Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (7 page)

 
          
“Bugger.” Peter slaps
the screen of the
autochef. “Take a look here. What’s up with our
Maitre d’l
”

 
          
Rene,
Zoe and Ritchie have all coincided with us in the mess room; they step or float
over too.

 
          
JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE

           
ASPARAGUS

           
VINAIGRETTE

           
CORN ON THE COB

           
ONIONS A LA GREQUE

           
BEETROOT

           
x ICE CREAM x

           
KALE

 
          
Ritchie
peers. “They’re all darn vegetables. Except for the ice cream—and it’s run out.
There’s no meat. I like meat. Why’s it putting us on a vegetarian diet? Scared
of space scurvy? Not that it knows anything about us! Idiot programme.”

 
          
“Override
it,” advises Rene. “Dial another menu.”

 
          
“It’s
hardly amazing that there’s no ice cream left,” remarks Zoe. “Given the rate at
which friend Jacobik’s been cramming it down. Not least since you-know-what.
Infantile compensation, eh? Cold joys for cold boys.”

 
          
Peter
punches a button.

 
          
Appears:

 
          
JAM PANCAKES

           
x APPLE PIE x

 
          
CARAMEL CUSTARD

           
ORANGE WHIP

           
BLINTZES

           
x ICE CREAM x

           
KUMQUAT

 
 
         
“All sweets! ” Ritchie whistles.
“Something’s gone wrong with the housekeeping. I’d better buzz Natalya.”

 
          
Then
the penny drops. “That isn’t all that Jacobik’s been doing. Look down the
initial letters.” I trace them one by one. “What do they spell out? Jacobik.”

 
          
Ritchie
bounces back from the wall interphone. He nods disbelievingly. “Sick paranoid.
He’s screwed up the menu programme.”

 
          
“Maybe
it’s a cry for help,” says Zoe.

 
          
“Yeah,
from the gut. From our guts. Christ, has he been indulging in other practical
jokes too? He‘s already lost us all our missiles.”

 
          
“We
all
lost those,” says Ren6 firmly.
“And a good thing too. A kind of purge.”

 
          
“A
few meals like these and we’ll not need purging, friend! I’d better buzz the
Captain too. We’ll have to check all ship’s systems now. Shit.”

 
          
Zoe
is in a forgiving mood. “Jacobik may not be to blame. Just because his name
appears here—”

 
          
“Of
course it’s his bloody fault!” I know this for a certainty— as though I’ve just
brushed against his nasty mind, which indeed I do believe I have: momentary
contact with a brooding spider. “This is his signature. He’s gone
mad.
Oh, he was that all along! But now
that’s
all
he is.”

 
          
Jacobik
is under restraint in his cabin with an improvised seal on the door. The
probability of our arriving has declined again, the green line dropping back
down the orange crystal. He giggled like a delinquent child when he was
confronted with the evidence. Now we are all in loathsome
loco parentis
to him, and a tiny Jacobik homunculus gnaws away in
everyone’s mind . . .

 
          
Gus
wipes his brow. “At least it was nothing worse than the autochef. If he’d had a
go at the reactor—”

 
          
Kendrick
looks furious with Gus. “He couldn’t! What do you mean?”

 
          
“If
the reactor had started—well, over-reacting . . .”

 
          
“That’s
impossible.”

 
          
Captain
K shakes his head slightly at Kendrick. (‘Be quiet. Don’t go on.’)
   
Strange
.

 
 
         
“Might
I suggest,” offers Natalya, noticing nothing of this exchange, “since Jacobik
is already tranquillised, yet the probability continues falling, that
tranquillisation is quite pointless?” “Is it surprising? He’s inside us all! ”
My head aches with him. “Maybe he should pass the rest of the voyage completely
unconscious? We can feed him intravenously.”

 
          
Zoe
raises her hand. “The voyage will still be vulnerable to his unconscious
impulses—all the time then, not merely during sleep. Heinz says that the
probability really slipped back”—she waves a dismissive hand at the clock—“a
while ago, when he was asleep. When he woke up, the probability steadied.”

 
          
“In
that case he needs to be switched right off, period!” Ritchie bites his lip but
there’s no way to bite back the words.

 
          
“Oh
no. He needs to be more alert. He needs to be made more responsible, more
aware. He needs to come to terms. Let’s stop drugging him and try to
lead
him. Lead him back. He did appeal
for help, in a roundabout way. We must give him that help. I can be a friendly
listener. You know, I almost became a priest once, long ago.”

