The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 10

AS he passed through the doorway of Leel’s house, Ruiz heard music, a soft sweet murmur of strings and chimes. It seemed to swirl forth from a fountain that played in the center of the room. The white-plastered walls had no windows, but a pure bright light fell from high clerestories.

The fountain rose in languid jets from a shallow basin set in the red tiled floor, and after a moment Ruiz realized that the water of the fountain was moving far more slowly than was natural on a world of Sook’s mass.

He must have frowned or made some other gesture of distaste, because Leel gave his arm a little shake and looked at him with mock severity. “No, Ruiz, it’s not another of Somnire’s little liberties with reality. I allow none of his nonsense in my house; I live as I did in life, as much as possible. The fountain has a gravity filter under it. I thought it pretty. Isn’t it?”

She pulled him forward to stand in the cool air that billowed around the basin. “Yes, it’s pretty,” he said. The fountain, seen up close, seemed a confection of flowing glass, and he had the illusion that if he touched it, the glossy ribbons and upwellings would have a dense impenetrable surface. He reached out and learned that it was just water, though his hand felt very light when it passed through the shimmering curtain.

As his hand disturbed the fountain, the music fell into a dissonance, but it recovered its sweetness as soon as he pulled back.

“I read all sorts of omens into the music,” Leel said. “It always seemed remarkable to me that the universe is tied together with webs of gravity, and that whenever the farthest star trembles, my fountain shivers in response. I put the gravity filter under it not just to make it pretty, but to insulate my omens from the evil old mass of Sook, and make the stars’ messages stronger. Silly, right?”

“Doesn’t seem at all silly to me,” said Ruiz. He looked aside. Leel’s attention was fixed on the fountain and her face was full of a fresh vivid delight. This is a ghost, he reminded himself.

But she seemed as alive as anyone he had met lately. He wished, with a sudden stark intensity, that he felt half as vital as she seemed to be. He felt an odd shift in his perceptions. She became irresistibly desirable.

She looked so clean. He couldn’t imagine her with sour sweat greasing her face, with dirty feet, with lice in her translucent curls. With blood on her long fine hands.

I’m a ghost too, he thought, but it was an idea without significance.

He was horrified, ashamed of the lust that surged out of some deep place in his heart. His vision seemed misty with it; he heard the pulse pounding in his ears.

“Tell me,” he said thickly. “Are you a mind reader too?”

She gave him a quick bright look. “No. That’s Somnire’s sole privilege — and burden. Who would want that?”

He felt a certain relief, though the lust seemed as strong and hot as before. “Good,” he muttered, returning his attention to the fountain.

“Well,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

He shot her a sharp glance. Had she lied about the mind reading? But then he realized that she was asking if he wanted food. “A little, maybe.”

“Come to the kitchen, then,” she said, and led him from the fountain room.

Her kitchen was small and intimate, and it seemed to Ruiz that there was nowhere he could look that didn’t show him some desirable part of Leel. She seated him at an old table, its wood worn white with scrubbing. She arranged three sprays of tiny gold-red blossoms in a round blue vase and set it before him. She brought pale gray plates of an antique mannered design, and mugs of celadon porcelain. Her long legs carried her around him in a kind of graceful domestic dance. His desire seemed, impossibly, to intensify.

When she bent over him to set the silver, her shift fell open and he caught a glimpse of tiny breasts, puffy pink nipples. Her scent was of the sea and sunshine and something darkly sweet, like night-blooming flowers.

She laughed and laid her arm delicately across his shoulders. Her face was only a few centimeters from his, and he felt pleasantly engulfed in her smile. “Tell me,” she said. “Would you rather eat or go to the bedroom?”

An image filled his mind and pushed Leel from the center of his thoughts: Nisa in the bone-filled niche, watching him with strange eyes. A cold hand squeezed his heart and he looked down at his fists, clenched on the table.

“All right,” said Leel. “Perhaps I was wrong.” She seemed unoffended. She went to her stove, an archaic mechanism with nickel-silver fittings and blue enamel oven doors. She broke a pink egg into sputtering oil, she buttered toast, she poured a glass of amber fruit juice.

