Necropath (28 page)

“Chandra... Sit down. You’re wasting your time.”

“I’m not giving in, Jeff. I’m not just going to sit here and wait...”

Vaughan felt a quick pang of guilt, then, for ridiculing Chandra’s futile efforts to escape.

“Jimmy, listen to me. Take it easy. You’re exhausting yourself. Sit down and get your thoughts together, okay?”

Chandra had made a circuit of the sheer rock face, arrived back where he had started. “I can’t find the smallest toehold. But there’s got to be some way out of here.” There was an edge of desperation in his voice. He sank to the ground, hugging himself.

Vaughan thought of the oblivion which awaited him in death, the oblivion to which hundreds, even thousands, of Disciples had given themselves willingly. If only they could have experienced what he had lived through all those years ago in Canada... He felt a sudden rage towards his captors, a desire to avenge his death even before he had died.

He scanned. The minds of the Disciples were distant now, and growing ever more faint as they headed down the valley towards the waiting flier.

* * * *

NECROPATH

A voice in the darkness said, “An hour’s passed, Jeff. I’m freezing. Let’s... let’s do something. We’ve got to try...”

Vaughan opened his eyes, aware that he’d been on the verge of sleep. He scanned: silence.

He stood, his shoulder throbbing painfully. It was almost pitch black in the pit, the light of the strange constellations overhead providing little illumination. Chandra joined him and Vaughan knelt and said, “Climb on my shoulders, Jimmy. Careful—!” He cursed under his breath as Chandra straddled his shoulders, increasing the pain.

He took a breath and stood, his knees wobbling with the strain. Chandra’s weight eased from time to time as he tried the occasional handhold. Vaughan moved slowly clockwise around the pit, Chandra giving a running commentary.

“There’s nothing around here at all. Move right, further. Stop. There’s something here. I can’t get a decent grip. Damn!”

As they completed the circuit, Chandra became quiet. Vaughan stopped, lowered himself into a crouch. Chandra climbed down and Vaughan felt suddenly buoyant with the release of the burden. He sat down with his back against the rock, kneading his shoulder.

A silence as vast as the universe came between them.

He closed his eyes, felt himself drifting off. He awoke with a start, what felt like minutes later. He was shivering with the cold, the bone-gnawing chill that had forced him awake. His hands were numb, lifeless. He clamped his fists into his armpits, drew his legs up to his chest, and pressed his face into the material of his trousers.

He became aware of a low sound. He listened. It was Chandra, singing. No... he was chanting a mantra, a prayer. A dull, monotonous drone in Hindi. The sound, irrationally, infuriated Vaughan.

“Jimmy, for Chrissake will you quit it?”

The drone continued.

“Jimmy... what the hell?”

“I’m preparing myself, Jeff. I’m preparing myself for the next life.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus Christ,” Vaughan said. He could not stop himself, “Why do you sound so goddamned frightened, Jimmy? If you’re going on to another life, why the hell do you sound so shit-scared?”

He heard the sob in Chandra’s voice. “Because... I am scared, Jeff. I’m scared for Sumita. I’m scared for all those innocent victims of the Vaith. I’m even scared for myself.”

Vaughan shook his head. “Cheer up—you’ll get another turn, right? What about me? What have I got to look forward to but endless oblivion?”

Chandra’s mantra ceased. The silence stretched. At last, in a small voice, Chandra asked, “What turned you into such a bastard, Jeff? Or were you always a bastard?”

“Is my bastardy genetic or conditioned? There’s an interesting one. Maybe a bit of both, Jimmy. But mainly conditioned.”

Chandra remained silent. Vaughan was aware of him in the darkness, looking his way. At last Chandra said, quietly, “Who the hell are you?”

The question hit Vaughan like a blow. He had not been expecting that, a counterpunch from someone he had thought he had beaten into submission.

He rode the silence, hoping Chandra would not press his advantage. Seconds later, a tentative jab, “Well?”

“Well, what?”

Another silence, taunting him. Chandra took a breath. “I... I accessed a program, back at the Station,” Chandra said, stuttering with the cold. “I wanted to know more about you, more than you’d told me. I wanted to know who I was working with.”

A freak wind corkscrewed itself deep into the bottleneck of the pit, giving a razor edge to the cold. Vaughan felt something icy prick his cheek. He looked up. High overhead, against the star field, he made out a flurry of snow.

Chandra went on, “You were a cop, in Canada... What happened, Jeff?” He paused, then said, “Who are you?”

Vaughan stared into the darkness, trying to make out the shape of Chandra. He told himself that in the brightening light of the stars he could see the whites of the Indian’s eyes, staring at him.

He had never told anyone about his past. To open up, admit to his other, hidden identity, would have been to endanger himself needlessly. Yet now, with only hours to go before the end... what was stopping him now?

