Beast Of The Heartland And Other Stories Part 19

"I'm busy," I snapped, reaching for the off switch.

"Reynolds!"

His desperate tone caught my attention.

"I need to talk to you," he said. "A matter of some importance."

I gave an amused sniff. "I doubt that."

"Oh, but it is... to both of us."

An oily note had crept into his voice, and I lost patience. "I'm going to switch off, Brent. Do you want to say goodbye, or should I just cut you off in mid-sentence?"

"I'm warning you, Reynolds!"

"Warning me? I'm all aflutter, Brent. Are you planning to a.s.sault me?"

His face grew flushed. "I'm sick of your arrogance!" he shouted. "Who the h.e.l.l are you to talk down to me? At least I'm productive... you haven't done any work for weeks!"

I started to ask how he knew that, but then realized he could have monitored my energy usage via the station computers.

"You think..." he began, but at that point I did cut him off and turned back to the image of the Spider floating in the holo tank, its arms weaving a slow dance. I had never believed he was more than dreams, vague magical images, the grandfather wizard trapped in flame, in golden light, in the heart of power. I'd hoped, I'd wanted to believe. But I hadn't been able to accept his reality until I came to Helios, and the dreams grew stronger. Even now I wondered if belief was merely an extension of madness. I have never doubted the efficacy of madness: It is my constant, my reference in chaos.

The first dream had come when I was... what? Eleven, twelve? No older. My father had been chasing me, and I had sought refuge in a cave of golden light, a mist of pulsing, s.h.i.+fting light that contained a voice I could not quite hear: It was too vast to hear. I was merely a word upon its tongue, and there had been other words aligned around me, words I needed to understand or else I would be cast out from the light.

The Solar Equations -- which seemed to have been visited upon me rather than a product of reason -- embodied the s.h.i.+ftings, the mysterious principles I had sensed in the golden light, hinted at the arcane processes, the potential for union and dissolution that I had apprehended in every dream. Each time I looked at them, I felt tremors in my flesh, my spirit, as if signaling the onset of a profound change, and...

The beeper sounded again, doubtless another call from Brent, and I ignored it. I turned to the readout from the particle traps monitored by the station computers. When I had discovered that the proton bursts being emitted from the Spider's coronal hole were patterned -- coded, I'm tempted to say -- I had been elated, especially considering that a study of these bursts inspired me to create several addenda to the Equations. They had still been fragmentary, however, and I'd had the notion that I would have to get closer to the Spider in order to complete them... perhaps join one of the flights into the coronosphere.My next reaction had been fear. I had realized it was possible the Spider's control was such that these bursts were living artifacts, structural components that maintained a tenuous connection with the rest of his body. If so, then the computers, the entire station, might be under his scrutiny... if not his control.

Efforts to prove the truth of this had been inconclusive, but this inconclusiveness was in itself an affirmative answer: The computers were not capable of evasion, and it had been obvious that evasiveness was at work here.

The beeper broke off, and I began to ask myself questions. I had been laboring under the a.s.sumption that the Spider had in some way summoned me, but now an alternate scenario presented itself. Could I have stirred him to life? I had beamed protons into the coronal holes, hadn't I? Could I have educated some dumb thing... or perhaps brought him to life? Were all my dreams a delusionary system of unparalleled complexity and influence, or was I merely a madman who happened to be right?

These considerations might have seemed irrelevant to my colleagues, but when I related them to my urge to approach the Spider more closely, they took on extreme personal importance. How could I trust such an urge? I stared at the Spider, at its arms waving in their thousand-mile-long dance, their slow changes in configuration redolent of Kali's dance, of myths even more obscure. There were no remedies left for my fear. I had stopped work, drugged myself to prevent dreams, and yet I could do nothing to remove my chief concern: that the Spider would use its control over the computers (if, indeed, it did control them) to manipulate me.

I turned off the holo tank and headed out into the corridor, thinking I would have a few drinks. I hadn't gone fifty feet when Brent accosted me; I brushed past him, but he fell into step beside me. He exuded a false heartiness that was even more grating than his usual obsequiousness.

