Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  Willi alive. Nina had not been lying to me about that at least. I understood almost none of this: Nina and I bringing our sacrificial victims to this vicious feast while Willi— whose life Nina claimed was in imminent danger— laughed and moved freely among his nominal captors.

  Willi looked almost the same— perhaps a bit more marked by his self-indulgences than he had been six months earlier. When his face first became clear in the stark light and deep shadow of the corridor, I had Miss Sewell turn away, pulling back into the shadows of her cell before I realized how silly that was. Willi spoke in German to the man Nina’s Negress had called Saul, welcoming him to hell. The man had told Willi to go to the devil, Willi had laughed and said something to a younger man with reptilian eyes, and then a very handsome gentleman came up. Willi addressed him as C. Arnold, and I knew that this must be the legendary Mr. Barent that Miss Sewell had done research on. Even in the harsh light and the squalid surroundings of this tunnel, I could tell at once that here was a man of noble bearing and refinement. His voice held the educated Cambridge accent of my beloved Charles, his dark blazer was exquisitely tailored, and if Miss Sewell’s research was correct, he was one of the eight richest men in the world. I suspected that this was a man who could appreciate my own maturity and genteel upbringing, someone who would understand me. I had Miss Sewell move closer to the bars, look up, and half close her eyes with a provocative lowering of lashes. Mr. Barent did not seem to notice. He walked away even before Willi and his young friend left.

  “What’s going on?” asked Nina’s Negress, the one who had called herself Natalie.

  I had Justin turn toward her in anger. “See for yourself.”

  “I can’t right now,” said the colored girl. “As I explained before, at this distance the contact is imperfect.” The girl’s eyes were luminous in the candlelight as we sat in the parlor. I could see no trace of Nina’s cornsilk blue in those muddy brown irises.

  “Then how can you keep control, my dear?” I asked, Justin’s slight lisp making my voice even sweeter than I had intended.

  “Conditioning,” said Nina’s catspaw. “What is going on?”

  I sighed. “We are still in the little cells, Willi was just here . . .”

  “Willi!” cried the girl. “Why so surprised, Nina? You yourself told me that Willi had been ordered to be there. Were you lying when you said that you have been in touch with him?”

  “Of course not,” snapped the girl, recovering her composure in that quick, sure way that did remind me of Nina. “But I’ve not seen him in some time. Does he look well?”

  “No,” I snapped. I hesitated, decided to test her. “Mr. Barent was there,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “He is very . . . impressive.”

  “Yes, he is, isn’t he?”

  Was there a hint of coyness there? “I see why you allowed him to talk to you into betraying me, Nina, dear,” I said. “Did you . . . sleep with him?” I hated the absurd aphorism, but I could think of no less crude way to confront her with the question.

  The colored girl merely stared at me and for the hundredth time I silently cursed Nina for Using this . . . servant . . . in place of a person I could treat as an equal. Even the loathsome Miss Barrett Kramer would have been preferable as an interlocutor.

  We sat in silence for some time, the Negress lost in what ever reverie Nina placed in her head and my own attention divided among my new family, Miss Sewell’s limited sensory impressions of cold stone and the empty corridor, Justin’s careful monitoring of Nina’s catspaw, and the final, most tenuous of touches in the mind of our new friend at sea. This final contact was by far the hardest to maintain— not merely because of distance, for distance had ceased to be much of an obstacle since my illness— but because the connection had to remain subtle to the point of invisibility until that moment when Nina decreed otherwise.

  Or so she thought. I had accepted the challenge because of my need to play along with Nina at the time and because of her somewhat childish taunt that it would not be possible for me to establish and maintain such a contact with someone I had seen only through binoculars. But now that I had proven my point, I had little need to follow the rest of Nina’s plan. This was especially true now that I better understood the severe limitations that death had placed on Nina’s Ability. I doubt if she could have Used someone at a distance of almost two hundred miles before our disagreement six months earlier in Charleston, but I was sure that she would not have revealed her weakness or placed herself in a situation where she was in any way dependent upon me.

