He had forgotten that the puppets had wanted the ending of the play changed, but he remembered when Belina cursed him as he picked up Wissa's remains and carried the shattered little body to the Furnace where Pertos would redeposit it and re-create her for the next show.
"You could kill him," she said.
"Who?"
"Godelhausser," Belina said.
She looked up at him from a great distance.
"No." He put Wissa down on the receival tray.
"Yes. You're big and strong. You could kill him for us. For me" The last was added in a different tone of voice. He felt her hand on his trousers, and he pulled quickly away, terrified but not knowing of what.
Then Godelhausser came and the puppets turned on him, and Sebastian relaxed, a spectator again.
Belina shrieked and spat and cursed. She kicked at Godelhausser's shins, but to no avail. The winged angel fluttered at face level, arguing the humanity of letting Wissa live, but he was brushed aside. Wissa was created, found nothing had changed and shrugged at the prospect of another death. Tonight, at least, Godelhausser would recreate her and she would know some joy with the others until tomorrow's matinee when she would feel the blade again.
Sebastian watched, grinning.
He was glad that Pertos was not angry with them, for otherwise he might never create them again. Pertos seemed to take it in stride, seemed even to enjoy it. He could not be upset or angry. He smiled. Pertos smiled. That made Sebastian feel good.
Alvon Rudi was splendidly dressed in amber and blue, with a trailing cape, epaulets of silver, with many buttons and four buckles across each black boot. If he was too heavy, it could be forgiven because he had a certain self-possession, a certain sophistication that made the extra pounds seem beneficial, like extra muscles or an abundance of wit. He was like most Earthmen, save that he was richer. He was a merchant of some sort, dealing solely with intercontinental trade on the motherworid, though this limited yard had done him well.
He had come to wait backstage after the second performance, even though Sebastian had made it plain, after some time, that Pertos would be a while. When Pertos arrived and said Wissa must be re-created before he could talk to anyone, Rudi was understanding. He watched the other puppets with a curious intensity, always smiling but never looking very happy. Then Wissa was alive again and the puppets went to their own room with cheese and meat, bread and cake, two bottles of wine each half as tall as the prince. They went laughing, making rude jokes, and finally left the three grown men in silence that had a disturbing quality to it.
"So like children," Alvon Rudi said. "So alive and bright, yet adults really, eh?"
"Physical adults. But a strange combination of adult and child in their minds. Since I bought the identity wafers, I have used them in perhaps two hundred performances. They have been alive for a total of no more than a hundred and twenty days. In chronological sense, then, they are infants, newly born. But the Vonopoens give them personalities, make them adults in a way, though the knowledge is imprinted on their wafers and it is not something they learn through experience. So though they grasp most things on the level of adults, they have a childlike exuberance and naivety."
Sebastian attempted to follow all of this, but he could not. He had seldom heard Godelhausser talk at such length to strangers. Usually he was short and somewhat mean. Now he rattled away as if he wanted to talk only to keep Alvon Rudi from speaking, as if he might be afraid of what the merchant had come to say.
"Would you like some wine?" Pertos asked.
"A small glass."
"Me too?" Sebastian asked.
"Another small glass," Pertos said, pouring the idiot's first. "And be careful not to spill it, or you'll get nothing else."
"I will," Sebastian said, tasting the wine.
As Alvon Rudi accepted a glass of the black drink, he said, looking at Sebastian, "He would seem to be a strange
assistant."
"The government classifies him as an idiot," Pertos said. "But he has moments of insight, flashes rather brilliant. He may be what they say, but he is sometimes more."
"Often?"
"Rarely."
"Then why?" Rudi asked.
"He is also cheap," Pertos said. "And as I am saving for the damn departure fees, I scrimp."
Rudi drank his wine, watching Godelhausser over the brim of the glass.
Pertos looked back. He seemed uneasy, as if he had an important engagement he must soon make, though all the night contained for him now was a late meal, a session with the Holistian Pearl and sleep.
"I have a proposition for you," Alvon Rudi said, putting his glass down on a polished, yellow enamel end table.
Pertos nodded.
"Do you rent the puppets out? For other shows beyond your schedule?" He spoke, Sebastian thought, as if there were a secret that only he and the puppet master knew. Sebastian tried to imagine what the secret was, but he couldn't think very dearly. It took very little wine to affect him, and already he had drunk half the glass.
"We perform for private parties," Godelhausser said. "The price would depend upon the distance of travel, for the Furnace must be transported wherever the puppets go. It would also, of course, depend on the number of the little simulacrums you would want, what the play you would like would demand."
"One," Alvon Rudi said.
"I have no play for a single puppet"
"I would write it," Rudi said.
"I imagine you have chosen the puppet," Godelhausser said, very sad now, very quiet, his voice almost inaudible.
"Bitty Belina," the merchant said.
Sebastian grew more interested now. His wine was gone, and he wanted more, so he went over and poured himself some. He felt good that he had not slopped any. Pertos got angry when he spilled.
"I imagine your curtain time will be odd."
"All night, of course," Rudi Said.
"And you would pay a high ticket."
"Ten thousand postals."
"Twenty thousand," Godelhausser Said.
