The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II

by David G. Hartwell

  Still –

  She peeked back from behind the safety of a woman’s sleeve, and after a moment located the man in white.

  His pasty-white face with its searching eyes was much closer. But what had happened to his white cap and gown? Now, they weren’t white at all! What optical fantasy was this? She rubbed her eyes and looked again.

  The cap and gown seemed to be made up of green and purple polka dots on a white background! So he was her man!

  She could see him now as the couples spread out before him, exchanging words she couldn’t hear, but which seemed to carry an irresistible laugh response.

  Very well, she’d wait.

  Now that everything was cleared up and she was safe again behind her armor of objectivity, she studied him with growing curiosity. Since that first time she had never again got a good look at him. Someone always seemed to get in the way. It was almost, she thought, as though he was working his way out toward her, taking every advantage of human cover, like a hunter closing in on wary quarry, until it was too late . . .

  He stood before her.

  There were harsh clanging sounds as his eyes locked with hers. Under that feral scrutiny the woman maintained her mental balance by the narrowest margin.

  The Student.

  The Nightingale, for love of The Student, makes a Red Rose. An odious liquid was burning in her throat, but she couldn’t swallow.

  Gradually she forced herself into awareness of a twisted, sardonic mouth framed between aquiline nose and jutting chin. The face, plastered as it was by white powder, had revealed no distinguishing features beyond its unusual size. Much of the brow was obscured by the many tassels dangling over the front of his travestied mortarboard cap. Perhaps the most striking thing about the man was not his face, but his body. It was evident that he had some physical deformity, to outward appearances not unlike her own. She knew intuitively that he was not a true hunchback. His chest and shoulders were excessively broad, and he seemed, like her, to carry a mass of superfluous tissue on his upper thoracic vertebrae. She surmised that the scapulae would be completely obscured.

  His mouth twisted in subtle mockery. “Bell said you’d come.” He bowed and held out his right hand.

  “It is very difficult for me to dance,” she pleaded in a low hurried voice. “I’d humiliate us both.”

  “I’m no better at this than you, and probably worse. But I’d never give up dancing merely because someone might think I look awkward. Come, we’ll use the simplest steps.”

  There was something harsh and resonant in his voice that reminded her of Matt Bell. Only . . . Bell’s voice had never set her stomach churning.

  He held out his other hand.

  Behind him the dancers had retreated to the edge of the square, leaving the centre empty, and the first beats of her music from the orchestra pavilion floated to her with ecstatic clarity.

  Just the two of them, out there . . . before a thousand eyes . . .

  Subconsciously she followed the music. There was her cue – the signal for The Nightingale to fly to her fatal assignation with the white rose.

  She must reach out both perspiring hands to this stranger, must blend her deformed body into his equally misshapen one. She must, because he was The Student, and she was The Nightingale.

  She moved toward him silently and took his hands.

  As she danced, the harsh-lit street and faces seemed gradually to vanish. Even The Student faded into the barely perceptible distance, and she gave herself up to The Unfinished Dream.

  Chapter Three

  She dreamed that she danced alone in the moonlight, that she fluttered in solitary circles in the moonlight, fastened and appalled by the thing she must do to create a Red Rose. She dreamed that she sang a strange and magic song, a wondrous series of chords, the song she had so long sought. Pain buoyed her on excruciating wings, then flung her heavily to earth. The Red Rose was made, and she was dead.

  She groaned and struggled to sit up.

  Eyes glinted at her out of pasty whiteness. “That was quite a pas – only more de seul than de deux,” said The Student.

  She looked about in uneasy wonder.

  They were sitting together on a marble bench before a fountain. Behind them was a curved walk bounded by a high wall covered with climbing green, dotted here and there with white.

  She put her hand to her forehead. “Where are we?”

  “This is White Rose Park.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “You danced in on your own two feet through the archway yonder.”

  “I don’t remember . . .”

