Weinberger nodded.
‘‘I took the liberty of having a word with Claudio Menotti — our euthanaser.”
‘‘I know who he is. He was on the platform at the ceremony. Oh boy, was he looking forward to his duties! Surely you didn’t tell him about —?”
“O/course I didn’t. I simply asked to borrow one of his assistants to keep an eye on certain medical equipment.”
Weinberger’s face showed a mixture of intense relief, and almost paranoid suspicion. Relief, because the equivalent of a dental appointment for a deep filling was now certainly postponed —
‘‘Oh, so we couldn’t have got started this afternoon in any case?”
And suspicion: that somehow the cage might be transformed without his knowledge into a euthanasia machine, which he would enter unwittingly.
To allay the suspicion, Jim said quickly, “Noel Resnick told me he wanted you to make a public appearance before the end. To atone. I think we can safely put that off for a while, eh?”
Weinberger smiled happily. His cage was safe. He was safe too — except from the Death which he hoped to lure into the cage, to trap.
“The assistant’s called Sally Costello. She won’t know what’s really going on. I put it to Menotti that this is a special therapy experiment sanctioned by Resnick. Which, actually, it is.”
Weinberger nodded. Jim felt sure that the man would guide himself to his own good death with hardly a guiding touch on his arm after his flirtation with this preposterous apparatus.
“We’ll set the trap tomorrow?”
“Just one tiny point,” said Jim. “Are you sure that you can ape the death state satisfactorily, without actually dying?”
He knew by now that Weinberger had also been deeply interested, while a guide, in trance states which closely approximated the actual journey into death. This discovery had forged something of a bond between the two men during the past week, though Nathan had shown no interest as yet in the oceanic unity that could be achieved that way. Weinberger rode to battle: to wage war, not peace. And yet, while helping to assemble the machine, Jim had become increasingly aware of a curious similarity between its supposed purpose and that of the sensory deprivation tank which he and Mike Mullen had built back in Gracchus, to investigate the death-trance using bio-feedback from the ‘thanatos’ rhythm.
Jim wondered how Weinberger could possibly achieve the peace of mind necessary to induce the death-trance — though Nathan had assured him that he would be able to. The benefits of Weinberger’s achieving this state, for whatever purpose, should be considerable — while the risk of going too far into death ought certainly to be minimised by Nathan’s core of anger. In his machine, Weinberger would in fact be studying the art of genuine dying, as an unintentional byproduct. When the cage produced no other result, this at least would remain as a boon to the dying man. So actually Jim had been telling the honest truth to Claudio Menotti when he described the whole business as experimental therapy.
Weinberger gripped Jim by the arm. “What do you mean — without actually dying?”
“It’s an occupational hazard of death-mimicry,’’ he said lightly, his tone entirely belying the sorrow and deprivation that he felt just then. “I lost a dear friend. In Gracchus. He was called Mike Mullen. He mimicked death not wisely but too well. And went. That’s why the Gracchus House closed down its afterlife studies. That’s how I got transferred out here.’’
“Fellow, I won’t die. Not on this bed, at any rate! Oh no!” Weinberger swung Jim round, and stared into his face. “I know how you’d hate to lose me before my time.”
Releasing Jim, he touched a lever on the medi-console, and the stimulant syringe twitched forward inside the cage. Encountering no obstacle of flesh, it did not discharge its drug.
Weinberger rubbed his hands together.
“This is a goot/set-up,” he said affectionately. “It’s better than any I could have designed myself, with all these extras. You’re right — it would have been risky all alone in my apartment. Well, not alone — I’d have had a friend keep watch. One of my buddies. That’s why the periscope’s here. But would he have been on the ball? No, I need qualified observers. How odd,” he smiled, “that Death should be trapped and trounced in his own House. Yet how appropriate!”
Poor man, thought Jim. Poor deluded man. At least, on that waterbed, he could learn to float his way out on to the ocean of unity.
Jim escorted Weinberger back to his room, then he went to guide his other charges elsewhere in the House.