“My real name doesn’t matter,” he told Chandra at last. “I no longer think of myself as anyone other than Jeff Vaughan.”

Overhead a keening wind howled across the opening of the pit.

“I worked for the government of the Federated Northern States of America,” he said. “Not voluntarily. I had no choice in the matter. When I was twenty, I tested psi-positive. I was given the chance to volunteer.” He laughed at that. “Volunteer? There was never any doubt about it. They told me they could make me into a mind-reader, that they’d pay me fabulous wages. I was twenty, for Chrissake. I signed on the dotted line. I had the operation, the cut. They only told me later... they said that during the op they’d discovered I had a special talent, which with augmentation could prove beneficial to the government. I don’t know. They probably knew all along.” He fell silent, cursing the psychiatrist who’d smooth-talked the impressionable twenty-year-old into thinking he could become a superman.

Chandra said, “Knew what, Jeff?”

“Knew what they could make me into.” He stopped; he wanted to weep for the boy he had been, the wreck he had become.

“A telepath?” Chandra asked.

“A... a special kind of telepath, Jimmy. Ever heard of a necropath?”

Chandra repeated the word. In the shadows, Vaughan could see him shaking his head. “A necropath? No, I’ve never... Necro—something to do with the dead?”

Vaughan nodded. “Right. You’re right, Jimmy. They made me into a telepath who could read the minds of the dead. I worked for the Toronto Homicide Department.”

Chandra’s silence, this time, was shocked. After seconds he said, “I... I don’t understand.”

So Vaughan told him about the many oblivions he had vicariously experienced.

* * * *

He would never forget his first case.

The victim was a young woman, attacked and stabbed to death during a robbery at her apartment. He was rushed to the scene of the crime, hurried through the crowd of investigators and forensic specialists who looked upon him with gazes of awe and pity that Vaughan had failed to understand at the time.

He had inserted his pin, knelt before the corpse, and scanned.

He accessed the women’s fading awareness, the core of her sensorium still erratically firing fifteen minutes after death, and he relived her last memories, saw the face of her killer, and more importantly found that he was known to her, in fact lived nearby.

But more than that, more terrible than being privy to the women’s terror at the attack, he had ridden her failing mind towards oblivion, the total negation of everything she had ever known in life.

And he had cried and pushed himself from her, clawed the pin from his head, and rolled into a foetal ball in the corner of the room, trying to banish the hell of oblivion from his mind.

He was counselled after that, told that the first time was always the worst, and sent back out.

He read more dead and dying minds, and he developed a technique to try and minimise the pain. He would dive, and find what he wanted, and then hurry to get out before the pain became too much. But always he experienced the terror, to varying degrees. Every day he knew what it was to die. He knew what awaited him when his own brief existence came to an end.

For a while he harboured a desire to kill his instructor, and the surgeon who had made him like this, and the psychiatrist who had first discovered that he possessed psi-ability.

The desire passed, and the pain continued, and he waited for the chance to get away and start a new life without fear of being discovered. Five years after his very first case with the Toronto police, during a job that went very wrong, he knew that he had to get away or kill himself.

Two days later he boarded an orbital shuttle to Bangkok... and he had been running, with occasional stops, ever since.

Chandra was silent for a time, then said, “It must have been hell, Jeff.”

“Hell?
Hell...
You’ve hit it in one, Jimmy. You asked what made me into the bastard I am, remember? Well, that did, Jimmy. Reading dead minds did...”

The cop murmured, “I’m sorry, Jeff.”

“And you know what else? There’s no white light. There’s no Nirvana or Heaven or Valhalla— no afterlife of any kind. You know what there is? I’ll tell you. There’s one fucking big black ocean of oblivion. I’ve ridden hundreds of minds on that final journey. I’ve read their terror. Christ, I’ve shared that terror, felt it myself, the soul-destroying horror of knowing that the only thing awaiting is a cold, empty nothingness for all eternity, of knowing that when life is over there’s no more warmth or love or anything we take for granted, just oblivion.”

He stopped there, aware that he was shaking uncontrollably.

Chandra did not respond for what seemed like minutes, and then he said nothing to counter Vaughan’s interpretation of the dying experience, as Vaughan had thought he might. Instead he said, “So you quit? Changed your identity?”

“I had to change my identity. A necropath can’t just quit, leave the government. You’re a valuable commodity—they’ve spent millions on you, you’ve solved crimes that otherwise would have gone unsolved. The only way to get away is either to kill yourself—and I considered that often enough—or to drop out, find yourself a new identity.”

“And if they found you now?”

“They’d kill me.” He said it before he realised the irony of what he’d said, then laughed aloud. “They’d kill me, Jimmy. I know too much. I’m too much of a security risk. If I fell into the hands of my government’s enemies...”