  “I thought perhaps you were trying to lend a bit of realism to the part. But you’re early.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are only white roses growing in here, and even they won’t be in full bloom for another month. In late June they’ll be a real spectacle. You mean you didn’t know about this little park?”

  “No. I’ve never ever been in the Via before. And yet . . .”

  “And yet what?”

  She hadn’t been able to tell anyone – not even Matt Bell – what she was now going to tell this man, an utter stranger, her companion of an hour. He had to be told because, somehow, he too was caught up in the dream ballet.

  She began haltingly. “Perhaps I do know about this place. Perhaps someone told me about it, and the information got buried in my subconscious mind until I wanted a white rose. There’s really something behind my ballet that Dr. Bell didn’t tell you. He couldn’t, because I’m the only one who knows. The Rose comes from my dreams. Only, a better word is nightmares. Every night the score starts from the beginning. In The Dream, I dance. Every night, for months and months, there was a little more music, a little more dancing. I tried to get it out of my head, but I couldn’t. I started writing it down, the music and the choreography.”

  The man’s unsmiling eyes were fixed on her face in deep absorption.

  Thus encouraged, she continued. “For the past several nights I have dreamed almost the complete ballet, right up to the death of The Nightingale. I suppose I identify myself so completely with The Nightingale that I subconsciously censor her song as she presses her breast against the thorn on the white rose. That’s where I always awakened, or at least, always did before tonight. But I think I heard the music tonight. It’s a series of chords . . . thirty-eight chords, I believe. The first nineteen were frightful, but the second nineteen were marvellous. Everything was too real to wake up. The Student, The Nightingale, the white roses.

  But now the man threw back his head and laughed raucously. “You ought to see a psychiatrist!”

  Anna bowed her head humbly.

  “Oh, don’t take it too hard,” he said. “My wife’s even after me to see a psychiatrist.”

  “Really?” Anna was suddenly alert. “What seems to be wrong with you? I mean, what does she object to?”

  “In general, my laziness. In particular, it seems I’ve forgotten how to read and write.” He gave her widening eyes a sidelong look. “I’m a perfect parasite, too. Haven’t done any real work in months. What would you call it if you couldn’t work until you had the final measures of the Rose, and you kept waiting, and nothing happened?”

  “Hell.”

  He was glumly silent.

  Anna asked, hesitantly, yet with a growing certainty. “This thing you’re waiting for . . . might it have anything to do with the ballet? Or to phrase it from your point of view, do you think the completion of my ballet may help answer your problem?”

  “Might. Couldn’t say.”

  She continued quietly. “You’re going to have to face it eventually, you know. Your psychiatrist is going to ask you. How will you answer?”

  “I won’t. I’ll tell him to go to the devil.”

  “How can you be so sure he’s a he?”

  “Oh? Well, if he’s a she, she might be willing to pose alfresco an hour or so. The model shortage is quite grave you know, with all of t
he little dears trying to be painters.”

  “But if she doesn’t have a good figure?”

  “Well, maybe her face has some interesting possibilities. It’s a rare woman who’s a total physical loss.”

  Anna’s voice was very low. “But what if all of her were very ugly? What if your proposed psychiatrist were me, Mr. Ruy Jacques?”

  His great dark eyes blinked, then his lips pursed and exploded into insane laughter. He stood up suddenly. “Come, my dear, whatever your name is, and let the blind lead the blind.”

  “Anna van Tuyl,” she told him, smiling.

  She took his arm. Together they strolled around the arc of the walk toward the entrance arch.

  She was filled with a strange contentment.

  Over the green-crested wall at her left, day was about to break, and from the Via came the sound of groups of die-hard revellers, breaking up and drifting away, like spectres at cock-crow. The cheerful clatter of milk bottles got mixed up in it somehow.

  They paused at the archway while the man kicked at the seat of the pants of a spectre whom dawn had returned to slumber beneath the arch. The sleeper cursed and stumbled to his feet in bleary indignation.

  “Excuse us, Willie,” said Anna’s companion, motioning for her to step through.

  She did, and the creature of the night at once dropped into his former sprawl.

