by Trevor Hoyle
Hands clenched in the pockets of his jacket, Cawdor arched back as the wind sent a stinging wet slap of spray into his face.
The physical sensation acted upon his memory, as if that too had received a mental slap, and the buried dream shot to the surface of his consciousness. In it he had been on a sailing ship bound for America. His wife and son were with him. The ship was packed with emigrants, mostly poor people, with a few skilled tradesmen like himself. Cawdor could almost smell the reek of humanity crammed below decks. He could feel the heat of the sun in mid Atlantic burning his shoulders through his broadcloth shirt. There were several religious cults on board, and the dream now yielded itself up so vividly that he knew the name of one of them – the Shouters. And see them too: a circle of tall, austere figures in dark robes punishing some poor wretch for a transgression of their dark serpentine faith.
For several minutes he stood there, remembering, finally aware that his clothing hung heavy, saturated with spray.
Cawdor turned from the shoreline. Heading back to the car, he moved slowly along the sandy track winding through the dunes. Don. Carlson’s reaction to Phyllis’s accusation troubled him. If Don, his partner and close colleague of ten years or more, had doubts about him, what would others think? Suppose Sarah got to hear of it? Even if she rejected the whole thing as absurd and accepted his plea of innocence (already he was on the defensive, having to plead his innocence) the niggling, wriggling worm of suspicion would be at work inside her. That was human nature. No smoke without fire. That’s what people would say, giving one another sly knowing winks.
Yeah, course the bastard did it, took advantage. Sure as God made little green apples.
Inside the car he discovered he was shivering. The square green quartz clock in the leather fascia told him it was four-thirty. He backed the car round and drove up the rutted track to the two-lane road which, six miles further on, linked up with 107.
Traffic was light as far as Roslyn Heights, after which it got heavier, but it was heading towards him out of the city. The shortest route home was directly through Manhattan. He knew he had to talk to somebody, and the somebody he had in mind lived on 116th Street, two blocks east of Broadway.
The dolls and fluffy toys that had been her childhood friends and companions, but which she no longer played with, were arranged on three corner shelves above the unit with its tier of drawers that served as a worktop for Daniella’s dress designs and fashion sketches. Patterns and intricate shapes cut from sheets of brightly coloured paper were scattered about; they were intended to form an ensemble of ideas for tops, skirts, dresses, casual wear and complete outfits, but had lain on the worktop, untouched and forgotten, for the past fortnight.
Wearing T-shirt and shorts, her long brown legs tucked under her, Daniella reclined on the bed, propped up on a bank of pillows and cushions. The screen threw a green wash of light over everything, making the pink bed covers a sickly purple. She’d half-closed the blinds, dimming the light that was already fading as evening came on. There was no lock on the door, but her mother wouldn’t enter without knocking. Sarah respected her privacy, knew that her daughter liked to remain secluded in her room. She sucked on the round lozenge that had rather a bittersweet taste. All the kids at school were using them. They were passed from hand to hand, given away as freely as candy. The wrapper, bearing a red ‘M’ in a black circle, was screwed up in the pocket of her shorts. Daniella wasn’t too sure what the ‘M’ stood for, though Sandy had told her it was something called ‘melibrium’. And God, yes, she’d have to remember to flush the wrapper down the toilet – she had found a wrapper pushed underneath the mattress a couple of mornings ago, and panicked that she might have left other wrappers for her mother to find. If that happened, the shit would really hit the fan, and how!
The stuff was working, she could feel it now, as if redness – that’s the only way she could describe it – was pulsing through her body in slow undulating waves. It was like floating languorously in a red ocean, the sky above kind of yellow. No, more like ochre, as Mrs Sullivan, her art teacher, would describe it.
Daniella sighed luxuriously and sank into the pillows, absorbed by the image on the screen. His face was lean and pale, and he had burning soulful eyes with long black lashes that penetrated right to the core of her being. She loved the way the two curtains of hair swept back over his ears; the thin, curved sideburns that emphasised the fine cheekbones and shadowy hollows beneath.
