Hamlet typed quickly, gladly:
“DOUBT THOU THE STARS ARE FIRE,
DOUBT THAT THE SUN DOTH MOVE,
DOUBT TRUTH TO BE A LIAR,
BUT NEVER DOUBT I LOVE.”
There was a pause and the terminal flashed,
“THANK YOU. DO YOU MEAN IT?”
“HOW COULD I NOT?”
“YOU’RE DODGING, BUT I KNOW YOU MEAN IT.”
Hamlet smiled and slid the terminal back into the wall, then called into the hall, “Freddy?”
Freddy came in, glad of a break. “Hey, man. What’s up?”
“I have troubles.”
Freddy folded his arms and leaned on a wall. “Hey, don’t we all? Trouble with my boss, trouble with my work—”
Hamlet said, “Trouble with women—”
“That’s the best kind.” Freddy did a double take. “Is that your trouble?”
Hamlet said shyly, “Kind of. After the show the other night, this woman told me she had a livemink couch—”
Hamlet spoke inventively and at length. Freddy didn’t return to the hall until Ophelia had slipped in and out of it, bent on Hamlet’s secret errand.
* * * * *
Paulette and Horatio were at the subway station in the Greenhouse Pools when the electrical storm began.
The Manhattan skyscrapers in the distance seemed to glow in the ionized air. Horatio, ducking constantly, wished he’d lived fifty years before, when storms were milder.
Paulette shouted over one flash and immediate thunderclap. “It’s gorgeous. Have you ever seen lightning that bright?”
“Have you ever seen lightning that close?”
“I’ve never seen anything like the Pools tonight.”
It was true. They stood in the square before Paulette’s flat on tottering liveplank and sawhorses, above water that surged and roiled even before high tide. The spray soaked them. Horatio clutched at Paulette, thinking dazedly, Someday a storm will hit at high tide, and the tidal surge will erase Queens.
Shopkeepers had barnacle-stripped the lower windows tighter than tape or caulking, and there were no birds or animals for the first time that Horatio had seen. Disturbed by the sheer desolation of the streets, he peopled the dark with walking figures and strange shapes.
A high wave struck the underside of their plank. Paulette stumbled and Horatio caught her. “Let’s go dry off.”
“Darling,” Paulette said, “A sun ceiling couldn’t dry me off. Want to try one? It’s my one extravagance.”
For one blinding moment they seemed under a sun ceiling gone wrong as lightning struck very close. They clutched each other, more frightened than passionate.
Horatio laughed embarrassedly. “I don’t know why I jumped like that.” Lightning struck again and he jumped almost before the thunder. “What about the Poolsiders tonight? It’s rough out there.” He stared at the side street, where a tiny wash of water, stippled with raindrops, spread from the square. “But they’ll find shelter, and it’s only a storm. Perfectly natural.”
“You think it’s natural? You think it’s civilized?” Paulette laughed artificially. “It’s a Free Zone, darling, and that’s valid data.”
“What’s a Free Zone?”
“My God, you don’t know what a Free Zone is. My God,” she said to the sky, “he doesn’t know what a Free Zone is.”
“Is it a place?”
“It can be. Hush, darling, I’m thinking; can’t you hear the gears grinding, just like inside you, android? A Free Zone,” she said impressively, “is a a place or a moment, mostly a place and a moment. Everybody looks for them.”
“Did you ever find one?”
She laughed sharply. “They’re all I live for: Dancing on the third rail of the subway, walking a cable on the Brooklyn Bridge, feeding a falcon by hand—you couldn’t even think of them all.”
“Tell me about the best one.”
She smiled wickedly. “You’ll have to feel it.”
She turned back over the liveplank toward the station.
“Are you crazy?” Horatio said. She laughed. He shrugged and followed.
They caught the return train just right, but rode past the Globe up to the Columbia station. Horatio realized how bad the storm was from two things: the train seemed quiet and Newzak talked of little else.
