“You’ll certainly keep it warm,” Noyes said, and they both laughed.
The ferry was nearing Jubilisle’s approach slip, now. The great arching dome of the pleasure island rose precipitously before them, topped with a layer of living light that pulsed from one end of the spectrum to the other. A hundred acres of area, six separate levels, the capacity to amuse half a million people at once—that was Jubilisle, and Noyes could not deny it was an impressive sight. Even Elena looked moved.
“Roditis owns it all?” she asked in a whisper.
“Through a nominee corporation, yes. I helped plan the financing soon after I joined his organization. It was his first great coup.”
“It must have cost billions!”
“It did. And of course Roditis didn’t have that kind of money yet, so we had to juggle. He pledged everything as collateral. Paul Kaufmann was willing to put up a construction loan of two billion, but he wanted a fifty-percent equity. Roditis said no. Kaufmann was so astonished he lent the two billion anyway. At ten percent, but he lent it. And Roditis kept the full equity. He owns the place outright. The last debenture was paid off in January. He’s thinking of arranging a mortgage, now. Say, about seven billion, from a consortium of banks, and using the money to finance Jubilisle Canton and Jubilisle Rio. Eventually he’ll have a dozen of them on every continent. Am I boring you with all this money talk?”
“Not at all,” Elena said. She did look genuinely enthralled. “I’m very much interested. Roditis must be a terribly exciting man. I’d love to meet him.”
“You never have?”
“Never. We just haven’t crossed paths. You know, I spend so much of my time with Mark, and Mark is so hostile to Roditis.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“But I think one day I will happen to meet Roditis. And he and I will both find the meeting rewarding.”
“Powerful men intrigue you, eh, Elena?”
“Why not?”
“Mark Kaufmann—Santoliquido—”
She looked startled. “Santo and I are just good friends.”
“Is that all?” He saw the color rising in her cheeks. Laughing, he said, “Very good friends, I imagine.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
The ferry was at rest. The gangways extruded themselves and the crowd started ashore. Noyes and Elena let the flow carry them along.
A brilliant directory board in at least six colors confronted them. Twenty feet high, thirty feet wide, the board provided a detailed map of Jubilisle’s offerings. Noyes paused to study it, but Elena tugged him along. “Let’s just wander,” she said. “One level’s as good as another.”
“That’s not true. They’re aimed for different sectors of the population.”
“What does that matter? We’re slumming tonight!”
He shrugged and yielded, and they stepped aboard the moving ramp leading to Level D. Noyes was hazily familiar with the structure of Jubilisle from his past visits; he recalled that the island was cunningly laid out in a series of mazes and dead ends, so that the bemused visitor might roam for hours without arriving at any clear knowledge of how much remained to be seen. The intention was to prod the clientele into realizing that it was impossible to see more than a small fraction of Jubilisle on any one visit, and thus one must return again and again.
The island was devised to offer something to every economic stratum, from those who lived off government credit to those who could afford a dozen persona transplants. Generally, the pull of Jubilisle was stronger in the lower middle brackets, those people who could not afford to traffic in the Scheffing process but who had enough disposable income to part with some here. There was no admission charge at Jubilisle; Roditis made his money partly from the ferry ride, but mainly from the income of the booths and concessions. Noyes had seen the analysis: each visitor spent some fifteen dollars fissionable per trip, on which Roditis’ net profit was about thirty-five percent. With half a million visitors at any one time, and perhaps three or four million on a busy Saturday night between sunset and dawn, it was easy to see the source of Roditis’ affluence. Jubilisle had competitors now, of course, but it was the first of its kind, and the most successful. The powerful Kaufmann interests, having missed their chance to gain an equity investment in the original Jubilisle, had not deigned to open an imitation, much to Roditis’ pleasure. Officially, it was because they had no desire to pander to the debauched tastes of the ignorant, but Noyes thought it was more likely the Kaufmanns stayed out of the pleasure-island business out of fear that they would not meet Roditis’ level of success.
