Dio Read online

  Water tinkles steadily in the fountain. After a long time the inner doors open and a man emerges; he leans over and speaks to another man sitting nearby. The second man gets up and goes through the inner doors; the first moves out of sight in the opposite direction.

  Neither reappears. Claire waits, but nothing more happens.

  No one has taken her name, or put her on a list; no one seems to be paying her any attention. She rises and walks slowly down the room, past the group at the table. Two of the men are talking vehemently, interrupting each other. She listens as she passes, but it is all student gibberish: “the delta curve clearly shows . . . a stochastic assumption . . .” She moves on to the three who sit at the screen.

  The screen still seems dark to Claire, but faint glints of color move on its glossy surface, and there is a whisper of sound.

  There are two vacant seats. She hesitates, then takes one of them and leans forward under the hood.

  Now the screen is alight, and there is a murmur of talk in her ears. She is looking into a room dominated by a huge oblong slab of gray marble, three times the height of a man. Though solid, it appears to be descending with a steady and hypnotic motion, like a waterfall.

  Under this falling curtain of stone sit two men. One of them is a stranger. The other—

  She leans forward, peering. The other is in shadow; she cannot see his features. Still, there is something familiar about the outlines of his head and body . . .

  She is almost sure it is Dio, but when he speaks she hesitates again. It is a strange, low, hoarse voice, unlike anything she has ever heard before: the sound is so strange that she forgets to listen for the words.

  Now the other man is speaking: “—these notions. It’s just an ordinary procedure—one more injection.”

  “No,” says the dark man with repressed fury, and abruptly stands up. The lights in that pictured room flicker as he moves, and the shadow swerves to follow him.

  “Pardon me,” says an unexpected voice at her ear. The man next to her is leaning over, looking inquisitive. “I don’t think you’re authorized to watch this session, are you?”

  Claire makes an impatient gesture at him, turning back fascinated to the screen. In the pictured room, both men are standing now; the dark man is saying something hoarsely while the other moves as if to take his arm.

  “Please,” says the voice at her ear, “are you authorized to watch this session?”

  The dark man’s voice has risen to a hysterical shout—hoarse and thin, like no human voice in the world. In the screen, he whirls and makes as if to run back into the room.

  “Catch him!” says the other, lunging after the running form.

  The dark man doubles back suddenly, past the other who reaches for him. Then two other men run past the screen; then the room is vacant: only the moving slab drops steadily, smoothly, into the floor.

  The three beside Claire are standing. Across the room, heads turn. “What is if?” someone calls.

  One of the men calls back, “He’s having some kind of a fit!” In a lower voice, to the woman, he adds, “It’s the discomfort, I suppose . . .”

  Claire is watching, uncomprehendingly, when a sudden yell from the far side of the room makes her turn.

  THE DOORS have swung back, and in the opening a shouting man is wrestling helplessly with two others. They have his arms pinned and he cannot move any farther, but that horrible, hoarse voice goes on shouting, and shouting . . .

  There are no more shadows: she can see his face.

  “Dio!” she calls, getting to her feet.

  Through his own din, he hears her and his head turns. His face gapes blindly at her, swollen and red, the eyes glaring. Then with a violent motion he turns away. One arm comes free, and jerks up to shield his head. He is hurrying away; the others follow. The doors close. The room is full of standing figures, and a murmur of voices.

  Claire stands where she is, stunned, until a slender figure separates itself from the crowd. That other face seems to hang in the air, obscuring his—red and distorted, mouth agape.

  The man takes her by the elbow, urges her toward the outer door. “What are you to Dio? Did you know him before?”

  “Before what?” she asks faintly. They are crossing the room of machines, empty and echoing.

  “Hm. I remember you now—I let you in, didn’t I? Sorry you came?” His tone is light and negligent; she has the feeling that his attention is not really on what he is saying. A faint irritation at this is the first thing she feels through her numbness. She stirs as they walk, disengaging her arm from his grasp. She says, “What was wrong with him?”

