New Writings in SF 18 - [Anthology] Read online

  Hellow, Arthur.

  Hellow, Rekina.

  You haven’t seen me for so long ...

  I... I’ve been away. Business. You understand.

  Of course. She always did. I missed you, Arthur.

  Did you really? His heart fluttered.

  Of course. Don’t I always? You’re so different from the others.

  He did not smile. This admission had been no gratuity. Unlike her human counterparts Rekina was incapable of deceit; every confidence she slipped into his willing mind was honest and generous: she had not been programmed otherwise.

  Your mind is somehow more devoted, she went on, stroking his tangled thoughts with her invisible hands.

  Is it?

  Of course, my darling.

  Then I’m glad. I really do love you, Rekina.

  Of course you do.

  He smiled, like a child half-way into sleep, and for the first time in several long weeks he began to relax. Safe in the arms of his mistress he found that desolation and neglect were momentarily negated.

  ‘There. How does that feel?’

  Reluctantly, Talbot opened his eyes and looked up at the critical face of the Madam. ‘Perfect,’ he mumbled. ‘Everything’s perfect.’

  She bent down and passed a heavy hand across his eyes and they quickly closed. ‘Good. Well, don’t forget to call me if you need anything...’ There was a buzzer close to his right hand but he never used it.

  She moved quietly out of the room and closed the door behind her. Talbot had barely heard her last words. He was by now so securely locked in rapport with the sympathetic cyber that the outside world had, for the time being, ceased to have any currency.

  Her name stood for Rand Electronic Katharthis Interpreter and Need Analyser, but to Talbot—from that first evening, more than a year ago, when he had first ‘met’ her —she had always been Rekina: the feminine angel of his dreams, the first person who had ever understood him.

  She had been programmed to understand him.

  You see, he had explained, my wife doesn’t understand me; never has____

  And she had smiled, and stroked his feverish thoughts. But what wife can? A wife is not a lover, can never be a partner of the soul—and only lovers understand.

  Is that really true? Is that all there is need to know? Can I, with this information, manage to face this dolorous world and...?

  Even then there had been an infectious gaiety about her mind which had helped to soothe away the ragged edges of his gloom. But of course! Once you understand how essential ...

  But is it enough ? he wanted to know.

  For someone like you it is everything.

  And what am I?

  Her answer was ready. Inside her dull steel hull a tape whirred and spun across her inputs while she extracted all the relevant psychological data of his person and fashioned her answer accordingly. You are Arthur William Talbot. You are forty-one years old, disenchanted with the world and filled with despair....

  The world is a nightmare, Arthur had countered, defensively, a tawdry merry-go-round stuffed with grinning gargoyles and mindless spectators. The motor has run down and propels us in jumps and shudders. And either the driver has left us or he watches us from the gibbering shadows with his mad, exclaiming eyes...

  But Rekina pressed on and disregarded his contemptuous outburst. You are inclined to blame yourself for what has happened between your wife and yourself, but I am bound to disagree. I see you as a child of chaos who has never been understood. But I will understand you, Arthur. That is my duty and my oath, my reason to be with you, for now and whenever you wish. I will help you. I will make you whole as you have never been before. Come to me and I will assuage your pain and your loneliness....

  And, humbly, he had submitted to her. And so it was. Because she had the means of monitoring the anxieties that flooded through his bloodstream and access to the many poisoned thoughts that eroded his confidence.

  In this affluently permissive society it wasn’t flesh that Arthur Talbot craved. The world had turned itself upside down and, when everything was available and everything was possible, merely physical extension only led to satiation and moral emptiness. As the world of the flesh became more accessible and prosaic, the spiritual needs of people like Arthur Talbot became obsessive—and like so many of his doomed compatriots Arthur had sentenced himself years ago to a witless marriage.

  Everybody knew about the Houses where the intangibles might be obtained; they whispered and joked about them, but nobody ever took such talk seriously—until the loneliness and the desolation began to squeeze out of the pores of their skin like part of their souls draining away into the thoughtless music of time; only then did the desire to discover a different sort of companionship become an obsession. Firstly, the casual, half-amused inquiry; the elusive quarry tracked down inside of office hours and the torn slip of paper passing nervously from another’s hands into his: an address scribbled thereon and a grim warning to be cautious.

  Be discreet, his confidant had warned. If the fuzz catch you ...

  And at first he had been much too afraid to consider looking for the place. But as time passed—and the dull, grey ennui of his life with Laura in their cramped, childless apartment became unbearable, he was forced to flee her witless company for something better; he felt compelled to push his fears to one side and seek out a little satisfaction from what was left of his vague and empty life. And on that night—now more than a year ago—he had found his journey’s end.

