"I might be more highly motivated if you were to recover your memories of the crime of which I've been accused."
Her brow furrowed, expressing a transparently insincere degree of concern. "I'm working very hard in therapy. I'm sure I'll have a breakthrough soon." She brightened. "But I do have something to tell you. Whether you perceive it as an encouragement … that's entirely up to you."
I signaled that she should continue.
"Joan Gwynne, as you recall, came to embody the soul of Villon's lost love, Martha Laurens. Carl was Tacque Thibault. John Wooten … Guillaume du Villon. But have you ever asked yourself who embodies the soul of Amorise LeDore, and why, of all those people gathered in the Martinique to celebrate the inception of the Sublime Act, she is the only one with whom you have no apparent previous connection?"
"Is that important?"
"Everything is important, David." A note of venom crept into her voice. "Surely as a craftsman, a devisor of murderous machines, you realize the importance of details?"
"Very well," I said. "Who are you?"
"Let us suppose that this woman, the woman whom you know as Amorise LeDore, is also named Allison Villanueva. And that her brother Erik and her sister-in-law Carmen were murdered by one of your security devices." She gave these last two words a loathing emphasis. "Let us further suppose that in her grief Allison came to recognize that if the courts would not punish you, she must seek her own vengeance, and after the lawsuit against you was dismissed, she traveled from her home in Merida to do that very thing."
Astonished, I jumped to my feet and the guard stationed behind Amorise gestured at me with his baton. I sat back down. "What are you telling me!"
"What I'm telling you," she went on, "is what I am telling you. Make of it what you will." She reached into her purse and withdrew the book I had taken from her locker at Emerald Street Expansions. "Novallis. Did you notice, David, that by rearranging the letters you can also spell out the name Allison V? It's not a difficult chore to forge an antique, and Allison may have taken pains to do so. Or she may not. Did you verify the book's age?"
"No," I said in a tight voice. "I did not."
"Well, if you had, you might have discovered that the book, if a forgery, is a very good forgery. I doubt any expert would claim that it is inauthentic. Be that as it may …" She restored the book to her purse.
"I don't believe you!"
"What is it you don't believe? That I'm Allison, or that I'm Amorise? Perhaps both are true. That would suit the subtle character of the Sublime Act, would it not? The subjects must be suitable, and Allison is perfect for Amorise. But then, too, Amorise is precisely what Allison needed."
"You fucking witch!" I said. "Don't try to con me!"
"Why not, François? You're a natural-born mark."
"I know who you are … and I know who I am."
"Let's examine who you are," said Amorise. "I must confess I've deceived you to an extent. We did do a little something to you at Emerald Street."
"That's crap!" I said. "The woman there … the blonde. She told me the machine didn't work. The leads were burned out."
"Jane Eisley. She's a friend. Actually, you know her, too. You dated her sister at Stanford. There was some slight unpleasantness involved. A pregnancy, I believe. An abortion, a broken heart. And a very long time ago, you may have known her as Fat Margot, a Parisian prostitute."
I was at a loss, capable only of staring at her.
"We didn't have to do much," she said. "It's as I told you the other night, you were perfect for François. Well … almost perfect. I needed you to fall in love with Joan, so we tweaked your emotional depth a bit. The rest of it … the anger, the violence, the disdain. You supplied all that. But love was needed to make you fully inhabit those qualities, to bring them to flower." She fixed me with her disturbing green eyes. "Do you understand me, David. I wove the web, but you flew into it with passion, abandon, arrogance. All those qualities you thought you lacked and wanted to explore. From the moment we met, you surrendered yourself to me. You desired what I have given you … and what I have given you is yourself."
"What do you want?" I pressed my palms hard against the plastic barrier, hoping for a miraculous collapse that would allow my hands to close about her throat.
