The Shockwave Rider (12 page)

She led him into the living room. Meter-high freehand Egyptian hieroglyphs marched around three of its walls; over the fourth, white paint had been slapped.

“I’m losing this,” Kate said. “It’s from the Book of the Dead. Chapter Forty, which I thought was kind of apt.”

“I’m afraid I never read the …” His voice trailed away.

“Wallis Budge titles it ‘The Chapter of Repulsing the Eater of the Ass.’ I bleat you not. But I quit repulsing that fiercely.” She gave a mocking grin. “Any how, now you see what you can lend a hand with.”

No wonder she was wearing a layer of dust. The whole apartment was being bayquaked. In the middle of the floor here three piles of objects were growing, separated by chalked lines. One contained charitable items, like clothing not yet past hope; one contained what was scrapworthy, like a last-year’s stereo player and a used typewriter and such; one contained stuff that was only garbage, though it was subdivided into disposable and recyclable.

Everywhere shelves were bare, closets were ajar, boxes and cases stood with lids raised. This room had a south aspect and the sun shone through large open windows. The smell of the city blew in on a warm breeze.

Willing to play along he peeled off his shirt and hung it on the nearest chair. “I do what?” he inquired.

“As I tell you. Mostly help with the heavier junk. Oh, plus one other thing. Talk about yourself while we’re at it.”

He reached for his shirt and made to put it back on.

“Point,” she said with an exaggerated sigh, “taken. So just help.”

Two sweaty hours later the job was finished and he knew a little about her which he hadn’t previously guessed. This was the latest of perhaps five, perhaps six, annual demolitions of what was threatening to turn from a present into a past, with all that that implied: a fettering, hampering tail of concern for objects at the expense of memories. Desultorily they chatted as they worked; mostly he asked whether this was to be kept, and she answered yes or no, and from her pattern of choice he was able to paradigm her personality—and was more than a little frightened when he was through.

This girl wasn’t at Tarnover. This girl is six years younger than I am, and yet
…

The thought stopped there. To continue would have been like holding his finger in a flame to discover how it felt to be burned alive.

“After which we paint walls,” she said, slapping her hands together in satisfaction. “Though maybe you’d like a beer before we shift modes. I make real beer and there are six bottles in to chill.”

“Real
beer?” Maintaining Sandy Locke’s image at all costs, he made his tone ironical.

“A plastic person like you probably doesn’t believe it exists,” she said, and headed for the kitchen before he could devise a comeback.

When she returned with two foam-capped mugs, he had some sort of remark ready, anyway. Pointing at the hieroglyphs, he said, “It’s a shame to paint these over. They’re very good.”

“I’ve had them up since January,” was her curt reply. “They’ve furnished my mind, and that’s what counts. When you’ve drunk that, grab a paint-spray.”

He had arrived at around five p.m. A quarter of ten saw them in a freshly whitened framework, cleansed of what Kate no longer felt to be necessary, cleared of what the city scrap-and-garbage team would remove from the stoop come Monday morning and duly mark credit in respect of. There was a sense of space. They sat in the spacefulness eating omelets and drinking the last of the
real
beer, which was good. Through the archway to the kitchen they could see and hear Bagheera gnawing a beefbone with old blunt teeth, uttering an occasional
rrrr
of contentment.

“And now,” Kate said, laying aside her empty plate, “for the explanations.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a virtual stranger. Yet you’ve spent five hours helping me shift furniture and fill garbage cans and redecorate the walls. What do you want? To plug into me by way of payment?”

He sat unspeaking and immobilized.

“If that were it …” She was gazing at him with a thoughtful air. “I don’t think I’d say no. You’d be good at it, no doubt about that. But it isn’t why you came.”

Silence filled the brightly whitened room, dense as the feathers in a pillow.

“I think,” she said eventually, “you must have come to calibrate me. Well, did you get me all weighed and measured?”

“No,” he said gruffly, and rose and left.

INTERIM REPORT

“Bureau of Data Processing, good afternoon!”

“The Deputy Director, please. Mr. Hartz is expecting my call. … Mr. Hartz, I thought you should know that I’m approaching a crisis point, and if you care to come back and—

“Oh. I see. What a pity. Then I’d better just arrange for my tapes to be copied to your office.

“Yes, naturally. By a most-secure circuit.”

IMPERMEABLE

It was a nervous day, very nervous. Today they were boarding him: not just Rico and Dolores and Vivienne and the others he had met but also august remote personages from the intercontinental level. Perhaps he should not have shown a positive reaction when Ina mentioned the corp’s willingness to semiperm him, hinted that eventually they might give him tenure.

Stability, for a while at any rate, was tempting. He had no other plans formulated, and out of this context he intended to move when
he
chose, not by order of some counterpart to Shad Fluckner. Yet a sense of risk grew momently more agonizing in his mind. To be focused on by people of such power and influence—what could be more dangerous? Were there not at Tarnover people charged with tracking down and dragging back in chains Nickie Haflinger on whom the government had lavished thirty millions’ worth of special training, teaching, conditioning? (By now perhaps there were other fugitives. He dared not try to link up with them. If only …!)

Still, facing the interview was the least of countless evils. He was preening prior to departure, determined to perfect his conformist image to the last hair on his head, when the buzzer called him to the veephone.

The face showing on the screen belonged to Dolores van Bright, with whom he had got on well during his stay here.

“Hi, Sandy!” was her cordial greeting. “Just called to wish you luck when you meet the board. We prize you around here, you know. Think you deserve a long-term post.”

