by Tanith Lee
Very well, Jaxon would assume the captain wished that someone (Jaxon) would investigate. What capacity did the hidden machine have? There must be safeguards on it, which were? “It’s presumably a war-machine. That’s why it’s been dumped. Whoever gets hold of it will be able to call the shots.” (“Oh, nice,” said Jaxon sarcastically, bleeding in his free drink.) “On the other hand, it may be nothing. But we’d like to follow the rumour up, without sticking our necks out too far.”
“So you want to stick my neck out too far instead.” The captain detailed the fee. Jaxon thought about it. It was not until he was aboard the ship that he asked again: “You still haven’t given me specific answers to my two specific questions. What does this machine do? How’s it protected?”
“All right. This is apocryphal, maybe. I heard it’s an unraveller.” Which was the slang name for something that had been a nightmare for decades, was condemned by all solar and galactic governments, could not, in any case, exist.
Jaxon said, “By which we’re talking about a Matter-Displacement-Destructor?”
“Yes. And here’s the punchline. Be ready to laugh. The only safeguard on the damn thing is one lone woman in a white hotel.”
Legends abounded in space, birthed in bars and backlands, carried like seeds by the crazier shipping, planted in fertile minds, normally born to be nothing. But Jaxon, who had scented something frenetic behind the deal, was ultimately granted the whole truth. The freelance captain was a ruse. The entire run was government-based, the mission – to find and destroy that machine, if it existed. Anything else was a cover. A quasi-pirate on a joyride, a notorious adventurer looking for computer treasure – that was all it was to be. If the powers who had hidden the machine learned its fate and made a fuss, the event must fail to become a galactic confrontation. You didn’t go to war because you’d been ripped off by a cat-burglar.
“Alternatively, someone may pulverise the cat-burglar.”
“Or it may all be nothing. Tall stories. Lies. A storm in a teacup.”
“You ever seen a storm in a teacup?” asked Jaxon. “I did, once. A trick some character pulled in a bar one night. It made a hell of a mess of the bar.”
As he entered the city, framed between the sky-touching pylons of the bridge, Jaxon saw the hotel.
He stood and looked at it, and thought about the idea of one woman guarding there an MDD chaos device that could literally claw the fabric of everything – planets, suns, space itself – apart. If any of it were so, she would have to be a robot, or robo-android. He had a scanner of his own, concealed in the plain gold ring he always wore. This would tell him exactly what she was, if she existed, from a distance of three hundred feet from the building.
One of the hover-cars swam by. Jaxon hailed it and got in. It carried him swiftly towards the eccentric old hotel. Two hundred feet away from its royal icing facade, Jaxon consulted the ring. It told him promptly the woman did indeed exist and, as expected, exactly what she was. Her name had been planet-registered in the past; it was Medra. She was not a robot, an android, or even (present analysis) biologically tampered with. She was a young woman. She had black springing hair, pale amber skin, dark amber eyes. She weighed – “Just wait,” said Jaxon. “More important, what about implants?” But there were no implants. The car was now only thirty feet from the building, and rising smoothly as an elevator up the floors, sixty, sixty-nine, seventy – “Check again,” said Jaxon. The lizards glared at him with bulging eyes as he passed them, but he had already checked those – there were over two thousand of them dwelling in and on the building. They were saurian, unaggressive, obliquely intelligent, harmless, and nonmechanic. A bird flew over, a couple of hundred feet up. “And check that,” snapped Jaxon, scowling at the lizards. But it was only a bird. Seventy-nine, eighty, eighty-nine – And the car stopped.
Jaxon beheld the woman called Medra. She was standing at a window, gazing out at him through a double thickness of glass. Her eyes were glorious, and wide.
Jaxon leaned forward, smiling, and mouthed; Can I come in?
He was made of gold. Golden skin, yellow-golden eyes, golden fleece of hair. The semi-uniform he wore was also of a tawny gleaming material. He seemed to blind what looked at him.
