by Ted White
He spoke of being “in the open,” as though he actually had been. And all the while he had been bent on giving his “sacrament” to as many as he could, converting them into followers, into a buffer ring around him, capable of protecting him, certainly shielding him, donating their credit to him, ultimately giving him this house and grounds in all its isolation, all designed to shelter him until he had sufficient power to come out into the open—as he had done at last, on the 3-D.
Sufficient power to come out into the open… for what…? What was his ultimate purpose? Just what was his “mission” here on Earth?
I felt a chill run down my spine as I stepped out into the afternoon sun. He was accomplishing something in this subtle expansion of influence over the people around him. He was demonstrably changing them.
As I strode down the path to my car, I found a girl, robed in the now-familiar uniform, staring at a flower on one of the bushes. She looked up at me, smiled, seemed to take from my expression a clue to my intent, and let her smile slip.
He was changing people, in some specific way. I decided it was time to see if the method or the result of that change could be scientifically established.
“You,” I said to the girl. “You belong to this, ah, church?”
The answer was recorded plainly upon her. She nodded, wordlessly.
“You’re coming with me,” I said, and I seized her wrist and pulled her down the hill after me.
No one saw us. No one stopped me.
But all the way down to Santa Rosa, she regarded me with sad and compassionately knowing eyes.
Chapter Thirteen
I took the girl, whose name was Lora, into our Bay Complex office. I’d called ahead; they were expecting me. I led her into an unused room and told her to sit.
“There are two ways we can do this,” I told her. “We can take you apart, muscle filament by muscle filament, until we have you laid out all over a laboratory. Or you can tell us what you know about the changes your, um, sacrament brought about in you.”
“Why have you waited until now to tell me this?” she asked. “Is it because you feel more safe here?”
Every time I spoke with one of these people, I ran into the same disconcerting feeling that we could only talk at cross-purposes. I wanted to slap the girl. Perhaps it showed; she shrank back from me. “All right,” I said, turning my back on her and pacing across the short floor to the opposite wall, turning, and pacing back. “We’ll take you apart, then.”
“You can’t,” she said. “I am aware of my rights. As a matter of fact, I am a Lawyer, Class D, and I am licensed to practice before the bar in Bay Complex.” She gave me a sweet smile. “My license number is A2MHX-6910CK-alpha-alpha,” she added. This is an office of the Bureau of Non-Terran Affairs and can claim absolutely no jurisdiction over me.”
At that I felt genuinely happy. I gave her my warmest smile. “Not directly over you, perhaps,” I admitted, “but definitely over your body, which has been isolated for testing for suspected alien plague.” I removed a printout sheet from my hip pouch and presented it to her. “This is an order, granted in Geneva, for the isolation and quarantine of your body”—I’d had her name filled in when I’d called to make my initial report from Santa Rosa—”for the purpose of biological tests.” I flourished the plastic sheet and then thrust it at her. I loved meeting lawyers.
She paled a little. But she accepted the sheet and read it thoroughly. At least she wasn’t a bum lawyer. Finally, she looked up. “I can’t tell you anything,” she said. “Will you really have me destroyed?”
They took her to Lima, and I went back to Megayork. I had the flat feeling of anticlimax, of a confrontation that had somehow misfired, aborted. When I replayed the events in my mind, when I dictated my prelims on them, I found them fuzzy, indistinct, and somehow unreal. When I tried to pin down a specific memory—what color was Dian’s robe? Which direction did the windows of that church-like room face? How long had I actually spent in that house?—I found my thoughts squirming out from under my scrutiny. Had I succeeded in my specific mission? I felt I hadn’t—and yet Tucker had been almost warm in his praise for me (a reflection, I was certain, of the praise he had received from his superiors). Sharp-eyed young Level Seven Agent spots fugitives on 3-D show (who watches 3-D anymore?) in new roles as religious leaders. Quietly pursues his mission to West Coast, where he tracks them down to hillside retreat. Sure, I even kidnapped an innocent girl and turned her over to the X-T biolabs. I must certainly be in line for a medal and a commendation. If not promotion.
I needed a break. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Ruth since the night (morning?) she’d stormed out of my apt. And I had no real desire to. That ploy was finished, dead. It was stupid to begin with. But thinking about it started a chain of associations going.…
I had to use a little push to get into the restricted part of Directory Assistance—first names aren’t much to go on—but I got a make on Veronica. Her last name was Mullins. I suppose that explained her reluctance to use it.
She lived not a mile away from Dian’s old residence, but, mercifully, much closer to the pod line. Her studio occupied the top three floors of another ancient building very much like the one in which Dian had lived. But at least this building had been modernized; the doors were new and slid back as I approached them, and the lift took me up to the tenth floor in about three heartbeats.
Veronica produced sensuals. The entire time I was in her studio I was aware of the vibrations overhead, and the impression of heavy machinery above me made me want to hunch in my shoulders and drop my head between them. I cannot understand why she chose to live on the lowest of her three floors instead of over her production plant, but it seemed of absolutely no concern to her, and she laughed the only time I mentioned it, waved her fingers distractedly, and dismissed the whole subject. I didn’t bring it up again.
