Janus (11 page)

“Who would you like to see?” the nurse at the desk asked.

When she explained and identified herself, he began rattling keys on a terminal in front of him.

“When did you start that?” she asked. “Isn’t there enough to do without keeping track of everyone who visits a patient? Are you going to start logging bedpan changes too?”

The man shrugged. “Orders. Something about trying to make the best use of our resources. A two-week test period. Okay. They’ll let you see her, but only with supervision. Someone’ll be along in a minute.”

“Half an hour, more like,” she muttered, but almost immediately Carlo appeared and nodded to her to follow him.

“I’d tell you how glad I was to see you,” he said quietly. “But I’m not sure you were wise to come. Seeing her now isn’t likely to set your mind at rest.”

“Neither is not seeing her.”

“Well, maybe. But don’t be expecting too much. She still may not know you.”

He unlocked a door and went ahead of her into a small white room. In a narrow, metal-frame bed, Barbara lay on her back, her face turned to the wall. Loops of grey tape fastened her ankles and wrists to the bedframe.

“Jesus Christ,” Elinda whispered, “what are you doing to her?”

Carlo caught her arm. “Careful,” he said, in a strained, apologetic tone. “She bites.”

Elinda stared at him, then pulled herself free and went to the bed. Barbara’s eyes were closed; she was breathing quickly and shallowly. Then her head rolled to the side and she muttered something.

Elinda looked at Carlo. “She’s awake?”

He shrugged. “We haven’t sedated her today, yet.”

“Barbara,” she said as steadily as she could. “Barbara, can you hear me? Do you know what happened? Tell me what I can do to help.”

Barbara’s eyes opened. They turned from side to side, as though they found nothing in the room to focus on. Her mouth worked. After a moment, Elinda was able to understand the words. “. . . since breakfast. Coffee then. It’s curfew, half an hour, subway’s not running. . . .” She thrashed against her bonds, twisting her neck to try and snap at her hands, then suddenly was still again. She began to mumble, and saliva dribbled from the corner of her mouth. Carlo came forward with a swab, but Elinda stopped him.

“Let me.”

“Careful,” he began, but she was already reaching over.

She wiped Barbara’s chin, gently, though her fingers felt like tongs. When she had finished, Barbara seemed to be sleeping.

Carlo tilted his head towards the corridor, and after a moment she shrugged and nodded. He followed her out and locked the door.

“Well?” she said.

He spread his hands. “She’s calmer than she has been, but there’s no way to predict what she’ll be like an hour from now.”

“I meant, what the fuck’s wrong with her? What are you treating her for?”

“We don’t know,” he said uncomfortably. “That’s why we’re using sedation as little as possible. We can’t be certain what side effects there might be from anything we do.”

“Jesus Christ. So what do you plan to do next? Garlic and silver crucifixes? Rain dances?”

“You’re taking this badly. I think you’re blaming yourself—”

“That’s my right, isn’t it? And it looks as useful as anything else being done around here.” She winced and shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“You’re taking it badly,” Carlo went on, “because you’ve been under more strain than you need to be. I think worrying about your past has been preying on your mind these last weeks, when you’ve had personal problems to cope with. I’ve seen what can happen. . . . Anyway, I strongly recommend that you come back for therapy sessions as soon as possible.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Look, we’re doing our best for her, all of us. But she’s not the only one of you who needs help. You’re going to wear yourself down to the bone if you keep on like this.”

“Let me think about it, Carlo. I can’t decide now.”

“Okay then. You can see her again tomorrow. If there’s any change before then, I’ll get word to you.”

She went down to the lab and collected Barbara’s pair of coffee mugs, her holo of a crimson rose, a gold-nibbed pen, and half a dozen pages of notes that Dr. Schneider agreed were too cryptic to be of use to anyone else. Elinda intended to try and decipher them for clues as to what had led Barbara to prepare the leaflet.

