their clean red fibro-plas coats and took her firmly by the arm. Pressed a small vial to her arm and squeezed a plunger with a barely audible hiss. Held her as she slipped into a sleep. Of sorts. Answered her last question: ‘Because you didn’t take drink. Sorry.’
Then they took her back to the room. With its muted pastel walls. And its standard grey rest unit. And they attached her again. Where she could sleep and dream.
* * * *
High. Binomial eyes clicked. A light film of thinnest oil eased tumblers. On the control panels, dazzling arrays of changing colours—a rainbow of reaction. On the master board, wheels danced and numbers flashed. At last the digits slowed, settled became finite. The selection was made. For that part of that day in that part of the city. High.
<
* * * *
MURDERS
Ramsey Campbell
When is a murder not a murder? Just how much real non-reality can a mind take, particularly when the privacy of this non-reality no longer remains inviolate? The precedents here seem secure enough; but reality sets shifting confusion beneath them, giving the legal aspects many opportunities for tortuous appraisal, and striking uncertain reflections from our own secret motivations. The word maird as used here by Ramsey Campbell should not be confused with the French word of similar sound.
* * * *
One
‘All right, Mounth,’ I said. ‘I hope you’re ready to die.’
The point of my knife pursued him as if he were magnetic north. Light touched the edge, then spilled across the blade. Mounth had retreated towards the back of Holoshows Studios, until an angle of the wall arrested his shoulders. As he made a timid attempt to scurry free I closed in, and he was crucified and quivering against the walls, and I felt the knife light on my fingers as it sailed forward for the first easy incision, and I noticed that the white walls against which Mounth was pressed were vividly lit. But it was supposed to be night. I tried to ignore the error, but my sense of it wouldn’t let me alone. Maird, I swore, and began to reconceive. Without distractions I would have just about enough time.
‘All right, Mounth,’ I said. ‘I hope you’re ready to die.’
He was squeezing himself back between the walls. It was dark, and darker within the angle, so that I couldn’t see his face. Maird, I thought, maird. Then I heard Thaw getting into his car behind me. Its beam wavered a little, then snapped into place as a frame around Mounth. Thaw sat watching, appreciatively smiling, as I began
to open Mounth up with the knife. Mounth’s squeals urged me on, but his blood seemed too bright, no doubt because I’d seen little of the real thing, and there wasn’t much of it, though my mind would have rejected profusion: indeed, had done so. I finished murdering him and stepped down from my throne, feeling rather disappointed, a minute before they switched off the power.
I stood in the centre of my apartment, gazing at the pastel rainbow whorls and curlicues of the walls, wondering whether Mounth knew I’d been killing him. Probably not, since he was involved in the first of what he’d assured us were the most important shows of his career. Anyway, I didn’t care. I glanced at the holocast receivers pointing down into the comer of the room and thought of finding out what Mounth was saying. But I wouldn’t; I kept my nights free from Holoshows completely free. And all because of Mounth, I thought. He was the latest and by far the worst of our troubles.
I switched off the windowframes. Activating them had been the product of habit; nobody was ever burgled on the fifteen-mile level, few people were burgled at all. But the government insisted we made ourselves safe during throne-time, so that nobody could accuse them of promoting crime. Nobody except Mounth.
I gazed from the window. At night you might as well be on the viewless ground level as on the fifteen-mile, and even during the day you could seldom see as far as that. I looked down towards the windows of the ten- and twelve-milers, bright discs and polygons set in implicit unseen planes of darkness, their total composition occasionally shifting minutely. I wondered how many people had felt compelled by guilt or fear to watch Mounth’s holocast and to forego their thrones. I wondered again if he’d felt me murdering him. I would know tomorrow, I felt vulnerability and triumph swiftly mingling, and my mind retreated to the time before Mounth.
Not that Holoshows had ever been free of troubles. What is? Even the initial advertising of the new experience had fumbled somewhat, largely because the board hadn’t wanted the public to dismiss Holoshows as just another disappointment hiding behind the images of an advertising cartel. Tridi was losing huge amounts of cash and credibility to its image, and the inevitable rise in fees was losing it subscribers by the thousand. Holoshows didn’t intend to go that way, and we had created our own advertising. But for a while that threatened us as much as it sold. Except you can’t touch it, it’s solid, we said, and the tridi newscasts grabbed themselves interviewees who said they could see their apartment floor through a perfect holocast—but only by concentrating on one spot for more than an hour, as we eventually discovered and pointed out. If you walk into it you’ll harm the holocast, not your health, we said belatedly as the tridis began interviewing mothers who thought their children were being lured into a deadly laser beam (instead of our harmless-for-half-an-hour variety). Our holocasts can’t talk but you’ll never know, we said to the people the tridis prompted to complain when they found they had to buy speakers as well as receivers and holostage cube. But: she’s young, she’s pretty, you can’t touch but she doesn’t mind what else, we said and had a rush of censorious good taste only just before the government did.
I shouldn’t say ‘we’ about that period, but I feel it. I was working for tridis then. When their sniping at Holoshows became embarrassing, and the ridiculousness of their attacks clear to everyone but themselves, I went to direct for Holoshows. I’d worked out new techniques of tridi editing and camera handling, and now I translated these into holocast terms. Ego break: until I came they hadn’t even thought of taking the holocameras 360° around anything, let alone how. But my experiments were all formal. They didn’t risk offending the government.
