Janus (4 page)

From . . . Winnipeg. Manitoba,
he’d said.
I was—a technician. Yes. I learned blood-typing in college, and circuit theory and some calculus and— My father had brown eyes and a moustache—

Grebbel shivered in the morning chill. He’d have to learn to call this darkness morning, to accept whatever they decided was morning. Ninety-eight-point-something hours rotation period, they’d told him: at this season that meant nearly three days of unbroken darkness, while the temperature dropped and the winds howled overhead across the bowl of the mountains.

Janus—the god of doorways and auspicious beginnings, someone had explained.

Pink scars ran from the knuckles halfway to the elbow. He turned his wrist back and forth in the strap. Twice he opened his mouth to speak, and said nothing. He let his arm fall limp

“I guess I’m a celebrity now,” Grebbel said. “I suppose you don’t get that many new recruits, if you can afford to give me a red carpet treatment like this.”

There’s nothing else. I can’t remember anything else.

“To be honest,” Henry said. “I’m indulging myself a little. Since you arrived between the normal immigration flights, it was easy to make some special arrangements. And it so happened I had a new treatment algorithm worked out to help restore your memories. . . .”

“Dr. Henry was one of the originators of the therapy programme,” Carlo interjected. “They were reluctant to let him come to Janus.”

“Well, some of them were. Unfortunately, nowadays I spend two-thirds of my time being an administrator; it was the only way they let me come here. So any excuse I get to do more clinical work is welcome, and the opportunity to supervise my new algorithm was too good to miss. And then it’s always good to get to know one’s patients before starting therapy; so I decided to take on the job of tour guide and see what it felt like.”

Grebbel was beginning to wonder what was in store as therapy—and why was that making him apprehensive?—but Henry was reluctant to discuss that in advance.

“Someone else will show you where you’ll be living, after this session,” he continued. “You’ll probably find it a little spartan at first. A lot of our accommodation isn’t on the main power or water grids yet, but we have enough in the way of point sources—solar power, wood furnaces, and wells and streams and so on—to make things acceptable. Actually we’re a technological ragbag of absolute essentials, worn out leftovers and cut-price deals; we’ll probably strike you as a throwback to the dark ages—we still haven’t got a workable microwave link for a phone system. Something to do with auroral discharges in the upper atmosphere, they tell me. And you’ll find we’re going back to the paper age. Man in Hut Seven has got the techniques worked out pretty well. But the first thing is to see how many of your memories we can salvage before they fade any further. This is the clinic here.”

They had reached the entrance to a long, single-storey building faced with wide split logs. There was hardly anybody else around. Just a woman in a light blue parka watching them as she walked towards one of the larger buildings. The entrance lights above them seemed to bring down the dark like a black ceiling.

“The treatment wing’s to the left,” Carlo said. “The other way are the biology and pathology labs, for when we get time to do some research. You can scrape the mud off your boots here.”

The floor was concrete; the walls and ceiling were painted in high-gloss white. Carlo led the way, past the lobby with a reception desk, and down a short corridor. His footsteps reverberated in the enclosed space. At the end was a small room containing three wooden chairs and several racks of electronic equipment. Beside a shuttered window, shelves on the far wall carried rows of bottles and steel instruments. Grebbel hesitated, rubbing the scars on his wrist.

“You can hang your coat behind the door,” Carlo said. He tossed his own parka over a chair and sat beside a keyboard mounted in one of the racks. Dr. Henry folded his trench coat over the back of another chair, but remained standing where he could watch over Carlo’s shoulder as Carlo began turning switches on the electronics.

The dirigible was turning. He could hear the wind and the motors thrumming. He strode to the window of the cabin and reached towards the pane.

And was met by his own face and his scarred hand outthrust.

“You want to tell me what these machines do?” Grebbel said.

“I’m afraid a detailed explanation would take more time than we have,” Dr. Henry said. “But, briefly, we use a combination of electrical, chemical and sensory stimulation to restore activity in some of the brain’s networks that have suffered from the passage through the Knot. The state of mind you’ll experience is like a deep hypnotic trance, but we believe we’ve eliminated most of the suggestibility that made such states difficult to work with.”

He picked up a bowl apparently made of silver basketwork. “We’ll use the helmet to measure some of your brain waves, and also apply low-frequency oscillations to enhance responses in certain of the networks. The process relies heavily on feedback; so we have to calibrate your responses to certain stimuli before we start.”

Carlo asked Grebbel to sit in the third chair, a complex structure covered in black vinyl, with clamps and multicoloured wires emerging from the headrest and arms. Carlo taped electrodes to Grebbel’s wrist and neck, and then began adjusting the metal framework helmet to fit Grebbel’s head.

“Try to relax, Mr. Grebbel. You’re very tense. Open your hands and breathe deeply. There’ll be no pain—at most some slight discomfort. Let your jaw relax, stop clenching your teeth. Take slow, deep breaths. That’s better.”

Working behind him, Carlo made some more adjustments on the helmet. Grebbel’s scalp tingled as cold metal touched it, then seemed to go numb as his skin adjusted to the sensation. He saw that the scars on his wrist were bright pink. He tried to moisten his lips.

Now Carlo was in front of him again. “I’m going to give you a shot in a couple of minutes, a mild relaxant, and then we’ll be ready. First, though, I’m going to calibrate your responses.” He went and dimmed the ceiling light. “In a moment I’ll put a pattern on the oscilloscope screen there, and I want you to concentrate on it while I ask you some preliminary questions. Okay?”

Grebbel nodded.

Blue lines tangled and leapt on the screen. Carlo fitted earphones into Grebbel’s ears and spoke into a microphone. “I’ll use this to get better control over your sense inputs. Can you hear me all right?”