TEN
Sally Costello was a chunky young woman with cascades of dark curly hair. She favoured a loose, robe-like style of dress, with her arms bare to the shoulders and several serpentine bracelets pressing her flesh. Hers was a moon face, with prominent cheeks which were somewhat pocked beneath a layer of powder. Jim imagined dust drifting into little meteor craters up on the dead world — though there was little that was dead about Sally Costello, aside from her job as Menotti’s assistant. She beamed frequently, as a natural function of the prominence of her cheeks. Her eyes twinkled. Her robe swirled. She tossed her curls. Jim wondered a little at her operatic role in her duet with Menotti. She reminded him of Mary-Ann Sczepanski, but she was younger and fleshier.
She ran her hands over the medi-console, familiarising herself, like a musician who sees an instrument but does not really know it till she touches it. She glanced through the glass walls which boxed the golden cage about, and beamed.
It was a mousetrap, thought Jim, with Weinberger soon to be laid out as the bait, synthetically scented with the gorgonzola of death — a smell which neither Jim nor Sally Costello would be able to detect.
The ‘bait’ was dressed in brief shorts and a string vest. Thus the medi-sensors could read his status easily. In this kit Weinberger looked like a victim of starvation about to sprint the hundred metres. As he stood waiting he jiggled his gaunt limbs, as though to warm up.
“Let’s get started,’’ said Jim. He pulled back the glass wall from the cage door, which he unfastened. Weinberger crawled through into the Faraday cage, careful not to buckle any of the thin wire framework. Stretching himself out on the waterbed, he reached back to don the sticktight skullcap. For a short while the bed undulated sluggishly.
“Good hunting, Nathan.”
Weinberger nodded. Composing himself, he shut his eyes. Having closed the door, Jim locked it with the gilt key which Weinberger had fastidiously included in his design, and slipped the thin key chain around his neck. Then he shut the glass panel.
He switched on the current to the cage at minimum power. It hummed faintly.
“Air recycling on” he said to himself.
“He looks like a scarecrow version of Snow White,” called Sally Costello. Weinberger would hardly be able to hear her now. “But where’s the poisoned apple?’’
“Everywhere. In his guts, in his liver, in his spleen — metastasizing. Lodged all over.’’
“Oh. I suppose so.’’ She went back to checking his vital signs on the read-outs.
Inside that glassed-in golden cage Weinberger began to intone a monotonous, hypnotic refrain to himself in tune with the mild electric hum. As Jim watched the man’s lips move, silently it seemed, he nodded approval. Weinberger was really quite adept at this technique.
Or had been, once. The mumbling went on for a long while, till the room seemed to have frozen in time. Sally’s head, bowed over the console and hooding it in black ringlets, was that of a waxwork.
At last Weinberger raised a limp hand — it was barely a gesture at all — and Jim touched the button to opaque the glass walls.
A milky fastness confronted Jim. Weinberger and his golden cage had vanished from the world.
Jim bent to the periscope, resting his brow on the hood. Inside the cage, not even Weinberger’s lips moved now. He was utterly still. In the pearly interior light he looked even more convincingly blanched and corpse-like. The mock-corpse lay beside a mirrored sel
f, which lay beside another mirrored self . . . Toe to toe, and head to head with yet others. Each lay in its own frail gilded cage, the bars of which overlaid each other as bodies multiplied further and further till they faded out and there was nothing else to be seen but bars. Right now Weinberger’s machine seemed like some device for cloning dead bodies. It was quite easy to lose one’s centre of focus in there.
The descent into the death trance took the best part of an hour. Jim began to doubt whether Weinberger would ever achieve it. He felt sure that the man’s subconscious was putting up resistance, and possibly part of his conscious mind too. Jim alternated periods of periscope watch with intervals of staring at the blank wall before him. The glass box was a great marble block now, impenetrably solid: a white kaaba. How could there be anyone inside it? But he looked down, and there was — and then the box was a mausoleum. He looked up again.
