Janus (19 page)

“That’s terrible,” he said. “And they think he planted that bomb?” His voice was measured, as though he was trying to sound more concerned than he was. But then she saw that the colour had faded from his lips. His face seemed to age twenty years. “Shot, you said? Is he alive?” Now she could hear something in his voice, and it sounded like fear.

“I don’t think he can be, no.”

Larsen nodded and sighed, seemed to relax. Then he grimaced and turned away from her. Almost inaudibly he whispered what sounded like, “Dear god, what next?” His hands fumbled with a paper on his desk, crumpled it, then clenched on each other. “Dear god.”

“Did you know him well?” she asked, beginning to feel she had drawn more of a response than she wanted.

“What? No—not well at all. It—it’s just such a shock . . . after the bombing.”

“They say they found evidence in his rooms that he’d been building a bomb. And when they brought him out, he said—”

“I’m sorry,” Larsen interrupted, “I haven’t got time to listen now.” He turned away and bent over his keyboard.

Half an hour later, Chris came in and told her the underground version of what had happened. It added little to what she already knew, and in the middle of Chris’s account Larsen left the office to check on the work in the labs.

At the end of the afternoon, Larsen had not returned. Feeling curious but guilty, Elinda went to look for him. As she had suspected, he was not at the lab. Schneider had spent only five minutes with him, reviewing what she had told him the day before.

It was the end of the afternoon when Elinda found her way to Larsen’s home. She had been there only once before and had trouble finding it again. There was a pale yellow glow in one of the downstairs windows, but when she went to the door and knocked there was no response. She knocked again, louder, but still without result, and finally went to peer in the window.

Two white candles in black holders were burning on a coffee table set by the far wall. Larsen was kneeling before them, his back to her, his shoulders hunched, his head lowered. She could see no religious icons, but he seemed to be praying. Faintly through the triple panes, she heard slow, solemn music. His hands were held near to his face, and his shoulders heaved once as though with a heavy sigh. She backed away guiltily, ready to leave him with his private burdens. But then thoughts that had been waiting at the back of her mind suddenly fitted together, and she hammered on the door until it was opened.

Larsen looked at her in surprise.

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” she began, “but when you didn’t come back this afternoon, I wondered if you were all right—”

“Yes, thank you. It’s good of you to be concerned, but it was just a temporary—”

“—and then I thought of something you might not want to talk about in front of Chris.”

“To do with this afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” He hesitated. “Very well. Come in, then and get warm.”

When he switched on the electric light, the room was as stark as it had seemed from the outside. The candles in stubby brass holders still burned on the dark wood table. The walls were pale cream; the furniture, glossy black and dark brown; the floor, polished, amber-coloured wood. She had forgotten Larsen’s taste for expensive austerity. He excused himself briefly and returned with two glasses and a green bottle. The label had been removed, but Elinda guessed it had said something like
ExtraSolar Burgundy
. He poured, and handed her a glass, then went and sat down. He moved stiffly, his head high and his back straight, as though going to his own execution. She sat facing him on a hard chair with a thin cushion. From a single loudspeaker behind her the sound of discordant string music started and began to saw at her nerves.

“I overheard you the other day,” she began, “when Strickland went to see you in the office. He was still looking for his friend, Erika, then, wasn’t he? Before he gave up hope and got angry. I didn’t mean to spy on you, but you were both raising your voices, and I was just outside the door.”

“Whatever you intended, evidently you did overhear us. I take it you haven’t come just to let me hear your confession.”

“No. I heard something he said—that you’d helped him, but refused to help her. And in the Square, near the end, before he died, he was talking as though he remembered his life back there.”

“Perhaps,” Larsen said, “he was one of the lucky majority, who came through the Knot unscathed. Have you considered that?”

“Was he? I could ask around. I could find out.”

Larsen met her eyes, then moistened his lips and looked away.

“And when you were talking to him,” she went on, “you said something about the hippocampus. That’s part of the brain, isn’t it? Something to do with memory, perhaps?”

“I won’t ask where all this is leading, but I would like to know why you think it concerns you.”

“Strickland said if you’d helped her, she wouldn’t have gone and done something else, gone to someone else, maybe. Now she’s missing. I was looking for a friend too, but we found her. And when we found her, something had been done to her mind. And now it seems as though she had been looking for someone. So: I’m clutching at straws, but I know of two missing persons, female, both probably looking for someone here—”

“Not necessarily the same person,” Larsen interjected.

“But looking for someone. One of them is found with her mind scrambled, and there’s some evidence that the other wanted something done to her mind, her memories. I’m trying to find out what happened.”

“Let me be sure I understand what you’re suggesting here. You believe, I take it, that Strickland came to me, and I did what the experts at the clinic were unable to do, I restored his lost memories. Then, because I refused to do the same for his girlfriend, she ran off to someone who damaged her in some way so that she hasn’t been seen since. As a result of either his personal loss, or the trauma of regaining his past, Strickland became unhinged. He detonated a bomb at the dam, and was shot down this afternoon. In other words, you believe I am ultimately responsible for several maimings at the dam work site and for Strickland’s death today.”

“No, I don’t believe that. But I think you do. I saw your face when you got the news each time. That’s why I was worried about you today.”

Larsen stared at her with an expression she could not fathom. Then he lowered his head and stared down at his hands.

“I can’t help you,” he said, in a dull, weary voice. “I don’t know what your friend might have found, or whom Robert Strickland’s friend might have turned to. Please do not ask me for more details of what I did. It was a mistake; I had plans, and they were misguided. The reason I refused to help the poor woman was that I felt I risked being found out if I continued. I am not cut out for heroism.” He raised his head to meet her eyes. “Now you know enough to put me in jeopardy, and I have no alternative but to trust you.”

