Collected Short Fiction, page 831
Lying there congealed and coagulated on top of Lissa, he understood perfectly what was happening. Nat Hamlin, having conserved his strength for a couple of hours, was trying to achieve a takeover of a new level of their shared brain. Specifically Hamlin was attempting to grab Macy’s speech centers. Macy knew that that would mark the start of his own obliteration; once Hamlin had control of the voice, it would be his thoughts, not Macy’s, that their body would express. Hamlin would have access to the external world and Macy would be shut inside. But at the moment Hamlin wasn’t doing too well. He had grabbed the neural sectors governing speech, only his grasp was incomplete, and the best he could manage were these bursts of nonsense. Somehow, Macy realized, Lissa had become entangled in the battle before he himself had known it was going on. Her brain hooked into his; Hamlin speaking, or trying to, through her mouth. A microphoning effect of some kind. Now they were both doing it, the two of them bellowing like demented seals. Feeding hour at the zoo. Is this where it ends? Does Hamlin take over from me now? No. No. Fight back. Stop him here and drive him into a corner.
How, though?
The way you did last night, when he had hold of the side of your mouth. Pry him loose. Through sheer strength of concentration, break his grip.
Macy tried to visualize the interior of his brain. Telling himself, This is where Hamlin lives, this pocket of gunk, and these are the pathways he’s been building to other parts of my brain, and this is the place he’s attacking now. It was a purely imaginary construct, but it would serve for the moment. Try to visualize the speech centers themselves. Say, row upon row of tight-strung pink cords, a kind of piano deal, with a switchboard attached. Hamlin at the switchboard, plugging things in, looking for the right connection; and the pink cords, all ajangle, giving off weird groaning noises. Come up behind him. Grab his arms. He isn’t any stronger than you are. Pull him away, knock him on his ass. Jump on him. Careful, don’t smash any of the machinery. You’ll need it when this is over. Just hang on to him. Stay on top. Pin him, pin him, pin him! Good! Smash his head against the floor a couple of times! Okay, the floor’s spongy, it gives a little, smash him anyway. Stun him. Right. Now start hauling him the hell out of there. Heavy fucker, isn’t he? One hundred ninety pounds, same as you. Heave. Heave. Heave. Into this musty corridor. A hot humid smell coming out of it. Things must be rotting in there. In with him! Down the chute! Slam the door. There. Easier than you expected, eh? All it takes is some mental energy. Perseverance. You can relax now. Catch your breath. Hey, Jesus, what’s this? He must have come to, in there. Hammering on the other side of the door. Starting to push it open. Wow, you can’t let him do that. Hold it closed! Push . . . push . . . push . . . a stalemate. He can’t get it open any further, you can’t close it that last crack. Push. He’s pushing back. Push. Push. Bear down. Oh, Jesus. There! It’s closed again. All right, keep your shoulder to the door, hold it tight. The bear’s locked in his cave; you don’t want him coming out again. Now fasten the door. With what? Slip a bolt in place, dodo. But there isn’t a bolt. Sure there is. This is your mind, your own fucking mind, can’t you use a little imagination? Invent a bolt! Like that. Fine. Now ram it home. In the slot. In. In. There. Okay, step back. See if he can break out. Be ready to clobber him if he does. He’s banging on the door. Throwing himself against it. But the bolt holds. It holds. Good deal. Let’s check out the machinery, now. Make sure he didn’t screw it up. Loud and clear, let’s hear it:
“My name is Paul Macy.”
Good. Nice to hear some sense out of your mouth again. Keep going.
“I was born in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on the 12th of March, 1972. My father was a propulsion engineer and my mother was a schoolteacher.”
Voice production generally okay. A little rusty around the edges, a little froggy in the lower frequencies, but that’s only to be expected, the way he was abusing your pipes. It’ll clear up fast, most likely.
You win this round, Macy.
Slowly, shakily, he rose from the bed. Lissa still lay there, looking crumpled and flattened. She didn’t move. Her face had resumed its normal appearance. Her eyes were open. No glow in them. A sullen, absent expression.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
No response. Off in another galaxy somewhere.
“Lissa? Are you okay?”
