by Tanith Lee
‘What a rat,’ he said, and for the first time he grinned. He picked up the phototypes; he looked younger, and far more mature as he did it, handling something he knew and was sure of. Without the polarising lenses his eyes were dark. They steered away from eye-contact with anyone else’s, which is not necessarily the badge of the Trustless it was once reckoned to be, only of the Insecure.
We put the fossil into a lacquered specimen case, and I witnessed it as he locked the lid.
That seemed to be that.
When I returned to the roof-deck, Cimarin was fully asleep, rocked in her hammock of sweetness. I found a robo to serve me coffee, set up my notebook and camera and began to compose some stills of water, sky, and curving green land.
Hindsight is often a harsh master. To set the record in order, I conclude here that I have now to pass some judgement, also, on myself. My own motives are worth glancing at. Although both I and my reader should beware. One tends to let oneself off with a caution, or else to condemn for life.
To be honest, and probably it is already evident, my uninvolved politeness was the burnish on feelings of superiority, I have never craved wealth, only the means to do as I wished, plus, I confess, power of a certain sort — the secret intellectual power that is the most dangerous of all. I regarded Cimarin’s kind, therefore, with indulgence. Childishly, I treated them as — children. And Arro’s kind, too, children of another village. I had, it’s true, more respect for him, since he was involved in the creative arts. But that alone set him apart, that and the melodrama he had enrolled in with Cimarin — a woman I had, however remotely and affectedly, rather enjoyed in the past. It was not until the second private meeting with him, that I became aware I was attracted to Arro Haine. Once so aware, to re-evaluate some of what had gone before was an inevitable course. As I took my shots of the islands and lagoons, I ran through mental tapes, and it occurred to me for the very first time that he might have other reasons for his actions than pure blind malice in a trap. This is not to say I found excuses for him. But having admitted I had already, subconsciously, discovered something to like in him, I tried to trace what it might be.
He was not trapped, in fact. He had the means to leave and could do so — even ‘permanently’. He was not addicted to the rich man’s riches or the luxury code — he did not seem to be shamming in his indifference or aversion to both. (His manner of dressing, alone, gave ample evidence.) If he returned, then, it was to her. And if he returned to her, then he did so because he had had, still had, some feeling for her. Through that, he too became enmeshed in their game, the underpinning of which had a devastating simplicity. She surrounded herself, so him, by those who treated her as she had always been treated, a pampered, adored little girl. She wanted him to learn by example. See, this is how it’s done. But he, naturally, did not treat her in that way, for to him she was his own image of Cimarin — possibly the very image she herself had first projected at him. This Cimarin — one could glimpse her sometimes — was strong, liberated, and carefree. Probably, he had needed that. While the lightness of her had entertained him, once. So he never would learn the lesson she had decided her love-chorus should teach him. He set himself instead to thrash the silliness out of her. Just as she was, it seems, he was trying to show her where she was driving him. But her condition had advanced too far, even by the time he met her, for anything prosaic fundamentally to alter it. He said to me later, ‘My intention was to make her hate me. That way, when I left her, she’d be glad to see the back of me.’ Which only shows he understood none of it very well. Not Cimarin, not himself, nor what he wanted.
I insert these conclusions here, aside from the structure of events, as otherwise what follows may make me out too canny. I had made plenty of mistakes already. In what came next I operated on instinct, and out of bias in Arro’s favour.
The day went by in a lagoon-dream. Fish beasts swam across the vilyo’s bows, huge and glistening, with lace for tails. The islands drew in, and through the jewellery skeins of jungles rooted in water, as the dark started to come, the eyes of hidden animals flashed back the lights of the boat’s tall decks.
‘I saw a tiger half an hour ago. Over there. As large as an elephant.’ ‘And an elephant as large as an apartment block?’ ‘No. I tell you I did.’ ‘Oh Tiger, Tiger, burning bright in the four rests of the night.’ ‘Forests.’ ‘Four rests.’ ‘Oh, what are they?’ I make love to you once. I rest. I make love to you twice. I rest — ’ ‘Only four?’ ‘Five, dear. Five. The rests come in between.’
