Janus (5 page)

Grebbel stared at the jagged moonlit skyline. “Too far for an afternoon walk.”

“That’s true. You can go for a walk in the wood, though. There are animals—you can see the imagery—but they tend to avoid us; we probably smell weird to them. Just try and stay on the main paths. But you’ve only just got here. You can’t be wanting to get on a shuttle already.”

“No—I just remembered. I was a plane spotter when I was a kid.”

“Then I’m afraid you’ll just have to make do with the blimps here. Fortunately, the atmosphere’s deep enough for them to get above the peaks and the turbulence. They’re over every day or so when the winds allow, and there are three different models. What else have you remembered?”

“I think I had a pet when I was a kid. Dog, maybe.” Grebbel paused. “I’ve got a picture of shaggy hair and something rolling on the ground. Maybe something happened to it. Something whining and puking all the time. I don’t know. If it was our dog, maybe it got hit by a car or something, and we got rid of it.”

“Anything else? Can you remember where you were when you had the dog?”

Grebbel thought. “Red bricks, maybe. Concrete steps. A front lawn with a curved path—a gate and a low hedge.”

“What was the number?” Carlo asked quietly. “Or the name of the street?”

“I’m trying to remember. The front door . . . all wood, painted green, but I can’t see the number. And the street name was at the corner—it was out of sight because the road curved.”

“That’s quite good,” Carlo said. “It looks promising. I’d say we’ve brought up an individual memory, of one particular occasion, but without enough detail yet to tell what the occasion was. Often it’s nothing special—just whatever happened to be triggered by the therapy this time round and was easily recovered. The fact that it seems to have no strong emotional associations for you probably means the memory is just whatever we managed to catch in the net. Your visual memories are strongest at the moment, which is why you had to look for things like the number of your house. Later, that may turn up on its own.”

“Don’t you have that sort of information on my file?”

“We have some, of course, but nowhere near enough detail to replace what you’ve lost. And we prefer not to tell you things like that, because then you’d start relying on our files, instead of unearthing the truth by yourself.”

Carlo stopped and faced Grebbel. “What you find for yourself is yours,” he said, “and you’ll know you can trust it. But what happens if you’ve been relying on our files and someone’s confused you with Juan Grable, the taxi driver in Buenos Aires?” They walked on. “Let’s try a bit more. Can you see the inside of your house? Is there anyone there—your family, neighbours, some friends?”

“It’s too hazy,” Grebbel said. “It keeps slipping away. But there’s a white room somewhere. Brick walls whitewashed. And it’s quite dim. Just one light bulb up in the ceiling, and I can’t see a window. There’s a stain on the wall.”

“Well, that’s quite detailed, but it’s hard to see how it fits with the other memory. Maybe we should let things take their course for a bit longer.” Carlo looked at his watch. “I’d better show you where you’ll be staying, and then I’ll have to let you explore by yourself for a while. We’re short-staffed at the clinic today; one of our technicians hasn’t come in. We turn left here.”

They came to another long single-storey building of the usual log-and-frame construction. The roof was angled to the south. “Too much like a motel, I’m afraid, despite the photocells on the roof,” Carlo said, heading for the entrance to one of the units. “If you remember such things. But you’re stuck with it for the moment.” He unlocked the door, fumbled with a light switch.

“Good, they remembered to bring your belongings over. I’ll leave you to unpack in a minute, but I’d better give you a quick rundown first. Two main rooms. The whole block’s insulated—the local timber’s quite good in itself too—so you shouldn’t need much power. There’s a set of storage cells for the whole building under the roof. You can use the lights and so on while you’re in here, but turn them off when you go out, and if you start getting a brown-out, switch everything off, or you’ll be running the battery below the recommended level, and no one’ll thank you if it has to be replaced. Hot water’s partly solar, partly from a wood furnace. Here’s the key. I think everything else is fairly obvious. You can find your way to the cafeteria, or the clinic if you need to?”

