Electric Forest Read online

  The elevator stopped. Its door slid aside.

  Magdala pulled herself out into the luminous sunlit space beyond, and began her arduous progress to the counter.

  The two counter attendants leaned by the menu screen. One pointed Magdala out to the other. “Here’s the cripple, like I said. She always comes in on processory pay days.” She caught the words with ease. Swiftly she selected from the menu screen and the attendant tapped out her order to the mechanical kitchen. Magdala kept her eyes down. In this position, both lids drooping, her eyes seemed almost acceptable. The second attendant had submitted her ten-astrad check and returned now with her change. He skimmed it across to her, not touching her hand.

  She was twenty-six. Since her birth, no one had ever willingly touched her, beyond the impersonal doctors at the state home and the children who had tortured her.

  She took her tray and started toward the darkest booth. She was nearly there before she realized that someone was already seated inside.

  Magdala was briefly confused. Today, the cafeteria was two-thirds empty and nobody took this booth when so many others, with access to the polarized sunny roof and glazium windows, were available. Then a new, more startled confusion overtook the first, for the seated figure in the booth was the pale-haired young man who had passed her on the street.

  His profile, blond like his hair against a somber ground, was so fine, so perfectly made, it seemed machine finished. The long-lashed eyes shone translucent yet metallic. A glazium beaker of red alcohol on the table before him had been encircled by a notable, hard, flexible, and long-fingered hand, that appeared almost alive of its own volition. The silver music discs were no longer inside his ears.

  Magdala threw her body hurriedly into retreat, commencing the turn which would carry her to safety.

  “Don’t run away.”

  Magdala halted in the midst of her turning, listened for what would come next. Nothing came.

  Magdala completed the turn and assayed a step.

  “Why do you persist in running away, when I just told you not to?”

  The voice was cool and virtually expressionless.

  Again Magdala had involuntarily halted. She did not look about. She sensed rather than saw the young man, full face to her now, waiting, his arm casually draped across the back of the booth.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  Something galvanized Magdala. She was able to move again, and did so. He said nothing further as she walked gradually along the line of vacant booths.

  She was not sure why her fear had sharpened with such vehemence. Surprise, maybe. Perhaps this man was one of those who sometimes burst out into speech with her, sickly fascinated into uncontrolled conversation. But he had not spoken in that way at all. And control did not seem to be, at the moment, his problem.

  Magdala entered a booth and laid out her tray. Her wrists were trembling. She put a mouthful of food between her lips, chewing carefully. When the mouthful had been swallowed, she introduced another.

  She had been eating for five minutes when his shadow fell across her tray.

  He moved around the table and sat down facing her.

  This time, her eyes flickered once over his face. She could not help that. Then she dropped her head lower over her plate. She kept eating, but she could not taste the food. He sat, immobile, watching.

  Long ago, she had been warned that she might meet those who took an unwholesome interest in her condition. Those who might wish to harm her, eradicate her—

  From three or four short glimpses, he had been recorded in great detail on her retina. The bleach-colored hair appeared natural, and naturally striped through with curious subsidiary streakings: dun, gold, gray. The eyes, seen close to, like the hair were multitudinously blended, striped, flecked, which amalgam, from a short distance, formed two extraordinary lenses of polished greenish brass.

  His proximity was truly terrifying. Not because of any previous warning. Not even because of his frightening uniqueness. But because of some unseeable, totally lethal thing. As if he were radioactive.

  “What’s your name?”

  His voice had not altered. Still cool, unhurried and flat.

  Magdala ate, eyes on the food.

  “I said, what’s your name?”

  Magdala ate, and found she could not swallow.

  “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of me? There’s no need.”

  Magdala managed to swallow. She had had to, she wanted to say something. She said: “Please leave me alone.”

  “I want to know your name,” he said.

  “Why?” Now that she had communicated with him, it was difficult to resume silence.

  “You won’t tell me your name because you’re patently afraid to. But, as you see, I followed you from the commercial area, and a minor inquiry led me to anticipate your visit here, even your chosen booth. I can probably locate your apartment as simply. In fact, withholding your name won’t prevent me from discovering as much about you as I wish.”

  Magdala dragged herself along the seat and upright. Leaving her meal unfinished, she walked toward the elevator. She could not travel fast. Any moment she expected his shadow to slant again across her path, his inexorable voice to jerk her to a standstill. He could catch up to her with no trouble. But he did not.

  She entered the elevator with several men and women who were vacating the cafeteria.

  Between their bodies, and across all the sun-glowing tangle of booths, tables, and human movement, she saw his beautiful and horrifying face staring straight back at her. And even as the door slid to and the singing elevator dropped softly toward the earth, his face remained, painted upon the skin of the air.

  II

  SHE WALKED ALONG the edge of the park, keeping to those spots where trees and plants were most thickly massed. From inside a tunnel of shadow, she gazed out and beheld the park dotted sparsely by people, swimming in the pool, feeding the black and white doves. Later, she walked through the narrow back streets, behind the blocks of old stores, second-hand precincts of curios and paper books, virtually deserted. For two hours she read in a cubicle at the electro-library. They were used to her there, and offered no comment. But as the machine whispered the pages into view on the screen, she barely saw them.

