The Man Who Melted

by Jack Dann

  “Damn you,” Mantle said, standing up and pacing the room. “That was a few minutes ago, when I took you out of the box. That's no answer. What do you remember?”

  “What I told you.”

  “Well, it's a piss-poor job of programming, then.”

  “I remember when we went to Florida with Carl and—”

  “Oh, shut up,” Mantle said, disgusted. “Carl's fed you what he knows, which isn't much. Sonofabitch!”

  “Ray…?”

  Mantle paced slowly, back and forth. “I should put you away and meet Joan and—”

  “Who's Joan?” Josiane asked. “Is she your wife? Oh, God, I never even thought of that. I'm really dead, aren't I?”

  “You're a construct.”

  “Ray, help me. Whatever you think I am, I feel the same way I did about everything when I was…as I was…as…”

  “Say it,” Mantle said, sitting down before the desk again.

  “I know what I am, but I can't believe it. Help me.”

  “Pfeiffer made you up to help me, remember?”

  “No, I don't remember. Some things are clear, but time is all mixed up for me. How's Mom? I thought she came through the operation really well. Remember, we were both in the room, waiting for her in the hotel—I can't remember the name of it—and the doctor called and you fell asleep right on the phone. But I don't remember anything else. Ray…?”

  She was there, Mantle thought. He had glimpsed it, just now, remembered that it was she who woke him up after everyone else had left, after she had taken the phone from him and found out that Mom was all right. They had gone to Le Cygne for dinner and then spent the night sitting at Mom's bedside. He remembered making love to Josiane in the hotel room—no, it was a suite. The furniture was all cream-colored, and there was a living room and, God, he could taste and smell Josiane right now; he remembered.

  “Ray?”

  “Yes,” Mantle said, sitting back. He had been staring into Josiane's face. “Mom's dead. She died in a Screamer attack.”

  “Oh my God.” And Josiane began to cry, softly, as she always had. Tears leaked from her eyes. “God, this is hell, I'm in hell.”

  “Stop it,” Mantle said softly. “I'll try to make it easy for you; I can imagine what you're feeling.”

  “Can you?” she asked, sobbing.

  “I'm sorry, but I have to know what happened to you; I've got to find you…Josiane.”

  “Then you still love me.”

  “I love her, yes. And I can't remember.”

  “I'll help you,” said the head. “Please let me help you.”

  Sighing, Mantle said, “You know only what Pfeiffer knows.”

  “I remember the ice cream,” Josiane said, trying to smile. Her tears made lines down her face, and she was sniffing.

  “What do you mean?” Mantle asked, but he smiled in spite of himself.

  “The first time, when we were kids, and we used to call it making ice cream. And I remember that you used to always want to do it with those stupid videotectures hanging all over the room in the air. And I remember how you used to come to me when you were afraid, and make love to me. Ice cream.” She closed her eyes as if to squeeze out the last tears, and whispered, “I can't believe Momma's dead.”

  “Stop it,” Mantle said, oddly embarrassed that he could react to the head as if it were Josiane. “I'll try to make it as easy as possible for you, but I can't believe you're Josiane, no matter how you feel or think you feel. You're a construct. Believe that and it will be easier for you. And perhaps if I don't take you out, then—”

  “No,” she said, fear transforming her face. “Don't put me back in the box. I'm afraid of the dark, just as you are. Oh my God, no. Just leave me, but don't do that to me.” Then suddenly her face became calm, just as it had before. She closed her eyes, then opened them. “I suppose I have emotional fail-safes,” she said. “So you see, I can't throw a tantrum and get my way as I used to.” She smiled, but the eyes looking out from that sad, incredibly realistic face were Josiane's. They reflected the loss.

  Mantle lifted the head from the table, suddenly forgetting that her emotions were mechanical, that she was a construct, wired and grown.

  And he had to fight the urge, the compulsion, to kiss her before he gave her back to the dark.

  TWENTY

  Shaken after his talk with the head, he went to the Café Parisien for a drink. He couldn't bear to sit at a dinner table and make small talk with the other guests; and he wasn't ready to answer any of Joan's inevitable questions about his conversation with the head.

