THE DECEIVERS
Page 18
DEMI
Meaning I’m a liar.
ROGUE
Meaning you’re a sprite.
DEMI
Yes, they all call me “Tinkerbell.”
ROGUE
And I do believe in fairies.
DEMI
If you believe in fairies, clap your hands.
“I dig! I dig! The tank is telling it from her point of view; how she’d like to remember it or how she wishes it’d happened. She must have recorded this bijou for me when she came up here to leave her cat and key before zigging off on the lam.”
ROGUE
This is a damned lymphatic start for anything.
DEMI
Why? Isn’t it full of fun and games? That’s what you said you liked about me.
ROGUE
Who’s having fun?
DEMI
Me.
ROGUE
Who’s playing games?
DEMI
Your gay deceiver.
ROGUE
So where do I come in?
DEMI
Just play it by ear.
ROGUE
The left or the right?
DEMI
The middle ear. That’s where your soul dwells.
ROGUE
You’re the damnedest girl I ever met.
DEMI
I’ve been berated by better men than you, sir.
ROGUE
Like who?
DEMI
Like the ones to whom I refuse the worst.
ROGUE
You leave me in doubt.
DEMI
Yes, that’s the only way to handle you.
ROGUE
Damn it! I’m outclassed.
“Surprise! Surprise! This reenactment is pretty close to what really happened. Evidently Demi rather liked it. Wonder what made it so special for her.”
DEMI
This is the last thing I expected from you.
ROGUE
What last thing?
DEMI
Your being shy.
ROGUE
Me? Shy!
DEMI
Yes, and I like it. Your eyes are taking inventory, but the rest of you hasn’t made a move.
ROGUE
I deny that.
DEMI
Do you know John Donne’s love poems?
ROGUE
I’m afraid not. Must have busted them, owing to a surfeit of something.
DEMI
All Virginia girls read them and sigh. I’m going to act one out for you.
ROGUE
I am not afraid.
DEMI
“Licence my roaving hands, and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below.”
ROGUE
Now I am afraid.
DEMI
“O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one maid mann’d…
How blest am I in this discovering thee!”
ROGUE
Demi, don’t. Please don’t.
DEMI
“Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joyes.”
ROGUE
I beg you…
DEMI
“To teach thee, I am naked first; tonight
Why needst thou have more covering than thy sprite?”
ROGUE
Demi!
DEMI
Come on, Rogue…
“Jigjeeze! Did she tape her version of us together in bed that night?”
Oh, I did, I did. In the darkness he seemed to be a hundred men with hundreds of hands, mouths, and loins. He was a Black with a thick tongue that choked me, and hard, high strokes that shuddered deep into me.
He was a succulent, crooning in my ear while his mouths drank arpeggios from my skin, before, behind, between, above, below. He was an outworld animal emitting guttural grunts as he bestialized me and wrenched ecstatic moans from my belly. He was tough, tender, demanding, savage, macho, macho, macho. My loins trembled in an earthquake of endless spasms.
And yet through all this we were carrying on a sparkling conversation over champagne and caviar as an erotic prelude to lounging before the fire to share love for the first time, and after the first kiss he placed a ring on the third finger of my left hand, a pink-gold seal ring engraved with a Virginia flower.
Winter was jolted to his feet.
“Go to black!” he shouted to his half-self.
The screens faded.
He took a deep breath. He could have thought the command, but now he knew that the computer was in business for itself, and he suspected why. “She couldn’t know about the ring,” he said slowly. “She’d already split from the Triton soldiers when I was buying it. She never saw it. She never heard about it. Unless… Unless…” He paced. “It was a greater synergist than I who said, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’ And so it is. And I’m a complete idiot. No wonder the Jink gorills couldn’t get at her.” He raised his voice. “Program Problem APB Demi Jeroux Print Absolute Address.” Then he sat down and waited.
He didn’t know what he was expecting; a street or CB number, perhaps, or the image of a house, office, terminal, a city, a continent, a satellite, a planet, a river, a lake, an ocean. His tank knew where Demi was. He knew that an “absolute address” in computer circles demanded the exact storage location where the referenced operand is to be found, and no weaseling before, behind, between, above, below and out of the imperative. Certainly he never anticipated this as the screens brightened:
“#$%_&’)(*+:=-;#.”
“What the hell is that?”
“*#)$(%’_&+.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“#*$*%*_*&*‘*()*)(.”
“Oi veh! Me Good Indian; who you?”
“+ =:;*-o)o(#&=+.”
“Would you mind telling me what language you’re speaking… if language is the word?”
