by Dean Koontz
"Not my luck, but my weight," I said.
"He doesn't take to a subordinate position. He's a bastard."
"I know. That's why I needle him."
"When did the masochism arise?"
"Not masochism-my well-known God-syndrome. I was just passing one of my famous judgments."
"Look," he said, "you can quit."
"We both need the money. Especially me."
"Maybe there are other things more important than money."
Someone pushed us aside as equipment was trundled out of the hex-painted room.
"More important than money?"
"I've heard it said..."
"Not in this world. You've heard wrong. Nothing's more important when the creditors come. Nothing's more important when the choice is to live with cockroaches or in splendor."
"Sometimes, I think you're too cynical," he said, giving me one of those fatherly looks, something I inherited along with his last name.
"What else?" I asked, buttoning my greatcoat.
"It's all because of what they tried to do to you. You should forget that. Get out more. Meet people."
"I have. I don't like them."
"There's an old Irish legend which says-"
"Old Irish legends all say the same thing. Look, Harry, aside from you, everyone tries to use me. They want me to spy on their wives to see if they have been laying with someone else. Or they want me to find hubby's mistress.
Or I get invited to their cocktail parties so that I can perform parlor tricks for a batch of drunks. The world made me cynical, Harry. And it keeps me that way. So, if we're both wise, we'll just sit back and get rich off my cynicism. Maybe if a psychiatrist made me happy-go-lucky and at peace with myself, my talent would disappear."
Before he could reply, I left. When I closed the door behind me, they were wheeling Child down the corridor.
His empty eyes stared fixedly at the softly colored ceiling.
Outside, the snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystal tears. Sugar from a celestial cake. I tried to come up with all the pretty metaphors I could, maybe to prove I'm not so cynical after all.
I slid into the hovercar, tipped the Marine as he slid out the other side. I drove into the street, taking the small curb too fast. White clouds whooshed up behind me and obscured the AC building and everything else I put behind me.
The book lay at my side, the dust jacket face down because it had her picture on it. I didn't want to see amber hair and smooth lips imitating a bow. It was a picture that disgusted me. And intrigued me. I couldn't understand the latter, so I pretended to more of the former than I felt.
I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the newscaster casting his tidbits on the airwave waters with a voice uniformly pleasant whether the topic was a cure for cancer or the death of hundreds in a plane crash. "Peking announced late today that it had developed a weapon equal to the Spheres of Plague launched yesterday by the Western Alliance..." (Pa-changa, changa, sissss, sisss pa-changa, the Latin music of another station added in unconscious sardonic wit) "... According to Asian sources, the Chinese weapon is a series of platforms..." (Sa-baba, sa-baba, po-po-pachanga) "... above Earth's atmosphere, capable of launching rockets containing a virulent mutant strain of leprosy which can be distributed across seventeenmile-wide swaths of territory..." (Hemorrhoids really can be dealt with in less than an hour at the Painless Clinic on the West Side, another station assured me, though it faded out before it would tell me how much less than an hour and just how painless.) "... Members of the New Maoism said today that they had assurances from..."
I turned it off.
No news is good news. Or, as the general populace of that glorious year was wont to say: All news is bad news.
It seemed like that. The threat of war was so heavy on the world that Atlas must certainly have had a terrible backache. The 1980s and 1990s, with their general climate of peace and good will made these last fourteen years of tense brinksmanship all the more agonizing by comparison. That was why the young peace criers were so militant. They had never really known the years of peace, and they lived with the conviction that those in power had always been men of guns and destruction. Perhaps, if they had been old enough to have experienced peace before the cold war, their fiery idealism might have been metamorphosed into despair, as with the rest of us. I was very young in the last of the pre-war years, but I had been reading since before I was two and spoke four languages by the age of four. I was aware even then. It makes the present chaos more maddening.
Besides the threat of plague, there was the super-nuclear accident in Arizona which had claimed thirty-seven thousand lives, a number too large to carry emotion with it.
And there were the Anderson Spoors which had riddled half a state with disease before the Bio-Chem Warfare people had been able to check their own stray experiment.