The inner core of the island provided the highest-priced delights. Those who came specifically to gamble large sums, to purchase costly sexual experiences, or to indulge in the illicit sensory stimulations of forbidden drugs, generally proceeded by a direct route to that area of Jubilisle. But Noyes had come merely as a casual sightseer, as had Elena, and they moved without plan down the glowing halls and galleries and chambers.
At a gambling pavilion, close to the perimeter of the island, the rhythms of exploding atoms determined the payoffs. A barker claimed that the process was completely random and so must be utterly honest. “Everyone stands an equal chance, folks. I don’t mind telling you that some games favor the house, but not here, not here, not here! Step right up…”
“Can that be so?” Elena asked. “A truly random game of chance?”
“Maybe so,” Noyes told her. “Notice that it’s on the outside of the island. If people win steadily here, they’re encouraged to try the games within. Which are not quite so impartial.”
“But Roditis must lose money on this, even so.”
Noyes shook his head. “Not if it’s truly random. He’ll break even, and all he’ll lose is his overhead, which isn’t consequential. Call it a promotional loss. Let’s try it?”
“All right.”
They stepped up. You could pay cash, and most did, but of course Elena had no cash except the souvenir nestling between her breasts, and Noyes thumbed the plate to establish a gambling balance for her. The game was intricate; he scarcely understood its workings himself, and those about him must be wholly baffled by it. In the center of the platform lay what purported to be a block of polonium, flanked by a comically ornate gamma detector; an array of tubes and pipettes emerged from it, filled with scintillating colored fluids. A turquoise fluorescence paid off at 3 to 1; carmine yielded 5 to 1; a yellow streak in the ebony fluid produced a 10 to 1 payoff. The barker chanted rhythmically; the polonium atoms disgorged their component particles; the lights lit and went out. The crowd pressed close. A bell rang and a certificate dropped from a hopper.
“You’ve won ten dollars,” Noyes said.
“Glorious! I want to play again!”
“There’s much else to see,” he reminded her.
They moved on. At a fortune-telling booth a spectral hooded figure predicted long fife for them both, and numerous children. Then, looking Noyes over cunningly, the prophet added, “You will have many rebirths.” Noyes tapped the plate and added a dollar to the soothsayer’s credit balance.
“How did he know we were recorded?” Elena asked.
“He guessed. He saw how well-dressed we were and figured we were wealthy, and if we were wealthy we must be on file with the Scheffing people. In any case, it’s flattery to wish us rebirths, even if we’re not in the class that lives again.”
“Perhaps he recognized us,” Elena suggested.
“I doubt it.”
“I’d like a mask, in any case.”
Many of the fairgoers were masked, particularly the women. Girls bare to the hips tripped along, cloaked only by striped dominoes. At Elena’s insistence Noyes took her to a masking booth and purchased a concealment for her: a dark band of pseudoliving glass that took possession of her face in a kind of caress, slipping snakelike into place from ear to ear. They laughed. She pulled him close and kissed him fleetingly on the lips.
“Buy a mask yourself,” she said.
He did. Hidden now from the stares of the curious, they moved through the gallery, taking a dropshaft to the one below on a sudden whim. Noyes felt buoyant, relaxed. Within him Kravchenko was dormant for once, and Elena, warm and exciting on his arm, seemed to promise eventual ecstasies. The evening was going well after a poor start. The giddiness of Jubilisle had broken through his habitual melancholy. Yet there was always the memento mori not far below the surface; they paused in a closed arcade to embrace, and Noyes drew Elena so tightly against him that the soft mound of her left breast felt the impress of the flask of lethal carniphage that he carried always with him. When they separated, she touched the bruised place tenderly and said, “You hurt me. Something in your pocket—”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you’d feel it.”
“What do you have there, a gravity bomb?”
“Just a flask of carniphage,” he told her pleasantly. “In case a suicidal mood hits me.”
Of course she did not believe that, and so she showered a silvery cascade of laughter over him.
A flamboyant sign declared: WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF HALF-LIFE.
“What’s this?” she asked. “More radioactive games?”
