The Best of C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  Deirdre had not moved. Her expressionless mask, in the mirror, watched him calmly. She must have understood. Yet she gave no sign, except that the weaving of her arms had almost stopped now, she moved so slowly. Like a dance seen in a nightmare, under water.

  It was impossible, of course, for her to express any emotion. The fact that her face showed none now should not, in fairness, be held against her. But she watched so wholly without feeling—Neither of them moved toward the window. A false step, now, might send him over. They were quiet, listening to his voice.

  “We who bring life into the world unlawfully,” said Maltzer, almost thoughtfully, “must make room for it by withdrawing our own. That seems to be an inflexible rule. It works automatically. The thing we create makes living unbearable. No, it’s nothing you can help, my dear. I’ve asked you to do something I created you incapable of doing. I made you to perform a function, and I’ve been asking you to forego the one thing you were made to do. I believe that if you do it, it will destroy you, but the whole guilt is mine, not yours. I’m not even asking you to give up the screen, anymore. I know you can’t, and live. But I can’t live and watch you. I put all my skill and all my love in one final masterpiece, and I can’t bear to watch it destroyed. I can’t live and watch you do only what I made you to do, and ruin yourself because you must do it.

  “But before I go, I have to make sure you understand.” He leaned a little farther, looking down, and his voice grew more remote as the glass came between them. He was saying almost unbearable things now, but very distantly, in a cool, passionless tone filtered through wind and glass, and with the distant humming of the city mingled with it, so that the words were curiously robbed of poignancy. “I can be a coward,” he said, “and escape the consequences of what I’ve done, but I can’t go and leave you—not understanding. It would be even worse than the thought of your failure, to think of you bewildered and confused when the mob turns on you. What I’m telling you, my dear, won’t be any real news—I think you sense it already, though you may not admit it to yourself. We’ve been too close to lie to each other, Deirdre—I know when you aren’t telling the truth. I know the distress that’s been growing in your mind. You are not wholly human, my dear. I think you know that. In so many ways, in spite of all I could do, you must always be less than human. You’ve lost the senses of perception that kept you in touch with humanity. Sight and hearing are all that remain, and sight, as I’ve said before, was the last and coldest of the senses to develop. And you’re so delicately poised on a sort of thin edge of reason. You’re only a clear, glowing mind animating a metal body, like a candle flame in a glass. And as precariously vulnerable to the wind.”

  He paused. “Try not to let them ruin you completely,” he said after a while. “When they turn against you, when they find out you’re more helpless than they—I wish I could have made you stronger, Deirdre. But I couldn’t. I had too much skill for your good and mine, but not quite enough skill for that.”

  He was silent again, briefly, looking down. He was balanced precariously now, more than halfway over the sill and supported only by one hand on the glass. Harris watched with an agonized uncertainty, not sure whether a sudden leap might catch him in time or send him over. Deirdre was still weaving her golden patterns, slowly and unchangingly, watching the mirror and its reflection, her face and masked eyes enigmatic.

  “I wish one thing, though,” Maltzer said in his remote voice. “I wish—before I finish—that you’d tell me the truth, Deirdre. I’d be happier if I were sure I’d—reached you. Do you understand what I’ve said? Do you believe me? Because if you don’t, then I know you’re lost beyond all hope. If you’ll admit your own doubt—and I know you do doubt—I can think there may be a chance for you after all. Were you lying to me, Deirdre? Do you know how…how wrong I’ve made you?”

  There was silence. Then very softly, a breath of sound, Deirdre answered. The voice seemed to hang in midair, because she had no lips to move and localize it for the imagination.

  “Will you listen, Maltzer?” she asked.

  “I’ll wait,” he said. “Go on. Yes or no?”

  Slowly she let her arms drop to her sides. Very smoothly and quietly she turned from the mirror and faced him. She swayed a little, making her metal robe ring.

  “I’ll answer you,” she said. “But I don’t think I’ll answer that. Not with yes or no, anyhow. I’m going to walk a little, Maltzer. I have something to tell you, and I can’t talk standing still. Will you let me move about without—going over?”