“,.;=o-*+:?#)(.”
“Care to try another? Solaranto, maybe, or even TankSpek? You know, one plus one equals whatever you’re programmed for.”
“-”
“Is that a ‘no’?”
“+”
“Is that a ‘yes’?”
“+”
“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s play Twenty Questions. Are you animal?”
“+”
“Vegetable? Just to make sure of your + and -.”
“+”
“Both? You throwing curves? Mineral?”
“+”
“All three? Now what could possibly be all three; animal, vegetable, and mineral? Man? Maybe, if you count prosthesis, and a lot of us are prosthetic these days. Machine? Maybe. Food? Maybe. Some seasonings are mineral. But Man doesn’t speak your kind of language. Neither do machines. That leaves Food. Ah, food! It speaks a lovely language of taste and smell and—”
Winter was jolted again.
After a chaotic moment he burst out, “Dear God! Dear trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind God, I thank Thee, and someday I’ll do You a good turn. Of course! Elementary, my dear Watson. Scents, tastes and sensations—the Titanian chemical language. That’s what the tank is trying to translate into visual, simply because it’s not equipped to project taste and touch. No computer is. Maybe they should be someday. All the same, I’m impressed, really impressed; I didn’t think we had it in us. So gig, go ahead with the program. Tell me all in Titanian. Where the hell’s Demi Jeroux?”
“Yes?”
“Yes?”
“Go ahead.”
“Keep on talking.”
“A halfmoon, maybe? Sort of standing on its ear?”
“A circle. Yes. And?”
“The circle’s divided into two. And now?”
“And now four? Wait a minute. Wait. Just. One. God. Damned. Minute. This pattern rings a bell. Bell. Bell. Bell. Bellboy. Bellpull. Belladon
na. Bell jar. That’s it! The bell jars covering the instruments in biology lab at Tech. Biology. Cell cleavage into blastulation. Then the gastrula. Embryology, that’s what I’m seeing. Something’s being born. What? Where? What the hell kind of message is this?”
He was hypnotized by the display of lightning cell division; blastula, gastrula, blastodisc…
“My God! It’s going in microseconds.”
Ectoderm, mesoderm, endoderm…
“This is the first time in history that a computer’s ever given birth, but to what?”
Primitive Streak…
His excitement drove him into the workshop to get a better view of the end product on the giant prime video of his computer. During those few moments the development had accelerated into its dénouement, for he arrived just in time to have the huge screen explode into his face. Demi Jeroux burst out of the computer in a shower of plastic particles, rolled and sprawled on top of him. She was naked, sweating, trembling.
“Golly!” she gasped. “Getting in was easy compared to getting out. Are you hurt, darling?”
“I’m fine. I’m great. I’m ennobled. I’m stupefied. Hi, hey. Hi, my love. Hi, my darling sprite. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like that?”
“Surprised?”
“Hell no. I always knew we had it in us. I knew it all along.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Terra Incognita
Ah, me! What a world this was to live in two or three centuries ago when it was getting itself discovered! Then Man was courting Nature, now he has married her. Every mystery is dissipated. The Solar is as familiar as the trodden pathway running between towns. And if you believe that, you’re meshuge.
—Odessa Partridge
This time they left the six-foot tub together and dripped into the living room. They sat on the couch with their feet up on the coffee table, saturating everything with bath water and not giving a damn in their joy over the final resolution of their crises.
“You ought to hear the furniture and rugs complaining,” Winter laughed. “Glug, glug, glug. Glgglglg. Glooog, glooog, glooog. There’s no pleasing some things.”
“I’m a pleased thing,” Demi glowed. She was looking like a Nereid reclining on a wave; red flowing hair, green eyes, coral-pink skin. “I never dreamed sharing love under water could be so—so—”
“So what?”
“I can’t say. Nice Virginia girls never talk about it, so I have no words. Did you, ever before?”
“Many times,” Winter answered promptly. “I’ve been a rogue under all kinds seas; sea salt, season’s greetings, sea lions, a seesaw, a bishop’s see, the Zuider Zee dam—” She shut him up with a smack.
“And while I was gone?”
“What, while you were gone?”
“You know what. Was there anyone else? I promise I’ll understand,” and she began to look like Whistler’s mother.
“Get out of the rocking chair,” he grinned. Then, seriously, “Believe me, love. We all chase; not because we’re lecherous, we’re simply looking for variety and novelty, for entertainment. Well, every time with you it’s new and different, so I don’t have to chase anymore. The answer is no. I was happy to wait for my entertainment. Also, I was too busy trying to locate my variety show and get her back.”
