He pushed her down on the ice hard rim of the bath and punched his frantic erection wildly at her bared crotch. Catherine sobbed as his claw entered, grabbed his shoulders, locked her ankles in the small of his back, their bodies bucketing like rocks falling down a mountain. He was still muttering as they coupled, old man likes you, old man likes you. When they finished: finished, or suddenly neither could stand any more, she was astride him. He pushed her off and rolled free. “You’ve got to bumfuck me.” He slumped in the rubbish filled tub, groping to cover himself. “I think I’ve broken my back. Got to have your dick up my arse. How can this be? Mother Vlab will provide. Next time. Soon. Got to come down now. Got to give this stuff up, soon. Soon. I’m dying. Go on, go to your room. Go.”
She blundered out into the hallway. Her robe was in tatters. She dropped her light bulb and it rolled away. A little cleaner, interrupted in its night-time job of picking lint from the carpet, fussed around this strange obstacle with the unhappy air of a simple soul helpless before the unexpected. She crawled to retrieve the light and stayed down, unable to get back to her feet. She spoke in tongues to the father while the son, at a sly remove, shafted her, absolutely shafted her under the patriarch’s table. The mysterious Helen sat with her head bowed while Mrs. Hunt chewed discreetly. Mrs. Hunt, ersatz woman. Should that be woman sous rature? A concept partly erased, inadequate but essential. She clambered to her feet and stumbled, giggling, to her room.
ii
Sometime later, perhaps an hour in human reckoning, Catherine unfolded from a catatonic crouch and got down from the bed-with-legs. She went to her bathroom and dumped the rags of the lathyrus robe in the waste bucket. She was wearing Expedition uniform overalls underneath. She’d decided that this was the dress her host would expect of her for a formal dinner. Misha had torn the closures of suit and underwear, but the fabric had recovered while she was in her trance.
She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the woolen rug. She wanted to know more about Helen. She was convinced, by things spoken and unspoken, that there was some mystery her Renaissance friends wanted to reveal to her: but, for whatever reason, they didn’t dare. Something to do with Traditional young ladies. The snake-toy girl at the police station. Helen Connelly.
What if she used her password and asked to speak to Miss Helen? A voice would answer, an image would materialize on the reader screen: void-force, deadworld things, completely untrustworthy. Besides, there were lurkers in this net. Besides, she particularly needed to meet Helen in the flesh. She decided to go and look for Helen’s room. The house wasn’t large. It shouldn’t be difficult. If Misha’s sister had not wanted to meet Catherine she would not have come down to dinner. On the strength of this silent message, she believed Helen was waiting, expecting her. A door would open and she would be beckoned inside. Out in the corridor the walls and ceilings glowed dimly: She carried her fading light bulb, stepping cautiously, finding her way easily to the gallery above the entrance hall. Was this subtle glow piped starlight? She could hear music, old, Pre-Contact human music, as faint as if it came from the stars.
She followed the sound along a passage that led at right-angles from the gallery and down a small flight of steps to a heavily curtained doorway. The door behind the curtain was ajar, showing a line of light. She pushed it open.
The room was no larger than her own bedroom, wainscoted and lined with bookcases to the ceiling. The walls between the cases were covered in dark blue hide, stamped with a silver pattern a fleur de lys. Two armchairs, one studded hide, one upholstered in brocade, flanked a fireplace. There was a glowing fire. A table-desk, covered in books and papers, a multi-media rack like the one in her room. An array of old and beautiful musical instruments. Directly in her line of sight stood a virtual screen, half lifesize. It showed the scene invoked by the music: a young girl, surrounded by fluttering attendants, like a flower in a snowstorm; like a white butterfly. They were dressing her, preparing her for her bridal. Catherine found the image extremely disturbing, she didn’t quite know why. She had lived on Earth before. She knew human weddings. The music faltered, with a sound like grit snarling in a tiny mechanical gear. Mr. Connelly stood up. He was halfway across the room before he saw Catherine.
“Good evening!” He continued on his way and carefully removed, from one of the antique instruments, a large black disk. He studied it minutely. “My music has drawn you from your lair. Come and look at this, Catherine.”
