Electric Forest by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

appalled delirium. "Let's play one."
    And as she said it, she noticed that the man cast no shadow, and that where his arms rested along the arms of the chair, the form-cushioning plastase had not altered its shape.
    The wild scared heat in her throat and groin went cold. Cold froze her eyes and mouth. She had stumbled, as she always stumbled, into yet another of Claudio's traps. She could not make her voice come for half a minute. Then she got it out, hard and jagged.
    "When the leaves fall from the trees outside, they disappear. A millionaire's holostetic forest, turned on or off by a switch or a button. How much did the man cost to design and project, Claudio? Is he sufficiently realistic that he can put his arms around me? Or will I need a sensit head-set for that?"
    The man winked out like a lamp; even the glass disappeared. Claudio walked from a wall, clapping. "Good," he said. "Good. "
    She averted her face, but he came and stood over her.
    "Holostets have their limitations," he said. "The tress are fine. They work strictly to a pre-program, without variety. But a holostet that seems to react must be controlled, and from a distance of not more than ten
meters. And to get the damned thing to talk calls for feasts you would scarcely credit. But you. You work very nicely on your own, don t you? Quite a display. You must take a ft er your mother, Mary of Magdala. A thoroughbred whore."

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    The oddly anachronistic gibe struck her as ludicrous. She glanced up and met his eyes, and the tide within
her changed direction, though Tri-V still ordered her vocal chords. She had remembered how she had
envisaged him, the voyeur, spying on her own arousal; the choice of words he had given the holostet
     

     
     
    illusion.
    "Well," she said, "you've paid my price already/* And waited, her body emotively unbreathing, for his reply.

    "Me?" he smiled, wide-eyed. "My apologies, Magdala. I assure you it was just a test-run on your
    unconsidered retaliation to an event. Preparation for the world outside. Nothing else. You forget, I know what you actually look like. No thanks."
    She shriveled . And, even as she shrank from him, she smelled his cruelty, pungent as burning wires. It was
another first. For the first time, she was attempting to investigate the motives of those who wounded her.
    "Don't cry over it," he said. "You shouldn't find tears easy, as you are. You'll need to practice that, too." But she had not cried in sixteen years. She was a desert, and in her desert she had the leisure to begin to hate him, an efficient chiseled hatred, new to her as everything.
    The sunrise fitting spilled in his blond hair and down his well-dressed, slim, young-man's body. His beauty was like a razor's edge.

    Even now that he had made her equally beautiful, it could comfort her to hate Claudio Loro.

    "I suggest you go back to your room," he said. *Go and sit with the mirrors."

    He had dropped the silver discs into his ears.

    She went.
    She read from the electrobook screen through the remainder of the night. The library was vast. She spun the dial at random, and read random sections, spinning the dial again if she grew uninterested, or if the tumult of her thoughts in-

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    traded; also to mislead him, for he was probably keeping track of everything she did.
    The window wall faced north across the bay. The sun rose on the right side of the house, and the sky and the agitated waves lightened, distracting her. There was a mist, and through it the sea resembled blue milk.
    When she turned back to the electrobook screen, the page had melted, and a trivisual image of Claudio was there instead.
    Charmingly, and extraneously, he informed her:
    "I'm afraid you can't keep me out. The house does exactly as I tell it. You have no privacy. However, I thought you should know. The enchanting dummy-run last night, with our holostet visitor, wasn't pointless. In a couple of days' time, we're traveling a hundred kilometers down the coast together, into the