The Man Who Melted (12 page)

“…it is our rule, however,” said the man at the desk, “that you and your opponent, or opponents, must be physically in the same room.”

“Why is that?” Joan asked, feeling Pfeiffer scowling at her for intruding.

“Well,” he said, “it has never happened to us, of course, but cheating has occurred on a few long-distance transactions. Organs have been wrongly lost. So we don't take chances. None at all.” He looked at Pfeiffer as he spoke, obviously sizing him up, watching for reactions. But Pfeiffer had composed himself, and Joan knew that he had made up his mind.

“Why must the game be played with psyconductors?” Pfeiffer asked.

“That is the way we do it,” said the captain. Then, after an embarrassing pause, he said, “We have our own games and rules. And our games, we think, are the
most
interesting. And we make the games as safe as we can for all parties involved.”

“What do you mean?”

“We—the house—will be observing you. Our gamesmaster will be hooked-in, but I assure you, you will not sense his presence in the least. But if anything should go wrong, or look as if it might go wrong, then
pfft
, we intercede. Of course, we make no promises, and there have been cases—”

“But anything that could go wrong would be because of the hook-in.”

“Perhaps this
isn't
the game for you, sir.”

“You must have enough privileged information on everyone who has ever played here to make book,” Pfeiffer said.

“The hook-in doesn't work that way at all. And we are contract-bound to protect our clients.”

“And yourselves.”

“Most certainly.” The captain looked impatient. “You would have to be scanned, anyway: it is a rule in all houses.”

“And downstairs?”

“The stakes aren't as high; and when they are, we require a quick connection.”

Pfeiffer suddenly laughed and glanced at Joan. Of course, the bitch certainly knew the nature of these games. All this to mindfuck me for Raymond. As if I would give her his past.

“If you can both read each other's minds,” Pfeiffer said to the captain, “then there can be no blind cards.”

“Aha, now you have it, Monsieur.” At that, the tension between Pfeiffer and the desk captain seemed to dissolve. “And, indeed,” the captain continued, “we have a modified version of chemin de fer that we call blind shemmy. All the cards are played facedown. It is a game of control (and, of course, chance), for you must block out certain thoughts from your mind while, at the same time, tricking your opponent into revealing his cards. And that is why it would be advantageous for you to let your friend here connect with you.”

Pfeiffer groaned, and Joan smiled, amused now by the captain. Obviously, he didn't have to sell his game to his customers.

“Please clarify,” Pfeiffer asked, certain now that he was right about Joan.

“Quite simply, while you are playing, your friend could help block your thoughts from your opponent with her own. But it does take some practice. Perhaps it would be better if you tried a hook-in in one of our other rooms where the stakes are not quite so high.” Then the captain lowered his eyes, as if in deference, but in actuality he was looking at the CeeR screen of the terminal set into the antique desk.

Joan could see Pfeiffer's nostrils flare slightly. The poor sonofabitch is caught, she thought. “Come on, Carl, let's go back and wait for Ray.”

“Perhaps you should listen to Miz Otur,” the captain said, but the man must have known that he had Pfeiffer.

“What games would be open to us?” Pfeiffer asked, turning toward Joan, glaring at her. She caught her breath: if he lost, then she knew he would make certain that Joan lost something, or someone, too.

“If you wish, you can play what we call ‘Vite,'” replied the captain. “It is a simple game in which you must make your play quicker than your opponent upon seeing the draw. It is a much better game for amateurs, especially if you are loathe to have anyone make the connection with you.”

Joan knew instinctively that that was a game Pfeiffer would not play.

“I wish to play blind shemmy,” Pfeiffer said.

“I have a game of nine in progress,” the captain said. “There are nine people playing and nine others playing interference. But you'll have to wait for a space. It will be quite expensive, as the players are tired and will demand some of your points for themselves above the casino charge for play.”

“How long will I have to wait?”

The captain shrugged, then said, “I have another man waiting who is ahead of you. He would be willing to play
a bon chat bon rat
. I would recommend you play him rather than wait. Like you, he is an amateur, but his wife, who will be connected with him, is not. Of course, if you wish to wait for the other…”

Pfeiffer accepted; and while he and Joan gave their prints to the various forms, the captain explained that there was no statute of limitations on the contract signed by all parties, and that it would be honored even by those governments that disapproved of this form of gambling.

