Janus (37 page)

“I—don’t know. I don’t think I’ve heard it before.” Until he spoke, she had been too intent on trying to follow his words to be aware of the sounds building in the background.

“Ah, I didn’t ask if you recognised it. But your body seems to know it—your hands do. It’s shifting between 5:4, an uncommon rhythm, and 2:4, and you’re following it perfectly. I noticed the first time we met in the bar, you seemed to have hidden talents. Isn’t it odd, the things people do without realising they’re doing them—not to mention the motives they have and never recognise? Don’t you find that?”

“I hadn’t thought about it much, I’m afraid,” she muttered. This was getting more complicated than she had expected. “My friend—”

“Oh, but you should think about it, both of you. Look for the little mental quirks you can’t explain. That’s the way to ensnare those elusive memories: go on with your business as though you hadn’t noticed a forgotten thought was peeking out. Just keep it in the corner of you eye until you can tell it’s come too far to get back-then turn and seize it.” At the last phrase, as if to demonstrate, he reached out and took her by the wrist.

She flinched, but converted the reaction to a stifled giggle. His fingers were large and soft, but their grip was unpleasantly strong. “I must try that—I’ll tell my friend too. That’s your advice, is it?”

“That depends on what you and your friend really want. Won’t you tell me her name, by the way? I like to know whom I am helping. Tell me more about yourself, too.”

“You’re going to help us, then”

“Of course I’ll do my miserable best. But you still haven’t fulfilled your part of the bargain. It’s necessary, as well as desirable, that I know more about the people I’m dealing with. But I’ll let you think about that while I look for some refreshments.”

He rolled out of his cushion and went to a wooden cabinet in the corner from which he produced glasses and bottles. She tried to watch what he was mixing, but the kaleidoscopic shifts of the hologram before her kept drawing her gaze into it. Every time her attention wandered from him, the music tugged at her mind, simultaneously familiar and elusive.

“Here we are.” A tall glass beaded with condensation was put into her hand. She sniffed at it, sipped. The drink soothed her, then burned deep. She sipped again, then took a swallow. A lightness began to spread through her.

“Now,” he said, “why don’t you tell me more about yourself and what you want.”

She appalled herself by starting to cry.

“Ah,” he murmured, and stroked her shoulders. “That’s it now. Let it come out, let it flow. Tell me what you need.”

She shook her head and hid her face in her hands, in fear of what might escape her lips if she tried to speak.

“Tell me,” he repeated, holding her now. “I can’t help if you won’t tell me what’s wrong. Why did you think you had to invent a friend as an excuse to come to me? Did you think I’d laugh at you or turn you away?”

“I don’t know—I was scared.”

“But not more afraid than you are now. And why did you pretend to be something you’re not? You’re too bright to think I’d believe that little charade. Did you imagine I’m one of those who are only attracted to intellectual midgets?”

Miserably she nodded, wondering how long any of her pretences would last.

“But now you know better, don’t you? Now you can trust me.” She nodded again, and he asked. “Then why are you still afraid?”

“I don’t know,” she cried. “The dreams—” And when she said it, she found it was in some sense true.

“Then we’d better look at them, hadn’t we? Try to relax and keep watching the images.” He took up the control box and moved to her side, where she could barely see him if she watched the images on the wall; but she sensed he was watching her face intently.

“What was in that drink?” she mumbled.

“A mild relaxant, to make you more in touch with your feelings. Nothing I wouldn’t take myself. Now lean back and relax. I’m going to adjust the aural stimuli in a moment. . . .”

It was a black midnight when she found her way home. The evening had been harrowing and fruitless. Henry had managed to turn her into a puppet with all its strings cut. She could no more have turned the scene to her advantage than she could have shouted down a mob. She wondered what he had got out of it; the serious pass she had been prepared for had never materialised. Maybe he just got off on playing therapist-confessor to young women in his own parlour. Or maybe he was letting her build up a debt he would collect later; she had agreed to return the following evening.

She took out the recorder she had carried with her, and tried replaying the talk with Henry. After a few sentences, it became unbearable. She stopped the playback and erased the whole record.

She slept for a while, but then woke, and knew she would lie awake until morning unless she managed to understand what had happened to her and decided what she was going to do about it.

He had found a route to her deepest fears. That much was clear—she had been terrified. But also, when she tried now to understand where the fear came from, she found no focus for it, only grief and pride in something she could not identify, and inexplicable guilt.

She recalled some of the illusory images he had conjured before her: waves like the sluggish ripples on stale brown water, and like the intertwining voices of the music that had accompanied it. . . . Why had she thought of that now? She was trying to distract herself when there were things she had to face. Like how she was going to be able to confront Dr. Henry if she did convict him in her own mind. Like what he had stirred up in her and how. Like what those amorphous images and sounds seemed to mean to her. Like guilt.

And part of the answer was obvious, and she had been skirting it for hours. Somehow, Henry had been knocking on that walled-up room when her past was hidden, and the dry bones were stirring.

