The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  Harris did not try to answer her. He sat without moving, watching her expressionless face. In a moment she went on.

  “I’ll tell you the best thing, John,” she said, her voice softening to the old intimacy he remembered so well that he could see superimposed upon the blank skull the warm, intent look that belonged with the voice. “I’m not going to live forever. It may not sound like a – best thing – but it is, John. You know, for awhile that was the worst of all, after I knew I was – after I woke up again. The thought of living on and on in a body that wasn’t mine, seeing everyone I knew grow old and die, and not being able to stop—

  “But Maltzer says my brain will probably wear out quite normally – except, of course, that I won’t have to worry about looking old! – and when it gets tired and stops, the body I’m in won’t be any longer. The magnetic muscles that hold it into my own shape and motions will let go when the brain lets go, and there’ll be nothing but a . . . a pile of disconnected rings. If they ever assemble it again, it won’t be me.” She hesitated. “I like that, John,” she said, and he felt from behind the mask a searching of his face.

  He knew and understood that somber satisfaction. He could not put it into words; neither of them wanted to do that. But he understood. It was the conviction of mortality, in spite of her immortal body. She was not cut off from the rest of her race in the essence of their humanity, for though she wore a body of steel and they perishable flesh, yet she must perish too, and the same fears and faiths still united her to mortals and humans, though she wore the body of Oberon’s inhuman knight. Even in her death she must be unique – dissolution in a shower of tinkling and clashing rings, he thought, and almost envied her the finality and beauty of that particular death – but afterward, oneness with humanity in however much or little awaited them all. So she could feel that this exile in metal was only temporary, in spite of everything.

  (And providing, of course, that the mind inside the metal did not veer from its inherited humanity as the years went by. A dweller in a house may impress his personality upon the walls, but subtly the walls too, may impress their own shape upon the ego of the man. Neither of them thought of that, at the time.)

  Deirdre sat a moment longer in silence. Then the mood vanished and she rose again, spinning so that the robe belled out ringing about her ankles. She rippled another scale up and down, faultlessly and with the same familiar sweetness of tone that had made her famous.

  “So I’m going right back on the stage, John,” she said serenely. “I can still sing. I can still dance. I’m still myself in everything that matters, and I can’t imagine doing anything else for the rest of my life.”

  “He could not answer without stammering a little. “Do you think . . . will they accept you, Deirdre? After all—”

  “They’ll accept me,” she said in that confident voice. “Oh, they’ll come to see a freak at first, of course, but they’ll stay to watch – Deirdre. And come back again and again just as they always did. You’ll see, my dear.”

  But hearing her sureness, suddenly Harris himself was unsure. Maltzer had not been, either. She was so regally confident, and disappointment would be so deadly a blow at all that remained of her—

  She was so delicate a being now, really. Nothing but a glowing and radiant mind poised in metal, dominating it, bending the steel to the illusion of her lost loveliness with a sheer self-confidence that gleamed through the metal body. But the brain sat delicately on its poise of reason. She had been through intolerable stresses already, perhaps more terrible depths of despair and self-knowledge than any human brain had yet endured before her, for – since Lazarus himself – who had come back from the dead?

  But if the world did not accept her as beautiful, what then? If they laughed, or pitied her, or came only to watch a jointed freak performing as if on strings where the loveliness of Deirdre had once enchanted them, what then? And he could not be perfectly sure they would not. He had known her too well in the flesh to see her objectively even now, in metal. Every inflection of her voice called up the vivid memory of the face that had flashed its evanescent beauty in some look to match the tone. She was Deirdre to Harris simply because she had been so intimately familiar in every poise and attitude, through so many years. But people who knew her only slightly, or saw her for the first time in metal – what would they see?

  A marionette? Or the real grace and loveliness shining through?