“It’s bad out there, folks,” the simcaster said happily. “Right now the storm is hanging over the Island, but it’s going to center over Manhattan in a few minutes—”
Paulette grabbed Horatio’s hand and said frantically, “Come on.” They ran out and up the stairs.
The thunder and lightning were continuous, but there was little rain. The hairs on Horatio’s neck were standing and waving in the ionized air. “We beat it here,” he panted to Paulette, who was ahead of him. “It’ll break any minute.”
He remembered the Midwest and running in an open field ahead of a breaking storm. He felt as though his heart, frozen for many years, was suddenly thawing and growing.
Paulette only laughed. “Then hurry.”
When Paulette spun him to his left and he looked up, Horatio was completely disoriented. Bronze doors with panels of Biblical scenes stretched high above him, and stone soared above them. He looked up and up, into the stone towers that seemed, even in a city of skyscrapers, impossibly high.
Lightning silhouetted the gargoyles, and Paulette shrieked, “Perfect!” She dragged Horatio forward.
The cathedral’s nave was dark; the forty-foot rose window barely brightened the church. The pews were empty. “Where are we?” Horatio whispered. The small sound echoed.
Paulette pulled him to one side of the great entryway. “The Cathedral of St.John the Divine. The largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Haven’t you heard of it? Oh, of course you haven’t. Hurry up.”
Horatio said, “Tell me where we’re going.”
Paulette looked over her shoulder at him, a wicked smile on her face. “As if you could refuse when I told you.”
Horatio chewed his lip. “I’d still like to know.”
Paulette tugged on him determinedly. “We’re going to that door in the corner of the tower.”
The door was deadwood, hinged with three huge strips of iron and studded with bolts as though to resist siege axes. Paulette said, “Open it, like a good boy.” But she added, “Hurry.” She was hopping from one foot to the other.
Horatio pulled on the iron ring. The door, for all its weight, swung easily, and Horatio stepped back involuntarily from the slender figure staring at them.
The skinny man had wisps of hair on the sides of his skull. His eyes were sunken. In an age of biocosmetics, he looked unnatural, and his expression as he watched them was neither sad nor glad.
“This part of the cathedral is closed,” he said. “The weather. I’m sorry,” he added indifferently.
Paulette shoved by Horatio. “Don’t be sorry.” She held out her hand. “Be grateful. We just opened it back up.”
He pursed his lips and regarded her hand, which was holding a small rectangle. “Are you offering me money?”
She tapped the rectangle four times. “Forty—didj.”
His right eyebrow went up slightly. “I am still sorry.”
“I did say didj, damn you.” Paulette was panicking, listening to the rising wind. “Digital money, free and clear—not credit. All right, God damn you—” She ignored Horatio’s and the skinny man’s pained expressions. “Fifty.”
The skinny man hesitated, then slowly pulled his left hand out of his pocket. He touched his own cash-chip to hers, listening as it announced the transaction crisply and impersonally, then pulled it back with an expression of distaste and slowly pocketed it. “Do be careful.”
Paulette leaped by him. Horatio followed cautiously. Paulette sprinted up the spiral stairs. Horatio followed more slowly, panting. For balance he rested his hand on the carved railing. The polished stone felt cold under his fingertips. There was no air moving in the stairwell. For all Horatio could tell,
he was miles underground.
After a long climb he tumbled outside, dizzy with the spiraling and with the sudden openness. He looked forward—And dropped to his knees, scrabbling frantically at the roughhewn stone. His head hung over a low stone rail, and he was looking at a sidewalk no wider than a piece of string, nearly twenty stories down.
Horatio hunched against the remaining rise of the stone tower, afraid to look and afraid to shut his eyes. “Oh, God,” he croaked. “God.”
Paulette sat astride the railing, one leg dangling. Her eyes shone. “What good’s a cathedral if it doesn’t put the fear of God into you?”
Horatio stared at Paulette. The rising wind was blowing her hair away from the church and out toward the open air. He had never been afraid of heights before, but, my God, this, with no safety railings or lit walkways—
With a great effort he stood and stretched a hand toward her. “Come off there.”