It was all so heartbreakingly ordinary.

“Is that enough? It’s easy to make more, if you’re still hungry.” She sat across from him, nibbling at a pastry filled with scryfruit and sweetened with a glistening smear of lime-blossom honey.

For a moment he didn’t answer — he was too fascinated by the pink tip of her tongue, licking up the crumbs that stuck to her lower lip. “No, that was fine,” he said.

“Good.” She put the last bite of pastry down and then took the dishes to the sink.

When she began to wash them, his bemusement spilled over into speech. “Why do you do this? Why eat? Why cook? Especially, why wash dishes?”

She turned gracefully, still swabbing at one of her antique plates. “When all you have is the illusion of life, you guard that illusion fiercely.” Her eyes were dark and deep and he regretted that he had asked her the question.

“I see,” he mumbled.

“No, you probably don’t,” she said. “Somnire doesn’t try to fool himself… but Somnire is the closest thing we have to a saint. The rest of us can’t be the way he is. We’d go mad. Of course, he’s more than a little mad, isn’t he?”

“I’m no judge,” he answered.

“And I hope you never become one,” she said cryptically. “The flesh is so great a gift…. But those who wear it rarely appreciate it.” Her mouth trembled, and she went back to her dishwashing with a somewhat forced air of concentration.

“I’m sorry,” he said, though he was unsure of his offense.

“Never mind,” she said, and smiled. “Listen, why don’t you sleep for a while? Somnire gave me a precis of your recent memories, and I’d like to look over them, to see what weighs so on your soul.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Ruiz said. He felt a shudder of hot shame, that this clean lovely person might learn of the terrible things he had done.

“I must,” she said. “It’s my job.”

She took him to a cool dark room in the center of her house, where a narrow bed waited. “Sleep as long as you like,” she said. “Somnire has explained the elasticity of time here, so don’t fret about wasting it. We’ll have you back in your body before your muscles have a chance to cool off. We want you spry when you return to the niche.”

He sat on the bed and tugged off his sandals. The white sheets drew him almost as passionately as Leel’s body had.

She went to the doorway and reached up to untie a curtain. The light shone through her shift, so that for an instant she seemed luminously naked.

Just before she went, he spoke. “Why? Why are you doing these things?” he asked. It seemed the only important question.

She shrugged. “Can’t you guess? We want to hurt Roderigo, and you can do it for us. Or so Somnire believes, which is good enough for me.” She smiled and waved her hand. “Sweet dreams,” she said, and then she was gone, the curtain fluttering.

Ruiz woke in a sweat, though the room was still cool. He sat up and wiped his face with trembling hands. Oddly, he felt a little better after his imaginary slumber, though still far less than well.

After a while, he rose and went out.

The house was silent, but for a thread of the fountain’s music, almost inaudible.

He wandered down the hall, which was lined with waist-high pedestals, each of which supported a crystal belljar. Under each jar was some enigmatic object, extraordinary only for the value evidently placed on it by its owner. Here was a tiny bedraggled baby shoe, with laces of rainbow shimmerglass. Next, a black hat with a narrow soft brim, sweat-stained and dusty. An empty wine bottle. An old leather dog collar with a rhinestone bauble. A rusty trowel. A tangled nest of fishing line, from which a gaudy treble-hooked lure peered with bulging black eyes. Crumpled blue panties, entangled in a worn-out work glove. A silver-framed flatgraph of Leel, wearing ragged shorts and nothing else, leaning from a sunny balcony, a look of contentment shining from her face.

A fascination grew in Ruiz as he went from pedestal to pedestal, trying to imagine the significance of the objects. It was oddly entertaining, a sort of archaeological voyeurism, and it diverted him from his weariness.

So absorbed did he become in his speculations that he jumped when Leel spoke. “More silliness,” she said. “I anchor my memories as best I can. But it helps. Some of us here have grown very strange. Forgotten our names, and even our humanity.” She stood in the far doorway, arms folded.

He wanted to ask her about the objects, or about the strange virtual-dwellers, but then he decided his curiosity might seem rude.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s talk. Come in my bedroom. I won’t make indecent advances, unless you’re very charming.”