And, of course, there were the twisted things the AC labs produced (their failures), which were sent away to rot in unlighted rooms under the glossy heading of "perpetual professional care." Anyway, I turned the radio off.
And thought about Child.
And knew I should never have taken the job.
And knew that I wouldn't quit
IV
At home, in the warmth of the den, with my books and my paintings to protect me, I took the dust jacket off the book so I wouldn't accidentally see her face, and I began reading Lily. It was a mystery novel, and a mystery of a novel. The prose was not spectacular, actually intended for the average reader seeking a few hours of escape.
Still, I was fascinated. Through the chapters, between the lines of marching black words, a face seen at a party weeks before kept drifting through my mind. A face which I had been fighting to forget...
Amber hair, long and straight.
"See that woman? Over there? That's Marcus Aurelius. Writes those semi-pornographic books, like Lily and Bodies in Darkness, those."
Her face was sculpted, smooth planes and milky flesh.
Her eyes were green, wider than eyes should be, though not the eyes of a mutant.
Her body was graceful, provocatively in vogue.
Her...
I ignored what he was saying about her, all the foul things he suggested, and studied amber hair, cat's eyes, fast fingers touching that hair, clasping a glass of gin, jabbing the air for emphasis in conversation...
When I was finished with the book, I went and made myself some Scotch and water. I am not a good bartender.
I drank it and pretended I was about sleepy enough for bed. I stood on the patio, which is slung over the side of the small mountain which I own, and I watched the snow.
I got cold and went inside. Undressing, I went to bed, nestled down in the covers, and thought about ice floes and blizzards and piling drifts, letting myself find sleep.
I said, "Damn!" and got up and got more Scotch and went to the phone, where I should have gone as soon as I finished the last page of the novel.
I could not understand the logic of what I was doing, but there are times when the physical overrides the cerebral, no matter what the proponents of civilized society might say about it.
Punching out the numbers for directory assistance, I asked for Marcus Aurelius' number. The operator refused to give me her real name and number, but I esped out and saw it as she looked at the directory in front of her:
MARCUS AURELIUS Or MELINDA THAUSER; 22-223-296787/ UNLISTED.
So I said sorry and hung up and dialed the number I had just stolen.
"Hello?"
It was a competent, businesslike voice. Yet there was a sultriness in it that could not be ignored.
"Miss Thauser?"
"Yes?"
I told her my name and said she would probably know it and then sounded pleased when she did. It was all as if someone were possessing me, directing my tongue against the will of the screaming particle of me that demanded I hang up, run away, hide.
"I've followed your exploits," she sa
id. "In the papers."
"I've read your books."
She waited.
"I think it's time I had my biography done," I said.
"I've been approached before, but I've always been against it. Maybe like the primitive tribesmen who feel a photograph locks their soul away inside it. But with you, maybe it would be different. I like your work."
There was a bit more said, and it ended with me and with this: "Fine. Then I'll expect you here for dinner tomorrow night at seven."
I had suggested escorting her to dinner somewhere, but she had said that was not necessary. I insisted. She had said that restaurants were too noisy to discuss business. In the course of the floundering planning, I had mentioned my cook. And now she was coming here.
I went out and swallowed half a glass of Scotch on the rocks (as a change from the Scotch and water), which solved the problems I had just acquired upon hanging the phone on its hook: a dry mouth and a bad case of the chills.
It was stupid. Why be so afraid of meeting a woman? I had met quite famous and sophisticated ladies, wives of men of state and some of them statesmen themselves.
Yes, I told myself. But they were different. They were not young and beautiful. That was where the core of my terror lay, though that seemed just as unfathomable as anything else.
At two in the morning, unable to sleep, I got heavily out of bed and walked through the many rooms of my dark house. It is a fine place, with its own theater and gaming rooms, a shooting range, and other luxuries. But there was no solace in seeing all I possessed.
I went into the den and closed the door, looked around without turning on the lights. The machine stood in the corner, silent, monstrous. It was what I had gotten up for in the first place, though I had needed a few minutes to admit it.
The headrest was ominous, a bulky electrode-strung pad that curved to encompass the skull.
But my nerves demanded soothing.
