by Simon Ings
The dance ended as it had begun. Slowly, almost carelessly, she swung up the velvet stairs, moving with rhythms as perfect as her music. But when she reached the head of the stairs she turned to face her audience, and for a moment stood motionless, like a creature of metal, without volition, the hands of the operator slack upon its strings.
Then, startlingly, she laughed.
It was lovely laughter, low and sweet and full-throated. She threw her head back and let her body sway and her shoulders shake, and the laughter, like the music, filled the theater, gaining volume from the great hollow of the roof and sounding in the ears of every listener, not loud, but as intimately as if each sat alone with the woman who laughed.
And she was a woman now. Humanity had dropped over her like a tangible garment. No one who had ever heard that laughter before could mistake it here. But before the reality of who she was had quite time to dawn upon her listeners she let the laughter deepen into music, as no human voice could have done. She was humming a familiar refrain close in the ear of every hearer. And the humming in turn swung into words. She sang in her clear, light, lovely voice:
“The yellow rose of Eden, is blooming in my heart—”
It was Deirdre’s song. She had sung it first upon the airways a month before the theater fire that had consumed her. It was a commonplace little melody, simple enough to take first place in the fancy of a nation that had always liked its songs simple. But it had a certain sincerity too, and no taint of the vulgarity of tune and rhythm that foredooms so many popular songs to oblivion after their novelty fades.
No one else was ever able to sing it quite as Deirdre did. It had been identified with her so closely that though for awhile after her accident singers tried to make it a memorial for her, they failed so conspicuously to give it her unmistakable flair that the song died from their sheer inability to sing it. No one ever hummed the tune without thinking of her and the pleasant, nostalgic sadness of something lovely and lost.
But it was not a sad song now. If anyone had doubted whose brain and ego motivated this shining metal suppleness, they could doubt no longer. For the voice was Deirdre, and the song. And the lovely, poised grace of her mannerisms that made up recognition as certainly as sight of a familiar face.
She had not finished the first line of her song before the audience knew her.
And they did not let her finish. The accolade of their interruption was a tribute more eloquent than polite waiting could ever have been. First a breath of incredulity rippled over the theater, and a long, sighing gasp that reminded Harris irrelevantly as he listened to the gasp which still goes up from matinee audiences at the first glimpse of the fabulous Valentino, so many generations dead. But this gasp did not sigh itself away and vanish. Tremendous tension lay behind it, and the rising tide of excitement rippled up in little murmurs and spatterings of applause that ran together into one overwhelming roar. It shook the theater. The television screen trembled and blurred a little to the volume of that transmitted applause.
Silenced before it, Deirdre stood gesturing on the stage, bowing and bowing as the noise rolled up about her, shaking perceptibly with the triumph of her own emotion.
Harris had an intolerable feeling that she was smiling radiantly and that the tears were pouring down her cheeks. He even thought, just as Maltzer leaned forward to switch off the screen, that she was blowing kisses over the audience in the time-honored gesture of the grateful actress, her golden arms shining as she scattered kisses abroad from the featureless helmet, the face that had no mouth.
*
“Well?” Harris said, not without triumph.
Maltzer shook his head jerkily, the glasses unsteady on his nose so that the blurred eyes behind them seemed to shift.
“Of course they applauded, you fool,” he said in a savage voice. “I might have known they would under this set-up. It doesn’t prove anything. Oh, she was smart to surprise them—I admit that. But they were applauding themselves as much as her. Excitement, gratitude for letting them in on a historic performance, mass hysteria—you know. It’s from now on the test will come, and this hasn’t helped any to prepare her for it. Morbid curiosity when the news gets out—people laughing when she forgets she isn’t human. And they will, you know. There are always those who will. And the novelty wearing off. The slow draining away of humanity for lack of contact with any human stimuli any more—”
Harris remembered suddenly and reluctantly the moment that afternoon which he had shunted aside mentally, to consider later. The sense of something unfamiliar beneath the surface of Deirdre’s speech. Was Maltzer right? Was the drainage already at work? Or was there something deeper than this obvious answer to the question? Certainly she had been through experiences too terrible for ordinary people to comprehend. Scars might still remain. Or, with her body, had she put on a strange, metallic something of the mind, that spoke to no sense which human minds could answer?