  The warm blue day began to roll downhill into a fiery sunset behind the slender glazium towers. Like a firework display on the crimson sky, a million little green shocks emitted from the high roofs and the upper links as the solar generators of the city closed their circuits against the night.

  Under the igniting street lights and checkerboard of blank yellow or black windows, Magdala, a ghastly lurching shape, moved homeward along the boulevards.

  The elevator carried her to her floor. Her door dashed wide at the touch of her thumb. Before she could check herself, she had entered her apartment. Windowless, it should therefore be black now as a hole in the ground, till her entry triggered its lamps. But the apartment was already full of light, its lamps already triggered. And in the center of the light, like its sun and its source, stood the man.

  Somehow, she had known. Known that, impossibly, he would be waiting for her here. Not once during her afternoon wandering had she glanced over her shoulder. Not once had her fear risen to its extreme pitch, out on the street.

  Yet no stranger could enter through a print-lock, a lock whose function was to respond to one print alone: that of its owner.

  The young man showed Magdala a silver rectangle lying in his hand.

  “It’s not magic,” he said. “This takes a sensor-reading of your print from the lock. I press the little switch, and the reading is played back into the lock. The lock obeys. Earth Conclave government has possessed similar gadgets for years. Nothing is to be relied on, M. Cled. Believe me.”

  Omnipotent, he had discovered her name. He must have asked one of the Accomat staff,
then located her apartment number from the registration screen in the foyer. He had been very thorough, very determined.

  Behind her, the door had automatically shut. In the tiny, near-featureless room, he blazed and burned like a star. She could not take her eyes off him finally, staring up at him, hypnotized, her brain struggling.

  “Magdala,” he said musingly, “Magdala Cled. Let me see. Cled is a composite name, is it not? Your mother’s initials, or your father’s, or a combination of both, preceded by C, the initial of the State Orphanage where you were brought up. Am I right? Magdala, however. Now that is interesting. Let me hazard a guess. Your mother was a licensed whore, and State Orphanage C had a reformatory whim. Yes, that would have to be it. Mary of Magdala, the repentant prostitute of Modernist Christianity.”

  Magdala had not properly listened to what he was saying. A part of her was convinced that he had come here to kill her and would now do so. She waited, desperate, dazzled; numbed by lack of resolution.

  But he made no move toward her. The reverse. He buttoned down one of three folding seats from the wall, and sat on it. Idly, he threw the silver door opener up into the air, caught it. Threw it, caught it.

  “I suppose,” he said, soft as cold snow falling on her mind, “you think I am a horrible maniac, bent on removing every last crippled lady from Indigo. I’m not, dear hideous crippled lady, anything of the sort.”

  Magdala’s twisted shoulders met the wall. She pressed herself against it. “Please,” she said, “please go away.”

  “We’ve been through that before. Obviously, I’ve no intention of going away. You can assume I want something from you. Why don’t you amuse us both by guessing what it is?”

  “Cash,” she said. Her heart surged. “I’ll dial it for you. Five thousand astrads. Then you can go.”

  “How interesting. Yes, that’s a possibility. But don’t worry. I could fix your pay-dial as easily as I did the door. If I wanted your astrads, I’d have gotten them already. So that eliminates theft and murder. What else would it be? Perhaps I’m a pervert aroused only by the obscenely unwholesome. Sorry, your luck’s out. Not that, either.”

  “Please—” she said again.

  “I suggest you stop pleading with me to go. Don’t you like me? Don’t you think I’m rather decorative? Most people do.”

  She had edged all the way along the wall. Her right foot rested over the plate in the floor that worked the door from the inside. But the door did not open.

  “Yes, I’ve tampered with that, too. I’m clever as well as ornamental, you see.”

  Suddenly, he ran his hand down the button panel next to his seat. Instantly, all the furniture unfolded from the walls. The two other seats, the couch, the table, the cabinet with its magnetized shelves. The room was jammed by a mob of white plastic fitments. And thus revealed in the midst of it, were the hidden aspects of Magdala.

  She understood that he had already done this once, earlier, before she returned. He had seen everything. The twenty paperback books, the minute desk of music cassettes, the limpid seashell from Sapphire Flats, the jade bead from Earth. And on the bed, somehow more naked than anything else, the sleek-furred simulate cat—a child’s toy.

  His eyes flickered over her secrets, registered the imprint of her soul, just as the cunning device had registered her thumb print in the lock. Then he rose, picked delicately between the unfolded furniture, and lifted her toy cat by its forepaws.

  “So it’s true,” he remarked, “we all need something to love.”

  To get between the furniture was harder for Magdala, but she succeeded. Reaching him with a quickness that surprised both of them, she flung up one hand to seize the cat. The other she drove against his ribs. She had not been tortured by children without learning from them, and her spatulate hand appeared to hurt him a lot. He swung aside in the narrow space with a ragged gasp of pain.

