by Tanith Lee
‘Su-ure,’ said the new-worlder.
‘Take a seat, please.’
Grinning, the new-worlder rippled onto a couch. Double-jointed, too. That should offer Malvanda a challenge.
Beldek came around the counter and extended a small steel wafer.
‘You understand, this entertainment being of the kind it is, you must first –’
‘Sign a disclaimer? Yes, su-ure.’ The new-worlder was already excited, a little drunk or otherwise stimulated. That had usually happened too, before they got themselves to these doors.
The newman accepted the wafer, which hummed, and spoke to him, telling him of possible dangers involved in what he was about to experience. As it droned on, the newman grinned and nodded, nodded and grinned, and sometimes his all-blue eyes went to Beldek, and he grinned wider, as if they were in a conspiracy. When the machine finished, the new-worlder was already up at the counter, his six fingers out for the disclaimer and stylus. He signed with a flourish. He paid the fee in one large bill, and shiftily counted his change from habit, not really concentrating.
‘What now?’
‘Now you meet the lady.’
‘Say,’ said the newman.
Beldek fed the disclaimer into the computer. The back of the kiosk murmured and rose, revealing the black lacquer door. The new-worlder tensed. There was sudden sweat on his face and he licked his lips. Then the door opened, inward.
Standing well back by the counter, Beldek got a glimpse of sombre plush, sulky, wine-smoked light, the vague shimmer of draperies in a smooth wind scented with camellias and sorrow-flowers, the floral things of drugged funerals. He had seen the poisonously-alluring aperture, that throbbing carnelian camellia vulva of doorway, many thousands of times. The new-worlder had not. Mindlessly, helplessly, he went forward, as if mesmerised, and poured over the threshold. A heavy curtain fell. The door swung shut. The ultimate orifice had closed upon him.
Beldek moved around behind the counter and touched the voyeur-button. He watched for less than a minute, his face matte as fresh linen, ironed young and expressionless. Then he cut off the circuit.
Such a device, mostly unknown to clients, was necessary by law, which did not call it a voyeur-button. Persons who underwent such events as Malvanda had to be monitored and easy of access should an emergency occur. Twice, before Beldek joined the show, a client had died in there. Because the disclaimers were in order, and medical aid was rushed to the spot, Qire was covered and no action resulted. The newman, however, had registered healthy on the wafer. Beldek had told at a glance he was strong. There was no need to watch.
Qire sometimes came around just to do that. There was a more private extension of the voyeur-button in the cubicle off the inner office. Qire had not invented Malvanda’s Mansion, only sponsored the design and then bought the product. But he liked it. He liked to watch. Sometimes, Qire brought a friend with him.
Beldek went into the inner office and dropped crystals in his ears that would play him an hour of wild thin music, a concerto for Celestina and starsteel.
He did not need to watch Malvanda.
He knew what happened.
When the hour was up, Beldek tidied the office, and reset the computer. The panels dimmed one by one as the lamps softened in the kiosk and the carnal peak on the roof went out. The new-worlder was the last customer of the night. In thirty minutes, dawn would start to seep across the eastern hills.
As Beldek was revamping the computer program for tomorrow night, the black lacquer door shifted open behind him. He heard the newman emerge, stumbling a little on his double joints.
The hiccupping footsteps got all the way to the whaal-ivory doors before the voice said, ‘Say.’ The voice had changed. It was husky, demoralised. ‘Say.’
Reluctantly, abrasively polite, Beldek turned. He levelled a wordless query at the sagging male by the kiosk doors. The newman’s eyes were muddy, looking sightless. He seemed to go on trying to communicate.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Nothing,’ said the new-worlder. ‘Just – nothing.’ The doors opened and like a husk he almost blew into the diluting darkness, and away through the dregs and embers of the Fair.
Whatever else, the click in the mechanism obviously hadn’t spoiled it for him at all.
By day, the Nightfair goes to ground. Some of the big architectures and marts sink down literally into the bedrock. Others close up like clams. Coming over the hills too early, you get a view of acres of bare earth, burned-looking, as if after some disaster. Here and there the robot cleaning-machines wander, in a snowstorm of rinds, wrappers, drugstick butts, lost tinsels. Places that stand, naked to the two eyes of heaven, the pair of dog-suns, have a look of peeled potatoes, indecent and vulnerable.