He had to smile at the absurdity of it all.

Her bedroom was spacious and full of light. Ornate glass doors led out to a flagstone terrace, and thick rugs of brown and maroon wool covered the floor. Leel waited on her bed, gracefully cross-legged in the center of a faded patchwork quilt. Spread in a semicircle about her were a dozen squares of smoky plastic. “I made Somnire give me your memories in these,” she said, laying her hands on two of the squares. “He wanted me to experience them directly, but I wouldn’t. I know I’m just a pattern of electrons in the circuits of the machine, but I refuse to have it demonstrated to me more forcefully than is absolutely necessary.” She patted the bed and said, “Sit.”

He sat uncomfortably at the bed’s edge.

She picked up one of the squares. “I believe Somnire when he says these magic mirrors hold a fair sampling of your memories — though no sampling could be completely fair, I suppose. Still, in Somnire we trust. Right?” She flexed the plastic square and it threw moving light on her features — though Ruiz could see nothing of the images that shifted through the square.

Ruiz wondered what she watched; her expression was unreadable.

She looked up at him and smiled, without mockery. “By any humane standard, you’ve been a great monster, Ruiz Aw. The things you’ve done….”

“Yes,” said Ruiz. “A monster.” He felt only a sort of detached discomfort.

“It doesn’t matter,” she went on, “that in most things you meant well — at least until you went to work for the Art League. Monsters are as monsters do. Many monsters are loving to their families, take good care of their pets. So strange.”

Ruiz looked down at his hands, confused as to the purpose of the conversation.

“I should, really, detest you,” she said. “But for some reason I can’t.”

“Why not?” Ruiz asked, intrigued. Who, knowing what he had done, would not detest him? “Are you also a monster?”

She laughed. “I don’t think so — though for a fact, monsters generally don’t think themselves monstrous. You’re unusually forthright in that respect. Maybe that’s why I like you. And also, despite what you’ve done and been, there’s still a sweetness to you. A decency. Very strange, but there it is.”

A silence grew, while she picked up one square and then another.

He grew uncomfortable. “I don’t understand any of this. Why should you care? If I’m a monster, give me what I need to hurt Roderigo and set me on them. Why all this, this… discussion? Dissection?”

“Well, for one thing, I’m curious about you,” she answered. “Strangers come infrequently to the virtual — or anyway, strangers we can entertain. Will you humor me? And besides, have you not felt a lessening of effectiveness, a blunting of purpose lately? Perhaps discussion will help a little.”

“Perhaps,” he said, grudgingly.

She held up a square, and in it he saw the farmhouse where he’d been born a slave. It was early morning, just after dawn, and the light lay silver on the old stones.

“Tell me about this,” she said in a terribly gentle voice. He felt tears of remembrance cloud his eyes.

Leel was far more thorough than any minddiver, even Nacker the Teach. She turned the stones of his memory over, and seemed unrepulsed by all the ugly things that scurried from the light. She reviewed his childhood as a slave, his youth as a bondservant to a senile aristocrat, his career as a free-lance emancipator — his scarce and empty triumphs, his betrayals and disappointments. When he took his first contract with the Art League, she seemed only puzzled. She asked an occasional question, but mostly she listened without response to his terse summations.

When Leel saw his memories of the empty world where he had lived alone for so many years, she seemed to take an unforced pleasure in touring the gardens he had cultivated there.

“If you live, and escape Sook… will you go back there?” she asked, a little wistfully.

“Perhaps,” he said. The idea seemed as fantastic as any fairy tale.

“I would, too, were I you,” she said. “I love to grow flowers, and here I’m always aware that it’s just a game, that the flowers don’t depend on air and water and soil, but on my remembrance of real flowers. It subtracts much of the joy from them, though they’re still beautiful, I suppose.”

Curiosity scratched at him. “Tell me. Did you always look as you look now?”

“Exactly so, since I came to the Compendium,” she said.

“You’re never tempted to improve anything?” he asked, looking away.

