"Gate, please open up. I want to go in," she told it, but for the first time in her life, she was talking to a gate that did not hear her. For the second time that evening, she was completely perplexed. The universe just wasn't acting the way it was supposed to. Mr. McIntosh was supposed to be waiting for her at the end of her lesson, and gates were supposed to open up when you asked them--she had even said please.
So it was that Joan found herself alone, for the first time, trapped outside her world of safety, in a strange place at night.
She was not alone for long.
The woman in the red cloak was a Touchable, of course--Joan knew that. In fact, Joan knew all about Touchables. She knew that her mother always steered her and her brothers away from Touchables who sold hoop dogs on bagels in the streets. She also knew that the end of holovision programs, Touchables were often sent to the microwave ovens.
Joan interpreted this, from her limited experience with microwave ovens, to mean that Touchables were being sent to a kitchen somewhere and were being forced to bake bagels and reheat hoop dogs. It was these stale goods that her mother didn't want to buy from the Touchables on the steet.
This Joan was fully expecting the woman to try to sell her a stale hoop dog when she approached. If she'd had any money, she would have bought it, too; she hadn't had dinner yet.
"You look like a nice little girl," the Touchable said to Joan. "Aren't you, now?"
Joan felt very shy, but she managed to nod. Now that she was very close to the Touchable--closer than she'd ever been to one before--Joan could see that the woman was pretty, with blond hair peeking out from under the hood, and large, deep-set eyes. Joan could also sense that the woman was very frightened.
"I knew you were nice, I knew it," the Touchable said. "And I'm sure a nice little girl like you wouldn't want to see anything bad happen to someone, would you?"
"Not if they didn't do something bad first," Joan said. Then she immediately covered her mouth with her hand because she had remembered that she wasn't allowed to talk with strangers.
But the Touchable was ready for this. "You don't have to be afraid to talk to me. I have a daughter just like you at home. In fact, it's because of her that I need your help."
This was absolutely true; the Touchable was one of the resident mothers in Vaginatown, just across the landing strip; and she was frightened because she had failed to make it back to the ghetto before sundown.
Nonetheless, her remark was well planned, having just the effect on Joan's curiosity that she expected. For the simple fact was that like most other little girls of the upper class, Joan had met very few girls of her own age.
"What are you afraid of?" Joan asked suddenly.
The Touchable decided to give Joan the same explanation she had given to her own daughter. "Do you know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?" she asked.
Joan nodded; she had the storydisc at home.
"Well," the Touchable said. "I'm just like Red Riding Hood. That's why I have to wear a red cloak. And I'm afraid that if I don't get right home, the Wolf will get me."
"Oh," said Joan, when she made a thoroughly logical connection. "Then you don't have to be afraid. Wolf told me that he doesn't bite people anymore."
This was a decidedly odd turn of conversation, the Touchable thought. It might have remained totally incomprehensible to her if they had not been standing right in front of an institute of lasegraphy. The Touchable knew nothing about lasegraphy, but for her generation there was a name as thoroughly associated with that art as Stokowski's had been to symphonic music, or Einstein's to physics, for previous generations. Could it be possible? Tentatively she asked, "Do you mean Wolfgang Jaeger?"
Joan nodded. "Do you know him too?"
This was an opportunity the woman had not expected. It was getting very dark now, and each moment she was out of the ghetto increased the danger. She knew that a Touchable crossing the landing strip into Vaginatown after sunset was a clear target for the Marnies who hunted in the area. But if she could persuade the child to accompany her across, there was a chance that she would be unmolested. While any Touchable was a legal game target after dark, she had found that most packs of Marnies had at least one member--a woman or androman--who was loath to involve a child, even a Touchable's.
All this crossed her mind in the split second it took her to decide to lie. "Yes, I do," she answered Joan, then took her lie one step further than she needed to. "Wolfgang Jaeger is a very good friend of mine."
Joan's face lit up. Concatenative friendship is the oldest and most obvious principle of human association, whether to a tribal warrior, or to a bank's loan manager, or to a five-year- old girl told not to speak to strangers. "It's okay for me to talk to you, then," Joan said. "But why are you afraid of Wolf? He said that he doesn't bite his friends."
I'll need the reflexes of a hunted animal to explain this, the Touchable woman thought. Then suddenly, by this very reflex, her mind made a connection and she remembered a newscast on the holy three months before. A news commentator was finishing up her report on Wolfgang Jaeger's visit to Earth for his centennial. "Wolfgang Jaeger," the commenter had closed. "His name translates roughly from German as 'Hunter of the Wolf Pack,' but it will be in the Tiger Pit that the master lasegrapher will be hunting tomorrow at the pyradome."
"Oh, you're getting confused," the Touchable told Joan lightly. "Wolfgang Jaeger is the hunter who saved Red Riding Hood from the Wolf. That's why 'wolf' is part of his name. I'm not afraid of Wolfgang, but the Wolf himself."
"Oh," Joan said. This wasn't crystal-clear, but it seemed to make a sort of sense. "I thought that Wolf was just make believe."