  He nodded distantly. “You can’t interfere from that distance,” he said. “But keep the distance. What do you want to say?”

  She began to pace a little way up and down her end of the room, moving with liquid ease. The table with the cigarette box was in her way, and she pushed it aside carefully, watching Maltzer and making no swift motions to startle him.

  “I’m not—well, sub-human,” she said, a faint note of indignation in her voice. “I’ll prove it in a minute, but I want to say something else first. You must promise to wait and listen. There’s a flaw in your argument, and I resent it. I’m not a Frankenstein monster made out of dead flesh. I’m myself—alive. You didn’t create my life, you only preserved it. I’m not a robot, with compulsions built into me that I have to obey. I’m free-willed and independent, and, Maltzer—I’m human.”

  Harris had relaxed a little. She knew what she was doing. He had no idea what she planned, but he was willing to wait now. She was not the indifferent automaton he had thought. He watched her come to the table again in a lap of her pacing, and stoop over it, her eyeless mask turned to Maltzer to make sure variation of her movement did not startle him.

  “I’m human,” she repeated, her voice humming faintly and very sweetly. “Do you think I’m not?” she asked, straightening and facing them both. And then suddenly, almost overwhelmingly, the warmth and the old ardent charm were radiant all around her. She was robot no longer, enigmatic no longer. Harris could see as clearly as in their first meeting the remembered flesh still gracious and beautiful as her voice evoked his memory. She stood swaying a little, as she had always swayed, her head on one side, and she was chuckling at them both. It was such a soft and lovely sound, so warmly familiar.

  “Of course I’m myself,” she told them, and as the words sounded in their ears neither of them could doubt it. There was hypnosis in her voice. She turned away and began to pace again, and so powerful was the human personality which she had called up about her that it beat out at them in deep pulses, as if her body were a furnace to send out those comforting waves of warmth. “I have handicaps, I know,” she said. “But my audiences will never know. I won’t let them know. I think you’ll believe me, both of you, when I say I could play Juliet just as I am now, with a cast of ordinary people, and make the world accept it. Do you think I could, John? Maltzer, don’t you believe I could?”

  She paused at the far end of her pacing path and turned to face them, and they both stared at her without speaking. To Harris she was the Deirdre he had always known, pale gold, exquisitely graceful in remembered postures, the inner radiance of her shining through metal as brilliantly as it had ever shone through flesh. He did not wonder, now, if it were real. Later he would think again that it might be only a disguise, something like a garment she had put off with her lost body, to wear again only when she chose. Now the spell of her compelling charm was too strong for wonder. He watched, convinced for the moment that she was all she seemed to be. She could play Juliet if she said she could. She could sway a whole audience as easily as she swayed himself. Indeed, there was something about her just now more convincingly human than anything he had noticed before. He realized that in a split second of awareness before he saw what it was.

  She was looking at Maltzer. He, too, watched, spellbound in spite of himself, not dissenting. She glanced from one to the other. Then she put back her head and laughter came welling and choking from her in a great, full-throated tid
e. She shook in the strength of it. Harris could almost see her round throat pulsing with the sweet low-pitched waves of laughter that were shaking her. Honest mirth, with a little derision in it.

  Then she lifted one arm and tossed her cigarette into the empty fireplace.

  Harris choked, and his mind went blank for one moment of blind denial. He had not sat here watching a robot smoke and accepting it as normal. He could not! And yet he had. That had been the final touch of conviction which swayed his hypnotized mind into accepting her humanity. And she had done it so deftly, so naturally, wearing her radiant humanity with such lightness, that his watching mind had not even questioned what she did.

  He glanced at Maltzer. The man was still halfway over the window ledge, but through the opening of the window he, too, was staring in stupefied disbelief and Harris knew they had shared the same delusion.

  Deirdre was still shaking a little with laughter. “Well,” she demanded, the rich chuckling making her voice quiver, “am I all robot, after all?”

