Take No Prisoners (45 page)

I looked at my watch. "Time's passing. Just tell me."

"This is the quicker way of doing it," he said, tapping the device with his fingertips.

My shoulders slumped. "OK, I admit it. I'm not sure I could take another dose of that – not so soon after last time. OK?"

He was immediately apologetic. "I'm sorry. I should have thought of that. You've already taken more of this" – he patted the lamprey again – "in a couple of hours than most people can take in a week. I'll try to explain the rest as best I can. It's just knowing where to start is the problem ..."

"You said we were 'necessarily' in denial about things because Q is," I prompted. "That'd be as good a place as any."

He drew himself upright. "Yeah. OK." I could see him marshalling his thoughts. "I've got to give you the results of at least a dozen renderings here. I'll do my best. Whatever reality we possess—"

I put both hands up as if I were trying to stop an onrushing juggernaut. "Whoa there!"

This time he chose to contradict. "Bear with me, or we're never going to get anywhere," he said. "Just live with the fact that I'll be telling you things in the wrong order – there is no right order, you see."

"Be OK with you if I recorded this, then? So's I can make sense of it later." I groped around on the floor for where I'd dropped my bag. I found it and dug out my hand-held recorder.

"Don't see why not," he said, watching me.

"Your guy took my only cassette, though. You got one I could bum?"

He walked across to one of the little utilitarian desks that dotted this hangar of a room, and opened a drawer. "Here," he said, coming back towards me and tossing the cassette my way. I nearly broke a thumbnail getting the goddam cellophane off, but finally the recorder was ready.

"Right," I said. "We're thinking the same thoughts as Q, you were saying." I'd been putting a few twos together to make a few fours – and fives – while he'd been fetching the cassette. "I can understand that part of it. Otherwise this sort of collective dreaming mind of ours wouldn't be all telling the same story – the individual contributions wouldn't be coming together to render up the Q-consciousness. That fits. What I can't understand is the why of it."

I pressed the Record button and held the recorder out in his direction. I could feel the little wheels turning inside it.

"You've got it near enough," he acknowledged, dropping down on the couch beside me again and then immediately standing up and beginning to pace. "'Telling the same story', you said, and that's kind of the crux of it. You see, the only status we have in reality – the universe's reality, not the composite reality we construct through our perceptions – is that we're all elements of the story Q is reading. One of the stories, at least. When Q first encountered the universe there weren't any stories going on in it – it had no need for stories, being just fine the way it was. But Q is, to rely on a gross simplification for just a moment, a master storyteller. He likes stories. They entertain him. So he invented a whole bunch of them that he could tell, that he could write down using the universe as his blank sheet of paper."

I stared at him, incredulous. "You mean – what you're trying to tell me is we're all just characters in a story someone's making up?"

"That's it as near as dammit, yes." He stopped pacing, looked at the little round microphone on my recorder as if it had been it, not me, that had asked him the question. Then he was moving again. "Q saw the universe as a playground, like I said, but it was a pretty boring playground because nothing was going on in it. So he populated it with stories – thousands and millions and billions of stories. What we'd say is that he created life, sentient life, on all the planets in the universe he found that could possibly maintain it, but that's only the way our minds rationalize it. Q's not capable of creating life – he's not capable of creating anything that impinges on the physical reality of the universe. All he can do is create stories, and, consciously, not even the full stories – just their beginnings. Then he becomes a spectator, watching as the stories tell themselves. I said a moment ago you could think of him as a master storyteller, but he's not really that at all. If he's a master of anything, it's of being an audience. Just like we read stories into the universe, deceiving ourselves that it's the universe telling the stories when really, for the most part, what's happening is that we're selectively picking out from the random background supposedly conceptual strings that seem to make sense according to our own rules of logic – just in that same way, Q gets things started and then follows where the strings lead. He's projecting his perceptions onto the universe, and seeing what stories fall out of the randomness. It's not randomness at all, of course: it's ordered by the laws of the physical universe. But those laws are so divorced from the logical system underpinning Q's own ability to conceptualize – and ours – that what they generate might as well be random."

