The Man Who Melted

by Jack Dann

  And one of those voices might be Josiane's.

  When they reached the quay, it had stopped raining. The streets were comfortably filled with locals and visitors alike, everyone dressed in costume. A parade made its way down the boulevard like a great, colorful, segmented bug. Light-sticks burned in rainbow colors, held by all manner of demons and beasts and angels and religious figures. Children were up late and cavorting with the spirits, playing jump-the-cross and begging for the indestructible American money. Looking across the port, Mantle could see the festival floats covered with mimosa, roses, carnations, violets, narcissus, and hyacinth. The wetness seemed to make everything pellucid, preternaturally bright; Mantle was reminded of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Indeed, Shrove Tuesday was not far away.

  “You'd best get to the hotel for your bags,” Mantle said to Pfeiffer as he looked around for Pretre, wondering if he would come at all.

  “There's plenty of time for that,” Pfeiffer said; he seemed to be enjoying the noisy Festival atmosphere. “Come on, let's take some wine before your rendezvous.” Another touch of sarcasm there.

  Mantle thought he glimpsed Pretre, who disappeared behind some people. “I'll see you later, then, at the house.”

  “Come on,” Pfeiffer said earnestly, “we'll all have a drink together or, perhaps, something to eat. It is time.” For all his bluster and show of independence, Pfeiffer did not do well alone except when he was writing—and even then he preferred to have people around so he could read his work aloud. “Perhaps I can join you. I can wait for you during the service, and then you can show me the town.” He smiled. “I haven't had a woman in some time, you know.”

  Pfeiffer's false show of intimacy embarrassed Mantle. Again Mantle felt trapped, as if Pfeiffer really did have hooks into him. “Dammit, Carl, hasn't it occurred to you that I might not feel like seeing the town tonight? Or not feel like seeing you? I have something to do, give me some room.”

  Pfeiffer, ever the immovable object, said, “The funeral is only going to depress you. Going out will make you feel better.”

  “Fuck off,” Mantle said wearily. “You haven't changed at all, have you? You still can't understand no.”

  “All right, Raymond, I'm sorry. But you can at least tell me what kind of ceremony it is that you can't take me.”

  “The ceremony is for a Screamer,” Mantle said, watching for Pretre. “Now would you still like to come along?” he asked, turning to Pfeiffer. “Perhaps you could plug-in and meet your mother.”

  “I said I was sorry, Raymond.” How Mantle hated the way Pfeiffer still used his full Christian name, as if Pfeiffer were a professor addressing a callow, pimply faced student. “You don't have to reach to try to hurt me, especially with my mother. You were close to her once upon a time, remember?” Pfeiffer stood his ground, his presence suffocating Mantle more than the people around him. It was then that Mantle became aware that the Festival gathering was becoming dense, turning into a crowd which might become dangerous.

  Mantle caught sight of Pretre and saw that Joan was with him. “Damn,” he said under his breath, forgetting about Pfeiffer, who was saying something to him. What's she doing here? Does she think she's going along? Joan had introduced Pretre to Mantle as a favor—she had interviewed him once, she said; but never, never had she spoken of having ever been to a ceremony. He felt conflicting emotions. Seeing her again, especially now, excited him. He loved her more than he admitted, felt protective toward her, and didn't want her around as there might he trouble. But more than that, he didn't want to share Josiane with her. For a split second, though, he considered giving up the whole venture. He could have his own life with Joan; after all, the past was already buried.

  Mantle waved at Joan and Pretre, who acknowledged by waving back. They made their way toward him through the crowd.

  Could she have been a member of that fucking church all along? Mantle asked himself. Anger and anxiety began to boil inside him. Pfeiffer took his arm to get his attention, “You don't want to get involved with that sort of thing. What's the matter with you?” Pfeiffer asked—a bit too loudly, for an American couple nearby were staring at him. “Plugging into a Screamer is illegal and dangerous, and the fate of the Christian Criers is in litigation.”

  “You can't litigate faith,” Mantle said, and then he turned to greet Joan and Pretre.