 
          
“Let’s
feed him ice cream,” sneers Gus. “Only, he already ate it all, like he fired
all our missiles off.”

 
          
“He
isn’t our scapegoat! If anyone is guilty, we all are. As Amy says, he’s inside
each of us.”

 
          
“Why
should
he
want to arrive, uh? He has
nothing to do when he gets there.”

 
          
“Let
me try. A little love and sympathy.”

           
“I ought to try too,” insists
Natalya. “Some psychotherapy.” “No doubt he should not be so completely
isolated from us,” nods Captain K. “Yet we can’t let him loose either. Still, I
worry about either of you being left alone with him.”

           
Natalya laughs. “I can handle
myself.” Zoe only shrugs; she knows all about self-defence from way back, where
she grew up.

 
          
“He
is
safely under restraint,” points out
Wu. “Let him win back his place among us by developing right thinking—by
reordering his thoughts constructively.” She
mocks
her own words faintly, not looking at Li at all, but speaking
to her, I suspect.

 
          
And
Li, amazingly, reacts. “Yes, he must be conditioned back to right thinking. So
we should adopt a criticism-unity policy, a two-wrongs one-good tactic—I refer
to the wrongs of religion and psychoanalysis. Mere elimination of the poisonous
weed might be harmful to us all.”

 
          
Beautiful
flower Li, with cold seeds of jargon in your heart: mere codes, when it comes
to discussing the management of a man (even if it
is
Jacobik) ... Is that what you’re really like?

 
          
“Psychotherapy
could take months,” says Ritchie.

 
          
“That’s
why I’ll back my way,” smiles Zoe. “He may be teetering on the brink of a—”

 
          
“A
conversion?”

 
          
“—well,
of ... a more positive frame of mind. He’s been all negatives so far: a warden
of death. How can he possibly adjust if he’s kept in a kind of strait jacket?
That would drive anybody mad.”

 
          
“Perhaps
both of you should be present all the time,” suggests Captain K.

 
          
“No,
to gain his confidence—”

 
          
“The
analyst has to operate in privacy,” says Natalya at the same time. “He is, as
Wu points out, suitably secured.”

 
          
“Though
perhaps group analysis,” wavers Zoe—jealous of Natalya?

 
          
“Group
analysis is what we’ve been into, all the journey long,” sighs Kendrick. “Where
has it got us to? Where are we now?”

 
          
A
question which none of us, of course, can answer.

           
It’s
a coral
morning in
Prague
. Bells make clonging noises in the air.
Amethyst vapours drift up from the waters of the
Vltava
. The black slug of a barge oozes upstream,
twitching a little rowing boat tethered in its wake. Just so does he twitch me
along, tethered in his wake . . .

 
          
The
boy leans on the bridge. He has a catapult stuffed in his back pocket; he wants
to pot a pigeon. Or a dove.

 
          
“You? How?”

           
“We’re all part of one another,
little sister,” he grins maliciously.

 
          
And
I know where I am, as surely as I know—through him— that this is the
Prague
of his boyhood days. I’m trapped in
Jacobik’s mind, that has flown home to childishness. He has me. Yet, somehow,
now that I really look at him, the grin isn’t malicious. Only impish.

 
          
“But
you were crushed by the tanks, little sister . . . You’re very like her, you
know. What she would have been. A big brave girl, full of life, full of ideals.
My, how you’ve grown! Life and ideals don’t really go together, little sister.
Ideals belong somewhere else. Ideals are birds—they should fly off to a place
where they’ll be happy. Somewhere out of the world.”

 
          
He
looses a stone from his catapult, and a scraggy pigeon flutters brokenly along
the pavement, till he gives it the
coup
de grace
with the heel of his hand.

 
          
“You
bastard!”

 
          
He
looks hurt. “Don’t call your brother that. Don’t be horrified,
amie.
I love whatever brings death.
Death is the doorway. Death isn’t unlovable.”

 
          
And
suddenly I know him. As a sister knows a brother, who is her opposite in every
way.

