Janus (42 page)

She had seen the dirigible burn and had left the river bank, but been unable to get to the fire. A couple of kilometres from it, she had passed a stretcher party carrying two dark bundles toward a clearing to wait for a dirigible to pick them up. There were half a dozen militia with them, wearing gas masks and carrying pistols. They had warned her off the slopes. They told her that four of their own and three of the terrorists had been injured, as well as a couple from the crew of the dirigible. Three were critical but most of them were expected to live. She had pried out descriptions from them and convinced herself that Grebbel had not been among the casualties. Then the dawn winds had come.

Sometime later she had come across the stream. She had stooped to drink, and had been unable to move away.

She could hear the searchers now, working through the undergrowth again now that the winds were dying. So they hadn’t caught him yet.

A dirigible was floating over the forests near the crash. It must have just arrived as soon as the winds quieted enough, and picked up the casualties. Stiffly she got to her feet.

Walking at random, she found her grasp on the present slipping again. She was on vacation with her parents the year before high school; she was walking with the rest of the nature class through the woods of Stanley Park; she was going over the second draft of her final year composition project, when Dr. Miller stopped the recording and pointed to the score on the screen. “Parallel fifths again.” He shook his finger at her. “Three hundred years ago, we’d have failed you on the spot, young woman. But fortunately times have changed, and you at least have something to say. You should allow your instincts more freedom. Pretend you’re writing for a real chorus.” She was with Leon, on her twenty-fourth birthday, singing a snatch of melody, and conducting with a dog rose she had plucked, singing for joy of him and the life within her. She was walking with Barbara, skipping across the stepping stones at the stream, both knowing they were going to make love.

She came back to the present, and found she was climbing toward the area where she and Grebbel had camped. Would he be trying to get there? He had hinted he had material hidden in the caves there. She remembered their descent through the caves, the dimness around their light, the resonant dark. Then she tried to look back, to find a point where things had gone beyond rescue, looking for a moment where a phrase or a look might have changed everything.

The trail of crushed vegetation and disturbed dead leaves jerked her back to where she was. It had leapt out at her before she was aware of it. Now that she tried to trace it, it was elusive—as though she had merely connected a few random traces in her mind. But she followed her imaginings down the slope for ten metres, and just as she was becoming convinced she really had invented it all, there was an unmistakable gouge in the loam. A little further on there was a single footprint. She guessed he had been favouring one leg and crawled much of the time. He did look to be heading for the ledge where they had camped, the entrance to the caves. So she would be able to catch up with him. Provided the others didn’t find him first.

But she lost the trail in a clearing. Shivering she wandered among the trees at the edge. Above her head a branch bore buds like bronze fingers. She reached up on tiptoe, and a drop of dew transferred itself to her fingertip, a tiny jewel of brilliance. The wind stirred, with the smell of smoke, and the new dirigible moved sluggishly along the valley. “They’re going to catch you,” she whispered. “Monster. There’s no hope for you.” She wanted to cry.

There was a sound behind her. A pile of dry leaves burst open and fell aside with a splintery crash. A figure crouched there, stretching a hand towards her.

“Water,” croaked Jon Grebbel. “Get me some water for Christ’s sake.”

She brought water from the stream in his empty ammunition pouch and he drank like a parched animal. She did not ask where the contents of the pouch had gone, but he must have seen the question in her. “I lost the gun,” he said. “Threw it away when the shells ran out. They’re looking for me now. For revenge, I suppose. Are you going to fetch them?”

“You know I can’t. God damn you, I wish I could.”

“All right then.”

“But you could give yourself up.”

“You think so? Now? You know what they’ll do to me if they get their hands on me—after they’ve finished taking revenge for what we did to them last night.”

“They’ll put you on trial, you’ll get a fair hearing.”

“And then they won’t even shoot me. They’ll put me back under that machine. If they don’t burn out my brain, I’ll be less than an animal.”

“No they won’t. They’re not allowed to do that.”

“I’m a medical problem now. And don’t forget that the head of the administration helped develop that machine and its uses. He wouldn’t let me out of its clutches. He wouldn’t waste another experimental subject.”

“No—he isn’t in charge. Not any more.” She told him what had happened the evening before, what she had found out about Dr. Henry. “He could get away with what he did to those women only because so much had to be secret here.”

“We could be together. It could still work.” She reached for his hand. “We could have more times like the picnic.”

He shook his head impatiently. “We can’t go back. I’m not what I was when I arrived here. I’m what I was back there, and I don’t have to pretend to be anything else. I’m not the person you met.”

“I’m not what I was then, either. Don’t you understand? Things have been coming back to me for days, but since last night, it’s been a flood. I feel I’m living a dream and all that’s real are my nightmares. We can’t go back, either of us—we have to go on.”

Another sound came through the air—a roar of engines. A large delta-winged aircraft appeared in the eastern mouth of the valley and followed the river. As they watched, it pulled up and seemed to hover, then put down landing gear and sank out of sight towards the landing field.

“Troop transport,” said Grebbel. “And using real fuel. No expense spared. They’ve probably brought investigators, the top brass. Maybe the experiment’s going to be reconsidered. Maybe its opponents have found some leverage.”

