Janus (8 page)

“You’re early,” said the man at the desk. “Back home, we’d make you wait outside till we’d all decided lunch time was over, just to teach you humility, and by then it would be getting dark. But I guess your friend hasn’t got hungry enough to come back, and you’re a mite worried. Well, we’re getting the bulletins copied and there’s a notice on the datanet. . . .”

Elinda said, “If you don’t start getting a search party organised now, I’m going up there to find her myself.”

“Well, now.” He glanced at his computer screen. “I’ve got my orders, my priorities. . . . But, hell, it wouldn’t do a lot of harm if someone took a look round where you thought she’d gone. I can’t leave this desk right now, so I guess we’ll see if Charley feels like taking an extended coffee break. If you and she don’t find anything, we’ll see what we can do about the priorities.”

Through heavy clouds, the low sun lit green fans, bluish leaf blades, webs of silver that swayed overhead and flailed in slow motion as they opened to the air. Elinda and Charley, the security officer, reached the turnoff towards the stream and paused, buffeted by the winds. “I’m pretty sure she went that way,” Elinda said. “There were fresh tracks yesterday morning, and it was too early for anyone else who’d be likely to take that path.”

“You didn’t look?”

“Not all the way. It didn’t seem urgent at first, and then the tracks were fading. I went as far as the stream last night, but I couldn’t find anything.”

“The tracks will be worse now,” Charley said. “The sooner we start looking, the better.”

Between patches of glistening, grimy snow, the mud was still thick. Dead leaves from the previous autumn had begun to spume away from drifts under the trees. Walking from shade to red sunlight and back, Elinda had to squint into the shadows and the wiry scrub on either side of the path.

A scaly grey burrower shuffled from the undergrowth, with the bright blue of a rider cresting its head like an orchid on a rock. The rider’s head twitched upward towards Elinda and Charley, and it sent its mount scuttling back out of sight.

“Too much traffic and wind scouring,” said Charley. “I can’t make sense of these prints.”

“Maybe it’ll be easier on the other side of the stream.”

“Hope so, if we’re not on a wild goose chase. Be nice if we are, though. This game used to be fun.” She walked on, talking into the wind, without turning to Elinda. “I haven’t had much time for it here, but back home, we used to go out in the bush every chance we got, Rick and I . . .”

The stream glittered in front of them, frothing around the stepping stones. A silver-blue bird-like creature on the far bank squawked and fluttered into a tree. . . .

Elinda realised she had hardly listened to what the woman had just said. She stopped and looked at her. “You had a son? I mean—I didn’t realise. What happened?”

“The sort of thing that happens to a cop’s kid sometimes.” They walked a few paces in silence. “Then I reckoned I’d learned enough about that world, and maybe it was time to try somewhere else.”

Elinda was standing on the first stone, with the rush of the stream filling her ears. “I’m sorry,” she said, too loudly. “I shouldn’t have asked you that.” The glare from the water stabbed at her eyes.

Charley shrugged. “It’s as much a part of what I am as any of the good times.” Her voice was almost drowned by the sound of the stream. “It doesn’t do to pretend things never happened.”

“Let’s go on,” Elinda said. “It’s colder near the water, isn’t it?”

They crossed to the far bank. Here the ground was steeper; it sloped up ahead and to the left. Snow lay in the shaded side of every hollow. None was marked by footprints. Outcrops of grey limestone pushed through the soil, with dead leaves silted up against them. An insect whirred, another avian drifted from branch to branch across the path. Something scurried in the undergrowth.

Charley pointed. “Looks like someone came this far, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t have spotted those. Can you follow them?”

“Sure. They’re really quite clear, but they’re closely spaced. Whoever made them was still following the path, but going slowly. Maybe it was too dark to see, or maybe she was looking for something.”

She,
Elinda, thought; they had both accepted that the tracks were Barbara’s.
Maybe she was looking for something.
And—what? Got lost? Twisted an ankle? Found what she was looking for?

“The ground’s drier here,” Charley said. “The traces are getting hard to follow. I’m not a professional at this, you understand.”

“What’s that? It looks like something broke through the scrub down there.”

“Right.”

The path was fading among bare brown undergrowth and rocky scree. To their left an outcropping of grey rock rose almost sheer; to the right the ground fell away at almost forty-five degrees. Ten metres below them, a couple of leafless birdcatcher bushes had been broken down. If there was any more indication of what had happened, it was hidden by trees and another outcrop of rock.

They edged diagonally down the slope, the scree threatening to slide under their boots. Elinda found herself icily calm. She let Charley go first and examine the broken bushes.

“Just broken,” Charley said. “No thorns, no leaves, so I might not expect to see much in the way of traces. But no shreds of clothing I can see—or anything else.”

No blood.

Charley was looking around for more signs. She pointed ahead, to something beyond a large boulder, and strode towards it. As Elinda started to follow, Charley reached the boulder, looked beyond it, stopped.

Come over here,” she muttered over her shoulder. “Be careful. It’s steep.”

The wind caught Elinda as she stumbled down and she lurched against the rock. She peered over Charley’s shoulder.

A couple of metres below them was a figure in mud-stained jeans and an anorak, sprawled facedown. Brown, shoulder-length hair was matted with dirt and twigs. A few strands of the hair twitched in the breeze. It was the only motion Elinda could see. At her side, Charley whispered, “Is it . . . ?”

“There’s so much dirt, and I can’t see her face. How can I be sure? Yes, it’s Barbara. She’s—not breathing, is she?”

