6

THE AUDIENNCE STIRRED, A SINGLE ORGANISM IN THE anonymous darkness of the storyship's empatheater.

Kelexel, seated near the center of the giant room, felt that oddly menacing dark movement. They were all around him, the story cadre and off-duty crewmen interested in Fraffin's new production. They had seen two reels run and rerun a dozen times while the elements were refined. They waited now for another rerun of the opening scene, and still Kelexel sensed that threatening aura in this place. It was personal and direct, something to do with the story, but he couldn't define it.

He could smell now the faint bite of ozone from the sensimesh web, that offshoot from Tiggywaugh's discovery, whose invisible field linked the audience to the story projection. His chair felt strange. It was professional equipment with solid arms and keyed flanges for the editing record. Only the vast domed ceiling with its threads of pantovive force focusing down, down onto the stage far below him (and the stage itself) -- these were familiar, like any normal empatheater.

But the sounds, the clicks of editing keys, professional comments -- "Shorten that establishment and get to the closeup ... " "Hit the olfactory harder as soon as you have light ... " "Soften that first breeze effect ... " "Amplify the victim's opening emotion and cut back immediately ... "

All this continued to be discord.

Kelexel had spent two working days in here, privileged to watch the cadre at its chores. Still, the sounds and voices of the audience remained discord. His previous experience of empatheaters had always involved completed stories and rapt watchers.

Far off to his left in the darkness, a voice said: "Roll it."

The pantovive force lines disappeared. Utter blackness filled the room.

Someone cleared his throat. Clearing throats became a message of nervousness that wove out through the dark.

Light came into being at the center of the stage. Kelexel squirmed into a more comfortable position. Always, that same old beginning, he thought. The light was a forlorn, formless thing that resolved slowly into a streetlamp. It illuminated a slope of lawn, a curved length of driveway and in the background the ghost-gray wall of a native house. The dark windows of primitive glass glistened like strange eyes.

There was a panting noise somewhere in the scene and something thudding with a frenzied rhythm.

An insect chirred.

Kelexel felt the realism of the sounds as pantovive circuits reproduced them with all the values of the original. To sit enmeshed in the web, linked to the empathic projectors, was as real as viewing the original raw scene from a vantage point above and to one side. It was, in its own way, like the Chem oneness. The smell of dust from wind-stirred dry grass permeated Kelexel's awareness. A cool finger of breeze touched his face.

Terror crept through Kelexel then. It reached out from the shadowy scene and through the web's projectors with a billowing insistence. Kelexel had to remind himself that this was story artistry, that it wasn't real ... for him. He was experiencing another creature's fear caught and preserved on sensitive recorders.

A running figure, a native woman clad in a loose green gown that billowed around her thighs, fled into the focus on the stage. She gasped and panted as she ran. Her bare feet thudded on the lawn and then on the paving of the driveway. Pursuing her came a squat, moon-faced man carrying a sword whose blade like a silvery snaketrack glittered in the light of the street-lamp.

Terror radiated from the woman. She gasped: "No! Please, dear God, no!"

Kelexel held his breath. No matter the number of times he had seen this, the act of violence felt new each time. He was beginning to see what Fraffin might have in this story. The sword was lifted high overhead ...

"Cut!"

The web went blank, no emotion, nothing. It was like being dropped off a cliff. The stage darkened.

Kelexel realized then the voice had been Fraffin's. It had come from far down to the right. A momentary rage at Fraffin's action surged through Kelexel. It required a moment for the Investigator to reorient himself and still he felt frustrated.

Lights came on revealing the rising wedge of seats converging on the disc of stage. Kelexel blinked, stared around him at the story cadre. He could still feel the menace from them and from that empty stage. What was the threat here? he wondered. He trusted his instincts in this: there was danger in this room. But what was it?

The cadre sat around him row on row -- trainees and off-duty crewmen at the rear, probationers and specialist observers in the center, the editing crew down near the stage. Taken individually, they appeared such ordinary Chem, but Kelexel remembered what he had felt in the dark -- the oneness, an organism bent on harming him, confident of its ability to harm him. He could sense it in the Chem empathy, the all-one-life they shared.

There was an old stillness to the room now. They were waiting for something. Far down near the stage heads bent together in inaudible conversation.

Am I imagining things? Kelexel wondered. But surely they must suspect me. Why then do they permit me to sit in here and watch them work?

The work -- that violent death.

Again, Kelexel felt frustration at the way Fraffin had cut off that scene. To have the vision denied him even when he knew how it went ... Kelexel shook his head. He felt confused, excited. Once more he swept his gaze over the cadre. They were a gaming board of colors in the giant room, the hue of each uniform coded to its wearer's duties-red patches of flitter pilots, the motley orange and black of shooting crewmen, green of story continuity, yellow of servicing and repair, purple of acting and white of wardrobe, and here and there the black punctuation marks of Manipulators, subdirectors. Fraffin's inner circle.

