His gaze traveled downward still, to the pinch of her waist, the gentle flair of hips, to the long, well-shaped legs that were now all revealed by the shorts she wore. She was barefooted. Somehow this last detail intrigued him more than any other.
Re-direct your attention.
He told the other half of the cyberdetective to go to hell.
You cannot risk physical involvement. That may lead to emotional ties, and you are aware of what that would do to your ability to function at optimum efficiency as a cyberdetective.
St. Cyr still felt the urge to reach for her, to draw her gently to him, to see if that olive skin felt as soft and smooth as it looked. At the same rime, the bio-computer had subtly influenced him, even while he recognized its influence, and he raised his eyes to look only at her face.
He said, "If you really think you're a terrible artist, why do you continue to work?"
She laughed bitterly, laughed so hard that it ended in a choking cough. When she could speak again, she said, "I haven't any choice. There's nothing else I can do but paint, draw, sculpt, watercolor, sketch…"
"Surely you have—"
"No," she interrupted. "Remember, I've undergone hypno-keying — at the age of three, at my father's direction. Do you know what that does to you?"
"Not exactly," he said. "Somehow, it makes certain that you reach your full creative potential."
"And locks you into that."
"I don't understand," he said.
"Each of us seems born with certain abilities," Tina said, turning and crossing to the window, leaning with her back against it. Her black hair and dark complexion paled the night. "Dane, for instance, has an hereditary facility with words, as did Betty and Dorothea. Mother has a solid musical ability. Father, like me, excels in the manual arts."
St. Cyr waited.
"Once you've been through psychiatric hypno-keying, once you've had them in your head nudging your creative talents, you're almost—possessed by whatever one ability you have. I have to paint. My whole world is painting, drawing; I even gain satisfaction from cleaning my brushes at the end of a day."
She walked away from the window and stood before a self-portrait done in shades of orange and yellow.
She said, "When I try to get away from it— Oh, there are times I get so goddamned disgusted with myself, with my clumsy fingers, with my limited vision, that I never want to think about painting again! But when I run away from it for a while, a few days, the anger goes. And I begin to grow nervous… I find myself anxious to be back at it again, anxious to try to do better at it. I know that I cannot do better, that my talent simply stops at a certain point of achievement, that I'm very good but not great. Yet I always go back. I always pick up the brush again. Over and over I make a fool of myself. I never manage to hold out against the urge for more than a week or two. Sometimes three."
"Maybe, with all this drive—"
She talked over him as if she had not heard him begin to speak. "Everyone who has gone through hypno-keying, unless his creative talent is enormous, supreme, lives in a gentle sort of hell ever after that. He cannot do anything but what the hypno-keying has freed him to do — and he knows he can never do it as well as it can be done. And then the drive, as you said." It was the first indication that she had heard him. "The motivation is somehow stimulated by the hypno-keying. In the end, you can do only one thing, you want to do only one thing, but you can never do it as well as you hope to."
"The others feel this way?" he asked.
"They may not vocalize it as readily, but they feel it."
"It doesn't show," St. Cyr said.
"Doesn't it?" She turned away from her portrait and faced him. She was no longer emotional, no longer angry with herself. In a level voice, she said, "Didn't it seem that the family took Betty's death with little emotion?"
"Your mother was in tears."
"A point for my argument," she said. "Mother went through hypno-training later than all the rest of us. Father was treated as a baby, as were all his children. My mother, however, did not undergo treatment until after they were married. Some vestige of normality remains in her."
"I don't see how you tie together the hypno-keying and any lack of emotional response on your family's part."
"It's easy," she said, and smiled. The smile, as before, was not a smile at all. "Each of us is driven by his particular talent, consumed by it despite the limit of his vision. It is not easy, therefore, to establish relationships with other people, to care deeply about them when your energies are concentrated in this one arena."
"You forget that two other murders have taken place here. I would think all of you justified in reacting less forcefully to this one."
"We reacted the same to the first," Tina said. "A bit of grief, a day or two of loss, then plunge back into the work at hand, create, form, build…" She looked at the paintings on the wall to her right, sighed audibly. ''What all of these hypno-keying experts seem not to understand is that you can't create classic art when you have no love life. If love of art is supreme, it's all masturbation. If life, people, places don't come first, there isn't anything for the talent to draw on, no stuffing for the sack."
Though he was not, as she had subtly observed, a man of any great sensitivity — give him bright colors, bold lines, pleasing shapes, loud and lively music any day; to hell with the proper, genteel criteria — he saw in her a deep and awful suffering that, even with the aid of her explanations, he could not clearly grasp. He supposed that, as the attainment of perfect understanding in her art would always elude her, an understanding of her pain would elude him. He had a feeling that she did not sleep well at night, any night but especially this night — and that she tore up more paintings than she kept. He said nothing, for he had nothing to say that would make her feel any better — or any differently, for that matter.
In a quieter voice, almost a whisper, she said, "How can I ever make anything lasting, get anything genuine down on paper or canvas, when I haven't any ability to care for people, for anyone?"
"You could care," he said.
"No."
"Look, you've spent most all your life among other hypno-keyed artists. But if you were living among other people, normal people, they would react strongly to you, form attachments to you and force you to react as strongly as they did. You could care."
"You really think so?"
"Yes."
Be careful.
Go to hell.
"I doubt it," she said.
The confusion of the real and the subvocal conversations forced him to say, "Doubt what?"
She looked at him curiously and said, "I doubt that I could care for anyone."
"You could," he repeated stupidly.
For a long, awkward moment, they stood facing each other. He did not know how she felt, but he seemed suddenly transformed into a blundering, heavy-handed, club-footed wonder. He could hear himself breathing, and he swore he was as loud as an air-conditioning intake fan. He waited for her to say something, for he was unable to initiate anything more on his own. Then, finally aware that she felt she had already said too much and that she wanted to be alone, he said, "Keep the pistol near you at all times."
"I will."
He said goodnight and left her there.
The elevator ride to the fifth level seemed to take forever.
In his room, he poured himself a healthy glassful of Scotch over a single ice cube — one cube so that there was more room in the tumbler for the liquor.
Liquor will dull your perceptions.
Go to hell.
He knew that he was finished for the day, that he could not go anywhere or do anything without a few hours sleep. He sat down in a chair near the patio doors and quickly worked toward the bottom of his golden drink.