The sound ceased. The humming died. Then Deirdre laughed and made another and quite differently pitched sound. It seemed to reach out like an arm in one straight direction—toward the window. The opened panel shook. Deirdre intensified her hum, and slowly, with imperceptible jolts that merged into smoothness, the window jaried itself shut.
"You see?" Deirdre said. "You see?"
But still Maltzer could only stare. Harris was staring too, his mind beginning slowly to accept what she implied. Both were too stunned to leap ahead to any conclusions yet.
Deirdre rose impatiently and began to pace again, in a ringing of metal robe and a twinkling of reflected lights. She was pantherlike in her suppleness. They could see the power behind that lithe motion now; they no longer thought of her as helpless, but they were far still from grasping the truth.
"You were wrong about me, Maltzer," she said with an effort at patience in her voice. "But you were right too, in a way you didn’t guess. I’m not afraid of humanity. I haven’t anything to fear from them.
Why"—her voice took on a tinge of contempt—"already I’ve set a fashion in women’s clothing. By next week you won’t see a woman on the street without a mask like mine, and every dress that isn’t cut like a chlamys will be out of style. I’m not afraid of humanity! I won’t lose touch with them unless I want to. I’ve learned a lot—I’ve learned too much already."
Her voice faded for a moment, and Harris had a quick and appalling vision of her experimenting in the solitude of her farm, testing the range of her voice, testing her eyesight—could she see microscopically and telescopically?—and was her hearing as abnormally flexible as her voice?
"You were afraid I had lost feeling and scent and taste," she went on, still pacing with that powerful, tigerish tread. "Hearing and sight would not be enough, you think? But why do you think sight is the last of the senses? It may be the latest, Maltzer—Harris—but why do you think it’s the last?"
She may not have whispered that. Perhaps it was only their hearing that made it seem thin and distant, as the brain contracted and would not let the thought come through in its stunning entirety.
"No," Deirdre said, "I haven’t lost contact with the human race. I never will, unless I want to. It’s too easy… too easy."
She was watching her shining feet as she paced, and her masked face was averted. Sorrow sounded in her soft voice now.
"I didn’t mean to let you know," she said. "I never would have, if this hadn’t happened. But I couldn’t let you go believing you’d failed. You made a perfect machine, Maltzer. More perfect than you knew."
"But Deirdre—" breathed Maltzer, his eyes fascinated and still incredulous upon her, "but Deirdre, if we did succeed—what’s wrong? I can feel it now—I’ve felt it all along. You’re so unhappy—you still are. Why, Deirdre?"
She lifted her head and looked at him, eyelessly, but with a piercing stare. "Why are you so sure of that?" she asked gently.
"You think I could be mistaken, knowing you as I do? But I’m not Frankenstein… you say my creation’s flawless. Then what—"
"Could you ever duplicate this body?" she asked.
Maltzer glanced down at his shaking hands. "I don’t know. I doubt it. I—"
"Could anyone else?"
He was silent. Deirdre answered for him. "I don’t believe anyone could. I think I was an accident. A sort of mutation halfway between flesh and metal. Something accidental and… and unnatural, turning off on a wrong course of evolution that never reaches a dead end. Another brain in a body like this might die or go mad, as you thought I would. The synapses are too delicate. You were—call it lucky—with me. From what I know now, I don’t think a… a baroque like me could happen again." She paused a moment. "What you did was kindle the fire for the Phoenix, in a way. And the Phoenix rises perfect and renewed from its own ashes. Do you remember why it had to reproduce itself that way?"
Maltzer shook his head.
"I’ll tell you," she said. "It was because there was only one Phoenix. Only one in the whole world." They looked at each other in silence. Then Deirdre shrugged a little.
"He always came out of the fire perfect, of course. I’m not weak, Maltzer. You needn’t let that thought bother you any more. I’m not vulnerable and helpless. I’m not sub-human." She laughed dryly. "I suppose," she said, "that I’m—superhuman."
"But—not happy."
"I’m afraid. It isn’t unhappiness, Maltzer—it’s fear. I don’t want to draw so far away from the human race. I wish I needn’t. That’s why I’m going back on the stage—to keep in touch with them while I can. But I wish there could be others like me. I’m… I’m lonely, Maltzer."
Silence again. Then Maltzer said, in a voice as distant as when he had spoken to them through glass, over gulfs as deep as oblivion:
"Then I am Frankenstein, after all."
"Perhaps you are," Deirdre said very softly. "I don’t know. Perhaps you are."
She turned away and moved smoothly, powerfully, down the room to the window. Now that Harris knew, he could almost hear the sheer power purring along her limbs as she walked. She leaned the golden forehead against the glass—it clinked faintly, with a musical sound—and looked down into the depths Maltzer had hung above. Her voice was reflective as she looked into those dizzy spaces which had offered oblivion to her creator.
"There’s one limit I can think of," she said, almost inaudibly. "Only one. My brain will wear out in another forty years or so. Between now and then I’ll learn… I’ll change… I’ll know more than I can guess today. I’ll change— That’s frightening. I don’t like to think about that." She laid a curved golden hand on the latch and pushed the window open a little, very easily. Wind whined around its edge. "I could put a stop to it now, if I wanted," she said. "If I wanted. But I can’t, really. There’s so much still untried. My brain’s human, and no human brain could leave such possibilities untested. I wonder, though… I do wonder—"
Her voice was soft and familiar in Harris’ ears, the voice Deirdre had spoken and sung with, sweetly enough to enchant a world. But as preoccupation came over her a certain flatness crept into the sound. When she was not listening to her own voice, it did not keep quite to the pitch of trueness. It sounded as if she spoke in a room of brass, and echoes from the walls resounded in the tones that spoke there.
"I wonder," she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice.
(1944)
FLIGHT
Joanna Kavenna
Joanna Kavenna’s writing career began in 2005 with a voyage to the Arctic and the publication The Ice Museum, an imaginative hybrid of travel narrative and cultural history that drew comparisons to the work of Robert Macfarlane, himself one of Kavenna’s early champions. Inglorious (2007) is a delightfully self-referential novel in which a high-minded bookworm chooses not to leave for the Arctic, preferring a life of ill-defined philosophical reflection: needless to say, things don’t work out at all well. In Come to the Edge (2012), a Robin Hood scheme to combat rural inequality in Cumbria comes memorably unstuck. Kavenna’s most recent novel, modelled loosely on Jorge Luis Borges’s "The Garden of Forking Paths", is A Field Guide to Reality (2016) in which a professor creates, and contrives to lose, a "manual for fixing existential angst".
I was above those old streets, so high, the wind was whispering – I could see the stars beyond the clouds, swelling and declining, as if they were breathing. The clouds were congealing around me, there was a low hum. I might have become afraid, I might have cried out – except everything was happening too fast, I was being propelled along, the wind was singing in my ears—