Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The agent tried to calm him down. “Great. Fine. But right now we’ve got this job to do.”

  Dorian struck his fist on a table, awkwardly. “If the job gets in the way, to hell with the job. I want to marry her.”

  “Marry her?” Lord didn’t get it at all. Neither of these kids had struck him as the marrying kind. “And what’re you talking about, the job getting in the way? Why should it?”

  “I just said if.”

  For the time being the job went on. But Sibyl and Dorian could hardly wait until the sessions were over before they disappeared into the house together, kissing as they walked.

  A number of additional recording sessions took place at Dorian’s house over the next several days, mainly on the terrace. Sometime between the second and third session, Sibyl moved in with him.

  Lord, arriving for a fourth session a few days after number three, made himself at home on the terrace and started to replay what he thought was the tape of the most recent Sibyl-modeling session. He didn’t ordinarily look over his clients’ shoulders as they worked, but this had more and more earmarks of a special situation.

  What he got on the holostage, instead of a working session with either of his clients, was two Dorians and two Sibyls. A nude encounter quartet, like something from a hardcore porn show. You could tell the two personal graphics from the two recorded human bodies chiefly because the graphics were better-looking and more graceful. No matter what position they got into, they didn’t sag or show little ugly bulges. And you could tell by which bodies really interacted physically. Personal graphics were still purely visual, not tactile.

  If this was really pom-for-hire, then two of Lord’s clients were earning some money on the side, and neither was paying him his ten percent. Even worse than that—perhaps—they were in violation of their new studio contracts, jeopardizing a lot of real money.

  Lord watched for a while and relaxed a little, becoming gradually convinced that this was only something the kids had done for their own amusement. They must have got up there on the stage in the flesh, while their two images cavorted, and joined in, meanwhile recording the whole thing. Oh well, it was great to be young. But somebody really ought to scrub this tape.

  Lord turned it off and thought for a while. He didn’t really know what this portended.

  Dorian came out of the house, wearing the robe he’d had on the first day Lord met him. His face was stony sober, white around the lips. Something had happened.

  “What?” Henry Lord demanded, monosyllabic in excitement, jumping to his feet.

  “She’s gone.”

  “All right. Where? When? How? You had a fight?”

  “I saw her graphic. I took a good look at it, at last, and then we had a fight.”

  “Her graphic. You mean this stag show that the two of you cooked up?”

  “No. No. The one Hallward’s trying to get ready for the studio.”

  “All right. You saw it. So?”

  “So. You know something? She’s got nothing, and I told her so. To think I was ready to marry her. I felt something for her, I really did. I felt a lot, but she killed it. What a pig. Even my own graphic was telling her what a pig she was.” And moisture was welling up in the eyes of Dorian Gray.

  “Even your own . . . what? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  Dorian began to babble incoherencies. Lord murmured soothing words. He managed to determine that Sibyl was really gone, out of the house with all her things, Dorian didn’t know where. The graphics of her—the official ones not the porn show—were still here. Lord found the disk and took a look at them. Pretty nearly worthless. They were really piss-poor.

  Hallward, on arriving and being confronted with this feet, grew angry. “You keep telling everyone I’m a goddamn genius, but there are limits. Computer’s like a movie camera, some people it likes and some it doesn’t. I can only do so much to augment, and then the output starts looking like a cartoon character. That’s not what the studios are buying this year.”

  After that encounter, Lord was busy with other clients and other affairs for several days. Hallward, much in demand, also had other jobs to catch up on. Lord did not see or hear from Sibyl Vane. She had dropped out of sight. When she was found, in a cheap motel room, she had been dead for two days. She had died of a pill overdose and it was pretty obvious that she had killed herself.

  Henry Lord phoned Dorian as soon as he heard the news. The hometronics system answered, and the agent left a message, then hurried over in case Dorian was at home and just not answering his phone.

  When Lord got to the house he found his client on the terrace, watching one short sequence of Sibyl’s graphic over and over again. Her slender figure on the stage was chastely garbed, picking imaged flowers and arranging a bouquet.

  “Dorian, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. ”

  “I was tough on her, that’s for sure. But you know, I think I learned something about myself through all this. I think things are going to be all right now.”

  “That’s good.” Lord sighed. “That’s the way to take it. I’m glad you’re taking it like that.”

  “Yeah. I learned what it feels like to do something really rotten, you know? And I don’t like it. So, no more. Today I start straightening out.”

  “Great. What’s the first step?” Lord could hope that it might involve a new dedication to the job. It was time for another session with Hallward. And this new look on Dorian’s face had graphic possibilities.

  “First step is Sibyl. I’m gonna marry her after all.” Lord stared at him for some seconds in silence. Dorian didn’t look as if he realized there was anything at all wrong with what he had just said.

  “Dorian,” the agent said finally.

  “What?”

  “I left a message on your system today. Didn’t you read it?”

  “No. I saw it there, but I . . . I was afraid it’d be something I didn’t want to know.” Dorian looked suddenly like a big, overgrown kid.

  Lord was used to that in actors. “Dorian. Sibyl Vane is dead. As near as I could tell from the information that was given on the news, you’re not mixed up in it in any way. She left a note, but I don’t believe it said anything about you.”