"Production," he said. "That's our keynote here, Reynolds."

I glowered at him.

"We can't afford to have deadwood lying around," he went on. "Now if you're having a problem, perhaps you need a fresh eye. I'd be glad to take a look..."

I gave him a push, sending him wobbling, but it didn't dent his mood.

"Even the best of us run up against stone walls," he said. "And in your case, well, how long has it been since your last major work? Eight years? Ten? You can only ride the wind of your youthful successes for so..."

My anxiety flared into rage. I drove my fist into his stomach, and he dropped, gasping like a fish out of water. I was about to kick him, when I was grabbed from behind by the black-clad arms of a security guard. Two more guards intervened as I wrenched free, cursing at Brent. One of the guards helped Brent up and asked what should be done with me.

"Let him go," he said, rubbing his gut. "The man's not responsible."

I lunged at him, but was shoved back. "b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" I shouted. "You smarmy little s.h.i.+t, I'll swear I'll kill you if..."

A guard gave me another above.

"Please, Reynolds," Brent said in a placating tone. "Don't worry... I'll make sure you receive due credit."

I had no idea what he meant, and was too angry to wonder at it. I launched more insults as the guards escorted him away.

No longer in the mood for a public place, I returned to the apartment and sat scribbling meaningless notes, gazing at an image of the Spider that played across one entire wall. I was so distracted that I didn't notice Carolyn had entered until she was standing close beside me. The Spider's colors flickered across her, making her into an incandescent silhouette.

"What are you doing?" she asked, sitting on the floor.

"Nothing." I tossed my notepad side.

"Something's wrong."

"Not at all... I'm just tired."

She regarded me expressionlessly. "It's the Spider, isn't it?" I told her that, Yes, the work was giving me trouble, but it wasn't serious. I'm not sure if I wanted her as much as it seemed I did, or if I was using s.e.x to ward off more questions. Whatever the case, I lowered myself beside her, kissed her, touched her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and soon we were in that heated secret place where -- I thought -- not even the Spider's eyes could pry. I told her I loved her in that rushed breathless way that is less an intimate disclosure than a form of gasping, of shaping breath to accommodate movement. That was the only way I have ever been able to tell her the best of my feeling, and it was because I was shamed by this that we did not make love more often.

Afterward I could see she wanted to say something important: It was working in her face. But I didn't want to hear it, to be trapped into some new level of intimacy. I turned from her, marshaling words that would signal my need for privacy, and my eyes fell on the wall where the image of the Spider still danced... danced in a way I had never before witnessed. His colors were s.h.i.+fting through a spectrum of reds and violets, and his arms writhed in a rhythm that brought to mind the rhythms of s.e.x, the slow beginning, the furious rush to completion, as if he had been watching us and was now mimicking the act.

Carolyn spoke my name, but I was transfixed by the sight and could not answer. She drew in a sharp breath, and seconds later I heard her cross the room and make her exit. The Spider ceased his dance, lapsing into one of his normal patterns. I scrambled up, went to the controls and flicked the display switch to off. But the image did not fade. Instead, the Spider's colors grew brighter, was.h.i.+ng from fiery red to gold and at last to a white so brilliant, I had to s.h.i.+eld my eyes. I could almost feel his heat on my skin, hear the sibilant kiss of his molten voice. I was certain he was in the room, I knew I was going to burn, to be swallowed in that singeing heat, and I cried out for Carolyn, not wanting to leave unsaid all those things I had withheld from her. Then my fear reached such proportions that I collapsed and sank into a dream, not a nightmare as one might expect, but a dream of an immense city, where I experienced a mult.i.tude of adventures and met with a serene fate.