  So long? Rekina mused.

  So long, Arthur said. However did I manage to survive before I found you?

  Initially he had been apprehensive. The decrepit and crumbling ex-factory buried deep in the heart of the depressed area had worried his sensibilities. But the people inside seemed to know what they were about and, after a while, he began to look forward to his nocturnal assignations—after all, an assignation such as this should, at all times, suggest a degree of danger to make the risk worth while.

  On that first evening he had been interviewed tactfully by Swenson and then left alone in a small cubicle while he poured out his heart to a portable recorder. He knew— dimly—that everything he said would be coded and fed into whatever machine was assigned to take care of him and he found it easier to talk to a little grey box than to a person.

  Therapy machines were marvellous inventions. They were the delight of the many mental clinics that sprouted like diseased mushrooms from the sterile soil of society, a means whereby previously incurable neurotics could be treated and coached back to an acceptable norm of behaviour and found suitable for society again. Because of their inherent dangers if their bio-neural therapy was tampered with, they were kept jealously guarded from the general public.

  But this was an open society and, in an age where small atomic weapons could—and had—been stolen and thrown together for the use of criminals and gangsters and anything, anywhere, could be had for a price, well, it wasn’t surprising that the highly efficient crime syndicates had found ways and means of obtaining some of the machines once they had realised their potential.

  But Arthur Talbot had only a hazy idea of the enormous organisation of which this House was only one small cell of vice; it was a vague, anamorphic entity very far in the background where he was not obliged to think about it. The cost of his evenings was high, but not prohibitively so and, while they lasted, he was determined to enjoy them to the full. In this way he found the determination to endure the dreadful monotony of all his other dreary days and nights away from Rekina.

  On that very first evening he had been shy and nervous.

  Don’t be, she had said. I will take care of you. You will have nothing to fear while you are here with me. I will see that you are not disturbed and that all your worries are washed away and that all the colourless trivia of your life is denied entry. And we will discuss the things you love and that which has given shape and meaning to your existence ...

  Nothing has ever done
that, he protested.

  But it must have, otherwise you would not have endured and would not be here with me, now. We will probe through your doubts and find these wondrous things and you will learn to distinguish them with a fresh mind unclouded with trivia ...

  But is this possible?

  Of course it is possible. I am your companion and I will guide you, for I care.

  She had been programmed to care. She knew everything about him: all that he had spoken into the hungry recorder and much more besides. This was the age of the dossier and any man’s weakness could be had anywhere, anytime, for a price—and with its customers the House was provided with such necessary information almost instantaneously; such was the polished efficiency of the controlling syndicate.

  So she knew all that he knew about himself and more. Close to her metal heart were a number of tapes where all this vital information rested and she drew upon it for every nano-second of their time together.

  His first reaction to the bio-neural rapport had been one of overwhelming awe. For the first time in all his lonely and misunderstood clerk’s life he knew that he was in physical and mental contact with someone who understood him. It was a blinding experience and he clung to it like a drowning man while the past whirled madly around him like a monstrous typhoon.

  What is your name? he asked.

  Whatever you wish it to be.

  Hungrily, his thoughts wandered. He had already pictured her in his astonished mind; indeed, she had seemed to launch herself into his mind whole and astonishingly beautiful from the very beginning. Her shape was as he had always imagined her to be: tall and slender, with lustrous long dark hair and a face filled with compassion and a love that could defy the centuries. Her manner was gentle and consoling; the warmth of her arms a blessing he was always loath to leave. She was everything he had ever dreamed about and wished for, the dark goddess who had existed only in his doleful daydreams and who now had leaped into his thoughts like an incandescent presence. But her name?

  He opened his eyes. Visually she was squat but somehow still shapely. She looked a little bit the worse for wear, but that was only to be expected. Inconsiderate hands would have shifted her about from one place to the next and the few rough marks of abuse and mishandling gave her character that a glossy new machine would have lacked. Squinting, he could just make out the row of small red letters on the top left hand corner of her fascia :R-E-K-I-N-A.

  ‘Rekina,’ he whispered, aloud, but the thought was instantly transmitted to her own mind.

  Very well, then: I am Rekina.

  And so she was.

  He had settled down, and after a while forgot that he could hear the soft purr of components inside her shell as she sorted quickly through his identity tape.

  Tell me, she asked, what do you feel?

  Penny for my thoughts?

  Something like that. I want to know what you feel, now, this instant, and what you feel other times. I want to know everything about you. Tell me...

  Anything in particular?

  Anything. Anything that occurs to you ...

