“That’s an amphitheater,” I said, a bit puzzled that she hadn’t a clue. I laughed, “It is the finest singing stage on Earth.” I jumped up on the stage. I began to sing. It was not one of my greater talents.
“Stop! Stop!” she implored.
“If you don’t want me to sing, then I want to hear you sing.” I smiled wickedly: a key element in good blackmail is good humor.
Underneath her reluctance I could see a glimmer of acceptance. I continued, more softly yet more commanding, “Come on, now.”
She frowned, but ascended to the stage nonetheless. She waved her hands at me. “Shoo,” she said.
I stepped down. She began to sing. And I stood transfixed by the beauty and power of her voice.
I am sure my reaction was not strictly the result of my personal bias toward her; I still remember that a small child, four or five years old, curly blonde hair and innocent blue eyes, was drawn to the stage to listen with me. At first I thought the little girl was an apparition called into existence by the singing, just a natural element of the song itself. But when her parents joined us a minute later, they too shared the entrancement.
Karly sang of unalloyed joy, spots of bright sunshine reflected from raindrops, but with no need for raindrops to carry them; or perhaps there were raindrops, for when she finished, I had to wipe my hand across my face to dry them off.
“Beyond imagining,” I said.
She laughed, jumping lightly off the podium to join me. “You’ve heard it before, I’m sure,” she said.
“Never—whose work was that?”
“Stuart Glennan.” She looked puzzled. “You haven’t heard of the most famous songwriter in the world?” Her expression changed, as she came to some internal realization. “Uh, I guess I’m not surprised. He’s really only famous where I come from.”
“He certainly deserves to be famous,” I said. “Why hasn’t he published on the Web?”
“He has… or I guess I should say, he will,” she concluded. “I guess he hasn’t gotten around to it yet.”
“He sure as hell ought to!” I couldn’t believe such beautiful music hadn’t been published yet! “Listen. Let’s chat him up—why don’t you come on down to my place, we’ll log on, and find him and get him publishing! He deserves a larger audience!”
The more I talked, the more unhappy she became. She was slowly backing away from me; I realized she was already out of reach of my long arms.
“Gotta go,” she said in a small voice.
“Wait,” I cried, to no avail. She was running silently across the path, her hair streaming out in moonlit splendor behind her.
I started after her; I could have caught her, even with my bum knee, I’m sure. But she did not want me, and that ended the race before it had begun.
Slumping as I watched her disappear into the darkness, I suddenly realized how late it was. Cory! I straightened up with an electric rush. Was that why Karly had run off? Because her alternate personality had kicked in and told her she needed to change costumes for her next meeting? I trotted around the side of Moscone North; from the crest of the hill I could see the entrance to Moscone South where I was to meet Cory, and at the same time I could watch to see if she came from the same direction in which Karly had disappeared. I guess I was a bit too sure that she’d come that way, because I was looking at the Wurlitzer building when the word “Boo!” suddenly whispered in my ear. Cory’s warm breath tickled my ear.
I didn’t quite jump out of my skin. “How’d you do that?” I asked as I turned to her.
She was a different person from the grim Cory I’d met earlier. Oh, she wasn’t transformed into Karly, but she had Karly’s radiance; she was bubbling over with joy. “It’s wonderful here,” she said, twirling around with her arms thrown wide. “It’s so free!”
“Unlike Berkeley,” I replied dryly.
Her arms fell. “Well, that’s not exactly what I meant.”
“It’s OK.” I didn’t know what was OK, but she suddenly needed consoling. I put my arms around her, pulling her close. Now my breath was as warm on her neck as hers was on mine. I was relishing the moment till I noticed a little detail, barely discernible in the light from the street lamps—there was no black dot of ink on her neck. Cory and Karly really were different people. The good news: I wasn’t falling head over heels for a multiple-personality escapee from a psycho ward. The bad news: I was falling for two different people.
People who happened to be twins but who didn’t know each other. Twins who had both lost their tall boyfriends named Gary, in Berkeley, just recently. Gary must have been a brilliant two-timer, to keep these two on a string without finding out about each other.
Sure he was, and I had a flying saucer in Brooklyn left to me by an expired maiden aunt. I needed a better explanation. All I could come up with was that somehow, Karly had found and removed the (supposedly) indelible mark on her neck in the few minutes between leaving and returning; the mark she didn’t even know she had when she left. Yeah, right.
Inspiration struck. “I have a favor to ask of you.”
She smiled inquiringly.
I took her hand and guided her to the amphitheater. “Will you to sing for me? Your favorite song?”
“Well…” She looked very doubtful.
“Please. I know you have a beautiful voice.”
She closed her eyes. And a new melody unlike anything yet heard on earth filled the park.
Where Karly’s song had been a burst of joy, this was a haunting work of despair, of lonely terror in the dark, of empty eternities… of missed opportunity. Her voice had an eerie, otherworldly quality, an almost inhuman tenor.
I cried again, as I had cried for Karly’s song, but this time the tears were cold, carried by the chill midnight air.
When she had finished, I abruptly sat on the grass: my legs seemed unable to support me. She plopped down beside me then, and hugged me as I had hugged her. “It’s all right,” she said, “it’s not going to happen. I promise,” she said cryptically.
“Who wrote that?” I asked, still in a bit of a daze—although I already knew the answer. “Don’t tell me Stuart Glennan wrote that one too.”
Ha! This time I had amazed her. Her face filled with wonder. “How did you know?”
“Because your twin sister, or your clone, or whoever Karly is that she is a perfect replica of you, also has an incredible favorite song by the same guy.”
Her voice fell. “Eric, I told you before, I don’t have a sister, and I cannot possibly have a clone, either.” She thought for a moment. “At least, I cannot possibly have a clone here, at this time.”
For the next hour we didn’t talk so much as I interrogated her. She never denied the clear implication that there was something very funny about her, never refuted my strange questions with the simple observation that I was strange myself. Clearly, her heart wanted me to figure it out, to understand her, to share her grief and pain. But her mind fought it, believing it too dangerous to trust anyone, even me, the smart nice guy who looked so much like the love she had lost.
“What do you think of the future of VR?” I asked.
“Silly stuff,” she replied, a different answer that was yet symmetrical to an answer Karly had given me during dinner, when I had talked with her about nanotech: “Nothing important will come of it,” Karly had said. Now Cory cleared her throat and spoke of VR: “Nothing important will come of it.” Cory’s voice, like Karly’s earlier, was full of confidence and scorn.
Unthinkingly, I posed another test to her. “Come with me, let’s talk to Stuart Glennan on the Web.”
“No! I have to leave now.”