  He had no possible way of knowing. He saw her too clearly as she had been to see her now at all, except so linked with the past that she was not wholly metal. And he knew what Maltzer feared, for Maltzer’s psychic blindness toward her lay at the other extreme. He had never known Deirdre except as a machine, and he could not see her objectively any more than Harris could. To Maltzer she was pure metal, a robot his own hands and brain had devised, mysteriously animated by the mind of Deirdre, to be sure, but to all outward seeming a thing of metal solely. He had worked so long over each intricate part of her body, he knew so well how every jointure in it was put together, that he could not see the whole. He had studied many film records of her, of course, as she used to be, in order to gauge the accuracy of his facsimile, but this thing he had made was a copy only. He was too close to Deirdre to see her. And Harris, in a way, was too far. The indomitable Deirdre herself shone so vividly through the metal that his mind kept superimposing one upon the other.

  How would an audience react to her? Where in the scale between these two extremes would their verdict fall?

  For Deirdre, there was only one possible answer.

  “I’m not worried,” Deirdre said serenely, and spread her golden hands to the fire to watch lights dancing in reflection upon their shining surfaces. “I’m still myself. I’ve always had . . . well, power over my audiences. Any good performer knows when he’s got it. Mine isn’t gone. I can still give them what I always gave, only now with greater variations and more depths than I’d ever have done before. Why, look—” She gave a little wriggle of excitement.

  “You know the arabesque principle – getting the longest possible distance from fingertip to toetip with a long, slow curve through the whole length? And the brace of the other leg and arm giving contrast? Well, look at me. I don’t work on hinges now. I can make every motion a long curve if I want to. My body’s different enough now to work out a whole new school of dancing. Of course there’ll be things I used to do that I won’t attempt now – no more dancing sur les pointes, for instance – but the new things will more than balance the loss. I’ve been practicing. Do you know I can turn a hundred fouettés now without a flaw? And I think I could go right on and turn a thousand, if I wanted.”

  She made the firelight flash on her hands, and her robe rang musically as she moved her shoulders a little. “I’ve already worked out one new dance for myself,” she said. “God knows I’m no choreographer, but I did want to experiment first. Later, you know, really creative men like Massanchine or Fokhileff may want to do something entirely new for me – a whole new sequence of movements based on a new technique. And music – that could be quite different, too. Oh, there’s no end to the possibilities! Even my voice has more range and power. Luckily I’m not an actress – it would be silly to try to play Camille or Juliet with a cast of ordinary people. Not that I couldn’t, you know.” She turned her head to stare at Harris through the mask of glass. “I honestly think I could. But it isn’t necessary. There’s too much else. Oh, I’m not worried!”

  “Maltzer’s worried,” Harris reminded her.

  She swung away from the fire, her metal robe ringing, and into her voice came the old note of distress that went with a furrowing of her forehead and a sidewise tilt of the head. The head went sidewise as it had always done, and he could see the furrowed brow almost as clearly as if flesh still clothed her.

  “I know. And I’m worried about him, John. He’s worked so awfully hard over me. This is the doldrums now, the let-down period, I suppose. I know what’s on his mind. He’s afraid
I’ll look just the same to the world as I look to him. Tooled metal. He’s in a position no one ever quite achieved before, isn’t he? Rather like God.” Her voice rippled a little with amusement. “I suppose to God we must look like a collection of cells and corpuscles ourselves. But Maltzer lacks a god’s detached viewpoint.”

  “He can’t see you as I do, anyhow.” Harris was choosing his words with difficulty. “I wonder, though – would it help him any if you postponed your debut awhile? You’ve been with him too closely, I think. You don’t quite realize how near a breakdown he is. I was shocked when I saw him just now.”