  “Hello, darling,” Joan said to Mantle. She appeared to be out of breath, but Mantle knew that as a sure sign of her nervousness. “I'm sorry we're late…the usual problems. Jesus, it's more crowded than we expected.” She looked over at Pfeiffer and said hello. Pretre glared at Pfeiffer, then turned his gaze toward Mantle.

  “Carl Pfeiffer, this is Joan Otur,” Mantle mumbled. Ignoring Pfeiffer and Pretre, he asked Joan, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I thought to come with you,” she said, her eyes averted. “The first time can be a bit unhinging.”

  “Then you have done this before,” Mantle said, feeling himself turning cold, and controlled, “And you never told me. Why?”

  “I kept losing my nerve. I was going to try to tell you when you came back from Naples. I was going to try….” She composed herself and looked him directly in the eyes. “It seems you have brought someone else, also,” she said, then turned to smile at Pfeiffer, who looked a bit embarrassed and bewildered, as did Pretre. But Pretre also looked anxious.

  “Carl is not staying,” Mantle said.

  “I think, perhaps, I'd better leave,” Pretre said curtly. “Another time.”

  “Oh, no, Francois,” Joan said, taking Pretre's arm. “Stay, please.” They made an odd couple: straight, stiff, squarely cut, and uncomfortable Pretre; and Joan, who was tiny, with short-cropped hair, pale, full face, and an air of casual Midwestern sureness, if not sophistication. “Carl is a friend of Ray's. It will be all right, I pledge so.”

  Pretre seemed to relax a bit. He looked coyly at Mantle and said, “I do not know your Raymond, except for a momentary glimpse.” It suddenly occurred to Mantle that, like Joan, Pretre was a poseur: the mock motions of fluttering and business, the ill-fitting, crinkle-neat uniform of the obedient convert were all protective guises. He suddenly saw Pretre as a survivor of the riots and burnings and camps.

  “Joan, I want to speak with you for a moment,” Mantle said, and he nodded to Pretre and left him standing awkwardly before Pfeiffer.

  “You should not have come here.”

  “But I wanted to be with you, to share the past, to help you find it,” she said, looking earnestly up at him. “You'll be different after you plug-into the Crier, and I want to be there to begin with you anew.”

  “You should have told me what you are. Liar.”

  “You weren't ready, and—can't you see?—I'm telling you now, just by being here, everything I've done—”

  It was too late. “Does Pretre know why I want to plug-into a Screamer?”

  Joan shrugged, her only affectation, and said, “Yes, I told him you are obsessed with the past; that—”

  “It was a setup. From the beginning.”

  “There was no other way to do it. And it was what you wanted.” It was to Joan's credit that she did not shrink from Mantle's stare. Poseur, he thought. User. Of course, subliminal engineers were always in demand, and most churches were evangelistic. Joan had done her homework. Well, he thought. It's fair. Mutual using.

  “I don't want you along,” Mantle said firmly.

  “I do love you,” Joan said, and, irrationally, Mantle believed her. But Joan was not Josiane. “We both have conflicting loyalties,” she continued, “and secrets to be shared. But don't shut me out, not now, I came to help you, perhaps plug-in and share—”

  “You can help me by getting Pfeiffer out of my hair.”

  “I don't think Pretre would permit that.” Her voice lowered in register, becoming flat, cold. “He knows that plugging in could be dangerous for you.”

  “For me?” Mantle asked.

  “Well,” she said
, shrugging again, then looking at him directly, defiantly, “you have admitted to right-brain tendencies…. I'm sorry, Ray. Let's stop this right now. Please, I want to be with you. It's no trick of the church.”

  “Is there anything you haven't told Pretre?”

  “No,” she said, and accepting the inevitable, turned to Pfeiffer. “Carl, would you like to accompany me to my club for a drink while these two attend to their business?” Pretre gave her a nasty look; unmindful, she took Pfeiffer's arm. Pfeiffer, who seemed interested in Joan, started to say something to Mantle, but thought better of it and said, “All right, but I think we should meet later.”

  You won't want to see me later, Mantle thought. He nodded and told them he would join them at the club or her apartment later if he could, although he had no intention of doing so. They didn't need him around to have sex. Mantle looked at Joan. There was a momentary awkwardness, shared sadness and regret, and then she and Pfeiffer left arm in arm, swallowed into the happy crowd as the old-fashioned fireworks boomed and spiraled in the windy air above.