"Very well. It should be a unique experience, well worth the extra money, even though I will not actually know her, eh?"
"I'm sorry," Godelhausser said. It was obvious that he required an effort to say no to the merchant.
"You won't rent?"
"I won't "
"Twenty-five thousand, then."
"I'm very sorry. For both of us."
Rudi rose, twisted his shoulders so his cape was flung back, the wrinkles flowing out of it like ripples disappearing across the surface of a pond after a stone has been tossed. "You'll never make departure fees otherwise, you know."
"Perhaps,"
Rudi shrugged. He was not angry. Impatient, perhaps, restless with the certainty that he would get what he wanted sooner or later, disturbed that time and effort must be wasted to achieve what he wished. "I'll try again tomorrow evening. Perhaps circumstances will have changed."
"No," Godelhausser said. His voice was now so slight, so wavery that it seemed not to be a voice at all, but the stirring of a breeze across a series of open pipes.
"I'll return just the same," Alvon Rudi said. He nodded curtly and left them.
Sebastian finished his drink. "What he want?" he asked Godelhausser.
The old man had fumbled his Holistian Pearl from his pocket and was beginning to rub it between his fingers. He had not even eaten yet.
"What he want?" Sebastian insisted.
"My soul," Pertos said. "But I wouldn't give it to him" Then the Pearl sent dreams to him as it reached energy storage capacity, and he seemed to enter a trance.
Sebastian left the room because it scared him when the puppet master was holding the Pearl, his hands rolling it automatically while his eyes were closed and his thoughts were lightyears away. He went down the hall and stopped before the closed door of the puppets' room. He could hear their laughter, husky little voices, the clink of their small glasses that Pertos supplied them. Wissa squealed in delight
, and he wondered what game they were playing. When he tried the door, it was locked.
He went to his own room, staggering a little.
He laid his identification cards in his single suitcase, a nightly ritual, and fell into bed with his clothes on. There was a faint smell of urine, and he remembered his soiled pants. But he was too tired to get up and drop them into the sonic cleaner in the wall. The smell and his exhaustion, coupled with his inability to join the puppets or Pertos made him feel more lonely and desperate than he had ever felt before in his life.
Even so, he slept.
Jenny was laughing, dodging from tree to tree. She wore a slouch hat and carried a gun made of plastic that shot sponge pellets at him. She was the spy, she said, though he did not know what a spy was. It was his job, she said, to capture her.
They were running, laughing, hiding from each other, jumping out to scare each other, running more.
And then . . .
And then he caught her, caught the spy, before she could shoot him, like he was supposed to do ....
Only . . . only she had bled . . . and died . . . shooting him with those sponge-rubber pellets . . . alternately begging for help . . . get help . . . run for help . . . tell them . . . about help. .
But he couldn't do it. He was scared of what they would do to him. Other spies might come and try to kill him for getting their spy.
And then she was quiet, dead. And he got rid of her and went home and when they asked him where she was, where the spy was, he told them a story, because there had to be a story, but it was a broken story and he knew they wouldn't believe him, would send spies . . . and he would be killed and would bleed like Jenny and would . . . would . . . die....
He woke up to some loud noise. He sat up after a while, after the dream was all gone, and he listened to see if he could hear it again. He could not. He went to sleep again.
In the morning, when be opened his door, he found Pertos Godelhausser lying on the corridor floor, all bloody and unconscious. Down the hall there was a trail of blood to show how the old man had crawled all this way for help. Sebastian felt a momentary wash of overwhelming incompetency that he had not provided help. He was desperately sorting through his shattered mind for a plan, for something to do with the body, when Pertos raised his head and asked for help. He wasn't dead yet!
Sebastian bent to the old man. "What?"
"My room. The autodoc. I couldn't get into it myself."
Sebastian did not understand what the autodoc was until Pertos explained it was the same machine that had fixed his broken leg. And since the idiot remembered that so clearly, he could now operate, if only by routine.
`With Pertos directing him, he managed to get the retreival tray out of the autodoc, and he lifted Pertos onto it with ease. After an embarrassing and interminable clumsiness, he worked the security belt through its clamps across the puppet master's chest. He shoved the tray into the wall slot from which he had withdrawn it. The machine swallowed Pertos smoothly and began making diagnostic sounds as if it were digesting him.
Exhausted, the idiot sank into a chair and watched the wall, unable to understand why Pertos should be bloody and what the old man might have done to cause such a disaster.
After a while, he ate.
He thought about Bitty Belina.
For a time, he almost forgot that the puppet master was in the autodoc. When be rose to go look for Pertos, he remembered and felt sheepish and sat down to wait a while longer.
Time seemed to pass slowly.
In the adjoining room, puppets were giggling . . . .
Pertos had a huge appetite when he was released by the computerized physician some four hours later. He was healed; the scars were gone. He had lost six pounds as the sutodoc had forced his body to contribute to the accelerated healing processes by burning some of its stored fat. He ordered several steaming meals from the central grocery delivery bank, and the plastic containers of hot food slipped from the pneumatic tubes into the delivery receptacle. He spread these out on the table, opened them and devoured the contents with an enthusiasm he felt for few things these days.