Then the furry boy appeared like an apparition to take them to their room where they would be given time to practice and become acquainted.

The boy's member was slightly engorged, and Pfeiffer now became frightened. He remembered his mother, and her last filthy thoughts.

The furry boy led Joan and Pfeiffer into the game room, which smelled of oiled wood, spices, traditional tobacco, and perfume. There were no holos or decoration on the walls. Everything, with the exception of the felt atop the gaming table, cards, thick natural carpet, computer consoles and cowls, was made of precious woods: oak, elm, cedar, teak, walnut, mahogany, redwood, ebony. The long, half-oval gaming table which met the sliding partition-wall was made of satinwood, as were the two delicate but uncomfortable high-backed chairs placed side by side. On the table before each chair was the psyconductor cowl, each one sheathed in a light, silvery mask.

“We call them poker faces,” the boy said to Pfeiffer, and he placed the cowl over Joan's head. He explained how the mechanism worked, then asked Pfeiffer if he wished him to stay.

“Why should I want you to stay?” Pfeiffer asked, but the sexual tension between them was unmistakable.

“I'm adept at games of chance. I can redirect your thoughts, and without a psyconductor”—and he looked at Joan and smiled.

“Put the mechanism on my head and then please leave us,” Pfeiffer said.

“Do you wish me to return when you're finished?”

“If you wish,” Pfeiffer replied, and Joan watched his face redden ever so slightly. Without saying a word, she had won a small victory.

The boy lowered the cowl over Pfeiffer's head, made some unnecessary adjustments, and left reluctantly.

“I'm not sure I want to do this,” Pfelffer said, faltering.

“Well,” Joan said, “we can easily call off the game. Our first connection is just practice—”

“I don't mean the game. I mean the connection.”

Joan remained silent. Dammit, she told herself, I should have looked away when he made his pass at the furry pet.

“I was crazy to ever agree in the first place to such a thing.”

“Shall I leave now?” Joan asked. Trump the fucker, or get off the pot and wait for Ray. She stood up, but did not judge the distance of the cowl/console connections accurately; the cowl was pulled forward, bending the silvery mask.

“I think you're as nervous as I am,” Pfeiffer said.

“Make the connection right now. Or let's get out of here.” Joan was suddenly angry and frustrated. Do it, she thought to herself, and for once she was not passive. Certainly not passive. She snapped the wooden toggle switch, which activated both psyconductors.

There was no scamdown into the black and silver places, the soothing death-hollow corridors. Instead, she was thrust into vertiginous light. It was all around her, as if she could see in all directions at once. But she was simply seeing through Pfeiffer's eyes. Seeing herself small—even in his eyes, small. After the initial shock, she realized that the light was not brilliant; on the contrary, it was soft and diffused.

But this was no connection at all: Pfeiffer was trying to close his mind to her. He was thinking “slut,” projecting images of her trying to mindfuck him, digging into him with nail and claw. He let her know that he had been taught by brainwash psychs to stonewall dangerous thoughts and memories.

But she saw that, until now, he had never been put to the test….

Pfeiffer appeared before her as a smooth, perfect, huge, sphere. It slowly rotated, a grim gray planet close to her, forever closed and hiding Ray's secrets.

“Are you happy now?” asked Pfeiffer, as if from somewhere deep inside the sphere. It was so smooth, seamless. He really doesn't need me, she thought, and she felt as if she were flying above the surface of his closed mind, a winged thing looking for any discontinuity, any fault in his defenses.

“So you see,” Pfeiffer said, exulting in imagined victory, “I
don't
need you.” The words came wreathed in an image of a storm rolling angrily over the planet.

She flew in sudden panic around his thoughts, like an insect circling a source of light. She was looking for any blister, crack—any anomaly in the smooth surface. He would gamble himself away without her, that she knew, unless she could break through his defenses, prove to him how vulnerable he was.

But she only needed entrance to that country of memory where Ray's past was buried. After that, it wouldn't matter….

“So you couldn't resist the furry boy, could you?” Joan asked, her thoughts like smooth sharks swimming through icy water. “I would not think you a pervert if you were not such a hypocrite. Does he, then, remind you of yourself, or do I remind you of your mother?”

His anger and exposed misery were like flares on the surface of the sun. In their place remained an eruption of Pfeiffer's smooth, protective surface. A crack in the cerebral egg.