Staring blankly at him, she said, “Do you give a shit if I am?” Her voice was as hoarse as his.
“What kind of question is that?”
“You were really letting me have it before all the fireworks started,” she said. “Telling me you suspected I was on his side, and a lot of other crap. If I had any sense I’d get the hell away from you, fast, I don’t need to be pushed around like that.” She stood up, huddling her arms against her sides, looking more vulnerable than ever. The blue streaks of veins visible in her breasts. Stretch-marks in the skin of her hips, showing where she had lost weight lately. Quick angry motions. Snatching at her clothes, throwing things on. A blouse, a tunic. She said, “That was him, wasn’t it? Hamlin? Trying to talk through my voice?”
“And then through mine, yes.”
“Where did he go?”
“I beat him down. I made him let—”
“Hurray for you.” Tonelessly. “My hero. You see my sandals anywhere?”
“Where are you going?” he asked. “This is a crazyhouse. I’m worse off here than I was alone. I’m going home.”
“No,” he said. He remembered that he had decided, only this dawn, to sever her from his life once the Rehab Center had plucked the resurgent Nat Hamlin from his brain. Telling himself then that it was too dangerous to have her around him, because of her gift, her curse, whatever it was that had awakened Hamlin, Out she goes, he had decided. Self-preservation first and always. Out she goes. How hollow that sounded to him now. He still had Hamlin inside him, and he was frightened by the thought of having to grapple with him in solitude. Lissa wasn’t as dispensable now as she had seemed earlier. “Don’t go,” he said. “Please.”
“I’ll get nothing but trouble here.”
“I didn’t mean to yell at you. My nerves were raw, is all. You can understand that. I didn’t intend to accuse you of anything, Lissa.”
“Even so. You got me all stirred up. And then him, jumping into my head. The sounds I was making. I never did that before. Like I was some kind of ventriloquist’s dummy, and I could feel Nat trying to move my lips, trying to push my vocal cords, trying to get his words out through me—” She seemed to gag on something. “It was coming out of you, Paul. I thought my head would blow. I don’t want to go through that again.”
“I beat him back,” Macy said. “I shut him off.”
“And if he gets out again? Or if you start suspecting me again? Asking me if I’m really on his side? Maybe next time you’ll bang me around, some. You could break my arms. You could knock all my teeth out. And then you’d apologize later.”
“There’s no possibility of that.”
“But you’ve got reason to be hostile. I’m responsible for waking him up inside you, right? Even if I wanted to stay here, you know, it wouldn’t be smart for you if I did. Maybe he’ll use me now to finish the takeover of your body. Play his mental energy through my ESP output, or something. He almost did that just now, didn’t he? Do you want to chance it?”
“Who knows?” Macy said. He caught her by the arm as she moved slowly toward the door. “Do I have to beg you, Lissa? Don’t leave me now.”
“First you didn’t want anything to do with me. Then you screamed at me that you didn’t trust me. Now you don’t want me to go. I can’t figure you, Paul. When somebody comes out of a Rehab Center, he’s supposed to be sane, isn’t he? You scare me too much. I want to get out of here.”
“Please. Stay.”
“What for?”
“To help me fight against him. I need you. And you need me. We can support each other. Separately we’re both going to go under. Together—”
“Together we’ll both go under too,” she said. Moving no closer to the door, though. “Look, I thought you could help me, Paul, that’s why I wrote you at the network, that’s why I begged you to see me. But now I realize that your troubles are as bad as mine. Worse, maybe. I just hear voices from outside. You’ve got somebody else in your head. On account of me. We can only harm each other.”
“No.”
“You ought to believe it. Look what I’ve already done to you, bringing him back. And then you, bouncing him into my head for a couple of minutes. And on and on and on like that, things getting worse and worse and worse for both of us.”
He shook his head. “I’m going to fight. I’ve beaten him twice in two days. Next time I’ll finish him altogether. But I don’t want to be alone while I’m doing it.”