  Harris opened his mouth to speak, but he did not utter a word. This was not his show. The byplay lay wholly between Deirdre and Maltzer; he must not interfere. He turned his head to the window and waited.

  And Maltzer for a moment seemed shaken in his conviction.

  “You…you are an actress,” he admitted slowly. “But I…I’m not convinced I’m wrong. I think—” He paused. The querulous note was in his voice again, and he seemed racked once more by the old doubts and dismay. Then Harris saw him stiffen. He saw the resolution come back, and understood why it had come. Maltzer had gone too far already upon the cold and lonely path he had chosen to turn back, even for stronger evidence than this. He had reached his conclusions only after mental turmoil too terrible to face again. Safety and peace lay in the course he had steeled himself to follow. He was too tired, too exhausted by months of conflict, to retrace his path and begin all over. Harris could see him groping for a way out, and in a moment he saw him find it.

  “That was a trick,” he said hollowly. “Maybe you could play it on a larger audience, too. Maybe you have more tricks to use. I might be wrong. But Deirdre”—his voice grew urgent—“you haven’t answered the one thing I’ve got to know. You can’t answer it. You do feel—dismay. You’ve learned your own inadequacy, however well you can hide it from us—even from us. I know. Can you deny that, Deirdre?”

  She was not laughing now. She let her arms fall, and the flexible golden body seemed to droop a little all over, as if the brain that a moment before had been sending out strong, sure waves of confidence had slackened its power, and the intangible muscles of her limbs slackened with it. Some of the glowing humanity began to fade. It receded within her and was gone, as if the fire in the furnace of her body were sinking and cooling.

  “Maltzer,” she said uncertainly, “I can’t answer that—yet. I can’t—”

  And then, while they waited in anxiety for her to finish the sentence, she blazed. She ceased to be a figure in stasis—she blazed.

  It was something no eyes could watch and translate into terms the brain could follow; her motion was too swift. Maltzer in the window was a whole long room-length away. He had thought himself safe at such a distance, knowing no normal human being could reach him before he moved. But Deirdre was neither normal nor human.

  In the same instant she stood drooping by the mirror she was simultaneously at Maltzer’s side. Her motion negated time and destroyed space. And as a glowing cigarette tip in the dark describes closed circles before the eye when the holder moves it swiftly, so Deirdre blazed in one continuous flash of golden motion across the room.

  But curiously, she was not blurred. Harris, watching, felt his mind go blank again, but less in surprise than because no normal eyes and brain could perceive what it was he looked at.

  (In that moment of intolerable suspense his complex human brain paused suddenly, annihilating time in its own way, and withdrew to a cool corner of its own to analyze in a flashing second what it was he had just seen. The brain could do it timelessly; words are slow. But he knew he had watched a sort of tesseract of human motion, a parable of fourth-dimensional activity. A one-dimensional point, moved through space, creates a two-dimensional line, which in motion creates a three-dimensional cube. Theoretically the cube, in motion, would produce a fourth-dimensional figure. No human creature had ever seen a figure of three dimensions moved through space and time before—until this moment. She had not blurred; every motion she made was distinct, but not like moving figures on a strip of film. Not like anything that those who use our language had ever seen before, or created words to express. The mind saw, but without perceiving. Neither words nor thoughts could resolve what happened into terms for human brains. And perhaps she had not actually and literally moved through the fourth dimension. Perhaps—since Harris was able to see her—it had been almost and not quite that unimaginable thing. But it was close enough.)

  While to the slow mind’s eye she was still standing at the far end of the room, she was already at Maltzer’s side, her long, flexible fingers gentle but very firm upon his arms. She waited—

  The room shimmered. There was sudden violent heat beating upon Harris’ face. Then the air steadied again and Deirdre was saying softly, in a mournful whisper:

  “I’m sorry—I had to do it. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean you to know—”

  Time caught up with Harris. He saw it overtake Maltzer too, saw the man jerk convulsively away from the grasping hands, in a ludicrously futile effort to forestall what had already happened. Even thought was slow, compared with Deirdre’s swiftness.