“The whole private-enterprise thing is just a myth, you know,” she told me almost immediately after I entered her apt. “Anybody can play—if you can supply something for which there’s a demand.”
“And there’s a demand for you?”
“Always.” She glanced upward. “All twenty-four.”
“Perhaps I should have subscribed, instead of coming here,” I said.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“Persistence,” I said.
“How nice. And why?”
“I remembered you from Miss Moore-Williams’ party.”
She laughed. “You became quite the stud, I recall.” She mock-pouted. “And you told me you weren’t a torn.”
“That was earlier,” I said.
“—And then you weren’t,” she agreed. “Now …?”
“You intrigued me. I wasn’t sure how much was memory and how much—”
She laughed. “Elvira’s parties often produce that effect!”
“—how much I dreamed. I decided to check it out.”
“You’re very dogged.”
An infomat buzzed and claimed her attention, so I turned slowly around, surveying the room she’d brought me into. It was long, perhaps the combination of two smaller rooms with the dividing walls taken out, and stylishly decorated with hue-shifting walls and the Roman-style couches which seemed to mark the latest fad among the well-to-do. The far end of the room was dominated by a life-size pornographic hologram of my hostess, which invited my closer attention, and from which I quickly shifted my eyes. Instead I wandered over to one of the low couches and sat down on it.
A moment later she was back, dropping quickly to a seat beside me. “The one drawback,” she said lightly, “business. As long as I’m here, I have to put up with it.” She sighed. “I go out often.”
“Tell me something about yourself,” I suggested.
“What’s to tell?” She shrugged.
“You didn’t always produce sensuals.”
“No.” She seemed to look inward for a moment. “But I try not to think about that.”
“O
h.”
“You’re not really used to this sort of thing, are you?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She smiled, self-deprecatingly. “The, oh, call it the life of the idle rich—even if I’m not exactly idle all the time.”
“It’s above my touch,” I confessed. In point of actual fact, I had crossed a subtle but sharply defined class-barrier, first in taking Ruth to the party and again in coming here. It had seemed less so when I decided to come here, but that had been beforehand.
There is no law, no rule even, that says a man of my credit standing, a government employee, cannot enter the high-credit life. It is not even difficult, as far as the mechanics of it go. Class distinctions exist far more as attitude-barriers than anything else. To enter this world I had to cross over into a world of alien attitudes, of differing mores. It was uncomfortable. I felt like a fish out of water. These people did not think as I did. The gulf that separated us was the one most difficult to bridge. For most people the notion of crossing it was unthinkable. We tended to think of ourselves, each of us in his own class, as the only sort there was; we rarely even acknowledged the existence of other classes, either above or below us. Their thought processes were too alien.
I rarely watch 3-D.
“It bothers you?” she asked. “Our life style?”
“I’ve never even subscribed to a sensual,” I admitted.
“How would you like to make one?” A wicked smile teased the corners of her lips.
“Me?”
“I’ll even give you a share of the royalties.”
“What appeal would there be—for your customers?”
“Oh, novelty, perhaps….”
“I don’t know….” I hesitated.
“Isn’t that really what you came here for?”
“No, not to become a—a performer.”
“We all perform; life is just one continuous show—live and in solid color, you know? Why not hook in to it?” She got to her feet and moved lithely across the room. Again my gaze was attracted to the hologram on the far wall.
Could I climb inside that hologram?
She came back, something in her hand. “Have you ever been outside yourself?” she asked. “Really outside, I mean?”
“That night at the party.…” I said.
“That’s not what I mean. Have you ever thought of making a sensual, and then experiencing it?” She leaned forward, lips pursed, and kissed me.
The shock of oral contact was like ice and fire, alternately scalding and numbing my nerve ends. I never even felt the injectab against my neck. She leaned back and smiled a lazy smile. “There,” she said proudly. “Now I know you’ll want to.”
I shook my head a little stupidly. “I don’t get you,” I said. My lips felt puffy and slightly anesthetized; I had trouble speaking clearly through them.
She stood up again, her movements seeming jerky to me. “Come—on,” she said. “This’ll be—fun now.”
Deep inside myself, I wailed with self-pitying anguish. What am I doing here? my buried mind screamed helplessly Why did I get into this? What’s this woman doing to me? But I climbed readily to my feet, feeling as if I was on a sudden swift lift that catapulted me into the air. Then I was dancing, feather-light, on the balls of my feet, frisking after Veronica, who beckoned and led me into another room.
It wasn’t like the party. I wasn’t disassociated from myself. My sensations seemed, if anything, more immediate, more acute. Reality was more real. But I had very little self-will; I initiated nothing.
I followed her into a small room where she was already disrobing. “Hey,” I said, “I’m incompetent. You know that?”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Just take your things off.”
I did, and then she began smearing a colorless but strong-smelling paste over my body, avoiding only my genitals and those areas where my body hair was thick. It was a highly gratifying sensation, and I became lost in it, only to be jerked back to awareness when I realized she had stopped.
