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Authors: Patricia Anthony

Conscience of the Beagle

BOOK: Conscience of the Beagle
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I HATE
it
when he smiles, as if we share a secret. As if, when he puts his hands on me, we’ll both think it’s fun.

His body’s squat, genetically designed for the tidal forces near the singularity’s rim. I could never take him on. There’s enough muscle in those shoulders to subdue me if I struggle. Enough power to bludgeon me to death.

“We’re pleased to have you aboard, Major Holloway. Our ETA for Tennyson is eleven days, seven hours, RES time. My name is Lawson, and I’ll be your steward.”

I hate that he knows my name. I resent him giving me his. Lawson My Steward has a voice that could be used as a lubricant. Or an emetic.

Planning escape routes is habit. I look for possibilities now. To my right rows of bubbles sit open, the nude men waiting in them like passengers on the half shell. Down the long row to my left the bubbles are closed and pearly with emollient.

“We’re ready for the mask,” Lawson says. “Hold your breath for a count of twenty. If the airway fails to open, let me know.”

In one swift move, he smothers me.

“Just relax.”

Blind, cold panic. I try to tear off the mask. Lawson looks astonished. He seizes my wrists. Must have never imagined that I’d fight him.

“It’s all right. I’m here. I’m right here.” His tone is soothing. His grip hurts. “Come on. You’ve been through this before.”

They must have given him my dossier. The government is clever like that. A policeman, Lawson’s thinking. Why isn’t he more professional? Eight trips. Why isn’t he used to this?

Never been so afraid. But I can’t help it. This time something’s wrong.

I forgot to count. That’s what it is. How many seconds has it been? More than twenty. Has to be more than twenty.

Twin pops in my frontal sinuses. A welcome rush of air. Ashamed now, I go limp. Lawson’s fingers have left red cuffs on my wrists. Tomorrow they’ll be bruises.

“We’re ready for the tube, Major Holloway.”

He’s no longer smiling. The urinary tube’s in his hand.

I turn my head away to let him know that I won’t resist. Lawson rolls the condom over my penis. The Smart Plastic is hot, its grip tight. I dig my fingernails into my palm. Count backwards from one hundred. Think of the victims on Tennyson. Nothing helps.

Lawson says quietly, “It’s all right, Major. I see it all the time. Erections happen sometimes with tubal coupling. The sedation will take effect in a minute or two and it’ll all be over.”

I look around to see if anyone’s watching. The other passengers stare straight ahead, blank-faced, made self-absorbed by fear.

Lawson’s so quick that I don’t see him do it. The whoosh of the closing bubble catches me utterly by surprise. The world fogs. Trapped. Something thick, warm, and wet spills over my ankles. The emollient.

Damn it! Wait!

Lawson didn’t warn me it was coming. Didn’t want a scene. I thrash. My back spasms from hip to shoulder blade so painfully it feels like I’ve been shot.

I batter my fists against the walls of the bubble. Loud, so the other stewards can hear. They’ll get me out. They’ll realize I’m still awake. They’ll get me out.

No, I’ll drown

Pale bloated corpse. Bruises on knuckles like defensive wounds.

No! Please!

The screaming in my brain lowers to a whisper.

Please.

My eyelids twitch.

In the closet-sized kitchen of our apartment, Lila turns. Her smile is dying. Dying.

“Tell me about the murders, Dyle.”

I don’t know if she means the victims on Tennyson or if she’s talking about another case. The acts of violence, a lifetime career of them, run together like thick red ink on a bone-white page.

I try to touch her, but my arm is tired from eighteen months of reaching.

“The murders are horrible,” I tell her, and then I wonder if I’ve misspoken and my clumsy mind, my clumsy mouth have said, “Your murder was horrible.” I must not have, though, because her smile doesn’t change.

Something thick, warm, and wet licks at my chin. When it reaches my lips I’m afraid it will taste of salt and tarnished metal. And suddenly there I am, standing in the narrow corridors of M-4 SubLevel T Chicago, not far from home. Everything here is silent.

The floor is striped with the dot-dash-dot reflection from ceiling light tiles. At the end of the hall, where the tiles have failed, something patient waits in a pool of shadow.

Darkness pulls me. I bolt, but it tugs at my back. If I turn I’ll see shadows at my heels. I run, trapped like a lab rat among the maze of tight corridors and the blink-blink-blink of the lights.