  “A very rare complaint,” answers the other, without pausing. They are in the outer room now, in the gloom under the bright frieze, moving toward the doors. “Didn’t you know?” he asks in the same careless tone.

  “I’ve been away.” She stops, turns to face him. “Can’t you tell me? What wrong with Dio?”

  She sees now that he has a thin face, nose and lips keen, eyes bright and narrow. “Nothing you want to know about,” he says curtly. He waves at the door control, and the doors slide noiselessly apart. “Good-bye.” She does not move, and after a moment the doors close again. “What’s wrong with him?” she says.

  He sighs, looking down at her modish robe with its delicate clasps of gold. “How can I tell you? Does the verb ‘to die’ mean anything to you?”

  She is puzzled and apprehensive. “I don’t know . . . isn’t it something that happens to the lower animals?”

  He gives her a quick mock bow. “Very good.”

  “But I don’t know what it is. Is it—a kind of fit, like—” She nods toward the inner rooms.

  He is staring at her with an expression half compassionate, half wildly exasperated. “Do you really want to know?” He turns abruptly and runs his finger down a suddenly glowing index stripe on the wall. “Let’s see . . . don’t know what there is in this damned reservoir. Hm. Animals, terminus.” At his finger’s touch, a cabinet opens and tips out a shallow oblong box into his palm. He offers it.

  In her hands, the box lights up, she is looking into a cage in which a small animal crouches—a white rat. Its fur is dull and rough-looking; something is caked around its muzzle. It moves unsteadily, noses a cup of water, then turns away. Its legs seem to fail; it drops and lies motionless except for the slow rise and fall of its tiny chest.

  Watching, Claire tries to control her nausea. Students’ cabinets are full of nastinesses like this; they expect you not to show any distaste. “Something’s the matter with it,” is all she can find to say.

  “Yes. It’s dying. That means to cease living: to stop. Not to be any more. Understand?”

  “No,” she breathes. In the box, the small body has stopped moving. The mouth is stiffly open, the lip drawn back from the yellow teeth. The eye does not move, but glares up sightless.

  “That’s all,” says her companion, taking the box back. “No more rat. Finished. After a while it begins to decompose and make a bad smell, and a while after that, there’s nothing left but bones. And that has happened to every rat that was ever born.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she says. “It isn’t like that; I never heard of such a thing.”

  “Didn’t you ever have a pet?” he demands. “A parakeet, a cat, a tank of fish?”

  “Yes,” she says defensively, “I’ve had cats, and birds. What of it?”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Well—I don’t know, I suppose I lost them. You know how you lose things.”

  “One day they’re there, the next, not,” says the thin man. “Correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right. But why?”

  “We have such a tidy world,” he says wearily. “Dead bodies would clutter it up; that’s why the house circuits are programmed to remove them when nobody is in the room. Every one: it’s part of the basic design. Of course, if you stayed in the room, and didn’t turn your back, the machine would have to embarrass y
ou by cleaning up the corpse in front of your eyes. But that never happens. Whenever you saw there was something wrong with any pet of yours, you turned around and went away, isn’t that right?”

  “Well, I really can’t remember—”

  “And when you came back, how odd, the beast was gone. It wasn’t ‘lost,’ it was dead. They die. They all die.”

  She looks at him, shivering. “But that doesn’t happen to people.”

  “No?” His lips are tight. After a moment he adds, “Why do you think he looked that way? You see he knows; he’s known for five months.”

  She catches her breath suddenly. “That day at the beach!”

  “Oh, were you there?” He nods several times, and opens the door again. “Very interesting for you. You can tell people you saw it happen.” He pushes her gently out into the vestibule.

  “But I want—” she says desperately.

  “What? To love him again, as if he were normal? Or do you want to help him? Is that what you mean?” His thin face is drawn tight, arrow-shaped between the brows. “Do you think you could stand it? If so—” He stands aside, as if to let her enter again.

  “Remember the rat,” he says sharply.

  She hesitates.

  “It’s up to you. Do you really want to help him? He could use some help, if it wouldn’t make you sick. Or else—Where were you all this time?”