She put me in a ‘fresher then, removing the paste from my skin. This made no sense to me until I noticed that my-body hair was now also gone. I realized the paste had been a depilatory, and I said, proudly, “Hey, that stuff took my hair off, right?”
“It’ll grow back soon,” she said. “You’ll never miss it—and it won’t really show.”
I nodded in agreement. I was pleased with my powers of ratiocination.
She smeared a thin jelly over my smooth skin, and then had me don a very lightweight skintight suit of sorts, the crotch of which had been cut out. I expected her to attach connections of some sort to the suit, but she explained—very patiently—that the micro-sensing circuits of the suit included extremely short-range broadcast units and that wires would only get in the way. “Here,” she said. “Let me test you.” She ran one fingernail slowly down my left side, over my left nipple and across my hip. The suit transmitted the sensation to me like a second skin.
“The suit picks up what you do?” I asked.
She’d gone over to an inconspicuous console set in the wall of the room and appeared to be checking it. “No,” she said over her shoulder, “it picks up what you experience. It’s keyed into your nervous system. It plays back everything you experience, you know.”
“Oh,” I said happily. “Well, I’m ready to start experiencing now.”
She laughed, an honest, open laugh. “All right,” she said. “I guess we’re all set.”
Afterward she let me experience the sensual. The drug had worn off by then, and I felt almost bitter with embarrassment.
“This will travel all over the world,” I said.
“You should hope so,” she said. “Think of what it’ll do to your credit rating! You’re a businessman now, you know.”
“I could lose my job,” I responded.
I doubt it. The only way anyone could ever know it was you would be to ask me. And if I’m honest enough to give you royalties, you can trust me to keep your little secret safe.”
I stared at her. “Have you any private feelings left?”
She tossed her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re a public commodity—for those who can afford you.”
“So are you, now. Do you feel any different?”
“I don’t know, yet. How can I tell?”
She shook her head. “Tad Dameron,” she said. “You live in another world. Do you know that?”
“I’d just about figured it out.” I said.
“You look wrung out,” Ditmas told me the next day. He had the office cubicle next to mine. He was just back from his accumulated six-month vacation, and looking very fit. “You need to take some time off the job, fella’.”
I gave him one of my weaker smiles. “It’s the off-the-job moments that leave me looking like this,” I told him. “I felt hollow and exhausted. I hadn’t slept much that night, and my digestion was off.
He laughed, and popped back into his own office, no doubt convinced that I was living it up on my off-hours. Ruth had leaked the Word about the Moore-Williams party, and it was common knowledge now. It didn’t give me a whole lot of satisfaction to note that she was also a free agent these days, and spending her time with anyone who asked her. Tucker had let her go and probably realized himself to be well off by now.
I did routine work for the next few hours, and caught myself making only a dozen or less errors. I did a lot of intermittent staring out my window, but the sky was a leaden gray, the water of the Sound two shades darker, and the whole scene of no great emotional uplift.
Finally I did something I had been putting off for years. I made an appointment with a shrink.
Her office was furnished like a particularly homey apt, and I felt a sense of instant déjà vu when I entered it. She was seated on a comfortable-looking couch, facing a second couch across a low table upon which a parasitic plant of some sort was growing. She was looking at a sheaf of printout sheets, an
d looked up almost guiltily when the door snicked shut behind me.
“Hello, there. You must be Tad,” she said. Her face was soft and warm, dominated by a large nose and two deep brown eyes, which regarded me a little quizzically. She’d had no cosmetic surgery, and her age showed, despite the current mode of her lightly silvered hair. “Won’t you sit down,” she added. “I’m afraid I was just checking out your file just now. I’ve been so rushed,” she said apologetically.
I eased myself down onto the couch facing her. The cushions were hydraulic, and heated. They adjusted to my body and soothed some of the tensions from my muscles as I sat there. She had returned to my file and was flipping quickly through the remaining sheets. I wondered what I was doing here and what I would say, but did and said nothing.
She was a large woman, unabashedly matronly. Her clothing made no attempt to hide that fact. I found myself watching her hands as they flexed and gripped the plastic sheets; the play of muscles under the loosening skin, the furrows of tired flesh, the age and the strength they showed in her. Long fingers, curiously graceful. One ring: a single platinum band; anachronistic. No timepiece on her fingers. She looked up again, and this time, it seemed to me, a little sharply.
“It took you a long time to come to me,” she said. “Do you have any idea why?”
“I don’t know why I’m here now,” I admitted. “Why don’t you tell me? You’re the shrink.”
“‘Shrink,’” she repeated. “Why do you call me that?”
“What else should I call you?” I asked. The couch was very warm, very comfortable. It nestled me.
“Why don’t we be honest with each other,” she suggested. “Why don’t you just call me Mother?”
Chapter Fourteen
“It wasn’t coincidence, was it?” she said.
“No,” I agreed. “I checked a directory. The name caught my eye—not many of us Damerons around. I had a check run.”
“So you came to see me.”