  The sharp outward jerk was strong. It was strong enough to break the grasp of human hands and catapult Maltzer out and down into the swimming gulfs of New York. The mind leaped ahead to a logical conclusion and saw him twisting and turning and diminishing with dreadful rapidity to a tiny point of darkness that dropped away through sunlight toward the shadows near the earth. The mind even conjured up a shrill, thin cry that plummeted away with the falling body and hung behind it in the shaken air.

  But the mind was reckoning on human factors.

  Very gently and smoothly Deirdre lifted Maltzer from the window sill and with effortless ease carried him well back into the safety of the room. She set him down before a sofa and her golden fingers unwrapped themselves from his arms slowly, so that he could regain control of his own body before she released him.

  He sank to the sofa without a word. Nobody spoke for an immeasurable length of time. Harris could not. Deirdre waited patiently. It was Maltzer who regained speech first, and it came back on the old track, as if his mind had not yet relinquished the rut it had worn so deep.

  “All right,” he said breathlessly. “All right, you can stop me this time. But I know, you see. I know! You can’t hide your feeling from me, Deirdre. I know the trouble you feel. And next time—next time I won’t wait to talk!”

  Deirdre made the sound of a sigh. She had no lungs to expel the breath she was imitating, but it was hard to realize that. It was hard to understand why she was not panting heavily from the terrible exertion of the past minutes; the mind knew why, but could not accept the reason. She was still too human.

  “You still don’t see,” she said. “Think, Maltzer, think!”

  There was a hassock beside the sofa. She sank upon it gracefully, clasping her robed knees. Her head tilted back to watch Maltzer’s face. She saw only stunned stupidity on it now; he had passed through too much emotional storm to think at all.

  “All right,” she told him. “Listen—I’ll admit it. You’re right. I am unhappy. I do know what you said was true—but not for the reason you think. Humanity and I are far apart, and drawing farther. The gap will be hard to bridge. Do you hear me, Maltzer?”

  Harris saw the tremendous effort that went into Maltzer’s wakening. He saw the man pull his mind back into focus and sit up on the sofa with weary stiffness.

  “You…you do admit it, then?” he asked in a bewi
ldered voice.

  Deirdre shook her head sharply.

  “Do you still think of me as delicate?” she demanded. “Do you know I carried you here at arm’s length halfway across the room? Do you realize you weigh nothing to me? I could”—she glanced around the room and gestured with sudden, rather appalling violence—“tear this building down,” she said quietly. “I could tear my way through these walls, I think. I’ve found no limit yet to the strength I can put forth if I try.” She held up her golden hands and looked at them. “The metal would break, perhaps,” she said reflectively, “but then, I have no feeling—”

  Maltzer gasped, “Deirdre—”

  She looked up with what must have been a smile. It sounded clearly in her voice. “Oh, I won’t. I wouldn’t have to do it with my hands, if I wanted. Look—listen!”

  She put her head back and a deep, vibrating hum gathered and grew in what one still thought of as her throat. It deepened swiftly and the ears began to ring. It was deeper, and the furniture vibrated. The walls began almost imperceptibly to shake. The room was full and bursting with a sound that shook every atom upon its neighbor with a terrible, disrupting force.

  The sound ceased. The humming died. Then Deirdre laughed and made another and quite differently pitched sound. It seemed to reach out like an arm in one straight direction—toward the window. The opened panel shook. Deirdre intensified her hum, and slowly, with imperceptible jolts that merged into smoothness, the window jarred itself shut.

  “You see?” Deirdre said. “You see?”

  But still Maltzer could only stare. Harris was staring too, his mind beginning slowly to accept what she implied. Both were too stunned to leap ahead to any conclusions yet.

  Deirdre rose impatiently and began to pace again, in a ringing of metal robe and a twinkling of reflected lights. She was pantherlike in her suppleness. They could see the power behind that lithe motion now; they no longer thought of her as helpless, but they were far still from grasping the truth.