Janus (28 page)

He gave a twisted smile that froze on his face, and said no more. Silence filled the room.

“What are you going to do?” Larsen whispered.

“Go back to the clinic and sleep; they’re expecting me,” Grebbel said and gestured at him wearily. “You can get up now, you can leave. I’m sure we’ll meet again before too long.”

Elinda sat and stared at the recorder. She sensed she was letting Barbara slip away from her. Her memories of their times together now seemed as remote and vulnerable as the whispers of her voice on the recording. The metal shell was cool and impersonal, she had to remind herself it been held in Barbara’s hand. She pushed buttons, found the list of current files, their time stamps, their sizes, the memory-space and battery power remaining when the recording was made, memory locations, signal-to-noise quality. She understood from somewhere that the latter was related to the battery level.

She froze. “My god.” She had recharged the battery; it had quickly got too low to drive the speaker, just work the display screen. “How blind stupid can I get?”

When Barbara had made her little sound test, there had been another two hours’ worth of battery power available. But the battery had started dying when Elinda got it home. Nothing more recent was listed in memory. So something like ninety minutes’ worth of recorded sound was gone, lost.

Erased.

It wouldn’t stand up in court, but it confirmed what she had known in her bones for weeks: Barbara had met someone that night and whatever she had recorded then had been destroyed. And the one who had done it had then sent her out into the night to die.

In the clinic, Grebbel smiled for the orderly who connected him to the test apparatus; he laughed at the jokes that came with the dinner tray, and finished every scrap on the plates.

But that night, he dreamed of Elinda.
You’ve remembered, haven’t you?
she said again, and her face filled his sight as though he were looking into the sun.

Yes, I’ll tell you
, he said,
I’ll tell you all of it.

The words died soundless at his lips. Her gaze pierced him. He felt it would cut out his heart.

He ran from her. Fled along white echoing corridors, crossed shadow-filled excavations on planks that fell away as he leapt from them. Came to a closed door. It was a high wooden door, with a loose brass handle, and he knew that on the other side of it were steps leading down. He reached up to turn the handle.

You’ve remembered everything, haven’t you?

It was dark, and somewhere an icy wind was blowing, and he was shivering, huddled around the warmth of his body, his torn arm. . . .

You’ve remembered, haven’t you?

Keep back
, he said, not turning to see her.
Don’t make me—

When he awoke, her face remained beside him as it had been in the dream, the face of a woman on the rack, contorting in response to his slightest movement. But when he reached out to touch her cheek, his fingers brushed a shadow on the pillow, and he fell into full awareness. And was alone.

Elinda sat beside Barbara, and watched her sleep, while her thoughts eddied aimlessly; finally she left and went along the corridor to Grebbel’s room. At the door she hesitated. It would be the first time she had visited him since their fight. She could turn away now, and never have to deal with what he had become.

She rapped on the door and pushed it open. He was in bed, with electrodes taped to his temples, connected to a recorder beside the wall. He looked up and saw her. His face tensed, then his eyes widened, he relaxed and smiled.

“Friends?” she said.

He beckoned her. “Yes. Friends. Yes, yes.”

She went in.

Two days later, Carlo was waiting for her, in the clinic lobby. “I’ll walk part of the way with you,” he said, fastening his coat.

“Well, okay,” she said, preparing to continue their last exchange.

They went out into the evening, turned towards the Square.

“How are things?” he asked. “Are you still bent on playing detective?”

“I’m not playing. I may not be professional, but I’m not treating it as a game.”

“Sorry. I was wondering if you’d changed your mind about it, or anything else.”

“Like having more sessions with your new machine you mean? No thanks, Carlo, I’ve not changed my mind about that.”
Because it’s a fraud isn’t it?
she almost added.

“Have you thought about why you don’t want to go back there?”

“Perhaps I’m not ready to recover my memories,” she said, cursing herself for the half-truth. “After this business about there being mental cases here, I’ve been getting flashes of something that feels like the past, and I don’t like them. Whatever I was, maybe I should just settle for being who I am, here.”

“What you mean,” he said carefully, “is that you’re afraid. And that’s quite reasonable. If there are some old bones in your psychic closet, it’s quite logical that you’d be nervous about disturbing them. But that probably means that’s exactly where the problems are, and where we have to go to tackle them.”

“I don’t mean to be obtuse, Carlo, but I had the impression that my most pressing problems were here in this pleasant little community, and right now.”