  “Left a note. Then she—”

  “Yeah. She did. You hadn’t seen her since she walked out of here, had you? Talked to her, maybe?”

  “No. No. Oh, my God. No, I didn’t talk to her after she left here. I killed her, though, didn’t I?” He stared at Lord. “I killed her, and I can’t feel anything.”

  “Enough of that crap about you killed her. No one kills themselves these days because their lover tells lliem to get lost. She was a real flake anyway. And anyway, you don’t want to step into the kind of publicity you’d get on this one. Especially not at this stage of your career. When you’re fifty years old and people are starting to forget about you, then maybe. Right now no one knows who you are yet. What we ought to do—” He stared at Dorian.

  “Yeah?”

  “Call up Hallward. There’s something new in your face. I think he ought to try to get it on tape for the program.” They tried to get Hallward on the phone. His hometronics system told them, after they had identified themselves, that he had just left on a trip to Japan.

  “It can wait, then, kid. It’ll have to wait. For now just sit tight. And don’t say anything to anyone about your fight with Sibyl. Okay?”

  “Okay, Hank.”

  A day passed. Then Dorian, coming back to his house from a long, aimless drive, was surprised to encounter Hallward’s van, coming down his long curving driveway just as he was starting up.

  Dorian stuck his head out of the Maserati’s window and called a greeting. The programmer grunted something in return, and added: “I want to take a look at your master.”

  “What?”

  “The master copy of your personal program. It’s still here in your house system. I want to take a lo
ok at it—I’ve got a couple hours before my plane leaves.”

  “We thought you were gone already.”

  “I put that announcement on my home system ahead of time. There were things I didn’t want to be bothered with. Let me see the program.”

  Feeling an intense reluctance, Dorian pulled in his head and gripped the steering wheel. Hallward backed his van up the curving drive and stood waiting for Dorian at the foot of the stairs.

  When both of them were standing on the terrace, Dorian paused and said: “I don’t know if you ought to see the master copy.”

  Hallward stared at him in astonishment. “Why in hell not? I’m going to be taking it to Comdex in a couple months anyway.”

  “You’re what?”

  “You heard me, pal. Comdex. The big computer show.”

  “You could take another copy.”

  “There’re shades of difference in all of’em. It says in the contract I can designate one original and keep it. This is the one I want.”

  But when Hallward had the graphic up and running, he paused, staring at Dorian-on-stage in astonishment. “What’ve you been doing to this? Who’s been working on it?”

  “No one.”

  “Goddam it, it’s changed.”

  “How could it have changed?”

  “Look at the face. Someone’s been screwing around.”

  “You should know, Hallward,” said the graphic image on the stage. “You’re an expert on screwing around. And screwing up.” It laughed.

  “Who’s been doing this?” A vein was standing out in Hallward’s forehead.

  “Not me,” said Dorian. “I’m no programmer.”

  “Neither is Hallward,” said the image, and laughed again. Hallward became abusive and threatening. This copy was his property, that was in the contract. Someone had damaged it. If the damage was something he couldn’t fix, he was going to sue Dorian Gray for his whole farm. He opened up his terminal and put on his alpha helmet—a tool that allowed a degree of direct interaction between the programmer’s brain and his machine—and got to work. A lawsuit seemed certain now. He had the evidence right here.

  It was easy for Dorian to move close behind the programmer as he sat in furious concentration before the terminal, oblivious to everything else around him. Easy to bend over and extract a heavy mallet from the open toolbox beside Hallward’s chair. The alpha helmet on Hallward’s head was too flimsy to offer any real protection, so striking the blow was, in a way, the easiest thing of all. Then Dorian struck twice more, to make sure.

  There wasn’t much blood to be taken care of; later he would hose the terrace perfectly clean. Getting the helmet off Hallward’s head was really the worst part. One of the little scalp probes had been driven right into skin and scalp and perhaps bone.

  Dorian looked over the balustrade. All was quiet, and it was getting dark, but there was still light enough to see. It was as if the necessary actions had already been planned out for him.

  He hoisted the body over his shoulders and carried it down to the parking area and loaded it into Hallward’s van. There was another gate to the parking area, seldom used, that led to a road—a rutted track rather—used only on rare occasions by utility companies. Being careful not to leave fingerprints in the van, Dorian got the keys from Hallward’s pocket and drove the paneled vehicle down the unused road until he reached the old mudslide area near the throughway.

  Here the genegineered kudzu vine recently planted by the highway department was taking charge of things. The ground-hugging vine devoured petroleum products and other pollutants from the air and soil, and released the oxygen from whatever it came across. The highway was so close now that Dorian could hear the rush of traffic in the dusk, but the traffic was above the mudslide area and the headlights never came near. The last time he had been back this way he had seen another abandoned vehicle already half-covered by the relentless kudzu. Maybe in a hundred years, he had thought, someone would take the trouble to dig it out. By that time only a few plastic parts would be left. Meanwhile everyone thought Hallward had gone to Japan. Some time would certainly pass before that was straightened out.