For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Then Maltzer rose abruptly and stood looking down at Harris with an abstract scowl.
“I wish you’d go now,” he said.
Harris glanced up at him, startled. Maltzer began to pace again, his steps quick and uneven. Over his shoulder he said, “I’ve made up my mind, Harris. I’ve got to put a stop to this.”
Harris rose. “Listen,” he said. “Tell me one thing. What makes you so certain you’re right? Can you deny that most of it’s speculation—hearsay evidence? Remember, I talked to Deirdre, and she was just as sure as you are in the opposite direction. Have you any real reason for what you think?”
Maltzer took his glasses off and rubbed his nose carefully, taking a long time about it. He seemed reluctant to answer. But when he did, at last, there was a confidence in his voice Harris had not expected.
“I have a reason,” he said. “But you won’t believe it. Nobody would.”
“Try me.”
Maltzer shook his head. “Nobody could believe it. No two people were ever in quite the same relationship before as Deirdre and I have been. I helped her come back out of complete—oblivion. I knew her before she had voice or hearing. She was only a frantic mind when I first made contact with her, half insane with all that had happened and fear of what would happen next. In a very literal sense she was reborn out of that condition, and I had to guide her through every step of the way. I came to know her thoughts before she thought them. And once you’ve been that close to another mind, you don’t lose the contact easily.” He put the glasses back on and looked blurrily at Harris through the heavy lenses. “Deirdre is worried,” he said. “I know it. You won’t believe me, but I can—well, sense it. I tell you, I’ve been too close to her very mind itself to make any mistake. You don’t see it, maybe. Maybe even she doesn’t know it yet. But the worry’s there. When I’m with her, I feel it. And I don’t want it to come any nearer the surface of her mind than it’s come already. I’m going to put a stop to this before it’s too late.”
Harris had no comment for that. It was too entirely outside his own experience. He said nothing for a moment. Then he asked simply, “How?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ve got to decide before she comes back. And I want to see her alone.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Harris told him quietly. “I think you’re imagining things. I don’t think you can stop her.”
Maltzer gave him a slanted glance. “I can stop her,” he said, in a curious voice. He went on quickly, “She has enough already—she’s nearly human. She can live normally as other people live, without going back on the screen. Maybe this taste of it will be enough. I’ve got to convince her it is. If she retires now, she’ll never guess how cruel her own audiences could be, and maybe that deep sense of— distress, uneasiness, whatever it is—won’t come to the surface. It mustn’t. She’s too fragile to stand that.” He slapped his hands together sharply. “I’ve got to stop her. For her own sake I’ve got to do it!” He swung round again to face Harris. “Will you go now?”
&
nbsp; Never in his life had Harris wanted less to leave a place. Briefly he thought of saying simply, “No I won’t.” But he had to admit in his own mind that Maltzer was at least partly right. This was a matter between Deirdre and her creator, the culmination, perhaps, of that year’s long intimacy so like marriage that this final trial for supremacy was a need he recognized.
He would not, he thought, forbid the showdown if he could. Perhaps the whole year had been building up to this one moment between them in which one or the other must prove himself victor. Neither was very well stable just now, after the long strain of the year past. It might very well be that the mental salvation of one or both hinged upon the outcome of the clash. But because each was so strongly motivated not by selfish concern but by solicitude for the other in this strange combat, Harris knew he must leave them to settle the thing alone.
He was in the street and hailing a taxi before the full significance of something Maltzer had said came to him. “I can stop her,” he had declared, with an odd inflection in his voice.