It was Ricki who had first told her about the Beamers of Joy video. In class one day she’d rolled her eyes and said in a throaty whisper, ‘Gotta watch it. You’ll come like Niagara with that hunk, babe.’ In truth, Daniella had been shocked at the crudity of Ricki’s language, but what she said was a living fact. You could really get it on with this guy. And what seemed to make it even more exciting was that he wasn’t your regular tanned musclebound jock; more the slim and lithe type, dark eyes throbbing into yours with the promise of sweet and tender understanding… and yet lurking in their depths was that hint of devilment that sent chills down her spine.
Oh yes, absolutely – Yessss! the hit was on line now – she was afloat on the red ocean under the ochre sky with this gorgeous guy, the two of them locked together like true soul mates, the thudding bass rhythm of the soundtrack beating in time with her heart. His eyes seemed to contain a secret message for her and her alone. It was in the music too, an urgent voice whispering repetitively in her ear –
Messiah Wilde loves you
– and the harder Daniella stared at the screen, which now and then seemed to flash with faint symbols –
I love Messiah Wilde
– the more she felt to be sliding into another realm while the world around her became airy and insubstantial, like a ghostly shadow play.
The walls of the room had turned dark red and were starting to bulge inward. It was getting hotter too. The dark eyes on the screen seemed to glow with scorching heat she could feel on her skin. Daniella stretched out her legs, shiny with sweat, and arched back against the pillows as the undulating waves of redness coursed through her body. She felt to be burning up with fever. There was a tingling sensation in her breasts, and her thighs were on fire. Her mouth parted in a dry gasp, and the words moaned out of her, ‘I love Messiah Wilde … I love Messiah Wilde … I love Messiah Wilde,’ until they became a chant that pulsed inside her to the beat of the music and the bulging dark-red walls. She pressed her hands to her breasts and pushed her palms down her sides to her waist. Her damp fingers fumbled with the buttoned fastening of her shorts, and she raised her legs to slide the shorts and her pants off together.
Daniella opened her legs wide to the dark burning eyes on the screen. He could see her, she knew it, and the thought of brazenly displaying herself to his gaze made her shudder deliciously with a thrill of wanton wickedness. She longed to have Messiah Wilde lying beside her on the bed. To feel his lean body close to hers, to submit to the touch of those slender graceful hands. He would be very gentle with her, Daniella knew, and also very masculine and hard, both tough and tender, fully understanding how it must be handled as she ceased being a girl and became a woman.
But she was alone in the furnace heat of the dark-red room. No one there to caress her…
Looking into his eyes and chanting his name, she could imagine it was him doing it, his long tapering fingers slipping inside her, her moistness responding to his urging, quickening tempo. She writhed on the bed, uttering little moans and whimpers, while around her the room pulsed waves of heat and the beat of the music pounded on relentlessly from crescendo to climax.
4
Gil Gribble pushed back the mop of frizzy ginger hair from his eyes and fitted the helmet-like VR sensory unit to his head. With the padded shoulder braces fitting snugly, it transformed his appearance to that of a small, potbellied man with the shiny black head of a gigantic beetle.
Suddenly muted, the braying horns of gridlocked traffic coming through the balcony windows sounded to
his ears even softer than the usual subdued hum of the central processing core. Gribble settled himself. The Beast was his baby all right. He’d cannibalised a dozen or more systems to build it. The control console alone took up a complete workbench, cables and wires trailing off to six shelves of a ceiling-high metal rack that held the peripherals and power transformer feeds. The memory store could hold half the contents of Columbia University Library, whose tall narrow windows directly faced his across 116th Street.
Reaching up, he tweaked a control on the side of the headpiece, then, like a blind man, with outstretched hand fumbled for the master switch on the panel in front of him. The central processing core chuntered to itself for a while; there came a series of clicks and beeps and electronic burps; and then the program locked in.
He was in business.