  Back in his house, Dorian discovered that Hallward had left a message on the home system this afternoon. The programmer said he couldn’t wait any longer, and was heading for the airport.

  All to the good. Dorian left the message unerased.

  Then he went back to the stage and confronted the graphic image of himself that still stood looking at him.

  Again the face of it had changed, more drastically this time. Yet it was still him, Dorian Gray, and this was something he could not allow the world to see.

  “I saw what you guys did,” the image announced, as its human model approached the stage. Dorian had a hard time forcing himself to look at it. The once-perfect nose of the graphic image was turning into something like the snout of a pig. The red inside of its lower eyelids showed, as if the whole face were being stretched down, and the eyes themselves were increasingly bloodshot.

  “What do you think you saw us do?” Dorian asked it at last.

  It raised a hand, moved it up and down slowly, and the fist as it moved turned into the blunt head of a mallet.

  “Bonk,” the image grated, in its once-fine voice.

  “I see I have to do a little reprogramming on my own,” said the man, and picked up the alpha helmet from the stones of the terrace. Then he stood there staring at the damaged helmet in his hands. No reason to panic because he had temporarily forgotten one detail. There were plenty of places where he could hide the helmet—the programmer might just have forgotten it here. No, because it showed damage, better to get rid of it entirely. Anyway, it would be a long time before anyone came here seriously looking for Hallward.

  “You’re not a programmer,” the graphic said. “Before you put on that helmet and start screwing around, you ought to remember that. Your job in this partnership is to look beautiful. You do that well. You should leave the other jobs to other people. ”

  “Maybe. Maybe you’re right. We’ll let the programming go for now. There’s plenty of time. ”

  “When is Sibyl coming back?” the graphic asked him.

  “Sometime. I wish . . . oh God. Oh well. Right now, you get put to sleep for a while.”

  And Dorian Gray slept well that night.

  During the next few weeks, the copies of the program of Dorian Gray that were working at the studio went on having a fine career. Prince Charming, with a new co-star, was in the can and ready for release. At Dorian’s house, the original home copy, and the damaged alpha helmet, had both been hidden away.

  The next time Henry Lord came visiting, he saw the orange Volks of the pedicurist in the parking area. Somehow he took it as a hopeful sign.

  “That bastard Hallward,” he said to Dorian. “He’s always been flaky. They wanted him for publicity the night of the premiere and he wasn’t around. Now no one can find him; there’s even some doubt he ever went to Japan at all.”

  “I have a feeling,” said Dorian, “he’s not coming back.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I killed him.”

  Lord gave his client a long look. “Still trying to get Sibyl out of your system? It’s not gonna do you any good to talk like that. Listen, we’re gonna need Hallward soon, or be looking for another programmer. With the grosses for the first week in the theaters as good as they are, we want to sign up soon for something new. ”

  “You saw Hetty leaving just now.”

  “That her name?”

  “She and I have kind of got back together.”

  “Listen, this time they’ll want to team you with some established star.”

  “No. No, I don’t mean I want to use her for a graphic.” Dorian, for some reason, shuddered faintly. “I was on the verge of asking Hetty to marry me today.”

  “Jesus Christ, kid. What is it with you and marrying? Why complicate your life just now? If—”

  “No, listen to
me, Hank. I changed my mind. Because my life is so screwed up already, I couldn’t drag her into it. And, you know? Deciding not to mess up her life too was about the best thing I’ve ever done. I think I turned some kind of a comer, doing that.”

  “Great,” said Lord after a thoughtful pause. “I agree it was probably a wise decision. You’ve got the career to think of now. I haven’t met Hetty but somehow I doubt she’d fit.”

  “Yeah,” said Dorian, “there’s the career to think about. The graphic career. I’m thinking about that more than ever now. ”

  When Henry Lord was gone, Dorian opened a drawer and stared at the innocent-looking laser disc on which the master copy of his graphic image was now stored. It seemed a long time since he had looked at the graphic, though actually only a few days had passed.

  He put the disc into the machine and called up the graphic image on the stage. He pulled the damaged helmet from its hiding place, and plugged it in, and fitted it on his head.

  When Henry Lord came back to the house that evening, he found Dorian, with the alpha wave helmet still on his head, lying dead on the terrace. Circuit breakers in the system terminal had popped off, and Lord was alert enough to notice that the helmet appeared to have been damaged. Some of its wiring looked shorted, as if it had been beaten by a hammer or something similar. Dorian’s head of blond curls looked undamaged; he wasn’t going to touch him to find out.

  “Henry Lord, Henry Lord,” said the hideous graphic cavorting on the nearby stage. It was dressed in a Nazi uniform now, like something right from central casting. “You’ve got ten percent of me. I recognize you, Henry Lord.”

  “In that you have the advantage of me, as they said in the old days.” Lord was letting his voice sound tired. “But I figure you’re right about the ten percent.” He stared at the shape, the face, the body, of the image. Might that thing once have looked like Dorian Gray?

  He reached out a hand to a nearby phone, to call the cops, then drew it back. He didn’t want to touch this house’s system, or any system that had that in it. Something was wrong with it. He’d go down to his car and use his mobile unit.