SOMEONE’S SCREAMING.
The
sound bounces from wall to wall. It echoes along the corridor. And suddenly I’m awake.

A hush lies over the Jump recovery station. Dreaming, then. I wonder if I cried aloud. Around me, men slumber on tables like corpses in a morgue.

I hate the intimacy of travel. The helplessness. I hate knowing I was asleep while the stewards were awake. That once through the event horizon they carefully laid my body out, like some murderers display their victims.

Next to me Szabo dozes, a blanket pulled up to his chin. I have to be careful. HF is shrewd. When an investigator reaches the end of his usefulness, they send a spy. Who better than a psychic?

It could be anyone of them. I don’t know the team well enough: not Szabo the affable, not Arne the high-strung, not Beagle of the eternal life.

As I wait for a steward, I rub precipitate from my fingers. It comes away in greasy white rolls. When I look at Szabo the second time, I find him staring.

A steward has haphazardly cleaned Szabo’s face. Precipitate sloughs from his balding head. His full beard is caked with white. In that snowy chaos, his eyes are the bright clear blue of mountain lakes.

Why is he looking at me?

He politely averts his eyes. Must have read my mind. “I hate these trips,” Szabo says. “You’d think you’d get used to them after a while.”

I greet the words with silence, the same deadly silence that for eighteen months has settled in my rooms. Sometimes I imagine I convey that silence like some people carry their kitchen’s cooking smells in their clothes.

“ . . . prepared,” Szabo murmurs.

I stiffen. “What?”

When he speaks his voice is casual, like he’s hiding something. “I hope everything’s prepared for us down there. I hate confusion.”

“Major Holloway? You awake?”

Lawson’s abrupt appearance makes me flinch. He leans over, smiling.

“Let me help you up, sir.”

His grip is gentle. Bruises on my wrists have faded to bronze. My skin is forgiving. I’m not. If I wasn’t so rocky from the eleven-day sleep, I’d cold-cock him.

We don’t speak. He takes me to a cubicle and leaves me there. When I’m sure he’s gone, I depress a white button labeled SHOWER. A blast of hot soapy water nearly knocks me down.

Outside my stall are coughs and mutterings, the noise of running water, and shuffling feet. They are tired sounds, disoriented sounds, as though the inhabitants of a graveyard have awakened for Judgment.

Then, above my head, a ceiling tile flickers and goes out. I shouldn’t look. It’s not safe. I know that. But it happens so fast that it catches me off-guard.

There, just there. A black square in the ceiling, a neat hole punched into the universe. The giddy weightlessness of panic sucks me to it. My feet loosen from the floor. I reach out. Try to grab the tiles.

Just then I hear Szabo’s gut-loud, merry laugh. Where did he learn to make a happy sound like that?

I close my eyes and hang on to that laugh. Hang on tight. It feels as though, having been flung into space, I’ve grasped a cable stretched between Earth and the stars.

LILA USED
to
love the zoo. But memory fades, that’s the good thing. Now I can look past Lila’s profile and remember the aviary. Tennyson’s groundport is as vivid, as deafeningly cheerful, as that.

Beagle sits on the bench beside me and leans over. His cheeks, his jowls sag on their frame. He has a cozy easy chair of a face. “They’re fifteen minutes late,” he says.

“I know.”

“Are you sure we’re not supposed to meet them at the hotel?”

A group of brightly-dressed colonials pass, three women and two men. All five stare at us. All five smile and nod. This time I don’t get up. For fifteen minutes now, I’ve risen expectantly as colonials met my eye. Our brown-uniformed gloom must catch their attention.

I don’t know which annoys me more: the scrutiny of the colonials or Beagle’s challenge. “They didn’t say which hotel we’d be staying at. The lodgings weren’t arranged before flight time.”

Beagle nods toward Arne. “His hands shake. Christ. Think about that a minute. A demolitions expert, and his hands shake.”

I watch Arne pace. He’s a small man, pale and fey, the sort of man best seen out of the corner of the eye.

“He’s not regular Home Force,” Beagle says. “They got him from the goddamned Bureau of Transportation and Commerce, and he acts like a head case. What did his files say?”

Odd question. Maybe a test. “You know those files are confidential.”

Beagle’s face might be soft, but his eyes are a hard gray. I wonder how much of Hoad Taylor lurks in them. “I’m M-8, Major.”