He looked through the trees at the river and the dam, and then at the dirigible floating further up the valley. He lowered his head. “I remembered something last night. Perhaps their meddling stirred things up that I’d lost since childhood. A nightmare perhaps. Something in the cellar, our cellar. It had been human, someone close to me—and now it was rotting into something obscene. That must have stayed with me, even though I didn’t know it, because when I was older and I found a stray cat in our garden, I took it down to the cellar. . . . I had to wash the blood off the wall before my parents came home. That was the first, long before the police station . . . if these are real memories.” He shook his head and stared at her, his voice suddenly desperate. “But if they are real, does it mean I had no choice at all? Because, if that’s the way it is, then it’s all been meaningless, life’s nothing but a sick joke.”

“Don’t think like that now,” she said. She had sat down beside him and rested her hand on his shoulder while he spoke.

“What else is there?” he asked bitterly.

She hugged her arms to her body and swallowed. “I murdered my child,” she said.

Slowly the air brightened. As he listened to her and the pain in her voice, he watched the searchers working their way nearer. He eyed the dirigible, estimating the range, the allowance for wind and elevation. His hand clenched on an invisible gun butt and quivered.

Elinda finished speaking.

“They had no right to take that from you,” he said.

“And they tied my tubes for it. And left me to believe that was what I’d chosen.”

He put his hand to her chin and lifted her head. “I lost my gun, but I’ve still got one bargaining chip.” He pulled out the grey trigger box. “We mined the dam. This is a trigger. If they start to play rough, I’ll use it.”

“Oh, Christ, no more.”

“What should I do then? Hand it over and promise to be a good boy?”

“Yes! Yes. A fresh start. A promise of good faith. To show that you’re different.”

“Different? Am I?” He looked at her lowered head, at the red light on the ice fields, then back at her hair. “Yes, I’m different.” He smiled to himself. “I’m the one they used to ask for—there wasn’t a man or a woman I couldn’t break. Who is this, sitting here waiting for them to come and finish their work? What am I doing here with you?” His voice rose. “It’s what they put in me, spewing its thoughts from my mouth, pushing me out of my own mind.”

The fluttering of the dirigible’s airscrews came down the wind.

“It’s too late for that. We have to do something.” She stood up. “I’m going to wave. It’ll look better if we attract their attention before they find us.”

“I can’t stop you, can I?”

The dirigible altered course towards them.

It hovered above the clearing. In the doorways, men wearing dark sniping goggles trained automatic weapons. An amplified voice blared. “Put your hands behind your heads and wait at the edge of the clearing. Don’t move.”

The dirigible sank until it was below the upper branches. A ladder dropped and three men scrambled down—two with assault rifles and an officer with a holstered pistol.

“We’ve spent all night and all morning looking for you,” the officer said to Grebbel. “You’ve caused all the grief you’re going to cause. Now it’s our turn.”

“I’m hearing every word you say,” Elinda said loudly. “And I’m not leaving him until I’m sure he’ll be safe.”

“So you think. We have a say in that too.” He gestured at Grebbel. “You—up the ladder.”

Grebbel muttered and limped forward.

The officer grabbed his shoulder, tried to swing Grebbel round to face him. “What? What did you say?”

“I said, I’ve roasted better than you over a fire.”

The officer’s head jerked, and one of the guard swung his rifle butt into Grebbel’s kidneys. “Murderers need to be taught about civil tongues. We just lost some good friends because of you.”

Grebbel had fallen to his knees. Slowly he pushed himself upright. He gasped into the office’s face. “Amateur. Pathetic, piss-licking amateur.”

The guard’s rifle went back again, and Elinda grabbed for his arm. The other guard caught her by the throat and yanked her away. She stumbled and fell, and glimpsed the man tensing his leg for a kick. Grebbel’s voice stopped them all.

“Listen to me. I can save us all a lot of trouble. Or I can make the sort of mess you’ll spend the rest of your career explaining away.” He was holding up the detonator box. He thumbed a button twice quickly, then held it down. “You can guess what this is. There’s a few kilos of azoplas at the other end. If you want to find out exactly where, just keep pushing us around. Now we’ll all get into your chariot and fly down to the field, and then we’ll talk. Until then, this is staying right here in my hand, and nobody had better get any other ideas about it. I suppose from what I’ve seen of you so far, you’ll need to be told that this button I’m pressing is a deadman switch and there’s an independent timer at the other end. And you’d better give us some blankets. I wouldn’t want to lose control of my fingers from hypothermia.”

The officer glared at him and stiffened his shoulders, then gestured towards the ladder.

“Leave the door open,” Grebbel said pleasantly when they were all aboard. “I’ll sit by the fresh air. There isn’t enough metal in these walls to block the detonation signal, but I wouldn’t want anyone to miscalculate on that and take unnecessary risks.”

“You’re enjoying this,” she hissed at him, pulling a blanket around her.

“Of course. That’s what I’ve been telling you. . . . Can you stay out of those updrafts? We’d like a smooth ride down here. The bumps make my hands itch.” Then he looked at her again, and grew quiet.