...To understand Dulambre, his relations.h.i.+p with his father must be examined closely. Alex Dulambre was a musician and poet, regarded to be one of the progenitors of drift: a popular dance form involving the use of improvised lyrics. He was flamboyant, handsome, amoral, and these qualities, allied with a talent for seduction, led him on a twenty-five-year fling through the boudoirs of the powerful, from the corporate towers of Abidjan to the Gardens of Novo Sibersk, and lastly to a beach on Mozambique, where at the age of forty-four he died horribly, a victim of a neural poison that purportedly had been designed for him by the noted chemist Virginia Holland. It was Virginia who was reputed to be Reynolds' mother, but no tests were ever conducted to substantiate the rumor. All we know for certain is that one morning Alex received a crate containing an artificial womb and the embryo of his son. An attached folder provided proof of his paternity and a note stating that the mother wanted no keepsake to remind her of an error in judgment.

Alex felt no responsibility for the child, but liked having a relative to add to his coterie. Thus it was that Reynolds spent his first fourteen years globetrotting, sleeping on floors, breakfasting off the remains of the previous night's party, and generally being ignored, if not rejected. As a defense against both this rejection and his father's charisma, Reynolds learned to mimic Alex's flamboyance and developed similar verbal skills. By the age of eleven he was performing regularly with his father's band, creating a popular sequence of drifts that detailed the feats of an all-powerful wizard and the trials of those who warred against him. Alex took pride in these performances; he saw himself as less father than elder brother, and he insisted on teaching Reynolds a brother's portion of the world. To this end he had one of his lovers seduce the boy onhis twelfth birthday, and from then on Reynolds also mimicked his father's omnivorous s.e.xuality.

They did, indeed, seem brothers, and to watch Alex drape an arm over the boy's shoulders, the casual observer might have supposed them to be even closer. But there was no strong bond between them, only a history of abuse. This is not to say that Reynolds was unaffected by his father's death, an event to which he was witness. The sight of Alex's agony left him severely traumatized and with a fear of death bordering on the morbid. When we consider this fear in alliance with his difficulty in expressing love -- a legacy of his father's rejections -- we have gone far in comprehending both his marital problems and his obsession with immortality, with immortality in any form, even that of a child...

--Russell E. Barrett, The Last Alchemist.

3.

Carolyn.

Six months after the implantation of Reynolds' daughter in an artificial womb, I ran into Davis Brent at a pleasure dome where I had taken to spending my afternoons, enjoying the music, writing a memoir of my days with Reynolds, but refraining from infidelity. The child and my concern for Reynolds' mental state had acted to make me conservative: There were important decisions to be made, disturbing events afoot, and I wanted no distractions.

This particular dome was quite small, its walls Maxfield Parrish holographs -- alabaster columns and scrolled archways that opened onto rugged mountains drenched in the colors of a pastel sunset; the patrons sat at marble tables, their drab jumpsuits at odds with the decadence of the decor. Sitting there, writing, I felt like some sad and damaged lady of a forgotten age, brought to the sorry pa.s.s of autobiography by a disappointment at love.

Without announcing himself, Brent dropped onto the bench opposite me and stared. A smile nicked the corners of his mouth. I waited for him to speak, and finally asked what he wanted.

"Merely to offer my congratulations," he said.

"On what occasion?" I asked.

"The occasion of your daughter."

The implantation had been done under a seal of privacy, and I was outraged that he had discovered my secret.

Before I could speak, he favored me with an unctuous smile and said, "As administrator, little that goes on here escapes me." From the pocket of his jumpsuit he pulled a leather case of the sort used to carry holographs. "I have a daughter myself, a lovely child. I sent her back to Earth some months back."

He opened the case, studied the contents, and continued, his words freighted with an odd tension. "I had the computer do a portrait of how she'll look in a few years. Care to see it?"

I took the case and was struck numb. The girl depicted was seven or eight, and was the spitting image of myself at her age.

"I never should have sent her back," said Brent. "It appears the womb has been miss.h.i.+pped, and I may not be able to find her. Even the records have been misplaced. And the tech who performed the implantation, he returned on the s.h.i.+p with the womb and has dropped out of sight."

I came to my feet, but he grabbed my arm and sat me back down. "Check on it if you wish," he said.

"But it's the truth. If you want to help find her, you'd be best served by listening."

"Where is she?" A sick chill spread through me, and my heart felt as if it were not beating but trembling.

