The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  For a time, I stared bemusedly after her.

  —

  Three nights after my first session, the night of my conversation with Wardress Kefa, I reentered the Sharer’s chamber. Nothing had changed, except that the dome’s shutters stood ajar and moonlight frosted the mosaic tiles. The Sharer awaited me in the same recumbent posture, and the red-winged blackbird set one of its perches rocking.

  Perversely, I’d decided not to talk to the Sharer—but I did approach the stove-bed and lean over him. Hello, I thought, and almost said. I straddled the Sharer and studied him in the stained moonlight. He looked just as my sense of touch had led me to conclude earlier—like a skull, oddly flattened and beveled, with the body of a man. But despite the chemical embers agleam beneath his bed, the Sharer’s body lacked warmth. To know him more fully, I resumed tracing him with a finger.

  At every conceivable pressure point, a tiny scar existed, or the tip of an implanted electrode, while miniature canals into which wires had been sunk veined his inner arms and legs. Beneath his sternum a concave disc about eight centimeters across, containing neither instruments nor any other conspicuous features, had been set like a stainless-steel brooch. It hummed under my finger as I drew my nail around the disc.

  What was it for? What did it mean?

  I rolled toward the wall and stretched out beside the Sharer. Maybe he couldn’t move. On my last visit he’d moved his dimly phosphorescent head, but feebly. Maybe his immobility stemmed from a mechanical dysfunction.

  My resolve not to speak fled me—I propped myself up on my elbow. “Sharer…Sharer, can you move?”

  The head turned toward me slightly, signaling…what?

  “Can you rise? Try. Get off this dais under your own power.”

  A miracle: the Sharer nudged a quilt to the floor and struggled to his feet.

  Moonlight glinted from the ringed units of his eyes, giving his bent, elongated body the look of a piece of Inhodlef Era statuary, primitive work from the extrakomm world of Glaparcus.

  “Very good. Now tell me what you’re to share with me. We may not have as much in common as our Wardress thinks.”

  The Sharer extended both arms and opened his fists. In his palms, he held two items I’d not noticed during my tactile examination. I accepted these—a small metal disc and a thin metal cylinder. The disc reminded me of the mirrorlike bowl in his chest; the cylinder resembled a penlight.

  Absently, I pulled my thumb over the head of the penlight. A ridged metal sheath followed the motion of my thumb, uncovering a point of ghostly red light stretching away into the cylinder forever. I pointed this instrument at the wall, our bedding, the Sharer—but it emitted no beam.

  When I turned the penlight on my wrist, the results were much the same: not even a faint red shadow appeared along the edge of my arm. The pen’s light existed internally, a beam transmitted and retransmitted between its two poles. Pulling back the sheath on its head hadn’t disabled its self-regenerating circuit, and I stared in wonder into the tunnel of redness.

  “Sharer, what’s this thing for?”

  The Sharer took from my other hand the disc I’d ignored. He laid it in the larger disc in his chest, where it apparently stuck—for I could no longer see it. That done, the Sharer stood immobile, a statue again, one arm frozen across his body, a hand stilled at the margin of the sunken plate into which the smaller disc had vanished. He looked dead and self-commemorating.

  “Lord! What’ve you done, Sharer? Turned yourself off?”

  Turned off, the Sharer ignored me.

  I felt opiate-weary. I could not stay on the dais with this puzzle-piece being from another sun standing over me like a dark angel from my racial subconscious. I thought to manhandle him across the room, but lacked the will to touch his bone-and-metal body, and so dismissed the idea. Nor would Wardress Kefa help me, even if I tried to summon her. Is this what you want me to experience, Rumai? The frustration of trying to devise my own “therapy”? I peered through one of the dome’s unstained polygons in search of the constellation Auriga, but realized I wouldn’t know it even if it lay within my ken.

  “You’re certainly a pretty one,” I said, pointing the penlight at the Sharer’s chest. Then I drew back the sheath on its head. “Bang.”

  A beam of light sang between the instrument in my hand and the plate in the being’s chest. The beam died at once (I’d registered only its brightness, not its color), but the disc kept glowing, residually. The Sharer lowered his arm and assumed a looser, more expectant posture. I turned the penlight over, pointed it at him again, and waited for another coursing of light. The instrument still burned internally, but the alien’s inset disc did not reignite; however, it still dimly glowed. I brandished the penlight.

