Then slowing, and slower, slower. Stopped.
The music stopped.
Blackness followed. Applause filled it.When the lights came on again the two robots were standing statue-like, facing the audience. Very, very slowly, they bowed.
The applause increased.
Then they turned and were gone.
The music came on and the light was clear again. A babble of voices arose. Render slew the Kraken.
"What d'you think of that?" she asked him, Render made his face serious and said: "Am I a man dreaming I am a robot, or a robot dreaming I am a man?" He grinned, then added: "I don't know."
She punched his shoulder gaily at that and he observed that she was drunk.
"I am not." she protested. "Not much, anyhow. Not as much as you."
"Still, I think you ought to see a doctor about it Like me. Like now. Let's get out of here and go for a drive."
"Not yet, Charlie. I want to see them once more, huh? Please?"
"If I have another drink I won't be able to see that far."
"Then order a cup of coffee."
"Yaagh!"
"Then order a beer."
"I'll suffer without."
There were people on the dance floor now, but Render's feet felt like lead.
He lit a cigarette.
"So you had a dog talk to you today?"
"Yes. Something very disconcerting about that... .**
"Was she pretty?"
"It was a boy dog. And boy, was he uglyi"
"Silly. I mean his mistress."
"You know I never discuss cases, Jill."
"You told me about her being blind and about the dog. AH I want to know is if she's pretty."
"Well ...Yes and no." He bumped her under the table and gestured vaguely. "Well, you know ..."
"Same thing all the way around," she told the waiter who had appeared suddenly out of an adjacent pool of darkness, nodded, and vanished as abruptly.
"There go my good intentions," sighed Render. "See how you like being examined by a drunken sot, that's all I can say.""You'll sober up fast, you always do. Hippocratics and all that."
He sniffed, glanced at his watch.
"I have to be in Connecticut tomorrow. Pulling Pete out of that damned school.. .."
She sighed, already tired of the subject.
"I think you worry too much about him. Any kid can bust an ankle. It's part of growing up. I broke my wrist when I was seven. It was an accident. It's not the school's fault, those things sometimes happen."
"Like hell," said Render, accepting his dark drink from the dark tray the dark man carried. "If they can't do a good job, I'll find someone who can."
She shrugged.
"You're the boss. All I know is what I read in the papers.
"—And you're still set on Davos, even though you know you meet a better class of people at Saint Moritz?" she added.
"We're going there to ski, remember? 1 like the runs better at Davos."
"I can't score any tonight, can I?"
He squeezed her hand.
"You always score with me, honey."
And they drank then- drinks and smoked their cigarettes and held their hands until the people left the dance floor and filed back to their microscopic tables, and the gelatins spun round and round, tinting clouds of smoke from hell to sunrise and back again, and the bass went whumpf Tchga-tchgaf
"Oh, Charlie! Here they come again!"
The sky was clear as crystal. The roads were clean. The snow bad stopped.
Jill's breathing was the breathing of a sleeper. The S-7 raced across the bridges of the city. If Render sat very still he could convince himself that only his body was drunk; but whenever he moved his head the universe began to dance about him. As it did so, he imagined himself within a dream, and Shaper of it all.
For one instant this was true. He turned the big clock in the sky backward, smiling as he dozed. Another instant and he was awake again, and unsmiling.The universe had taken revenge for his presumption. For one reknown moment with the helplessness which he had loved beyond helping, it had charged him the price of the lake-bottom vision once again; and as he had moved once more toward the wreck at the bottom of the world—like a swimmer, as unable to speak—he heard, from somewhere high over the Earth, and filtered down to him through the waters above the Earth, the howl of the Fenris Wolf as it prepared to devour the moon; and as this occurred, he knew that the sound was as like to the trump of a judgment as the lady by his side was unlike the moon. Every bit. In all ways. And he was afraid.
Ill
"... The plain, the direct, and the blunt. This is Winchester Cathedral," said the guidebook. "With its floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge treetrunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces: the ceilings are flat; each bay, separated by those shafts, is itself a thing of certainty and stability. It seems, indeed, to reflect something of the spirit of William the Conqueror. Its disdain of mere elaboration and its passionate dedication to the love of another world would make it seem. too, an appropriate setting for some tale out of Mallory... ."
"Observe the scalloped capitals," said the guide. "In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif...."
"Faugh!" said Render—softly though, because he was in a group inside a church.
"Shh'" said Jill (Fotlock—that was her real last name) DeVille.
But Render was impressed as well as distressed.
Hating JiU's hobby though, had become so much of a reflex with him that he would sooner have taken his rest seated beneath an oriental device which dripped water onto his head than to admit he occasionally enJoyed walking through the arcades and the galleries, the passages and the tunnels, and getting ail out of breath climbing up the high twisty stairways of towers.
So he ran his eyes over everything, burned everything down by shutting them, then built the place up again outof the still smouldering ashes of memory, all so that at a later date he would be able to repeat the performance, offering the vision to his one patient who could see only in this manner. This building he disliked less than most. Yes, he would take it back to her.
The camera in his mind photographing the surroundings, Render walked with the others, overcoat over his arm, his fingers anxious to reach after a cigarette. He kept busy ignoring his guide, realizing this to be the nadir of all forms of human protest. As he walked through Winchester he thought of his last two sessions with Eileen Shallot. He recalled his almost unwilling Adam-attitude as he had named all the animals passing before them, led of course by the one she had wanted to see, colored fearsome by his own unease. He had felt pleasantly bucolic after boning up on an old Botany text and then proceeding to Shape and name the flowers of the fields.
So far they had stayed out of the cides, far away from the machines. Her emotions were still too powerful at the sight of the simple, carefully introduced objects to risk plunging her into so complicated and chaotic a wilderness yet; he would build her city slowly.
Something passed rapidly, high above the cathedral, uttering a sonic boom. Render took Jill's hand in his for a moment and smiled as she looked up at him. Knowing she verged upon beauty, Jill normally took great pains to achieve it. But today her hair was simply drawn back and knotted behind her head, and her Ups' and her eyes were pale; and her exposed ears were tiny and white and somewhat pointed.
"Observe the scalloped capitals," he whispered. "In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif."
"Faugh!" said she.
"Shh!" said a sunburned little woman nearby, whose face seemed to crack and fall back together again as she pursed and unpursed her lips.
Later as they strolled back toward their hotel. Render said, "Okay on Winchester?"
"Ofcay on Winchester."
"Happy?"
"Happy."