Charley pulled out a chunky transceiver and spent a minute fighting the bad reception to report what they had found. Then, leaning on the boulder, she picked her way down. She bent and examined Barbara. “There’s still a pulse. No apparent bleeding. Her skin colour’s still good. No sign of major bruising or contusions where I can see. I can’t rule out a head or spinal injury yet, so I don’t want to move her, but otherwise I can’t see anything organically wrong. It doesn’t look like anything attacked her.”

“Could she have eaten something here? Alkaloid poisoning?”

“I’m not an expert on the symptoms, but it’s as good an explanation as any. Let me take her pulse.” She lifted Barbara’s wrist.

The arm jerked out of her grasp, the legs kicked, and then Barbara’s body was still again. Charley stood up quickly and stepped back. Then she turned to Elinda.

“That probably answers the questions of spinal injuries. Help me turn her over.”

Barbara was as rigid as a statue. When they turned her onto her back, her arms were crossed on her chest, her face pulled down towards them. Her eyes were closed and in shadow.

Cautiously Charley bent to lift her eyelid, and Barbara came to life again. She knocked Charley away and hunched forward. Her teeth flashed and snapped. The whites of her eyes were livid against the mud on her cheeks. They jerked back and forth, and short harsh cries burst from her throat, “Ah—Ah—Ah—” Then she flopped face down at the base of the rock and ceased to move.

Elinda had fallen back against the stone. Her hands were pressed against its rough surface and air rasped through her throat.

Charley picked herself up and looked down at Barbara, breathing heavily. “We’ve got to get help. She broke my radio.”

“You go then,” Elinda mouthed. “I’ll stay with her.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

She nodded. “Go on.”

Charley’s footsteps grated on the scree. Then Elinda was alone with Barbara. She pushed herself away from the rock. Her fingers were scratched. She sat beside Barbara. She remembered walking with her in these woods, and Barbara squirming up a tree to pluck garlands of glossy purple-and-gold leaves for their hair. Slowly Elinda put out her hand and let it rest on Barbara’s shoulder. After a few moments Barbara shifted uncomfortably. Elinda realised there was something hard in the breast pocket of Barbara’s parka. She reached and eased it out of the way.

The wind was still slapping waves against the causeway and the valley was filled with smoky red sunlight like the aftermath of an inferno.

Jon Grebbel turned the dump truck into the service bay and edged it toward the plugin. Beside him in the cab, Menzies, the foreman, looked down from his open window. “You can come another metre easy, and over to the right a bit. Better. That’s it. Now I’ll show you how to plug in the charger. Switch off first.”

Grebbel swung himself to the ground and watched as Menzies unhooked the battery cable and plugged it into the power socket. He tried to stifle his impatience.

“Check the voltage on the meter before you leave it,” Menzies was saying. “Some of these batteries get cranky after a while, and if the voltage isn’t regulating, you can come back and find bits of the truck all over the scenery.”

“How long do you expect me to be needed here?” Grebbel asked.

“You think you’d be happier doing something else?”

“This isn’t coming naturally to me, at any rate.”

“You’ll get the hang of it. We’d like to keep you as long as we can, unless you totally screw up. We’re short-staffed. Shit—everyone’s short-staffed, to hear them talk. But if this dam isn’t working by next spring’s floods, it’ll be another year before they can fuel their survey fleet, and the news’ll be all over the networks into the bargain. You’ve not done this sort of job before?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Grebbel said, “the way I handled that truck, does it?” He was thinking of the effects of a battery explosion, shards of metal and ceramic piercing flesh, hot alkali spraying into faces. If you were careless with a wrench when the terminals were exposed . . .

“But you can’t be sure, because you’re one of the unlucky thirty percent. You arrived without all your chips programmed, and they’ve only just started on you in the clinic, is that it? How much do you reckon you’ve lost?”

“Hard to say. I can remember how to do algebra, but I can’t remember when I took it, or where.”
I’ve kept what I did, and I’ve lost what I am.

“That can be rough.” Menzies drew his fingers through wiry, greying hair. “I’ve seen some . . . Well, never mind that. You work at settling in here, and what you don’t get back you won’t miss.”

“That’s what they say in the clinic, too.”

Menzies considered for a moment. “If it’s important enough, it’ll find a way to return to you. I’ve seen that happen, too.”

“Be nice to think so. In the meantime, what do I do? Go on autopilot?”

“That’s about it. Shit, it’s a shame, though. People come out here for all sorts of reasons. What it comes down to in every case, though, is that they were after some kind of a fresh start. And then a third of them find they’ve lost their past. They don’t know what they were running from, or even if they were running. How’re you going to make a fresh start if you can’t look back and see where you went wrong? How in hell you ever going to do that?”

Grebbel rubbed his chin, then put on his gloves. “I heard something about a leaflet being passed around yesterday,” he said, “saying some hopeless mental cases had been shipped out here. Maybe they’d be happier without their memories.”

“Ah, you don’t want to believe shit like that. If someone thinks that sort of thing’s going on here, let then come out and point to it, so we can all make up our minds. Then I’ll listen. Look, I’ll tell you a case I know about. There was a man back there, not a bad sort, he’d watch the game Saturdays with the guys, go for a drink after work, Fridays. Maybe he chased the skirts on the lower end of Main Street the odd time when he’d told his wife he was making deliveries across town, but not a bad guy. Only, he started making those deliveries about every other week, and then twice a week, and then he got into the heavier stuff. Found he couldn’t stop—even when one of the girls had to be taken away in an ambulance. He’d made the call himself.