Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (9 page)

 
          
“A
whole lot of people die every hour, Nathan. They even die
simultaneously.
Even if this Death of yours skipped around at the
speed of light —”

 
          
“Okay,
okay. But Death might be general
and
particular. If I kill the particular death — if I zap the bullet with this
person’s own special name on it, right out of the way, swat it, squash it,
vaporise it! — would this person,” and here Weinberger’s hand drifted over the
imaginary contours of his subject ‘volunteer’, as sensuously — thought Jim —
as some fantasizing soldier in the old days of war, stuck in a jungle hundreds
of miles from a brothel, ‘‘would this person
live for ever
? Would I have invented an immortality treatment, here
in the midst of the House of Death? That would be one hell of an irony!”

 
          
“It
would certainly be a way of getting people to volunteer,” allowed Jim. ‘‘Roll
up, roll up! Climb into Weinberger’s Death Cage and he’ll make thee immortal
with a hiss ... of cyanide gas. Ah, but you’re forgetting something, my friend.
You’d kill the person, that way, before you nailed his death.
Baby and the bathwater, Nathan.
Baby and
the bathwater!”

 
          
Weinberger
looked crestfallen, as though he had seriously considered the possibility. As
perhaps he had. Jim was now doubly sure that the gun had been kept hidden from
long ago with just some such plan in mind. Instead of which, Weinberger had
used it to shoot Norman Harper, to save the poet — absurdly — from falling into
the clutches of Death . . .

 
          
‘‘With
these medi-sensors and the ‘thanatos’ screen hooked in,” said Jim, ‘‘we need
somebody on hand who’s qualified in using the apparatus.” He wanted a witness,
for his own protection. He also wished most dearly to avoid a repetition of
what had happened in Gracchus.

 
          
Weinberger
nodded.

 
          
‘‘I
took the liberty of having a word with Claudio Menotti — our euthanaser.”

 
          
‘‘I
know who
he
is. He was on the
platform at the ceremony. Oh
boy,
was he looking
forward to his duties! Surely you didn’t tell him about —?”

 
          
“O
/course
I didn’t. I simply asked to
borrow one of his assistants to keep an eye on certain medical equipment.”

 
          
Weinberger’s
face showed a mixture of intense relief, and almost paranoid suspicion. Relief,
because the equivalent of a dental appointment for a deep filling was now
certainly postponed —

 
          
‘‘Oh,
so we couldn’t have got started this afternoon in any case?”

 
          
And
suspicion: that somehow the cage might be transformed without his knowledge
into a euthanasia machine, which he would enter unwittingly.

 
          
To
allay the suspicion, Jim said quickly, “Noel Resnick told me he wanted you to
make a public appearance before the end.
To atone.
I
think we can safely put that off for a while, eh?”

 
          
Weinberger
smiled happily. His cage was safe. He was safe too — except from the Death
which he hoped to lure into the cage, to trap.

 
          
“The
assistant’s called Sally Costello. She won’t know what’s
really
going on. I put it to Menotti that this is a special therapy
experiment sanctioned by Resnick.
Which, actually, it is.”

 
          
Weinberger
nodded. Jim felt sure that the man would guide himself to his own good death
with hardly a guiding touch on his arm after his flirtation with this
preposterous apparatus.

 
          
“We’ll
set the trap tomorrow?”

 
          
“Just
one tiny point,” said Jim. “Are you
sure
that you can ape the death state satisfactorily, without actually dying?”

 
          
He
knew by now that Weinberger had also been deeply interested, while a guide, in
trance states which closely approximated the actual journey into death. This
discovery had forged something of a bond between the two men during the past
week, though Nathan had shown no interest as yet in the oceanic unity that
could be achieved that way. Weinberger rode to battle: to wage war, not peace.
And yet, while helping to assemble the machine, Jim had become increasingly
aware of a curious similarity between its supposed purpose and that of the
sensory deprivation tank which he and Mike Mullen had built back in Gracchus,
to investigate the death-trance using bio-feedback from the ‘thanatos’ rhythm.