Suddenly Sally shook her hair free of her screen, breaking the spell. She tapped the screen with a chubby finger, squeezed by a large bronze ring which would never slide off until her flesh melted from her bones. Perhaps that was why she wore that ring and the squeezing bracelets.
“He’s done it. Here’s the start of the thanatos rhythm.”
Jim hugged the periscope hood around his head, and only heard her voice.
“The other rhythms have flattened out now. It’ll take four or five minutes before the thanatos wave is full enough to trip that drip-feed contraption.”
“Ah . . . drip-feed is on now.”
Jim sniffed reflectively, though he knew he would not be able to smell anything.
He focused on the point of the needle, waiting near Weinberger’s bare calf to plunge a massive dose of stimulants into the man at Sally’s command if the need arose. He kept his own hand on the squeeze-button which would multiply the power fed into the Faraday cage by fifty-fold; This should step up the power automatically when certain micro-electronic patterns appeared, about which Weinberger had not been entirely precise — perhaps he was hoping to claim a patent? — but Jim was a human back-up system able to exercise his own judgement.
Suddenly something flickered . . . into existence. A red thing — except that it was not really ‘red’ — appeared abruptly, perching upon Weinberger’s chest.
It was like a bat, or like a giant moth.... It flickered: it seemed to dance in and out of existence. It had big glassy eyes — if they were eyes — as red as the rest of its body. And a cruel little beak. It wore sharp hooks on its veil-like wings — if they were wings — like the spurs of a fighting cock from the bygone years of cruelty. The thing seemed to be trying to reach the back of Weinberger’s neck — its beak ducked forward, hen-like — but it kept hopping back to where his heartbeat was.
It was like various things, but what was it in itself? Despite his shock, Jim realized that he was only seeing what his eyes and brain could see, not necessarily what was actually there . . .
“Thanatos finale!” sang out Sally, oblivious to any of this. “Stimulating, how.”
Jim squeezed his button at the same moment. But whatever micro-electronic gizmo Weinberger had included had already done its job. The cage crackled with fifty-fold insulation.
Simultaneously the needle slid into Weinberger’s calf. Weinberger jerked like a galvanised frog, from the old time of torture experiments.
He sat upright on the water-bier, his eyes wide open.
The red thing leapt away from him, flickering, phasing in, phasing out — more in than out. It hit the side of the cage and seemed to pass through the electrified filigree; and through the glass walls too.
But no. It passed through, yet not into the room which Jim and Sally shared. It passed through into one of the reflected doubles of the cage — actually into it, leaving no ‘original* behind in the real cage.
Jim realized now that there had only ever been ‘one’ of it from the moment of its first appearance. In his initial shock at seeing it he had failed to understand this, though his brain had recorded the fact. There had been no reflections. No mirror duplicates. Many reflections there had been of Nathan Weinberger — but none of it. How could something which he could see with his eyes not have a reflection in a mirror? Perhaps . . . because it was indivisible. Nothing could double it — any more than a man could die twice. This weird characteristic made the creature seem more real than if it had possessed a hundred reflections: wherever it flew to, it existed totally. It was as though this creature had soaked up all potential reflections into itself, so that it could be seen fully — intensified — not just glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. And that was precisely the magic, or the technology, of Weinberger’s cage!
Circling outward from the real Nathan Weinberger, the red bat-moth beat from one phantom cage to the next. Yet the further it flew outward, the more golden bars got in the way. Very soon it was flying into a wall of thick syrup. It could escape no further through the reflections.
Weinberger swung round, tracking it. He grabbed in the air with both hands. The space above the actual waterbed was empty; the thing — Death — was not there. But in all of the mirror-cages all the reflections of his hands grabbed in unison. Weinberger seemed to know exactly what he was doing.
Death flapped frantically around the circuit, from one cage to the next, to escape those grasping hands. But it was all one and the same cage to Nathan.
He caught it.
