Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (11 page)

She unlocked the door with one of the old-fashioned keys on her ring, revealing a spacious room with high ceilings and tall panels of windows. Lavish afternoon sunlight draped golden on the polished wooden floors. Other than that, the room was empty, except for an easel with a canvas on it, a wooden paint box and pallet, and a chair.

“This is where I lived with my husband,” she explained.

“After he left, I couldn’t stand to even come up here. I hadn’t opened that door in five years. This morning I did.”

“You’re taking up painting again?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m glad.”

“Are you? Good. Then you shall agree to model for me.”

“What? No, I couldn’t do that.”

“And why not? You’ve used up the free rent you earned helping me clean and paint. Here’s your chance to make a bit more.”

“No”

She dropped her bantering mood and laid her fingers on his arm.

“Please! I want a chance to capture what that street-scribbler did. I want a chance to paint something difficult, hidden, and true. I think, once, I could have done that. I want to see if I still can.”

The sincerity in her voice got to him.

“Very well,” he said.

“I suppose it can’t hurt. But you won’t get me out of my clothes, young lady.”

“No? Then you will wear the outfit I picked for you, yes?”

He shrugged.

“Why not?”

They stood there for a moment, until she said,

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Go change.”

“Don’t fidget. There, like that.”

“Can I breathe?”

“Breathe, talk, whatever you want, just hold that position, more or less.”

“I’ll try,” he said, dryly.

In his peripheral vision, he saw her regard him, then the canvas, then tentatively lift her brush.

“I’ve never painted portraits before, you know?” she said, after a few moments.

“It was considered passe when I was in school. Minbari dialectic perspective was all the rage.”

“Minbari what? You’re making that up.”

“No, sorry to say, I’m not. It was a key philosophy in the nouveau post-ante-postmodern tradition.”

“You’re making that up, too.”

She laughed, a musical trill, the first such laugh he had ever heard from her. A child’s laugh.

“Somebody made it up. It wasn’t me. I’ve read your literary columns, you know. Don’t play the epistemological innocent with me.”

“You read my column?”

“Yes, now and then. You have a most apt way with insults.”

“Is that a compliment?”

She chuckled again, this time in her more accustomed, more cynical voice.

“What good is a compliment? No one ever gained anything from praise.”

“Ah. So you have read my column.”

“Yes. If you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. Kaufman, I don’t really approve of it.”

“Criticism of criticism? Now you try to improve me?”

“It’s easy to take a house apart. It’s harder to build one.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you have a way with language, and you ought to use it in a positive way. Write something of your own.”

“So that it, in turn, might be criticized?”

“That’s what stops you, then? Fear?”

Bester considered that.

“No. To be honest, it actually never occurred to me to write anything.”

“You seem like a man with a lot to say. Isn’t there anything you want people to understand, something you think the Human race has missed, somehow?”

From the place in his mind where he kept Byron, he heard a sardonic chuckle.

Yes, Mr. Bester Wouldn’t you like to make them understand? Understand why you made me slaughter defenseless normals? Why you murdered your own kind? Why the gutters of the reeducation camps ran with tears and blood? Tears and Blood - now there’s a title for you.

“Maybe you’re right,” Bester said, trying to ignore Byron.

“I’ll have to think about it.”

For whatever reason, his medication hadn’t shown up in his secure postbox. The one thing he really needed from what remained of his network, and it hadn’t come. It was three days late now. What could have happened? The people involved simply couldn’t betray him-he had too much on them, and in some cases, in them.

In another week, things would start to get bad. He would start leaking, telepathically. Louise, if no one else, would find out what he was. She might even be able to handle it, but would she be able to handle it when he lost his mind and began the agonizing process of dying? Would she be able to handle having to spoon-feed him like a baby, change his pants’? He wouldn’t put her through that, no matter what, not that she would do it anyway. No, he would end up in the hospital, where eventually a routine DNA check would slip past his insiders in the Metasensory Division of the EABI. Then the hunters would come. But of course they wouldn’t find much, would they?

It was just a delay, nothing more. The ampoules would arrive tomorrow, and everything would be fine.