 
          
Jim
wondered how Weinberger could possibly achieve the peace of mind necessary to
induce the death-trance — though Nathan had assured him that he would be able
to. The benefits of Weinberger’s achieving this state, for whatever purpose,
should be considerable — while the risk of going too far into death ought
certainly to be minimised by Nathan’s core of anger. In his machine, Weinberger
would in fact be studying the art of genuine dying, as an unintentional
byproduct. When the cage produced no other result, this at least would remain
as a boon to the dying man. So actually Jim had been telling the honest truth
to Claudio Menotti when he described the whole business as experimental
therapy.

 
          
Weinberger
gripped Jim by the arm. “What do you mean — without actually dying?”

 
          
“It’s
an occupational hazard of death-mimicry,’’ he said lightly, his tone entirely
belying the sorrow and deprivation that he felt just then. “I lost a dear
friend.
In Gracchus.
He was called Mike Mullen. He mimicked
death not wisely but too well.
And went.
That’s why
the Gracchus House closed down its afterlife studies. That’s how I got
transferred out here.’’

 
          
“Fellow,
I won’t die. Not on this bed, at any rate!
Oh no!”
Weinberger swung Jim round, and stared into his face. “I know how you’d hate to
lose me before my time.”

 
          
Releasing
Jim, he touched a lever on the medi-console, and the stimulant syringe twitched
forward inside the cage. Encountering no obstacle of flesh, it did not
discharge its drug.

 
          
Weinberger
rubbed his hands together.

 
          
“This
is a goot/set-up,” he said affectionately. “It’s better than any I could have
designed myself, with all these extras. You’re right — it would have been risky
all alone in my apartment. Well, not alone — I’d have had a friend keep watch.
One of my buddies.
That’s why the periscope’s here. But
would he have been on the ball? No, I need qualified observers. How odd,” he
smiled, “that Death should be trapped and trounced in his own House.
Yet how appropriate!”

 
          
Poor
man, thought Jim. Poor deluded man. At least, on that waterbed, he could learn
to float his way out on to the ocean of unity.

 
          
Jim
escorted Weinberger back to his room,
then
he went to
guide his other charges elsewhere in the House.

 
          
Sally Costello was
a chunky young woman
with cascades of dark curly hair. She favoured a loose, robe-like style of
dress, with her arms bare to the shoulders and several serpentine bracelets
pressing her flesh. Hers was a moon face, with prominent cheeks which were
somewhat pocked beneath a layer of powder. Jim imagined dust drifting into
little meteor craters up on the dead world — though there was little that was
dead about Sally Costello, aside from her job as Menotti’s assistant. She
beamed frequently, as a natural function of the prominence of her cheeks. Her
eyes twinkled. Her robe swirled. She tossed her curls. Jim wondered a little at
her operatic role in her duet with Menotti. She reminded him of Mary-Ann
Sczepanski, but she was younger and fleshier.

 
          
She
ran her hands over the medi-console, familiarising herself, like a musician who
sees an instrument but does not really know it till she touches it. She glanced
through the glass walls which boxed the golden cage about, and beamed.

 
          
It
was a mousetrap, thought Jim, with Weinberger soon to be laid out as the bait,
synthetically scented with the gorgonzola of death — a smell which neither Jim
nor Sally Costello would be able to detect.

 
          
The
‘bait’ was dressed in brief shorts and a string vest. Thus the medi-sensors
could read his status easily. In this kit Weinberger looked like a victim of
starvation about to sprint the hundred metres. As he stood waiting he jiggled
his gaunt limbs, as though to warm up.

 
          
“Let’s
get started,’’ said Jim. He pulled back the glass wall from the cage door,
which he unfastened. Weinberger crawled through into the Faraday cage, careful
not to buckle any of the thin wire
framework
.
Stretching himself out on the waterbed, he reached back to don the sticktight
skullcap. For a short while the bed undulated sluggishly.

 
          
“Good
hunting, Nathan.”

