Meg sat forward eagerly. "And that's when it all happened?"
Beth shook her head. "No. Not at all. I was flattered, naturally, but such a request was impossible to comply with. I was only nineteen. It was six years before I would come of age, and my mother and father would have forbidden me to go even if I had asked them."
"So what did you do?"
Beth laughed. "I did the only thing I could. 1 sent him an invitation to my next concert."
"And he came?"
"No. What happened next was strange. My father called on me. I hadn't seen him in over six months; and then, the day after I'd sent the note to Hal, there was my father, larger than life, telling me that he'd arranged a husband for me."
Meg's mouth fell open a second time. "A husband?"
"Yes. The son of an old friend of his. A rich young buck with no talent and as little intelligence."
Meg clutched her mother's hands tightly. "And you said no. You told your father you were in love with Hal Shepherd and wanted to marry him. Is that right?"
Beth laughed. "Gods, no. I had no say in it. Anyway, I wasn't in love with your father then. I quite liked him. He was handsome and intelligent, and I felt a kind of , . . affinity with him. But beyond that nothing. Not then, anyway. What I didn't realize, however, was that your father had fallen in love with me. It seems he had spent that whole year trying to forget me, but when he heard about my engagement, he went mad and challenged my intended to a duel."
Meg blinked. "He did what?"
"Yes," Beth laughed delightedly. "An old-fashioned duel, with swords."
"And?" Meg's eyes were big and round.
"Well. . . My father was horrified, naturally. My fiance wanted to fight, but Hal had something of a reputation as a swordsman and my father was certain he would kill my future husband. He asked Hal to call on him to try to sort things out."
"And they came to an arrangement?"
Beth leaned forward. "Not straight away. Though that's not the story my father told. You see, I listened secretly from the next room when they met. My father was angry at first. 'You can't have her,' he said. 'If you kill this man, I'll arrange a marriage with another.' 'Then I'll kill him, too!' Hal said. My father was taken aback. 'And I'll find another suitor. You can't kill them all.' But Hal was determined. His voice rang out defiantly. 'If I have to, I'll kill every last man in Chung Kuo! Don't you see? I want your daughter.' "
Beth laughed, then sat back, her face suddenly more thoughtful, her eyes gazing back in time. Then, more quietly. "Gods, Meg. You don't know how thrilling it is to be wanted like that."
Meg watched her mother a moment longer, then looked down, giving a small shudder. "Yes . . . And your father gave in to Hal?"
"Gods, no. He was a stubborn man. And a mercenary one. You see, he'd found out how much Hal was worth by then. All this was a kind of play-acting, you understand, to put up the price."
Meg frowned, not understanding. ;
"He wanted a dowry. Payment for me."
Meg made a small noise of astonishment.
"Yes. And he got it, too. He threatened to stop Hal from marrying me until I was twenty-five unless he paid what he asked."
"And did he?"
"Yes. Twice what my father asked, in fact."
"Why?"
Beth's smile widened. "Because, Hal said, my father didn't know the half of what he had given life to."
Meg was silent for a while, considering. Then she looked up at her mother again.
"Did you hate your father?"
Beth hesitated, a sadness in her face. "I didn't know him well enough to hate him, Meg. But what I knew of him 1 didn't like. He was a little man, for all his talent. Not like Hal." She shook her head gently, a faint smile returning to the corners of her mouth. "No, not like your father at all."
"Where's Ben?" Meg asked, interrupting her mother's reverie.
"Downstairs. He's been up hours, working. He brought a lot of equipment up from the basement and set it up in the living room."
Meg frowned. "What's he up to?"
Beth shook her head. "I don't know. Fulfilling a promise, he said. He said you'd understand."
"Ah . . ." Shells, she thought. It has to do with sheik.
And memory.
BEN SAT in a harness at the piano, the dummy cage behind him, its morph mimicking his stance. A single thin cord of conduit linked him to the morph. Across the room, a trivee spider crouched, its program searching for discrepancies of movement between Ben and the morph. Meg sat down beside the spider, silent, watching.
A transparent casing covered the back of Ben's head, attached to the narrow horseshoe collar about his neck. Within the casing a web of fine cilia made it seem that Ben's blond hair was streaked with silver. These were direct implants, more than sixty in all, monitoring brain activity.
Two further cords, finer than the link, led down from the ends of the collar to Ben's hands, taped to his arms every few inches. Further hair-fine wires covered Ben's semi-naked body, but the eye was drawn to the hands.
Fine, flexible links of ice formed crystalline gloves that fitted like a second skin about his hands. Sensors on their inner surfaces registered muscular movement and temperature changes.
Tiny pads were placed all over Ben's body, measuring his responses and feeding the information back into the collar.
As he turned to face Meg, the morph turned, faceless and yet familiar in its gestures, its left hand, like Ben's, upon its thigh, the fingers splayed slightly.
Meg found the duplication frightening—deeply threatening—but said nothing. The piano keyboard, she noted, was normal except in one respect. Every key was black.
"Call Mother in, Meg. She'd like to hear this."
The morph was faceless, dumb; but in a transparent box at its feet was a separate facial unit—no more than the unfleshed suggestion of a face, the musculature replaced by fine wiring. As Ben spoke, so the half-formed face made the ghost-movements of speech, its lips and eyes a perfect copy of Ben's own.
Meg did as she was told, bringing her mother from the sunlight of the kitchen into the shadows of the living room. Beth Shepherd sat beside her daughter, wiping her hands on her apron, attentive to her son.
He began.
His hands flashed over the keys, his fingers living jewels, coaxing a strange, wistful, complex music from the ancient instrument. A new sound from the old keys.
When he had finished, there was a moment's intense silence, then his mother stood and walked across to him. "What was that, Ben? I've never heard its like. It was . . ." She laughed, incredulous, delighted. "And I presumed to think that I could teach you something!"
"I wrote it," he said simply. "Last night, while you were all asleep."
Ben closed his eyes, letting the dissonances form again in his memory. Long chordal structures of complex dissonances, overlapping and repeating, twisting about each other like the intricate threads of life, the long chains of deox-yribonucleic acid. It was how he saw it. Not A and C and G Minor, but Adenine and Cytosine and Guanine. A complex, living structure.
A perfect mimicry of life.
The morph sat back, relaxing after its efforts, its chest rising and falling, its hands resting on its knees. In the box next to its feet the eyes in the face were closed, the lips barely parted, only a slight flaring of the nostrils indicating life.
Meg shuddered. She had never heard anything so beautiful, nor seen anything so horrible. It was as if Ben were being played. The morph, at its dummy keyboard, seemed far from being the passive recipient of instructions. A strange power emanated from the lifeless thing, making Ben's control of things seem suddenly illusory: the game of some greater, more powerful being, standing unseen behind the painted props.