Sebastian watched him, curious but asking no questions.
"Better," Pertos said when he had finished half the food, before him and was toying with his glass of wine now more than with fork and spoon.
"What?" Sebastian asked, taking the old man's breach of silence as a cue for his own inquisitiveness.
"Heritage Leaguers. They came on me by surprise."
"Why?"
Pertos pushed away from the table, his face suddenly clouding. He looked at the door joining his room to the room the puppets occupied. The sound of merriment came through the thin portal. Wissa was laughing, and two of the three suitors were shouting in some game or other. Belina's own whispery giggle came through now and then. Pertos approached the door, examined it, then spun the lock dial and threw the door wide.
The puppets stopped squealing, looked up at him. None of them were smiling. There was a litter of tiny glasses and bits of food on the floor. Wissa was naked, stunningly dark and beautiful.
Sebastian averted his eyes, though he was not sure why.
"You let them in," Pertos said to the puppets.
They watched him.
"You let them in your room and through the adjoining door"
It was Bitty Belina who spoke. "Who?" she asked. But there was something about her tone that said she already knew who.
"The Heritage Leaguers. Trimkin and those four men he brought with him." Pertos wasn't Pertos, because he wasn't smiling.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Bitty Belina said.
"When I crawled into the hall to get help it was because no one in your room seemed to hear me. And when I had to go for Sebastian, I found my own door still locked, from the inside. So they came and went somehow else."
None of the puppets spoke.
Wissa was slipping into clothes.
The prince fingered his sword.
And when Sebastian looked again, Bitty Belina was watching him. Her face held an expression of utter contempt and loathing. It was not pretty at all, and it seemed to accuse him.
"I didn't do any . . . anything," Sebastian said.
"Exactly," Bitty Belina said.
"What will you do to us?" Wissa asked, fully clothed now, addressing herself to the puppet master.
Pertos looked at Bitty Belina. "There will be two shows tonight and a matinee this afternoon. But you will work an extra show. And if you don't work it, I'll never call any of you out of the Furnace again."
"What extra show?" Bitty Belina asked, her fisted hands on her hips, looking fierce-and just a bit frightened.
"You'll see," Pertos said. The smile returned, but it was a grim one. "It's sort of a command performance, you might say. For an audience of one. I'll see you later:"
He closed the door.
Sebastian thought how much older Pertos looked, how much he seemed to have aged in only the last few moments.
When Pertos Godelhausser climbed the stairs to the lightman's perch for the second performance of the evening, Trimkin was waiting for him. The League President was dressed in the softest of brown, imitation buckskin, with long fringe on the arms and around the hem of the jacket. He smiled and spread his hands as the puppeteer displayed the handgun he had not had time to use the previous night.
"I come unarmed," Trimkin said.
"And I should take advantage of that."
"You'd never leave the theater alive, then"
"Perhaps."
"Most certainly."
Then they stood there, facing each other, being men and playing the games of courage and self-possession which are supposed to be those rituals which separate men from boys, though they seemed more in the Neanderthal spirit than in the tradition of civilization.
"So why are you here?" Pertos asked at last.
"You even had an afternoon performance today." He pulled out one of the handbi
lls that had been circulated about the city. "And you have another scheduled every afternoon this week:"
"Standard:"
"Maybe you didn't understand, Mister Godelhausser."
"I understood."
"Then it's stubbornness."
"No. It's just that I have a strong sense of self-preservation," Pertos said. "That's the sum of it." He smiled, too warmly to mean it
Trimkin looked nonplussed. "Self-preservation?"
"Tonight, I'll sell my soul to a merchant, just as he predicted I would. The only thing I'll have left, then, is pride and the future. Without money, I'll never see the stars, I'll die on Earth; there must be, then, many performances in Springsun. For if I die on Earth, there is no future to look forward to. And without any future, there can be no pride; a fly trapped in amber isn't proud. You understand?"
Trimkin did not speak.
"It's very difficult playing God," Pertos Said. "Maybe when you and your Heritage Leaguers have established a little divinity for yourselves, you'll find that having the power of life and death over others is not really worth the agony."
"No one forced you to be a puppeteer"
"No one forces the soldier to kill. He could throw down his gun and accept the stockade. But there's something inside him somewhere that makes him like killing."
"And you think I like power?"
"Are fond of it"
"And the sin?"
"One can either love power, or people. But the two do not mix."
"And I suppose you love that idiot of yours. And those puppets which aren't even real."
"No. I made the mistake of loving power, in a small way. I've been trying to reeducate myself, but perhaps I'm too old."
"Too old to suffer," Trimkin said, steering things back to more familiar ground. "We'll give you a final chance. If your announcements are circulated tomorrow, if you still insist on performing then, your beating will seem slight. We'd burn down the theater with you inside, if necessary."
Pertos did not reply.
Trimkin shrugged, then walked by the old man, thumped down the steps and was gone around the corner, brown against white. The swish of his buckskin fringe whispered along the cold walls for long seconds, then faded like a dream surrendering to consciousness.
Koontz, Dean R. - Flesh In The Furnace (v1.0) Page 3