 
          
Weinberger
nodded. Composing himself, he shut his eyes. Having closed the door, Jim locked
it with the gilt key which Weinberger had fastidiously included in his design,
and slipped the thin key chain around his neck. Then he shut the glass panel.

 
          
He
switched on the current to the cage at minimum power. It hummed faintly.

 
          
“Air
recycling
on”
he said to himself.

 
          
“He
looks like a scarecrow version of Snow White,” called Sally Costello.
Weinberger would hardly be able to hear her now. “But where’s the poisoned
apple?’’

 
          
“Everywhere.
In his guts, in his liver, in
his spleen — metastasizing.
Lodged all over.’’

 
          
“Oh.
I suppose so.’’ She went back to checking his vital signs on the read-outs.

 
          
Inside
that glassed-in golden cage Weinberger began to intone a monotonous, hypnotic
refrain to
himself
in tune with the mild electric hum.
As Jim watched the man’s lips move, silently it seemed, he
nodded approval.
Weinberger was really quite adept at this technique.

 
          
Or had been, once.
The mumbling went on for a long while,
till the room seemed to have frozen in time. Sally’s head, bowed over the
console and hooding it in black ringlets, was that of a waxwork.

 
          
At
last Weinberger raised a limp hand — it was barely a gesture at all — and Jim
touched the button to opaque the glass walls.

 
          
A
milky fastness confronted Jim. Weinberger and his golden cage had vanished from
the world.

 
          
Jim
bent to the periscope, resting his brow on the hood. Inside the cage, not even
Weinberger’s lips moved now. He was utterly still. In the pearly interior light
he looked even more convincingly blanched and corpse-like. The mock-corpse lay
beside a mirrored self, which lay beside another mirrored self . . . Toe to
toe, and head to head with yet others. Each lay in its own frail gilded cage,
the bars of which overlaid each other as bodies multiplied further and further
till they faded out and there was nothing else to be seen but bars. Right now
Weinberger’s machine seemed like some device for cloning dead bodies. It was
quite easy to lose one’s centre of focus in there.

 
          
The
descent into the death trance took the best part of an hour. Jim began to doubt
whether Weinberger would ever achieve it. He felt sure that the man’s subconscious
was putting up resistance, and possibly part of his conscious mind too. Jim
alternated periods of periscope watch with intervals of staring at the blank
wall before him. The glass box was a great marble block now, impenetrably
solid: a white
kaaba
. How could there be anyone inside
it? But he looked down, and there was — and then the box was a mausoleum. He
looked up again.

 
          
Suddenly
Sally shook her hair free of her screen, breaking the spell. She tapped the
screen with a chubby finger, squeezed by a large bronze ring which would never
slide off until her flesh melted from her bones. Perhaps that was why she wore
that ring and the squeezing bracelets.

 
          
“He’s
done it. Here’s the start of the thanatos rhythm.”

 
          
Jim
hugged the periscope hood around his head, and only heard her voice.

 
          
“The
other rhythms have flattened out now. It’ll take four or five minutes before
the
thanatos
wave is full enough to trip that
drip-feed contraption.”

 
          
“Ah
. . . drip-feed is on now.”

 
          
Jim
sniffed reflectively, though he knew he would not be able to smell anything.

 
          
He
focused on the point of the needle, waiting near Weinberger’s bare calf to
plunge a massive dose of stimulants into the man at Sally’s command if the need
arose. He kept his own hand on the squeeze-button which would multiply the
power fed into the Faraday cage by fifty-fold; This should step up the power
automatically when certain micro-electronic patterns appeared, about which
Weinberger had not been entirely precise — perhaps he was hoping to claim a patent?
—
but
Jim was a human back-up system able to exercise
his own judgement.

 
          
Suddenly
something flickered . . . into existence. A red thing — except that it was not
really ‘red’ — appeared abruptly, perching upon Weinberger’s chest.

 
          
It
was like a bat, or like a giant moth.... It flickered: it seemed to dance in
and out of existence. It had big glassy eyes — if they were eyes — as red as
the rest of its body.
And a cruel little beak.
It wore
sharp hooks on its veil-like wings — if they were wings — like the spurs of a
fighting cock from the bygone years of cruelty. The thing seemed to be trying
to reach the back of Weinberger’s neck — its beak ducked forward, hen-like —
but it kept hopping back to where his heartbeat was.

