Janus (3 page)

“Does that mean I’ve gotta go tying plastic roses on all the pot plants in the Greenhouse again?” Christopher asked.

Larsen eyed him. “One day, you will say something of the kind that I will take seriously, and you’ll spend the rest of your days on top of a firewatch tower. You can read the details later. Now,” he continued, “perhaps we should get on with more current business. I’d like to think about some more experiments on germinating seed in the local soil.”

They discussed possible experimental protocols until noon and then broke for lunch. Elinda had not brought anything to eat and picked up her coat to walk to the cafeteria. Then she stopped and asked Chris if he had seen the leaflets on the breakfast table that morning.

He looked up from unwrapping sandwiches. “Didn’t drop in there today.” He looked at the leaflet she handed him. “But you know the talk—we’re the suicide squad sent here to test for hostile aliens, or we’re an experiment in adapting to hydroponic food, or in mind control—that sort of thing.”

“And you just laugh this off the same way?”

“What else? Am I supposed to sit here waiting for one of you to creep up and smash a video monitor over my skull?”

Elinda nodded at Larsen, who was listening with interest. “You’re saying just what he said.”

Chris shrugged expansively. “Had to happen sooner or later.”

Outside, the air was colder. She walked briskly towards the cafeteria. The woods on the lower slopes shimmered with the ghost lights of predator and prey. Below her, two trucks were transferring gravel to the end of the growing dam. Nearer, a couple in a coracle were out on the fish farm with a flare and a scoop net—someone would be getting live protein on the menu this evening. Another couple, with three children in faded red and green parkas, were at the far edge of the landing field, under the lights, trying to get a box kite into the air. Everyone else seemed to be at lunch.

Barbara had probably come back from her adventure and was only concerned with catching up on her work in the lab. Judging from previous occasions, questions would not be welcome, but sooner or later they’d have to have it out. That meant breaking through the silence, and another fight. Or maybe the whole thing was over for good. Maybe it had been for weeks. Elinda thought about that, and found she could not decide what she felt.

Nothing was certain here, nothing had clear meaning. It was like the crops in the Greenhouse, flourishing but artificially rooted in a few centimetres of sand. She wondered again about going for more memory treatments. With Carlo. Yeah, sure—who knew what they might learn together if she wasn’t careful? But, in fact, hadn’t she given up too easily? She thought back to those sessions in her first weeks there, and how depressed she had been after them, so that Barbara had talked her out of continuing. Well, she was better adjusted now, wasn’t she? Was that why half the time she still referred to Barbara as her roommate?

In the cafeteria neither Carlo nor Barbara was to be seen.

A group of space jockeys in the silvery coveralls with the comic-book shoulder patches were sitting at one of the tables against the far wall. She spotted the dirigible flight-crew two tables over; they were reading something and passing it from one to another, and she guessed it was one of the leaflets. A short man in olive green went over to the table and said something quiet and emphatic to the aircrew, then came away with the sheet of paper, folding it and slipping it into an inside pocket.

“Excuse me.”

Someone was edging past her in the queue, heading for the door. She stepped to one side, then saw who it was. “Jessamyn.” Barbara’s ex. There had been a strained cordiality between them since Elinda and Barbara had moved in together. Elinda swallowed a temptation to ask her if she knew where Barbara might be. But Jessamyn looked back at the man who had taken the leaflet, then at her, and whispered, “What did she tell you?”

Confused, Elinda shook her head.

“Nothing? You don’t know what she found? Shit.” She was gone before Elinda could start to frame a question.

Elinda found a table near the window. Sitting there were a group of hydroelectric engineers she knew slightly. They were turning to talk to the dirigible crew at the next table, but when she sat down, one of them asked her if she had seen the leaflets everyone was talking about.

She said she had.

“They
were
passed around, then,” the other woman said. “Someone whisked them away so fast, you’d think they wanted to create paranoia. It’s probably some crank’s idea of a joke of course, but it’s not funny. Some of us brought kids here to get away from that sort of thing. If you lived in Chicago during the last fifteen years—” She broke off as her neighbour elbowed her, not very subtly.

“It’s all right,” Elinda said. “There’s always the chance something’ll strike a chord.”

“That wasn’t—” the woman began, and stopped short. “Anyway, it’s probably too much to hope we’ll find out who did it, but if anything like this happens again, some of us are going to want a full investigation.”

“You’re assuming there’s nothing to the story?” Elinda asked.

“Well—naturally. You have to, don’t you? We’re all in this together here. The danger is that someone’ll set us against each other. I’ve seen it happen.”

Elinda sensed that the other was wanting to bite her tongue again. “So tell me about living in Chicago,” she said. “Really.”

Listening while she ate, Elinda as usual found it difficult to imagine a place like the one being described. The words were familiar—bus, freeway, high-rise, elevator, rush hour, museum, phone—and she knew what images they represented, but they were no more tangible to her than the concepts labelled
angel, dragon, destiny
or
salvation
.

At the end of the meal, she caught sight of the new arrival again, lining up for the last of the lunch menu. He wore a dark grey sweater, tight around the shoulders, and looked tense, probably aware that half the cafeteria would be looking him over. He’d missed the regular delivery, that was the trouble, or he’d be one of a group, getting proper orientation. Hard eyes, she decided. He might have a temper.