"No more than what I told you at the club. I want you to enact the laws of your nature. So far you're doing a splendid job." She settled back in her chair, folded her arms and regarded me coolly. "I'd like you to consider the possibilities. On the one hand, it's possible that this is no more than an ornate Latina cruelty. That Allison Villanueva has manipulated you through completely ordinary means in order to avenge her brother and her sister-in-law. That utilizing your suggestibility, your gullibility, your penchant for the macabre and your underused yet nonetheless potent imagination, she has persuaded you that a witch has come from the fifteenth century to implant the soul of François Villon into your body for some arcane purpose—something she may have done many times before. And now she's telling you that the entire scenario may be a fraud. That would be the logical conclusion … at least if we are to accept the logic of the age. On the other hand, it's conceivable that the story of the witch is true. Or, a third possibility, both stories are true. This speaks to the beautiful symmetry of the Sublime Act. It begins with a multitude of options, but eventually reduces those choices to three. Ultimately those three become indistinguishable."
It took all my strength to restrain anger—I wanted to yell at her, to revile her; but if I did the guards would return me to my cell, and I wanted to stay, to hear everything she had to say.
"Next," she said, "consider the character of the Sublime Act. I believe Guillaume du Villon told you that it was 'to ensure our continuance.' Were those not his words?"
I nodded.
"For the sake of argument, let's say that our continuation is simply the mechanism by which the Sublime Act is effected. Its character may well be something other than mere immortality. Why would a woman, a witch, wish to drag the same ninety-three souls forward in time, skipping like a stone across the centuries, causing the same event to be re-enacted over and over? What purpose could this painful form of immortality serve … if not vengeance? Do you see the correspondence, David? Why the subjects must be suitable? A crime, a terrible crime committed millennia ago, is redressed endlessly by conforming to a contemporary crime and thus achieves the most terrible of vengeances. The kind that never ends. An eternity of punishment. A hell that the object of vengeance creates for himself by enacting the laws of his nature. The Sublime Act. Sublime because the witch achieves sublimity through her creation. She is an artist, and vengeance is the canvas upon which she paints variations on a theme."
"What crime," I asked shakily, "could merit such a punishment?"
"Perhaps I've already told you. Perhaps someday I will tell you. Perhaps I'll never tell you. So many questions, David. Were some or all of your acquaintances in the Martinique acting, or were they, like you, manipulated by science or witchery or both? Is Joan Martha, and will you ever have her again? Or is she just another person whom you have wronged and who hates you with sufficient passion to be my complicitor? Could she have a connection to that ancient and possibly fraudulent crime? You will never answer any of these questions … unless you create the Text. Then you may discover the truth, or you may not. The thing you must accept is that whoever I am—Amorise or Allison or both—I own you. I control you. I may testify in such a way that you will be set free, but I will still control you. I'll continue to cause you pain. I've surrounded you with a circumstance you cannot escape. You may come to think that you can injure me, but you can't. My wealth and power insulate me. I swear you will never be happy in this life or any other. Not until I decide enough is enough. If, that is, I ever do."
She closed her purse and stood looking down at me. "There is one way out. But to take it you must go contrary to your nature. You can disobey me and not create the Text. Then I'll testify that you murdered Car
l McQuiddy, and you will die. That's your choice, the only one I offer. To die now, or to create the Text and die after long years of suffering. What will you do, David … François? You can't believe a thing I've told you, and yet you cannot disbelieve me. The stuff of your being has been transmuted from confidence to doubt. Logic is no longer a tool that will work for you."
"I wouldn't be here," I said, "if I hadn't killed McQuiddy. It was an accident. You couldn't have predicted it."
"You always kill, François," she said. "A priest, a lawyer … Are not lawyers the true priests of our time? You're drawn to detest such authority as they represent. If you hadn't attacked McQuiddy, he would have attacked you. I own him as well." She let out a trickle of laughter, a sound of sly delight. "So many questions. And the answers are all so insubstantial. What will you do?"