  Anna cleared her throat. “Where now?”

  “At this point I must cease to be a gentleman, I’m returning to the studio for some sleep, and you can’t come. For, if your physical energy is inexhaustible, mine is not.” He raised a hand as her startled mouth dropped open. “Please, dear Anna, don’t insist. Some other night, perhaps.”

  “Why, you – ”

  “Tut tut.” He turned a little and kicked again at the sleeping man. “I’m not an utter cad, you know. I would never abandon a weak, frail, unprotected woman in the Via.”

  She was too amazed now even to splutter.

  Ruy Jacques reached down and pulled the drunk up against the wall of the arch, where he held him firmly. “Dr. Anna van Tuyl, may I present Willie the Cork.”

  The Cork grinned at her in unfocused somnolence.

  “Most people call him the Cork because that’s what seals in the bottle’s contents,” said Jacques. “I call him the Cork because he’s always bobbing up. He looks like a bum, but that’s just because he’s a good actor. He’s really a Security man tailing me at my wife’s request, and he’d only be too delighted for a little further conversation with you. A cheery good morning to you both!”

  A milk truck wheeled around the corner. Jacques leaped for its running board, and he was gone before the psychiatrist could voice the protest boiling up in her.

  A gurgling sigh at her feet drew her eyes down momentarily. The Cork was apparently bobbing once more on his own private alcoholic ocean.

  Anna snorted in mingled disgust and amusement, then hailed a cab. As she slammed the door, she took one last look at Willie. Not until the cab rounded the corner and cut off his muffled snores did she realize that people usually don’t snore with their eyes half-opened and looking at you, especially with eyes no longer blurred with sleep, but hard and glinting.

  Chapter Four

  Twelve hours later, in another cab and in a different part of the city, Anna peered absently out at the stream of traffic. Her mind was on the coming conference with Martha Jacques. Only twelve hours ago Mrs. Jacques had been just a bit of necessary case history. Twelve hours ago Anna hadn’t really cared whether Mrs. Jacques followed Bell’s recommendation and gave her the case. Now it was all different. She wanted the case, and she was going to get it.

  Ruy Jacques – how many hours awaited her with this amazing scoundrel, this virtuoso of liberal – nay, loose – arts, who held locked within his remarkable mind the missing pieces of their joint jigsaw puzzle of The Rose?

  That jeering, mocking face – what would it look like without makeup? Very ugly, she hoped. Beside his, her own face wasn’t too bad.

  Only – he was married, and she was en route at this moment to discuss preliminary matters with his wife, who, even if she no longer loved him, at least had prior rights to him. There were considerations of professional ethics even in thinking about him. Not that she could ever fall in love with him or any other patient. Particularly with one who had treated her so cavalierly. Willie the Cork, indeed!

  As she waited in the cold silence of the great antechamber adjoining the office of Martha Jacques, Anna sensed that she was being watched. She was quite certain that by now she’d been photographed, x-rayed for hidden weapons, and her fingerprints taken from her professional card. In colossal central police files a thousand miles away, a bored clerk would be leafing through her dossier for the benefit of Colonel Grade’s visigraph in the office beyond.

  In a moment –

  “Dr. van Tuyl to see Mrs. Jacques. Please enter door B-3,” said the tinny voice of the intercom.

  She followed a guard to the door, which he opened for her.

  This room was smaller. At the far end a woman, a very lovely woman, whom she took to be Martha Jacques, sat peering in deep abstraction at something on the desk before her. Beside the desk, and slightly to the rear, a moustached man in plain clothes stood, reconnoitring Anna with hawklike eyes. The description fitted what Anna had heard of Colonel Grade, Chief of the National Security Bureau.

  Grade stepped forward and introduced himself curtly, then presented Anna to Mrs. Jacques.

  And then the psychiatrist found her eyes fastened to a sheet of paper on Mrs. Jacques’ desk. And as she stared, she felt a sharp dagger of ice sinking into her spine, and she grew slowly aware of a background of brooding whispers in her mind, heart-constricting in their suggestions of mental disintegration.