Awnings of durable wait like rags, dipped flags, for the glow and glitter of neon night.
The peoples of the Nightfair are wolves, foxes, coomors, they sleep by day in their burrows, or their nests up in the scaffolded phantom towers, among the peaceful wrecks of sky-buses, their wry lemon dreams filling the air with acids.
In the last of the afternoon there begins to be some movement, furtive, rats on a golden hill of rubbish littered with tin-can calliopes.
‘Beldek, is that you, you ghexy guy?’
Qire’s runner, Chakki, having used his key to the whaal-ivory doors, peered about the office.
‘Who else did you hope to find?’
Beldek was tinkering with a small box of wires and three or four laser-battery tools. He did not turn round. Chakki now and then dropped by, never when expected, checking up for Mr Qire, or just nosing. Scrawny and pretty, Chakki was a being of instinct rather than thought or compunction, an alley cat that runs in, steals a chicken dinner, pees in a corner, and, soulless physical ghost, is gone.
‘What ya doing, lovely Beldek?’
‘Trying to repair a click.’
‘My … Malvanda clicketh. Yeah, I heard about it. Better now?’
‘We shall see.’
‘You going in to give it her?’
Beldek walked past him toward the back wall of the kiosk, which was going up to reveal the door of Sinoese lacquer.
‘You lucky buck. Bet she bends ya.’
‘So long, Chakki.’
The lacquer door started to open. Chakki stared tiptoe over Beldek’s shoulder into camellia, carnelian, lilies-go-roses, funereal virgo unintacta.
‘Let’s have a piece, Bel?’
‘If you can afford it. Come back tonight with the other clientele.’
‘Go swiff yourself, Bellrung.’
The curtain fell. The door had closed.
Beyond the door, no matter the time of day or season, it was always midnight in Indian Summer.
Around the great oval room there were long windows that seemed to give onto a hot perfumed night, mobile only with the choruses of crickets. There were lush gardens out there, under the multiplicity of stars, the best constellations of ten planets, and beyond the gardens, hills, the backs of black lions lying down. Now and then a moth or two fluttered like bright flakes of tissue past the open glass. They never came in. It might distract the customer.
The roof apparently was also of glass, ribbed into vanes, like the ceiling of a conservatory. You saw the stars through it, and soon a huge white moon would come over, too big to be true.
There were carpets on the walls. Draperies hung down, plum velvets, transparencies with embroidery and sequins, dividing the room like segments of a dream. Everything bathed in the aromatic smoke of a church of incense candles. The other scent was flowers. They bloomed out of the bodies of marble animals grouped around little oases of water thick with sinuous snake-fish. Red-black flowers, albino flowers, flowers stained between red and white and black, grey flowers, fever and blush flowers, bushes of pale, sighing faints.
The marble stair went up to shadows, and reflected in the polished floor. If you looked in the floor at the reflection, presently something moved, upside down, a figure in fluid. The
n you looked up again at the stair. And saw Malvanda, out of the shadows, coming down.
Malvanda was tall and 22 years old, slim but not slender, her shoulders wide for elegance, her hips wide as if to balance panniers, her waist to be spanned by a man’s hands, her breasts high and firm and full to fill them, spill them. Malvanda’s skin was as white as the sorrow-flowers, with just that vague almost-colourless flush, at the temples, ear-lobes, hollow of the throat, insteps, wrists … that the sorrow-flowers had at the edges of their petals. She was platinum blonde. Flaxen hair without a trace of gold or yellow, hair that is white, like moonlight blanching metal. Her eyebrows were just two shades darker, but her lashes were like tarnished brass and her eyes were like untarnished brass. Wolf-colour eyes, large; glowing now, fixed on him.
A small movement of her head shifted the coils of platinum hair away over her shoulder. The column of her throat went down and down into the crimson dress. The V of the neckline ended just under her breasts. She smiled a little, just a very little. Her lips were a softer crimson than the gown. Rose mouth. She began to come toward him, and her hand stole from her side, moving out to him ahead of her, as if it couldn’t wait to make contact.
