Hidden Faults (4 page)

He took off his glasses and pinched his nose. “No. At least not yet. I can’t discuss it further with you, and I’d ask you not to discuss it outside this room. Officially, he’s been seconded to the Department of Health and Welfare. Silly bloody
fool.
”

“To throw away his career for that...are they sure? He never struck me as religious, sir.”

He gave me a narrow-eyed look. “I can’t discuss it, Jodi, and that’s final. Let me say that should you find the urge to sit around holding hands with people who claim they can see the dead, I’d be
very
disappointed in you.”

“Me too.”

Inside my chest, my heart hammered hard enough to hurt. We’d never lost an employee this way in the six years I’d worked in this department. I'd heard stories. Timo had lost three colleagues during security clampdowns in the past...but of all the stupid ways to fuck up a career. And how the hell had Lenai even met up with people like that? Why had he? He wasn’t a para. What did the Spiritists even offer him?

“If it’s a mistake, will he come back?”

He shook his head. “National Security doesn’t make mistakes, Arwe Jodimai. Now, you better get back to your lab. I hope you didn’t spend
all
weekend on this. You look a little tired. I don’t want you to burn out on me.”

“I’m fine, sir. I had a bit of a long night after the conference, drank a little too much.” I gave him an embarrassed smile. “Kanar’s a terrible influence.”

“That he certainly is, but he keeps us on our ethical toes. Though I probably shouldn’t say it, we need people like him to challenge the official line.”

I blinked. I always thought Kregan and the official line were as one. “You think he has a point, sir?”

“I think he’s a valuable irritant. So long as he doesn’t support terrorism or Spiritists, then he’s a useful reminder of the complexity of the issue. He’s too intelligent to get involved with anyone likely to cause trouble.”

And maybe his continued liberty makes people think their views can be heard,
I dared to think, not that I was the first to conceive such an idea. “Maybe the problem is that the people who listen to him, aren’t that smart.”

“He’s aware of that too, Jodi. He knows exactly how far he can go, and goes not a mycdec past that point. He should have been a politician.”

“Then someone really would have assassinated him by now.”

“Indeed. Now, back to work. I still want that formal report on the conference. I can distribute it to the meeting of department heads if you get it to me before the end of the week.”

I agreed and left the room, my mind still churning over the bitter news about Lenai. Bloody fool, as Kregan had said. And now anyone who’d socialised with him, or was related to him, would fall under completely unnecessary suspicion, and maybe have
their
security gradings lowered. So many lives altered because a single idiot had grown curious about a completely confected, fraudulent religion. I wasn’t the most devout Marranite in Pindone, but at least it had respectable roots in history, had a proper structure and belief system. Spiritists believed in nothing, and existed to promote anarchy under the guise of communing with spirits—in other words, talking to the dead. What drivel.

Darno was eager to show how cooperative he would be in working with me—Limiw must have been bitching around the labs while I was at the conference—so I set him to do some intense data analysis on our previous year’s test results. I simply couldn’t see why the therapy didn’t work. The genes involved in paranormal ability and allied infertility had been isolated for well over a decade, and we’d been able to suppress all but two, which remained stubbornly resistant to everything we had thrown at them. No one had any idea why. No one had any idea why so many people with the active gene didn’t go on to develop full paranormality. I was infertile because of it, so was Timo, as were at least twenty percent of the identified infertility cases in the country, though many more with the gene were completely fertile. Without mandatory sperm donation registration, and hefty incentives for egg donation, Pindone’s population would always hover on the edge of decline, so prevalent was this gene. Yet paranormality itself was comparatively rare.

There was apparently no difference between the activation of the genes inside me and those of the unfortunate Mas Neim. Yet he could make fire from nothing with a thought while I would always need to use matches if I wanted to light a candle. Equally, nothing explained why someone with his genetic profile had such minor pyrokinetic ability, and yet another with the same profile could be a powerful and dangerous weapon, capable of wholesale destruction by flame and fire. The sex differences between abilities were equally inexplicable. What were we missing?

We were forced to use human subjects entirely, much to my regret. Humans were the only species discovered to have the gene in any form at all, and all efforts to introduce the gene into other mammals, or reproduce its effects, had failed. This slowed our work considerably. A wish to somehow avoid using people as test rodents hung in my mind all morning as I combed through data from our lab technicians and geneticists, and progress reports on allegedly better therapy delivery methods.

Finally I’d had enough. “I’m going to visit our subjects from the last test round, see how they’re getting on.”

Darno swung around on his chair in surprise. “Sir, the medics take the daily readings.”

“Yes, of course. I felt I should...it never hurts to add a personal touch.”

I could see him thinking ‘to paras?’ but he never said it. Darno wasn’t as overt as Limiw by a long way, but if I rejected every assistant who looked down their nose at paranormals, I’d have no one to work with. Darno was simply a product of his age. We all were.

“I’ll be back after lunch,” I told him, and headed out.

The entire medical wing of our building maintained tight security throughout, but especially so around the pyrokinetics, of whom we had three in residence. The physical powers of pyrokinesis and telekinesis were particularly useful for our purposes because we could be completely certain when the therapy did or did not work. Telepaths were considered too dangerous for clinical work because of the potential for subversion, while empathy was worthless, being so cumbersome to test. I’d always thought it was so unfair to class empathy alongside the demonstrably offensive abilities, but people were twitchy about anything paranormal, and the role of empaths in Spiritism had damned them to the same fate as all the others.

I passed the security checks, my biochip being read at three separate points, and had to submit to a full body patdown as well as a metal scan. If I got this kind of treatment as a doctor, I couldn’t imagine what civilians endured. But visitors to our paranormal residents were very rare. Mas Neim almost certainly would have had none since his arrival.