She returned to work, and the afternoon passed. She managed to accomplish most of the things she was supposed to do.

On her way home, two hours later than usual, she passed the path where she had noticed the footprints in the mud that morning, but she didn’t have the energy to follow them. If Barbara wanted to run around with her old flames, it wasn’t up to her to snoop, was it? Was it?

And besides, when she got in, Barbara would be there, with the vegetables peeled for supper.

The bungalow was dark inside, and empty. As she stood in the hallway, with the door shut at her back and the living room in shadow, the stillness was so intense she imagined she could hear the stream in the woods nearby. She punched the kitchen lights on, slumped into one of the hard chairs beside the window and pulled pita bread from the bin. It tasted like cardboard to her now, but she filled her mouth and chewed and swallowed, and bit more off, until some of the emptiness inside her was filled.

Her eyes ached. In her ears was a memory of lapping water. But now, more definite memories were crowding in on her, of long frozen silences in these rooms, and screaming rages. Carefully she unlocked her fingers from each other and exhaled in a long ragged sigh. “God damn it,” she whispered, “you’re not going to make me miserable. When I find you you’d better have something to say for yourself.”

Under a haze of arc lighting, the river swirled and foamed, muttered and roared. The man whose name was Jon Grebbel stared down at it from the road along the bank and tried to make sense of what he was being told. To his right, fifty metres downstream, a truck loaded with gravel inched out along a causeway that cut into the river and joined onto a metal bridge that spanned the rest of the distance to the far bank.

“One-point-five gigawatts of hydroelectric power, Mr. Grebbel,” the tall grey man was saying, “that’s our goal when the dam is fully operational. Enough to fuel the next generation of space probes exploring this system. Oxygen and hydrogen—until we strike oil, they’re still the simplest and the cheapest fuels this side of the Knot. At the moment, of course, with the dam still under construction, we produce just about enough power for our own needs and a few launches a year.”

Grebbel nodded and said nothing, turned his back to the arc lamps as the taller man moved along the path. In front of him at the top of a short slope stretched the landing field, with its control tower and mooring pylon. Black-furred slopes loomed above the field; a few greenish lights drifted and blinked. Downstream, beyond the dam, was a cluster of low buildings and above them, level with the landing field, was a huge low structure of transparent panes.

Higher up, slabs of white mountainside reared up into the moonlight and ended in fangs that cut into the sky. And above them, a great whorl of cloud, silver-edged where the moonlight shot through it, opened out, as though to suck the black sky down upon them. He could feel the funnel turning, pulling, although when he stared at any part of it, he could see no motion. Below its southern rim, spaced above the peaks on the far side of the river, two ivory moons swam in a copper-tinged haze, one gibbous, one almost full, like the stare of two unmatched eyes.

He shivered, and his mind slipped back to the cabin in the dirigible—coming out of a coma alone in a darkened room, finding himself strapped to a bed.

Get these fucking things off me! Who do you think I am?
Then quiet voices:
How much do you remember? Can you remember your name?
Electric light. Hands freeing his wrists. Trying to sit up, staring at the pale walls, the careful, expressionless faces.

And the scars on his arm . . .

He turned back towards the river, trying to concentrate on the words he was hearing.

Henry, that was the man’s name, Something Henry. He would have to make a point of memorising names. He wondered if he’d always had trouble with that, or if this was another part of the effect of coming through the Knot. The other man walking close beside him, looking unobtrusively guardian-like, he was Carlo somebody. Grebbel didn’t think he’d heard the second name.

“You can see the coffer dam,” Henry said. “We use it to hold back the water while we work on the main structure. Part of the flow is diverted through the sluiceways in the far wall of the valley; in there it drives the turbines. You can see a smaller set on this side too. The rest of the water finds its way under the bridge there.” The metal-frame bridge strung with arc lights linked the far end of the main dam to an opening in the wall at the far side of the river. “When the new dam is ready, we’ll be increasing the flow through the sluiceways, of course, and using a bigger set of turbines—they’re being installed at the moment. By then, a lot of what you see will be under water.”

From the way Henry was throwing around the word “we,” Grebbel guessed he was a senior bureaucrat who never got any closer to the actual construction site than he was now.

But when had this mystery called Jon Grebbel learned to think such thoughts? He looked around, tried to connect what he could see with what he had been told. A long, narrow valley, steep as a knife cut on its southern side, the river close to its estuary here. Looking upstream, he would be facing east, most of the settlement on the slopes to his left. The hidden source of the river would be high in the mountains there; and beyond them, the salt flats where the shuttle must have landed.

You took the shuttle to Earth orbit,
one of the voices had told him;
then the transfer out to the Knot. Is anything coming back now?

Several hundred metres away, floodlights on the landing field still lit the dirigible that had brought him. It had been winched to the ground, and two men were working on one of the motors. The cabin was an elongated grey box slung underneath. Enough room for a couple of dozen men maybe, or—what?—five or ten tonnes of cargo?

“Well,” said Henry. “As you seem to be one of the unfortunate thirty percent, let’s get along to the clinic so we can get started on your memory.”