 
 
          
This
country is a land of the dead, a land fenced in. The tanks have come over the
border. The flowers are all crushed by their treads. The only way out is death.
He has seen the expressions on the faces of the dead, and on those who are
about to die—where it is a look of horrible liberty, almost of licence. The
polite etiquette of facial muscles has collapsed. They are slack-jawed,
drop-mouthed, spittle-lipped, faces out of control, like masturbating boys in
a woodshed peeping through cracks at a sunbathing girl who has slackened, too,
the etiquette of brassiere straps. The only way out over the frontier is
death—whose servant he will therefore be, in minor ways at first, then more
professionally, wearing a uniform of the State with all the dour panache of a
public executioner. He will rise high—higher than pigeons and doves with their
tatty, spurious freedom of the skies and rooftops—as high as death can be
borne. Yet always the horror remains that death might not, after all, be the
irrefutable visa; that a committee, a police, a politbureau may preside over
death itself, marshalling even the souls of the dead (who will not be dead, but
only buried alive), controlling that last freedom.

 
          
He
reaches in his pocket for another pebble, and finding none, bursts into tears. He
bubbles . . . petulantly? No:
heartbroken.
He wept this way after he fired all our missiles and they only cancelled
themselves out, did not achieve anything. He’s mad. Infantile. He thinks death
is an achievement, something to attain —not to overcome.

 
          
“We
purged
ourselves when you fired all
the missiles,” I try to explain to him. (We did promise to help him, after
all.) “We couldn’t go on to God’s World with all that freight of pointless
human animosity on board. Pointless, yes! Paltry. It was just plucked out of
our grasp, like a nasty toy.”

 
          
I
reach to take the catapult, to toss it over the parapet of the bridge into the
misty water of the
Vltava
; but he clutches it tightly to his heart,
almost like a crucifix. As though Christ had been slain by a catapult.

 
          
“Pointless?
Little sister, it was all our knowledge of death, and what death might be to
us! We
need
death as our ally.”

 
          
“I
can’t imagine why! ”

 
          
“Because
it leads
beyond.
I shall lead all
living creatures beyond! It’s
necessary
.”
He brightens. “Kiss me, little sister? We belong. You’re my other self. I shall
search for you forever.”

 
          
“The
hell you will!”

 
          
“When
a particle meets an antiparticle, they annihilate in a flash of
light.
Let there be this light between
us,
amie.
Let us meet in that flash
of light. Love meets Death. And they become . . . the pure Light. The God.
Through Death. I love . . . but you don’t know the language of my love. Kiss
me. Annihilate me. Let me be your antiparticle. The tank treads crushed you,
buried you alive, but here I have you back again. Let my fingers crush you,
instead! I will do the job they cheated me of. Lovingly . . . I’ll fight that
politbureau of the Dead, if there is one. And I can smell one. It stole my
weapons, so that you shouldn’t know what a blessing death may be.”

 
          
Some
kind of nasty dream. Just as well I don’t remember anything, apart from the
nastiness. I don’t want to. Something— some healing, soothing element in
me—advises that this is best. Something blessed. Something larger—a wise whale
in the sea of general mind—has sieved out the nasty little things that nibbled
at me.

 
          
Ah
yes, I must have dreamt about the phantom battle. But now we’re safe. We’re
purged.

 
          
Oh
no, we’re not. There’s still that damned lunatic.

 
          
Jacobik
is dead, hanged naked in his cabin.

 
          
How
does a man hang himself in High Space, where gravity is null? By sheer venomous
hatred of the ship, and of himself, does he generate surges of quasi-gravity
fierce enough to throttle himself in the loops of plastic cable which had
formerly secured him to his bunk, his wrists and ankles bound? That cable now
tethers his neck to a ceiling brace. His clothes, tom off him, float like rag
banners in the air...

 
          
How
acrobatically he must have twisted and turned, to untie the tethers with his
teeth! How much in love with death he must have been, for he died ejaculating!
Death was his orgasm, and his orgasm was death: a perfect equation which
annulled him, adding up to final zero.

 
          
“Not
so,” says Captain K, after we have frozen his body. “I regret to say that he
was undoubtedly murdered. The door seal was quite cleverly tampered with ...”
Neil Kendrick nods sourly. “Judging by the manner of his death, I’m led to
believe that it must have been a female crew member—unless . . He leaves the
alternative implication afloat, like Jacobik’s corpse, to haunt us. He stares
in turn into my face, Natalya’s, Sachiko’s, Zoe’s, Li’s, even Wu’s; then gazes
at the men, too, for good measure. “Somebody let themselves into his cabin.
Someone loosed him, though not his wrists or ankles—not till afterwards. I
noted the bruises on those.”

 
          
“He
might have bruised them, struggling to free himself,” says Natalya
dismissively.