When two more days passed with no sign of his medication, he did something he did not want to do. He went to a pay phone and dialed a certain number. That connected him to an AI in Sweden, which in turn up-linked him to Mars, and finally to the off-world colony of Crenshaw’s World. Supposedly, at each node there was only a two-percent chance of being traced either way, and through three transfers he should be safe no matter what.

The call took a long time to connect. Finally, someone answered the phone.

“Hello.”

He stood stock-still. He didn’t answer. He knew the voice well enough, but it wasn’t the one he had expected.

“Bester? Is that you? You know who this is, don’t you?”

It was Garibaldi.

“Fin coming for you, Bester. I’m coming for you, you son of a bitch.”

Bester hung up.

Jem made a stuttering sound when he opened the door to find Bester standing there. It took him several seconds to compose himself enough to invite Bester in.

“I haven’t been giving Louise a hard time,” he rushed to say.

“In fact, I’ve been keeping trouble away from her and givin’ the other hotels in the neighborhood more trouble so she’d get more customers. Just like you said.”

“I know, Jem, and I’m very pleased. That’s not what I came here for.”

“No?”

“No. I need some help with something, something right up your alley.”

“Oh. Uh - sit down, if you mind?”

“I don’t mind if I do,” Bester replied, taking a seat in an overstuffed armchair.

“Mind if I get a drink?”

“Not at all.”

“You want one?”

“It’s a little early in the day for me.”

Jem poured himself a tumbler of scotch, then sat on the couch, rolling the glass between his palms.

“What’s the deal?” he asked.

“It’s pretty simple, really-a little breaking and entering.”

“Where, what, and when?”

Jem’s voice was smoothing out now, growing more confident now that they were talking about something he knew how to deal with.

“A pharmacy downtown, the big one on the Boulevard St.-Germain.”

“I know the place. It’s pretty tough. During the plague there was a rumor that they had a cure, but only the rich were getting it. After a few breakins they screwed security down good. What do you need? I can probably get it on the black market.”

“Not this. And it’s the only place in Paris that has what I want.”

There were four people in Paris besides himself who suffered from his condition-he’d checked that before coming. He had even acquired their names and addresses, against just this sort of eventuality. His original contingency plan had been to simply go to their houses and take their doses if he needed them. That was before Garibaldi got involved. The drug was made by a rival company, but Garibaldi must have discovered Bester’s condition somehow and tracked down Bester’s supplier. That complicated matters considerably.

The number of people who needed the inhibitor were few enough that a man with Garibaldi’s resources could have tracked them all down. If one of them turned up dead, or had to apply for another dose, it would attract attention. So far, Garibaldi didn’t - couldn’t - know where he was. His contact on Crenshaw’s World couldn’t have given up his location because he didn’t know it.

But if he took the serum from one of the other telepaths in Paris, Garibaldi would know where he was, probably within days, certainly in under a month. Hitting the pharmacy itself was safer, more oblique. Pharmacies got robbed all the time. The trick was simply to make certain no one could tell why it had been hit.

“I need you to torch it, too.”

“Why?”

“That’s on a need to know basis, Jem, and you don’t need to know. How about it?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Kaufiran. I’ll do it.”

“Actually, we’ll do it. I need to be there.”

Jem absorbed that with clear surprise, but didn’t say anything. He took another gulp of his drink and stared down into the amber fluid.

“What did you do to me, Mr. Kaufiman?” he asked, in a small voice.

“I tried… I tried to tell my buddies, but I couldn’t. Sometimes I try to think about killing you, too…” he winced, suddenly “…but I can’t even think about it. And the dreams I have… I keep dreaming I’m dead, that I’m just this walking hole in the air.

I haven’t asked please in my whole life. Never, not even to my old man. But I’m asking now. Please. Je vous en prie. I’ll do whatever you say. Anything. But just-can’t you make the dreams stop?”

Bester tilted his head.

“You’ll do anything I say, no matter what, or it’ll get worse, and worse, and worse, until you can’t stand to even blink. You know that. I don’t have to do anything for your obedience. As far as you are concerned, I am God, the only thing in the universe that really matters.”

