Perhaps that was what obsession was. A thing against which there was no defense. Not even humor.
So, she thought. And this is yours. The real.
For a time he said nothing. She watched the movement in his dark expressive eyes. Sea moods beneath the vivid green. Surface and undertow. And then he looked out again, at her, and spoke.
"Come with me. I want to show you something."
ben's APARTMENT was to the north of Oxford Canton, on the edge of the fashionable student district. Catherine stood in the main room, looking about her.
"I never imagined . . ." she said softly to herself, then turned to find him there in the doorway, a wine-filled glass in each hand.
"You're privileged," he said, handing her a glass. "I don't usually let anyone come here."
She felt both pleased and piqued by that. It was hard to read what he meant by it.
It was a long, spacious room, sparsely decorated. A low sofa was set down in the middle of the plushly carpeted floor, a small, simply molded coffee table next to it. Unlike the apartments of her friends, however, there were no paintings on the wall, no trinkets or small sculptures on the tabletops. It was neat, almost empty.
She looked about her, disappointed. She had expected something more than this. Something like Sergey's apartment.
He had been watching her. She met his eyes and saw how he was smiling, as if he could read her thoughts. "It's bleak, isn't it? Like a set from some dreadfully tasteful drama."
She laughed, embarrassed.
"Oh don't worry. This is"—he waved his hand in an exaggerated circle—"a kind of mask. A front. In case I had to invite someone back."
She sipped her wine, looking at him sharply, trying to gauge what he was saying to her. "Well?" she said, "what were you going to show me?"
He pointed across the room with his glass. There was a panel in the far wall. A sliding panel with the faint indentation of a thumb-lock.
"The mystery revealed," he said. "Come."
She followed, wondering why he played these games. In all else he was so direct. So much himself. Then why these tricks and evasions? What was he hiding? What afraid of?
His fingers tapped out a combination on the touch-pad. The thumb-lock glowed READY and he pressed his right thumb into the depression. The door hissed back, revealing a second room as big as the one they were in.
She stepped through, impressed by the contrast.
For all its size it was cluttered, the walls lined with shelves. In the spaces between hung prints and paintings. A small single bed rested against the far wall, its sheets wrinkled, a simple cover drawn back. Books were piled on a bedside table and in a stack on the floor beside the bed. Real books, not tapes. Like the one he had given her. Her mouth opened in a smile of surprise and delight. But what really grabbed her attention was the apparatus in the center of the room.
She crossed the room and stood beside it.
"Is this what you do?" she asked, feeling the machine tremble, its delicate limbs quivering beneath her touch.
The scaffolding of the machine was laced with fine wires, like a cradle. Inside lay a lifesize marionette, a mock human, no features on its face, its palms smooth and featureless. The morph was like the machine, almost alive, tremblingly responsive to her touch. Its white, almost translucent surfaces reflected the ceiling light in flashes and sparkles.
It was beautiful, a work of art in itself.
"Does it do anything?"
"By itself, no. But yes, in a sense it's what I do."
She looked quickly at him, then back to the machine, remembering what Sergey had said about him being a technician, a scientist. But how did that equate with what he knew about art? All that intuitive, deeply won knowledge of his? She frowned, trying to understand, trying to fit it all together. She looked down at the base of the machine, seeing the thick width of tape coiled about the spools, like some crude relic from the technological past. She had never seen anything like it.
She circled the machine, trying to comprehend its function. Failing.
"What is this?" she said finally, looking back at him.
He stood on the other side of the machine, looking at her through the fragile scaffolding, the fine web of wiring.
"It's what 1 brought you here to see."
He was smiling, but behind the smile she could sense the intensity of his mood. This was important to him. For some reason very important.
"Will you trust me, Catherine? Will you do something for me?"
She stared back at him, trying to read him, but it was impossible. He was not like the others. It was hard to tell what he wanted, or why. For a moment she hesitated, then nodded, barely moving her head, seeing how much he had tensed, expecting another answer.
He turned away momentarily, then turned back. The excitement she had glimpsed earlier had returned to his eyes, this time encompassing her, drawing her into its spell.
"It's marvelous. The best thing I've done. You wait. You'll see just how marvelous.
How real"
There was a strange, almost childish quality in his voice-—an innocence—that shocked her. He was so open at that moment. So completely vulnerable. She looked at him with eyes newly opened to the complexity of this strange young man, to the forces in contention in his nature.
Strangely, it made her want to hold him to her breast, as a mother would hold her infant child. And yet at the same time she wanted him, with a fierceness that made her shiver, afraid for herself.
BEN STOOD at the head of the frame, looking down at her. Catherine lay on her back, naked, her eyes closed, the lids flickering. Her breasts rose and fell gently, as if she slept, her red hair lay in fine red-gold strands across her cheeks, her neck.
Stirrups supported her body, but her neck was encased in a rigid cradle, circled with sensitive filaments of ice, making it seem as if her head were caged in shards of glass. A fine mesh of wires fanned out from the narrow band at the base of her skull, running down the length of her body, strips of tape securing the tiny touch' sensitive pads to her flesh at regular intervals. Eighty-one connections in all, more than half of those directly into the skull.
The morph lay on the bed, inert. Ben glanced at its familiar shape and smiled. It was almost time.
He looked down at the control desk. Eight small screens crowded the left-hand side of the display, each containing the outline image of a skull. Just now they flickered through a bright sequence of primaries, areas of each image growing then receding.
Beneath the frame a tape moved slowly between the reels. It was a standard work—an original pat pi—but spliced at its end was the thing he had been working on, the new thing he was so excited about. He watched the images flicker, the tape uncoil and coil again, then looked back at the girl.
There was a faint movement in her limbs, a twitching of the muscles where the pads were pressed against the nerve centers. It was vestigial, but it could be seen. Weeks of such ghost movement would cause damage, some of it irreparable. And addicts had once spent months in their shells.
The tracking signal appeared on each of the eight small screens. Fifteen seconds to the splice. He watched the dark mauve areas peak on six of the screens, then fade as the composition ended. For a moment there was no activity, then the splice came in with a suddenness that showed on all the screens.
According to the screens, Catherine had woken up. Her eyes were open and she was sitting up, looking about her. Yet in the frame the girl slept on, her lidded eyes unmoving, her breasts rising and falling in a gentle motion. The faint tremor in her limbs had ceased. She was still now, perfectly at rest.
The seconds passed slowly, a countdown on the top-right screen showing when the splice ended.
He smiled and watched her open her eyes, then try to shake her head and raise her hands. Wires were in her way, restraining her. She looked confused, for a brief moment troubled. Then she saw him and relaxed. "How are you?" he asked.