Joan dove toward the fissure, and then she was inside Pfeiffer—not the outside of his senses where he could verbalize a thought, see a face, but in the dark, prehistoric places where he dreamed, conceptualized, where he floated in and out of memory, where the eyeless creatures of his soul dwelled.

It was a sliding, a slipping in, as if one had turned over inside oneself; and Joan was sliding, slipping on ice. She found herself in a dark world of
grotesque and geometric shapes, an arctic world of huge icebergs floating on a fathomless sea.

“Where is Ray?” she demanded, and Pfeiffer responded by closing imaginary ice walls around her, barring her from his memories of Mantle, trapping her….

And for an instant, Joan sensed Pfeiffer's terrible guilt and fear.

“Mindfucker, slut,” Pfeiffer screamed; projecting those words in a hundred filthy, sickening images; and then he smashed through Joan's defenses and rushed into the deep recesses of her mind. He found her soft places and took what he could.

All that before the psyconnection was broken. Before the real game began. As if nothing had happened.

NINE

The car was dark, an ancient four-door Chevy Steamer.

“
Vite, vite
,” someone said impatiently in the front seat of the car: a male voice, deep and scratchy.

The car lurched forward as soon as they climbed in, before Mantle could even close the door, which locked with a sigh.

They drove north, away from the shooting. There were two men in the front seat. Mantle guessed the driver to be in his fifties; the other man, wearing a peaked cap, looked considerably younger. Campagnards, good peasant stock. A woman sitting beside Roberta twisted around to look out the back window.

The driver negotiated a series of broken back roads without turning on his headlights, and then suddenly they were on the highway, speeding along at an easy seventy miles an hour. Mantle could hear the woman speaking to Roberta and the men in the front seat in quick French, but he ignored it and watched the trees whiz past, glaucous green, as if lit by floodlights hidden in their branches rather than the headlights of the auto. Beyond the trees, everything looked milky with moonlight or shadow dark. Mantle imagined that they were rushing through a tunnel, and felt once more as if he were hooked in, felt the pull of the other side, of the Screamers.

He fought the feeling, tried to hold on, to stay sane and swallow the fire of his heart. He couldn't go over the edge. Instead of asking Roberta what was going on and who these people were, he waged silent war with himself.

Plugging in had not helped him remember Josiane: it was just another scalpel, cutting and tearing, not restoring. He stared at his hands, which were clenched together, fingers intwined. When he released the pressure, he saw Josiane's face in the hollow made by his palms. The same face as in the stone, but this was not a holo.

“Oh, Christ,” he whispered.

“What?” Roberta asked, pressing close to him.

He didn't answer her. This was the way it had happened before, when he went over the edge, he thought: first, hallucinations, whispering, incomprehensible voices, then the heat and rushing sensations, the feeling of falling through the layers of the world, of isolation and helplessness.

Maybe I'm just still stoned, he told himself. It will wear off….

“Everyone has episodes after a hook-in,” Roberta said. “You've had a perceptual overload; think of it that way.” The woman beside Roberta was staring intently at him. “You haven't closed down yet,” Roberta continued. “That's not such a bad thing. You can hear more. See more. Isn't that so? You're more alive.”

“Don't condescend to me,” Mantle snapped. Then, after a pause, he mumbled, “I feel more dead now than alive.” Stop that! he told himself. Fight it, goddammit, don't indulge it.

“Well, you're not dead. Don't fight it. Let it take you where it will.”

Back to the hospital, he thought, carried by anxiety. I should have left well enough alone, left Josiane alone instead of following her down the hole. But something told him that he wasn't only searching for Josiane. There was something else down there, buried inside him, hidden in a mesh of lies and dead memories and false clues.

He was covering up his past, and dredging it at the same time.

“It wouldn't do any good to fight it,” he said to Roberta.

“That's good. I'm here, and so are the others.” She raised her face to the woman beside her as an indication. The woman was dark, pretty, with a long face, deep-set eyes, and shoulder-length hair. She was as thin as an American
model. “Danielle has been in the dark spaces; she can hear the voices,” Roberta said. “She will help you, and perhaps you will become
more
sane.” That said with a smile, a flash of irony which disappeared as she pursed her lips.

“You must work your way back to this world from the dark spaces,” Danielle said. “It is the same for all of us.” Her accent was heavy and provincial; but it wasn't so much the way she rolled her
r'
s as it was the way her voice lifted when making a statement, as if it were a question. “If you fight what is happening, you cannot get on and make your passage.”

