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 the 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.”