“Such as?” Her voice had a slightly tart edge.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “The color of your hair? Your nose, perhaps… a little smaller, a little larger? Something.”

“My nose?” She giggled and looked down. She pulled the thin fabric of her shift tight over her breasts, so that the soft swellings and the puckered nipples became obvious. “Too small? Don’t you think they’re pretty?”

“Yes,” he said, his hands knotted in his lap.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sobering. “May we go on? Even if it does you no good at all, I’m fascinated. Do you know, when the Compendium was still alive, I was a specialist in human adaptation?”

“Really?” The information made him uneasy, as though she saw him as some sort of fungus, evolved to thrive in blood and bitterness.

“Really.” She picked up another memory square and saw the Gench who had installed the League death net in Ruiz’s mind. “Hideous creature,” she said.

She put it aside, gazed at another. “And here, poor Auliss Moncipor, who probably still dreams of you, in her sterile little cube of air and light and warmth, up in the blackness over Pharaoh.”

She patted his hand. “I find it easy to put myself in her place — and when I do I know she still thinks of you as a handsome prince from a far country, who might someday return and save her from her tedious destiny. Even though you so rudely departed the platform, without so much as a good-bye.”

“She was a slaveholder. She bought children for her pleasure and never gave a thought to what she did.” Ruiz recalled the anger and disgust he had felt — long ago it seemed — that night on the platform.

“So she was shallow — and a woman of her time and culture. Your self-righteousness is incongruous, to say the least.” But Leel’s tone was more amused than malicious. “Let me ask you this: Why do you not condemn your Nisa for holding slaves?”

He shook his head; he’d never really considered it.

“I think I know. Nisa is from another time and culture, so you make excuses. Auliss was a pangalac like you, so you could not forgive her for failing to share your sensibilities.”

“Perhaps,” Ruiz said.

“Well, then, I can make excuses for you. You’re not of my time and culture, after all,” Leel said. Her eyes twinkled, and Ruiz was forced to return her smile.

She went on to show him the stony face of Pharaoh, the tragedy of the play in Bidderum, the Blacktear Pens, his foolish escape attempt, his time with Nisa in Corean’s apartments.

“She’s quite beautiful, Ruiz,” Leel said, studying an image of Nisa dressed in one of the glittering gowns she’d invented to pass the time. “She’s unmodified, true? Born that beautiful… a rare thing.”

“Yes,” said Ruiz, gazing at the Pharaohan princess, who gazed out of the memory square with soft fond eyes. He felt a rush of hopeless longing. Could she ever look at him like that again? He shook his head, as if to drive such foolish thoughts from it.

Leel flexed the square, and she faded, to be replaced by his memory of Corean as they had boarded the airboat for SeaStack.

“Also beautiful,” said Leel. “But not as good to look at.”

Ruiz drew a deep breath. “She’s probably dead, for which I’m grateful. A dangerous woman.”

Leel regarded him sidelong. “I understand The Yellow-leaf is quite handsome, in her harsh Roderigan way. How is it that you have so many perilous entanglements with beautiful women?”

“You say that as though it were a bad thing,” said Ruiz with a wry smile. At that moment, Leel seemed very beautiful herself.

“Well… when I look through your memories, I see that various disasters seemed to follow these entanglements. Perhaps there’s no connection.”

“An evil destiny,” Ruiz said. “But there are compensations.”

“So I see,” said Leel, looking at the final square. After a long moment she turned it so Ruiz could see what she watched.

It was that night on the Deepheart barge, when he and Nisa had made love on the upper deck. Her dark head tossed, thrown back, her hair an obscuring cloud against the star fields. Her white breasts swayed as she moved her beautiful strong shoulders….

Ruiz made an odd choking noise; it forced itself from his throat against his volition, and he couldn’t seem to find his breath, or get it past the swelling in his throat. His eyes clouded with tears, and he rubbed fiercely at them.

“Lovely,” Leel said in a sad small voice.

She turned the square facedown on her quilt, slowly and reluctantly.

“Ruiz,” she said. “Somnire gave me other memories, and colorful memories they were… but this is the last important one. I know… you suffered and did terrible things: the murders in SeaStack, and on the barge. And of course the time you spent in the Roderigan slaughterhouse — though surely you understand that you were no less a victim there than those whose throats you cut.”