"Then how do we know they exist at all?" I said, turning the mike briefly towards myself. "How does Q know?"

"He doesn't," said Tim, telling me with his body language that this was an aside before the main brunt of his reply. "That's part of his denial. As for us? We know they exist because ... well, you've heard music from other human cultures, right?"

"Right," I said, baffled.

"It sounds pretty strange to your American-educated ears, your Western-culture-educated ears. The progressions and intervals are all wrong. It can even sound less like music to us than like a somewhat unpleasant caterwaul. Most people in this country have difficulty listening to Chinese classical music for very long, and, hoo boy, just wait 'til you try the stuff from Thailand." A smile broke the earnestness of his face so briefly I wasn't sure it had been there at all. "Now imagine you were treated to a burst of the music created by beings from Altair, or wherever. It'd probably not sound like music at all to you, just a cacophony. Its rules would be entirely different. But you'd still know it was music, whatever your ears were telling you. You'd still know the music was there, even though all you heard was a seemingly random collection of noises."

"I'd know there were rules," I said, "even if I might never be able to understand what the rules were – even if the nature of my own perception made it impossible for me ever to be able to grasp the rules."

"Good to see our new Deputy Director of Operations is even brighter than the old one," said Tim, looking at me with a fresh degree of respect. "It took Alex a long while to work that part out. Or maybe," he added, presumably believing he was deflating me, "I've just learned to tell it better."

"Doesn't matter," I said. I wasn't into games like that. I was surprised, and a bit disappointed, that he was.

But wasn't I setting my expectations too high? Tim Heatherton, me, everybody else – we were all merely story elements. It was no wonder the dreamers were echoing Q's thoughts, no wonder we all of us did. We were just invented characters playing our parts in a fiction Q had initiated to stop himself from getting bored. We were logical developments from an initial set of circumstances Q had set up, so he could watch what happened next. They say that all the characters an author invents for the stories s/he tells are merely different facets of the author: they are the author, whether the author likes to admit it or not. Authors can't really create new characters. All they can do is collect up a few of their own attributes, give the collection a name, and say it's a person. Our thoughts echoed Q's thoughts because they were Q's thoughts. Hell, we were just Q's thoughts. I was back with the busted hologram again. I was like a shard of a hologram. Pick me up and look at me and what you saw was a fuzzy, dim, blurred, out-of-focus Q.

And the same went for everyone.

I looked at the back of the hand holding out the little recorder for Tim. Tiny marks were still visible where I'd pinched the flesh. It sure didn't feel as if I were just a thought. Try as I might, I couldn't perceive myself as such.

But then I was trying to do the perceiving through the medium of a human mind, which wasn't designed for the task. It's hard-wired wrongly for it. The human mind is like one of those stupid robots that's OK for the tasks it was built for, but useless for anything else – its limitations so small it can't even conceive anything might exist beyond its selected group of chores. But then the human mind is an echo of ...

I made a decision.

"This Q of yours," I said to Heatherton, my voice sounding almost defiant in my ears, "he's pretty dumb, isn't he?"

~

Heatherton's eyebrows rose, and he looked irritated. I could tell he'd not expected me to get to this conclusion until he'd told me. The bright student had outflanked the patient instructor again. No doubt I'd missed a lot of links in the chain, but I'd got there.

"You're right," he said. Then he heaved another of those long expressive sighs of his – those sighs that imparted more than could a multitude of words. His whole body, which I'd thought had been fairly relaxed when I'd first met him, now showed me I'd been wrong. A great burden had been lifted from his shoulders, not because of anything I'd said but because of the thoughts my mind was racing ahead to encompass. He knew I had to be having those thoughts. He was just a different shard broken off the same hologram, after all.

And there was another reason the weight had been lifted from him.

"That's not just a tape recorder you're holding, is it?"

"No," I said. "It isn't."

He looked at the little round hole that functioned as a microphone.

"It does actually record as well," I reassured him. "You've not been wasting your breath. What you've been saying is all on the tape."

"And what'll you do with the tape?"

"Put it in a vault, maybe. Somewhere deep inside Langley where no one'll ever come across it by accident and play it."

