8
* * *
AS BORISOVICH PUTS DOWN a hand of cards totaling less than ten, thus ending the game, the enunciator reports on an inappropriate question that a member has put to one of the girls. The enunciator isn’t privy to the conversations in the upstairs suites, but it receives from the girls those questions and phrases that have been deemed to be potential breaches of protocol. In this case: Do you ever think about leaving this place?
Having received the same report from the enunciator, Volodin looks up from the cards and meets Borisovich’s eyes.
Borisovich shrugs. From time to time, members say things that are problematic, although none has ever caused a serious incident.
The most annoying thing that ever happens is when, on rare occasion, a disposal is required. Otherwise, they have it easy. He and Volodin are given everything they need. They are happy. Their employers are thoughtful and generous. The sad life is far behind them. They do not dwell on it. They hardly remember. They do not wish to remember, and therefore they do not.
Volodin shuffles the cards.
9
* * *
IN SPITE OF LULING’S exceptional beauty and her apparent self-possession, her sense of vulnerability had become nearly as visible to Jane as were the red silk pajamas. This girl was lost and alone, and in denial of both truths.
Or maybe her mental condition might be more terrible than mere denial. Perhaps she was profoundly delusional, unable to recognize her condition and express her true feelings.
“LuLing, how do you pass the time when visitors aren’t here with you?”
“I am responsible for keeping my suite clean, but that is not difficult. I am given every convenience. My employers are generous.”
“Then you are paid?”
LuLing nodded, smiling. “I am paid with kindness, with anything I need, with escape from the ugliness of the world.”
“There is no ugliness here in Aspasia.”
“None,” LuLing agreed. “None at all. It is the most beautiful place.”
“And when you’re not cleaning?”
“I prepare my own meals, which I greatly enjoy. Greatly. I am given every convenience, and I know a thousand and one recipes.” She suddenly brightened and clapped her hands as though delighted by the prospect of cooking for her visitor. “May I make for you a wonderful dinner, Phoebe?”
“Maybe later.”
“Oh, good. Good, good. You will like my cooking.”
“You clean and cook. What else—when there’s no visitor?”
“I exercise. I love to exercise. There is a fully equipped gym downstairs. I have a precise exercise routine. A different one for each day of the week. I must maintain my good health and appearance. I have a precise exercise routine and a precise diet, and I follow them precisely. I do not stray. I am very good about this.”
Jane closed her eyes and took slow, deep breaths. She had interrogated serial killers regarding their cruelest desires and their methods of murder, but this conversation was taking a toll from her that she’d never paid before.
She could not stop picturing the regimented mice in the video. She could not ban from her mind the image of Nick bathed in blood drawn by his own Ka-Bar knife. The fates of Nick and the mice and this girl were determined by the sinister application of a powerful technology about which she could theorize in only the vaguest terms; and though the people behind this scheme, this conspiracy, this new cartography of Hell, had purposes she understood too well, they also had intentions—why the suicides?—that she could not understand at all.
“Would you enjoy a cocktail now?” LuLing asked.
Jane opened her eyes, shook her head. “What about the other girls here. Do you know them?”
“Oh, yes, they are my friends. They are wonderful friends. We exercise together. Sometimes we entertain a visitor together.”
“What are their names?”
“The girls?”
“Yes. What are their names?”
“What would you like their names to be?” asked LuLing.
“You don’t know their names,” Jane said. “You don’t know who they are or where they came from, do you?”
“Of course I know them. They are my friends. Good friends. They are wonderful friends. We exercise together.”
“Do you laugh together, LuLing?”
Lines formed in that previously smooth and flawless face, but they were like ripples on a pond made by a tossed stone, formed and fading even as they formed, gone by the time that she had spoken. “I do not know what you mean, Phoebe.”
“Do you cry together?”
A knowing look came over the girl. Red silk whispered against the upholstery of the sofa as she slid closer to Jane. She put one hand on her visitor’s thigh. “Would you be pleased to make me weep, Phoebe? There is beauty in pain, even greater beauty in humiliation. There is nothing but beauty in Aspasia, nothing ugly, and I am yours completely. You own me.”
Here was abomination in this dark palace of beauty, and Jane rose from the sofa with a shudder of abhorrence, nauseated. “I don’t own you. No one owns you.”
10
* * *
THE ENUNCIATOR RECEIVES from the girl a problematic statement by the visiting member and conveys it to Borisovich and Volodin: I don’t own you. No one owns you.
The men put aside their cards. They consider the Wilson Combat .45s lying on the table, but they do not pick them up.
“It is only a member,” Volodin says.
“No breach of the premises has occurred,” says Borisovich, for there has been no alarm.
Violence is never used against a member.
Rarely, a member becomes so enamored of a particular girl that the desire is to have her exclusively at his or her side, beyond the walls of Aspasia. This cannot be permitted. The member must be dissuaded from doing anything rash. Two other members, whoever is available, must come to confer with him or her and effect a change of mind.