The Touchable decided to follow up on this before the point was lost. She couldn't be sure, but she thought she heard the distant whine of a flying belt. "No," she said, and gave a little shiver, "the Wolf isn't make-believe. But he isn't an animal, like it shows him in the storydiscs, but a very cruel man. And that's why I need your help. You see," the Touchable went on, "I have to walk home to my little girl--we live right across the runway--only the Wolf will be looking for me. But he's a very big coward, and if he sees the two of us together, he'll run right away. So will you walk home with me?"
"What about Mr. McIntosh?" Joan asked.
"Who's Mr. McIntosh?" the Touchable said quickly. She thought the flying belt might be closer.
"My governor," Joan said. "He's supposed to take me home after my lesson."
"I'll phone him as soon as we get to my home."
"Can't you phone him from here?"
The whine was definitely nearer. "I'm not wearing a phone, dear. Come on, we'd better hurry."
"Okay."
The Touchable took Joan's hand, and they began walking toward the landing strip.
They walked down the street slowly. The woman knew how futile it was to try to evade pursuit from a sky-belter, if they were spotted, and any attempt at running would be interpreted as resistance. The first thing one learned as a Touchable was that open resistance tended to be fatal.
Beyond the last apartment building, the street was unlighted. Since the runway itself was without lights--landing guidance relied on other parts of the spectrum--it was becoming darker with each step. In spite of herself, the Touchable began pulling Joan along more quickly. Joan started to say something, but the woman shushed her. She strained her ears, trying to hear the flying belt, but it seemed to be gone. She relaxed slightly.
They finally came to the landing strip and started across. The white plastic below their feet was slightly phosphorescent and still rain-slicked; what faint light there was from distant sources reflected up a ghostly aura. Then, suddenly, the Touchable felt it and gasped. She stopped, grasping Joan's hand tightly. One wasn't supposed to be able to tell, but after a while one always knew. Her transponder had been scanned. "We must be brave now," she told Joan, and they resumed walking across.
The light hit them at the halfway point.
The light was not the l
anding beacon of a skymobile in flight, but a warning flare tossed onto the ground. They halted. The flare blinded them, reflecting across the white plastic as if it were a sheet of ice, and cast ghoulish long shadows behind them.
"Out past curfew, aren't you, little mother?" the man's voice said. He was ahead of them, beyond the flare. The red-cloaked woman and Joan stood absolutely still. From the roughness of the voice, Joan was sure it was the Wolf.
"I asked you a question," the voice said.
"I can't see your medallion," the Touchable said.
"Oh, you want to see me, do you? Well, let's see how much."
A second flare was struck, and after being tossed in an arc over their heads, it landed behind them, so they could see who was there.
There was only the one man. He was wearing a flying belt and standard Marnie hunting apparel--black leather jacket and pants, high leather boots--but he was not wearing a Marnie's helmet with its official hunting medallion. The man was short by current standards, only about five feet eleven inches. His face was long, unshaved, and rattish, with sharp nose and pale-but- mottled skin. His black hair was greasy and unkempt.
"Now, answer me," he said.
The Touchable delayed long enough to allow the whine of a skymobile passing close overhead to die away.
"My little girl and I are on our way back into the ghetto," she said. "We are, as you said, a few minutes past curfew. But surely a gentleman such as you won't keep my little girl out past her bedtime?"
"I'm not any rapin' gentleman," the man said, and he grinned wildly.
"Are you the Wolf?" Joan asked him.
He laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. "Well, little girl, in a way. I'm Touchable, same as your mother."
If the woman had been frightened to this point, she became terrified now. While a Marnie would sexually abuse a Touchable in almost any imaginable way, it was a rule of the hunt always to leave the Touchable unharmed, available to later hunters, so long as there was no resistance. But a Touchable out hunting other Touchables was a frustrated sex criminal who might do anything. The woman grabbed Joan's hand and pulled her forward.
The man let them get a few feet away, then gave a short blast of his flying belt and jumped ahead of them again.
"If you're Touchable, you can't possibly have any real interest in me," she told him. "Let us pass."
"Wrong again," the man said. "I'm one of the lucky ones. Found a real nice doctor who, for a price, grew me another manhood and sewed it back on, good as new."
"I'm not interested in your medical history," the Touchable woman said. "And you're just wasting time. You'd better hide somewhere yourself before the Marnies get you. It's the ovens for you this time, if they catch you uncloaked with a belt and a you-know-what."
He grinned again, more ferally than before. "Suppose you let me worry about the rapin' Marnies. You want to leave? Go right ahead, little mother, anytime you like."
The woman and Joan started forward again. Once more the man blocked them.
"All I want is the pretty little girl."
Vera watched from the dark.
She had seen the groundflares on her Phaethon's initial approach, passed over them, then set down at the far end of the runway and taxied to the parking zone. When she'd passed close by the flares again on her walk back to the Malcolm Institute, she had approached to see Joan, and to hear the two adults talking, but she was far enough away not to be seen herself.
"All I want is the pretty little girl."