The love flowers were in fine chorusing fettle by the dining hour. Cimarin, who had been asleep all morning in the hammock, all afternoon in her suite, now emerged in gold and silver lustres, floating among us. Everything about her told us that a great change had come to pass, and now all would be well. She would make it well. She floated to Arro, who had begun the day’s drinking late and was hurrying to catch up. She kissed him. ‘How are you, darling?’
‘I’m leaving you,’ he said.
Cimarin petrified. She reacted as if he had never said a rough word to her ever before. While he looked back at her, meeting her eyes, but only with the polarised lenses which were no longer necessary.
‘What?’ she said.
‘You heard me. I’m leaving. As soon as we get to T. South. Goodbye.’ A robo came along the deck with a large closed cocktail mixer. Arro waved it down, and put the mixer on the table beside him.
Cimarin laughed. ‘If you mean the film, well, I know — ’
‘I mean before, and after, the film. That’s that.’
‘No,’ she said.
Everyone watched. The flowers, and I. They were stage-lit, the two of them, by all those candles and lamps burning flattened to butterfly wings in the salty wet metamorphic air.
‘You can’t leave me,’ she said. ‘Where would you be without my money?’
‘Oh,’ he said. He smiled, as if one unflawed note had sounded at last on a rusty piano. ‘Well, Cim, I can go and you’ll still give me money. Won’t you? You’re so generous and kind, you won’t let me starve in the big wicked world.’
‘Arro, how can you do this to me — ’ she cried.
‘Cliché time. What else can I do to you? What else are you good for having done to you?’
‘Arro — ’
‘Stop calling me by my name. You don’t know it. You don’t know who I am. You don’t know me.’
‘Oh, please — ’ she cried out.
‘Please what? Please kick you again? I’ve kicked you enough. I’m sick to death and bored with it, Cim. And your toy ship and your toy people. And your constant bloody bad godawful acting.’
She screamed at him then. I couldn’t hear what she said, and she may have said nothing, only sounds. It was unbearably raw to look at and to listen to.
And then the denouement came, not as anticipated. He turned and opened up the cocktail shaker. He said to her, ‘Well, at least the shock of parting will have got you over your awkward fear of this. Here’s how close it’s been.’ Then he tipped the canister and out of it rolled the fossil.
It was the kind of armchair psychologist’s gambit that can sometimes work, can sometimes make ridiculous all parties, can sometimes cause incalculable harm.
She was standing in profile to me, about forty feet away. She didn’t even look at the fossil lying beside her, close enough to touch, and this is significant.
She seemed to try to speak, or shout, but no words would come. Then her colour rose. She turned a frightening brick-red, with an appalling blush that filled face and throat and breast. She flung out her arms stiffly and she shook so violently I could see it, even where I stood. I started to run. Arro had discarded all attitudes. He leaned forward and grabbed her. He looked terrified. Now he was asking her, like a scared stupid small boy, what the matter was, but in that moment the muscular spasms stopped. She went limp in his grasp, her head flung back, her mouth slack. As I reached them, I could already tell what he held in his arms was dead
.
All around, on the close-pressed shores, the animals prowled, and stared with their burning eyes at the anchored vilyo. And up on the roof-deck, the animals also prowled, and stared with their burning eyes, at Arro Haine.
It took an hour before one of them said, softly, ‘Why don’t we kill him, and get it over with?’
In the first forty minutes, every medical device on the yacht, and they were quite impressive, had been put into service. But nothing could revive Cimarin. The medicom showed a titanic increase of blood pressure, systemic breakdown, cardiac arrest — a total shutting-off. It had happened inside fifteen seconds. Her last medical check was only a month old. She had been healthy then. It was plain enough: fear had killed her. The flying apart of the mental persona which in turn destroys the physical life. A hysteria. Its instigator? Her husband.
