Horatio put an arm around her. She shrugged it off. “You’re being nice and I’m being horrible, but just now it would only count if you were real.”
He trembled and took a deep breath. She went on, “And if you were I’d kill myself. I don’t ever, ever want anyone to know what happened here.”
“They won’t,” he heard himself say.
“No one real?”
“No one but me. Could I ask you something?”
“Why not?” She raised her arm, then let it drop. Even now she looked theatrical and false. “Everyone else just goes ahead and tells me.” She glanced at the processor and gestured hastily, cancelling her earlier arm-raise before it conjured up a second dinner.
“Your father is paying for the apartment, too, isn’t he? And the jewelry, and the movie and simula posters, and everything else?” She nodded. “Why is he doing that?”
She burst out, “I don’t know!” She said more quietly, “I don’t know. Honest to God I don’t. I’ve always liked acting, and he’s always hated that. A couple of months ago, he started talking about acting. He’d even listen to me and clap. It was the most time he’d spent with me in years.” She sniffed.
“And he got me simulas, and took a simula of me, and took a lifechip made of my memories for the simula. And we argued every night over dinner in restaurants about simula and stage, which was better. One night he mentioned hearing of the Hamlet Theater, and I had to come to it. And he argued with me, but finally he told me to go do what I want.”
She finished, a ghost of her old sarcasm, “He never told me to do what I wanted before.”
Horatio stroked her short, straight hair with one finger. “I’ll tell you to, I hope. Come lie with me and be my love. If you can’t be, pretend for a moment. It may make you feel better.” He finished carefully, “And I’d like it very much.”
“You’re just being nice. You’re made to be.” But she smiled.
He pulled her closer. “I have more free will than you think. Want to see?” He pushed her back, then yawned showily. “It’s been fun, but I’m beat. Time for an early evening, don’t you think?” He kissed her quickly on the forehead, then tickled her. “See you tomorrow.”
She laughed, still crying, and chased him. He led her between the tea-tortoises, picking up the portajets from the Simula performance and stuffing them under the sofa.
Predictably, the chase ended in the bedroom. Afterward, as the bed lay trembling, she wept out her embarrassment and frustration in his arms.
Later she said she felt better, and never said a thing about his not being real. Horatio held her tight and wondered how long, if he tried very hard, the two of them could stay unreal together.
20
Horatio walked fifteen blocks to find an Access; the Greenhouse Pools didn’t have public units. He stood under the familiar Circle-A and recited the security codes.
When Thibodeaux’s chair appeared in the blank white distance, Horatio said, “Move faster.”
Thibodeaux said, “No way I can.”
Horatio said, “You’re a simula.”
The chair stopped. Thibodeaux peered uncertainly at him. “No way you can know that.”
“Go get the real Thibodeaux.”
The simula sighed loudly. The chair galloped back the way it had come.
The chair returned. Thibodeaux looked the same, but wore a livefur robe and slippers, and he was blinking. The blinking looked odd, since most of his face was frozen. It was as if he was peering through a mask. “You woke me, boy.”
“In midafternoon?”
“I sleep a lot. This had damn better be important.”
Horatio said, “I want to meet you in person.”
“We are face to face, boy. Counting this as a face.”
Horatio looked him up and down. “Maybe.”
“I don’t see anybody in person. I ain’t seen anyone in person for ten years.” He leaned forward. “Tell me why you think you’re the first.”
Horatio said, “Remember the woman we talked about? I can prove that she murdered Capek.”
Thibodeaux said nothing.
Finally Horatio said, “If you think Access is secure enough—”
Thibodeaux said tiredly, “Come on in.”
* * * * *
Horatio stood at the foot of the Simula National building. Part of the reaction against minimalism, it had lintels, cornices, capitals, eaves—even mansard roofs and cupolas. A plant grew on every surface.
Lianas wound from balcony to balcony, spider monkeys creeping in them. Toucans peered between the palm fronds, and parrots brighter than the orchids flew among the philodendrons and banana trees.