Shrugging, she said, “Don’t blame me if—”
“I won’t.” He looked at the time. A sudden bold idea hooking him. By their works ye shall know them. Yes. Go to the museum, see his version of Lissa. Look at her through his eyes. An unexpectedly powerful hunger rose in him to know the real past, to find out what manner of man he had been, what he had been capable of creating. In a sense what I was capable of, in my other self. And the sculpture of Lissa a bridge to that hidden past. Leading him out of this shadowy unlife into the realm of authentic experience. He did this, he made it, his unique and irreplaceable vision was at work. And I must understand him in order to defeat him. Macy said, “Listen, there’s no sense in my going to the office this late in the day. But we’ve still got the whole afternoon. You know where I want to go? The Metropolitan Museum. To see the sculpture he did of you, the Antigone 2L”
“Why?”
“Old maxim: Know your enemy. I want to see his interpretation of you. Find out what his mind is like. Size him up, look for the places where I can attack.”
“I don’t think we should go. It could trigger anything, Paul. You said yourself, how at your office you saw one of his pieces and it almost knocked you out. Suppose at the museum—”
“I was caught by surprise that first time. This is different. I’ve got to take the offensive, Lissa. Carry the battle to him, do you see? And the museum’s as good a place to start as any. Showing him that I can hold my own under any conditions. All right? Let’s go, shall we? The museum.”
“All right,” she said distantly. “The museum.”
SEVEN
ENTERING the huge building, he felt apprehensive and ill at ease. An overwhelming sense of not belonging in this vast and labyrinthine palace of culture oppressed him. Searching his stock of synthetic memories, he couldn’t find any recollection of having been here before. Or any other art museum. The Rehab people hadn’t built a strong interest in the visual arts into him, it seemed. Music, yes. The theater. Even ballet. But not sculpture, not painting, not anything that was likely to impinge on the world Nat Hamlin had inhabited. A deliberate divergence from the abolished past. Still, why was he so edgy about going in? Afraid of being recognized, maybe? People turning, whispering, pointing? Look, that’s Nathaniel Hamlin, the famous psychosculptor. He did that naked woman we saw before. Hamlin. Hamlin. That man looks just like Hamlin. Requiring you to say something by way of correction. Pardon me, ma’am, you are in error. My name is Paul Macy. Never done a sculpture in my life. Ostentatiously rubbing your Rehab badge. Thrusting it in her eyes. I must tell you, ma’am, that Nathaniel Hamlin has become an unperson. And the woman fading away in embarrassment, heels clicking on the stone floor, looking back at him over her shoulder, sniffing a little in disdain. Maybe even reporting him to a guard for molesting her. Macy smiled sourly and swept the whole scenario away. Not much chance of any of that happening. Rembrandt could walk through this place and nobody’d recognize him. Michelangelo. Picasso. Mommy, who’s that funny little baldheaded man? Shh, dear, I think that’s some senator. Yes. Macy shook off his apprehensions. They went inside.
Just within the main entrance they were held for a moment in a cone of tingling blue light, some kind of scanning device ascertaining that they carried no explosives, knives, cans of paint, or other instruments of vandalism. Evidently there was a lot of free-floating masterpiece-directed hostility in this city. They passed the test and advanced into the colossal central hall. Pink granite pharaohs to the left; bleached marble Apollos to the right. Straight ahead, an immense dizzying vista of receding hallway. The dry smell of the past in here: the nineteenth century, the fourteenth, the third. “Where is it?” he asked, “Your statue.”
“Second floor, all the way in the back, the modern art wing,” Lissa said. Once again she seemed remote and abstracted. She slipped easily into that kind of withdrawal, that closed-and-sealed surliness. “You go, Paul. I’ll wait here and do the Egyptian stuff, or something. I don’t want to see it.”
“I’d like you to come with me.”
“No.”
“Jesus, why not?”