He laughed, a sour bitter sound. “It hurt me more than it did them, is that it?”

She shook her head, the translucent curls bobbing. “What else could you have done? Could you have saved any of them? The Roderigans are a pestilence on the universe. A plague that strikes down innocents at random, and what can be done? All anyone can do is try to survive.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “But I’ll never feel clean again.”

Her green eyes flashed, and he felt her anger, like hot breath. “Did you feel clean before? Then you were a monster indeed. How many innocents have you killed, over the years — or caused to die?” She bared her white teeth at him.

“I never claimed to be a saint,” he said.

“Did you claim to be human?”

Now he felt an answering anger. “Yes. I did.”

She flailed at the memory squares, scattering them off the bed. “These tell a different story, Ruiz Aw!”

“I didn’t force you to look at them,” he said stiffly.

The room seemed chilly. Ruiz wondered how he could have begun to feel comfortable in this foolish dream. He looked around; he seemed to be able to see through the imaginary walls of Leel’s house, to the tumbled stones that remained.

But Leel finally reached out and patted his arm — and her hand was as warm as a real woman’s hand. “I’m sorry, Ruiz. It’s not for me to judge you and what you’ve done with your life. My life was so different. I grew up on Becalt — a long-settled world, stable and prosperous. My family was wealthy and loving. I went to the university. I did my graduate work on Dilvermoon. I never knew a day of hunger or physical fear. All my crises were manufactured by myself: puppy loves, striving for status, social slights. During a long life in the pangalac worlds, I never saw a dead person.”

She took his hand and squeezed it. “Here, the same. My life ran down smooth channels and the only sorrows I knew… small things, compared to yours. A setback in my research. Envy of my more talented colleagues. A less than perfect party… similar small embarrassments. An unhappy love affair or two.”

“Well,” he said, wondering why she was telling him these things. “Not your fault if you had an easier life.”

“Oh, it didn’t seem easier, at the time. No, I was sure my little sorrows were as deep as anyone’s…. Anyway, this personality matrix, all that’s left of me now, was taken several months before the Roderigans and their allies destroyed the Compendium and slaughtered the people. So I have no direct memory of the end… of our lives. But Somnire made us watch recordings.”

“Ah,” he said.

Her face was a mask of tragedy. She twisted her hands together and didn’t look at him.

“That must have been difficult,” he said.

“I didn’t see my own death; Somnire was kind and edited the recordings. But I saw the ruin of all that I loved.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m telling you this because I want you to know that I can feel, just a little, the things that drove you to be a murderer. I know a little of how it must feel to know that no matter what you do, it can never be enough, can never balance the scales, can never make your life right again.” She again gripped his hands in hers and pulled them into her lap. Her eyes searched his. “I know a little, just a little. If you showed me every Roderigan hetman, bound and helpless, every Roderigan neck stretched on a block, I couldn’t cut their evil throats, as much as they deserve it. Though I’d cheer if you could; I’d weep for joy.”

It seemed a charming picture to him, and he must have smiled in a way that disturbed her, because she looked aside and shivered. She didn’t push his hands away, however, and he began to feel a bit overwhelmed by pleasant sensations. He could feel the hardness of her hipbone against his wrist, the softness of her belly, the resilience of the thick curls that covered her mound.

This is foolish, he told himself, and would have drawn back. But she wouldn’t let him go. She gazed fiercely into his eyes. “Listen, Ruiz,” she said. “None of that really matters, not anymore. You’ve been the knife in so many hands, for so long — but you don’t have to be, not anymore.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked roughly. “You don’t want me to hurt the Roderigans? Somnire wouldn’t like to hear you talking like that. Would he?”

“No, he wouldn’t. But I think you’ll hurt the Roderigans sufficiently to satisfy me, just by denying them your use. Never mind that; I promised I wouldn’t go into it… my point is, you can stop. You have your salvation, if you’re smart enough to seize it.”