  The cafe was almost empty, although a small dance band was playing a waltz, as if for the edification of the walls. There were a few Europeans and Americans sitting quietly in clusters, but the majority of the passengers on the ship were Africans and Asians, and they were punctilious observers of proper social custom; hence, they were all at dinner.

  Mantle took a table away from the others; he sat in a large wicker chair that faced an ornately trellised wall. A waiter took his order, and Mantle was left to himself, the music, and his thoughts. He would not easily forget the look on Josiane's face when he put her into the box. He had vowed not to take her out of the box again—for both their sakes.

  “Well, hello,” said a familiar voice behind him.

  “What are you doing here?” Mantle asked, shocked to find Faon standing beside him. She looked different than when he had last seen her, younger somehow, as if she had cast all her troubles to the sea. She was appropriately dressed in turn-of-the-century French fashion, which was in vogue when the ship first sailed. She wore a white silk dress under a pink and red flowered caftan, matching red bracelets, a fur-trimmed coat—as it was nippy outside—and an oval-shaped hat covered with a willow plume.

  “Is that any way to greet a friend?” Faon asked, smiling.

  “You're the last person I would expect to find on this ship,” Mantle said as he stood up to pull out a chair for her, but a waiter rushed over, took her coat and her order for a drink.

  “Are you glad to see me, then?”

  “Yes, of course…but—”

  “But Joan will be upset—Is that what you're thinking?”

  “Yes,” Mantle said. “She's frightened of you and the church, she—”

  Faon sighed and said, “I know what she thinks. She'll just have to deal with it, won't she?”

  “That doesn't sound like you. You seem different.”

  “I am.”

  “What's happened?” Mantle asked. “What are you doing on this ship. How did you know we were taking it?”

  “My, are you the egoist.”

  “You did know,” Mantle insisted.

  “Yes,” Faon replied. “Of course I did.” She paused, then said, “I had a sending when I was hooked-into Roberta.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was told to keep my promise.”

  “What do you mean?” Mantle asked.

  “I'm promised, just as Roberta was. It's my time to die and shift over to the other side.”

  “And where's your husband?” Mantle asked, suddenly angry and anxious.

  “In Boulouris; it is not his time yet.”

  “Why die here?” Mantle asked. “Why not at home?”

  Faon lifted her face to Mantle, and suddenly she looked older, as if once again she were carrying some great invisible weight. “I don't know, exactly. Perhaps to help you, perhaps Joan…perhaps to serve as an example.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what it means to cross over to the other side. You, too, are promised, Raymond. Remember what I told you about the Seed Crystal?”

  The waiter brought Faon a cocktail, asked Mantle if he wished another, then bowed and left.

  “I think you're all crazy,” Mantle said. “Joan was right.”

  “Yes, until it's time, I am going to be crazy.” Faon smiled flirtatiously at him. “And remember what I told you when you last came to visit me? It doesn't matter what you think.”
>
  “I want to know why you're here,” Mantle said tightly.

  “To show you how the world will end,” Faon said. “Now, will you dance with me…?” The band was playing a fox-trot.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The great ship hit an iceberg on the fourth night of her voyage, exactly one day earlier than scheduled. It was Saturday, 11:40 PM, and the air was full of colored lights from tiny splinters of ice floating like motes of dust. “Whiskers ’round the light” they used to be called by sailors. The sky was a panoply of twinkling stars, and it was so cold that one might imagine that they were fragments of ice floating in a cold, dark, inverted sea overhead.

  Mantle and Joan were standing by the rail of the promenade deck. Both were dressed in the early twentieth-century accoutrements provided by the ship—he in woolen trousers, jacket, motoring cap, and caped overcoat with a long scarf; she in a fur coat, a stylish “merry widow” hat, high-button shoes, and a black velvet two-piece suit edged with white silk. She was fidgeting with a small camera, which she usually wore in her hair or upon her dress. This trip had made her career. It was Pfeiffer's idea that she interview the most interesting passengers, predict who would opt to die, and why; and then give her predictions to the millions of Pfeiffer's faithful viewers. She conducted a poll several times a day, and the viewers responded immediately. They loved her. She was creating new heroes and heroines for a tired and jaded public, and effectively upstaging Pfeiffer.