  Pretre silently led the way to the nearest transpod station. As they walked, the fireworks died away and the entire quay as far as La Castre became a huge videotecture. Lasers recreated the interior of Amiens Cathedral, which had been destroyed by terrorists; imaginary naves and chapels floated, as if in God's thoughts, above the Festival. People passed through the aisles and holy walls of the holographic structure like angels moving to and fro in heavenly reverie. The crowd was thick near the transpod station, everyone howling and halooing. As if on cue, hawkers appeared everywhere, selling their wares: holy inhalors with a touch of the dust of Palestine, shards of the true cross, magical silver amulets, and bone fragments of the true Christ. There was even an old woman dressed in rags selling dates, halvah, and plastic phylacteries.

  It certainly was like the old days, Mantle thought.

  “Come on, hurry,” Pretre said, obviously disgusted with the goings-on around him. A car was waiting inside the small, glassite station, and a transpod rut descended into the ground a few meters away. The transpod looked like a translucent egg; it was computer controlled and driven by a propulsion system built into the narrow rut.

  Pretre punched in the coordinates, opaqued the walls for privacy, and with a slight jar, they were off.

  “Where is the ceremony taking place?” Mantle asked after a few moments to break the awkward silence. Pretre seemed to be lost in contemplation, as if he were deciding whether to take Mantle to the funeral after all.

  “Near Plage du Dramont,” Pretre said, “South of here.”

  A long pause, and then Mantle asked, “Has Joan told you why I want to attend the ceremony?”

  “Yes,” Pretre said matter-of-factly. “She told me of your lost wife, Josiane. A terrible thing, but a common problem these days.”

  “If you know that, why are you taking me to the ceremony?”

  “So that you can see and believe that, but by the grace of our Screamers, as you call them, we have not only found a new faith, but another, higher form of consciousness,” Pretre said.

  “And if I remain an unbeliever?”

  Pretre shrugged. “Then at least you will owe us a favor. Perhaps you will regain your memory, perhaps not. Perhaps this dying Crier can take you to your wife's thoughts, perhaps not. But I'm reasonably certain that you would not want to make public what you see tonight, as we could certainly affect your position with the newsfax. Given your previous record and your incarceration after you left New York…”

  Mantle held back his anger; it would not do to spoil his chance at a plug-in now.

  “We still have a bit of a ride,” Pretre said. “If you like, I can give you a blow-job.” That was said in his matter-of-fact voice, which was now without a trace of an accent.

  “Why did you bring Joan?” Mantle asked, ignoring Pretre's polite suggestion.

  “That was for your own safety. It was her suggestion—she's concerned for you. You know the chances of getting lost in another's mind, or you should. You might become a Crier yourself.” Pretre smiled, enjoying the irony. “The presence of a familiar, sympathetic mind could help you, should you lapse into fugue. Now you take your chances. Whatever you might think of Joan now, she does love you, and has for quite some time. Of that I can assure you. I thought you treated her rather badly. Of course, that's none of my business….”

  “That's right,” Mantle said. “It isn't.” But Pretre was right: Mantle had treated her badly. He had always treated her badly. And now he was afraid of being alone. Suddenly, everything seemed hard, metallic, hollow. Mantle remembered his first experience with enlightenment drugs; how the trip reversed and he scammed down into the stinking bowels of his mind, through the hard tunnels of thought where everything was dead and leaden.

  He might become lost inside the Screamer and still not find Josiane. At the thought, his insides seemed to open up, his heart began to pound, and he had a sudden rush of claustrophobia. Where was Joan to protect him…?

  “If you don't mind, I'm going to transparent the walls,” he told Pretre as he pressed the appropriate stud.

  “Are you all right?” Pretre asked.

  “A touch of motion sickness, that's all.”

  They were above-ground now, near the city's edge. In a cold sweat, Mantle watched the tiers of fenestrated glasstex whiz past, studded with sunlights. The city blazed like noon under a night sky. A few moments later, they were rushing through darkness again, along the coast, through the ribbon of country. City lights were a mushroom glow behind them, stars blinked wanly overhead. Mantle's claustrophobia was replaced by vertigo.

