by Joe Mahoney
Bedridden and surrounded by umpteen Casa Terra soldiers, I couldn’t just up and hightail it out of there. I had no choice but to stay put and get back on my feet as quickly as possible. I figured I would gain Rainer’s confidence, lull him into a false sense of security, and then, at the very first opportunity, act. Though precisely what such an act might consist of eluded me.
Weak and feverish, my purchase on the here and now deteriorated. My mind traversed the events of my life like a spider wandering forlornly in an infinite web. Traces of the Mind Snoop drug must have remained in my system, singling out specific memories and playing them over and over. The majority of these waking dreams featured my sister Katerina.
Most of the memories were insignificant. Flotsam from my childhood long since relegated to the trash heap of consciousness. Eating supper with Katerina at the dining room table. Helping her wash the dishes. Chatting idly as she brushed the tangles out of her long, red hair. A childhood’s worth of petty events barely worth remembering, yet filed away just the same, turning up now like snapshots from a long-forgotten photo album.
Belly-laughing over a game of Monopoly. Baking a cake together in the kitchen. Sharing cake and ice cream on my birthday. Sitting on the back porch together taking in a particularly striking sunset.
Yet other memories were almost more than I could bear.
Rain on the kitchen window.
A squad car pulling into the driveway, its white lights bouncing off the walls of my home.
Whiter still the face of the thirteen-year-old boy stumbling through my front door clutching the arm of a policeman.
Beside me in the den. Ridley, shaking. The police officer hunched over in the easy chair across from us. The policeman’s name doesn’t stick. Some of his words do. They cling to the inside of my brain like Band-Aids. One by one I peel them painfully off.
One of the words is “Katerina.”
Another is “accident.”
I awoke and sat up. I was alone in the room. Of course, I could never be truly alone with Sebastian monitoring the house, but with the door to the hallway closed I was at least afforded the illusion of privacy.
Feeling a lot better, I slid out from under the sheets, careful not to overdo it. A little light-headed, I paused briefly before placing my feet onto the floor.
I stood.
Wobbled.
Fell down.
My left leg couldn’t support my weight. Lying there in a crumpled heap, I poked it with a finger. Nothing. Zero sensation.
Had that bastard Rainer crippled me?
The thought unnerved me. I couldn’t seem to breathe. The tips of my fingers tingled and a bead of sweat trickled down my forehead. The room began to close in and I didn’t know whether to curl up in a corner or flee. I scurried on my three good limbs to the en suite bathroom, where I scaled the vanity and with trembling fingers wrenched water from the tap. I slurped thirstily with all the daintiness of a dehydrated pig.
Afterward I splashed water on my face and stood gripping the solidity of the porcelain as though it and it alone stood between me and some dire oblivion.
My leg—it didn’t matter. I would make do. I had a whole other one. The important thing was getting my nephew back. If I had to crawl to get him back, then so be it.
The door to the room squeaked open. I twisted around and saw a middle-aged woman enter.
“Ah, Mr. Wildebear, you’re up. That’s good. I need to take a blood sample, if you don’t mind.” Her accent suggested more than a hint of the islands, but not the island I was from. My guess was Trinidad. A plump woman, she looked and sounded friendly. In stark contrast to me.
“I do mind.”
“Now, Mr. Wildebear—”
“Out!”
She left.
Supporting myself by means of doorjambs, walls, and night tables, I manoeuvred my way back to the bed. After slipping back under the bedcovers I heard the door open again.
“Out!” I repeated.
An instant later my heart sank like a torpedoed boat. The enemy vessel responsible for scuttling me floated into my room in a subtle sea of perfume. I admired the vessel’s sleek lines and steely exterior.
I tore my eyes away from her and concentrated on a coat hook on the wall.
“Hello, Barnabus.”
The coat hook was black except where the paint had begun to peel off. I could detect hints of a paler past.
“Barnabus?”
It just couldn’t compete, the damned coat hook. I watched Sarah approach out of the corner of one eye. Soon both eyes were implicated.
“You need to let Doctor Ramsingh take her blood sample,” she said. “It’s for your own good you know.” She folded her arms and regarded me sternly.
There’s nothing quite like being bedridden for three days and waking up crippled to make one susceptible to the charms of uncannily attractive women.
“No,” I said, just the same.
I meant it. I would never trust Sarah Frey again.
She sat down on my bed. “Look, I understand how you must feel, but—”
“Let me guess. You were just following orders.”
“I volunteered, actually.”
“If somebody ordered you to jump off a bridge, would you just, ah —” I tried in vain to make sense out of what I’d just heard. “Excuse me?”
“I said I volunteered.”
“Volunteered.” The meaning of the word eluded me. It sounded vaguely foreign—Dutch, perhaps.
“Are you feeling better?” she asked. “You look better.”
“Am I feeling . . . ?” Unable to generate sufficient outrage lying down, I struggled to sit up.
Sarah helped by propping a pillow behind my back.
