If she directed Alfred to give her more light, it would be provided. She did not ask for it.
Always, she was most comfortable in gloom. Even on a fresh spring day, with birdsong and the smell of clover on the breeze, even with sunshine like a rain of gold coins and the natural world as welcoming as Paradise, she preferred shadows.
She rose from the edge of the bed, trim as a teenager lithe, shapely, a vision. When it met her body, the pale silver light became golden, and her smooth skin seemed faintly luminous, as though she was aglow with an inner fire.
When she occupied the bedroom, the surveillance camera in that space was deactivated to ensure her privacy. She had locked it off earlier, on retiring. Yet she felt… watched.
She looked toward the corner where the observant lens was discreetly incorporated into the dental molding near the ceiling. She could barely see the dark glass eye.
In an only half-conscious expression of modesty, she covered her breasts with her hands.
She was so beautiful.
She was so beautiful.
She was so beautiful in the dim light, standing by the side of the Chinese sleigh bed, where the rumpled sheets were still warm with her body heat if one were capable of feeling it, and where the scent of her lingered on the Egyptian cotton if one were capable of smelling it.
She was so beautiful.
'Alfred, explain the status of the bedroom camera.'
'Camera deactivated,' the house replied at once.
Still, she frowned up at the lens.
So beautiful.
So real.
So Susan.
Her feeling of being watched now passed.
She lowered her hands from her breasts.
She moved to the nearest window and said, 'Alfred, raise the bedroom security shutters.'
The motorized, steel-slat, Rolladen-style shutters were mounted on the inside of the tall windows. They purred upward, traveling on recessed tracks in the side jambs, and disappeared into slots in the window headers.
In addition to providing security, the shutters had prevented outside light from entering the bedroom.
Now the pale moonglow, passing through palm fronds, dappled Susan's body.
From this second-floor window, she had a view of the swimming pool. The water was as dark as oil, and the shattered reflection of the moon was scattered across the rippled surface.
The terrace was paved in brick, surrounded by a balustrade. Beyond lay black lawns. Half-glimpsed palms and Indian laurels stood dead-still in the windless night.
Through the window, the grounds looked as peaceful and deserted as they had seemed when she had surveyed them through the security cameras.
The alarm had been false. Or perhaps it had been only a sound in an unrecollected dream.
She started back to the bed, but then turned toward the door and left the room.
Many nights she woke from half-remembered dreams, her stomach muscles fluttering and her skin clammy with cold sweat but with her heart beating so slowly that she might have been in deep meditation. As restless as a caged cat, she sometimes prowled until dawn.
Now, barefoot and unclothed, she explored the house. She was moonlight in motion, slim and supple, the goddess Diana, huntress and protector. She was the essential geometry of grace.
Susan.
As she had recorded in her diary, to which she made additions every evening, she felt liberated since her divorce from Alex Harris. For the first time in thirty-four years of existence, she believed that she had taken control of her life.
She needed no one now. She believed in herself at last.
After so many years of timidity, self-doubt, and an unquenchable thirst for approval, she had broken the heavy encumbering chains of the past. She had confronted terrible memories, which previously had been half repressed, and by the act of confrontation, she had found redemption.
Deep within herself, she sensed a wonderful wildness that she wanted desperately to explore: the spirit of the child that she'd never had a chance to be, a spirit that she'd thought was irreparably crushed almost three decades ago. Her nudity was innocent, the act of a child breaking rules for the sheer fun of it, an attempt to get in touch with that deep, primitive, once-shattered spirit and meld with it in order to be whole.
As she moved through the great house, rooms were illuminated at her request, always with indirect lighting, becoming just bright enough to allow her to negotiate those chambers.
In the kitchen, she took an ice-cream sandwich from the freezer and ate it while standing at the sink, so any crumbs or drips could be washed away, leaving no incriminating evidence. As if adults were asleep upstairs and she had stolen down here to have the ice cream against their wishes.
How sweet she was. How girlish.
And far more vulnerable than she believed.
Wandering through the cavernous house, she passed mirrors. Sometimes she turned shyly from them, disconcerted by her nudity.
Then, in the softly lighted foyer, apparently oblivious of the cold marble inlaid in a carreaux d'octagones beneath her bare feet, she stopped before a full-length looking-glass. It was framed by elaborately carved and guilded acanthus leaves, and her image looked less like a reflection than like a sublime portrait by one of the old masters.
Regarding herself, she was amazed that she had survived so much without any visible scars. For so long, she had believed that anyone who looked at her could see the damage, the corruption, a mottling of shame on her face, the ashes of guilt in her blue-gray eyes. But she looked untouched.
In the past year she had learned that she was innocent
— victim, not perpetrator. She need not hate herself anymore.
Filled with a quiet joy, she turned from the mirror, climbed the stairs, and returned to her bedroom.
The steel security shutters were down, the windows sealed off. She had left the shutters open.
'Alfred, explain the status of the bedroom security shutters.'
'Shutters closed, Susan.'
'Yes, but how did they get that way?'
The house did not reply. It did not recognize the question.
'I left them open,' she said.
Poor Alfred, mere dumb technology, was possessed of genuine consciousness to no greater extent than a toaster, and because these phrases were not in his voice-recognition program, he understood her words no more than he would have understood them if she had spoken in Chinese.
'Alfred, raise the bedroom security shutters.'
At once, the shutters began to roll upward.
She waited until they were half raised, and then she said, 'Alfred, lower the bedroom security shutters.'
The steel slats stopped rolling upward then descended until they clicked into the locked-down position.
Susan stood for a long moment, staring thoughtfully at the secured windows.
Finally she returned to her bed. She slid beneath the covers and pulled them up to her chin.
'Alfred, lights off.' Darkness fell.
She lay on her back in the gloom, eyes open.
Silence pooled deep and black. Only her breathing and the beat of her heart stirred the stillness.
'Alfred,' she said, at last, 'conduct complete diagnostics of the house automation system.'
The computer, racked in the basement, examined itself and all the logic units of the various mechanical stems with which it was required to network just as it had been programmed to do, seeking any indication of malfunction.
After approximately two minutes, Alfred replied: 'All is well, Susan.'