  The golden head shook. “No. He’s close to a breaking point, maybe, but I think the only cure’s action. He wants me to retire and stay out of sight, John. Always. He’s afraid for anyone to see me except a few old friends who remember me as I was. People he can trust to be – kind.” She laughed. It was very strange to hear that ripple of mirth from the blank, unfeatured skull. Harris was seized with sudden panic at the thought of what reaction it might evoke in an audience of strangers. As if he had spoken the fear aloud, her voice denied it. “I don’t need kindness. And it’s no kindness to Maltzer to hide me under a bushel. He has worked too hard, I know. He’s driven himself to a breaking point. But it’ll be a complete negation of all he’s worked for if I hide myself now. You don’t know what a tremendous lot of geniuses and artistry went into me, John. The whole idea from the start was to recreate what I’d lost so that it could be proved that beauty and talent need not be sacrificed by the destruction of parts or all the body.

  “It wasn’t only for me that we meant to prove that. There’ll be others who suffer injuries that once might have ruined them. This was to end all suffering like that forever. It was Maltzer’s gift to the whole race as well as to me. He’s really a humanitarian, John, like most great men. He’d never have given up a year of his life to this work if it had been for any one individual alone. He was seeing thousands of others beyond me as he worked. And I won’t let him ruin all he’s achieved because he’s afraid to prove it now he’s got it. The whole wonderful achievement will be worthless if I don’t take the final step. I think his breakdown, in the end, would be worse and more final if I never tried than if I tried and failed.”

  Harris sat in silence. There was no answer he could make to that. He hoped the little twinge of shamefaced jealousy he suddenly felt did not show, as he was reminded anew of the intimacy closer than marriage which had of necessity bound these two together. And he knew that any reaction of his would in its way be almost as prejudiced as Maltzer’s, for a reason at once the same and entirely opposite. Except that he himself came fresh to the problem, while Maltzer’s viewpoint was colored by a year of overwork and physical and mental exhaustion.

  “What are you doing to do?” he asked.

  She was standing before the fire when he spoke, swaying just a little so that highlights danced all along her golden body. Now she turned with a serpentine grace and sank into the cushioned chair beside her. It came to him suddenly that she was much more than humanly graceful – quite as much as he had once feared she would be less than human.

  “I’ve already arranged for a performance,” she told him, her voice a little shaken with a familiar mixture of excitement and defiance.

  Harris sat up with a start. “How? Where? There hasn’t been any publicity at all yet, has there? I didn’t know—”

  “Now, now, Johnnie,” her amused voice soothed him. “You’ll be handling everything just as usual once I get started back to work – that is, if you still want to. But this I’ve arranged for myself. It’s going to be a surprise. I . . . I felt it had to be a surprise.” She wriggled a little among the cushions. “Audience psychology is something I’ve always felt rather than known, and I do feel this is the way it ought to be done. There’s no precedent. Nothing like this ever happened before. I’ll have to go by my own intuition.”

  “You mean it’s to be a complete surprise?”

  “I think it must be. I don’t want the audience coming in with preconceived ideas. I want them to see me exactly as I am now first, before they know who or what they’re seeing. They must realize I can still give as good a performance as ever before they remember and compare it with my past performances. I don’t want them to come ready to pity my handicaps – I haven’t got any! – or full of morbid curiosity. So I’m going on the air after the regular eight o’clock telecast of the feature from Teleo City. I’m just going to do one specialty in the usual vaude program. It’s all been arranged. They’ll build up to it, of course, as the highlight of the evening, but they aren’t to say who I am until the end of the performance – if the audience hasn’t recognized me already, by then.”

  “Audience?”

  “Of course. Surely you haven’t forgotten they still play to a theater audience at Teleo City? That’s why I want to make my debut there. I’ve always played better when there were people in the studio, so I could gauge reactions. I think most performers do. Anyhow, it’s all arranged.”

  “Does Maltzer know?”

  She wriggled uncomfortably. “Not yet.”