“Some of them are,” he agreed. “Perhaps more than you realise—or you’re ready to admit. Last time, you talked about something scaring you. That’s why I got you this.” He turned towards the shadow of the Tree. “Come over here where we can’t be seen.”

Under the leathery fronds, he pulled a cloth package from his coat and handed it to her. “I tried to find something that would be easy to use. I looked for something that would discourage an attacker without necessarily injuring him badly—but most of the devices like that are either restricted or they need training and practice. I had to settle for something under the table, and it’s nastier than I’d like. It’s what some of the cops use as unofficial backup weapons. Ankle holsters and so on.”

It was a short-barrelled, ancient-looking black revolver. She could just see the blunt noses of the bullets in the cylinder.

“If you have to use it, hold in both hands, point it and pull the trigger firmly. I didn’t get any spare rounds, but it’s for one emergency only. Then you’ll lose it.”

“It’s small,” she said, thinking it looked like something you might find under a damp rock, “and ugly. Thank you, I think.”

“I had to do it for you.”

She looked at him questioningly.

“Something happened,” he said, and moistened his lips. “Back there. Someone I was close to, I should have protected. I couldn’t watch it happen again, to you.”

She shoved the gun into her jacket pocket. “Christ,” she muttered, “is everything we do driven by guilt?”

“Elinda—I went out on a limb to get that for you. Don’t be seen with it; there’s no way you could legitimately own it. And—please be careful. If you find you need to use that thing, you’ve got yourself further into something than you should have.”

“You’re not going to tell me any more than that, are you?”

“I’ve told you all I know for sure.” Through a chink in the cloud ceiling, one of the moons glimmered down. Carlo’s face looked carved from chalk. With his potential arrest warrant freely handed to her, she couldn’t bring herself to challenge him directly.

They walked on, the black metal weighing against her hip. “The last time we talked,” she said to fill the silence, “you were going to tell me something about the therapy machine.”

“Yes. The treatment itself,” he began, sounding a bit more comfortable, “—it’s more complicated than you probably think. Several decades ago, there was a well-known psychiatrist who tried to make his reputation by a technique he called psychic driving. It became infamous later—he’d been using hallucinogens and brainwashing techniques, at a time when clinical practice was still highly experimental and standards were lax. What this machine does is a kind of psychic driving.” His tone made her sure he was leading to a conclusion she would not like.

“You mean it reprograms—brainwashes—people?”

He hesitated. “It can—it could, if things weren’t properly controlled. The thing is, there’s no absolute guarantee that what it restores is real. So, we do our best to minimise any distortion, we look for obvious patterns and self-consistency. . . .”

”But you’re mostly working on faith?” Elinda said.

“Faith and experience, among other things. If I knew what you were asking for, I might be able to help you more.”

“I’m not asking for anything yet, Carlo. Just let me think about it for a bit. I’m not sure what I want.” What she did want, she realised, was Carlo to stop hanging up veils of secrecy; perhaps if he kept talking, something would slip out.

“I know you’re not asking,” he began quietly. “You haven’t asked me for anything. You didn’t ask me for protection, for the gun?” He turned to look into her eyes. “But you accepted it when I offered. If I offered this, would you accept it?” He hesitated. “If I offered more?” he said hoarsely. “I could, you know. I would”

She wondered whom he was seeing when he looked at her, whether there were two moons in the sky for him, or just one.

“Oh, Carlo, I’m sorry. I wasn’t ready for this. I’ve got all the complications I can handle right now. Don’t push it. Please.”

“All right,” he said, after a pause. “Forget I said anything, if you like. Let it go. Forget it.”

“I’m sorry, Carlo, but it’s the best thing right now.”

“It was stupid of me to bring it up. I knew it was, I wasn’t going to. But you started asking about the machine, and there are things I can’t tell you. And I don’t want to see you hurt.”

“It’s all right. I’m going to be careful. I’m glad you care, but let’s call it a night now. Let’s talk again later, from where we were before, okay?”

At the start of the weekend Grebbel was released from sleeping in the clinic. In his rooms, he stared at the strange, familiar walls and thought about how much had changed. He clenched his fist and flexed his healing arm.

That evening Elinda knocked on his door.

They gazed at each other. Then he stepped towards her. Without speaking they held each other tightly, without moving more than to breathe. To both of them it felt as though he had come back from another world.