Electric Forest by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online

before her showed no sign of being the nausea's original fount.)
    She stared at the monster. In revulsion. In a revulsion that could only be admitted now that she was liberated from hell.
    And as she stared, superimposed upon the vile thing in its

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    fantastic cradle, she beheld her glamour reflected in the glazium. Beauty and the Beast. Magdala laughed. She had caught her inventor s madness.
    It was a while before she registered that, apart from her two selves, and its own gadgets, the house was
     

     
     
    empty.
    Night had evolved outside, smothering the salt beach. A golden rose of dawn had ascended inside, and lit up every chamber, passage and vista. She had toyed with the toys of his house. Unclothed, she had enjoyed the naked sensation of silk and velvon, plastase or cool steel brushing her arms, legs, breasts and shoulders. Sensuality was so fresh to her she had no name to give it.
    She had penetrated to the kitchen area, thumbed switches and perceived nut-brown toasts and strange sea food rising from hidden ovens to her plate. She ate, curious. She tasted every bite, chewed with strong
white teeth, maneuvered with a strawberry tongue, swallowed, her creamy throat undulating. And then the food seemed to lose itself somewhere in die region of her ribs, dissolve, vanish. It was like
e li minex but permanent; she had no hunger, though she had an appetite. She could digest perfectly, without a digestion.
    At a touch, music soared, and sank through the house. Trivision flared. There was a Tri-V drama on the twelfth channel, it concerned a woman who would be classified as beautiful. The woman was not as beautiful as Magdala.
    For the first time, (all these first times), she knew the delight of vanity.
She had combed her blue-black hair, bathed her body slowly, slowly.
    But she had done everything with a mounting sense, not yet realized, that Claudio was not there.
    Finally, the awareness pierced through into her like a thin interminable noise in her ears, Alarm built quietly, layer on layer. When all the layers were established, each atop the other, her fear fastened on her, her fear in a revised style.

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    Claudio was her mentor, her guardian. He was the magician. He was gone.

    The reason for fear came eventually and revealed itself.
    She was afraid to be alone, for alone, it seemed that none of this could be. It grew surrealistic. Without another to verify her condition, it might fade; a blown-out fire, a mirage.
    She retreated, room by room, till she reached the room with the five walls. She turned on the mirrors and sat in the middle of them, glancing from each to each. And the mirrors seemed to exclaim: Here you are. See! You exist.
    This phase lasted a long time.
    At length, she heard the striking electro-battery clock which she had switched on in one of the chambers
beneath. It struck twenty-five tones. Each tone thrilled through the house, a brazen tuning-fork. It was midnight.
    Magdala got up. The syndrome of disbelief fell away, and she was abruptly conscious of her nudity. Before, the body had been a garment in itself.
    He had deserted her in the computerized house, without preparation and without clothes. At last, with an acid and reassuring anger, she had analyzed her predicament as another test. Possibly he was not even absent from the house, but spying from some wily camouflage. Gauging her.
    She could move fluidly now, delectably.

    I am delectable.

    Let him judge her, then. She was not a machine, not a robot. (Did she know what she was? She was his
     

     
     
    creation.) She stabbed the remaining buttons on the panel by the door, to see what else the mirror room would bring her.

    The ultimate button brought her a gray cottene bath robe.

    A pang of rage shot through her. He was playing with her again. Disappointing her. She put the robe on and
    tied it. She had expected silk. She was beginning to think as her body suited her to think. Her aspirations, in this short space, were already being