Medra retreated from the window and pressed the switch which let up the pressurised bubble over the balcony. The man stepped gracefully from the car to the balustrade and over. The bubble closed down again. Medra thought, should she leave him there, trapped and safe, an interesting specimen? But his presence was too powerful, and besides the inner glass was rather fragile and might be broken. She permitted the pane to rise, and golden Jaxon walked through into her room.
The selection of opening gambits was diverse. He had already decided what would be the most effective.
“Good evening,” said Jaxon. “I gather the name by which you know yourself is Medra, M-E-D-R-A. Mine is usually Jaxon, J-A-X- O-N. I have been called other things. Your suite is charming. Is the service still good here? I’ll bet it is. And the climate must be pleasant. How do you get on with the lizards?” He moved forward as he spoke. The woman did not back away. She met his eyes and waited. He paused when he was a couple of feet from her. “And the machine,” he said, “where is that?”
She said, “Which machine? There are several.”
“Now, you know which machine. Not the machine that makes the bed or tosses the salad or puts the music on. Not the city computer that keeps the cars running, or the generators that work the lights in the stores.”
“There’s nothing else,” she said.
“Yes, there is. Or why are you here?”
“Why am I –?” She looked at him in astonishment.
All this time the ring was sending its tiny impulses through his skin, his finger joint, messages he had long ago learned to read quickly and imperceptibly. She is not lying. She is shocked by his arrival and so reacting unemotionally; presently emotion will break through. Her pulse ticks at this and this, rising now, faster. But she is not lying. (Brain-handled, then, not to know?) Possibly. Pulse rising, faster, and faster.
“ – I’m here,” she said, she gave a shaken little laugh, “because I stayed behind. That’s all. The planet’s core is unstable. We were told to leave. But I elected – to stay here. I was born here, you see. And all my family died here. My father was the architect who designed the hotel. I grew up in the hotel. When the ships lifted off I didn’t go with them. There was nowhere else to go to. Nowhere tremors. The hotel is stabilised, although the other buildings sometimes – Only six months ago, one of the blocks across the plaza collapsed – a column of dust going up for half an hour. I’m talking too much,” she said. “I haven’t seen another human being for – I can’t remember – I suppose – ten years?” The last was a question, as if he knew better than she and would tell her. She put her hands over her eyes and began to fall very slowly forwards. Jaxon caught her, and held her as she lay in his arms weeping. (No lies. Valid. Emotional impulse verified: the ring stung and tickled its information through to him.) It was also a long time for him since he had held any woman this way. He savoured it abstractedly, his thoughts already tracking in other directions, after other deductions. As if in the distance he took pleasure in the warm scent of her, the softness of her dark witch’s hair; pleasure in comforting her.
II
There was time, all the time a world could give. For once, no one and nothing urging him to hurry. The only necessity was to be sure. And from the beginning he was sure enough, it was only a matter of proving that sureness, being certain of a certainty. Aside from the miniaturised gadgets he always carried with him, there were his own well-tuned senses. Jaxon knew, inside ten minutes, that there was nothing here remotely resembling the powerful technology of a fabled MDD. In other words, no key to nemesis. The government ship continued to cruise and to scan far overhead, tracking the hollows of the hills, the deep places underground, the planet’s natural penthouses and basements. And he, striding through
the city, riding through it in the ever-ready little cars, picked up no resonance of anything.
Yet, there was something. Something strange, which did not fit.
Or was that only his excuse for remaining here a fraction longer?
The first evening, as the sunset began at last to dissolve in night, she had said to him, “You’re here, I don’t know why. I don’t understand you at all. But we’ll have champagne. We’ll open the ballroom.” And when he grimaced with amusement she said, “Oh, be kind to us. Be kind to the hotel. It’s pining for a guest.”