“I have no idea. Shall we go in?”
They entered. A fee of a dollar fissionable was extracted from each of them. Swiftly they discovered that the House of Half-Life, despite its name, did not traffic in neutrons and alpha particles; the half-fife offered here was biological, hybrid creatures raised from fused cell nuclei. Behind an electrified barrier stunted beings shuffled around, while a preprogramed speaker recited their identities. “Here we have mouse and cat, folks, one of the most popular hybrids. And this is dog and tiger, believe it if you can! Next you see snake and frog.”
The hybrid animals bore little resemblance to any of their supposed ancestors. They tended to be neutral, unspecialized in form, evolutionary prototypes lacking in clear characteristics. Most were less than two feet in length, moving about on small uncertain legs. The dog-tiger had patches of gray fur. The snake-frog was squat and glistening, with pulsating pouches of flesh. “Man and mouse, ladies and gentlemen, man and mouse!” came the disembodied voice. “You think the Scheffing people work miracles? What of this? Infect them with the Sendai virus, blend the nuclei in a centrifuge, toss in a dash of nucleic acid, yes, yes, man and mouse!” A dozen distorted things, neither mouse nor man, moved into the arena. Their eyes were pink and beady, their hands were claws, they could not walk erect. Elena stared in rigid attention.
A shill sidled up to them, proffering a handful of explosive darts. He said silkily, “You look like expensive folk out for a night’s fun. Would you like to kill some of the hybrids? A hundred bucks fish a dart.”
“Sorry,” Noyes said. “No, thanks.”
“Try your aim. Some folk your class come back often. We’ve got a room in back, lots of hybrids to throw at. They aren’t rare, really.”
“Shall we?” Elena asked him.
Noyes looked at her in amazement. Her eyes were gleaming.
Kravchenko awakened and offered a warning:
—Don’t refuse her anything if you’re smart.
Sighing, Noyes gave in. They went to the back room. He lowered his credit balance by five hundred dollars fissionable and Elena took a cluster of darts in her delicate hand. On a platform before them, half a dozen pitiful bluish things, half squirrel, half otter, moved in ragged circles. They were slow, awkward animals with lengthy hairless tails and large flippered feet.
Elena aimed and threw. Her breasts quivered beneath the covering of green scales; her arm moved jerkily, a stiff throw from the elbow. To Noyes’ relief, she missed, and missed also on the second and third casts, the darts landing and igniting in quick incandescent puffs. But on the fourth she struck one of the hapless hybrids at the base of its twisted spine, and the odor of singed fur drifted toward them. When the smoke cleared Noyes saw the remnants of the creature. Elena looked exhilarated; a deep crimson flush appeared beneath her dark, tawny skin, making her appear disturbingly more sensual than before. She handed him the remaining dart. He thrust it back at her.
“Go on,” she cried. “Throw it! It’s fun!”
“To kill?”
“Those things come out of test tubes. They’re not really alive. They’re better off dead.” She joggled his arm. The nearness of her perspiring flesh maddened him. “Throw it!”
Desperately Noyes hurled the dart. It cleared the platform by ten feet and smashed harmlessly against the backdrop. Then he seized her by the hand and pulled her through a side exit. Up ahead, a cocktail lounge could be seen, and they entered it.
“Don’t you care for hunting?” Elena asked him.
“Not really. But hunting is sport. There’s nothing sporting about throwing darts at mutated monstrosities.”
She laughed. The tip of her tongue flicked out. “There was a grand hunt in Italy six years ago. We chased partridges across the campana south of Rome. You must have a memory of it.”
“I?”
“Jim Kravchenko was there. If he’s truly your persona, you have the memory.”