Outside the clinic, she looked at the clouds blowing above the valley. It could still snow again that year, she thought. She remembered floundering around the landing field on skis with Barbara, neither of them sure how to negotiate any but the gentlest slopes, and both of them getting more and more frustrated until they stuck their skis in a snow bank and threw snowballs at each other for half an hour. They had laughed a lot in those days—had been able to laugh at almost anything.

She left the things she had taken from Barbara’s desk in the office and then went on to the Greenhouse. She spent an hour doing an inventory of the crops ready for harvest and checking the water deionisers, and started walking back to the office. The air was cool, the wind coming in gusts with the approach of another night, and she felt a strange warmth at the idea of being cocooned in snow. Then she realised that Jon Grebbel had been in her thoughts all morning. Even while she had been wiping Barbara’s face, part of her mind had been elsewhere, intent. . . .

When she reached the office, she almost walked in before she heard the raised voices.

“It has practically nothing to do with the hippocampus,” Larsen’s voice said in its most pedantic tone. “The whole point of those procedures—”

“I don’t care about that,” another man’s voice broke in. “If you’d helped her the way you helped me, she wouldn’t have—she wouldn’t be . . .”

Larsen said something she did not hear, then added, “I’m not sure that I have helped you.”

As she hesitated, the door opened and a tall, red-faced man came out. She had seen him occasionally in the Admin building: Robert Strickland—he played sweeper for their soccer team. He flinched when he caught sight of her, as though guessing she had overheard, and he was hurrying past when he seemed to recognise her.

“You’re—I’ve seen you with Barbara Evans, haven’t I?” he said. “I wonder—I’m looking for someone. Do you know Erika Frank? About your height, and blonde too, but darker colouring. She worked at the landing field in the radio room. She always wore those wooden bracelets, half a dozen of them, it seemed like, silly, clumsy things—I mean, she wears them, she works there, she—” He swallowed and fell silent, his eyes desperate.

“I’m sorry,” Elinda whispered. “I don’t know her. I’m sorry.”

“No. Of course not. Excuse me.” He turned to go.

“Just a moment. How long has she been missing?”

“That’s just it—it might be two weeks. She was supposed to go back to the Flats for a training course, only I found out she never got there, maybe she never left. Somebody knows, though, somebody knows what happened to her, somebody here. Ask your friends.” He peered at her sharply then turned and hurried away.

Larsen looked up quickly when she went in. “I had assumed you wouldn’t be back today,” he said. “But as long as you’re here, you can help me check the monthly budget.”

She had no appetite and worked through lunch. Chris came in, his hands grimy from helping work on a truck suspension, and reminded them about the open party at his home the following evening. Larsen, unusually irritable, twice snapped at her for not paying attention.

She worked late, and when she locked up, the sun had slid behind the Five of Diamonds, although the sky was still brilliant. She walked home through the long dusk and the cutting wind, unable to remember a thing she had done.

The bungalow was full of Barbara’s presence. It seemed to her now that most of the decoration had been Barbara’s ideas. Certainly the surrealist landscape painting by Jessamyn in the living room had been one of hers. She wondered what Grebbel would think of it, whether she should return it and hang one of the throw rugs instead. She wondered how important Grebbel was becoming to her, why she kept putting off Carlo’s invitations to return to therapy, and why these thoughts should be filling her mind.

Barbara would have laughed at her once and taken her for a walk; more recently she would have been impatient. Brooding, she would call it. It’s today that matters, and tomorrow. That’s why we’re here now. Let the past look after itself.

There would have been the aggrieved, defensive tone edging into her voice. And now . . .
Careful, she bites.

Outside, shadows were sliding up the northern walls of the valley, and the swirling clouds becoming crimson-edged in the low sunlight. She ate a quick meal of leftovers, then picked up her coat from the couch and went out.

She had intended visiting Paulina and Louise next door, but met them on their front path, going out. “It’s the newsfeed at the Hall tonight,” Paulina reminded her. “Come along for a change.” Her tone suggested they had heard about Barbara.