Mantle had a sudden flash of a great ship, a four-stacked liner cutting the sea; and then he imagined he saw a gaming table and players wearing silvery masks. Dammit, he told himself, but he stopped trying to fight the noise in his mind. She's right, he thought: get it over with. It has to be, either now or later. “There is one thing, though,” Mantle said, a note of pleading discernible in his voice.

“You needn't ask it,” Roberta said. “We won't take you to a hospital under any circumstances. That is a promise.”

He felt an instant of relief and realized that, like it or not, these were kinspeople by common circumstances, a dark family; and like family, they would blackmail him. But it was too late to worry about that now. He had only to get through the night, and the next day, and the day after….

A police van passed, going in the opposite direction, its siren blaring and lights blinking. Mantle felt a surge of relief as it passed, as if he had escaped the form-destroyer, foiled death, beaten the odds once again. Just then, he became aware of the slight lump in his back pocket. It was a wallet, a very thin one: a reminder that the owner of these clothes was a ghost and perhaps Mantle hadn't escaped after all.

Mantle opened the window and threw the wallet out: he would keep the confidence of the dead man. Neither Roberta nor Danielle said a word. He subvocalized into the computer, and it told him that Joan and Pfeiffer had left him a joint message and were waiting for him to call. They were sure that everything went swimmingly and they would meet up with him at his flat later. They had gone to Paris on a whim, but were checking through the Net every half hour in case he left a message.

Mantle scowled, annoyed and surprised. He would not leave a message.
Let them have a good time, he thought, and experienced vertigo. He closed his eyes for a second and hallucinated the gaming table again—a monochromatic image seen through the same eyes as when he had been hooked in.

Afraid, not wanting to drop back into the black and silver world, he tried to keep control of himself. But it was inevitable that he would have to pass through the dark places if he was to become whole again. He shuddered at the thought, and subvocalized.

The computer plug whispered in his ear.

The year he lost Josiane, Mantle had been keeping a diary. The entries were brief and served as pegs to jog his memory. Although he knew most of the entries by heart, Mantle had become obsessed with working over every shred he could find from the past.

“July 8, 2112,” the computer plug whispered. “Congressional faxphotos retouched and symbolized, finally. Message from mother. Josiane dancing again. With reputable company. Pfeiffer called about rave review for his novel. Fight with Josiane. Still can't make love.”

Mantle could remember that hot, dry day in July—the anxious message from his mother about his father, “who was getting into that Indian business again,” and Pfeiffer droning on endlessly about how much the
Times'
reviewer Bjornson had appreciated the subtleties and significance of his novel—but he couldn't remember Josiane inside that day. He couldn't remember what the fight with her had been about, or why he couldn't make love.

He couldn't remember how she had looked or tasted or smelled.

“July 11, 2112…”

The computer whispered the days to him, and the words became a litany, a personal mantra. But he wasn't listening to the words. He was drifting backward to the still-vivid, yesterday memories of childhood and adolescence.

While growing up, he shared his bedroom with his sister. He could remember that old room as well as he could his present bedroom in Cannes: the battered wooden furniture, which would now be worth a fortune—a daybed; long black dresser; a captain's chair that slid into a built-in desk; holos of Duchamps and Van Gogh and LeFere permanently lit on the walls. But Mantle had a habit of keying the computer to light the whole room with
paintings and statues, or to blow up a painting three-dimensionally so he could walk around the figures, live in the painting, or change it to fit his taste. His favorite was Pollock's
Number 29
, an impressionistic abstract of shells, string, wire mesh, pebbles, and oil paint on glass, which appeared to hang in the air and fill the room. Mantle had made love to his sister inside that painting.

That he could remember.

He had often lived in that painting since.

“What are you listening to?” Roberta asked.

“Perhaps voices,” Mantle said.

Roberta smiled. “I think not. But why do you use an earplug?”

“Is that so strange?”

“Usually only old people use computer plugs. Implants are so much better.”

Mantle took the plug from his ear and dropped it into his shirt pocket. “You see, I'm no longer plugged in. You can't do that with an implant.”

“You don't need to, you simply don't have to use it.”

True, Mantle thought. But you're still connected, without the real privacy of isolation…. Isolation, the black and silver. Mantle shivered, and stopped his train of thought.