Suddenly Harris felt cold. Maltzer had made her—of course he could stop her if he chose. Was there some key in that supple golden body that could immobilize it at its maker’s will? Could she be imprisoned in the cage of her own body? No body before in all history, he thought, could have been designed more truly to be a prison for its mind than Deirdre’s, if Maltzer chose to turn the key that locked her in. There must be many ways to do it. He could simply withhold whatever source of nourishment kept her brain alive, if that were the way he chose.
But Harris could not believe he would do it. The man wasn’t insane. He would not defeat his own purpose. His determination rose from his solicitude for Deirdre; he would not even in the last extremity try to save her by imprisoning her in the jail of her own skull.
For a moment Harris hesitated on the curb, almost turning back. But what could he do? Even granting that Maltzer would resort to such tactics, self-defeating in their very nature, how could any man on earth prevent him if he did it subtly enough? But he never would. Harris knew he never would. He got into his cab slowly, frowning. He would see them both tomorrow.
*
He did not. Harris was swamped with excited calls about yesterday’s performance, but the message he was awaiting did not come. The day went by very slowly. Toward evening he surrendered and called Maltzer’s apartment.
It was Deirdre’s face that answered, and for once he saw no remembered features superimposed upon the blankness of her helmet. Masked and faceless, she looked at him inscrutably.
“Is everything all right?” he asked, a little uncomfortable.
“Yes, of course,” she said, and her voice was a bit metallic for the first time, as if she were thinking so deeply of some other matter that she did not trouble to pitch it properly. “I had a long talk with Maltzer last night, if that’s what you mean. You know what he wants. But nothing’s been decided yet.”
Harris felt oddly rebuffed by the sudden realization of the metal of her. It was impossible to read anything from face or voice. Each had its mask.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Exactly as I’d planned,” she told him, without inflection.
Harris floundered a little. Then, with an effort at practicality, he said, “Do you want me to go to work on bookings, then?”
She shook the delicately modeled skull. “Not yet. You saw the reviews today, of course. They—did like me.” It was an understatement, and for the first time a note of warmth sounded in her voice. But the preoccupation was still there, too. “I’d already planned to make them wait awhile after my first performance,” she went on. “A couple of weeks, anyhow. You remember that little farm of mine in Jersey, John? I’m going over today. I won’t see anyone except the servants there. Not even Maltzer. Not even you. I’ve got a lot to think about. Maltzer has agreed to let everything go until we’ve both thought things over. He’s taking a rest, too. I’ll see you the moment I get back, John. Is that all right?”
She blanked out almost before he had time to nod and while the beginning of a stammered argument was still on his lips. He sat there staring at the screen.
The two weeks that went by before Maltzer called him again were the longest Harris had ever spent. He thought of many things in the interval. He believed he could sense in that last talk with Deirdre something of the inner unrest that Maltzer had spoken of—more an abstraction than a distress, but some thought had occupied her mind which she would not—or was it that she could not?—share even with her closest confidants. He even wondered whether, if her mind was as delicately poised as Maltzer feared, one would ever know whether or not it had slipped. There was so little evidence one way or the other in the unchanging outward form of her.
Most of all he wondered what two weeks in a new environment would do to her untried body and newly patterned brain. If Maltzer were right, then there might be some perceptible—drainage—by the time they met again. He tried not to think of that.
Maltzer televised him on the morning set for her return. He looked very bad. The rest must have been no rest at all. His face was almost a skull now, and the blurred eyes behind their lenses burned. But he seemed curiously at peace, in spite of his appearance. Harris thought he had reached some decision, but whatever it was had not stopped his hands from shaking or the nervous tic that drew his face sidewise into a grimace at intervals.
“Come over,” he said briefly, without preamble. “She’ll be here in half an hour.” And he blanked out without waiting for an answer.
When Harris arrived, he was standing by the window looking down and steadying his trembling hands on the sill.
