Whisper their names. Depailler, Villeneuve, Willy Mairesse.
Me.
My helmet snaps up on a view of a hundred thousand cheering would-be suicides. I smile and wave; the sun and the wind dry my tears.
I pull the jack out and adjust my flight pants and get out of the car.
Next stop the champagne.
Maureen Havers is up on the podium. Her grey hair sparks on the wind. She has a smile like death and I envy it. A nude girl hands me the champagne magnum. It’s very hot here.
My hands are shaking.
It gets dark.
I look up at the sun, puzzled.
A blood spot on my retina, receding fast…
I wake up in my hotel room. Catharine is sitting by the bed. I look round. Angèle’s not here.
“Is it over?”
Catharine smiles. “It’s over.”
“Did I do—what did I do?”
“Rest first.”
“No!” I sit up in bed and it feels like I just shoved my head in a coffee grinder. I take a deep breath. “Show me now.”
She lights up Angèle’s PC.
Where is she?
We watch the rerun.
I see what a billion TV addicts have lived for all season.
Me.
I don’t believe it. There, on the podium, in front of them all—
I’m masturbating. I’ve got my hand inside my overalls and I’m…
It’s terrible. I don’t know whether to laugh or throw myself out the window. When it’s over my voice is high with hysteria. “How did you—how could you—I didn’t—I—” I force myself to stop. Tears of rage heat my cheeks.
“You didn’t do anything. Look again.”
My eyes are drawn to the screen.
She is right. I don’t do anything, but by the end of it I’m shaking afresh with disgust and self-loathing and fascinated revulsion. It’s worse than the act itself could ever be. The power of suggestion…
“I can’t believe I did that—didn’t do—” I’m babbling again. I turn to Catharine. Angèle must have told her I like Irish. She’s pouring me a tumblerful.
“You didn’t. Our ROM wafer did. It took you through a very special dance. Helene’s been working on it for months.”
“A dance.”
“Yes.” She hands me the tumbler.
I drink it down in one. “A repulsive dance.”
When I calm down she sits beside me and says, “The Grand Prix. A phallocentric institution, wouldn’t you say? But will men ever be able to draw that kind of strength from it, now its figurehead has lampooned it so ably—so cleverly?”
The truth clicks home. “You fucking bitch, I’ll never race again.”
She shrugs. She is prepared for my reaction.
I feel vivisected.
“There are other ways to drive,” she says. “When Havers sacks you, as she surely must, we have other games for you to play. Networks. Security systems. Stock exchanges.”
Through a veil of shock I sense the potential behind her words. I glimpse the power that is mine as a servant of the Programme, the riches my skills and my serviceable nervous system might yet yield—for me, and for the women of Brazil, Africa, the whole twisted world.
But. “How will I ever show my face again?”
“Which face?” She gets off the bed, and walks over to unplug the IBCN lead, and as she walks her legs grow stocky, her hair lengthens, her skin grows dark and when she turns to me, her mouth is more full, her forehead less pronounced, her cheeks have swollen a little—and Angèle smiles. It is beautiful.
“Everything has its place in the matrix of signification,” Angèle says, in a voice I do not recognize. “You claim no prejudice, no chauvinism—yet a gesture, a turn of the head, a way of lowering the eyelids, all of that plays on your stereotypic view of things. See how the white bitch becomes the dusky whore.”
“Oh no,” I murmur. “Not now. Not anymore.” I slip off the bed and walk clumsily toward Angèle and hold her in humility and run my hand over her back. I feel for the first time the ROM port between her shoulder blades. Her disguise hid that, too, till now. What a clever dance Helene has written for her!
My heart jolts up into my mouth. “Helene?”
“Hello.” Her tongue is hot on my cheek.
She laughs, and her laughter is a promise: peace… riches… revolution…
When I wrote this, it was cool to be a “New Man”; why, I’ll never know, but overnight this turned male fecklessness into some sort of political style statement. My decision to wire all this into semiotics and motor racing was entirely arbitrary: They were simply what I knew at the time.
My protagonist thinks he’s very sophisticated, very postmodern: underneath he’s just not that clever. We may imagine that for him, joining the Programme is only one in a long series of epiphanic episodes: sexual encounters; sexual-political conversions; motor racing, of course. He is without qualities: new ideas infect him continually. He will forever be repudiating one belief for another, one lover for another.
The House of Mourning
BRIAN STABLEFORD
Brian Stableford was born in Shipley, Yorkshire, in 1948. He was a lecturer in sociology at the University of Reading until he became a full-time writer in 1988. He has published more than forty novels, including The Empire of Fear and Young Blood. He is also a prolific writer of nonfiction about the history of imaginative fiction; two collections of his essays were released by the Borgo Press during 1995.
Anna could well be a descendent of Miss Dade in “The Lucifer of Blue”—like her predecessor she’s proud, or at least comfortable with her chosen profession. In the past, prostitutes and their johns were too often victims of incurable diseases such as syphillis and gonorrhea. In Stableford’s future, the diseases are just as deadly and the attitudes of those outside the profession just as intolerant.
ANNA STARED AT HER thin face in the mirror, wondering where the substance had gone and why the color had vanished from the little that remained. Her eyes had so little blue left in them that they were as grey as her hair. She understood enough to know that a disruption of the chemistry of the brain was bound to affect the body as profoundly as the mind, but the sight of her image in the soul-stealing glass reawakened more atavistic notions. It was as if her dangerous madness had wrought a magical corruption of her flesh.
Perhaps, she thought, it was hazardous for such as she to look into mirrors; the confrontation might be capable of precipitating a crisis of confidence and a subsequent relapse into delirium. Facing up to the phantoms of the past was, however, the order of the day. With infinite patience she began to apply her makeup, determined that she would look alive, whatever her natural condition.
By the time she had finished, her hair was tinted gold, her cheeks delicately pink, and her lips fulsomely red—but her eyes still had the dubious transparency of raindrops on a window pane.
Isabel was late, as usual. Anna was forced to pace up and down in the hallway, under the watchful eyes of the receptionist and the ward sister. Fortunately, she was in the habit of dressing in black for everyday purposes, so her outfit attracted no particular attention.