  Nevertheless, she became aware in that moment that he had provoked her for his own reasons, and that she had followed his leads as he must have predicted to himself she would.

  She stood with the toy cat in her arms, betrayed into self-revelation.

  “Congratulations,” he murmured, “you’re human.” He passed one long hand rhythmically across his side, where she had jabbed at him. “I was beginning to wonder. You don’t, of course, look human. I expect you’d like to. Would you?”

  She had crossed some peculiar line within herself. Her voice came from her throat, rough and strong: “Would I like what?”

  He half-turned, and demagnetized one of the paperbacks. He opened a page, and held up before her the photoplate of the long-limbed Venus, her underwater flesh folded in yellow hair.

  “How would you like,” he said distinctly, “to be beautiful?”

  Her heart stopped. Laughter began instead. She had never really laughed before in her life. Somewhere in the middle of this laughter, she lifted the white shell from its shelf, raised it above her head, and cut with its pointed cusp at the young man’s face.

  Whether he expected this second blow was not clear. Frantically he deflected it, his arm darting to protect his face. The point of the shell slit his hand. The impact whirled the shell aside. It brushed the wall and broke in fragments.

  Magdala’s mouth, mobile with laughter, contorted and closed. She regarded the broken shell, her eyes swelling as if to cry, yet without moisture. The habit of tearlessness prevailed. When he lifted his uninjured hand and struck her across the head, she rocked back, righted herself like some grotesque rubberized doll. She had braced herself for his retaliation and took no interest in it.

  And then, a bizarre dawning of amazement filled her. Physically, although in violence, they had touched.

  Blood dripped from his skin. He was gray. It came home to her, a profound truth, that he loved his own looks, and feared greatly to be robbed of them.

  “I take it from your display,” he said, “that the thought of being beautiful does capture your imagination, somewhat.” His voice was shaking, no longer cool or flat.

  “You can’t alter me,” she said. “No one can.” His shaking voice, his youth (a little younger than she, perhaps?), his very flawlessness, gave her abruptly a sense of power. After all, she was the one with nothing to lose. “Besides,” she said, “I have only five thousand astrads. It costs a lot, surgery. Are you a medic? Is that it?”

  But then he smiled again, and her brief confidence abandoned her. His smile was like a white door sliding ajar upon an alien world.

  “I’m not a medic. Nor do I require your pathetic astrads. I’m rich, dearest revolting Magdala. And I can make you beautiful.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “Beautiful,” he repeated. “Beautiful. Beautiful.”

  They stood and looked at each other in a long and utter quiet.

  III

  BEYOND THE CITY, the blue-pastel morning mist of Indigo’s Blue season lay thick and sweet-smelling over twenty sweeping highways of concrete and shining steel. Here, by day, the traffic ran above ground, fast, driverless auto-buses and fish-gleaming cars. The highways waited for dawn, noiseless under the fragrant fog.

  At six-o’clock the sun began to rise, and the first auto-bus of the morning, jeweled in a constellation of lights, raced down the western freeway.

  Blue through the blue mist filter, the world illusorily fled from the bus. Flying embankments fringed by trees with sun-sketched limbs and speed-smoking crests. Far away, dim blocks and domes, the out-city refineries and plants, their hydro canals like bubbling glazium. And now the rush of a golden rocket, a passing bus flinging itself cityward in the opposite direction. The deformed woman, crouched at her window, watched it all.

  Her scanty fellow passengers were indifferent, even to her, it seemed.

  Some had inserted in their ears the enamel discs that connected to the tape-music of the bus. Some slept.
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  The bus stopped twice in the initial fifty kilometers. The third regulation stop, one hundred and forty kilometers from the city, loomed up sharply solitary by the highway. Around the stop poured merely a landscape, uncultivated and oddly primeval in the levelly climbing sunlight and the evaporations of the mist.

  Moments after Magdala had descended, the bus was gone along the highway, melting into the vast azure parasol of the morning.

  Presently, she went into the stop shelter, and seated herself.

  Apart from the road, nothing man-made was visible—neither complexities of buildings nor any further traffic. Trees had spilled close across an eastern rise. Magdala, accustomed to the perpetual purring of the city, listened to the trilling of winds and the faint cry of birds in the wood. The novelty of these sounds combined in a frightening ambience with the novelty and strangeness of her situation. Anything might happen.

  The happening occurred.

  A silver mote materialized on the eastern horizon, became a shooting flame like light running over silk. A great silver car, like an incredible aqueous beast, swam to a halt beside her.

  She stared at the car until, impatient, it roared at her from some bronze vocal-apparatus within. Then she got up and went to it meekly. She carried no bags, was empty-handed as she had been instructed to be.

  He sat at the wheel, intolerant of the robot-drive. Pale as ice, he looked at her without friendship through the wine-dark polarization of the windscreen.

  “Get in,” he said. The rear side section lifted to admit her. Awkwardly, Magdala hauled herself into the ozonized interior. “How many saw you?”