Beldek walked up to her, and, as the smooth hand floated to his arm, he guided her fingers away. He ran his own hand in under the heavy silk hair to the base of her skull and touched.
Switched off, Malvanda stood quite still, her lips slightly parted, her eyes dreaming, brazen, swimming with late afternoon veldt.
Beldek ran his thumb around her throat and jabbed into the hollow. He pressed the second disc under her right ear, and the third under her left index fingernail, deactivating the safety. There had to be a suitably obtuse series of pressures, to avoid random deactivation by a client, when caressing her. Beldek knelt at Malvanda’s feet. He raised the hem of her gown and drew one flawless foot onto his knee. He gripped under the instep, and drew out the power-booster from the panel.
Then he got up and went around, undoing the cling-zip on the back of her gown. The keyboard opened where her lower spine should be. He compared it to the box of wires he had brought in, then, selecting one of the fine plumbing needles, he began to work on her.
After four and a half minutes he found the fault that might be responsible for the unfortunate click that had offended the aesthetic values of the Vyrainian. Two levers, the size of whiskers, had unaligned and were rubbing together. Looking through the magnifier, he eased them away and put in a drop of stabiliser. That area of the board could be overheating, so causing the levers’ unwanted expansion together. He would need to check it again in a couple of days.
Having closed the panel and sealed her dress, he replaced the power-booster in her foot. The gauge in her board had showed nearly full, so it was time to empty the sac before reactivating.
Very gently, Beldek parted her beautiful carmine lips, and reached in, past the beautiful teeth, to the narrow tube of throat.
The sac was not too easy to come at, of course. When Qire took him on, the first two things he had wanted to see were Beldek’s hands. Articulate and long-fingered, they had passed the test.
Beldek was half-way through disposing of the sac’s contents when he heard a noise behind him.
The moon was coming up over the glass ceiling, augmenting the candle-and-lamplight. Not that he really needed it to see Chakki, transfixed there, against the curtain with his mouth open and his eyes bulging.
Before coming in, Beldek always cut off the voyeur-button, both on the console and in the office cubicle. At such times as this, the computer would only release the black lacquer door to Beldek. Somehow, Chakki had found a way either to fool the computer or to force the door.
‘What the Garbundian Hop-Hell are you doing, Beldek?’ said Chakki, all agog.
‘Emptying the sac,’ said Beldek. ‘As you saw.’
‘Yeah but –’ Chakki burst into a wild laugh. ‘Holla, man. You’re kinkier than I ever thought.’
Chakki, unable to spy in the usual way, had obviously badly wanted to see Beldek in operation with Malvanda. Chakki had always, blatantly, imagined Beldek liked to get free what the patrons paid for. If he’d managed an entry one minute earlier, or one minute later, it need not have mattered.
‘Kinkier than you thought? Of course I am, Chakki.’ Beldek resettled the sac in Malvanda’s mouth, and let it go down the throat, always an easier manoeuvre this, than retraction. He keyed on the relays. Malvanda did not move just yet. She took a moment to warm up after deactivation. ‘I suppose I’ll have to bribe you, now, Chakki. Won’t I?’
Chakki giggled. He looked nervous. In a second he would start to back away.
‘How about,’ said Beldek, ‘a free ride with Malvanda?’ Then he sprinted, faster than any alley cat, straight through the candlelamp moonlight. He caught Chakki like a lover. ‘How about that?’ he asked, and Chakki shivered against him, scared now, but not quite able to make up his mind to run.
Beldek led him firmly, kindly stroking him a little, to the centre of the floor where Malvanda had been left standing.
As they got near, her eyelids flickered.
‘She’s something,’ said Chakki. ‘Maybe I could come round tonight.’
‘Busy tonight. Do it now. You always wanted to. Have fun.’
Chakki’s shiver grew up into a shudder. He glanced toward the curtained door. Then Malvanda woke up.
Beldek moved aside. Malvanda’s hand went to Chakki’s face, sensuous and sure.