  “Various places,” she says stiffly. “Littlam, Paris, New Hoi.”

  He nods. “Or you can go back and see them all again. Which?”

  She does not move. Behind her eyes, now, the two images are intermingled: she sees Dio’s gorged face staring through the stiff jaw of the rat.

  The thin man nods briskly. He steps back, holding her gaze. There is a long suspended moment; then the doors close.

  CHAPTER III

  THE YEARS fall away like pages from an old notebook. Claire is in Stambul, Winthur, Kumoto, BahiBlanc . . . other places, too many to remember. There are the intercontinental games, held every century on the baroque wheel-shaped ground in Campan: Claire is one of the spectators who hover in clouds, following their favorites. There is a love affair, brief but intense; it lasts four or five years; the man’s name is Nord, he has gone off now with another woman to Deya, and for nearly a month Claire has been inconsolable. But now comes the opera season in Milan, and in Tusca, afterwards, she meets some charming people who are going to spend a year in Papeete . . .

  Life is good. Each morning she awakes refreshed; her lungs fill with the clean air; the blood tingles in her fingertips.

  On a spring morning, she is basking in a bubble of green glass, three-quarters submerged in an emerald-green ocean. The water sways and breaks, frothily, around the bright disk of sunlight at the top. Down below where she lies, the cool green depths are like mint to the fire- white bite of the sun. Tiny flat golden fishes swarm up to the bubble, turn, glinting like tarnished coins, and flow away again. The memory unit near the floor of the bubble is muttering out a muted tempest of Wagner: half listening, she hears the familiar music mixed with a gabble of foreign syllables. Her companion, with his massive bronze head almost touching the speakers, is listening attentively. Claire feels a little annoyed; she prods him with a bare foot: “Ross, turn that horrible thing off, won’t you please?”

  He looks up, his blunt face aggrieved. “It’s The Rhinegold.”

  “Yes, I know, but I can’t understand a word. It sounds as if they’re clearing their throats . . . Thank you.”

  He has waved a dismissing hand at the speakers, and the guttural chorus subsides. “Billions of people spoke that language once,” he says portentously. Ross is an artist, which makes him almost a player, really, but he has the student’s compulsive habit of bringing out these little kernels of information to lay in your lap.

  “And I can’t even stand four of them,” she says lazily. “I only listen to opera for the music, anyhow, the stories are always so foolish; I wonder why?”

  She can almost see the learned reply rising to his lips; but he represses it politely—he knows she doesn’t really want an answer—and busies himself with the visor. It lights under his fingers to show a green chasm, slowly flickering with the last dim ripples of the sunlight.

  “Going down now?” she asks.

  “Yes, I want to get those corals.” Ross is a sculptor, not a very good one, fortunately, nor a very devoted one, or he would be impossible company. He has a studio on the bottom of the Mediterranean, in ten fathoms, and spends part of his time concocting menacing tangles of stylized undersea creatures. Finished with the visor, he touches the controls and the bubble drifts downward. The waters meet overhead with a white splash of spray; then die circle of light dims to yellow, to lime color, to deep green.

  Beneath them now is the coral reef—acre upon acre of bare skeletal fingers, branched and splayed. A few small fish move brilliantly among the pale branches. Ross touches the controls again; the bubble drifts to a stop. He stares down through the glass for a moment, then gets up to open the inner lock door. Breathing deeply, with a distant expression, he steps in and closes the transparent door behind him. Claire sees the water spurt around his ankles. It surges up quickly to fill the airlock; when it is chest high, Ross opens the outer door and plunges out in a cloud of air bubbles.

  He is a yellow kicking shape in the green water; after a few moments he is half obscured by clouds of sediment. Claire watches, vaguely troubled; the largest corals are like bleached bone.

  She fingers the memory unit for the Sea Pieces from Grimes, without knowing why; it’s cold, northern ocean music, not appropriate. The cold, far calling of the gulls makes her shiver with sadness, but she goes on listening.

