Janus (35 page)

“But this is here, and any willing help is useful, isn’t it? So let’s get started, shall we. . . . I don’t mean to snap, I’m probably more uptight than you are, that’s all. I’m grateful to you, if that makes things any easier.”

They wheeled Barbara’s bed into the instrument room. She was sleeping fitfully, loosely penned under an elastic sheet. Carlo set up an IV drip beside the bed.

“What’s that?” Elinda asked. “I thought she was drugged to the eyeballs already. I want to reach through to her, remember?”

“I don’t think her conscious mind is going to be much use to you,” he said. “We’ve used this before. It seems to allow the unconscious some ease of expression. We’ll give you a light dose too, to help the contact.”

Barbara muttered and blinked as the needle was taped to her arm. Watching, Elinda felt a stab of guilt at reducing Barbara to an experimental subject. She slid onto the bed next to her and closed her eyes while Carlo finished his preparations.

Then came the connection of the headsets. The rigid plastic hood went over her face, plugs fitted into her ears, closing out sight and sound. “Hold still,” Carlo’s voice said in her ears. “I’m going to inject a mild muscle relaxant.” There was something cold and wet against the inside of her elbow, then a faint pricking. In the quiet dark she floated alone.

“I’m going to run some tests now,” Carlo’s voice said. “I’ll ask you some questions and monitor your brainwave patterns when you answer. It’ll help me adjust the impedances on some of the feedback circuitry. Later on, you can just think of the answers, but at first I want you to speak them out loud. Is your name George . . . ?”

For several minutes, she answered simple questions, some of them more than once, and then thought of sensations as Carlo asked her to. He muttered into the microphone occasionally as though he was having trouble adjusting his settings, but finally he was ready to make the link.

“I’m energising the transmission circuits now. You may feel a slight disorientation.” She did: it was like being on an unlit stage and having the curtain go up to uncover a darkened auditorium. “I’m going to flash a light on and off in front of Barbara’s face. Let me know when you see something.”

For an unmeasured pause, nothing happened. She felt like a creature of the ocean depths groping for sunlight, or a swimmer in the toils of a muddy canal. Then came a pale, moth-like glow, through which she could still sense the surrounding darkness. It faded before she remembered to call out. “There! Just then, I saw it!”

It flickered again. Strengthened. “Yes. It’s there, it’s coming clear!”

The ghost grew flesh. It shrank and focussed, drew near. Eyelids blinked across it. It was a small, blue-shaded angle lamp, and the wall of the instrument room was dimly visible beyond it.

“Good,” Carlo said. “Let me lock that in. Now I’m going to lift her arm. . . .”

There was a lot more. Tactile sensations, then hearing. For smell, he waved a bottle of acetic acid under Barbara’s nose; for taste, he touched her tongue with a swab dipped in saline solution. It was pedestrian and uncertain, Carlo admitted, but still the best way they knew to open up any contact.

“I’ve done all the fine-tuning I can,” he said at last. There’s not much more I can do to help. You’ll have to try to find her though her senses. Try to feel what she’s thinking, try to hear what she remembers.”

The drug had left Elinda lightheaded. Now she found herself feeling without touch, groping without limbs into a soft, resonant darkness.

She smelled tobacco smoke—as clear as moonlight breaking through clouds, and then gone. A moment later came a glut of sensations as if she had opened the door to a brilliantly lit room full of shouts of laughter and screaming and the hot pungency of sweat and woodsmoke, and then the door had been slammed before she could identify any faces.

Even as she was trying to sort out her impressions, larger, vaguer patterns began to form. They seemed to be some distance from her, and she pushed through the dark unspace toward them. She heard voices. At first she could not understand them, could tell only that there was at least one man and one woman, and they were shouting. She found herself listening for another sound, another different voice, and was both disturbed and relieved at its absence. Then the voices became quieter. She began to recognise isolated words, but their sense slipped away before she could link them together.

She wanted to see, to understand what was happening. But as she tried to move closer, the voices faded and were lost. She felt as if another door had been closed in her face.

Barb
, she thought into the emptiness.
Don’t shut me out. It’s me, it’s Lindy.

The darkness churned, and was still.

Barbara. Please let me in.

The world was shaken as by a great sob. Close by, or from the edge of existence, came the keening of a cold thin wind. She sensed black limbs swaying under icy stars. The night was full of the sound, mindless, tormented and insistent. Suddenly there was a white room with recessed ceiling lights and padded walls. The door was cushioned, too, with quilting where the handle should have been, and pads over the hinges. It was opening.

The room had not seemed dark, but as the door swung wider, an unbearable white light blazed in from outside, and the walls seemed to become dark mist. In the midst of the light, the angel entered.

The angel was dark only in comparison to the light that accompanied her. Her hair was yellow, her skin white, but she was tall and terrible in that room. She had the face of a holy inquisitor, living in an ecstasy of transcendence while performing horrors. “Filth,” said the angel. “You are a debased creature. You are an affront to decency, a wart on the face of existence. You deserve no better than to rot in here. But I have accepted the task of redeeming you, and I must do what I can.” The angel began to undress.

When she was naked, she came forward. Her eyes were cold and calculating, her hands like pale talons. “You’ll have to show me what to do,” she said.

The room vanished. Somewhere, far away in the dark, was the high keening sound; then it too faded and was gone. She was alone.

“That wasn’t me!” she cried aloud. “I’ve never seen you in a cell!”