She was taller than Qire’s runner. Beldek’s height. Her mouth parted naturally now, the wonderful strange smile, inviting, certain. Just showing the tips of the teeth.
This time, Beldek would watch.
Chakki wriggled, still afraid. But the drugs in the candles were affecting him by now, and the water-lily touches, on the neck, the chest, slipping, lingering. He put out one hand, careful, into her neckline, and found a breast. Half-frightened, aroused, wanting approval, he looked at Beldek. ‘She feels real.’
‘She’s meant to, Chakki.’
‘Hey, I never really saw what you –’
‘That’s okay, Chakki. Enjoy.’
Malvanda’s strawberry tongue ran over Chakki’s lips. Her left arm held him like a loved child, her right hand moved like a small trusting animal seeking shelter, and discovered it, there in Chakki’s groin, and played and tickled, and burrowed, and coiled.
They were on the couch now. Chakki with his clothes off, with handfuls of Malvanda’s gown clenched in his fists, his nose between her breasts, was writhing and squeaking. Malvanda bent her head to do the thing they paid for, and the thing Chakki had not paid for. The true thrill, the perverse unique titillation that Malvanda offered. Her platinum hair fell over them, obscuring. But Beldek knew what went on under the wave of hair. Chakki was coming, noisily and completely, the way most of them did.
Beldek walked quickly across to the couch. He tapped Malvanda on the right shoulder, just once.
He had had the maintenance of her a long while. He had been able to innovate a little. A very little. Enough. Provision for a Chakki day.
Chakki was subsiding. Then struggling.
‘Beldek,’ he said, ‘she’s still – ah – Christ – Beldek!’
His arms flailed and his legs, as naked and puny. Chakki tried to push Malvanda away. But Malvanda was strong as only a machine could be. She held him down, pinned beneath her, her marmoreal body oblivious to the kicks and scratches that did not even mar its surface, as she went on doing what Beldek had just told her to go on doing.
Ignoring the screams, which gradually became more frenzied and more hopeless, Beldek walked out of Malvanda’s Mansion.
The marks where the door had been forced were not bad but quite plain. A paint job would see to it. Chakki would have planned to do that before Qire got back. Now Qire would have to see them.
Beldek shut the door and Chakki’s last wailing thinning shrieks were gone.
Just before suns’ set, Beldek call
ed Qire on the interphone. He broke the news mildly. Qire’s runner had got through the Mansion door when Beldek was in the bathroom. Entering the Mansion to check Malvanda, Beldek found Chakki. He had died of haemorrhage and shock, the way the two others had. There was, obviously, no disclaimer. What did Quire want him to do?’
He could hear the boss-man sweating all along the cable from Next Valley.
‘You called anyone else, Beldek?’
‘No.’
‘The pol?’
‘Not yet.’
He listened to Qire bubbling over, over there. The two prior deaths in Qire’s pavilion made things awkward, despite all the cover on the world. This third death, minus cover, could look like shoddy goods. And Chakki was a private matter. Beldek had known what Qire would do.
‘All right. Don’t call ’em. You listening, Beldek?’
‘Oh yes, Mr Qire. Most attentively.’
‘Don’t scad me, Beldek. I’m gonna give you a number. You call that. Someone’ll come see to things. Okay?’
‘Anything you say, Mr Qire.’
‘And keep your mouth shut.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Qire gave him the number and he used it. The voice at the other end was mechanised. He said to it the brace of phrases Qire had briefed him with, and then there were noises, and the line went blind.
The suns were stubbed out and the wild flame wheels began to turn on the sky of Indian ink, and the coloured arsons shot across the arena bowl below, and the carousels practised their siren-songs and got them perfect.
Someone came and tried to breach the darkened pavilion.
Beldek went out and stood on the lawn.
Two Pheshines stared from their steamy eyes, lashing their tails in the grass.
‘Dena mi ess, condlu ess, sollu ess. Dibbit?’
Beldek had told them, in Phesh, the show was closed. The gentlephesh did dibbit, and went off spitting to each other.
The nondescript carry-van drew up an hour later. Men walked into the kiosk and presently into the Mansion. They walked out with a big plastic bag and took it away.