He laid the disk back on the platter, picked up a small block of red velvet and rubbed it against his palm. “Dust lodged in a scratch. A little grease from the skin,” he murmured, smoothing velvet over the moving surface. “This is a Linn Sondek. It is three hundred and sixty years old. It does nothing in the world except go round and round and round. But it does so perfectly. The arm is not original,” he added apologetically, shifting a lever so that another part of the instrument dropped slowly onto the disk. “Unfortunately. Neither is the vinyl, though it’s very old. Yet the reproduction of time past is ‘nature identical,’ I think we could say. You like Puccini? A wonderful artist. He takes the grief of the world and transforms it into exquisite pleasure.”
“He does. The grief always seems to be a bit one-sided though. Poor Butterfly.” Then she was afraid this remark was gender politics: but Mr. Connelly didn’t seem offended.
“Is there anything you’d like to hear? I have an extensive archive.”
The fire was made of flowers, golden chrysanthemums that burned and were not consumed. She’d seen the effect before; it was still a beautiful design. The big virtual screen had vanished.
“I miss the twentieth century,” she said. “The era that was your past, your immediate cultural history, when we first arrived. What happened to that stuff? I didn’t notice the loss in my last life, because of the War. It seems strange now. Misha’s Renaissance friends have resurrected musique naturelle, but they seem never to have heard the songs that were ‘immortal classics’: Bob Dylan. The Beatles.”
“Ah, that was the intellectual property wars,” sighed Mr. Connelly. “As destructive as the War itself, in some respects. Wonderful art vanished forever in those wrangles. I have some very rare works.”
But he didn’t repeat his offer. Madame Butterfly continued to play, Mr. Connelly returned to the hearth. A supper tray stood by his chair: cheese and savories in a silver dish, chunks of bread, a decanter of whisky. He looked at Catherine with a new interest. “Did you know, Miss Catherine, that the word for patriarch and father, pere, pater, derives from the sign, the gesture of a platter of food? The father provides. Will you eat with me?”
He offered the dish, with a speculative gleam. They were alone.
“No thank you. It’s too late for me.”
Mr. Connelly laughed and picked up his whisky glass. “How do you like my house? Oh, I know what you think, I saw it in you: and I’d love to rebuild. I’d remodel the place, get rid of the military element, so passé! I can’t afford it, because I don’t know how to grovel. I only know how to protect, to preserve, to keep the pure human traditions alive. I do my duty. But nobody has rights, duties, privileges these days, only more or less money. Those who have the money may screw the brains out of those who have not, and that is the whole of the law.”
“What were you watching?”
“Eh? Watching?”
“When I came in. It didn’t somehow look like the scene from Butterfly.”
“It was nothing. A soap-opera episode from my archives.” He set the glass down, carefully. “I’d forgotten that Aleutians like to socialize at night. You must feel we’ve neglected you.”
“Not at all,” said Catherine. “I’m sleepy now. I’ll go back to bed.”
She resolved always to wear overalls in Mr. Connelly senior’s company, and not to be alone with him. Another time he might make that offer of “protection” more pressing. But though he could speak Aleutian, or at least understand it, much better than his son, his attitude to the alien belonged to
another age. Aleutian uniform would keep him at arm’s length, reminding him she wasn’t what she seemed. The boundary between Misha and Michael was blurred enough without her being actually, physically raped by both of them. She fell asleep wondering about that screen. It seemed poor taste, not Mr. Connelly’s taste, to watch ugly ancient virtual fiction in that exquisite antique study.
She dreamed of a house where all the doors opened outwards, onto limitless space. But as she opened them, with a sense of great gladness, she had an unpleasant feeling of something going on behind her, where she was aware of a muffled, heavy slithering and scrabbling. Finally she managed to turn her head, and saw the room called Wilson. She was looking down as if from the ceiling, the wooden floor and the woolen rug had become transparent. Looking down through the dining hall in the basement, to a deeply buried undercroft. It was a stark pit divided into blurred pens with high partitions. Someone was down there. It was Mr. Connelly, in a different suit of overalls. The skin of his face and hands glistened, he was wearing quarantine. He looked over a partition: she had a sensation of falling, and received his view. The imprisoned animals were naked, clean and plump. Their movement, over each other, against each other (the pens were crowded) was the sound she had heard. Their faces reminded her, horribly, of the bridal scene she’d glimpsed.