She had wanted to talk, but she agreed to go, and decided it was probably the best thing to do. Their implied sympathy made her uncomfortable, and she was reminded how much she envied them their relationship.

Ahead of them, one of the bluish lights along the main street flickered and glowed, and then the others shivered into life like a string of diamonds. “They haven’t got the settings right yet,” Louise commented. “Lights should have been on an hour ago this time of year.” She ducked her head against a cold gust.

“Yeah,” said Paulina as they wandered across the road, “with all the traffic we get through here, it’s a wonder there hasn’t been a massacre.”

“Is that why you go to these things so often,” Elinda asked, “because you miss all that—freeways and traffic jams and the rest of it?”

“Sure we miss it,” Louise said. “You’ve no idea how glamorous such memories are from this distance. It’s the best reason for coming here, to make that mess look captivating.”

At the Hall, the doors were open and some of the seats were already occupied. There was no reason Grebbel should have been easy to see in the dimly lit rows, but she recognised him almost immediately in the middle of a row near the back. She brought the others with her and introduced them as she sat beside him. The two of them regarded Grebbel with curiosity. Elinda wasn’t sure if it contained disapproval.

The lights started to go down. “If they’re starting already,” Paulina said for Grebbel’s benefit, “there must be a good ten minutes’ worth of noticeboard to sit through. Most of it’s a waste of time, but if we come any later, it’s hard to get a seat. No, thank god, a false alarm.” The lights had stopped fading, but the Hall was still not fully dark. Abruptly a picture flashed onto the screen. It blurred, then came into focus as a young woman’s face. Beside it, a block of text appeared in plain capitals and began to roll up the screen. ERIKA FRANK HAS BEEN MISSING FOR TWO WEEKS. The portrait was replaced by a full-length shot of her with the coffer dam in the background. SOMEONE KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED TO HER. Another picture of her, beside the dirigible mooring pylon. IF SHE IS NOT FOUND BY TOMORROW NOON, THIS COMMUNITY WILL ANSWER FOR IT. The first portrait flashed up again for a moment, and then the screen went dark.

Grebbel looked questioningly at her, and she shrugged, unready to put her doubts and suspicions into words.

“Well,” said Paulina, “first those leaflets, now this. You’d think they could keep tighter control over the lunatic fringe. But then I bet only forty-five percent of the population’s in the pay of security.”

“Erika Frank,” someone said,”—isn’t that Bob Strickland’s girlfriend?”

“Strickland thought so, anyway.”

“What do you think it meant—‘will answer for it’?” Grebbel asked.

“Probably a bluff,” Paulina said, “if it isn’t just a practical joke.”

Before the muttering from the audience drowned everything else, Elinda thought she heard voices raised behind the stage, where the projectors must be.

Then the house lights faded completely and the screen lit again. Elinda missed most of the few noticeboard items that appeared, wondering about the threatening tone of the first item, and whether it fitted the man she had seen with Larsen. The main feature began, and she made an effort to concentrate.

There was a soundtrack with music and a commentary, but it had no meaning for her. The pictures filled her mind. Wide plains divided into olive and brown cultivated squares. A city, sprawling under low, yellowish skies. There were tight knots of freeway interchanges, thick with traffic. Weather-stained freighters moored at a dock. The water, violet-dark and greasy, licked at their hulls. Gulls fought over debris churned up by the propellers of the tugs.

I know this place
, she thought.
I don’t recognise any of it, but I know it. Is that why I’m shaking?

Trucks thundered over concrete arches, where grimy rows of houses huddled on narrow streets. Words on the soundtrack she could not follow, the music beating at her.

He’d understand what I feel. He wouldn’t laugh at me.

And Grebbel, watching the images unfolding before him, felt his mind being squeezed into a smaller and smaller space, as though the sight of his old world was drawing his memories toward it, but they could get no further than whatever had happened in the Knot.