“Are you so afraid of being tied-in?” Roberta asked. “It seems your most important connection is with a past you cannot remember.” She laughed. “A disconnection.”

“Fuck you,” Mantle mumbled, disliking her as he had often disliked Joan for that same sarcastic kind of probing, the armchair psych bullshit. But it felt good to be angry again, even just a little; at least he didn't feel drugged. It was like turning on a light in a dark room, waking up to see that the night monsters were dreams. But still the dark closed in, all around him, inside him. “I'll probably have the episode soon enough,” he said to her as he looked out the window at the secondary road they were now traveling. The luminescent trees looked like old crones and gargoyles reaching for the car. “Must you hurry it?”

“You're not hot enough yet,” Roberta said; and she placed her left hand
over her mouth, and with her right she jerked out a tooth. “Now we're both disconnected. Does that make you feel better?”

To Mantle's surprise, it did.

They reached a large, rambling stone house a half hour later. The sky had cleared, and the moonlight softened the night to something less than twilight. Nearby and to the east was ocean. But the familiar trees beside the road were sparse here; in their place was the kind of exotic vegetation one might find in Africa, India, or the Orient. There were oleanders, arbutus, aligousiers, amelanchiers, aloes, eucalyptus, pistaches, jujube trees, acacias, lemon trees in variety, and sweet and bitter orange trees. It was like breathing perfume; Mantle could smell eucalyptus and pine, and the flowers: jasmine, violets, roses.

“I'm not ready to go inside, to be with anyone,” Mantle whispered to Roberta as they got out of the car. After a brief conversation, the others went on ahead to the house.

“Our clothes are filthy and damp,” Roberta said. “Come into the house with me.”

“Why don't you go inside with the others? I'll be in after a while.”

“I'm going to see it through with you,” Roberta said. “Is that all right?”

Mantle nodded, discovering that he was glad for her company, and asked, “What is this place?”

“We are just outside Boulouris—”

“No,” Mantle said, “that's not what I meant. All this strange vegetation”—he gestured with his arm—“and the fragrance, is it real?”

Roberta, who had looked pensive and vulnerable, suddenly began to laugh, then excused herself, apologized, and said that, indeed, it was all real. Did he think it was a videotect with olfactories? Granted, that would have been cheaper than the real thing….

Mantle walked to the edge of the circular driveway and found a cobbled footpath leading through the trees.

“It's all transplants; originally, from Hyers, surely you've heard of ‘The Bosphorus of the Côte d'Azur,' alas, the very place that—” She paused to draw breath, as if she was not quite sure whether to go on in this new, but perhaps more comfortable role. “The very place that Pompignan dreamed up
the Zephyr who ‘with his soul ablaze covers his swooning beloved with audacious kisses and in this precious moment the whole plain is perfumed.'” She took his hand then, and they both laughed, a touch of hysteria in their voices. They walked together. The air, heavy with natural perfume, had become cloying. It was hot and humid, as if the the moon above were a wan sun sending out heat but little light.

Mantle stopped, for the path turned to dirt and seemed to be swallowed ahead by brush and vine and trees. He was almost glad to see an olive tree, its characteristic shape lending reality to the grotesque, alien vegetation growing around it. He stared into darkness.

“Your friends were very kind to leave us alone,” Mantle said. “But you must go back to them. I know how upset you must be, you need—”

“Shush,” Roberta said. “It's my business to be with
you
, and that helps me.”

“But—” Mantle stopped himself as he felt her grip loosen on his hand. “I asked you to tell me about this place…and these people.”

“This house is something like a church,” Roberta said, and something like a commune. Some of us live here, and some, like myself, visit.”

“Who owns it?”

“You Americans are always interested in who-owns-it. You'll meet them soon enough, as soon as we go inside. Are you ready?”

“Not yet,” Mantle said, but they walked back toward the house, stopping when it was in view. “Is the owner a priest, like Pretre?” He regretted that as he said it, but too late—

Roberta looked at him, but seemed to show no pain, as if Pretre had not really been killed and she would see him tomorrow. “No,” she said after a pause. “Faon is no priest, just an indefatigable servant of the church.”

“What?”

“You'll meet Faon. She and her husband
own
the house.” Roberta smiled, as if to herself, and then said, “You know, it never occurred to me to think of Faon as a priest. Perhaps she is….”