 
          
It
was like various things, but what was it in itself? Despite his shock, Jim
realized that he was only seeing what his eyes and brain
could
see, not necessarily what was actually there . . .

 
          
“Thanatos
finale!” sang out Sally, oblivious to any of this.
“Stimulating,
how.”

 
          
Jim
squeezed his button at the same moment. But whatever micro-electronic gizmo
Weinberger had included had already done its job. The cage crackled with
fifty-fold insulation.

 
          
Simultaneously
the needle slid into Weinberger’s calf. Weinberger jerked like a galvanised
frog, from the old time of torture experiments.

 
          
He
sat upright on the water-bier, his eyes wide open.

 
          
The
red thing leapt away from him, flickering, phasing in,
phasing
out —
more in than out. It hit the side of the cage and seemed to pass
through the electrified filigree; and through the glass walls too.

 
          
But
no.
It passed
through, yet not into the room which Jim and Sally shared. It passed through
into one of the reflected doubles of the cage —
actually
into it, leaving no ‘original* behind in the real cage.

 
          
Jim
realized now that there had only ever been ‘one’ of it from the moment of its
first appearance. In his initial shock at seeing it he had failed to understand
this, though his brain had recorded the fact.
There had been no reflections.
No mirror duplicates. Many
reflections there had been of Nathan Weinberger — but none of it. How could
something which he could see with his eyes not have a reflection in a mirror?
Perhaps . . . because it was indivisible.
Nothing could
double it — any more than a man could die twice. This weird characteristic made
the creature seem more real than if it had possessed a hundred reflections:
wherever it flew to, it existed
totally.
It was as though this creature had soaked up all potential reflections
into itself
, so that it could be seen
fully — intensified — not just glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. And
that was precisely the magic, or the technology, of Weinberger’s cage!

 
          
Circling
outward from the real Nathan Weinberger, the red bat-moth beat from one phantom
cage to the next. Yet the further it flew outward, the more golden bars got in
the way. Very soon it was flying into a wall of thick syrup. It could escape no
further through the reflections.

 
          
Weinberger
swung round, tracking it. He grabbed in the air with both hands. The space
above the actual waterbed was empty; the thing — Death — was not there. But in
all of the mirror-cages all the reflections of his hands grabbed in unison.
Weinberger seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

 
          
Death
flapped frantically around the circuit, from one cage to the next, to escape
those grasping hands. But it was all one and the same
cage
to Nathan.

 
          
He
caught it.

 
          
In
a cage thrice removed from the original the hands of one of his reflections
closed on it and held it tight. His own real hands remained empty, as did those
of all the other reflections of himself. But not that one reflected pair. Not
those. They held the red thing high.
The bat-moth.
Death.

 
          
Death
slashed at his hands with its wing-hooks, and gouged with its beak. Blood ran
down the hands and wrists of that reflection. The real Nathan cried out in pain
— and yet
his
hands showed no trace
of wounds.
Only the hands of that one mirror image which held
the creature were being flayed and stabbed — yet Weinberger still felt the
pain.

 
          
However
much it hurt him, he refused to let go of the creature and continued to wrestle
with it. It seemed quite uncrushable, if he was trying to crush it. With face
distorted, he held on. His own two empty hands were cupped in mid-air, the
sinews standing out. However much damage the creature did to his phantom hands,
he still held it fast out there in the reflection. His finger bones had become
a cage.

 
          
“He’s
over-reacting to the stimulant!” Sally called, seeing none of this. “What’s
happening?”

 
          
“He’s
fighting Death!” cried Jim. “He’s caught Death and he’s fighting it!”

 
          
“What?”

           
At that moment Weinberger faced
towards where he knew Jim must be.

 
          
“Depolarise
the glass!” he bellowed through the wall.
“Transluce it!”

 
          
Jim
tore himself away from the periscope hood, found the button and hit it.