Horatio stared at the dead leaves and the bright feathers gathered in a wind-sheltered corner. This was no simula-front building. The tropical species above him were real, had a terrible mortality rate, and probably cost more than the combined incomes of the Greenhouse Pool residents.
Simula National could afford it.
He stepped in the front door, gave his name, and waited. After a few minutes, the lobby scanner said, “Please proceed to the elevator.”
He passed through a metal detector, then a brain scan. The carpet was wool-on-hide, very warm; he wanted to take his shoes off. The walls dripped with flowers: sword tails, large urns with pink flowerets, more orchids, birds of paradise.
The larger animal and bird species were absent. Horatio heard warblers, but couldn’t see them.
The elevator doors shut behind him, and the lights suddenly brightened. A voice said flatly, “Full body scan. Please wait” This time it took ten minutes. The voice, not at all friendly, said, “Your brain waves, retinal patterns, fingerprints, and jaw conformation match your identity.” The lights dimmed again, and the elevator said, “Floor?”
Horatio said with barely a tremor, “Top floor.”
Horatio squinted in the near darkness. The room was live-mahogany, rich brown. The only light panel was moonshaped, mounted in an upper corner. The only animal life was an owl, whose round eyes never left him.
An old man sat at an oak desk across the room. He had a narrow nose, a pointed chin, and watery, tired eyes. He was scribbling on paper with an old-fashioned hand pen.
Horatio came forward. The owl’s head tracked him. The man peered at him wearily through archaic bifocals and said, “I have a few routine questions.”
“Ask.” Horatio watched the owl.
“Very well.” The man scribbled with the pen on the paper. “Does your business require remarkably strict security? Is it intimate between yourself and Mister Thibodeaux? Does it involve the transfer of physical material?”
“Yes, yes, and no.”
The owl’s gaze was suddenly hostile; he fluffed and spread his wings. The old man stopped writing. “How, then, does it require physical contact?”
“Because I won’t tell it any other way.”
The man smiled thinly. “I doubt that you can truly distinguish physical contact by any means other than the obvious”
Horatio took his plaz unit from his tunic and threw it at the old man. It passed through and snapped loudly against the wall.
Horatio said, “I’ll do my best.”
The old man licked his dry lips and nodded. “That’s all most of us do, isn’t it? Through there.” He bent over the paper that never filled up.
Horatio stared around the room.
He didn’t know much about biology, except stories on EZNews, but he knew that these were rare retroclones. The floor was a flagstone path with pink lady’s-slippers. A prehistoric palm, distant ancestor of a ginkgo, rose opposite the window. A small biped dinosaur crouched under it, swinging its head back and forth.
A tiny pterodactyl clung to the palm, flapping its wings and swinging its tail for balance as it climbed. Horatio was reminded of the pigeons in Fort Tryon Park.
Bulky, multicolored fish darted in the pool to the right of the path. He didn’t know them but he recognized the crinoids—things
like starfish on stems—waving in from the pool floor. Trilobites slid between them.
On the other side of the path was a stone Japanese lantern. A dragonfly the size of a hawk perched on it, sunning its wings under the light panels.
Across the room was a stone desk with vines twined around the legs and trailing across its edge. A bonsai tree in a simple clay pot sat on it.
The wall behind it had a Cezanne, a Gauguin, and a Van Gogh—all landscapes. Between them, on a shelf about five feet above the floor, stood a jade block carved into a mountain, with tiny figures on it.
Thibodeaux, seated behind the desk, looked like one of the dinosaurs: bottled and inhuman. Even his chair looked ancient and corrupt.
In his mind Horatio heard his mother, hung over and short-tempered: “Some day your face will freeze that way.”
Thibodeaux watched Horatio stare around the room and asked sourly, “Like it?”
“It’s all right.” But the air was dry, and he couldn’t smell flowers. “Cut the crap, Paul. Turn the room off.”
Thibodeaux muttered angrily to his desk.
Horatio blinked at the sudden light. The cream-colored, bare walls reflected the omnilight moon set in the ceiling, and a single circle over the desk cast a surprising amount of light.