  “You’ve rejoined the living, haven’t you?”

  The Sharer canted his head.

  “Forgive me, but if you can move again, how about over there?” I pointed at the opposite wall. “Please don’t hover over me.”

  The Sharer obeyed, but oddly, cruising backward as if on invisible coasters—his legs moving, albeit not enough to propel him quickly across the chamber. Once against the far wall, he adopted the motionless but expectant posture that he’d assumed after the penlight “activation.” He still had some control over his own movements, for his skeletal fingers flexed and his skull nodded eerily in the halo of moonlight pocketing him. But he had genuinely moved only at my voice command and my simultaneous gesturing with the penlight. And what did that mean?

  Maybe the Sharer had surrendered control of his body to the man-machine Dorian Lorca, keeping for himself just those movements that persuade the manipulated of their autonomy. It was an awesome prostitution, even if Wardress Kefa would have frowned to hear me call it that. But I rejoiced. It freed me from the demands of an artificial eroticism, from any necessity to deduce what was expected of me. The Sharer would obey my least gesture, my briefest word. I just had to use the control he’d literally handed over.

  This nearly unlimited power was a therapy whose value Rumai would understand: a harsh assessment, but penlight in hand, I too resembled a marionette….Insofar as I could, I came to grips with the physics of the Sharer’s operation. First, the disc-within-a-disc on his chest apparently broke the connections ordinarily allowing him to exercise the senile power that he still owned. And, second, the penlight’s beam restored and amplified his power, but delivered it into the hands of whoever wielded the penlight.

  In Earth’s probeship yards, crews of animatronic workers, programmed to fit and to weld, had labored. A single supervisor could direct fifteen to twenty receiver-equipped laborers with only a penlight and a microphone.

  “Sharer,” I commanded, “go there….No, no. Lift your feet. March. That’s right…goose-step.” While Wardress Kefa’s third rule rattled about in my mind challengingly, for the next several hours I toyed with the Sharer. I set him to either calisthenics or dance, and he obeyed, more gracefully than I would have predicted. Here—there—back again, minus only music for accompaniment. At intervals, I rested, but always the penlight drew me back, and I again played puppetmaster.

  “Enough, Sharer!” The sky had a curdled quality hinting at dawn. Catching sight of the cage overhead, I had an irresistible urge. I pointed my penlight at it and said, “Up, Sharer: up, up, up.”

  The Sharer floated up from the floor, toward the ceiling’s vault: a beautiful aerial walk. Without benefit of hawsers, scaffolds, or wings, he levitated. Hovering above the stove-bed—over everything, in fact—he reached the cage, floating before it with his hands touching the scrolled ironwork on its door. I lowered my hands and watched. So tightly did I grip the cylinder, though, that my knuckles resembled the caps of four tiny bleached skulls.

  Time passed, and the Sharer posed in the gelid air awaiting some word. Morning entered the polygonal windows. “Take the bird out,” I said, moving my penlight. “Take the bird out and kill it.” This command seemed a foolproof, indirect way of striking back at
Rumai, Diderits, the Wardress, and the third rule of the House. Against all reason, I wanted the red-winged blackbird dead. And I wanted the Sharer to kill it. Dawn made clear the encroachment of age in his body, as well as the full horror of his fake death’s-head. He looked like he’d been lynched. And when his hands went up to the cage, instead of opening its door he lifted the contraption off the hook, fastened it to its tether, and then lost his grip—accidentally, I’m sure.

  The cage fell. Landed on its side. Bounced. Bounced again. The Sharer stared down with his bulging, silver-ringed eyes, his hands still spread wide to accommodate what he had just dropped.

  “Mr. Lorca.” Wardress Kefa knocked heavily. “Mr. Lorca, what’s going on?”

  I arose from the stove-bed, tossed my quilt aside, and straightened my robes. The Wardress knocked again. The Sharer swayed in the half-light like a sword, an instrument of severance. The night had sped.

  Again the purposeful knocking.

  “Coming,” I barked.