She walked away and my anger faded, as if my soul had been kindled brightly by her presence, and now, deprived of her torments, I had sunk back into a less vital state of being. At the door she turned and looked at me, and for an instant it seemed I was gazing through her eyes at a man diminished by harsh light and plastic into a kind of shabby exhibit. Then she was gone, leaving me at the bottom of the world. I perceived my life to be a tunnel with a round opening at the far end lit like a glowing zero.
I let the guard lead me back to my cell. For a long time I sat puzzling over the conversation. A hundred plans occurred to me, a hundred clever outcomes, but each one foundered and was dissolved in the nets of Amorise's gauzy logic. Eventually a buzzer sounded, announcing lockdown. The gates of the cells slammed shut, the lights dimmed. Everything inside me seemed to dim. A man on the tier above began to sing, and someone threatened him with death unless he shut up. This initiated a chorus of shouted curses, screams, howls of pain. They seemed orchestrated into a perverse and chaotic opera, a terrible beauty, and I recalled a line from "The Testament" that read: "… only in horrid noises are there melodies …" I wondered what Villon had been thinking when he reached this point in the Act, what kind of man he had been before meeting Amorise. If, indeed, any of that had happened. For an instant, I felt a powerful assurance that the Act was a fraud, a mere device in the intricate design of Allison Villanueva's vengeance; but then this sense of assurance dissolved in a flurry of doubt. It would never be clear. Only one kind of clarity was available to me now.
From beneath my pillow I removed the stub of a candle I'd bought from a trustee. I lit it, dripped wax onto the rail of my iron bunk and stood the stub upright in the congealing puddle I had made, and as I did I seemed briefly to see an ancient prison, begrimed stone walls weeping with dampness, a grating of black iron centering a door of age-stained wood, a moldy blanket and straw for bedding. I slipped a writing tablet from beneath my mattress, thin and smelly as an old man's lust. I opened the tablet and set it upon my knee. It made no difference whether the woman who had done this to me was Allison or Amorise. Either version of reality provided the same sublime motivation. I felt words breaking off from the frozen cliffs of my soul and scattering like ice chips into plainspoken verse, the ironic speech of a failed heart. Then, in the midst of that modern medieval place, with the cries of the damned and the deranged and the condemned raining down about me, I began:
Villain and victim, both by choice and by chance
I hereby declare void all previous Testaments
Legal or otherwise, whether sealed by magistrate
Locked away in the rusty store of memory
Or scribbled drunkenly upon a bathroom wall
Not knowing whether it is I, LeGary, who writes …
The End
© 2002 by Lucius Shepard and SCIFI.COM
The Emperor, by Lucius Shepard
"… That melancholy hole which is the place
All the other rocks converge and thrust their weight…"
Dante, Canto XXXI, The Inferno
Bless the moon, McGlowrie said to himself. Under bitter smokes and clouds of poison, here we are forbidden the lights of heaven, but lack especially the moon …
He spun the wheel of the rover, sending forty-five tons of armor-plated steel lurching to the right, nearly scraping the pit wall, all so as to avoid crushing a spiderlike machine that had scooted into his path.
—Go thou into the earth, he said, affecting the grandiose effusiveness of a drunk. The fact that he was drunk did not alter the depth of his pretense. Since taking charge of the mine and its many machines, he had become increasingly distant in personal situations and had discovered that exaggerating certain of his natural propensities helped to strengthen his humanity, to fix it as an artist might fix a painting, by sealing its surface with a glaze; and yet, for purposes of efficiency, he also nourished his unemotional side. It made for an odd balancing act, this tipping back and forth between calm rationality and what his friend, Terry Saddler, characterized as the oft-buggered macho of an aging barroom bully; and the very artificiality of this balancing act half-persuaded McGlowrie that he had already failed at it, that he had grown more machine than man in his responses. Nevertheless, he continued to strive to perfect his human imperfections.