"Who knows? S?o Paolo, Paris. Perhaps one of the Urban Reserves."

"Please," I said, a catch in my voice. "Bring her back."

"If we work together, I'm certain we can find her."

"What do you want, what could you possibly want from me?"

He smiled again. "To begin with, I want copies of your husband's deep files. I need to know whathe's working on."

I had no compunction against telling him; all my concern was for the child. "He's been investigating the possibility of life on the Sun."

The answer dismayed him. "That's ridiculous."

"It's true, he's found it!"

He gaped at me.

"He calls it the Sun Spider. It's huge... and made of some kind of plasma."

Brent smacked his forehead as if to punish himself for an oversight. "Of course! That section in the Diaries." He shook his head in wonderment. "All that metaphysical gabble about particulate life... I can't believe that has any basis in fact."

"I'll help you," I said. "But please bring her back!"

He reached across the table and caressed my cheek. I stiffened but did not draw away. "The last thing I want to do is hurt you, Carolyn. Take my word, it's all under control."

Under control.

Now it seems to me that he was right, and that the controlling agency was no man or creature, but a coincidence of possibility and wish such as may have been responsible for the spark that first set fire to the stars.

Over the next two weeks I met several times with Brent, on each occasion delivering various of Reynolds' files; only one remained to be secured, and I a.s.sured Brent I would soon have it. How I hated him! And yet we were complicitors. Each time we met in his lab, a place of bare metal walls and computer banks, we would discuss means of distracting Reynolds in order to perform my thefts, and during one occasion I asked why he had chosen Reynolds' work to pirate, since he had never been an admirer.

"Oh, but I am an admirer," he said. "Naturally I despise his personal style, the pa.s.sing off of drugs and satyrism as scientific method. But I've never doubted his genius. Why, I was the one who approved his residency grant."

Disbelief must have showed on my face, for he went on to say, "It's true. Many of the board were inclined to reject him, thinking he was no longer capable of important work. But when I saw the Solar Equations, I knew he was still a force to reckon with. Have you looked at them?"

"I don't understand the mathematics."

"Fragmentary as they are, they're astounding, elegant. There's something almost mystical about their structure. You get the idea there's no need to study them, that if you keep staring at them they'll crawl into your brain to work some change." He made a church-and-steeple of his fingers. "I hoped he'd finish them here but... well, maybe that last file."

We went back to planning Reynolds' distraction. He rarely left the apartment anymore, and Brent and I decided that the time to act would be during his birthday party the next week. He would doubtless be heavily drugged, and I would be able to slip into the back room and access his computer. The discussion concluded, Brent stepped to the door that led to his apartment, keyed it open, and invited me for a drink.

I declined, but he insisted and I preceded him inside.

The apartment was decorated in appallingly bad taste. His furniture was of a translucent material that glowed a sickly bluish-green, providing the only illumination. Matted under gla.s.s on one wall was a twentieth-century poster of a poem ent.i.tled "Desiderata," whose verses were the height of mawkish romanticism. The other walls were hung with what appeared to be ancient tapestries, but which on close inspection proved to be p.o.r.nographic counterfeits, depicting subjects such as women mating with stags.Considering these appointments, I found hypocritical Brent's condemnation of Reynolds' private life. He poured wine from a decanter and made ba.n.a.l small talk, touching me now and then as he had during our first meeting. I forced an occasional smile, and at last, thinking I had humored him long enough, I told him I had to leave.

"Oh, no," he said, encircling my waist with an arm. "We're not through."

I pried his arm loose: He was not very strong.

"Very well." He touched a wall control, and a door to the corridor slid open. "Go."

The harsh white light s.h.i.+ning through the door transformed him into a shadowy figure and made his p.r.o.nouncement seem a threat.

"Go on." He drained his wine. "I've got no hold on you."

G.o.d, he thought he was clever! And he was... more clever than I, perhaps more so than Reynolds.

And though he was to learn that cleverness has its limits, particularly when confronted by the genius of fate, it was sufficient to the moment.

"I'll stay," I said.