“Please.”

He was weeping. Bester reached over and patted Jem’s shoulder. The big man flinched.

“I’ll consider it, after this job. Consider it, mind you.”

“Okay,” Jem said, and finished his drink. His eyes didn’t seem to hold much hope.

“Now, why don’t you be a good little boy and go check out the pharmacy? Everything-floor plan, guards, security equipment. I’ll give you two days to get all of that together, then I’ll meet you back here and we’ll make our plans. Okay?”

“Okay. I’m right on it.”

“Good boy. I’ll see you in two days.”

Chapter 10

Bester’s skin itched, and the light played games with his eyes. He found it more difficult than ever to sit still, and Byron’s voice was louder in his head. So were strange voices, floating m from the street like unpleasant and unwanted fumes. He told himself it would be okay. Tonight he would speak to Jem again, and in a few days he’d have the inhibitor. If not… if not, he would do what he had to. Find one of the other teeps, take their dose, and leave Paris.

The thought of being on the run again, beneath cold and unfamiliar stars, hurt more than he thought it would. For a terrible instant, he actually thought he would weep. He was losing control of his emotions, not a good sign.

“You seem sad today,” Louise observed, from her place at the easel.

The sound of her voice soothed him, but it also highlighted his dilemma. Soon he would start leaking, telepathically. Soon she would know what he was, maybe even who he was. Would she hate him then? Probably. Definitely, Byron mocked.

“I’m just feeling sorry for myself. A common failing in the old.”

“You aren’t that old-but I must say, you do seem rather alone in the world, Mr. Kaufman. Don’t you have any family, any friends?”

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. We are the children of the Corps, Byron interjected, in a snide tone.

“Not anymore,” Bester said wearily.

“What about you? Don’t you have family?”

“I had a pretty big family,” Louise said.

“Three brothers and three sisters. I was the middle child.”

“Where is this big family of yours?”

“Well, it’s not so big now. Dad suffered a heart attack six years ago. My youngest brother, Pierre, was on the Victory when the Drakh took her out. Jean and Francois immigrated to Beta Colony years ago. Mom is remarried and lives in Melbourne; we talk on the phone but it’s been two years since I saw her. One of my sisters, Anne, fought with Sheridan against Clark, and my oldest sister was in Clark’s personal guard. They haven’t spoken since, and after one attempt at making peace between them, I haven’t spoken much to them, either.”

“That leaves a sister.”

“Ah. I stole her boyfriend and made him my husband.”

“Oops.”

“Yes. I keep hoping she’ll forgive me-you’d think she’d see by now that I did her a favor. But I’m not going to beg.”

“I’m sorry to hear ail of this.”

“Don’t be. I still love them, and I think they all still love me. You never really lose family-you just misplace them now and then. But I’ve learned that it isn’t smart to count on them, either. A lot of people from big families never really learn to be independent. I did, and I’m glad. The rest will work out, eventually.”

“And now you seem sad.”

“Sad, yes. Depressed, no. And you dodged my question, I think. About your family.”

“I had a big family, too,” Bester said, and to his surprise he realized it wasn’t exactly a lie.

“I had a brother-Brett. We were always rivals, I guess, always trying to one-up each other. In a way, I think I was closest to him, of all my siblings.”

He watched the clouds in the sky beyond the window. He thought he could see faces in them, Milla, Azmun, and yes, Brett. The kids from his cadre, the ones he had grown up with. What were they, if not siblings?

“Brett’s been dead for many years. I still miss him, even though it sometimes feels like he’s looking over my shoulder. Our parents…”

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father

“…our parents were tough, but fair. Pretty old school.”

He smiled, but behind his eyes a memory flashed so vividly that for a moment he didn’t see Louise, or the clouds, or anything else. Instead he saw fire and smoke, a rogue stronghold on Mars almost half a century ago.

The leader of the rebel telepaths was dying at his feet. A man who claimed to have held Bester as a baby, to have known his real parents. Matthew and Fiona Dexter, the kingpins of the underground until they were killed in 2189, the year he had been born.