And it was true, the hotel came alive at the touch of switches. It groomed and readied itself and put on a jewelry of lights. In the ballroom they ate off of the fine sercice, every plate, cup, napkin, and knife printed and embossed with the hotel’s blazon. They drank from crystal goblets, and danced, on the crystal floor, the lazy sinuous contemporary dances of ten years ago, while music played down on them like a fountain. Sophisticated beyond his self-appointed station, Jaxon was not embarrassed or at a loss with any of this. Medra became a child again, or a very young girl. This had been her physical youth, which was happy, before – before the outsiders had come with their warnings, the death of the city, the going away of the ships and of everything.
But she was not a child. And though in her way she had the innocence of a very young girl, she was still a woman, moving against him when they danced, brushed by sequins from the lights. He was mostly accustomed to another kind of woman, hard, wise, sometimes even intellectual, the casual courtings, makings, and foregone departures amid the liquor-palaces he frequented on-planet, or in the great liners of deep space. This does not mean he had only ever known such women as these. There had been love affairs once or twice – that is, affairs of love. And Medra, her clever mind and her sweetness coming alive through the stimulus of this proximity – he was not immune to any of that. Nor to the obvious fact that, with a sort of primal cunning, she had trusted him, since she could do nothing else.
And for Medra? She fell in love with him the moment she saw him. It was inevitable, and she, recognising the cliché and the truth which underlay the cliché, and not being a fool, did not deny it.
After the first night, a first date, waited on and worshipped by the reborn glory of the hotel, they parted, went each to an allotted suite of rooms. As Jaxon revelled like a golden shark in the great bathroom, drew forth old brandies and elixirs from cabinets, eventually set up the miniaturised communicator and made contact with the ship, reporting nothing – as all this occurred, Medra lay on her bed, still clothed in her dancing dress, dreaming awake. The waking dream seemed superior to any other dream of stars and oceans and altitudes. The man who had entered her world – her planet, the planet of her awareness – he was now star, sun, ocean, and high sky-held peak. When she fell asleep, she merely slept, and in her sleep, dreamed of him.
Then the days began, extended warm days. Picnics in the ruins, where the dust made both carpet and parasol. Or lunches in the small number of restaurants which would respond, like the hotel, to a human request. Together they walked the city, explored its emptied libraries, occasionally finding some taped or crated masterpiece, which in the turmoil of evacuation had been overlooked.
In the stores, the mannequins, the solar Cadillacs, had combined to form curious sculptures of mutation.
Jaxon accompanied her everywhere, testing, on the lookout, alert for anything that would indicate the presence of the item he sought, or had come seeking. But the other level of him was totally aware of Medra. She was no longer in the distance. Every day she moved nearer. The search had become a backdrop, a prelude.
Medra wandered through the abandoned city, refinding it. She was full of pity and nostalgia. She had come to realise she would be going away. Although nothing had been said, she knew that when he left he would take her with him.
The nights were warm, but with a cooler, more fragrant warmth. The lizards came into the lighted plaza before the hotel, staring, their ears raised and opened like odd flowers. They fed from Medra’s hands, not because they needed to, but because they recognised her, and she offered them food. It was almost a tradition between them. They enjoyed, but did not require the adventure. Jaxon they avoided.
Medra and Jaxon patrolled the nighttime city. (A beacon, the hotel glowed from many vantages.) In other high places, the soft wind blowing between them and the star-encrusted dark, he would put his arm around her and she would lean on him. He told her something of his life. He told her things that generally he entrusted to no one. Black things. Things he accepted in himself but took no pride in. He was testing her again, seeing now how she would respond to these facts; she did not dismiss them, she did not grow horrified and shut them out. She was coming to understand him after all, through love. He knew she loved him. It was not a matter of indifference to him. It crossed his mind he would not leave her here when he left the planet. In some other place, less rarified than this one, they would be far better able, each of them, to judge what was between them.
In the end, one night, travelling together in the elevator up towards the top floors of the hotel, Jaxon told her this: “This business I had here is settled. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Although she knew he would not go without her, even so she thought in this instant that of course he would go without her.
“I shall turn out all the lights,” she said simply. “As your ship takes you away, you’ll see a shadow spread across the city.”
“You can watch that too,” he said. “There’s plenty of room in a shuttle for both of us. Unless you want to bring any of those damn lizards along.”