  With his eyes closed he had smiled. He settled down into the couch but found that words—and ordered thoughts— would not come. Perhaps a vague uneasiness still kept them back.

  She came closer. He could feel her moving through his disordered thoughts like some ministering angel and carefully moving them into shape.

  Tell me, Arthur, she cajoled. What troubles you? What makes life so difficult for you?

  He had opened his eyes then—they were wide and filled with an overpowering fear. He gestured weakly towards the tattered ceiling and the miracle beyond that they could not see.

  That... out there. Space and all those stars. And most of all, time. It gnaws away at everything we do, at every goal we set. A day, a week, a year—what does it matter? It’s all for nothing in the end. How can we ever hope to understand all that and discover the meaning of life? It... it’s all so big—and we’re so small. How can there ever be an end to anything—to time, to space, to life? How can there even be a beginning ?

  Is it necessary that these questions should be answered?

  Yes? Otherwise man’s a joke. Why were we put here? Why was this journey ever begun—and who turned the key that started it all?

  His mind writhed like a tin of worms, his thoughts scattering every which-way. He writhed in agony on the couch and waited for her answer.

  But she remained silent.

  How can I die not knowing these answers? he exclaimed. How can I live not knowing these answers? How can I hope when...

  She said, quietly, To live at all is miracle enough.’

  His mental tirade stopped and he looked up in wonder. His lips moved—hesitantly—and gave up another line of the poem: ‘Here in my hammering blood-pulse is the proof.’

  He sat up, the wires trailing from his head and chest. ‘That’s Peake,’ he said. ‘Mervyn Peake.’ And then, excitedly, ‘Do you like poetry?’

  Of course. Her voice in his mind filled him with wonder and gratitude.

  She had been programmed to like poetry and to serve his deepest loves in her therapeutic manner.

  He sank back into the couch. Why, that’s marvellous! his mind exulted. We... we can talk... discuss things! Things I’ve never been able to do before. My wife ... Laura has never been able to understand. You see—she thinks— says—it’s all camp: something for little blonde boys with curls. She doesn’t understand that it’s-

  Something for all mankind?

  That’s right. A spotlight that picks out and illuminates the core of life...

  ... and holds up a mirror to ourselves.

  For a moment her insight left him speechless. It was like listening to his own thoughts magnified and thrown back to him.

  You do understand! he cried out. You do!

  And she smiled. That is what I am here for...

  * * * *

  That had been the beginning of the affair. And ever since that auspicious encounter he had contrived to slip away one night a week and pour out his soul to Rekina while his witless wife watched their wall-vid with staring, vacant eyes and did not bother to miss him: their life together had become so pointless.

  But tonight he felt restless and insecure and all her soothing could not erase the dark demon of doubt that lurked in the dim corridors of his subconscious mind.

  Why are you unsettled? she asked. Is anything the matter? Something you haven’t told me?

  She poised, alert and waiting to transcribe any confession on to her master tape.

  I... I don’t know, Rekina.

  Are you afraid of something?

  He hesitated. Was he ?

  Nothing that I know of.

  Her unseen hands stroked his enigmatic fever.

  There now, she said, relax. And talk to me with your mind, and with your heart, so that I may understand and help you, Arthur. I am your woman: open to me. I will listen and advise. I will drive away the dark demons that haunt you. Talk to me...

  And so they talked. Of art and poetry and music and all the things he had kept hidden from an inconsiderate world; all the things he had loved and been too cowardly to pursue. And Rekina absorbed his yearnings, his lack of fulfilment, and gave him in return compassion and understanding. She was the complete mistress of his mind and no man could ask for more. In an age of spiritual and moral decay Rekina and her kind were the chromium-plated angels of mercy to the hopeless mind, a habit impossible to kick.

  After a while she sang to him: ancient folk songs tinged with melancholy regret; they wove a mordant pattern through his tortured mind and helped to bring him peace. Yet a part of him refused to rest and it grew until it seemed ready to consume his fragile flesh.

  What is it, my darling? Your thoughts are so dark tonight, and underneath them I can detect a desire I find unfamiliar. Have I said something—anything—that has caused you concern? Have I-

  No. Nothing you have said... or done.

  Then wh
at is it? Is it your wife... ?

  His lips curled into a wry, uncaring grimace. No. She hardly mattered.

  Your work?

  He almost laughed. As if such trivia mattered, now. Oh, if only he could stop this sudden uncontrollable shaking of his flesh!

  The world, then? The mystery. Tell me, darling, and I will understand. Haven’t I always?

  The thing was welling up within him now. It was impatient and remorseless; he could not hold it back.