“Look,” I huffed, ignoring her charity. “I can’t feel my left leg, my throat’s killing me, my nephew’s been kidnapped by an alien, I’ve seen a man die, and you… you betrayed me, dammit!”
She placed a hand on my arm. If she had placed a tarantula there I couldn’t have felt more apprehension. And yet her hand felt warm, and good. I wanted to shrug it off. I wanted her to leave it there forever.
“You speak your mind, Barnabus. That’s good. Now let me say what’s on mine. I know you think you’ve been the victim of a great injustice, and I’m not going to say that you haven’t. But you’re not seeing the big picture. There’s stuff going on in the universe you can’t possibly imagine. Don’t get your back up. None of us can truly understand it.
“Humans like us are like fish in a pond. That’s how ignorant we are. Fish in a beautiful pond in a vast forest in the middle of nowhere. Outside this forest there’s a war going on. A terrible war with all sorts of people suffering horribly. I don’t mean people like you and me, but people just the same. And they’re at the mercy of evil—pure, unadulterated evil. Evil that the fish in our pond don’t know anything about. And what we’re trying to do is keep the fish in our pond from finding out.”
I experienced déjà vu as she moved closer to me on the bed. Unlike a certain other nefarious individual, she did not appear to have plundered my scotch. “And if they do find out about it? What then?”
“Death, Barnabus. Death is what then. Not just to one of the fish, or hundreds of them, or even millions. Death to every single fish in that pond.”
“Death to everybody on Earth?”
She nodded.
“You don’t think you’re being a little melodramatic?”
She shook her head.
Just how big a fool did she think I was? “And Ridley and me, we’re pawns in this war of yours. Or should I say prawns?”
“Barnabus —”
“Sacrificial lambs,” I barrelled on. “You’d throw us to the wolves in a second if you thought it would help, wouldn’t you? Go ahead, try to deny it. What are you people really up to?
That’s what I’d like to know.”
“I’m trying to level with you, Barnabus. There are things that have to be done and we have no choice but to do them.”
“Things like violate a man’s brain.”
“The information in your brain is priceless.”
“The price was my health.” I smeared each syllable with thick dabs of frost. “My well-being. My privacy.”
“Versus the survival of all humanity.”
“So you say,” I said, studying that duplicitous face, those treacherous freckles. “So you say.”
“There’s something you should see,” Sarah said.
A hologram appeared on the bed between us. I stared down into a miniature of Ridley’s room the way it had appeared before his abduction, all the furniture in its place. I had no trouble recognizing the two figures standing beside Ridley’s night table—Doctor Peter Humphrey and me. Doctor Humphrey held Iugurtha’s book in his hands.
“It’s not really even a book,” the holographic Humphrey said to the holographic Wildebear in a tinny little voice. “It’s—”
I had always fancied that a few days’ growth of beard lent me an air of roguishness—I saw now that it just made me look unkempt. Spying a distinct roll in my holographic counterpart’s belly, I began to feel decidedly self-conscious.
The holographic Wildebear stared at Humphrey. “What?”
“Look,” Humphrey said. “Believe it or not, this book, or one just like it, stole my wife from me.”
“Iugurtha,” Wildebear said.
Humphrey had been kind in his description of what had gone on in Ridley’s room. The violence with which I dispatched the doctor was appalling. It was a wonder he could walk at all afterward.
Iugurtha appeared translucent as she stepped through the gate, as if the hologram could not properly register her. She smiled at Wildebear before grabbing a handful of his hair and yanking his head back. With her other hand she pried his jaw open, placed her face close to his, and breathed into his mouth. Something vaporous passed between them. Wildebear reeled from the force of the transmission. He staggered backwards, his face contorted, his upper body spasming wildly.
“What in blazes?” I exclaimed.
“A unique but effective means of transmitting data,” Sarah said.
I began to feel queasy.
“Similar to the transmission of a virus through the respiratory system. Coded packets of information take up residence in the body and unzip in a way the unconscious mind is able to understand.”
“It’s not going to make me sick again, is it?”
“It’s why you got sick. Some discomfort can be expected after Mind Snoop, but nobody’s ever gotten as sick as you did. We almost lost you. You didn’t get sick because of Mind Snoop. You got sick because of what the entity did to you.”
I took that with a grain of salt about the size of Summerside. “What did she do that to me for?”
“It was looking to recruit you. The way it recruited Ridley and the others.”
“For this war you were talking about.”
She nodded.
The hologram vanished, leaving a wrinkled bed sheet in its place. “What did she put in my head?”
“We’re not sure exactly.”
“How could you not be sure? You’ve probed me inside and out, haven’t you? Maybe she didn’t put anything in there. Maybe you’re just wasting your time.”
“Oh, it put something there all right.”
“If my conscious brain can’t even get at it, what’s the good of it?”
“It may come to you.”
I stared at her. “How many times have you been through this before?”
A pained smile appeared on her face. “A few.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“Hard to say. Each situation is unique. Your nephew—we know the entity did something to him, but we’re not sure what exactly.”
“And Angelique? What happened to her?”