He paused, and she waited, feeling sure he was going to add something.

“When you said Strickland had been shot—” he began, and looked up at her—“when you told me he was dead, I was glad. My first feeling at that man’s death was relief that he would not be able to give me away. That is what I have been trying to come to terms with since I left the office.”

“It’s not so terrible,” she said, unable to suppress a flicker of sympathy. “It’s only human to be afraid for one’s self, isn’t it?”

“But I had set myself up to be above such pettiness—I had committed hubris. And now I am glimpsing the price.”

She had no answer for him.

She wondered why she had come, and prepared to leave; and then her mind started working.

“Just a minute,” she said. “You said it was a mistake, just now, restoring that man’s past. Was it a mistake because he was what the leaflets said, a criminal—a psychopath or something?”

“I can’t talk about this.”

“It must have been bad luck, to pick someone who was damaged.” She paused, then went on slowly, thinking. “The leaflet didn’t say how many like that had got through, but we haven’t had an obvious string of crimes. So there couldn’t have been that many, could there? And only about a third of them would need their minds restoring. . . . What am I missing here? You did something. Something you won’t talk about. And then you gave up after one bad experience.”

She stared at him.

“I’m still missing something. How many were there like that waiting to be restored? How many potential monsters? Do you know who they are?” She stopped short, appalled at what had come into her mind, then forced the words out: “Is—is Barbara one?”

Finally he answered, with a bitter smile: “If I said yes, would you ask me if I knew what she had done?” He moistened his lips. “Would you want to know that?”

“Shit.” Her nerve failed. Despising herself, she backed off. “All right, tell me this then—what has Carlo been doing, that you could fix people he can’t?”

More confidently, but apparently choosing his words with care, Larsen said: “To the best of my knowledge, your friend has been doing whatever he can to make a difficult situation tolerable for himself and those close to him.”

“Now that’s a reply that raises more questions than it answers.”

“If you really want them answered, you’ll have to go to someone else.” Larsen stood up. “And now, yes, I really have said too much. I wish we could both pretend this meeting had never happened. That’s impossible, I know, but it must stop here. I’ll say no more.” He ushered her towards the door. “Please go now, and don’t talk about this again.”

Grebbel did not appear in the cafeteria while Elinda was eating. She considered looking for him at the address she had found from the directory, but decided to postpone that until she had thought things over more. Instead, after dinner she dropped in on Louise and Paulina next door.

She wondered if they would try to probe the state of things between her and Barbara, or between her and Jon Grebbel, but they seemed content to stick to less personal topics. Inevitably, the events in the Square came up. Elinda was the only one who had seen what had happened. “Someone told me he was so easy to find, he might have wanted to be caught,” she said. “And it’s true, when he grabbed the gun he just stood there. He didn’t even try to hide behind the guards. He just stood there and made them shoot him down.”

“If it’s upsetting you to talk about it,” Paulina said, “let’s change the subject. Did you see they’ve released some new satellite data?”

Elinda shook her head. She had been too preoccupied to look at the bulletins.

“You know how big the continental masses are here,” Paulina said, “there’s hardly anywhere to put the oceans. But they’re
deep
. Anything could be going on down there. Well, apparently they’ve been picking up strange radar contacts from the middle of Dante’s Bay—been happening for years, but no one had been able to record more than a vague flicker. Only now there’s a clear five-second signal and an infra-red signature to match. The thing’s effective temperature was about twenty-eight Celsius, just a bit warmer than the water there. And someone did a computer analysis of the wave patterns around the blip. To cut a long story short, they’re talking about a twenty-five-metre tylosaur—a goddamned sea serpent!”

“Someone thought it would be a good idea to take a boat down there,” Elinda said. “I wonder if he’s changed his mind.” She remembered images of black volcanic islands combing the currents, and whole sargassos of gold and crimson vegetation spread on the waves. Now there was something new and purposeful beneath the bright surface.

She sipped Louise’s tea, brewed from herbs she grew in their boxes of compost under artificial sunlight. The conversation drifted. Elinda found herself wondering who these people really were, with their apparently inviolable memories of another life. She realised how much the day had been a strain on her.

At the back of her mind was Larsen’s question—if she found out that Barbara had been a criminal, how would she handle the knowledge? What would it do to them? She had run from the question in Larsen’s home; she wanted to run from it now. But she sensed it would pursue her into her dreams.

“Have you seen the latest bulletin from back there?” Louise was saying. “Langston’s campaigning in New England. A pretty face, but the man’s a total null. The only good thing in his platform is, he wants to remove sterilisation as a legal penalty. And he got that line from Sherry Tsang. Do you remember seeing either of them? I think they were on one of the broadcasts a couple of weeks ago. We remember them back from when they were running for local governorships—we always had a weakness for a good glitzy bedroom farce, and you can’t beat a big election for that. It’s one thing we miss out here. . . .”

Elinda’s attention had wandered again. Something in what Louise was saying had snagged her attention, but she was unable to focus on it. Too much had happened today. She needed time to think it through. After a few more minutes, she pleaded tiredness and excused herself.

Outside, the wind shrieked and roared through the valley. Snowflakes stung her cheek.

Grebbel materialised from the darkness ahead of her. “Don’t run,” he said tensely. “It’s me. I looked for you, but you weren’t in, so I stayed. I was walking around here, waiting. . . .”