  Ross grows dimmer and more distant in the clouding water. At length he is only a flash, a flicker of movement down in the dusky green valley. After a long time she sees him coming back, with two or three pink corals in his hand.

  Absorbed in the music, she has allowed the bubble to drift until the entrance is almost blocked by corals. Ross forces himself between them, levering himself against a tall outcropping of stone, but in a moment he seems to be in difficulty. Claire turns to the controls and backs the bubble off a few feet. The way is clear now, but Ross does not follow.

  Through the glass she sees him bend over, dropping his specimens. He places both hands firmly and strains, all the great muscles of his limbs and back bulging. After a moment he straightens again, shaking his head. He is caught, she realizes; one foot is jammed into a crevice of the stone. He grins at her painfully and puts one hand to his throat. He has been out a long time.

  Perhaps she can help, in the few seconds that are left. She darts into the airlock, closes and floods it. But just before the water rises over her head, she sees the man’s body stiffen.

  Now, with her eyes open under water, in that curious blurred light, she sees his gorged face break into lines of pain. Instantly, his face becomes another’s— Dio’s—vividly seen through the ghost of a dead rat’s grin. The vision comes without warning, and passes.

  Outside the bubble, Ross’s stiff jaw wrenches open, then hangs slack. She sees the pale jelly come bulging slowly up out of his mouth; now he floats easily, eyes turned up, limbs relaxed.

  Shaken, she empties the lock again, goes back inside and calls Antibe Control for a rescue cutter. She sits down and waits, careful not to look at the still body outside.

  She is astonished and appalled at her own emotion. It has nothing to do with Ross, she knows: he is perfectly safe. When he breathed wafer, his body reacted automatically: his lungs exuded the protective jelly, consciousness ended, his heartbeat stopped. Antibe Control will be here in twenty minutes or less, but Ross could stay like that for years, if he had to. As soon as he gets out of the water, his lungs will begin to re-absorb the jelly; when they are clear, heartbeat and breathing will start again.

  It’s as if Ross were only acting out a part, every movement stylized and meaningful. In the moment of his pain, a barr
ier in her mind has gone down, and now a doorway stands open.

  She makes an impatient gesture, she is not used to being tyrannized in this way. But her arm drops in defeat; the perverse attraction of that doorway is too strong. Dio, her mind silently calls. Dio.

  THE DESIGNER of Sector Twenty, in the time she has been away, has changed the plan of the streets “to bring the surface down.” The roof of every level is a screen faithfully repeating the view from the surface, and with lighting and other ingenious tricks the weather up there is parodied down below. Just now it is a gray cold November day, a day of slanting gray rain: looking up, one sees it endlessly falling out of the leaden sky: and down here, although the air is as always pleasantly warm, the great bare slabs of the building fronts have turned bluish gray to match, and silvery insubstantial streamers are twisting endlessly down, to disappear before they strike the pavement.

  Claire does not like it; it does not feel like Dio’s work. The crowds have a nervous air, curious, half-protesting; they look up and laugh, but uneasily, and the refreshment bays are full of people crammed together under bright yellow light. Claire pulls her metallic cloak closer around her throat; she is thinking with melancholy of the turn of the year, and the earth turning cold and hard as iron, the trees brittle and black against the unfriendly sky. This is a time for blue skies underground, for flushed skins and honest laughter, not for this echoed grayness.

  In her rooms, at least, there is cheerful warmth. She is tired and perspiring from the trip; she does not want to see anyone just yet. Some American gowns have been orderd; while she waits for them, she turns on the fire-bath in the bedroom alcove. The yellow spiky flames jet up with a black-capped whoom, then settle to a high murmuring curtain of yellow-white. Claire binds her head in an insulating scarf, and without bothering to undress, steps into the fire.

  The flame blooms up around her body, cool and caressing; the fragile gown flares and is gone in a whisper of sparks. She turns, arms outspread against the flow. Depilated, refreshed, she steps out again. Her body tingles, invigorated by the flame. Delicately, she brushes away some clinging wisps of burnt skin; the new flesh is glossy pink, slowly paling to rose-and-ivory.