At the start of this, he was too shocked to take their reactions seriously. Then, as realisation stole up on him, he began to try to drown nerves in more and more alcohol. By the time the decision had been taken to anchor, they brought him to bay on the roof-deck, and he, now, was the frightened one. When they said, Let’s kill him, he believed them. But he attempted the obvious bluff, boldly.
‘Oh, fine,’ he said. ‘And how do you propose to get away with it?’
‘An unfortunate accident.’
It took one of the women to say, ‘Or you killed yourself. Despairing grief. For Cimarin.’
Some of them laughed at that, innocently, and with a jungle sound. The rich never sin. They had been used always to paying for anything and everything, which can be as dehydrating to the soul as abject poverty. Murder was only one more purchase. Not even murder — it was summary justice.
‘You did kill her,’ the man said who had spoken before. ‘We are aware of that, you know. That you did it deliberately.’
‘Christ. I thought she was faking it. It looked like a fake to me. I tried to make her pull herself together.’
‘No. You killed her. The old story? You think you’ll get her enchanting money now?’
‘Please,’ he said, with resounding sarcasm. ‘I have read her will. You don’t suppose she was fool enough to leave anything to me?’
‘Then it was only another sadistic whim. Terrify her to death and be rid of all responsibility.’
‘You’re bloody mad,’ he said. He was shaking, though not as violently as Cimarin had shaken in her death throes.
‘No, Arro. You’re the crazy one. And we’re going to see to you. No nice court where you can wriggle out of it. No safe prison. Verdict and sentence and sentence carried out, sur-le-champ.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. None of them looked at me. I moved over and stood on the deck between them and him. ‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘allow you to act this out on such confused and slender evidence.’
I was another alien. We all knew that. Having stepped beyond the pale, they could see I had given them the right to cast stones at me.
‘You can’t allow it?’ someone asked.
‘And who the hell are you?’
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll demonstrate who I am.’
It was a showman’s device, but I was not about to despise it. As I had been told long before, it is sometimes essential to make a show. The Seal is in the ring on my left hand. Pressure releases it, the size of a tear-drop. On contact with the atmosphere, it will then expand to more impressive dimensions. Throw it, and it will appear to catch alight.
It landed on the deck, blazing: White on scarlet, the emblem of the Pelican Lodge. Since the revelations of the twenties, very few people do not, to some extent, recognise the authority of the Lodges, and what they are able to perform.
Cimarin’s lovers ceased to be animals and became flowers again. They only showed me their immobile thorns.
‘This,’ I said, ‘tells you who I am, whose technology I can call on, and how swiftly. And that, should you have considered it, neither my death nor the death of any other person here present, will go unremarked or uninvestigated.’
Somebody still hazarded.
‘The myth that all Lodge members are neatly life-coded on their Lodge computers? But that’s apocryphal.’
‘If you imagine that it is,’ I said, ‘kill or otherwise overpower me, and see what happens.’ I waited, then added, ‘You won’t be the first. Generally a deputation of Lodge jets reaches the spot in three-quarters of an hour. If there’s no Lodge centre closer than the Octa, it might take a full hour. Conversely you could run. With this boat going at full speed, it might take an hour and a half.’
Arro started to laugh behind me.
‘Be quiet, please,’ I said. He was going over the top into his own particular hysteria, just the normal one, but it could complicate matters. The whole situation still balanced on a wire. ‘I haven’t fired the court, only adjourned it. Since you all know now who I am, I’m going to use my transmitter to contact that closest Lodge centre I mentioned, wherever it is. I’ll be asking for technical assistance. Not people, but machines. What has happened needs exploration. You must accept that, I’m afraid. The lynching is off. Arro Haine stays your prisoner, but not your scapegoat. He is under the protection of this Seal, as I am. Do you follow me? However, the Lodges have never shielded any wanton criminal. If the tests I intend to make don’t alter the perspective, if it turns out he is guilty of this rather esoteric crime of malice, then he’s yours. You can give him to the justiciary at Tenebris South.’
Predictably, one of them said, ‘Spoilsport.’
And another, ‘A long way round to the same place we started from.’
Arro said to them, ‘Yes, you’d tear me in bits, for nothing.’