Kravchenko promptly thrust the memory up into view. A misty October morning; the shattered remains of a Roman aqueduct gaunt against the gray sky; handsomely dressed young men and women, riding power carts, pursuing the terrified birds across the rolling plain. Laughter, the occasional burst of needlefire, the squawk of the prey, the autumn fragrances. Elena beside him, looking a trifle slimmer, chastely garbed in hunting attire, wielding her needlegun to deadly effect and hissing with delight each time she registered a kill. Then, afterward, the tang of iced champagne, the pleasure of spicy foods imported from the outworlds, the easy flow of light conversation in a palazzo at the edge of the city. And Elena in his arms, still clad in her hunting clothes, the pleated skirt pulled up, the white thighs exposed, the hips thrusting, thrusting…
“Yes,” Noyes gasped. “I remember now.”
“You must have many interesting memories. Jim and I were quite fond of one another.”
“I haven’t done much checking,” said Noyes. “Somehow it seems unfair. It overbalances our relationship, Elena. I mean, I carry intimate recollections of you, so you have few secrets from me, but you have no such insight into me.”
She looked startled. “Why do we take on personae if not to gain advantage? I don’t understand you, Charles. If in your mind you hold Jim’s memories of me, why not enjoy them?”
—Because you’re a damned masochist, Kravchenko suggested.
Noyes winced. To Elena he said, “You’re right. I’m being foolish.”
He searched the archive Kravchenko had brought with him into his mind. He was lying, in a way, for he had already done a good deal of peering at Elena’s relationship with Kravchenko. He knew that they had been lovers for about two years, on and off, nothing serious on either side. Kravchenko had many women, and, Noyes gathered, Elena rarely confined her attentions to one man at a time. Within his mind was Elena’s entire repertory of passion; he had merely to sort it out and study it.
Elena said, “I find it hard to believe that Jim’s really dead. He was such an exciting man. Do you and he get along well?”
“No.”
“So I’ve understood. Why is that? Why did you select him, if there were incompatibilities?”
Noyes ordered drinks for them. “We came from the same general background,” he explained. “I was playing it cautious when I picked a persona. I could have had a financier, a university professor, a starman. Instead I chose a rich playboy, because I was just a rich playboy myself, and I wanted more of the same. Well, I got it. He gives me no peace.”
“You don’t have to keep a persona you don’t like,” she said.
“I know. Perhaps one day I’ll ask for erasure and start all over.”
—That’ll be the day, Charlie-boy.
“It might be best for both of you,” said Elena. “It would
give Jim a second chance too. Is he your only persona?”
“Yes. I didn’t think I ought to risk another.”
“Possibly a second one would have calmed him a little.”
“Possibly. What about you, Elena? You’re such a mystery woman. How many personae are you carrying?”
“Four,” she said coolly.
He was dumbstruck. He had calculated her for one, or perhaps two personae, no more. Few women undertook four. But Noyes realized he had made the mistake of assuming that because she was beautiful, she must also be of limited intellect. Evidently Elena could handle four personae, since she spoke clearly, with no signs of internal conflict.
“One secondary, three primaries,” she amplified. “It’s an amusing group. We get along well. I took on the first ten years ago, the last only in November. I may add others. I’ve talked to Santoliquido about a possible new transplant.”
“Someone in particular?”
“No,” Elena said. “Not yet. That is, if I can’t have Paul Kaufmann—”
Noyes sputtered. “You want him too?”
“I’m merely joking. They haven’t legalized transsexual imprinting, have they? But I imagine it would be fun to have him. I know Mark would be astounded. Mark worshiped that terrible old man. Strong as he is, Mark never could withstand his uncle’s wishes in anything. And if I walked into the house one day and opened my mouth and spoke to him with the words of Paul Kaufmann—” Elena giggled. “A delightful picture. It calls for another drink.”
Noyes found it difficult to see the humor in it. He summoned the drinks; then, slowly, he said, “Do you have any idea who’s really going to get the Paul Kaufmann persona?”
“How should I know?”
“You spent time with Santoliquido at Mark’s party.”
“I don’t discuss Santoliquido’s administrative decisions at parties,” Elena said. “Why do you ask? Are you thinking of applying?”
“For Paul Kaufmann? He’d burn me out in ten minutes. But John Roditis is interested.”
“Interested isn’t the right word, from what I hear. Desperate is more appropriate.”
To Live Again Page 10
