Ben sat, the young tree at his back, looking out across the bay to the river beyond. It had gone well today. For the first time in weeks his inner doubts had been silenced, his imagination caught up in the play of images. This was his tenth month working on the Shell, his two hundred and ninety-seventh day spent struggling with the material, and finally he felt close to capturing what he had first envisaged, all those months back.
He smiled, remembering where this had begun, back there in those few months before his father, Hal, had died. Hal had wanted to create something for his wife—something she could remember him by. Ben had proposed a "sense-diary"—a "within the skin" kind of thing— but Hal had wanted more.
"No. She has to see me too. From the outside. She'll need that, Ben. It'll comfort her."
And so he had broken with habit, switching from intense sensory fugues—moments which captured the experience of what it felt like to be Hal Shepherd—to colder, sense-distanced extemals, using older, more conventional techniques.
He had expected to be bored by it, at most disappointed, yet from the first it had been different, unexpectedly challenging. Exciting.
In the three months he had worked with his father on the Shell— months in which he had seen Hal transformed, hollowed out by the cancer that had been planted in him by Berdichev's assassin—he had learned more about his craft than in the previous three years.
He had had to make compromises, of course. Had had to let go of his vision of making it all realer-than-real. The cuts, for instance, between the internals and the externals—those mind-jolting leaps of perception he had termed the "discontinuity effect"—had, until then, always been a stumbling block. Before then, he had always argued that by drawing the viewer's attention to the artificiality of the medium, one destroyed the power of the illusion. Forced by his father to confront the problem, he had discovered otherwise; had evolved all manner of ingenious and subtle ways of using that moment to make the illusion stronger, more powerful than before.
It had surprised him. He had always thought that jolt—that moment when one went outside one's body and turned, looking back;—
destructive. And so it was if one thought in pure terms. Yet if one cheated—if one made the fiction work for you—if one embraced the suprareal. . .
He laughed softly, remembering those days, recalling how his father would watch him, fascinated, his eyes burningly alive in that wasted face. His father-brother. Amos's seed.
"Ben?"
He let the moment fade—let the intensity wash from him—then turned, looking up at his sister's shadowed form.
"I thought you were tired?"
She sat beside him, leaning back, her arms out behind her. "1 was," she said quietly. "But then I saw you out here and I thought. . ."
He turned, looking at her. It was dark, her face in deep shadow, and yet he had no need for light to see her. He had only to close his eyes and he could see her, as a child, a girl, and now—these last few years—a woman.
"You're tired, Ben. All this . . . it's too much. You need help. More than I can give you. Technicians. Someone to help you with the setups. Someone to take some of the basic programming work off your hands." She paused, then, exasperated by his silence, added, "You think you can do it all, Ben, but you can't! It's wearing you down. I see it day by day."
He laughed, but as ever he was touched by her concern. "I'm all right, Megs. Really I am."
Ben lifted his face to the night. From where he sat he could smell her; could almost taste the salt-sweet scent of her skin, feel the silk-smooth warmth of her beneath the soft cotton of her dress.
He turned, kneeling, facing her, for a moment content simply to be there in the darkness with her. Then, gently, he pushed her down, onto her back, one hand lifting her dress, his fingers tracing the smooth length of her inner thigh until they met the soft warmth of her sex, the small noise she made, the tiny shiver in her limbs, enflaming him, blinding his senses, making him jerk like a puppet and push down against her urgently, thrusting at her even as she struggled to unfasten him.
And then darkness. Violent, searing darkness.
IN THE FAINT LIGHT of dawn he woke. The house was still, silent, and yet he lay there stiffly, as if alerted, not knowing why.
He went out, into the corridor, standing in the deep shadow, looking toward the far end of the long, low-ceilinged space. The door to his mother's room was closed. To the right, beside it, light from the casement window fell onto the wall, illuminating the portrait there.
Slowly he went toward it.
Every day he passed it. Every day he glanced at it, giving it no more thought than he would a blade of grass or a leaf fallen on the path. But now he stood, studying it intently, trying to see beyond its familiar shapes and colors to the feelings that had formed it—that had here been channeled into canvas, oil, and brush. He closed his eyes, letting his fingertips explore the surface of the canvas, then stood back, squinting at it, trying to see it fresh.
It was himself. Or, rather, Catherine's vision of him. He stared at the dark, fragmented face, at the flecked and broken flesh and nodded gently. She had seen the doubleness in him. Had seen and captured it perfectly. For a moment he let his vision dissolve, admiring the abstract play of red and green and black, deriving a rare aesthetic thrill from the composition; then, focusing again, he saw it whole once more. No. Even Meg didn't know him this well. Even Meg.
Catherine . . . They had been students together at Oxford. Friends and, ultimately, lovers. He had not thought of her in some while; had shut her out, choosing not to remember. But now it all flooded back. The way she rested, like a cat, in her chair, her legs drawn up beneath her. The way her hair fell, a cascade of golden red, each strand a fine, clear filament of flame. The touch, the taste, the smell of her. He closed his eyes, the memory perfect, overwhelming, then, shivering, he turned, going down the narrow twist of stairs.
Downstairs the curtains were tightly drawn, the darkness intense. He made his way blindly to the door and raised the latch, stepping out into the freshness of the new day, his bare feet treading on the dew-wet grass.
Bird calls sounded from the trees across the bay, and then silence.
He moved out across the close-cut lawn, then turned, looking up at the window to his mother's room. The quartered space was dark, the curtains drawn, like a lid over an eye.
For a moment he stood there, thoughtful. She had seemed much happier these past few days, as if, at last, she had come to terms with Hal's death. No more did he wake to hear her crying in the night. And at breakfast yesterday morning he had been surprised to hear her singing softly in the garden.
He turned suddenly. There had been a noise. A high, keening noise that came from the darkness on the far side of the bay. It could have been an animal, but it wasn't. No, for there was nothing in the Domain that made a sound like that.
He shivered, a strange excitement filling him. It was the sound that had woken him, he realized. A strange, unearthly noise.
"Intruders . . ." he said quietly, a faint smile lighting his features. There were intruders in the valley.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Intruders
HE SAT at his father's desk, his great-great-grandfather Amos's keyboard—a strange, semicircular design—resting in his lap. The curtains were drawn, the door locked. Across from him, pulled down in front of the crowded, untidy bookshelves, a huge flatscreen showed a view of the lower valley; of a tree-covered hillside, a wide expanse of sunlit water.
Ben had sent out the remotes an hour ago; a dozen tiny, insectile "eyes" that even now scoured the valley from the creek in the far north to the castle at the river's mouth, searching for signs of intrusion. On one of two small, desk-mounted screens to Ben's left the remotes appeared as pinpoint traces on a map of the Domain, following preprogrammed search patterns. Ben sat there patiently, switching from view to view, alert for anything unusual, but as yet there was nothing.