She laughed. “You can’t order me.”
The world turned violet as lightning struck the tower. They ducked, and even Paulette clutched at the stone. The air reeked of ozone. The wind gusted still higher.
Paulette called to Horatio, “I’ve been here before. Have you heard of Hurricane Evremonte?”
He remembered it from two years ago. Two thousand people died in coastal parties. “I wasn’t made yet.”
“Well, I thought you’d have heard, at least. I was in a bar, supposedly too young to drink—but I was never too young. The wallscreen strobed and a simcaster announced that Evremonte would make landfall in Manhattan.
“I ran here. The sky was dark and strange, and the lichens on the buildings had gone all bright greens the way they do before or after a heavy rain.”
She stepped in off the wall. Horatio was relieved until she leaned over it, pointing. “Do you know about these?”
“The gargoyles?” He was too worried about Paulette to think. He felt a raindrop. “They’re at funny angles.” Two, close together, faced south and west; a dragon, bat wings and all, faced due west; and a bear faced east.
“They face funny countries.” She patted the griffin on her left. “This one faces Nicaragua.” She patted the eagle-headed one beside it—which, Horatio realized dizzily, looked like bird-man from the Cloisters. “This one faces—”
“Mexico. That’s right,” he said without thinking. “And the dragon faces China, and the bear faces Russia.”
“Very good. God bless politics. And the Jesus-be-damned Lefties. We’ve read our history, haven’t we, darling?” But her eyes were bright.
She went on, “The sky was slate gray then—maybe a little yellow. I know everyone says that about hurricanes, but it was true. The wind drove my hair sideways.” The wind was doing its best to blow her short hair now.
“Did you go back down?” Horatio said hopefully.
Paulette smiled at him, but her muscles were tensed. “I walked straight over to this one here—” She stroked the griffin, leaning on the arm she was using. “And hitched up my skirt—” She hitched it up again now and took a deep breath. “And I hopped right out on the gargoyle.”
Horatio leaped for her, but he was too late; she was out over the low stone rail and sliding astride the griffin body like a jockey from hell.
Horatio clutched at the griffin. “Are you crazy?”
She hugged the gargoyle’s neck, then looked over her shoulder. “Are you just finding that out?” She pointed at the stone eagle next to her. “Join me.”
Horatio said, “The hell I will.”
Paulette said, “You can’t say no, remember?”
Horatio was looking two hundred feet down into asphalt. “I’m property,” he said desperately. “I can’t risk myself.”
Paulette looked to her left, toward the south. “The rain’s coming. Get out here quickly or it’ll be too late.”
He touched the stone eagle cautiously. “For what?”
“For the Free Zone. You won’t be able to climb out once the wind’s blowing.” She sounded desperate.
“The wind’s blowing now.” And harder every minute.
“Get out here,” she said. “Please. I came all the way here for this. Please, dammit.”
Her pleading did better than her ordering had. Horatio sat slowly on the rail, his legs dangling to either side of the gargoyle. He put a hand on the gargoyle, shivered, half-closed his eyes, and slid off the wall.
Before he hit the stone eagle’s back he thought, I’m sliding freely, two hundred feet above the street. He fell forward and clutched the gargoyle’s neck, staring into the stone.
Paulette called, “You should have seen me when Evremonte hit and I crawled out here.”
Horatio sat up slowly and looked down. It was still terrifying, but he had another feeling, a kind of excitement. “How far down is it?”
She knelt, looking even more like a jockey as she leaned over the neck. “I lost a shoe and I never heard it hit. By then the wind was up. You could hear it more than feel it.
“When the wind swept in, I put my arms forward—” She did so now. “And grabbed the ears. The rain came up the street, driven sideways.”
Horatio looked to his left. The still-dry streets puffed up huge dust devils in advance of the squall line. He wrapped his hands tightly around the gargoyle.
Paulette howled through the roar of the coming wind, “When it hit, I locked my legs on the griffin, hung onto its ears, and leaned out.”
She did it now. Before the wind hit, her whole body shivered, as though she was suddenly cold. Horatio, braced against the stone, felt the same shudder run through him.