“Well, thanks,” he answered, hoping the camera wouldn’t catch the gleam of sweat he felt pearling on his skin.

“And I can strew your path with a rose or so.”

“Hm?” Instantly, all his reflexes triggered into fight-or-flight mode.

“I guess I shouldn’t, but … Well, for better or worse. Vivienne dropped a hint, and I checked up, and there’s to be an extra member on the selection board. You know Viv thinks you’ve been overlooked as kind of a major national resource? So some federal twitch is slated to join us. Don’t know who, but I believe he’s based at Tarnover. Feel honored?”

How he managed to conclude the conversation, he didn’t know. But he did, and the phone was dead, and he was …

On the floor?

He fought himself, and failed to win; he lay sprawled, his legs apart, his mouth dry, his skull ringing like a bell that tolls nine tailors, his guts churning, his fingers clenched and his toes attempting to imitate them. The room swam, the world floated off its mooring, everything
everything dissolved into mist and he was aware of one sole fact:

Got to get up and go.

Weak-limbed, sour-bellied, half-blind with terror he could no longer resist, he stumbled out of his apartment
(
Mine? No! Their apartment!
) and headed for his rendezvous in hell.

THE CONVICTION OF HIS COURAGE

After pressing the appropriate switches Freeman waited patiently for his subject to revert from regressed to present-time mode. Eventually he said, “It seems that experience remains peculiarly painful. We shall have to work through it again tomorrow.”

The answer came in a weak voice, but strong enough to convey venomous hatred. “You devil! Who gave you the right to torture me like this?”

“You did.”

“So I committed what you call a crime! But I was never put on trial, never convicted!”

“You’re not entitled to a trial.”

“Anybody’s entitled to a trial, damn you!”

“That is absolutely true. But you see you are
not
anybody. You are
nobody.
And you chose to be so of your own free will. Legally—officially—you simply don’t exist.”

BOOK 2

THE DELPHI CORACLE

SHALLOW MAN IN ALL HIS GORY WAS NOT DISMAYED BY ONE OF THESE

Take no thought for the morrow; that’s your privilege. But don’t complain if when it gets here you’re off guard.

ARARAT

With a distant … Too weak a word. With a
remote
part of his mind he was able to observe himself doing all the wrong things: heading in a direction he hadn’t chosen, and running when he should and could have used his company electric car, in sum making a complete fool of himself.

In principle he had made the correct decisions. He would turn up for his appointment with the interview board, he would outface the visitor from Tarnover, he would win the argument because you don’t, simply
don’t,
haul into custody someone who is being offered permanent employment by a corporation as powerful as G2S. Not without generating a continental stink. And if there’s one thing they’re afraid of at Tarnover, it’s having the media penetrate their guise of feigned subimportance.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. His were fine. They simply had no effect on his behavior.

“Yes, who is it?” In a curt voice from the speaker under the veephone camera. And then, almost in the same breath, “Sandy! Hey, you look sick, and I don’t mean that as a compliment! Come right on up!”

Sound of antithief locks clicking to neutral.

Sick?

He pondered the word with that strange detached portion of his awareness which was somehow isolated from his body at present, yet continued to function as though it were hung under a balloon trailed behind this fleshly carcass now ascending stairs not by legs alone but by arms clutching at the banister to stop from falling over. Legs race combines with arms race to make brain race and his brain was definitely racing. An invisible tight band had clamped on his head at the level of his temples. Pain made him giddy. He was double-focusing. When the door of Kate’s apt opened he saw two of it, two of her in a shabby red wrap-around robe and brown sandals … but that wasn’t so bad, because her face was eloquent of sympathy and worry and a double dose of that right now was to be welcomed. He was sweating rivers and imagined that he could have heard his feet squelching in his shoes but for the drumming of his heart, which also drowned out the question she shot at him.

Repeated louder, “I said, what the hell have you taken?”

He hunted down his voice, an elusive rasp in the caverns of a throat which had dried like a creek bed in a bad summer all the way to his aching lungs.

“No-uh-thing!”

“My God. In that case have you ever got it strong. Come quickly and he down.”

As swiftly and unreally as in a dream, with as much detachment as though he were viewing these events through the incurious eyes of old Bagheera, he witnessed himself being half-led, half-carried to a couch with a tan cover. In the Early Pleistocene he had sat on it to eat omelets and drink beer. It was a lovely sunny morning. He let his lids fall to exclude it, concentrated on making the best use of the air, which was tinted with a faint lemony fragrance.

She drew drapes against the sun by touching a button, then came in twilight to sit by him and hold his hand. Her fingers sought his pulse as expertly as a trained nurse.

“I knew you were straining too hard,” she said. “I still can’t figure out why—but get the worst of it over and then you can tell me about it. If you like.”

Time passed. The slam of his heart lessened. The sweat streaming from his pores turned from hot to cool, made his smart clothing clammy. He began to shiver and then, with no warning, found he was sobbing. Not weeping—his eyes were dry—but sobbing in huge gusting gasps, as though he were being cruelly and repeatedly punched in the belly by a fist that wasn’t there.

At some stage she brought a thick woolen blanket, winterweight, and laid it on him. It had been years since he felt the rough bulk of such a fabric—now, one slept on a pressure bed, insulated by a directed layer of air. It evoked thousands of inchoate childhood memories. His hands clamped like talons to draw it over his head and his knees doubled into the fetal posture and he rolled on his side and miraculously was asleep.

When he awoke he felt curiously relaxed. He felt purged. In the … How long? He checked his watch. In the at-most hour since he dozed off, something more than calm had occupied his mind.