The flagstones and the lantern stayed. So did the stone table, the bonsai, and the jade mountain.
Thibodeaux said again, “Like it?”
“Uh-huh.” He bent down and ran a finger over the rough stone and through the white pebbles to either side of the path. “It’s nicer this way”
He walked to the table and leaned across. “Just to be sure.” He touched Thibodeaux’s cheek. Thibodeaux, stunned, didn’t move.
The cheek felt smooth and cold, completely lifeless. Horatio stared at the sick flesh under his fingers and tried to feel sorry for Thibodeaux.
He pulled his hand back, and the old man sighed. “Don’t do that again. Not ever.”
“Don’t worry.” Horatio traced a quartz vein in the table. “Why fake life? You can afford the real thing.”
Thibodeaux sighed. “Life’s unclean, boy. That scares me.” His fingers traced the crater where his nose had been and slid over the holes on his cheeks. He reached toward the bonsai, almost touching it but pulling back quickly. “This here’s the only life I’ve got left. I wear gloves to trim it.
“Sometimes I dream the damn thing’s growing in my face. I move my tongue up and taste the roots. I know it’s breaking up the plastic over my cheeks and I’m gonna die.”
Horatio said, “That’d be a real loss.”
“You watch your mouth. I pay you.” He settled back. “And you ain’t worth it. That woman didn’t do it.”
“I know.” Horatio watched him. “I lied.”
Thibodeaux’s mouth opened and shut. “You lied to me, you little son of a bitch?”
“Why not? You lied to her to nudge her toward the Globe.”
After a long silence, the old man said, “Tell me one lie I told her.”
Horatio walked around the side of the table. “You pretended to care about her wanting to act.”
Thibodeaux’s eyes were narrow and furious. “She got simulas, posters, more chips than anybody ever had.” He knotted his hands into fists. “What the hell are you doing?”
Horatio came closer. “You told me Capek Accessed you, but you never said why. You Accessed him first.”
Thibodeaux was staring straight ahead at nothing. He said tiredly, “He’d gotten some favors on the thinkware for the Globe. He owed me, and he knew it.”
“And you thought she’d find some good biotek for you.”
“If Capek hadn’t got killed, she might have.”
“Unless she got killed.”
Thibodeaux leaned forward again and dropped his lower jaw enough that his semi-rigid lips could curl back and show his teeth. “God dammit, by the time I knew that could happen—”
“You knew, and you could’ve pulled her back out. You didn’t. You knew how big the prize must be, and you wanted her to keep looking for anything I missed.” Horatio ran a hand through his own hair. “You never told her what to look for. What was she supposed to do?”
Thibodeaux said, “I don’t have to tell you a thing.”
Horatio said, “I don’t have to tell you, either.”
Thibodeaux shouted hoarsely, “I’m paying you!” and slammed his fist on the table.
The old man stared at a small red spot on the table. He turned his hand, suddenly trembling. One knuckle was split. “Oh, God,” he quavered, “Oh, Jesus, I’m gonna get infected. I’m gonna die. Look what you made me do.”
He rubbed frightenedly at his knuckle and then, irrationally, at the blood on the table.
Horatio asked, “What did you think Paulette would find?”
Thibodeaux, distracted, said, “Not a God damn thing. Her jewelry could find out more. I’ve had full scan apparatus on her since she went in, I play it back as an add-on to that simula I took of her.” He added, “If I could get the earring in by itself, I wouldn’t need her at all.”
Horatio nodded. “Uh-huh. You said you haven’t been face to face with a human in ten years. You never physically met Paulette at all, did you?”
Thibodeaux was trying to wrap his knuckle with his own sleeve. “I sent my simula. Hell, we always met in public places. She shoulda figured it out.”
Horatio nodded. “She didn’t.”
Thibodeaux said angrily, “Enough about her. You go back to that theater, you find out what’s going on, and you tell me. That’s what you’re paid for.”
Horatio hesitated. The money no longer meant a thing, but a number of people, Paulette included, would need to know whatever he found out about the Globe Hamlet Troupe.