A black void filled his vision. At the centre of which was a glowing orb the size of a dime, pulsing with varied colours. Gribble leant forward, a pugnacious frown contorting his face behind the visor. He was visualising the billions of neurons zapping through his brain which formed his consciousness and controlled his autonomic system, and attempting to make just a tiny handful of those neurons interact with, and thus affect, the image he was seeing. Similar experiments had been done in the University’s Department of Parapsychological Studies – he himself had witnessed them – in which human control subjects could impose a pattern on a random number sequence by the use of mindpower alone, without any physical connection to the apparatus. They’d done it also with atomic clocks, slowing them down or speeding them up by nanoseconds. The infinitesimal degree of success didn’t matter. It was the proof that it could be done, that it was possible, that excited Gil Gribble. The principle had been established, and he intended to take it a step further; well, one huge, great, gigantic leap forward – if it worked.
One small anomaly was vexing him, however, which had nothing to do with getting the Beast to work. It was that, whenever he put the headpiece on, the same set of images kept flashing before his mind’s eye, as if the electronic signals generated by the software were interacting with the neurons in his brain. In other words, the exact reverse of what he intended was happening: it was the computer calling the shots, controlling his mindwaves instead of his imposing his will on a bunch of integrated chips and germanium circuitry. Now this wasn’t on. He’d built the hardware piece by piece, created the program, bolted the contraption together with his own two hands. There wasn’t a single byte in the hard-disk memory store that he hadn’t put there. So how come it had a ‘mind’ of its own? No matter how sophisticated they were, machines couldn’t think for themselves. They didn’t possess innate intelligence and therefore couldn’t figure out something that was beyond their ken.
There had to be a gremlin or a glitch lurking somewhere in the system, Gribble reckoned. He’d track it down, root it out, and strangle the little bastard. No damn computer was going to tell him what to think.
Hands gripping his knees, cut off from the outside world inside the beetle-like headpiece, his entire attention was focused on the glowing orb of shifting, mingling colours. The orb began to pulse and expand, resembling the primeval atom at the birth of creation, the big bang that kick-started the universe into being. Fine so far. He was in control. Easy does it. Not too fast. The orb was expanding now like a slow-motion explosion, filling the black void with light and colour and movement. Gribble blinked, stared, fingers digging into his knees. He couldn’t believe it. The same thing was happening again. The same crazy images as before…
He was in a vast auditorium filled with thousands of excited people keyed up to a fever pitch of anticipation. A drum roll sounded and a spotlight stabbed through the air, forming a silvery disc at the centre of the curved stage. The audience seemed to rise up all around him as a tall, lean, lithe figure strode out from the side of the platform. As the figure stepped into the spotlight the noise became deafening. Glistening black hair swept back from long sideburns, smouldering dark eyes, almost a contemptuous sneer on his full lips, he swung his guitar round and struck a pose, legs braced apart, one shoulder dipped, head thrown back, and let it rip –
Gil Gribble blanched. He couldn’t believe this.
Elvis singing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Or rather, not singing it, but mangling the words between his adenoids and grinding out the result in strangulated hiccuping falsetto.
Gribble tore off the headset. He held it at arm’s length, in two minds whether or not to dash it to the floor. The one singer he hated most in all the world. Never had liked his voice, his appearance, his music, his movies. Never liked him, period. If this Pandora’s box wanted to play fun and games with its creator, why couldn’t it have brought on stage a real singer, somebody he would appreciate and enjoy – Billie Holiday, say, or Nat King Cole – instead of a hip-swinging truck driver with tortured tonsils?
Muttering to himself, Gribble placed the headset on the table. He felt a movement and glanced down to see Schrödinger, his scruffy white and marmalade cat, brushing herself against his leg. He picked her up and stroked her back, which undulated under his hand. She made a low growling purr.
‘Wonder what you’d see,’ Gribble mused aloud, ‘if I tried it out on you? Tom and Jerry? Or a cat’s universe, huh? Whatever that looks like? Yeah, an ever expanding bowl of milk.’
Schrödinger had endured enough stroking. She squirmed free and bounded to the floor, tail whipping to and fro.