She woke up with a start, sweating: certain that there was somebody in the room with her. Wilson? She said. Nobody answered. Piped starlight showed only the beautiful old-fashioned bedchamber, empty and still.
Was that a nightmare, or a message? What did it mean? She touched her face. Eyedrops? A visor, stealthily slipped over her skull stealthily removed? She remembered Misha Connelly’s lair in Paris: “4-spaced,” so he could make things appear and disappear at will. The slithering, rustling animals were still behind her walls, but silent now. She went back to sleep.
8
Paper Flowers
i
Catherine was not required to repeat the performance of her first night. The evening ritual was unvarying, but Misha didn’t spike it with paper flowers and Mr. Connelly did not interrogate her again. He was gracious but reserved, a little on his dignity after their midnight encounter. She rarely saw the Warden at any other time of day, and Helen never reappeared. She would breakfast in her room. Later Misha would take her, chaperoned by a driver and a senior female servant, on one of the park’s excursions. They visited the great road, a picturesque ghost village, bird-haunted marshes; those highly popular badgers. The lynxes; ancient craft workshops. It was very curious and otherworldly, she found, to visit virtual-tourism sites in the real.
Once they drove to the mountains on the south-eastern margin of the reserve, and took one of the great fragile Wings, that were used for making masters, up to visit the nearest of the glaciers. They rode the air alone: Catherine pinned face down, helmeted and gauntleted, in the web behind the pilot’s sling. Misha was steering, their chaperones were left behind at the trailhead. It was freezing cold. The Wing was capable of vast journeys, but not equipped for the comfort of physical passengers. The mountain slopes lay under her like scarred and fissured skin, the darkness of bare beeches and chestnuts giving way to grey turf and shale. They hovered over pallid amoebae of permanent snow.
“It’s spreading,” His voice spoke in her ear, as she lay shivering in her borrowed oversuit. “Every year we’re supposed to report that the retreat’s begun. It hasn’t. There.” The glacier hung like a grey snake, its back pocked with boulders, the eyeless head stooping to drink at the margin of a long black lake. “Shall we go down?” Her view changed, swooped and banked. She was as if standing under the snake’s mouth, under the mass of its blue-shadowed flesh. “Do you want to see the ice caves?”
“No, thank you.”
The trailhead was an ecological hotspot (or cold spot. All the hotspots in this park were cold spots). They checked the ground station before they returned to the jeep. The instrumentation was inadequate, Misha grumbled. Scientific monitoring had to take second place to the needs of virtual users.
“The users, and that includes the government, don’t want to think about what’s creeping up on us. They’re safe indoors, and this is the pure wilderness. Scientific measurement is an intrusion, practically a crime. Damned fools. The whole park is unnatural. The air is unnatural. The food chain is stuffed with human effluvia, the wild life littered with weird genes. The forest is a man-made artifact. There is no pristine wilderness on the planet.”
The cold wind blew from the north, biting into their faces. “And the weather’s certainly unnatural,” grinned Misha. “Ironically it’s the Aleutians, who hate measurement, who defend these ground stations. They want to see how their climate improvement plan is progressing.”
The measuring post was by the shore of a frozen pool, a grey bruise of ice that reflected nothing but the cold. Misha looked up into the cloud cover. “It’ll snow soon…. Maybe your people are right. Chewing the top off the Himalaya range was a major intervention: bound to be some side effects. This cold spell is a temporary hitch, it’ll be worth it in the end when the whole earth’s a semi-tropical paradise. Or else our bad weather was coming to us anyway, all our own fault; the chop did nothing.”
“Which do you believe?” asked Catherine.
“Don’t think it matters.”
She wondered at this other Misha, competent and absorbed in his work, talking like any beleaguered professional she’d ever met: so different.