The chair that folded into the machine was like the tongue of some mythical beast, some man-eater and stealer of souls.
I could see the hollow compartment which would swallow me with a single lick, and it terrified me. But I needed soothing. My hands twitched, and a tic had begun in the corner of my mouth. I reminded myself that other generations never had the advantage of a Porter-Rainey SolidState Psychiatrist and that many people, even these days, could not afford one even when modern technology made it possible. I forced myself to forget the emptiness that would take me later. For the moment comfort was enough. And a few explanations...
I sat down in the chair.
My head touched the pad.
The world swiveled up and away, while darkness descended, while fingers probed where they should not be, while my soul was split open like a nut and the meat of my fractured personality was drawn forth for a close examination (in search of worms?).
Proteus Mother taking a thousand shapes, but never to be caught and held to tell the future...
The life spark flickering, then holding steady as a frozen flame. And a very vague awareness even in the womb, where plastic walls were soft and sophisticated thermostatic computers maintained a succor-filled environment. Where plastic walls were giving-but somehow unresponsive...
He looked up into the lights overhead and sensed a man named Edison. He sensed filaments even as his own filament was disconnected from the womb...
And there were metal hands to comfort him...
And... and... there... and...
SAY IT WITHOUT HESITATION! The voice was everywhere about me, was booming, was reassuring in its depth of passion.
And there were simu-flesh breasts to feed him...
And... and...
OUT WITH IT! The computerized psyche-prober imitated thunderstorms and symphonies filled with cymbals.
And there were wire-cored arms to rock him; and he looked out of his swaddling clothes and... and.., GO ON!
... looked up into a face without a nose and with blank crystal eyes that reflected his reddened face. Unmoving black lips crooned, "Rock-a-biiiii-bay-beeeee in theee treeeee (thriddle-thriddle) tops..." The thriddle-thriddle rattling interjection was, he found, the sound of voice tapes changing somewhere inside his mother's head. He searched for his own voice tapes. There were none.
GO ON, GO ON!
And he looked up out of swaddling clothes when he esped an understanding and... and...
IF YOU HESITATE, YOU WILL BE LOST.
I don't remember it after that.
YOU DO.
No!
Yes. YESYESYES. The machine touched part of my mind with blue fingers. Dazzling clouds of neon gas exploded inside my head. I CAN MAKE THE MEMORY
EVEN SHARPER.
No! I'll tell it.
TELL.
And he looked up out of swaddling clothes when he esped an understanding, and his first words were... were
FINISH IT!
His first words were: "My God, my God, I'm not human!"
FINE. NOW RELAX AND LISTEN. My electronic David sorted through the miasma of our conversation and interpreted my dreams for me. There wasn't any simple harp music to accompany his readings, though. YOU
KNOW THAT THE "HE" IS REALLY YOU. YOU
ARE SIMEON KELLY. THE HE OF YOUR ILLUSION IS ALSO SIMEON KELLY. YOUR PROBLEM IS
THIS: YOU ARE OF THE ARTIFICIAL WOMB. YOU
WERE CONDITIONED FROM CONCEPTION TO
HAVE HUMAN MORES AND VALUES. BUT YOU
CANNOT HOLD YOUR MANNER OF CREATION UP
TO THE LIGHT ALONGSIDE YOUR MORES AND
THEN MANAGE TO ACCEPT BOTH.
YOU ARE HUMAN. BUT YOUR MORES TEACH
YOU TO FEEL THAT YOU ARE STRANGELY
LACKING IN HUMAN QUALITIES.
Thank you. I am cured now and I must leave.
NO. The thunderstorms were firm in their denial.
THIS IS THE THIRTY-THIRD TIME YOU HAVE HAD THIS SAME ILLUSION-NIGHTMARE. YOU ARE NOT HEALED. AND THIS TIME I FEEL MORE BELOW THE SURFACE OF THE DREAM, AN ARRAY OF FRAGMENTED TERRORS WHICH SHOULD NOT BE THERE. TELL ME.
There is no more.
TELL ME. The bonds on the chair were tight around nay arms and legs. The headrest seemed to suck out the contents of my head.
Nothing.