The door buzzer sounded. Gribble padded down the hallway in his laceless sneakers and squinted through the peephole. His face lit up. Swiftly he slid the bolts back, released the three locks, lifted the angled iron strut out of the way, and finally opened the door.
‘Hey, Jeff! Come on in, come in.’ He grabbed Cawdor by the elbow and felt dampness. ‘Is it raining?’ he asked, puzzled.
Cawdor shook his head and proceeded along the narrow hallway into the organised chaos of the front room. After a few moments of relocking and rebarring, Gribble followed him in, rubbing his hands and beaming.
‘Hey, it’s great to see you, man. Didn’t think I would so soon, not after we talked on the phone and you said you was busy and stuff. You want something to drink? I got beer, I guess, and, er… that’s about it.’
‘I could go a beer,’ Cawdor said, looking around for somewhere to sit. Gribble shifted a huge stack of computer magazines, academic journals and junk mail from a chair on to the floor, where it threatened to topple over. Cawdor sat down on the tubular kitchen chair with the plastic back faked to look like wood.
Rubbing his hands briskly, Gribble went bustling off to the tiny kitchen. Halfway there he paused and turned, frowning. ‘You OK, Jeff? You seem kinda…’
‘Get the beer,’ Cawdor said. ‘Then I’ll tell you.’
‘Jeez, that’s a real humdinger, Jeff’
Gribble’s tongue performed a slow rotation, licking off the dewdrops of beer clinging to the fringes of his beard. He straightened up in the chair and pushed the frizzy mop of hair back from the high dome of his forehead. It immediately flopped down again.
‘Is that it, the sum total of your considered opinion?’ Cawdor muttered dryly. ‘“A real humdinger”? Thanks, Gil.’
‘Well, the woman’s a crackpot obviously, wouldn’t you say? It’s all up here –’ he tapped his temple ‘–a fantasy plain and simple. She can’t prove anything, can she? So?’
It was all Cawdor could manage to stop himself grinding his teeth in frustration. Though he’d started off by telling Gil Gribble about the episode with Phyllis Keets, he found it impossible to hold back on the other stuff, and out it all came. Seeing the man in the electric chair with the blue haze hovering above him. His dream of the sailing ship, centuries ago, with its cargo of fetid humanity. He even mentioned his daughter’s odd behaviour at dinner the other evening that had so baffled and alarmed him. Gribble had listened impassively, blinking now and again in a perplexed fashion as he tried to make the connection between these disparate events in this disj
ointed narrative. Therein lay the puzzle: there wasn’t any connection. None that Gribble could see, anyway, and Cawdor had to admit he couldn’t either.
The bit about Phyllis, however, had registered more strongly with Gribble. Although he had never met her, she and Gribble had spoken a number of times on the phone when he had called Cawdor at his office.
Even so, his conclusion was wide of the mark, and Cawdor told him so.
‘You’re missing the point, Gil.’
‘I am?’ Although he had no need of spectacles, Gribble gave the impression of myopia with his owlish large brown eyes forever blinking.
‘It wasn’t her fantasy – Phyllis’s – it was mine. I told you, these weird sexual images just popped up out of nowhere; I had her over the desk and I was … you know, touching her, my hand right up inside. Nothing, I swear to you, like that happened. Nothing. Yet she calls Don and describes in detail the very same experience. If it never happened – and it didn’t, except in my mind – how come she knows about it?’ Cawdor took a swig of beer and belched. ‘Got a quantum theory to fit that? Can’t you run it through the Beast – the Darth Vader’s helmet there – and see what it comes up with?’
He gestured with the beer can to the headset among the clutter on the workbench, with its jumble of cabinets connected by skeins of cables to the equipment on the metal shelves. He wasn’t being serious; at least not intentionally so.
Apparently Gil Gribble thought he was. ‘You’re welcome to try, but I ain’t got the glitches ironed out yet.’ He sighed gloomily. ‘Somethin’ screwy goin’ on I can’t figure out.’ He gazed off into space, biting his bottom lip. ‘Could be the probability curve’s out of kilter. Even so, that don’t explain it. Couldn’t stand the guy. Never a real singer, you ask me.’