Grebbel nodded.

“First thing this afternoon, you should report to the Administration building, behind the cafeteria—there’s a map on the desk there—to sort out your work detail. They’ll be expecting you, and they’re on part-time from other duties, so don’t upset their schedule by forgetting. I think that’s about it for now. When you’re through there, your time’s your own for the rest of the day. So make yourself comfortable, and we’ll see you at the clinic tomorrow at nine.”

Grebbel watched him walk away, then shut the door and leaned back against it. Closing his eyes, he drew in a long breath. He straightened his fingers one by one, eased his head from side to side, worked his shoulders loose, and slowly exhaled.

The room was sparsely furnished: white ceiling, three wooden shelves mounted on the far wall, an unvarnished wooden table under the window. A flashlight was plugged into a recharger beside the door. Two wooden-frame armchairs with foam cushions; cream-coloured plasterboard walls, and a plank floor. In the closet was another anorak and set of heavy thermal work pants like the ones he had been given in the blimp. There was a door to the bedroom, another to the bathroom, and an alcove with a sink and microwave oven. A scuffed blue suitcase and a large duffel bag had been left just inside the front door. Grebbel heaved the bag over his shoulder and carried it into the bedroom. Then he put the suitcase on the table in the living room, fumbled a key from his pockets, and snapped the lid up.

He pulled out two folded shirts and a pair of slacks, put them on the table, and picked up a thick plastic folder that had been underneath. He weighed it in his hands, then sat down. Unopened, it lay on the table, his hands flat on either side of it. He swallowed, and carefully lifted the cover.

A lot of e-mail printouts, a few letters on white airmail paper, on lined, three-hole loose-leaf sheets; spidery in blue ink, or black squarish italics. A graduation certificate from technical college, an old driving licence, with an earnest, youthful face he could just bring himself to recognise. A passport with a holo-portrait that looked barely more familiar.

A small e-photo album.

He moistened his lips before pulling it towards him and stepping down its menu.

Bright faces, party crowds, portraits of two or three under trees, in thick-carpeted living rooms with mahogany furniture, on the steps of a beige stone building. Faces. Grinning, polite, severe, friendly, laughter-distorted, anonymous faces.

His jaw clenched. When he tilted the album towards him, he caught sight of the scars on his wrist, and stopped. He closed his eyes and did not breathe.

His hand went up to sweep the table clear.

He shuddered and brought it down slowly. His breath came out in a ragged sigh.

With fingers that shook, he squared the album parallel to the corner of the table, stacked the letters and other papers back in the folder beside it, and pushed himself to his feet.

Methodically he took his clothing out of the bags, one item at a time, carried each with his head lowered, and placed it in the cupboard. When he had finished, he stood motionless in the same hunched position, and his breathing grew harsh. He straightened up then and fastened his coat and went out, quietly pulling the door shut behind him.

Hands jammed in pockets, he walked slowly in the midday darkness, listening to the gravel under his boots, concentrating on the sights and sounds that reached him, the half-familiar tang of the alien forests—trying not to think. Something whistled in the trees.

At one point a man and woman passed him from the opposite direction, talking quietly together. Grebbel thought he heard the man say, “Who knows what he was like back then?” and laugh. And he found he had swung round, his breath surging, his hands ready to seize and twist.

He checked himself and watched as the couple walked on, oblivious, the cold air pressing against his face like a steel mask.

Then his ears were filled with the sounds of his own body, breathing again, walking.

He stopped when another sound grew to dominate them, and found he was overlooking the site of the dam again. White water thundered before him under the lights. The earth seemed to shiver under his feet. He stared at the water that piled up, that churned and lathered and forced its way through the narrow sluiceways. Its frustrated urgency made his muscles tighten and quiver.