The government: they were our main trouble, or—more accurately—threat. They were teetering between the extremes of their two parties. They would touch an extreme and spark off a bill, then a year later to nobody’s surprise they might ratify an almost direct contradiction. Work together, hurt nobody and the rest of your time within your own walls is your own; improve yourself, improve the worlds for your children, without help the future’s always worse than now. Of course there was more than that to the parties, but it was often impossible to see what. Which made it especially difficult for Holoshows.
* * * *
It sometimes amazed us how much we achieved. Our more blatant victories owed all to Thaw’s strategy. Thaw was resident lawyer at Holoshows. Like most successful lawyers he’d been trained as a psychologist, and there was a whole psychological method in the way he used his stick as pointer, hinted threat, symbol of imminent victory, distracting pendulum as well as a third leg. But his gaunt frame and almost bone-tight skin, refusing wrinkles, were the emblems of decades of experience. It was Thaw, for example, who meditated a compromise on the holocasting of violence. Not that the majority of the government felt that the emulation of holocasts was consistent enough to be legislated for. No, the psychological effect we were accused of producing was subtler: a sort of vague domestic schizophrenia in which people felt dimly caged by apathy, the effect of violence transmitted so persuasively that it became indistinguishable from the real within one’s walls. No use our asking why violence, nor our pointing out that the squirts of always slightly unconvincing studio blood vanished in midair (accurately, at the surface of the holostage cube). All we could do was transmit a bright coloured outline to the cube itself when violence was imminent and wait for cancellations to arrive from, in the literal sense, disillusioned subscribers.
‘If you can stand realizing your best isn’t always good enough,’ Thaw once said to me, ‘you’ll survive anything life can throw at you.’
He might have been talking about the violence box, as we called the outlined cube, but in fact it was a year later and we’d had worse trouble: indeed, our earlier trouble in purest crystal form. The wife of the Minister for Media had left the room during one of our drama holocasts, and had returned to find a yard-high slightly drooping breast squatting in the corner of the room, the vision of a young holocameraman turned briefly avant-garde director. Arriving home minutes later to find his wife in hysterics, the minister called Emergency Power Control and talked quietly and coldly until they’d cut the domestic entertainments supply for hundreds of miles around the capital. Then: a commission of inquiry, threats of prosecution to half the staff at Holoshows.
Thaw took one glance at the robed bodies of the elderly women who were more than half of the commission and said that the holocast had been meant to express the director’s sense of beauty. But meanwhile the minister’s wife had wobbled on the edge of a breakdown, and (perhaps from an alarming and astonishingly single-minded sympathy) the majority of the government had upheld the minister’s action. Tridis had embraced puritanism and sunk, but we were doing little better as our subscribers relinquished a medium which could be put out of action at whim. Everyone at Holoshows, even Thaw, was chasing the tail of depression.
Then Mounth arrived and offered a telepath show.
* * * *
Telepath shows had been briefly in fashion some decades ago. They’d been burdened with titles such as the Tridi Telepath Talkshow but these weren’t the main reason why they’d died. So you could watch a perfect tridi of someone talking to guests whose evasions he could read: so? Hardly anyone became involved enough to sue. And when someone did, the law established that while unauthorized telepathy was still illegal, assuming the user was stupid enough to make it obvious, anyone who appeared on a telepath show had authorized telepathy by so doing. That decision was worth a few seconds at the end of a tridi newscast, and when the telepath shows were quietly faded, soon after, it was generally agreed that what they’d needed had been far more purpose and force. Mounth had a great deal of both.
I was at Holoshows the day he was interviewed. I saw him stride into Reception, smile warmly but without familiarity at our receptionist, sit his lumberjack frame like a clear-cut sharply pointed statement on one of Reception’s stools, hold his open alert face up to anyone who passed, eager to be called to speak.
It was then I was
convinced for the first time that the old sour belief about telepaths was true: that they adjusted their image each time they felt someone’s opinion of them, until they’d perfected it. I didn’t see him go in, but in another corridor I met the interview board on their way, their faces saying last resort, try anything, what have we come to, and Thaw’s reiterating his favourite maxim that you can’t afford to lose hope until whatever it is has been proved hopeless. He held up a lazy finger to confirm we would talk in an hour.
In fact it was closer to two, and while Thaw was telling me the interview was already becoming legend at Holo-shows. Especially Mounth’s final speech: ‘You, sir, you’re wondering if the people can identify with a telepath, even one who’s fighting for their rights,’ he said. ‘I think they can if he’s fighting as hard as I will. And you, sir, think that I couldn’t keep it up for long. But there’s a lot wrong with our world, and I think we should give people the chance to see it all. And you suspect my motives because I used to earn so much as a salesman. But I had to earn money before I could do what I should be doing, if only to give my parents a real home. And you’ (who was Thaw) ‘think I can influence you into hiring me. I can’t, I’m not that sort of telepath, which is why I have to be honest. I can’t avoid reading what you think about me but I could have avoided admitting it to you. I’ve been honest and you can show me the door if you wish. But there’s no use my avoiding honesty and truth, because they’re what my show will be based on if you let me have it. You’ve said yourselves that today people won’t let advertising play with them in any way. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s still truth that sells.’
New Writings in SF 26 - [Anthology] Page 12