“I can’t stop her,” he said in a monotone, and again without preamble. Harris had the impression that for the two weeks his thoughts must have run over and over the same track, until any spoken word was simply a vocal interlude in the circling of his mind. “I couldn’t do it. I even tried threats, but she knew I didn’t mean them. There’s only one way out, Harris.” He glanced up briefly, hollow-eyed behind the lenses. “Never mind. I’ll tell you later.”
“Did you explain everything to her that you did to me?”
“Nearly all. I even taxed her with that… that sense of distress I know she feels. She denied it. She was lying. We both knew. It was worse after the performance than before. When I saw her that night, I tell you I knew—she senses something wrong, but she won’t admit it.” He shrugged. “Well—”
Faintly in the silence they heard the humming of the elevator descending from the helicopter platform on the roof. Both men turned to the door.
She had not changed at all. Foolishly, Harris was a little surprised. Then he caught himself and remembered that she would never change—never, until she died. He himself might grow white-haired and senile; she would move before him then as she moved now, supple, golden, enigmatic.
Still, he thought she caught her breath a little when she saw Maltzer and the depths of his swift degeneration. She had no breath to catch, but her voice was shaken as she greeted them.
“I’m glad you’re both here,” she said, a slight hesitation in her speech. “It’s a wonderful day outside. Jersey was glorious. I’d forgotten how lovely it is in summer. Was the sanitarium any good, Maltzer?”
He jerked his head irritably and did not answer. She went on talking in a light voice, skimming the surface, saying nothing important.
This time Harris saw her as he supposed her audiences would, eventually, when the surprise had worn off and the image of the living Deirdre faded from memory. She was all metal now, the Deirdre they would know from today on. And she was not less lovely. She was not even less human—yet. Her motion was a miracle of flexible grace, a pouring of suppleness along every limb. (From now on, Harris realized suddenly, it was her body and not her face that would have mobility to express emotion; she must act with her limbs and her lithe, robed torso.)
But there was something wrong. Harris sensed it almost tangibly in her
inflections, her elusiveness, the way she fenced with words. This was what Maltzer had meant, this was what Harris himself had felt just before she left for the country. Only now it was strong—certain. Between them and the old Deirdre whose voice still spoke to them a veil of—detachment—had been drawn. Behind it she was in distress. Somehow, somewhere, she had made some discovery that affected her profoundly. And Harris was terribly afraid that he knew what the discovery must be. Maltzer was right.
He was still leaning against the window, staring out unseeingly over the vast panorama of New York, webbed with traffic bridges, winking with sunlit glass, its vertiginous distances plunging downward into the blue shadows of Earth-level. He said now, breaking into the light-voiced chatter, “Are you all right, Deirdre?”
She laughed. It was lovely laughter. She moved lithely across the room, sunlight glinting on her musical mailed robe, and stooped to a cigarette box on a table. Her fingers were deft.
“Have one?” she said, and carried the box to Maltzer. He let her put the brown cylinder between his lips and hold a light to it, but he did not seem to be noticing what he did. She replaced the box and then crossed to a mirror on the far wall and began experimenting with a series of gliding ripples that wove patterns of pale gold in the glass. “Of course I’m all right,” she said.
“You’re lying.”
Deirdre did not turn. She was watching him in the mirror, but the ripple of her motion went on slowly, languorously, undisturbed.
“No,” she told them both.
Maltzer drew deeply on his cigarette. Then with a hard pull he unsealed the window and tossed the smoking stub far out over the gulfs below. He said,
“You can’t deceive me, Deirdre.” His voice, suddenly, was quite calm. “I created you, my dear. I know. I’ve sensed that uneasiness in you growing and growing for a long while now. It’s much stronger today than it was two weeks ago. Something happened to you in the country. I don’t know what it was, but you’ve changed. Will you admit to yourself what it is, Deirdre? Have you realized yet that you must not go back on the screen?”