“Alta-Ty,” Nick said, “and a very close friend of Senator Harmon’s. I’m Senator Harmon’s son—see?” Nick flashed his Mutagen ID badge. “And if you don’t let her go immediately you’ll all be looking for jobs tomorrow.”
“The hell we will,” the cop said, but his voice was uncertain. Turning his back on Nick, he shouted, “Next!”
The stall opened and Hali emerged, enraged.
“This is a very unusual situation,” Nick said as they entered the theater and squeezed past more cops to get to their seats (at least sixty additional cops were stationed in key positions throughout the audience). “The cops are under a lot of political pressure, what with the elections coming up. If another murder takes place it will reflect very badly on Clinger.”
Hali did not reply. Her cheeks were a mottled purple and veins in her temples throbbed. Her “beak” was clamped shut and her breath hissed strangely, as though in her anger her nonhumanness were reasserting itself, demanding recognition. Nick experienced a sudden, quite real fear that at any moment she might blow apart like a defective boiler, filling them all with brittle blue shrapnel and scalding them with the steam of her rage.
“You’re right,” Nick said, “this whole thing is completely inexcusable. I should have dropped you back at the hotel, it was stupid of me to—”
A man in front of them hissed for quiet. The theater darkened. Three spotlights appeared: a first picked out the podium at the front of the audience where pilgrims could voice their requests; a second—the beam of a 480 X magnification projector—made a twenty-foot circle on the rear wall; the third shone stage center and within its parabola those with keen eyes could distinguish a transdimensional window no bigger than a button, suspended eight feet in the air. The magnification projector showed the window vastly enlarged; it looked identical to the window Lex had used, the shifting, trembling edges, the grayness contained within.
Seconds of silence elapsed. Then a plume of red flowed from the window like a scarf being drawn through a buttonhole. When the last of it had escaped, it formed a ball and, moving to one side of the window, hung there motionless.
The magnification screen revealed the mechanism behind the illusion, and oddly enough knowing the secret made it all the more fabulous, for the red was not a solid substance but rather a gestalt of thousands of tiny creatures {Hymnoptera salient) cloned from the artist who had conceived it, midwifed by Scolpes with a thousand innovative techniques, genetically modified to resemble a bee while retaining a single, semi-human consciousness.
Enlarged, he/they appeared to be flying in impossibly perfect formation, the blur of wingtips almost touching, the huge compound eyes staring in every direction, the thorax and abdomen striped with bright, bristly red fur.
Now a plume of blue seeped through the window, formed a ball and hung alongside the red one. Like the first it consisted of thousands of identical man/insects, these with blue fur on their abdomens instead of red. A third ball, a yellow one, joined the file, then a white one somewhat larger than the rest.
The four balls combined into one large ball, the three primary colors pinwheeling inward on a background of white, whirling faster and faster until they blurred. Then, in a virtuoso display of transmogrification, the sphere collapsed into a succession of objects, colors combining and recombining with dizzying speed. A housecat become a ferocious lion, a common pencil grew into a tree with thick green foliage. The magnifying screen showed the leaves to be two rows of yellow bees alternating with one row of blue, the colors combining like the dots in a newspaper photograph. The larger the object the more it tended toward translucency, the smaller, the more solid it appeared.
When the transformations threatened to become nauseating, they ceased and one ball remained, primaries pinwheeling on white. A voice came from it, rather ten thousand voices whispering in almost perfect unison, a sound slightly out of focus.
“What is matter?
Only molecules
Bound by electricity.
Insubstantial as clouds.
What does it matter?
We grow to be men
We shrink to be old We He in the dirt And enrich the soil. Soil for veggies To feed the folks Who have the babies That grow to be men. What’s the matter With transcience? All Is Etherium, Tell me your dream I’ll make it matter.”
The audience shouted for Sir Etherium’s attention. The ball took the shape of an arrow, pointed to an elderly man in the audience and beckoned, waggling like a crooked finger, for him to take the podium. He was tall and straight with white hair and nut-colored skin. His eyes were clear and blue. He spoke into the microphone:
‘‘Sir Etherium, I’d like to see Martha, my wife, again. She died twelve years ago and hardly a night goes by when I don’t fall asleep thinking about her. Maybe if I could see her one more time I could make my peace with her.”
The arrow had turned back into a ball and now the ball began to spin, the colors blurring, merging into white. Faster and faster it spun, humming like a top, and then the ball broke and the whiteness assumed the form of a young woman, darkening to copper flesh, to flaxen hair.
The man turned pale.
“Martha?” he said, voice trembling.
“Yes, Joe”—ten thousand whispers in almost perfect unison.
The magnifying screen showed a section of her skin to be three rows of white bees, one row of red, with a yellow every third place.
“How is it possible . . .?” he said.
“Always wanting explanations, my Joe.” She laughed. “I had to come back to tell you that the accident wasn’t your fault. The other driver jumped the rail.”
“But if I had turned fast enough . . .”
“No, Joe. My death was fated. Nothing you could have done would have made a difference.”
“If only I could believe that.”
“It’s true.”
He looked uncertain.
“You can’t bring me back to life,” she continued, “by living less yourself.” Her voice grew weaker. One hand drifted away from its wrist and a section of stage showed through her abdomen.
“Don’t go!” he cried and, more softly, “Not yet. So little time, it’s not fair—”
“Live, Joe,” she whispered. “Forget me and live. . . .”
Then there was only a ball with a three-colored pinwheel turning lazily inside. The man remained on the podium distraught, reaching with his hands toward the space she had occupied. Presently he stepped down and two priests led him back to his seat.
“How did he do that?” Hali whispered.
“He’s the greatest impressionist in the galaxy.”
“Yes, but how did he know the shape of her face and the sound of her voice?”
“When they go on the other side of the transdimensional window they can see a person’s past.”
“Really?” Her eyes opened wide. Then she remembered herself and frowned. “I think it is awful, reuniting him with his wife, then separating them again.”
“Only now he’s exorcised her memory, he’s worked out his guilts. She won’t be haunting him everywhere he goes.”
“This transdimensional window . . .” Hali began, wanting to know more, but the man in front of her hissed angrily for quiet, for once again the ten thousand voices were chanting:
What is matter?
Only molecules
Bound by electricity, Insubstantial as clouds . .
A woman mounted the podium, forty, short, slight and mousy. Her nose was large and the way she had her hair pulled back, it looked even larger.
“I don’t want to sound discontent,” she said to Sir Etherium. “I have a good life, good friends, a husband who loves me. Two wonderful children. Everything. But I’ve always wanted—well, it’s difficult to ask. My husband says I have inner beauty and I know that’s what really matters, but I still would give anything to look like one of those girls on the holovision, even for a minute. . . .”