  “Why are you going to throw Little Josiane away?” Joan asked Mantle, who was resting the cedar box containing the talking head on the rail.

  “The dreams are becoming worse.”

  “Then stay away from Faon,” Joan said. “I'm sorry, we promised not to talk about her and—”

  “You could have at least spoken to her,” Mantle said. “She certainly approached you enough times.”

  “No, I couldn't. You know what she's here for.”

  “And just what is she here for?” Mantle asked.

  “You.”

  “She's here to die.”

  “And to try to take you with her,” Joan said. “I'm afraid of her; I'm afraid for you.”

  “I'm afraid, too,” Mantle confessed.

  “The dreams?”

  Mantle nodded. “I keep seeing Josiane just below the surface of a shallow pool. And I heard her voice, I hear it every night.”

  “I hear it, too,” Joan said cautiously.

  “How…?”

  “You're open to me at night, just as I am to you, no matter how much you close me out during the day.”

  “I'm sorry, Joan, I know I've hurt you—”

  “Stop it, please.”

  “But I have to find out about Josiane, I have to know.”

  “What does Faon have to say about it?” Joan asked.

  Mantle shuddered. “She thinks that I'm in the dark and bright spaces, and I will have to choose one or the other. And she thinks that I'm promised.”

  “Oh, God….”

  “And the dreams of Josiane—it's as if I can't really wake up from them. I feel the dark spaces, and I'm afraid. I've got to find Josiane, but I don't want to die to find her….” His hands tightened around the box. “Joan, I need you to help me. Faon can only help me to die.”

  Joan drew closer to him, then rested her weight against him. “But I don't understand what this has to do with throwing the head away.”

  “I questioned her,” he said, referring to the talking head, “and I checked it out on the computers.”

  “And what did you find out?”

  “Mostly oral sublims, some pretty sophisticated, although I have no doubt that Carl programmed her himself.”

  “And?”

  “The doll, in all her subtle ways, is trying to tell me that she—that Josiane—is dead.”

  “That's quite possible; it must be faced.”

  “Of course I know that,” Mantle said, “but I just can't believe it, not after the dreams. And if she was dead, why would she call me home?”

  “I don't know,” Joan whispered, shivering in the cold.

  The sea was black, and as forbidding as anything she'd ever seen.

  “Carl programmed the head to manipulate me,” Mantle continued. “I won't let him do that to me…again. And this thing, this doll, somehow makes me grieve for Josiane, yet still I can't remember. I can't stand it.”

  “Then throw it away,” Joan said.

  Mantle brought the box to his chest as if he were about to throw it overboard, and then slowly placed it atop the rail again. “I can't.”

  “Do you want me to do it?” Joan asked, realizing that was a mistake even as she said it. He would blame her for doing it, even upon his authority.

  “No,” Mantle said.

  Joan exhaled in relief. “I wonder why Carl didn't wait until after the…accident to give you the head.”

  “It doesn't matter when, really. He told me to let the purser have it, along with any other personal items; that the purser would make sure they arrived in New York unharmed.” He toyed with the box, moving it back and forth against the rail as if he had to somehow align it. He chuckled and said, “I guess I'll just let nature take its course.”

  “What do you mean? Oh, the ship.”

  Just then someone shouted and, as if in the distance, a bell rang three times.

  “Could there be another ship nearby?” Joan asked.

  “Jesus, there it is,” Mantle said, pulling Joan backward, away from the rail. An iceberg as high as the forecastle scraped against the side of the ship; it almost seemed that the bluish, glistening mountain of ice was another ship passing, that the ice rather than the ship was moving. Pieces of ice rained upon the deck, slid across the varnished wood, and then the iceberg was lost in the darkness astern. It must have been at least one hundred feet high.