  “Some of the Esterel is still untouched by the cities,” Pretre said, staring eastward in the direction of the ocean. “This used to be a beautiful country, full of flowers and grass and cathedrals.”

  Mantle smiled (did Pretre think cathedrals grew out of the ground like orange trees?), and then remembered his own country, remembered Binghamton and its hilly surrounds. As a boy, he had vision-quested for four days and three nights atop a hill near his home. How different that had been from his experience with enlightenment drugs. But that was a lifetime ago, before new Route 17 and the furious urbanization around the mechanized highway. That old vision-quest hill had been leveled as if it had never been. But the movement of the transpod calmed him, and Mantle fancied that he was a passenger on an old railroad train—he was riding the ancient Phoebe Snow, and he was heading into Binghamton.

  Just then Pretre unnerved him by asking, “Your original home is Binghamton, isn't it?”

  “Yes,” Mantle replied, wondering for an instant if Pretre had read his mind. Coincidence, and his thoughts turned to Joan. She had told Pretre everything, he knew that. She was probably sitting down at a table with Pfeiffer at her club right now. He imagined that Pfeiffer would be holding forth about poor Raymond, what a waste, and Joan would listen intently and nod her head. Later, she would take him home to bed.

  Until now, Mantle hadn't been possessive with Joan; he had not had those feelings since Josiane. Joan had always had other relationships, and Mantle even encouraged them.

  It was Pfeiffer. He could not imagine her wanting to have Pfeiffer. The fat fucking fisherman! But that was another deception, and Mantle new it. He was simply afraid of losing her. It was the old, old anxiety surfacing.

  Well, fuck her, he thought. She was loving me for the church. I must have sensed it, he told himself. Maybe that's why we made love so rarely. He felt himself getting an erection. Now he wanted her when it was too late.

  “You look nervous, my friend,” Pretre said. “Would you like a tranquilizer? It will calm you, but not affect your thinking. And it will wear off by the time we reach the beach.” Pretre was staring at him intently, which did make Mantle nervous.

  “No, thank you,” Mantle said as he looked at the dark shapes and shadows whisking past like specters in a dream of falling. “I don't take any drugs if I can help it.”

  “A
h, since your incarceration, perhaps?”

  “It has nothing to do with that.” You faggot sonofabitch, Mantle thought. He still had an erection.

  Pretre took another tack. His voice became louder, more hollow-sounding and the accent returned. “Binghamton was blessed with Criers, wasn't it? Consumed, as it were, by the Singing Crowds.”

  Mantle grimaced as he remembered returning to his old neighborhood, which had been ravaged by the Screamer mobs. They had killed his mother in her bed. Yes, he thought, again feeling a rush of anxiety and guilt, Binghamton was certainly blessed.

  “But that should not have happened,” Pretre continued, “because according to your theorists, the population density was nowhere near Beshefe's limit. Beshefe was his name, I think.” The sarcasm in his voice was as thick as his accent.

  “People become Screamers as a reaction to stress,” Mantle said. “There are many ways to measure social stress, all approximations. Beshefe was a social scientist, not a physicist.”

  “Do you also believe our Criers are just schizophrenics?” Pretre asked. “Joan once believed that.” He smiled, obviously toying with Mantle, who was in no mood for it.

  It will soon be over, he told himself, while his thoughts darted from the past to present, back and forth, like fireflies in the darkness of his memory.

  He remembered his first newsfax assignment in Washington, although it was hard to imagine that there were mobs and riots before the Screamers. He had worn a riot-cowl and had packed a small stun weapon that was little more than a toy. He had been so afraid that he'd kept saying “Jesus Christ” into his recorder. He could remember it as clearly as if he were still standing there in burning College Park, choking on the stink of explosives and burned flesh, listening to people scream. Like horses, they had tried to bolt, but everyone was trapped in the crowd. He remembered Dodds, who had been standing beside him and shouting into his recorder until half his face was blown away; and how for one eternal heartbeat they had stared at each other before Dodds fell and died. In that last moment, Mantle had felt nothing but surprise. But deep inside was one thought: that it would soon be over. One way or another.