"Why not just destroy it?" he said. "Burn it?"

"I'm not sure," I confessed. "I just can't do that, for some reason. Information once gathered should never be lost – something like that."

"But you're going to make sure it is, just as surely as if you'd burned the tape."

I smiled at him. I liked him, liked him a lot, even though he'd irritated me once or twice when he'd gone into his patronizing-schoolteacher mode. "Who said Q was logical?"

I moved my thumb onto the little machine's Pause button.

"Alex wouldn't have done this, Cello. He knew all about us, and about Q, and ..."

"Wrong," I said. "It was Alex who sent me here. You're first on a long list he left for me, a list of calls he wanted me to make should anything happen to him – like, say, a bomb that took out not just the Prez but also the Deputy Director of Operations. It wasn't that Alex thought his own death was that important, you understand. Rather, he knew it would be a symptom that the disease had advanced too far for any other treatment to be feasible."

I readied my thumb on the Pause button again.

"There's one more thing you don't know," Tim said hastily. "One more thing you can't logically deduce from what you've learned so far."

"Why bother telling me?"

"Same reason as you. Information shouldn't just be thrown away once you've got it."

"Try me," I said, making my voice convey finality. This couldn't be protracted too long. I didn't want to be late back to DC.

I gave him thirty seconds, and that was all he needed. Then I pressed the Pause button firmly with my thumb. It was a clever little gadget, and there was hardly any recoil in my wrist at all. Almost without a sound, I made a small round hole appear in his forehead, neatly equidistant between his soft brown eyes.

With the minimum of fuss, he folded himself up.

~

I made a couple more of those tidy little holes in his head as he lay there, just to be sure, and then I turned off the tape and adjusted the tone control to full bass.

"Cello here," I said, holding the speaker grille up to my mouth. "Over."

"Barkelane," acknowledged my driver – or, at least, the guy who drove my limo. "Over."

"We have attained closure," I told him. "I'll tidy up at home. You do the same for the holiday cottage, OK? And tell the other cleaners to get to work. All these houses are real pigsties. Over."

"It's as good as done, boss," said Barkelane.

I switched out before he could add the obligatory "Over". Straightening my bright summer dress, casting around in case I'd discarded anything I shouldn't have, I got up from the couch and stepped over the shell of the Tim Heatherton thought. I would have to do Charles, the pretty receptionist, first. Then anyone else who was inside the main Center for Neuronic Research building – as well as all the puters, of course – before finishing off with the guard who'd let me in here. Barkelane and the guys and gals with him would already be mopping up in the commissary, or whatever the hell that out-building was. The rest of my team, the ones who'd split off from the convoy on the way here from La Guardia, would soon, in response to Barkelane's radioed instructions, be making their calls on spouses, siblings, anyone to whom a careless word might have been spoken. I wondered if Tim had known it wasn't just him my thumb had been pressing out of existence but also Natasha and – what were their names again? – ah, yes, Bryony Heatherton Makepeace aged thirty-three and Ellie Heatherton aged twenty-eight, cute young career women who both had their brother's eyes.

Soft brown eyes.

Purely by the laws of chance, some of Q's thoughts can be very lovely.

~

I arrived safely back in DC, in plenty of time for my meeting on the entirely irrelevant problem presented by the unexpectedly tough resistance our forces had encountered in Sweden and Norway. After the meeting was over, we adjourned at the new President's behest to have a belated dinner with him in the White House. It was nearly midnight by the time I stepped into my limo and gave Barkelane the welcome news that at last he could drive me back to Langley.

As soon as we were clear of Constitution Avenue I triggered the scrambled radio, and sure enough the news came through of the complete destruction by fire of a building complex, purpose and nature unspecified, in the middle of Nowheresville, NJ. The cause of the fire was unknown, but the emergency services, who'd arrived far too late of course, were all agreed that its spread had been almost preternaturally rapid and voracious. All they could really hope to do was make sure it didn't spark off a forest blaze while they waited around for the embers to cool down enough to permit them to pick through and see if there were any salvageable remains – which there wouldn't be.