She had not arrived in time to hear the earlier exchange between the leather-jacketed man and the red-cloaked woman, so she assumed that the man was a Marnie out to have his way with a Touchable's child. Touchable children, as Vera knew from her beginning law studies, had an odd, mixed-up status under Federation law. Theoretically, they were full citizens, not having to be cloaked and legally immune to sexual assault. But so long as they were under the guardianship of a Touchable parent, their brainprint registrations identified them as Touchables. And from the law discs she had begun studying, Vera knew that, de facto, no Marnie had ever been successfully prosecuted for molesting a Touchable's child.
So Vera knew that all she needed to do to rescue Joan from the man she thought to be a Marnie was to step a few meters forward into the light and tell the man to read Joan's transponder. Once he was satisfied that the little girl did not belong to the Touchable, Vera could escort Joan away, leaving him to have his fun with the Touchable.
But she did not make a move to do it. Instead, as she thought about moving forward to get Joan, she became more and more terrified.
The human mind is, at its best, complicated; at its worst, it is inexhaustibly devious. No one has ever claimed that one can truly know, outside of God's Final Judgement, what the absolute base of a human being's motivations is, even one's own. So it may well be that even though Vera knew that no man even half- insane would risk the ovens to touch a veteran like herself -- especially with a Touchable available--the wild look of this man was enough to make her afraid. Alternatively, it may be that her sensation of terror was merely a cover her brain was offering her, to prevent her from realizing that the wanted Joan to be hurt--punished--for being everything that she could not be. Perhaps both causes were simultaneous and never discrete.
In any case, at the moment when Vera thought that she could not wait any longer to walk forward into the light--at the moment she would watch the man knock Joan to the pavement--she felt the sensation of heat in her panties and down the insides of her thighs, and she became aware that she was wetting herself. The realization startled her, but she made no effort to stop. Instead, she rebelled against her terror, against her lost individuality, against her sister, against her mother, and in the stroke of an instant defected to the winning side. With the full genius of her subconscious mind, Vera slid her hand under the skirt into the golden stream draining out of her panties and masturbated herself, furiously, until she came.
"All I want is the pretty little girl."
"No!" the Touchable woman said.
"Who's gonna stop me," the man asked, "you? Hand her over, before I get rough."
"You lay a hand on her and the Monitors will hunt you forever."
"A Touchable's daughter? Don't make me laugh."
"I lied about her being my daughter," the woman said. "She's a student at the laser school over there."
The man looked down at Joan and snarled. "Is that true?"
Joan huddled closer in to the woman, but not wanting to cooperate with the "Wolf" said, "I'm not allowed to talk to you."
"You'd better read her transponder, if you don't believe me," the woman said.
The man uncovered his wrist scanner and took a reading from Joan's transponder. Several seconds later, the Monitor computers had answered him via satellite relay. "Cloneraping scat!"
He stood there a minute, fuming, then said, "I have half a mind to take her anyway. They can't kill you more than once."
The Touchable let go of Joan's hand and gently pushed her behind herself. Then she lowered her hood, revealing her face and hair. She stepped forward, provocatively, resting one hand on her hip. "What's the matter?" she said. "Can't you handle a real woman?"
She had done it deliberately, and now watched the man's rage, seeing his raw lust mixed in with it. He stepped forward, held himself back long enough to emphasize that it was deliberate, then backhanded her hard across her face. The force of the blow knocked her to the ground.
"Let her alone!" Joan shouted, and she launched herself at the man. She started raining blows ineffectually on his leather jacket. But he was no longer interested in Joan. He put up with her for a few seconds, then simply knocked her to the pavement.
Joan sat on the runway, one knee and elbow skinned, and began to cry.
The man walked past her to the Touchable. "Get up," he told the woman.
The Touchable woman stood, unsteadily. In one swift motion, the man pulled the red cloak over her head and threw it on the
ground next to Joan. Except for a small gold cross on a thin chain around her neck, she was naked.
Joan stopped crying a little, grabbing on to the discarded cloak for a bit of comfort, and looked at the Touchable closely. Joan had never seen a naked adult woman before.
The man was also looking hard, his breathing becoming rapid and irregular. He reached down to his leather pants and released his erect penis.
Joan looked at this closely also; she had never seen anything like this either. So she was watching when the man lifted up the woman and tried to shove his penis into her, but it wouldn't go in right away. He reached up to his hair, removed some grease, and slicked it onto his organ. He lifted her up again, and this time, when he shoved, his penis went in. If Joan had been curious until now, she found this absolutely astonishing.
The man laughed. The Touchable woman knew what was going to happen now. She closed her eyes and her lips began moving silently.
With a single thrust, the man revved his flying belt, grabbed the woman tightly, and took off into the sky, almost vertically.
Joan watched as they went higher, and higher, and higher into the dark sky. She couldn't see them anymore. Then, about half a minute later, a woman's body plummeted to the runway only fifteen meters or so away from where Joan was still sitting, and exploded into a mangled heap of blood, hair, and bones.
The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form Page 10