  “But he’ll have to give his permission too, won’t he? I mean—”

  “Now look, John! That’s another idea you and Maltzer will have to get out of your minds. I don’t belong to him. In a way he’s just been my doctor through a long illness, but I’m free to discharge him whenever I choose. If there were ever any legal disagreement, I suppose he’d be entitled to quite a lot of money for the work he’s done on my new body – for the body itself, really, since it’s his own machine, in one sense. But he doesn’t own it, or me. I’m not sure just how the question would be decided by the courts – there again, we’ve got a problem without precedent. The body may be his work, but the brain that makes it something more than a collection of metal rings is me, and he couldn’t restrain me against my will even if he wanted to. Not legally, and not—” She hesitated oddly and looked away. For the first time Harris was aware of something beneath the surface of her mind which was quite strange to him.

  “Well, anyhow,” she went on, “that question won’t come up. Maltzer and I have been much too close in the past year to clash over anything as essential as this. He knows in his heart that I’m right, and he won’t try to restrain me. His work won’t be completed until I do what I was built to do. And I intend to do it.”

  That strange little quiver of something – something un-Deirdre – which had so briefly trembled beneath the surface of familiarity stuck in Harris’ mind as something he must recall and examine later. Now he said only:

  “All right. I suppose I agree with you. How soon are you going to do it?”

  She turned her head so that even the glass mask through which she looked out at the world was foreshortened away from him, and the golden helmet with its hint of sculptured cheekbone was entirely enigmatic.

  “Tonight,” she said.

  Maltzer’s thin hand shook so badly that he could not turn the dial. He tried twice and then laughed nervously and shrugged at Harris.

  “You get her,” he said.

  Harris glanced at his watch. “It isn’t time yet. She won’t be on for half an hour.”

  Maltzer made a gesture of violent impatience. “Get it, get it!”

  Harris shrugged a little in turn and twisted the dial. On the tilted screen above them shadows and sound blurred together and then clarified into a somber medieval hall, vast, vaulted, people in bright costume moving like pygmies through its dimness. Since the play concerned Mary of Scotland, the actors were dressed in something approximating Elizabethan garb, but as every era tends to translate costume into terms of the current fashions, the women’s hair was dressed in a style that would have startled Elizabeth, and their footgear was entirely anachronistic.

  The hall dissolved and a face swam up into soft focus upon the screen. The dark, lush beauty of the actress who was playing the Stuart queen glowed at them in velvety perfection from the clouds of her pe
arl-strewn hair. Maltzer groaned.

  “She’s competing with that,” he said hollowly.

  “You think she can’t?”

  Maltzer slapped the chair arms with angry palms. Then the quivering of his fingers seemed suddenly to strike him, and he muttered to himself, “Look at ’em! I’m not even fit to handle a hammer and saw.” But the mutter was an aside. “Of course she can’t compete,” he cried irritably. “She hasn’t any sex. She isn’t female any more. She doesn’t know that yet, but she’ll learn.”

  Harris stared at him, feeling a little stunned. Somehow the thought had not occurred to him before at all, so vividly had the illusion of the old Deirdre hung about the new one.

  “She’s an abstraction now,” Maltzer went on, drumming his palms upon the chair in quick, nervous rhythms. “I don’t know what it’ll do to her, but there’ll be change. Remember Abelard? She’s lost everything that made her essentially what the public wanted, and she’s going to find it out the hard way. After that—” He grimaced savagely and was silent.

  “She hasn’t lost everything,” Harris defended. “She can dance and sing as well as ever, maybe better. She still has grace and charm and—”

  “Yes, but where did the grace and charm come from? Not out of the habit patterns in her brain. No, out of human contacts, out of all the things that stimulate sensitive minds to creativeness. And she’s lost three of her five senses. Everything she can’t see and hear is gone. One of the strongest stimuli to a woman of her type was the knowledge of sex competition. You know how she sparkled when a man came into the room? All that’s gone, and it was an essential. You know how liquor stimulated her? She’s lost that. She couldn’t taste food or drink even if she needed it. Perfume, flowers, all the odors we respond to mean nothing to her now. She can’t feel anything with tactual delicacy any more. She used to surround herself with luxuries – she drew her stimuli from them – and that’s all gone too. She’s withdrawn from all physical contacts.”