His voice was on the edge of panic, now. Theirs had turned persuasive.
I had, as I have explained, formed a fresh opinion of him. What he had done did not alter that. It seemed to me to spring from the same disbeliefs, that same blindness in him. He had been unable to see, after all the bad theatre which had gone before, that she had been acting at last a reality. This being so, the cause of death was not to be laid at his door. But if he had known, had foreseen, then he was to blame. Though it was only a crime of malice (no one could know her emotion was strong enough to kill) yet he would be guilty. And if he was, I could see no further means, and surely no rights, to try to save his life.
There is, of course, as we know, a Lodge centre at West X. The equipment I asked for arrived about midnight, the black silhouette of a hover-plane cutting out a piece of the meteor display, as steel lines dropped down to me, no questions raised (as they are never raised in the field), the boxed computative apparatus, which no commercial company has so far been able to reproduce in such a miniaturised form. The flowers were impressed by this. A side-effect, no more to be despised than the blazing badge.
They’d confined Arro, in a manner of speaking, on H Deck, in a spare unfurnished area beside the analyser unit. I accordingly set up my apparatus here. It was logical enough to use the bonus of the unit’s own juices.
A parting of the ways was presently enacted. The fossil, weapon of murder, had been carried to me by the metal hands of my new machines. Cimarin had been carried in an opposite direction, by human ones, responsive palms and digits clammy and fierce with love. It was not that they played a dead march, the speakers were ultimately silent. But taking her below-decks and deep down, to the medical area which supplied coffin-size cold storage — the last morbid luxury of that millionaire’s boat — I sensed theatre, nothing but theatre, to a point where human grief became debatable and, even if existing, banal. Was I now seeing only through Arro’s black, blind eyes? The attorney should never empathise too vigorously with the defendant.
Two or three men, elegantly attired, mounted guard on the long deck outside. They stood, as it seemed, half a mile off, waiting, not looking towards the bright glare of the unit. Sometimes these elegant guards changed, or elegant guard-women came to join them. But they might have been made from blueprints of the first men and w
omen. Yes, I saw them now as he saw them. I had aligned myself with him. I regarded the fossil, securely pressed into the belly of the machine, and was glad the computer-brain was uninfluenced by human values, save in the most mathematical way.
Arro had the doors open by now, between his ‘prison’ and the unit. He stood and watched me, until he perceived there was nothing left for the moment that I needed to do, or could pretend to do. He looked surely as solemn as a child. As any psychologist will tell you, children can be dangerous.
‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘The Lodges.’ Then he said it again, and once more.
‘That is correct.’
‘How splendid for you. And what luck for me. The one impartial bystander has the power to run the show.’
I said nothing. Since apparently I had to confront him, I did so, and almost instantly he looked away. Instead he came all the distance into the room, and scrutinised the machine for a while, but there was very little to see anywhere in this fish-bowl box, except the occasional tick of a light, meaningless to him.
‘Tell me then,’ he said eventually. ‘Is it true, this story? Which story. That it was your Lodges which drew us forth from the womb of the Millennium, through the eye of the needle, side-stepping war and want and all the general maxims of the pessimists, and set us down here laughing our goddamn heads off.’
One is asked this, and rarely anything else.
‘You’re not original,’ I said. I should not have said so, but my compassion had lessened. Every emotion will tend to usurp another. Compassion was usurped.
‘Oh, am I not? Oh dear. Well, when that lot of blood-crazed paper-minds gets hold of me and strings me up from the non-existent yard-arm, my unoriginality will cease. Try another question, then. Why have you taken up the sword on my behalf? You hated poor Cimarin after all?’
‘Did you?’
‘First two questions unanswered and a parrying question from you slung in my teeth. All right. I was rather fond of her. No, bloody hell, she got on my — But not to begin with. You see? It leaves a residue, the feeling I had for her, before.’ He paused, glanced at me, glanced away. ‘Presumably I fell for whatever display she put on for my benefit. I’m using your sort of jargon, I hope you notice, so you’ll understand.’