“Because it shows how beautiful I was. I don’t want to be in the room with you when you see it. And when you turn and look at me afterward and see what I’ve become. Go on, Paul. You won’t have any trouble finding it.” He was stubborn. Refusing to leave her. Unwilling to face the Hamlin piece without her. Suppose the sight of it struck him down again; who would help him up? But she was equally firm. Not going with him, simply not going. The museum expedition was his crazy idea, not hers. She couldn’t bear to see that piece. Won’t you? I won’t. I won’t. A tense little scene in the grand hallway. Their harsh whispers echoing from alabaster arcades. People staring at them as they bickered. He half expected someone to say, any minute, Say, isn’t that the sculptor Nathaniel Hamlin? Over there, the big one arguing with the redhead. Terrified by that irrational prospect. His discomfort grew so strong that he was on the verge of letting her have her way when suddenly she nipped her upper lip with her lower teeth, pressed her knuckles to her jawbone, hunched her shoulders as if trying to touch her earlobes with them, sucked in her cheeks. Began quirking her mouth from side to side. Possibly she was being skewered by invisible darts. Eyes wild. Glossy with panic. Saying to him, after some moments, in a veiled, barely audible voice: “Okay, come on, then. I’ll go with you. But hurry!”
“What’s happening to you, Lissa?”
“I’m picking up voices again.” A fusillade of twitches distorting her face. “They’re bouncing off the walls, a dozen different strands of thought. Getting louder and louder. All garbled up. Christ, get me out of this room. Get me out of this room.”
Everybody in the museum must have heard that. She seemed about to come apart.
He took her elbow and steered her hastily into the long hallway facing them. Hardly anyone here. Without any real idea of where he was going, he hustled her along, infected by the urgency of her distress; she slipped and slid on the smooth polished floor, but he kept her upright. Mounted figures in chain mail streaming toward them and vanishing to the rear. Shimmering tapestries looming in the dusk. Swords. Lances. Engraved silver bowls. All the loot of the past, and no one around, just a couple of blank-faced robot guards. When they had gone about a hundred yards he halted, aware that Lissa had grown more calm, and they stood for a moment in front of a case of small iridescent Roman glass flasks and vases with elaborate spiral handles. She turned to him, haggard, sweat-streaked, and dung to him, cheek to his chest. Her anxiety definitely subsiding, but she was still upset. Finally she said, “How awful that was. One of the worst ones yet. A dozen of them all talking at once, each one with a pipeline right into my skull. A torrent of nonsense. Swelling and swelling and swelling my head till it wants to explode.”
“Is it better now?”
“I don’t hear them, anyway. But the echoes inside . . . the noise bouncing around upstairs . . . You know, I wish I could go far away from the whole human race. To some icy planet. To one of the moons of Jupiter. And just live there in a plastic dome, all by myself. Although even there I’d probably pick up the static. Minds radiating at me right across space. Can you imagine what it’s like, Paul, never to have real privacy? Never to know when your head is going to turn into a goddamned two-way radio?” Then a chilly laugh from her. “Hey, that’s funny. Me asking you about privacy. And you with your own ghost sitting in your head. Worse off than I am. Paul and Lissa, Lissa and Paul. What a pair of fucking cripples we are, you and me!”
“Somehow we’ll manage.”
“I bet.”
“We can get help, Lissa.”
“Sure we can. He’ll kill you as soon as you go within a mile of your doctors. And nobody can fix me without chopping my brain into hamburger. But we can get help, yeah. I like your optimism, kid.” She pointed. “We can take that staircase. Nightmare Number Sixteen is waiting for us.”
Up the stairs, through another hall full of Chinese porcelains and Assyrian palace reliefs, past a room of Persian miniatures, one of Iranian pottery, gallery after gallery of archaic treasures, and emerging ultimately in an opulent cube of clear plastic cantilevered out of the rear of the building to overhang the wilted greenery of Central Park. The modern art wing. Crowded, too; Macy looked nervously at Lissa, fearing she would tumble into another telepathic abyss, but she appeared to be in control of herself. Guiding him coolly down yards of gaudy paintings and sculpture and tick-tock artifacts and dancing rasters and metabolic mirrors and liquespheres and all the rest. Left turn. Deep breath. A small room, no door, just a circular entrance. Over the entrance, in raised gilded letters: ANTIGONE 21 BY NATHANIEL HAMLIN. Jesus. A private exhibition hall for it. What he had taken to be the absence of a door was in fact the presence of an invisible air-seal, providing secret shelter for the masterwork within, insuring it its own environment and psychological habitat. They stepped through. No sensation while breaching the seal; cooler on the other side, the air tingling, full of wandering ions. A faint chemical odor. A low hum.