A WOMAN. THERE IS A FEMININE SPECTER IN
THOSE TERRORS. WHO IS SHE? SIMEON, WHO IS
SHE?
An author I have read.
AND MET. TELL ME MORE.
Blonde. Green eyes. Full lips likeSOMETHING MORE.
Full lips.
NO. SOMETHING ELSE.
Let me the hell alone!
TELL ME. It was the voice of a king. The kind who will not have your head lopped off, but who will decapitate you with words and shame.
Breasts. Big breasts that I- That II KNOW YOUR PROBLEM. I CAN SEE, FROM
YOUR CONDITION, THAT YOU FIND YOURSELF
IN LOVE WITH HER.
No! That's disgusting!
YES. DENIAL DOES NOTHING TO CHANGE REALITY. REFUSAL TO ACCEPT DOES NOTHING
MORE THAN MAKE EVENTUAL ACCEPTANCE
MORE DIFFICULT. YOU LOVE THIS WOMAN. YET
YOU HAVE THIS COMPLEX WHICH ELUDES ME IN
ITS ENTIRETY. SIMEON, DO YOU REMEMBER THE
SIMULATED FLESH BREASTS?
I remember.
THOSE ARTIFICIAL BREASTS HAVE COME TO
SYMBOLIZE YOUR INHUMANITY TO YOU. YOU
WERE NOT SUCKLED LIKE A MANCHILD, AND
THE LOSS OF THAT HAS DONE STRANGE THINGS
TO YOU. YOU ARE AFRAID OF WOMEN, OFNo. I'm not afraid of women. She was just disgusting.
You would have had to see her to understand. All this spoken reasonably, calmly.
NO. YOU WERE NOT DISGUSTED. YOU ARE
AFRAID, BUT NEVER DISGUSTED. YOU BACK
AWAY FROM EVERYTHING WHICH YOU DO NOT
UNDERSTAND IN THIS LIFE. THIS WOMAN IS
BUT ONE PART OF THAT. YOU BACK AWAY BECAUSE YOU CANNOT SEE WHERE YOUR PLACE
AN
D PURPOSE COULD LIE IN IT ALL. YOU SEE
NO MEANING IN LIFE AND YOU ARE AFRAID TO
SEARCH FOR ONE, FEARING YOU WILL EVENTUALLY DISCOVER THERE IS NO MEANING.
THAT IS WHY YOU SPEND SO MUCH, LIVE FASTER
THAN YOU SHOULD.
May I go?
YES. GO AND DREAM NO MORE OF PROTEUS
MOTHER. YOU WILL DREAM NO MORE. NO
MORE... NO... MORE...
It spat me into the room.
After every session with the machine, I was drained, lifeless, some sea creature tossed up on the beach and gasping its respiratory tract raw in a search for the medium of life it was accustomed to. I tossed my fins now, made smacking noises with my mouth, and wiped at my head, which was clammy and cold. I made my way into the bedroom and collapsed onto the mattress without pulling the covers over me.
I tried to encourage pleasant dreams of Marcus Aurelius.
And of Harry. And of money.
But somewhere, quite far way, there was a voice calling to me, a voice which was like chains dragged across a stone floor, like yellowed paper cracking between my fingers. It said, "You're the one they sent for. I know you are. I hate you..."
V
The next morning, there were rumors of military disturbances along the Russian-Chinese border, and news dispatches from the scene said that Western Alliance troops had met in brushfire contact with the Orientals and that a joint report of American and Russian forces would be filed with the U.N. to protest alleged presence of Japanese technical advisors in the Chinese ranks.
The new Chinese horror weapon circling the tired planet had been named Dragonfly by the press. Trust those boys to be original. Or at least colorful. Or, perhaps, just first.
I paid no attention to it. Thus it had been since my childhood, one mini-war after another, one "incident" on the heels of the last, pompous world leaders spouting even more pompous declarations. A man is not constantly aware of his hands. A bird must sometimes forget the sky is there because it has become so familiar to him. Such it is with disaster and war. You can forget as long as it does not touch you, and you can live in better times. It takes a certain peripheral vision deficiency, but that can be mastered with but a small expenditure of time and energy.