Horatio said, “I’ll keep going for now.” As Thibodeaux nodded satisfiedly, he added, “If you dump everything about Paulette to files reserved for me.”
Thibodeaux stiffened even more. “That’s too much.”
“Probably.” Horatio strolled behind the desk.
“Nobody said I had to tell you.” Thibodeaux shrank back into himself. Light glistened on his plasticized cheek, but it couldn’t hide the corruption underneath.
Horatio said, “You don’t have to.” Thibodeaux looked up at him. Horatio smiled. “I could Access or go to the labs, and you couldn’t stop me.”
Thibodeaux said anxiously, “You wouldn’t do that to a sick old man, would you?”
Horatio draped an arm around him. “Because we’re close?” Thibodeaux nodded cautiously. Horatio tightened his arm on Thibodeaux’s neck. “Because we’re buddies?”
Thibodeaux said nervously, “Sure.”
Horatio tightened his arm around the old man’s throat and said viciously, “And you’d never hurt anybody I cared about. Right?” He waited ten seconds while the old man’s body thrashed in its chair. “Right?”
He stepped back while Thibodeaux caught his breath. Thibodeaux gasped. His stiff hand ran jerkily up and down his throat. The silence was only broken by his ragged breathing.
Finally, Thibodeaux said resentfully, “I could have you killed. Maybe you could hide in the theater—” His voice trailed off.
Horatio said quietly, “Or I could walk out just far enough to get on Access and tell everyone in the world about the man who risked his own daughter’s life to get information.”
Thibodeaux stared at him. “What would that get you?” Silence. “You ain’t asked for more money. What do you want?” More silence. Thibodeaux finally said plaintively, “Why the hell are you still working for me?”
Horatio shrugged. “Habit. Will you dump me the data?”
Thibodeaux nodded. “But keep away from her.”
Horatio shook his head. “It’s too late for that.” He stared behind Thibodeaux at the jade mountain. “I hadn’t seen all these people walking on this thing. Who are they?”
“Pilgrims,” Thibodeaux said absently, staring at Horatio. “They’re h
eaded for that temple on the right”
Horatio said suddenly, “And they’re straining uphill for it.I like that.”
Thibodeaux said, “I like that they never get anywhere.”
He added shakily, “Access prehistoric room.” As an afterthought, he added, “Full physical.”
The plants and animals were back. The air was moist and heavy with the pregnant cool that comes just before a storm. An archaeopteryx cried out, and Horatio jerked his head around. Thibodeaux saw him and smiled. “I can blot life out as easily as I can make it.”
Horatio said, “You can fake life.” He walked away.
21
Hamlet, stepping out of his quarters, met Gertrude, who was holding Goode’s arm and sniffling. For once, her dress was modest; a dark brocade met a lace ruffle at her neck. The doctor’s solemn expression made his stiff white jacket look like a suit of mourning.
Hamlet asked, “Have you examined Ophelia?”
Goode said heavily, “Yes. She wandered into a lab and met with an accident. The damage is permanent.” He patted Gertrude’s arm quickly. She tried to smile at him.
Hamlet knew enough about simula by now to know that last was a lie. “Surely you can give her back what she lost?”
Goode spread his hands, disengaging from Gertrude. “Only by destroying her and reissuing her completely, and just now the expense—all decisions here are corporate, and the Globe would never agree—Hamlet, I’m truly sorry.” He put a hand on Hamlet’s shoulder. “How are you? Will you be all right?”
Hamlet pulled back. “Eventually.”
Goode raised an eyebrow. “Surely you can’t blame me.”
Gertrude said quickly, “He’s just upset, Alan.”
Hamlet ignored her. “Why would I blame you?”
Goode smiled thinly. “I can’t imagine. Would you come see her with me now? She’ll need special care, and I think you’re best suited to help.”
Hamlet sighed. “I’ll do whatever I can. Mother, tell Horatio I would like to meet him backstage.” Hamlet and Goode left together, but Hamlet kept a wary distance from the doctor.
Gertrude walked backstage, where Horatio was examining prop swords, and said jerkily, “You.”
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