 
          
“Da,
to free himself from death. If he was free, why did he tear his clothes to pieces
as a way of removing them? Why take them off at all? Clearly he was still
bound.”

 
          
“He
was mad,” says Trimble, uneasily.

 
          
“Someone
seduced him, in his craving and his childish greed and vulnerability.”

 
          
“This
is monstrous,” protests Wu.

 
          
“Dirty
bastard,” mumbles Ritchie, bright beads on his forehead. (Meaning Jacobik? Or
the unknown murderer? Or Captain K for unwrapping the manner of the crime?) He
glares at Salman momentarily, as though he suspects him of homosexual assault
or fears something of the sort in himself and associates the idea with the
handsome, lambent-eyed Persian. (We are hermaphrodites, because of High Space.
How we enter into each other, even sexually!)

 
          
“If
someone wanted to kill him,” says Rene reasonably, “surely it was simpler to
strangle him while he still lay tethered on his bunk? This is a most peculiar
way of killing somebody.”

 
          
“It’s
symbolic of execution,” says Peter. “Death by hanging. Otherwise it would just
have been furtive murder. This way, somehow, it’s justice. The unconscious mind
justifies it.” “Seduced to death.” Captain K turns slowly, fixing us all with
his glare. “I do not personally know much of these erotic quasigravity
effects. Only at secondhand. Hmm, about four hours ago, I think . . . No, it
must have been longer. Damn this twisted time! There was a tug, a surge. Who
was making love
recently
?” The
trouble is, none of us really knows what ‘recently’ means. No one owns up.

           
“Love, it sickens me to say, has
been used to kill. The little death became the big death.”

 
          
“Thanatos
and Eros hand in hand,” nods Natalya.

 
          
“What
real proof have you got?” blusters Trimble. “This is very harmful—”

 
          
“I
sense
it, more than anything. I sense
the manner of his death. Bruises and tampered locks are secondary. I know. But
I do not know
who.
It carries the
flavour of us all. So did that tug of quasi-gravity—recently.”

 
          
“Yeah,
I guess I noticed that,” admits Ritchie. “Some time ago. Since I last woke up.
I think.”

 
          
“I
too,” says Wu.

 
          
Some
of us are less sure. “I must have been asleep,” says Heinz firmly. So must I.

 
          
“Maybe
we’re all responsible,” says Zoe. “Though, as with the ghost battle, one person
must be the channel—a catalyst.”

 
          
“Does
that console us? Does that absolve the person responsible? As to our peace of
mind, though, Colonel Trimble, the probability has begun to rise again. The
thin green line creeps nearer to the summit even as I speak.”

 
          
“If
it’s true,” confirms Heinz.

 
          
“Whoever
is responsible will be even more eager to arrive—as will we all. Yet something
precious has gone from the journey now, for me—much worse than the misfiring of
the missiles. I bring this out into the open, rather than covering it up as you
no doubt would have preferred, for the simple sake of honesty and truth.
Irrelevant virtues? Well, they seem to apply here. Let us not feel glad that
Jacobik is gone, lest that gladness poison us. Let us genuinely mourn him. And
always remember that one of you . . . And to be fair I must include myself in
this circle of accusation—”

 
          
Why
include himself? Surely the impeacher is the one person whom we can confidently
rule out? Especially given the grotesque sexual bias of the killing . . . which
seems more like a sadomasochistic fantasy every moment. Unless ... Captain K
wishes to suggest that
he himself
might be responsible! Perhaps alone, perhaps in league with someone else, his
agent. Who? Natalya—who boasted that she could look after herself? Or Zoe—who
offered ‘love’ to Jacobik? While Li casually spoke of elimination . . .

 
          
At
this moment—just as in a flash of empathy once I understood how we are all
part of Captain K’s psychic laboratory—he resonates with me again; then is gone
again, gone utterly, blocked off . . .

 
          
He
is deliberately drawing the poison from the wound in ourselves, into himself.
He is acting as lightning conductor to ground the power of life and death which
one amongst us has arrogated. In so doing he re-establishes his authority as
our real commissar, alone possessing the authority of summary secret court
martial and execution. In accruing death and guilt, he distances himself.
Strangely, I feel that we have lost him now even more than we have lost
Jacobik. What happened to Jacobik was a psychic amputation—and now it is
cauterized by Captain K’s withdrawal of himself from us. There can be no more
killing now, even if a second Jacobik existed, for Captain K is the only one
who has such power. Ah, he is a diplomat of the soul,