As yet this member does not seem to have said or done enough to reach the threshold at which an intervention is required. The enunciator will make that decision according to its program.
11
* * *
AS JANE THRUST UP from the sofa, LuLing rose as well and put a hand on her shoulder as if to comfort. “Phoebe, nothing that happens here is wrong. You have your desires, and I have mine—that is all.”
The girl’s eyes were disturbing, though not because she met Jane’s gaze so boldly, nor because her stare was fixed and shallow like that of a glass-eyed doll, which it was not. LuLing’s eyes were lustrous pools of darkness, her stare as bottomless as that of every mystery that is a human being. But there was a difference to that depth, for it seemed not to teem with life as did other eyes, not to harbor countless hopes and ambitions and fears all schooling like fish. Instead, for all their depth, they were vacant eyes, offering a view into an oceanic abyss where the pressure was oppressive and life was sparse and the silence of drowned things seldom disturbed.
Jane said, “Do you have desires, LuLing? Do you?”
A childlike shyness overcame the girl again. Her soft voice became still softer. “Yes, I have desires. Mine are yours. To be useful and be used—that is what fulfills me.”
Stepping out from under the hand on her shoulder, Jane picked up the pistol that lay on the sofa.
As before, the girl showed no concern about the weapon. Perhaps she would even take a bullet with a smile. Nothing that happened in Aspasia could be ugly, after all, and every wrong that a member committed was instead a right.
“I need to go now,” Jane said, and she moved toward the door.
“Have I disappointed?”
Jane stopped, turned, regarded LuLing with a sadness unlike any she had known until now, sadness woven through with frustration and anger and dread and disbelief and belief. This was not merely a girl who had been brainwashed by a cult that deprived her of her freedom; this was more than mere washing; this was scrubbing away th
e mind until only broken threads remained, and then knitting those threads into someone new. Jane didn’t know to whom—to what—she spoke, whether in part to some filament of the girl who had once been fully alive or only to the body of that girl now operated by some alien software.
“No, LuLing. You haven’t disappointed. You couldn’t possibly disappoint a member of the club.”
The flawless and radiant face brightened with a smile. “Oh, good. Good, good. I hope you will come back. I could cook a perfect dinner for you. I know a thousand and one recipes. I would like nothing more than to make you happy.”
If far down inside this girl there had seemed to be some small imprisoned consciousness issuing a scream that couldn’t be heard here far above the bottom of the abyss, Jane would have taken her out of Aspasia. But to whom, what, where? To have her identified by fingerprints or otherwise, to return her to some family that she no longer knew and who would not know this new girl woven from the fragile threads remaining of who she had been? No counseling would restore her. If a surgeon trephined her skull and found a nanotech web woven across her brain, he would not know how to remove it, and she most likely would not live through its removal.
“I would like nothing more than to make you happy,” LuLing repeated. She sat on the sofa once more. Smiling, she used one hand to smooth the fabric where her visitor had been sitting. She smoothed and smoothed the fabric.
Jane wondered…When the girl was not cleaning her suite, which wouldn’t take much time, and when she was not making her meals, and when she was not exercising, and when she was not being owned by some visitor, how often did she sit staring into space, alone and silent and still, as if she were a doll abandoned by a child who had moved on from childish things and no longer loved her?
The doorknob felt like ice in Jane’s hand. Responding to her touch, the door eased open of its own accord, and she stepped into the hallway, and the door closed behind her.
The hall seemed colder than it had been earlier, and she was shaking, and her legs felt unsteady. She leaned against the wall and took slow, deep breaths. The pistol was terribly heavy in her hand.
12
* * *
THE ENUNCIATOR REPORTS no new transgression on the part of the member with Girl Number Six.
Borisovich and Volodin wait for developments, for the moment having lost interest in card games.
When there are no immediate developments, Volodin says, “It has gotten dark. We can go ahead with the disposal now.”
“We might as well,” Borisovich agrees. He rises from the table and picks up his pistol and holsters it in his shoulder rig.
Volodin does the same.
Neither man is wearing a jacket, their weapons revealed. They do not expect to encounter a member where they are going.
They leave Borisovich’s suite together.
13
* * *
JANE CONSIDERED CHOOSING another portrait, opening another door, talking to another girl. But she would learn nothing more than the bleak truth that she already knew. The conversation would be as disturbing and depressing as that between her and LuLing.
Sex was a truth of Aspasia, but it was not the truth. The larger truth was raw power, domination, humiliation, and cruelty. These sexual encounters involved no love, no slightest affection, and certainly no procreation. The girls were uncommonly beautiful, as was the house, so that these visitors who had descended into depravity could pretend to themselves and to one another that there was beauty as well in their pitiless barbarity, that their absolute power made them beautiful, too, rather than base and demonic.
Only once before in her life had Jane been this afraid and felt this powerless—and that had been a long time ago.