“You’re my favorite Starshmykler,” she beamed, transforming into her idea of a blushing meyd’l. “Now I want to hear all your adventures that weren’t reported by the computer grapevine.”
“No, you first.”
“But I haven’t had any. How could I, cooped up in your rotten old tank?”
He hesitated. “Well, which do you want, the good or the bad?”
“The bad first. Let’s get that over with.”
He nodded somberly. “You couldn’t know this,” he began slowly, “but on Triton I got trapped in one of their deadly ice lava caves for hours and hours. No food, no water, no light. The only thing that kept me going was thinking about you and dreaming of all the wonderful exciting new patterns we’d play together when and if I could ever find you.”
“But you did escape, Rogue. Obviously. How?”
“Finally, in desperation, I reverted to the Maori savage and clawed at the ice and lava with my bare hands like a trapped animal, and at last I opened a hole just big enough for me to squeeze through to the outside, but…”
“But what?”
“But when I got out I saw my shadow, so I went back in.”
She let out a little shriek. “Oh, you, you, you! You had me believing! Liar! Wicked Rogue liar! You’ll tell lies in your coffin.”
“Yeah, to the pallbearers. So how did you get into the computer? It only opens up to me and no one else. Showed it your shadow?”
“Well, after I broke away from the Jink hitmen—”
“How?”
“Mace.”
“I didn’t know you had any.”
“I don’t, but I kept screaming ‘Mace’ at them in Titanian chemical and it finally had the same effect.”
“My God, love, you’re something to cope with.”
“Indeed yes. I’ll never have to ‘have a headache’ with you, I can always cool you with chemical, not that it’s very likely with my one and only Starstud. Anyway, I came up here with the cat, let myself in with the key, and did some hard thinking. Was there any hiding place where I could survive and the Jinks couldn’t get at me again? The only one I could think of was your tank, so I went in.”
“But it only opens up to me.”
“You left it on.”
“Maybe I did, but it still won’t receive from anyone except me. So? How?”
“Well, it’s like scrying.”
“You mean crystal-gazing?”
“Just about.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Why not? We come out of a crystal world.”
He had to accept that. “How does it work?”
“You don’t have to use a crystal ball; anything will serve… a pool of ink, water, a mirror, a glass, your fingernail…”
“Yes?”
“I used your computer screen and concentrated on it. You have to lose yourself into something.”
“And?”
“The screen seemed to turn milky, then black, and even the reflections on it faded.”
“And?”
“Then I saw you, in black and white, not moving, like a still photograph.”
“Yes?”
“Then color came and you began moving, the way you pace while you’re talking and thinking hard. It was like a film slowly starting.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Not at first. It was silent. Then I began to hear your voice. And then it wasn’t a movie on the screen anymore, it was real. It was like I was standing at the side of the room and you were in the center, and you looked at me, and I went to you and—and you held me and—and I was with you inside the computer.”
“How could you be sure it was me? Most people complain that I’m so changeable, adaptable, that there isn’t any real bedrock me… Even my first wife.”
She compressed her lips and looked like a criminal required to convict herself. Then, “You’re not going to like this, darling, and I’d rather not tell you, but… Well, you’re deep and complex and adaptable and moody and—but not all that mysterious to a Titanian. That’s why so many of us prefer living on Terra; you’re sort of simple arithmetic to us and it makes life so much easier. So I was able to re-create your person and personality…”
She was right, he didn’t like it at all, but he controlled himself. “So you went in. As what? ‘Bits’ in the memory banks?”
“We can transform into any living thing, from an amoeba to a brontosaur. There’s a living organic switchboard in your tank, a Pons Varolli which is the control station for coordinating your sensations as it receives them. I duplicated it and joined it in parallel.”
“Kind of a backup Pons?”
“Just about.”
“And you were alive and well in the tank, sustained by the same nutrients that feed it?”
“Yes. A freeloader. I apologize.”
“And accessible only to me?”
“Only to you.”
“Then how could that damned Manchu Duke of Death have found out where you were holed up?”
“I’m not sure. He’s brilliant, a rare Mensa type, and he may have deduced it. Or his devoted exocomputer may have squealed.”
“It knew?”
“They all knew. Your tank is in touch with all the other organics within reach.”
“How?”
“Crosstalk and sidebands of communication signals and power lines. I learned a lot in your tank.”
“And you were safe. Why the hell didn’t you let me know?” His anger wasn’t as controlled as he imagined. “My God, I nearly went out of my mind worrying about you.”