In a cage thrice removed from the original the hands of one of his reflections closed on it and held it tight. His own real hands remained empty, as did those of all the other reflections of himself. But not that one reflected pair. Not those. They held the red thing high. The bat-moth. Death.
Death slashed at his hands with its wing-hooks, and gouged with its beak. Blood ran down the hands and wrists of that reflection. The real Nathan cried out in pain — and yet his hands showed no trace of wounds. Only the hands of that one mirror image which held the creature were being flayed and stabbed — yet Weinberger still felt the pain.
However much it hurt him, he refused to let go of the creature and continued to wrestle with it. It seemed quite uncrushable, if he was trying to crush it. With face distorted, he held on. His own two empty hands were cupped in mid-air, the sinews standing out. However much damage the creature did to his phantom hands, he still held it fast out there in the reflection. His finger bones had become a cage.
“He’s over-reacting to the stimulant!” Sally called, seeing none of this. “What’s happening?”
“He’s fighting Death!” cried Jim. “He’s caught Death and he’s fighting it!”
“What?”
At that moment Weinberger faced towards where he knew Jim must be.
“Depolarise the glass!” he bellowed through the wall. “Transluce it!”
Jim tore himself away from the periscope hood, found the button and hit it.
Immediately he and Sally could both see through the cage. And of course, all the reflection worlds had disappeared. Weinberger was still wrestling — with thin air. His fingers still clutched — nothing. Jim could see what the man was doing, because he already knew what he was doing, but to Sally it must have seemed an insane mime.
Now Weinberger was tearing Death free so that he could hold it in one clenched hand — to throw it far away from him? No, now that he had succeeded he would never give up his hold on Death. He held that one imprisoning hand aloft in a salute. Baring his teeth, he grinned through his agony.
“Cut the current!” he ordered harshly.
Jim squeezed the bulb. The crackling hiss, which might have been the sound of Death’s wingbeat or its wordless voice, faded away.
“Unlock the cage!”
Jim pulled the glass wall open, as ordered, then hesitated. Was he, in effect, letting Death — impossible, inconceivable, living Death — out into the world? Yet with the current no longer flowing, a mesh of frail wires hardly seemed any obstacle . . .
Weinberger saw his hesitation.
“You fool,
I’ve got tight hold of it!” he shouted at Jim’s face from the other side of the wires. He could easily burst through the wires by main force, but even in this extremity he had no desire to damage any part of his invention.
“It isn’t here. Not in this ‘here*! It’s still in the reflection — that’s where I’ve got hold of it!”
Had he? Had he really? Or was the pain so deeply etched into his punctured nerves and scoured fingers that he only thought he had? Was Weinberger only imagining that the struggle still went on in the way that an amputee feels phantom limb sensations?
Jim could not believe it. Weinberger continued to clutch the air — impeccably, and agonisedly. All the reflections had gone away to wherever reflections went when they were off duty. Yet, wherever that place might be, his reflected hands must still be mimicking, there, the shape and stance of his actual flesh and blood hands . . .
Jim tore the key from his neck, snapping the chain in his haste. He jabbed it at the lock twice before he succeeded in inserting it and turning it. At last he tugged the door open.
Weinberger crawled out and staggered erect before Jim and Sally, his clenched hand held at arm’s length, triumph and torment written on his face.
ELEVEN
As soon as Jim sank into the bean-bag seat, Resnick planted both hands firmly on the corner of his desk and began to pivot from side to side.
“This House is not a theatre of the absurd . .
Resnick was upset, and if he sat down he might not be able to speak coherently.
Sally Costello had talked to Claudio Menotti, who had duly complained to the Master about her distress. Jim’s cry — ‘He’s caught Death and he’s fighting it’ — had planted a dagger of disquiet in Sally’s heart, which had been driven deep by Weinberger’s frenzied emergence from the cage clutching an imaginary something at arm’s length.
Resnick’s scene-screen showed no sunset seascape this morning, but a smouldering volcano billowing smoke, on the verge of exploding.
Watson, Ian - Novel 10 Page 7