No way I can have forgotten. M-8. And famous. I’m only M-4. I may be team leader, but in every way he ranks me.

I’m too cautious, too smart, to respond. He sits back and watches Arne. Why didn’t HF choose Beagle? He must resent being subordinate. The strain of that resentment is bound to tear the team apart. Four-officer teams are unwieldy. Alliances form easiest in triads. If there’s an odd man out, I hope to God it won’t be me.

“You remember the routine Cully Blum used to do?” Beagle sounds amused. “The long involved one about the nervous rabbi at his first circumcision? The grandfather starts giving him instructions and, zip . . .”

I don’t know enough about him. His files were strangely incomplete. So. Before he was downloaded into the Beagle, Dr. Taylor had liked Cully Blum. Did he have many friends? Was he married? Is his wife still alive? If she is, I wonder what she thinks of her living statue.

Beagle says, “Arne’s the rabbi. The rest of us are dicks.” He glances over my shoulder and clambers to his feet. “Company.”

I rise and turn. Bustling toward us is a fat man. Grandly, flagrantly fat. The crowd parts. Like a ball, he bounces through.

He’s the first human being I’ve seen on Tennyson who’s not smiling. “You’re late!” he cries.

Incredulity makes me hesitate. “What do you mean? We’ve been waiting over fifteen minutes . . .”

“No,
no!”
The man’s rosebud mouth twitches. “You don’t understand! You’re
late!
You should have been at the hotel five minutes ago, and it’s all my fault. Well, don’t just stand there! Hurry, hurry, hurry.”

And he’s off, bustling through the crowd.

I trot to keep up. “Our luggage
—”

An expansive gesture which nearly catches a well-dressed woman on the cheek. “All taken care of. The luggage is all taken care of.”

The man’s speech is rapid, and it has an odd colonial lilt. I’m not certain I’ve understood him correctly when he says, “Bedding.”

“What?”

“Luxury bedding. A catastrophic docking. Simply catastrophic. Sheets and pillowcases in orbit. I don’t know how we’ll ever capture it all.”

The doors slide apart. In the open, my steps falter. It’s always disorienting, this first assault of the wind. The lack of walls. Sunshine dazes me. Beats warm on my face. I take a breath. The air has an intoxicating tang, but the light . . . Oh, the light. It’s a commanding, majestic presence. It’s the way, as a child, I always pictured God.

“So you can see, can’t you?” The colonial herds us, blinded by the light, toward a cab. “You can understand the delay. Well, go ahead. Get in, get in. The cab’s programmed for your hotel. I don’t know how I let the time slip away like this. I looked at the clock and . . . They’ll be very, very upset.”

I climb into the front seat next to Beagle. The door slides closed.

The colonial peers in the window. “They’re sticky about tardiness. It’s covered under one of the major sins

sloth? Yes, must be sloth. Wouldn’t fit under lust or avarice, I suppose. Just tell them it was my fault, will you? They’re bound to ask. Well, go on. Go on!”

The cab lurches down the drive. Behind us on the sidewalk the man waves such an animated goodbye that his entire bulk quivers. “My fault, remember? Tell them it was all my fault so they know who to fine!”

The encounter leaves me stupefied. No longer certain of anything. “Did he say ‘fine’?” I ask.

Sensing the lack of oncoming traffic, the cab makes its turn onto an eight-lane highway. In the distance crouch the low buildings of downtown Hebron.

Beagle chuckles. “Did you notice he never told us his name?”

“Look at the birds!” Szabo says from the back seat.

To our left is a rolling expanse. Lawn so perfectly green that it seems painted on. There willows hunch slope-shouldered about a pond and white birds sail like fat boats across its still surface.

“Ducks?” I ask, recalling Lila at the zoo and snowy birds on water.

“Swans,” Beagle says. “My place has a view of a park, and they have a flock of swans there. I feed them sometimes.”

Swans. A park. A pond. M-8 Level perks. I wonder if his apartment is on the top floor. If it’s washed in cascades of sunlight.

Szabo says, “Aren’t they pretty?” with such yearning that I wonder what he sees out his own apartment window.

“Fuck the goddamned swans,” Arne says.

Beagle and I exchange looks. My shoulders untense. Arne. So the odd man out will be Arne.

BOOK: Conscience of the Beagle
6.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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