The ritual completed, they moved together, not anymore to comfort, or to dance. Not as a test. He kissed her, and she returned his kiss.
They reached the eighty-ninth floor, and went into her apartment. On the bed where she had slept, and wandered among galaxies, slept and dreamed of him, they made love. About the bright whirlwind of this act, the city stood still as a stopped clock. The hotel was just a pillar of fire, with fiery gargoyles hotly frozen on its sides, and one solitary nova burning on the eighty-ninth floor.
III
A couple of hours before sunrise, Jaxon left his lover, Medra, sleeping. He returned to his rooms on the seventy-fourth floor and operated the communicator. He gave details to the mother-ship of his time of return. He told the government officer who manned the intercom that there would be a passenger on the shuttle. The officer was open-faced and noncommittal of tone, not discouraging. “She’s the last of the colony,” said Jaxon, reasonably, insidiously threatening. There would be no trouble over it. The story of the MDD had been run to ground and could be exploded. Spirits would be high, and Jaxon in favour. Maybe rich, for a short while. She would like that, the harmony money would produce for her, not the raw essentials of cash. . . .
Having switched off and dismantled the communicator into its compact travelling form, Jaxon lay back on his bed. He thought about the woman fifteen storeys above him, five minutes away. He thought about her as noncommittally and easily as the young man on the ship’s bridge. But nevertheless, or perhaps sequentially, a wave of desire came in on him. Jaxon was about to leave the bed and go back to her, when he heard the door open and a whisper of silk. Medra had come to him.
She walked towards him slowly. Her face was very serious and composed. In the dimness of the one low lamp he had kept alight, her black hair gathered up the shadows and draped her with them. She was, no less than he, like a figure from a myth. No less than he. More so than he. And then he saw – with a start of adrenalin that brought him to his feet – that the one low lamp was shining through her.
“What,” he said, putting his hand to the small gun by the bed – uselessly – “is going on? A real ghost, or just an inefficient hologram? Who are you really, Medra? If von are Medra.”
“Yes,” she said. The voice was exactly hers, the same voice which, a handful of hours ago, had answered his in passion and insistence. “I’m M
edra. Truly Medra. Not a hologram. I must approximate. Will you countenance an astral projection – the subconscious, free of the body?”
“Oh, fine. And the body? Let’s not forget that. I’m rather fond of your body, Medra. Where is it?”
“Upstairs. Asleep. Very deeply asleep. A form of ultra-sleep it’s well used to.”
“If you’re playing some game, why not tell me the rules?”
“Yes, I know how dangerous you are. I know, better than I do, that is, my physical self. I’m sorry,” the translucent image of Medra said to him, most politely. “It can only be done this way. Please listen. You’ll find that you do grasp everything I say to you. On some level, you’ve known all the time. The inner mind is always stronger and more resilient than the thinking process we have, desperately, termed the brain.”
He sat down on the bed again. He allowed her to go on. At some point, he let the gun slide from his hand.
Afterwards, for the brief while that he remembered, he seemed to have heard everything in her voice, a conversation or dialogue. It was not improbable that she had hypnotised him in some manner, an aid to his acceptance.
She understood (she, this essence of Medra), why he had come to the planet, and the nature of the machine he had been pursuing. The legend of an MDD was merely that. Such a device did not, anywhere, exist. However, the story had its roots in a fact far more ambivalent and interesting. The enormous structure of the universe, like any vast tapestry, rubbed and used and much plundered, had come with the centuries to contain particular areas of weakness. In such spots, the warp and woof began to fray, to come apart – fundamentally. Rather than a mechanical destruction which could be caused to engender calamity, the macrocosm itself, wearing thin, created calamity spontaneously. Of course, this giving way of atoms was a threat both local and, in the long term, all- encompassing. A running tear in such a fabric – there could be only one solution. That every rent be mended, and thereafter monitored, watchfully held together; for eternity, if need be. Or at least until the last sentient life of the physical universe was done with it.