When the weather was poor they spent their time in the underground room that was called “the main hall” by the officers and Misha’s father, “the Mess” by everyone else. They gossiped with the staff, and watched trees growing in the fake windows. She was introduced to the Virtual Master, L’Airial’s mascot: a hedgehog the size of a plump cat, who was not supposed to be indoors, ate gifts of live slugs with noisy enthusiasm and liked to climb onto people’s laps and chew their clothes. They wired-up and played Pre-Contact indoor games for the virtual-modeling: darts, boules, babyfoot. Sometimes they crouched in peculiar positions, wired to the staked-out domains of badgers, martens, flamingos, marsh-harriers, wild boar, and watched what went on; for the benefit of users who liked to spend their virtual visits in comfortless observation hides, so they knew they were really communing with nature.
Mrs. Hunt—on the Warden’s instructions, as she made plain—introduced Catherine to the domestic and farmyard offices. She met the gabbling hunting-dogs in their kennel—a bleak windowless barn where the big hounds romped and raced about, “wired” and goggled, contentedly certain that they were living a very different existence. Catherine and the housekeeper admired them from a control booth in what had been the hayloft. Watching the dogs gave Catherine a queasy feeling, they were too like human gamers. “Don’t they come into the house?” she asked, remembering Thérèse’s report.
“They are not pets,” said Mrs. Hunt repressively.
“Will they be taken out hunting during my stay? I’d like to go with them.”
“That depends on the Warden. We also have a stable and riding school, but they are physically located elsewhere. Actual animals are not necessary for our work. We have an enormous archive of mastered material; I don’t know why the Visitors can’t be satisfied with that. But they like to know the pack exists and that the horses they ride in virtuality are real animals somewhere. And their word is law. Next, we shall visit the potager. Our extensive year-round gardening program includes among other pursuits fungi and wild fruit gathering, peasant cultivation, resin extraction, apiary, and prize vegetable rearing. We grow over a hundred different species of edible plants. However at this season many are dormant in the real.”
The Visitors were given a capital letter, Catherine felt sure that she was not. She followed the housekeeper obediently, up and down the dormant but efficient-looking rows of food plant, stopped to admire whatever she was required to admire, and wondered how to penetrate the wall of suspicion. She wanted to talk about Helen. She didn’t be
lieve Mrs. Hunt’s hostility was due to her resentment of “real curves.” The housekeeper was Helen’s ally, and for some reason Catherine was a threat. A large and very natural-looking compost heap seethed in a barrel of rustic-effect plastic, traces of Atha’s specialty foods enlivening the top layer; being turned into something useful. Catherine averted her eyes politely from this sight. The potager was surrounded by a tall hedge, thickly covered with winter roses.
“Does Miss Helen help with the gardening?”
A flush arose in the housekeeper’s round cheeks. She almost smiled, and reached out to touch a flower. The petals were white, stained in a random pattern with crisp black.
“This winter rose, with the black and white petals, is called ‘Lord Maitri’s Librarian.’ It won prizes. Miss Helen made it: Miss Helen planted this hedge herself, the year Mr. Misha was born, for the English Garden program. We still have it on file.”
“I didn’t know she was older than Misha.”
“It would be strange if she wasn’t, Miss Catherine. Next, the sawmill, the tannery, and the slaughterhouse. Our slaughterhouse provides a complete practical and sensually vivid introduction to the end phase of organic animal husbandry, from a humane but highly immediate experience of administering death to every aspect of expert butchery.”
Further along her own passageway on the upper floor Catherine found a schoolroom. It held globes of the earth and the stars; a child’s model of a strange device she thought was an orrery. Big, jolly informative touch-screens covered the walls, still layered with graded information: “Our Planet”; “How Water Is Made”; “The Aleutians.” In a drawer she found a battered notebook full of diagrams and symbols, pages and pages of them, frozen in time and beginning to decay: equations, symbols, algorithms. The most complete of the images (as far as Catherine could tell) seemed to demonstrate how to turn a sphere into an indefinite number of other spheres of the same dimensions.
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