“Salvation?” It seemed a ridiculous word to apply to his situation, and he had no idea what she meant. “Will you let me stay here and listen to your fountain, forever?”

She shook her head and smiled a bittersweet smile. “No. You can’t stay here. But you have a better refuge. You have Nisa.”

Now he did jerk his hands away from her. He was filled with a formless frustrated rage. “Really?” he asked, almost shouting. His eyes watered and his voice shook. “Do you think so? ‘The love of a good woman,’ is that what’s going to save me? What a lovely romantic… maudlin, pitiable, pig-stupid idea. You know nothing about it — she doesn’t trust me and I don’t trust her. For all I know, she’s a Gencha puppet. And we’re both going to die on Sook.”

Leel seemed undisturbed by his outburst. She picked up the memory square that held the night on the barge. “I know whatever you know about it, Ruiz Aw. And it doesn’t really matter what she thinks of you — though I can’t believe she’s as cold as you fear. It doesn’t matter whether or not you trust her. What matters is, do you love her?”

He shook his head, unable to speak.

“Well, I didn’t really need to ask,” said Leel, smiling, as she laid the square aside. “Love is far rarer than most people suppose, but also more easily identified.”

He stood and went to the glass doors, looked out over the white slopes, down to the sunny sea. All imaginary, he thought. I’m listening to an imaginary minddiver, who’s telling me that love conquers all. The sad futility of it made him want to cry, and all his anger seeped away.

A few silent minutes passed, during which Ruiz noticed a curious regularity to the surf that broke around the roots of the great buttresses. Of course, he thought. The simulation is limited, after all. He wondered if every semblance of sanity in the universe was as unreal as the Compendium. Somewhere, he was sure, people lived lives of peaceful fulfillment, going through their days in safety and contentment. Surely there were such people; but in his present state of mind they seemed as bizarrely unnatural as the monstrous Shards, who rode their weapons platforms above Sook, who enforced their alien laws on the pirates, the slavers, the cannibals — and the innocents — who struggled over the surface.

He pushed open the doors and went out into the sunlight and sea breeze. He stood gripping the balustrade, between two terra-cotta urns full of pink cinnamon-scented flowers. The next palace was far below; three sarim with iridescent wings wheeled in the lucent gulf.

He felt Leel’s presence at his back, then her arms went around his waist and she pressed her thin body to his.

After a while he spoke musingly. “What would happen if I jumped off?”

“You’d fall for a while — until you’d passed from my domain. Remember, I cultivate realism here. But then I suppose Somnire would catch you. Knowing him, he’d probably appear as a mighty angel, and bear you aloft in a cloud of glory.” She hugged him a little tighter. “He has an odd sense of humor.”

Ruiz took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He rubbed at them with the heels of his hands. The pressure felt as real as it ever had; he felt as firmly held in this imaginary body as he ever had in his real one. Leel continued to hold him tight, and he became uncomfortably aware of her warmth, of the long thigh touching the back of his leg, of her slender hands crossed over his belly.

“Come back into my bedroom, Ruiz,” she said, in a different voice. She slipped her hands under his shirt and slid them upward.

He wanted to, very much. To lose himself in her handsome body, her cleanliness and sweetness… to drive all thought from his aching head, submerge his anguish in lovely imaginary sensation. But some bitter hardness in his heart made him laugh and say, “Part of the therapy?”

“No,” she answered, without any apparent resentment. “No. You’re a beautiful man, and I want you. Please.”

She pulled him around to face her, and he looked into her face. Her cheeks were flushed and a dew of perspiration glittered above her mouth, though it wasn’t warm on the terrace. Her eyes seemed unfocused with desire. She pushed off the straps of her shift so that it fell to her waist. She guided his hands to the soft buds of her breasts. “What does it matter to you?” she asked breathlessly. “It’s all pretend, anyway. I’m a ghost, a dream. No different from a joygirl in a pornsim.”

“You’re different. Very different,” he said. Her breasts seemed to burn his hands.

“Then let’s give each other this gift,” she said, and kissed him, hard enough to bruise his lips.

He was about to say, Why not? But then he just shut his foolish mouth and let her draw him inside.