On the far bank a dump truck emerged from a lighted tunnel entrance with a load of rubble. That would be where they were preparing to install the new turbines. Upstream was the tangle of steel pipes and tanks that was the cryoplant. He turned away from the river and looked up the valley wall. Among partly cleared timber above the little estate where his building was, there was a cluster of lights that meant more housing. And upstream of that, a white thread of moonlit water came down from the upper slopes. It vanished into the woods, glittered here and there among the trees, and evidently joined the river somewhere beyond the landing field.

He found himself wondering what the little stream would look like from above, from beyond the upper row of buildings. He tried to picture the fall of the valley from that perspective, the dark forest on the slopes below, down to the sharp division made by one of the larger roads. . . .

A siren sounded on the worksite. The icy wind was forcing itself through his coat. He fumbled to close the top button and caught another glimpse of his scarred wrist as the siren sounded again and fell quiet.

Something jarred in his mind.

Up there—or on a slope like that—he seemed to see a large isolated building, and lights spilling across the snow. In this valley, it would be up near the source of the stream. If he were there, looking down that slope, standing where that imagined building had been, the—memory—might return.

He would have to climb the slope as far as he could.

But not yet. Later, when this darkness felt more like evening.

Obscurely satisfied, he started to turn away. And the rage he had carried from his room sprang up again. He seized a rock the size of his skull, swung it over his head in both hands and heaved it out into the river. Before it splashed he had snatched up cobbles and begun hurling them—throwing furiously with either hand, stone after stone, until his arms ached and his breath sobbed in his ears. And then, as suddenly as the fury had come, he was calm again. He breathed heavily and stared at the water.

In the cafeteria he ate something that was called a cheese sandwich, paid for with a plastic card he found in his shirt pocket, then remembered his appointment at the Administration building. That turned out to be a low prefabricated structure, like a half-cylinder on its side. He wondered if it was part of a shuttle fuel tank. He followed a handwritten sign to the labour coordination office. The door was ajar and inside were a man and a woman working at small computer keyboards. Grebbel rapped on the open door and introduced himself.

“Good afternoon,” said the woman, brushing back a lock of brown hair with one hand and feeling for a pencil among the pile of papers with the other. “Come on in. Mr. Grebbel, you said?” She copied something from the computer screen onto the corner of a yellow sheet of paper that had seemed to have no useable space left on it. “Just give me another moment and I’ll be right with you.” Her hands were rough and reddened, with grime under the nails. We’ve only got another hour and a half, Mike and I”—she nodded towards the balding moonfaced man, bent over his computer as though mesmerised by it—“then we’ve got to help with the potato harvest. Things do get a bit hectic at times.”

“I’m sure.”

“I’ve got your work detail here,” she said, still concentrating on the screen, “somewhere. Fourteen,” she muttered, “in Zone Three, and they wanted . . .” She groped with her left hand among a stack of folders, pulled one out and handed it to him, without apparently turning her eyes from the computer. “You can save time by looking over that profile and filling in where it asks for information. We’ve been short one body for three weeks now, and no replacement in sight. Not even you, though I bet you’d love to work here, wouldn’t you?” She paused briefly. “They’ll have to take eleven and like it.”

Grebbel found a pen on the corner of her desk and worked on the form. He was finishing when she finally turned from the keyboard and faced him.

“Let’s have a look,” she said, and ran her gaze over the page. “Ah, that’s close enough. If there’s anything wrong, they can always go and ask you, can’t they? Okay, here’s what we’ve got for you. In their wisdom, they’ve decided that the biggest priority is to get the dam finished for the celebrations. So any cases with doubtful qualifications—that’s you—are assigned to construction work. Ever remember driving a truck? They tell me it’s not hard to learn. Just shifting gravel from one point to another, nothing too complicated. Here’s a map. Here’s who you report to. Hmm, starting tomorrow. Not much time to find your way around, but I suppose we can’t all have cozy desk jobs. That okay? Any problems, drop in and see us again. The hours are on the board in the entrance.”