The ward was a rather dingy place—clean, but decorated in drab grays and dull blue, with no decorative features or paintings on the wall to relieve the worn paintwork. The beds were segregated by sex, each resident having plenty of space, but not much in the way of luxury. Shabby, half-empty shelves of old books sat in the corner near the entrance to the shared bathroom, and beside each bed, a generous locker for the person’s possessions, but there were none of the bright flowers or cards or little gifts one would see in a normal infirmary. I found myself wishing I’d brought something with me to alleviate the drabness, but then reminded myself I wasn’t there as a regular visitor.

Predictably, being near the peak of the viral vector infection, our subjects were all feeling miserable. Three were asleep, but doing fine, the medic on duty assured me. A fourth—a female telekinetic in her sixties—was reading. She smiled at me, though a little sadly, as I sat by her bed. She held up the book—a cheap mystery novel, probably a staff cast-off.

“Haven’t read a book in years, doctor.”

“Been too busy, Mis Kolmi?”

She cocked her head as if my words puzzled her. “No. It’s the drug. I can’t concentrate well enough to finish more than a page or so. Can’t remember complicated plots and such.”

My heart shrank a little in horror. This woman had once been a respected journalist and had written for a living.

“If our research works, then you can read all the books you like again.”

“If. And if the government....” Her worn, lined features went blank as if she’d remembered to whom she spoke. “That’d be nice, doctor.” She laid the book down. “I’m sorry. I’m rather tired....”

“Of course. Another couple of days and you’ll feel much better, I swear.”

“Would it shock you to know this is the best I’ve felt in years?”

Shock, no. Sadden, yes. “Get some rest, Mis Kolmi. You’ve more than earned it.”

She closed her eyes, and though I doubted she was asleep, I was certainly dismissed.

I went into the men’s ward. Two of the three occupants were fast asleep. The third, Mas Neim, looking frail and tired, stared towards the window in a rather vacant way. I almost retreated without disturbing him, but he turned towards the sound of my footsteps.

“Arwe Jodimai?” he rasped.

“Hello, Mas Neim. How are you today?”

He coughed rather unpleasantly. “I’ve got a cold.”

I smiled. “Yes, I’m sorry about that.”

I came closer to his bed. By the door, the security guards tensed, but even with the display the other day, he didn’t scare me. I’d worked with PKs too long for that.

His hands fluttered above the bed, and I moved in, worried I’d distressed him. He stared up at me.

“Doctor, I want to apologise. I shouldn’t have...what I did that day. My Mam brought me up better than that. I’m sorry.”

I took a seat in the chair next to the bed. “Accepted, though there’s no need. I know what we’ve asked of you. What we’ve done to you.”

“I doubt that, young man. I don’t understand those bloody fools who take that drug for fun. I’ve got two wishes before I die. To die free of this noose around my neck, and to see my son again.” His lips thinned. “What are the chances of either, eh?”

“Where’s your son, Mas Neim?”

“No idea.”

“Your wife...divorced you?” I recalled mention in his notes of his once being married. So many normal people divorced their para partners after the laws were changed, I assumed that had happened in his case.

“She died. My boy—he was six. Took him off to be adopted by proper folk, and I never saw him again. How old are you, doctor?”

“Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine this week.”

He grunted. It turned into a wet sounding cough from which took him some time to recover. When he'd finished and had sipped some water, he nodded.

“Twenty-eight. Lotiwei would be that now. If he’s still alive. Not allowed to know, you see. I’m no biological kin, and the Laws of Restriction invalidated my adoption. I’ve got no rights to him at all.”

And yet the son’s sperm donor father did. “I’m sorry. How did your wife die?”

His mouth tightened in pain.

“Please, if it’s upsetting—”

“Arwe Jodimai,” he snapped quite suddenly, his voice more vigorous than I’d have thought him capable of, “I told you not to treat me like a fool last week. I’m sick, not stupid. Asking a man about his dead wife is always going to be upsetting. What kind of doctor are you?”

Stung by his words, I could only bow my head in shame. “Not a very sensitive one. I’m sorry.”

“You should be. It’s that kind of attitude that killed her.”

I looked up.

“You doctors killed her.”

“That’s a pretty strong accusation, Mas Neim.”

“
It’s the truth.” His stubbled jaw jutted stubbornly. “She started running a fever, began to throw up. She was never sick, not like that, and it worried me. I took her to a clinic—had to go to a para clinic because the ‘normal’ clinics wouldn’t touch me or any of my family.” He said ‘normal’ like a swear word. “Do you know what the para clinics are like, doctor? Overworked, understaffed. The only people who’ll work in them are the medics who can’t get jobs anywhere else. Febkeinzes, doctors who aren’t good enough for
your
people.”

“I’m aware paranormal clinics have problems. That’s not the same as the doctors killing anyone.”

“No, but they did this time. Happens more often than not. We had to wait for hours to be seen, and then the doctor, who could barely speak Pindoni spent about a minute examining her. He told us she only had stomach flu, and to go home and rest. So I took her home, even though she was so weak and sick she could barely walk. But she got worse. That night she woke up screaming in pain. I called the clinic and they sent a medical veecle, but it took an hour to come—an hour I had to watch her writhing around in agony. By the time she got to the clinic again, her appendix had burst. There was no surgeon available to operate, but they told me there wasn’t even any point. She died that morning. Because of me, what I am.”

He glared at me. “Because of you doctors and not thinking we were worth taking time over. Because of the government and its shitting laws. I never hurt a soul, not even as a kid, playing around. But because of this....” He held up his tattooed hand. “I’m guilty until proven worth hanging. Sometimes I’m glad they took my boy, doctor. What kind of life could I give him?”