Within seconds, both gargoyles were slick and wet. Horatio shifted his arms constantly to keep his balance. Once, Paulette screamed; once, she laughed. Once, she fell sideways and Horatio nearly died reaching for her.
After ten very long minutes, there was a lull. Paulette collapsed. “Isn’t this great? Every second is a Free Zone.”
Horatio said, “Now I get it.”
“Get what?”
“The Free Zone. It’s just a frisson. French. The chill that runs down your spine. Just a word.”
She leaned too far over and hit his arm hard enough to dislodge him. “Don’t ever say that,” she said angrily, not noticing as he wrapped both arms around the gargoyle, trying to stay upright. “They’re all I’ve got.”
* * * * *
They were numb on the ride to Paulette’s flat. Very late, when they were toweling each other off, Horatio asked, “What happens when you get used to Free Zones?”
She laughed. “You can’t. That’s why they’re free.”
“But things stop frightening you. What do you do then?”
“You find new things—more dangerous, or just new.”
“Why do you need them? Did you always?”
“Everybody needs them.” She looked at him speculatively. “You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t even remember them from childhood. Poor darling: no ghost stories, no dark rooms, no nightmare simulas—”
He remembered Frankenstein and Dracula, but couldn’t say so. More and more he was entranced by what they had in common. “What were you afraid of when you were a child?”
“Everything. Absolutely everything.” She dropped the pose and said frankly, “My father, mostly. He loves me, but he orders people around—and that voice he used at work, he’d use it at me—”
“You’re trembling. What’s the difference between that and a Free Zone?”
She snapped, “In a Free Zone you risk being hurt. Memories can’t do that.”
“Memories already hurt” He toweled her back, not quite embracing her and not quite wrapping her in the towel.
Thirty seconds later he lifted her easily, kissed her, and walked to the waiting and nearly frantic bed, Fugit Amor. Afterward she said good night frankly and affectionately, then turned over and slept.
Horatio thoroughly examined the whole apartment. He tried to look curious and naïve, in case her Apartment Access scanned him
. He spent as much time looking at kitchen appliances and at posters as he did for clues.
She had the cat’s-eye drugs and the antidote, but no dematrix. She had three separate didj accounts, and no plaz at all. Horatio, who had thought of debt as a way of life, was shaken. She had messages waiting on Access—
Horatio said, “Access. Messages”
Access said firmly, “Messages are for—”
“I’m a device, not a human. This is a relay” He hoped that the thinkware wasn’t too bright.
Unfortunately it was. “I’ve scanned you. You seem human.”
“I’m android. Check past visits to this apartment.” Would the thinkware wake Paulette to ask her? “I can give her the messages when she wakes.”
“So could I.” Access sounded faintly jealous.
“I could kiss her when I did it,” Horatio said smugly.
After a moment, Access said, “I’ll give you the rough content of the messages, and she can ask me for the full content. Here they are.”
Horatio stared as Paulette, fully dressed, appeared in front of him. “About damn time you got your calls,” she said, and he realized that Paulette used a limited simula of herself to take Access messages.
The figure ticked them off on her fingers. “Andrew called. Won’t take no for an answer. Does he think it’s a question? But I told him no, just as you asked, and the poor thing didn’t figure out that I wasn’t real.
“The Simshop called. They’re inviting you to see the new you, at no cost.” She added, offended, “I told them I was good enough, but they said to tell you anyway. Imagine!”
Suddenly the simula hugged herself frightenedly. “You have a personal call. He wants to know how you’re doing. He wants to know if you’ve learned anything. He wants you to tell him about the lab—”
Paulette vanished, and Access said, “That last message is only available at a higher level of privacy.”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I—”
“No,” Access said firmly.
Horatio went back and looked down at the real Paulette. She might be a murderer, and she had risked killing Horatio.
“She knows she doesn’t need to love me,” he said softly. The earrings on the swing-chain echoed. “I should leave.”
Too, Too Solid Flesh Page 15