Sarah’s mouth twisted as if she’d tasted a lemon. “She volunteered. Sort of. Against Rainer’s wishes. But it’s like I said, some things have to be done and we need to do them. Angelique knew this as well as anyone. She had clearance and before anybody could stop her she took the book and opened it. Afterward she had us examine her. We could see that she was changing physiologically, but we couldn’t tell what the end result would be. Shortly after that she disappeared, and the next time we saw the entity… well, Angelique was a part of it. Physically. Almost certainly mentally as well.”
I shuddered. “Is that why Rainer’s so obsessed?”
“He would be obsessed anyway. That’s just the way he is. It’s his job to eliminate the threat and he won’t stop until that’s accomplished.”
“Whatever the cost.”
“Whatever the cost,” Sarah agreed.
Sarah dropped by later carrying a black binder. “Remember I said the information in your head might come to you? Some of it just came to you.” She dropped the binder in my lap and left me alone to peruse the contents of my brain.
I peered at the binder’s spine. A neatly typed label read: Mind Snoop Subject #2H200-I: Barnabus Jehosophys Wildebear. Inside, I could see that the handwriting was my own, though I had no recollection of having written it. Mind Snoop had done nothing to improve my penmanship. Most of what I’d written was completely indecipherable. What little I could make out wasn’t much better—a melange of numerals, complex formulas, and arcane prose rendered the whole thing virtually impenetrable.
People plucking information from my brain—I was in no mood for it. The whole business just made me angry. I threw the binder across the room, where it struck the wall and clattered to the floor.
My stomach growled, and I realized I was famished. No wonder I felt so irritable.
“Sebastian,” I said on a whim, not expecting the AI to respond.
His voice sounded directly in front of me. “Yes, Mr. Wildebear?”
“Spying on me, were you?”
“I monitor all our facilities.”
“Uh huh. Well, I’m hungry. Do you feed your prisoners?”
“You’re not a prisoner, Mr. Wildebear. Casa Terra has arranged something for you to eat. I’ll have it delivered straight away.”
It bothered me, the idea that Sebastian was constantly monitoring me. I pulled the sheets up over my head to hide from his prying electronic eyes. The door opened. I peered out from the sheets in time to see Sarah enter.
“A little something to get you back on your feet.” She placed a tray of soup, toast, applesauce, and apple juice on my lap. Noticing the binder on the floor, she looked at me quizzically.
“Couldn’t make heads or tails out of it,” I said, embarrassed. “Why don’t you just sum it up for me?”
She picked the binder up from off the floor and sat down on the bed, forcing me to pick up the tray to prevent the juice and soup from spilling.
“It says your brain is filled with parameters, controls, and indices. There’s other stuff too, but—”
“Parameters for what?”
“Controlling the gate.”
“Controlling the gate? You think I can control the gate?”
She leafed through the binder. “A part of you. Maybe not the conscious part.” She stopped at a page that looked to contain a child’s reckless scribbling.
“Are you sure I didn’t just make it all up?”
She shook her head. “Too much came out of you too fast. No, Schmitz has used Mind Snoop for years. We know it works.”
“Then why don’t I actually know any of this stuff you’re talking about?”
“Because it’s not compatible with your brain. Not in its present form, anyway.”
I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. I dug into my soup, keen to finish it bef
ore she said something to spoil my appetite.
“We may need to convert the information into a form your brain can deal with. Either that or modify your brain.”
The spoon hung in the air halfway to my mouth. “And how would one go about doing that?”
“By going through the gate.”
I could hear Fletcher’s scream reverberating inside my head. “What makes you think that would work?”
“Let’s just say we’ve been through this before.”
“And if one didn’t want to go through the gate?”
“Then one might never see one’s nephew again.”
Rainer summoned me the next morning. I didn’t work for Rainer and I didn’t particularly like him, so I took my time getting ready.
Along with Rainer’s summons, Doctor Ramsingh had brought me a breakfast of ham, toast, and eggs. I savoured every bite. I bathed for the first time in days—languorously, shaving in the tub so I wouldn’t have to stand on my bum leg. Afterward, I put a great deal of thought into my clothes. I selected a shirt with the fewest possible wrinkles along with a clean pair of corduroys. Only the spiffiest suspenders would do, and a pair of bright red socks.
As I was painstakingly spit-polishing my dress shoes I wondered what had come over me. I’d never been much interested in clothes before—why make such a fuss over them now? A chill coursed through me: did it have something to do with Iugurtha? Had not Ridley exhibited a similar obsession before his abduction?
But it was nothing of the sort. I chuckled as the truth dawned. It was because I knew I would be seeing Sarah Frey. I wanted her to see me at my best. The laughter caught in my throat as I realized the folly of going to such lengths to impress a woman I had already dismissed as a traitor and a zealot.
I left my shirt untucked just to spite her.
After hopping down the hall in a sour mood I found Rainer and several of his cronies gathered around my dining room table as if they owned the place. One of the men removed his feet from the table when he saw me—or maybe the look on my face. Judging from everyone’s empty coffee cups they had been waiting for some time. I took some satisfaction in that.