The group near the stage broke apart. Fraffin emerged, climbed up onto the stage and to the very center, the bare circle of image focus. It was a deliberate move which identified him with the action which had occupied that space only moments before.

Kelexel bent forward to study the Director. Fraffin was a gaunt little figure down there in his black cloak, a patch of ebony hair above silver skin, the gashed straightedge mouth with its deep upper lip. He was suddenly something from the shadowy marches of a far and perilous realm that no other Chem had ever glimpsed. There was an arresting individuality to him.

The sunken eyes looked up and searched out Kelexel.

A chill went through the Investigator then. He sat back, his thoughts boiling with alarm. It was as though Fraffin had spoken to him, saying: "There's the foolish Investigator! There he is, ensnared in my net, trapped! Safely caught! Oh, certainly caught!"

Silence gripped the empatheater now like a held breath. The intent faces of the cadre focused on the image stage.

"I will tell you once more," Fraffin said, and his voice caressed the air. "Our aim is subtlety."

Again, Fraffin looked up at Kelexel.

Now, he has felt terror, Fraffin thought. Fear heightens the sex drive. And he has seen the victim's daughter, a female of the kind to snare any Chem-exotic, not too gross, graceful, eyes like strange green jewels. Ah, how the Chem love green. She is sufficiently similar to other non-Chem pleasure creatures that he will sense new physical excitements in her. Ah, hah, Kelexel! You will ask to examine a native soon -- and we'll permit it.

"You are not keeping the viewer sufficiently in mind," Fraffin said. His voice had turned suddenly cold.

A shiver of agitation swept up through the empatheater.

"We must not make our viewer feel too deep a terror," Fraffin said. "Only let him know terror is present. Don't force the experience. Let him enjoy it -- amusing violence, humorous death. The viewer must not think he is the one being manipulated. There is more here than a pattern of intrigue for our own enjoyment."

Kelexel sensed unspoken messages in Fraffin's words. A definite threat, yes. He felt the play of emotions around him and wondered at them.

I must get one of these natives to examine intimately and at my leisure, Kelexel thought Perhaps there's, a clue that only a native can reveal.

As though this thought were a key to the locked door of temptation, Kelexel found his mind suddenly filled with thoughts about a female from Fraffin's story. The name, such an exotic sound -- Ruth. Red-haired Ruth. There was something of the Subicreatures about her and the Subi were famous for the erotic pleasures they gave the Chem. Kelexel remembered a Subi he had owned once. She had seemed to fade so rapidly, though. Mortals had a way of doing that when paced by the endless life of a Chem.

Perhaps I could examine this Ruth, Kelexel thought It'd be a simple matter for Fraffin's men to bring her to me here.

"Subtlety," Fraffin said. "The audience must be maintained in a detached awareness. Think of our story as a form of dance, not real in the way our lives are real, but an interesting reflection, a Chem fairy story. By now, you all must know the purpose of our story. See that you hew to that purpose with proper subtlety."

Fraffin drew his black cloak around him with a feeling of amusement at the showmanship of the gesture. He turned his back on the audience, stalked off the stage.

It was a good crew, Fraffin reminded himself. They would play their parts with trained exactitude. This amusing little story would accumulate on the reels. It might even be salable as an interlude piece, a demonstration of artistic deftness. But no matter; it would serve its purpose if it did no more than lead Kelexel around -- a fear here, a desire there -- his every move recorded by the shooting crews. Every move.

He's as easy to manipulate as the natives, Fraffin thought.

He let himself out through the service tube at the rear of the stage, emerged into the blue walls of the drop hall that curved down past the storage bays to his quarters. Fraffin allowed the drop field to catch him and propel him past the seamless projections of hatchways in a gentle blur.

It's almost possible to feel sorry for Kelexel, he thought.

The man had been so obviously repelled at first confrontation with the idea of single violence, but oh, how he'd lost himself in the native conflict when shown it.

We identify with individual acts of violence so easily, Fraffin thought. One might almost suspect there were real experiences of this kind in our own pasts.

He felt the reflexive tightening of the armor that was his skin, a sudden turmoil of unfixed memories. Fraffin swallowed, halted the drop at the hatchway outside his salon.

The endlessness of his own personal story appalled him suddenly. He felt that he stood on the brink of terrifying discoveries. He sensed monsters of awareness lurking in the shadows of eternity directly before him. Things loomed there which he dared not identify.

A pleading rage suffused Fraffin then. He wanted to slam a fist into eternity, to still the hidden voices gibbering at him. He felt himself go still with fear and he thought: To be immortal is to require frequent administrations of moral anesthesia.

It was such an odd thought that it dispelled his fear. He let himself into the silvery warmth of his salon wondering whence that thought had come.