Seated in the chair beside McGlowrie, Robert Eads Bromley. Vainglorious boy. Blond beard razored with finicky precision, nary a strand out of ranks; a crisp new baseball cap, adorned with the Emperor's logo (a crowned man on a barbarous throne, aping the Tarot trump) and hiding a prematurely receding hairline. In a tone that reeked of an expensive education got in hallowed halls where the graduation ceremony consisted of having a stick rammed up your butt, he suggested that another ill-considered maneuver like McGlowerie's last might serve to uncouple the factory units linked behind the rover. He further suggested that McGlowerie lay off the drink.
—The Emperor's one of the last places on earth where a man can drive drunk with impunity, said McGlowerie. Allow me my small pleasures.
—If the company gets wind of your pleasures,said Bromley, they'll put your ass in a sling.
—And who's going to tell them? A trainee?
Bromley looked away from McGlowrie's stare; the older man made a sardonic noise and, annoyed, too much so to return to his tipsy poetics, he beat out a rhythm on the command console and sang:
—All the women in Boston
sing their white rose song.
Ah, Santa Katerina,
she's my icon …
—Did you like that? McGlowrie asked. I wrote it myself. Last time we replaced the command-control unit, while driving through the pit, I got to thinking about women, you know. Their variety, their essence …
Bromley muttered something that sounded resentful, gazing out through rain-streaked glass at the ghastly inhuman vista of the pit, at countless machines toiling, scuttling, lumbering, darting, and gliding over the broken ground.
—Beg pardon? said McGlowrie.
—The machine you swerved to avoid. It was a spider from the leaching ponds. There must be millions of them.
—You said all that? I could have sworn you were more succinct. McGlowrie chuckled. You're correct. It was only a spider. And most likely a damaged one, or else it wouldn't have strayed from the ponds. The hunter-killers will be at it soon, so you wonder, quite rightfully, why I bothered. Was it a whim? An inebriated twitch? Did it have philosophical implications, life being life in whatever guise? Was that the thrust of your inquiry?
—More or less.
McGlowrie nodded, as if he were considering the question, and said, Perhaps you'll like the second verse better.
—All the women in Moscow
with their stiletto heels.
with their Type O lipstick
and black market deals …
He cocked an eye toward his audience, awaiting a response, and, when Bromley failed to muster one, he continued.
—All the women in Chelsea
with their tiger smiles,
with their secret histories
and their serpent Niles …
Bromley picked himself up and started for the hat
ch.
—Sit, said McGlowrie.
Reluctantly, sullenly, Bromley sat.
—I take it you're not a music lover, said McGlowrie.
Bromley responded with a sideways glance.
—That's all right. It's not a requirement. McGlowerie steered around some unidentifiable wreckage that the recyclers had deemed unworthy of collection. What is required of anyone working here is that they cut their fellow employees a little slack. Otherwise …
—I didn't sign on to cut anyone slack.
—Otherwise, McGlowerie went on, your fellow employees will cut you none.
—I don't need it.
McGlowerie drove in silence for a time, drumming his fingers on the wheel, and then said, I assume you've been lectured on the psychological toll taken by the job. I also assume that after being here three weeks—three whole weeks—you've concluded that you're immune to the pressure. And perhaps you are. Anything's possible. But let's suppose you're cast of ordinary clay, that you fall a bit short of superhero status.
—Let's suppose you're a tiresome old drunk.
McGlowerie reflected on this comment and the assurance with which it had been delivered. I know Daddy's a big stockholder, he said. And I imagine he's willing to indulge his baby boy, to let you play at being a contributor to society. To pass through your grub stage, as it were, before you weary of it and evolve into a full-blown parasite. That's fine. Just don't make the mistake of thinking I'm easy. I've been fighting corporate battles for long years, and I don't fight fair.
Bromley coughed … or it might have been a laugh. You think I'm after your job?
—I don't give a damn what you want. Whatever it is, I'm telling you straight-up, if it's not in accord with my wishes, you won't get a sniff of it. I know the Emperor better than anyone. That makes me the one person the company doesn't want to lose.
Bromley refused to look at McGlowrie, but he did not appear particularly shaken.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 44
