D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

He refused to be put down. ‘I think you’re right. I think you’ll rave them best the way you are.’

I touched my shirt buttons, making sure they were done up right to the neck. The time for making myself known to my company chairman was long past. And if his friends were to be raved, they’d have to make it without the help of my nipples. He turned to Katherine. ‘If you’re rested now, we’ll go on down.’

We went.

He’d said we might find things a bit decayed. Presumably he’d meant people. The ground-floor living area — I never quite know what to call these multileveled expanses of knee-deep carpeting and kinetic art the rich go in for — was littered with sprawling, pot-happy freaks. Or rather, since I recognized several of the faces, littered with normal, establishment people who were working quite hard at being sprawling, pot-happy freaks. It was all depressingly what I had expected.

Apart from us, the only animated guest at the party was a young man, dressed totally in black, who sat drooped over the synthetizer console producing surprisingly ordered free association stuff. He ignored us.

‘Don’t mind him,’ Rondavel said. ‘He’s on his own out. All that’s left is a little psycho-motor in the fingers.’

He led the way between amoebic mounds of translucent upholstery, stepping over spilled legs and arms and exotic drapery. I nudged Katherine. ‘Weekend fringies,’ I murmured. ‘Most of the vices and none of the virtues.’

She nodded, and drew her skirts closely about her ankles.

‘You must excuse us,’ Rondavel said, at least having the sense to hand us food rather than drinks from the main service unit. ‘We do tend to go rather overboard at these little gatherings. Myself, I neutralized, then split for a touch of the realities. You know?… No objection to hoof beef, I take it?’

I accepted the condescension. As a fringie I wouldn’t have touched nonanalogue meat in years. Katherine had already bolted hers, and was being offered more. The room was ridiculous, like some bad director’s idea of after-the-orgy. No doubt that was where they’d got it from.

‘We’re very innocent,’ Rondavel said, astutely reading my thoughts. ‘We try for the best of both worlds. I suppose you despise us.’

Tolerance was the prime fringie thing. I smiled. ‘You do what you do. It’s not what I do. It’s a fragmentation. But who’s counting?’

‘You are, John. I know you are.’ He was working himself up. ‘You disapprove. I can see you do. You come in here radiating disapproval. You have this terrible reverse snobbery about the rich. You sit up on your high moral mountain, and—

‘We’d better go.’ But I had little hope. Maybe this was why he’d brought us here, to talk about his guilts.

We glared at each other, neither moving. Katherine yawned, saved us. ‘It’s all so boring…’ She took another slice of beef. ‘We use each other. People always do. Let’s agree on that and then get on with… whatever’s got to be got on with.’

It wasn’t mainstream fringie, but it shut him up. He relaxed, went around prodding people gently with his Turkish-slippered foot. They roused, scratched themselves, farted, giggled. Rich or poor, the human body never let up on you.

‘Visitors, my children. Bestir yourselves. Waifs of the storm. Interrupted on the long journey from nowhere to nowhere. Before your very eyes. Kindly here to give us of their wisdom.’

If he was mocking himself, he was mocking us also. We stood, and munched our hoof beef, and waited.

‘Don’t take any notice of Corry. The clothes go to his head. I’m Margaret.’

We introduced ourselves, nonintroduced ourselves. Behind her klutzy sunglasses this particular Margaret was a singularly beautiful young woman. ‘I’m so glad you could come.’ Me, I looked around for the cucumber sandwiches. ‘Corry doesn’t mean to insult you — he’s just embarrassed. I expect you are too.’

‘Not us,’ said, Katherine. ‘We have this built-in superiority thing. It’s so restful. In a world where everybody believed themselves superior there’d be no more wars.’

She was really doing extraordinarily well. Of course, I should have known she would. Margaret laughed. ‘Does that work between men and women too?’

‘More than ever. I know I’m superior to John here, and he -poor fool — believes he’s superior to me. That’s why we get on so well.’

Another woman, intense, aware of her overlarge teeth, joined us. ‘But who,’ she said, stretching her upper lip, ‘who gets on who? That’s what I want to know.’

And there we were, in thirty seconds flat, talking about sex. If it wasn’t drugs with us fringies, it was sex. No wonder we were envied.

‘Please, no mechanics,’ said Margaret quickly. ‘It’s far too early in the day for that.’

The woman took her teeth away, disappointed.

Katherine knew she was going out of her mind. She heard herself saying things she detested, impossible things. And laughing. Laughing… In this room she was as much on show as if she had been in front of Vincent Ferriman’s cameras. And she was, or a part of her was, a part of her certainly was enjoying it. Because it was a performance, perhaps. A lie. She who had planned to escape into truth, was enjoying the lie.

She felt as if time were reeling past her: hours, days, weeks, speeded up into computer chatter. She struggled to catch at it, understanding for the first time truly what was the matter with her. There was logic and anti-logic, sequence and anti-sequence, phase and anti-phase. The curve was exponential. They were burning her up. She knew she was going out of her mind. And enjoying it.

People peered into her face, terrible gaudy people. Sometimes she heard them. ‘Society is corrupt. Is that why you don’t mind living off it?’

‘Corruption isn’t a bad thing. Look in your dictionary. Out of corruption grow the most beautiful lilies.’

‘That sounds like the Bible — Consider the lilies of the field.’

‘I don’t know. I’ve only just thought of it. Perhaps they weren’t the same lilies.’

Laughing. Laughing. Her answers were as silly as the questions. Sometimes she simply walked among the terrified, terrifying people, and murmured ‘Care.’

She was given things to eat, and ate them. She was given things to drink, and drank them.

The places where she stood were sometimes very bright and sometimes very dark. There was music, and the people danced shapelessly. Compositions of tiny mirrors flashed, pricking her skin. They were burning her up. She stopped hearing the questions, stopped hearing everything but the music and the mirrors. The people retreated: she caught hold of them and still they retreated. They laughed as she ran among them, catching at their silks and burlap. They retreated, cloth coming away in her hands. They danced and laughed, not she but they, naked, and a path led away between them, up steps, through music, across aeons of crimson to Rod, tiny in the distance, growing as she ran.

She reached him, held him close, felt him drift out of her arms like smoke. But the path had closed behind her and he was there, still there. Still. There. Rod. A rod of iron. A rod for her own back. A rod… She clutched at his arms, his waist his smoky thighs. Around her people cheered silently, huge mouths over juddering pink and orange and blue. This, she knew, was no longer a lie. He was angry, arguing, shaking his head, shaking his head, shaking her head.

Cold now, her face against his smoky thighs, and sweating, she waited. She could feel his vehemence, his refusal. She waited. And the mouths gaped.

They took her away from him. There was a machine on huge silent wheels, smooth and beautiful. They placed it beside her, around her. She marveled, no longer afraid, at the terrible playthings of the rich. There was sex in the air, in the smooth and beautiful maneuvering of the machine. It took her up with a sigh. Rod was held far away, watching, gaping. The noises burst in on her, wordless, only to fade to a sudden quiet, with just the thin thread of music and the breath of the machine in her face. She didn’t struggle. The movement in her body wasn’t painful, only dry and wearisome. She looked out, past the machine, at Rod where he stood in the shifting flakes of light. His mouth was closed, and there were tears on his cheeks.