Yes, she thought, that explained the terror. That explained the terror all right. She lay under the dark ceiling with her sweat soaking into the sheets and too exhausted to cry. Desperately, she tried to plan.

As he hurried to the clinic, Larsen was remembering. Not the snow, the mountains and the narrow waters that were the traditional emblems of his home, but the sights and sounds he had grown up among—the squalid rows of lime-washed huts, their roofs dripping icicles, mongrels fighting for scraps in the frozen slush between them. Here around him was the mythical country of his childhood, the vast depths of sky, the snow-peaked grandeur, and bedecked with glowing creatures from a dream.

He almost paused to look around at the play of the aurora and the living lights among the trees. But that would just have been to torment himself with what might have been. The worm was in the apple, the snake was in the garden, and had always been, even before one of the children had named him, and he had gone to public trial. So now he hurried, head lowered and hands in pockets, driven more by the fear of failing his precarious ideals than by a rational concern that he might be watched. At the entrance, Sidney Tallis at the desk raised his eyes as Larsen went past, but said nothing. He was committed; if Tallis was Grebbel’s now, Larsen had put his head in the trap.

In the corner of the analytical lab, he sat at the main terminal. Schneider was at a meeting of the safety committee. Osmon was off duty. If he came back, Larsen would say he had to do some groundwork for a batch of memory restorations, test out some new parameter values for the machine. He had rehearsed the speech in his head until he was almost sure he could make it sound convincing. Anyone else on staff who turned up could be given some doubletalk about his ongoing research project with Schneider into local mutations and zoonoses.

He brought up the main directory and keyed in the password for the medical databases. As long as no one looked at the screen and asked how he had got access to that dataset . . . He pulled out the file he had created with the list of names and identification codes, their backgrounds and prognoses. He could print out a copy here, while he was sure the information was intact. No—there was too much risk of being interrupted. He spent two or three nerve-wracking minutes copying the file to the open medical bulletin board, and from there to the Settlement datanet, and then hiding his tracks.

With the screen clear again, he went over his next steps. Print out the list and get a copy, or the file itself, into the hands of Security. The hard copy would be best; he wasn’t sure he could feed a dataset into the Security files without leaving a trail. But first he had to know whom he could trust.

He switched off and stood up, wiping his palms on his thighs. From the doorway Tallis was eyeing him curiously.

“Anything wrong?” Tallis asked. “Find something you didn’t expect?”

“No—no. Maybe I’m coming down with something. Virus, it could be. They must mutate here the way they did back on Earth, I suppose. . . . I was just trying out some new parameters for the machine.”

“You expect to be using it again soon, then?”

“Yes, I don’t see why not. Do you?”

“I’d be careful. Security’s tighter these days—and you can’t be sure of who your friends are.”

“Yes,” Larsen said. “It’s bad when you cannot trust the ones you must work with. A society that’s built on trust can get along without most laws; without trust, all the law books in the world won’t save it.”

“I’m sure you’re right. People don’t like to think they’re being betrayed. They get nasty sometimes, very nasty.” Tallis eyed him coolly. “It’s not always safe at nights now. I’d be cautious about running unnecessary errands if I were you.”

“I intend to be very careful,” Larsen said tightly. “Just a few pieces of business to finish off, just one or two, that’s all.” The words dried up in his throat.

“Right. Be careful how you go, then.”

“I shall. Very careful. Yes.”

Grebbel awoke in the dark. With the blinds drawn, he put on the lights and examined his previous night’s work spread out on the table. There were two units in grey boxes, each small enough to fit in his hand. He checked for loose wires, then fitted the covers on the boxes. He picked up the box that had a round button on the top and walked across the room with it. He depressed the button twice quickly, then held it down with his thumb.

After ten seconds he lifted his thumb. From the unit on the table came a faint click, and a spark leapt between two contacts. Grebbel nodded and folded the two boxes separately in bubble-wrap and wrapped them with his lunch.

He left his room and walked out into the cold dark. Now he sensed that the net he had woven for himself was constricting. He thought of the sled leaping down the slope. The exhilaration came with the danger, when you were committed and could only hope to ride out what you had started.
Then
you were alive—then you knew what it was to be human. And at the end you could rip off the mask and feel the air icy clean on your face.

Would they take him as the head of Security? He thought he could make a good enough case, even without the azoplas and the hostages. But that was down at the bottom of the slope, and the ride had hardly begun.

Osmon met him beside the trucks.

“How quickly can you be ready to move?” Grebbel asked.

“You’ve decided, then?”

“Yes.” The sled was just starting to slide. But every instant, the momentum grew. One more push, and there would be no going back, for any of them. “They’ll stumble on something of ours soon enough. We can’t sit back and wait for them. Some of the azoplas charges are made up, and I know the dirigible schedules. How soon?”

“As soon as we can contact everyone, but—”

“That’s good enough. Today, then.” He handed Osmon the wrapped unit with the spark contacts. “I’ll give you the detonator circuit back. I tested it with the trigger this morning. You did a good job. I’m afraid I’m too likely to be watched, so get Joe to install it with the charge.”