But the angel’s last sentence had been hers. She remembered saying the words, the first night in Barbara’s old room. And behind the cruel exalted mask, the angel’s face had been hers, too. And the manner—?

She wanted to cry.

I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what you needed, what I was doing to you. Don’t shut me out now, please let me help you. Let me in, show me. . . .

She looked for light, and found none. She felt around for a doorway, but there was nothing. More urgently, she groped for anything that broke the silent stifling void.

She seemed to fall. And suddenly, the darkness thickened about her. It blocked her nose, forced itself into her throat. She began to choke, made frantic sweeping motions with her arms. She did not know whether she was soaring into the depths or diving toward the surface, but she sensed that what had happened so far was mere preliminaries, that the real revelation was about to appear before her.

She struck bottom.

The darkness crushed her down. She choked and struggled and tried to scream, and something opened beneath her, and again she fell.

She became aware of rough warmth—old bedsheets and a crumpled pillow. Stale, unventilated rooms, a leaky kerosene stove, diesel fumes from the bridge to the docks, and a chemical stink from the canal. There were always trucks on the bridge. She could feel the vibrations in the air, but there was no sound. There was no sound—but she could feel the abrasion of air in her throat when she breathed, and the pounding of the blood in her head.

She reached out under the sheets, her eyes still closed, wanting the feel of hard flesh, even the gritty stubbled cheek, rather than emptiness now. But there was nothing. She was faced with the day again, alone. Hopelessly she opened her eyes. The light through the blinds was brownish—the perpetual sodium lights of the dock road filtered through the smog over the canal. Her clock radio with the missing LEDs showed either 2:23 or 3:23. Still the middle of the night.

But she had to get up. Something had pulled her from sleep and was still pulling at her. Her hands were trying to sketch motions in the air; her lungs, her mouth were hinting at revelations to be taken out and studied—just as soon as she could get to that machine in the other room, just as soon as she could deal with what was pulling at her. Just as soon as she could stop it and get enough peace to listen to what her mind was offering her. But the silence choked everything.

It was the silence that had dragged her from her sleep again. It blocked her ears, it stuffed her throat until she wanted to gag. Even her eyes burned from it and ached to close. The silence had been keeping her awake for too many nights, choking off her work for weeks. Now it was making her get up and tend to it when she could feel the work finally throbbing for attention within her.

Push back the sheet and the heavy blanket. Cold wooden floor underfoot. Walking without sound. Measured breathing: in, two three four, hold, two three four, out, two three four. The door handle is loose, doesn’t rattle. Don’t look across the living room to the machine with its keyboard and headphones, not yet. The silence comes first. Into the other room. Turn on the light.

There it is—on its back, face screwed into scarlet wrinkles, its toothless mouth strained wide and drooling—each heave of its tiny lungs forcing out the silence. Silence that begins to split the brain like a wedge.

Beyond the open window is the grim and oily surface of the canal.

When Carlo finally lifted the helmet away, she was weeping uncontrollably.

“I pulled you out as fast as I could,” he said. “You were gone so long—”

“Her baby. She drowned her little girl in the canal.”

“You got that from the link?”

She nodded, choking. “Near the end. I couldn’t bear it after that.”

“I heard you. I’m sorry. . . .” He took her hand. She seemed not to notice, and after a moment he turned away and began fussing with the equipment, turning off switches, rolling up lengths of cable.

“Carlo, please get me out of here. I’m too weak to move.” She had begun to shiver. “I shouldn’t have done this.”

He turned off two more switches and came back to her. “That needle will wear off in a few minutes. I’ll help you into the one of the other rooms until then.”

“Yes. Thank you.” They reached the door, she leaning heavily on him. “Carlo, I’m sorry. I made you do this and it was all a waste. I didn’t learn what I wanted to know, and I found out things I shouldn’t have known. What’s worse, I’ve told you about them, when I had no right to.”

He helped her to a chair. “Don’t worry about that now.”

“I have to worry. If it isn’t my responsibility, whose is it?”

“It may not be anyone’s. I told you before we started, what you find with that technique may not be real.”

“Oh god, that was real.”

“It seemed real to you; there’s probably a real emotionally charged experience underlying whatever you found—but it doesn’t mean that what you found really happened. I don’t believe the link was working properly a lot of the time there. I was worried—something was happening but it didn’t look like the sort of communication we’ve seen before. But then, we’ve never tried it in these circumstances. You might have picked some random aberration out of the electronics, and built it into whatever you saw.”

“You mean it’s all been a big game of electronic Rorschach?” she said. “Putting my own interpretation on random data. You think I wanted to believe that of her?”

“I didn’t say that—”

“But it follows from what you did say. . . . And, god help me, it may be true, I think it’s true. She showed me how I’d used her: I’d turned to her here—
been
turned to her here, Carlo—when I really needed something else, and she knew it. Everything I’ve done for her since has been done from guilt. She made me realise that, and I hit back at her, by believing that about her.”

“When I hear a piece of self-analysis as facile as that, I always suspect it’s there to hide something else. I think you’re being too hard on yourself right now. I think the truth is somewhere else.”

“No, I think it’s true. I tried to get rid of that load of guilt by dumping it on her when she couldn’t fight back. No wonder I feel sick.”

“Well. We won’t settle that now. Where do you go from here?”

“That’s a good question, Carlo. I suppose I have to keep working on it the way I was before. I can’t see anything else to do.” She struggled to push herself to her feet. “I shouldn’t have made you do this. Now I’d better go home before I do any more damage.”