Grebbel nodded again.

“Right then. I’m going to ask you a series of questions, and I’d like you to answer them as quickly as you can, without stopping to think about what you’re going to say. Ready?”

Grebbel nodded.

“What are two and two?”

“Four.”

“What is your name?”

“Grebbel . . . Jon Grebbel.”

“A little faster if you can. Seven times four?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“What colour is grass?”

“Green.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-six. Thirty-six.”

“Your name?”

“Grebbel. Jon Grebbel. That’s all. Jon Grebbel.”

“What was your occupation? . . . Mr. Grebbel, can you hear me?”

“Technician. I was a laboratory technician.”

Carlo paused. “Mr. Grebbel, are you aware of anything causing you particular stress at the moment?”

Grebbel moistened his lips. “I don’t know.”

Carlo checked the electrodes on Grebbel’s wrists. Grebbel’s skin was white and sweating. The scars on his right arm were crimson.

Dr. Henry stepped forward and caught Carlo’s eye. The two of them muttered by the door for a minute. Then Carlo nodded and came back. “Sorry about that. I think we’ll go straight to the next stage now. I’ll give you the shot, and we’ll see how far we can get establishing a reference matrix for your memories.”

Grebbel’s sleeve was rolled up; a hypo-gun was pressed against his arm, and the flickering on the screen swelled to fill his mind.

“Here, you’ll be groggy for a few minutes,” Carlo said, “but then you’ll feel better.”

Grebbel took the brownish drink Carlo handed him and sipped: something fruit-based, warm and sweet.

Seeing Grebbel look around, Carlo grinned. “The Boss doctor? Back to work for him. We’re lucky, if that’s the word I want, to see him twice a month.”

Grebbel finished the drink and handed the glass to Carlo. As he did so, he caught sight of his wrist.

“What?” said Carlo. “I didn’t catch that.”

“Can I ask . . . ? You understand medicine, right? I mean . . . more than just this?”

“I’ve had some general background, yes.”

“These scars. On my arm. How old, would you say . . . ?”

Carlo frowned. “Depends. For someone your age, with hormone treatment, even deep cuts could heal to that stage in a couple of weeks. Otherwise . . . they could be, oh, anything up to six months old. Why? Have you remembered something?”

“Months.”

“Of that general order. Are you finding some associations? Don’t push it yet, you’re still coming round. If there is anything to be recovered at this stage, it’ll probably float into your mind on its own in the next hour or so. How’s your head now?”

“Bit better.”

“Okay, try standing up. Exercise usually helps; so as soon as you’re ready, I’ll show you the town and take you to where you’ll be living.”

Outside the clinic, they turned onto a gravel path that led up the valley side. They passed a cluster of large wooden buildings, built low to the ground and solid. “There’s a windstorm around sunrise and sunset almost every day,” Carlo said. “The atmosphere’s deep and a bit denser than you’re used to, though you probably won’t notice that unless you’re a singer. But when that cloud funnel breaks up, and the winds pour though the valley, it can get interesting here. Some people are concerned about tectonics as well; we’re probably clear of the worst faults, and the nearest active volcanoes are either inland or south of here, but the planning committee weren’t convinced that three-storey buildings were a good thing.”

Carlo pointed out the main street with the tavern at one end and, at the other, the auditorium, which doubled as council chamber and law court. Grebbel realised that what he had taken for an odd-looking greenish tower slightly north of the main street was actually one of the local trees, left standing to dominate the buildings around it.

“I’ll explain a bit more about what we do here, while you get your thoughts back together,” Carlo went on. “Then we’ll run an informal check on how your memories are coming. You won’t feel most of the benefit of each session for a day or two; so we’ll be doing some more formal checks when you come back in. Anyway: as you probably know, when they stumbled on the Knot back there, practically in Earth’s back yard, they didn’t know what it was at first or what to do with it. Then they found it led here, and they still didn’t know.

“So they sent the probes and did some exploring, and found they had a whole new solar system, at the very least, to play with, right next door—and all that implied.” Carlo paused for emphasis, evidently enjoying the chance to lecture. Grebbel felt he was expected to cue Carlo with another question. He said nothing.

Carlo hesitated but then continued brightly. “What did it imply?” he asked. “That was a hard one, too. Lots of fun for people interested in theories of planetary dynamics, or comparative geology, climatology, biology. . . . Maybe the results could save some of Earth’s ecology, maybe there would be some new pharmaceuticals from the research, but it would have to be a long-term venture. Eventually, with enough energy available here, it might become economical to ship produce, even fuel, back through the Knot. And that meant a decade or two spent on a resources survey of the system, to find fusion fuels. All things considered, a self-supporting colony seemed the goal to aim at. So here we are. All seven hundred of us.”

“At the dam,” Grebbel said finally.

“Right. Dr. Henry told you the plans. The explorers can use solar power for low-acceleration missions, but blast-off and major orbit changes still need high thrust, which still means oxy-hydrogen. At the same time, we provide a staging post for the survey of this particular world, and incidentally some normal-gravity R and R for our space-weary explorers. You’ll generally find at least one shift in the tavern.”

Grebbel walked on in silence, then asked, “Why are we so far from the shuttle base?”

“Geography, I’m afraid. Maybe history as well. The salt flats were one of the first areas explored, because they were a natural landing field for the shuttles, and the first supply dumps and parts depots were put there. This, on the other hand, is a lousy place to land a spaceship, but one of the best spots on this side of the continent to build a hydro plant, if you don’t want it falling into a crack between tectonic plates or buried in a lava flow. Besides which, if we ever figure out how to grow anything edible in this soil, this looks like the best place to do it climatically and geochemically. And, really, we’re not all that far from the landing field. It’s just the other side of the mountain range.”