  “Oh Jesus,” Mantle said, rushing to the rail and leaning over it.

  “What is it?” Joan asked.

  “Little Josiane, I dropped her when I pulled you away from the iceberg. I feel as if I've killed someone.”

  “She was a machine,” Joan said. “A machine…” Then, changing the subject, she said, “The iceberg, it almost looked like a ship. Like a sailing ship, an ancient windjammer. But I didn't feel a thing when we hit, just the scraping noise and—”

  “No, the engines seemed to lose a beat, I felt that,” Mantle said, recovering. But still he leaned over the rail and looked down at the dark water.

  “Ray, open up to me,” Joan whispered. “I need the connection. Don't grieve for a machine, help me.”

  “I need the connection, too,” Mantle said, putting his arm around her. “But it doesn't seem to work that way. I can't open it, I've tried.”

  “Could this really have been an accident?” Joan asked abruptly, as if she didn't want to hear what Mantle had to say. “That would serve us right, wouldn't it, hubris and irony and the gods and all that. We were supposed to collide with that thing tomorrow.”

  “It's no accident, I think, just a little something to throw everyone off, to make the trip more interesting,” Mantle said. “I have a feeling that our little vacation is going to become all too real in the next few hours. Now, come on, let's go inside. My face is freezing off, and you don't even have gloves on.”

  “Ray?”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought that being together, all of us, would somehow help you.” Joan rested her hands for an instant on the rail, which was so cold it was sticky to the touch, and then put her hands into her pockets. “I didn't trust Carl…don't trust him, although I like him, maybe even love him in a way. But I saw something when Carl and I hooked-in at the casino: that he needed you.”

  “You told me that already, early on.”

  “I know,” Joan said, “But it's more than that. When I saw that iceberg, I remembered how I felt when I was hooked-into Carl. I can't help but feel that Carl's done something terrible, or is going to do something terrible. I remember his fear and his guilt, and
I'm frightened.”

  “Joan, let's go inside. It's freezing out here…. We're both shaken up, seeing that iceberg, the—”

  “I'm afraid for you,” Joan said. “I think Carl's going to hurt you.” Once inside, she shivered and said, “I suppose I'm as bad as Carl. This trip is my version of organ gambling.” She laughed, as if this were a change to lighter topics.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The poll, of course. I know you disapprove—I certainly would if you were engaged in such foolishness. You're right about everything becoming real…real and dark and dirty.”

  “It was your chance,” Mantle said. “You'd have been a fool not to grab it.”

  “I couldn't stand being closed out, not being able to feel the connection, except at night when you slept and dreamed of Josiane. My weakness, I suppose.” Josiane leaned against the stairwell bannister and looked down the scuffed stairs. “It was knowing that you were with Faon instead of with me, knowing what she was trying to do. I knew that if I tried to argue, to fight for you, I would certainly lose you.”

  “You don't have to be more than you are,” Mantle said. “You're stronger than me, and, please believe me, you did the right thing, no matter how it turns out. You did everything for me; that's more than I could do for you, for anyone. I couldn't do anything else but fail you, but you didn't fail yourself or me.”

  “I did it out of anger,” Joan said. Standing in the harsh light of the stairway, she looked vulnerable, drawn, thin, and small beside Mantle. Yet her face was strength itself, supported, as it seemed, by her high cheekbones. “I was mimicking Faon, who makes a circus of death, who has given herself up to it. But you didn't notice….”

  “Yes,” Mantle said, “I noticed.” For an instant their circuit fantome was restored, as if by its own accord; and Mantle felt bathed in her faith and love and strength. Indeed, he felt that, like a vampire, he was drawing it from her. When the connection was broken, Joan looked pale and weak.

  “I want us to be together; I want the connection back,” Joan said.

  “I don't think it works like that. It seems to have its own life, and its—” But Mantle was interrupted by a group of burly crewmen who rushed up the stairs and out onto the deck. They were, in turn, followed by a steady stream of passengers. “It's going to get crazy up here soon,” he said.