  In the dented cage, a flutter of crimson. A stillness. Another melancholy bit of flapping. I hurled my penlight. When it struck the wall, the Sharer rocked for a moment without descending a centimeter. The knocking went on. “You have the key, Wardress. Open the door.” She did, and stood on the threshold taking stock. Her eyes were bright but devoid of censure, and I swept past her, burning with shame and bravado.

  —

  I slept that day—all that day—for the first time since leaving my own world. And I dreamt. I dreamt myself connected to a mechanism pistoning away on the edge of the Haft Paykar diggings, siphoning deadly gases from the shafts and recirculating them through the pump with which I shared a feedback circuit. Amid the turquoise sunsets and the intermittent gusts of sand, this pistoning went on continuously. When I awoke, I lifted my hands, intending to scar my face with my nails. But, as I expected, the mirror showed me a perfect unperturbed Dorian Lorca….

  “May I come in?”

  “I’m the client here, Wardress. So I suppose you may.”

  She entered and, intuiting my mood, stood far from me. “You slept, didn’t you? And dreamt?”

  I said nothing.

  “You dreamt, didn’t you?”

  “A nightmare, Wardress, but different from those I had on Miroste.”

  “A start. And you survived it? Yes? Good. All to the good.”

  I went to the room’s only window, a hexagonal pane of dark blue through which I could see nothing. “Did you get him down?”

  “Yes. And restored the birdcage to its place.” Her tiny feet paced the hardwood. “The bird was unharmed.”

  “Wardress, what’s all this about? Why have you paired me with this Sharer?” I turned around. “What’s the point?”

  “You’re not estranged from your wife only, Mr. Lorca. You’re—”

  “I know that. I’ve known that.”

  “I realize that. Give me some credit….You also know,” she resumed, “that you’re estranged from yourself, body and soul at variance.”

  “Yes, damn it! And the argument rages in my every pseudo-organ and -circuit!”

  “Please, Mr. Lorca. This interior argument, it’s really a metaphor for an attitude you assumed after Diderits performed his operations. And a metaphor can be taken apart and explained.”

  “Like a machine.”

  “If you like.” She paced some more. “To take inventory, Mr. Lorca, you have to surmount that which is inventoried. You go outside in order to reenter.” She halted and fixed me with a humorless, lopsided smile.

  “All of that is clear. Know thyself, saith Diderits. And the ancient Greeks. Well, if anything, my knowledge has increased my uneasiness about not only me, but others—and not only others, but the very phenomena enabling us to spawn.” I flashed on an image of crimson-gilled salmon firing upstream in a roiling barrage. “All that I know hasn’t cured anything, Wardress.”

  “No. So you came here—to extend your knowledge and to join in relationships demanding that you sanctify others as well as yourself.”

  “As with the Sharer I left hanging in the air?”

  “Yes. Distance is initially advisable, perhaps inevitable. You needn’t feel guilty. In a night or two, you’ll return to him, and then we’ll just have to see.”

  “Is this the only Sharer I’m going to be—working with?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on your progress.”

  But for Wardress Kefa, the Sharer in the crimson dome, and the noisy midnight clients I’d never seen, I sometimes believed myself the only occupant of the House. The thought of my isolation, though not unwelcome, was an anchoritic fantasy. In the rooms next to mine, going about the arcane business of the lives they’d bartered away, breathed humanoid creatures hard to imagine; harder still, once lodged in the mind, to purge from it. To what number and kind of beings had Wardress Kefa indentured her love?

  I had no choice but to ask. We heard an insistent stamping on the steps outside the House and then muffled voices in the antechamber.

  “Who comes?”

  The Wardress waved me to silence and opened my door. “A moment,” she called. But her husky voice didn’t carry well, and whoever had entered the House began rapping rudely on doors and clumping from room to room, all the while bellowing the Wardress’s name. “I’d better talk to them,” she said apologetically.

  “But who is it?”

  “Someone voice-coded for entrance. Nothing to worry about.” And she went into the corridor, wafting me a smell of spruce needles and a glimpse of solidly hewn rafters before the door swung to.