  For the thing drawn on the paper, in red ink, was – although warped, incomplete, and misshapen – unmistakably a rose.

  “Mrs. Jacques!” cried Grade.

  Martha Jacques must have divined simultaneously Anna’s great interest in the paper. With an apologetic murmur she turned it face down. “Security regulations, you know. I’m really supposed to keep it locked up in the presence of visitors.” Even a murmur could not hide the harsh metallic quality of her voice.

  So that was why the famous Sciomnia formula was sometimes called the “Jacques Rosette”: when traced in an everexpanding wavering red spiral in polar coordinates, it was . . . a Red Rose.

  The explanation brought at once a feeling of relief and a sinister deepening of the sense of doom that had overshadowed her for months. So you, too, she thought wonderingly, seek The Rose. Your artist-husband is wretched for want of it, and now you. But do you seek the same rose? Is the rose of the scientist the true rose, and Ruy Jacques’ the false? What is The Rose? Will I ever know?

  Grade broke in. “Your brilliant reputation is deceptive, Dr. van Tuyl. From Dr. Bell’s description, we had pictured you as an older woman.”

  “Yes,” said Martha Jacques, studying her curiously. “We really had in mind an older woman, one less likely to . . . to – ”

  “To involve your husband emotionally?”

  “Exactly,” said Grade. “Mrs. Jacques must have her mind completely free from distractions. However” – he turned to the woman scientist – “it is my studied opinion that we need not anticipate difficulty from Dr. van Tuyl on that account.”

  Anna felt her throat and cheeks going hot as Mrs. Jacques nodded in damning agreement: “I think you’re right, Colonel.”

  “Of course,” said Grade, “Mr. Jacques may not accept her.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said Martha Jacques. “He might tolerate a fellow artist.” To Anna: “Dr. Bell tells us that you compose music, or something like that?”

  “Something like that,” nodded Anna. She wasn’t worried. It was a question of waiting. This woman’s murderous jealousy, though it might some day destroy her, at the moment concerned her not a whit.

  Colonel Grade said
: “Mrs. Jacques has probably warned you that her husband is somewhat eccentric; he may be somewhat difficult to deal with at times. On this account, the Security Bureau is prepared to triple your fee, if we find you acceptable.”

  Anna nodded gravely. Ruy Jacques and money, too!

  “For most of your consultations you’ll have to track him down,” said Martha Jacques. “He’ll never come to you. But considering what we’re prepared to pay, this inconvenience should be immaterial.”

  Anna thought briefly of that fantastic creature who had singled her out of a thousand faces. “That will be satisfactory. And now, Mrs. Jacques, for my preliminary orientation, suppose you describe some of the more striking behaviorisms that you’ve noted in your husband.”

  “Certainly. Dr. Bell, I presume, has already told you that Ruy has lost the ability to read and write. Ordinarily that’s indicative of advanced dementia praecox, isn’t it? However, I think Mr. Jacques’ case presents a more complicated picture, and my own guess is schizophrenia rather than dementia. The dominant and most frequently observed psyche is a megalomanic phase, during which he tends to harangue his listeners on various odd subjects. We’ve picked up some of these speeches on a hidden recorder and made a Zipf analysis of the word-frequencies.”

  Anna’s brows creased dubiously. “A Zipf count is pretty mechanical.”

  “But scientific, undeniably scientific. I have made a careful study of the method, and can speak authoritatively. Back in the forties Zipf of Harvard proved that in a representative sample of English, the interval separating the repetition of the same word was inversely proportional to its frequency. He provided a mathematical formula for something previously known only qualitatively: that a too-soon repetition of the same or similar sound is distracting and grating to the cultured mind. If we must say the same thing in the next paragraph, we avoid repetition with an appropriate synonym. But not the schizophrenic. His disease disrupts his higher centres of association, and certain discriminating neural networks are no longer available for his writing and speech. He has no compunction against immediate and continuous tonal repetition.”