Blue Shifting by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

tear ducts would not oblige. She walked across the dome, her first faltering steps giving way to a more confident stride. She moved her arms, fingers and neck in the prescribed routine of rehabilitation, not unlike the precise choreography of a Balinese dancer. Sounds came to her, but distant, muffled. Likewise the sense of touch relayed objects to her as if they were wrapped in fleece. She stared at the dead woman's reflection in the dome. She opened her mouth, expelled air, then a scrap of sound. "Hell... hell... hello. Hello. I... am... Zoe. Wellard is... insane." The words came one by one, creaking from a larynx redundant for years. She experimented with complex sentences, wry observations, obscenities directed at Wellard, and then she relented: "Wellard cannot help... himself. He is a victim of... circumstance. I am Zoe Wellard. How do you... do?"
    She returned to the catafalque, sat carefully and lay down. She closed her eyes, allowed her awareness to drain slowly from the body.
    Abbie opened her own eyes and found herself lying on the floor. She lay blinking up at the dome, disoriented at the shift back to her own body. She stood wearily, touched the Zoe's brow and wept.
    She had known, when her agency had received the commission, what Wellard required, but his precise motives now, as then, were a mystery.
    ~
    Wellard was seated on the patio, staring out across the ocean, when Abbie stepped from the studio and joined him. He looked up. "Well?"
    She did not realise, until she sat down opposite him, how much the transfer had drained her. She felt physically weak, emotionally unstable. She had the urge to snap: "Well, what?" But it was obvious what he wanted to know.
    "I can pilot her," she replied. "She can walk, talk, hear, see. I could maintain control for an hour, maybe more." She watched him closely.
    Wellard smiled, a paradoxically boyish grin on a face so rugged. "That should be quite long enough."
    "For what?" she asked.
    He reached out to the table and picked up a sheaf of paper, an antique medium appropriate to Wellard's Primitivism. He passed it to Abbie.
    She leafed through the sheaf. It was an old fashioned play-script, a dialogue between two characters. She scanned the top sheet, bearing the title Atonement , and the opening. Time: fifteen years ago. Setting: the patio of an artist's dome, Mikonos, Earth. Dramatis personae: Benedict Wellard, an artist; Zoe Wellard, his daughter.
    Wellard: The love I had for your mother was unique.
    Zoe: Please, father...
    Abbie looked up from the script and stared at Wellard.
    His smile, the light in his eyes, suggested more than just enthusiasm for the entertainment he had planned. "It is the transcription of my final meeting with my daughter. It's verbatim up to a certain point, at which I have allowed myself a degree of artistic licence. Please, read on..."
    Abbie regarded the opening lines, a constriction in her throat, then slowly read her way through the following pages. Her heart hammered and gradually she became less aware of herself; she was wholly captivated by the words on the page as the drama unfolded its terrible logic.
    She was only peripherally aware of Wellard, watching her.
    She lowered the last page and stared at the artist, seeing only the tragic finale, the denouement that Wellard had himself fashioned to stand as testament to his overwhelming guilt.
    "Well?" he smiled.
    She shook her head. "It's sick..."
    His expression became grim. "Whether it is sick or not does not detract from its fundamental truth. Tonight's re-enactment will bring the cycle to a close with my fitting punishment-"
    "But you don't deserve... this ."
    "Who are you to say what I do not deserve?" he snapped. He stood and paced to the edge of the patio, then sat side-saddle on the rail and regarded her. "What I did fifteen years ago – and it isn't in the script – was... unforgivable. It brought about my daughter's demise and plagued me ever since."
    Abbie sat without moving, shocked