  I got up and followed. Outside the Wardress stood face-to-face with two imposing persons who looked identical in spite of their being one a man and the other a woman. Their faces had the same lantern-jawed mournfulness, their eyes hooded under heavy brows. They wore pea jackets, ski leggings, and fur caps bearing the interpenetrating-galaxies insignia of Glaktik Komm. I judged them in their late thirties, E-standard, but they had the domineering air of high-ranking veterans in the bureaucratic establishment. I had once been an official of the same stamp.

  The man, caught in mid-bellow, tried to laugh. “Ah. Ah. Wardress, Wardress.”

  “I didn’t expect you this evening,” she said.

  “We got a leave for finishing the Salous blueprint ahead of schedule,” the female explained, “and so caught a late ’rail from Manitou Port. We hiked down in the dark.” She lifted a hand lantern for our inspection.

  “We took a leave,” the man said, “even if we were here last week. We deserve it, too.” He told us that Salous dealt with reclaiming the remnants of aboriginal populations and pooling them for something called integrative therapy. “The Great Plains will soon be our bordello, Wardress. There, you see: you and the Orhas are in the same business…at least until they ask us to stage-manage something more prosaic.” He clapped his gloves together and looked at me. “You’re new. Whom do you visit?”

  “Pardon me,” the Wardress said wearily. “Who do you two want tonight?”

  The man looked to his partner. “Cleva?”

  “The mouthless one,” Cleva said, “preferably drugged.”

  “Come with me, Orhas.” The Wardress led them to her own apartment then into the House’s mid-interior, where they disappeared. I could hear them climbing, though. Shortly thereafter, the Wardress returned to my room.

  “Twins?” I said.

  “Clonemates: Cleva and Cleirach Orha, specialists in holosyncretic management. They computer-plan strategic movements of indigenous and alien populations—so they know of the House and have authorization to visit.”

  “Do they always appear together? Go upstairs together?”

  The Wardress’s silence clearly meant yes.

  “A bit unorthodox, isn’t it?”

  She gave me an angry look whose implications shut me up, then said: “The Orhas are our only clients who visit together. Since they share a common upbringing, the same genetic material, and identical biochemistrie
s, it should hardly surprise that their sexual preferences also coincide. In Manitou Port, I’m told, lives a third clonemate who married. I’ve never seen her here or in Wolf Run Summit. Even among clonal siblings a degree of variety exists.”

  “Do these two come often?”

  “You heard them in the House a few days ago.”

  “They have frequent leaves, then?”

  “Last time was an overnighter. They returned to Manitou Port in the morning, Mr. Lorca. This time they’ll remain several days.”

  “For treatment?”

  “You’re baiting me.” She’d taken her graying scalplock into her fingers; now she held its fan of hair against her right cheek. In this posture, despite her preoccupation with the Orhas, she looked at once old and innocent.

  “Who is the ‘mouthless one,’ Wardress?”

  “Good night. I returned only to tell you good night.” And she left.

  I hadn’t permitted myself to talk with her for so long since our first afternoon in the House, nor had I stayed in her presence for so long since our claustrophobic ’rail ride from Manitou Port. Even the Orhas, bundled to the gills, as vulgar as bullfrogs, had not struck me as wholly insufferable. Wearing neither coat nor cap, I took a walk through the glens below the House, touching each wind-shaken tree as if to conjure a viable memory of Rumai’s smile.

  —

  “Sex as weapon,” I told the Sharer lying on my stove-bed amid a dozen quilts of scarlet and off-scarlet. “As prince consort to the governor of Miroste, I had access to no other weapon. Rumai used me as an emissary, Sharer—a spy, a protocol officer, whatever state business required. I received visiting representatives of Glaktik Komm, mediated disputes in the Port Iranani Galenshall, and took biannual inspection tours of the Fetneh and Furak District mines. I did a bit of everything, Sharer.”

  As I paced, the Sharer studied me with a macabre but not unsettling penetration. The hollow of his chest was exposed, and when I passed him, an occasional metallic wink caught my eye. I told him the story of my involvement with a minor official in Port Iranani’s department of immigration, a young woman whom I’d never called anything but Humay, her maternal surname. I had had others besides this woman, but Humay’s story was the one I told—because alone among my ostensible “lovers,” I’d never taken her to bed. I’d never chosen to.