If talking to other girls reduced to LuLing’s condition would lead her nowhere, something useful might be learned on the ground floor. The back stairs were nearby. They were enclosed on both sides, unlike the grand main stairs, the ultimate vertical shooting gallery, but she went to them and descended as fast as she dared.
Stairs were one of the challenges she had been taught to meet at the Academy, in Hogan’s Alley, a little town of brick and wood buildings, with its courthouse and bank and drugstore and movie theater and Pastime Bar and motel and used-car lot and more, the most well-conceived and authentically constructed reality-training center in the world. No one really lived in Hogan’s Alley. All its criminals were actors provided by an agency.
As she descended the back stairs, Jane felt almost as if her training in the faux town of Hogan’s Alley had been expressly to prepare her for Aspasia, which was in its way also a stage setting, where the girls and the security men resided but where no one really lived.
During her sixteen weeks at Quantico, she’d now and then passed through Hogan’s Alley when no scenario was being played out, when no one else walked the streets. Although she was not given to easy superstition, the place had sometimes seemed to be haunted and had sometimes given her the feeling that she was at the end of the world when all human habitations were abandoned and hers was the last heart beating on the planet.
By the time she reached the bottom of the back stairs, she had been overtaken by that end-of-the-world feeling once more, and this time for a better reason. In Aspasia, the darkest desire of humankind—to hold absolute power, to control, to command obedience, to eliminate all voices of disagreement and dissent—had found its full expression. The technology that made LuLing happy to be used, happy to sit and wait to be hurt and humiliated, was the technology of hive masters who would order the world into their idea of utopia, and in so ordering would destroy it.
The west wing on the ground floor remained deserted, the long hallway dwindling toward the front stairs and the foyer, telescoping out before her, as if it would grow longer with every step she took.
She opened one of a pair of doors on the left, found the light switch, and saw a gym with weight-training machines, treadmills, Exercycles….
She thought that the first door on the right might lead to the kitchen, but instead she found a strange windowless room where the overhead fluorescent lights had been left on. White ceramic-tile floor. White walls. In the center of the space stood a table with a pedestal base tiled to match the floor and a stainless-steel top. It seemed like a chamber in a starship in some science-fiction film.
Lying on the table was a naked girl.
14
* * *
FROM A DISTANCE, the girl on the table appeared to be sleeping, but that illusion passed when Jane stepped farther into the room. The corpse’s hyacinth-blue eyes were open wide as though she had been shocked by the last thing that she’d seen. Ligature marks around her graceful throat were proof of a violent strangulation, though the necktie or scarf or length of rope with which the deed had been done was nowhere in evidence. Blood on her chin had issued from her tongue, which she had bitten in her death throes and which remained trapped between her teeth.
In life, this blonde had been as beautiful as LuLing, her face perfection, her body sculpted by Eros himself. As with LuLing, as far as looks went, Jane would not have been in the same league with this girl.
And yet she thought, This could be me, this is me. This is me tomorrow or next week or a month from now, because there’s no way to beat people with this power.
Another room connected to this one. The door between the two stood half open.
If she had been a person who ran from trouble instead of into it, she might have fled. But to flee would be to dishonor herself and to further fail her mother, whom she had failed nineteen years earlier. This was a world that didn’t reward flight. Whenever you fled from anything, you inevitably fled into its equivalent.
She went to the half-open door. Pushed it wider. Crossed the threshold.
Before her stood a super-efficient gas furnace that had no role in heating the grand house. The manufacturer had labeled it POWER-PAK III CREMATION SYSTEM. It was usually found only in mortuaries.
In memory she
heard LuLing’s voice: Would you be pleased to make me weep, Phoebe? There is beauty in pain.
Jane had known this must happen sometimes in a place that catered to the exercise of absolute power and to all the depravities attending it. She had known, but she had repressed the knowledge. When you were David against Goliath, you didn’t want to dwell too much on your adversary’s size or his capacity for violence, or his taste for cruelty.
Murder in the act of sex couldn’t happen too often, because they would have to be continuously scouting for girls, snatching them or otherwise procuring them, programming them. But if it didn’t happen often, they had anticipated that it would happen from time to time, and they had prepared to deal with the occasional inconvenient corpse, apparently with no quiver of conscience greater than what had troubled the Nazis or Stalin when murdering millions.
She felt small standing in front of the cremation system. She felt as small as a child.
Inside the Power-Pak III, the gas was escaping under pressure; and the flames roared with the burning of it. The cremation system was being preheated for the job ahead.
With that realization, Jane retreated to the first room and started for the door. Two men entered from the hallway.
15
* * *
BIG MEN, BRUTISH in appearance, they wore shoulder rigs adapted to accept—and quickly release—pistols fitted with silencers.
Jane was carrying her Heckler & Koch. She didn’t need to draw it. Without making a conscious effort to bring it up from her side, she found that she had it in a two-hand grip, arms extended.