  As she was dependent now. The Negress sat in my parlor, wearing a loose and strangely lumpy sweater over her drab dress, and to all intents and purposes Nina was blind and deaf. What ever happened on the island would be known to her now— I was increasingly convinced— only if I told her. I did not believe her for a second when she said that she had intermittent control over the catspaw called Saul. I had touched his mind for the merest fraction of a second during the boat trip out, and although I glimpsed the resonances of someone who had been Used— massively Used at some time in the past— and also sensed something else, something layered and latent and potentially dangerous, as if Nina had booby-trapped his mind in some inexplicable manner, I also sensed that this was a person not under her present control. I knew how limited the Use of even the most adequately conditioned catspaw was when conditions changed or unexpected contingencies arose. Of all of our merry trio through years past, I had held the honor of having the strongest Ability when it came to conditioning my people. Nina had teased me that it was because I was afraid to move on to new conquests; Willi had been contemptuous of any sort of long-term relationship, moving from catspaw to catspaw with the same shallow alacrity he moved from one bed partner to the next.

  No, Nina was doomed to disappointment if she hoped to be effective on the island only through a conditioned instrument. And at this point I felt the balance shift between us— after all these years!— so that the next move would be mine to make at my own choosing of time and place and circumstance.

  But I did so want to know where Nina was.

  The Negress in my parlor— in the parlor! Father would have died!— sipped her tea in the mindless ignorance of the fact that as soon as I had an alternate route of tracing Nina’s whereabouts, this particular colored instrument of my embarrassment would be eliminated in such a way that even Nina would be impressed with my originality.

  I could wait. Every hour improved the strength of my position and weakened Nina’s.

  The grandfather clock in the hall had just struck eleven, Justin was on the verge of dozing, when the jailers in their drab overalls crashed open the ancient iron door at the end of the corridor and hydraulically raised the bars on five cages. Miss Sewell’s cell was not one opened, nor was Nina’s catspaw’s on the niche above.

  I watched the four men and one woman walk by, obviously already being Used, and I realized with a strong shock of recognition that the tall, heavily muscled Negro was the one Willi had shown difficulty handling at our last Reunion— Jensen something.

  I was curious. Using every last shred of my enhanced Ability, dimming my awareness of Justin, the family, the man asleep in his small, softly pitching wardroom, everyone— even myself— I was able to project myself to one of the guards with enough control to receive at least dim sensory impressions, somewhat like watching a dull reflection of a poorly tuned tele vi sion, while the group walked the length of the corridor, passed the iron doors and ancient portcullis, passed down the same subterranean avenue we had entered by, and climbed the long, dark ramp toward the smell of rotting vegetation and the tropical night.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Dolmann Island Monday,

  June 15, 1981

  On the second night, Harod had no choice but to try to Use the man he had brought from Savannah.

  The first night had been a nightmare for him. It had been very difficult to control the woman he had chosen— a tall, sol
id, strong-jawed Amazon with small breasts and hair chopped off in an unappealing manner, one of Sutter’s born-again street people that he kept isolated and well fed each year at the Bible Outreach Institute until the Island Club needed a surrogate. But she was a poor surrogate; Harod had to use every ounce of his Ability just to get her to walk with the four male surrogates to the clearing fifty yards beyond the north fence of the security zone. A large pentagram had been burned into the soil there with a chalked circle at each point of the star. The other four took their places— Jensen Luhar walking to his circle with strong, sure strides— and waited while Harod’s female staggered drunkenly to her place. Harod knew there were many excuses: he was used to controlling women at closer, more intimate distances, this one was far too masculine for his tastes, and— not the least of factors— he was terrified.

  The other men at the great, round table in the Game Room sat comfortably in their chairs as Harod fidgeted and squirmed, fighting to keep contact with the woman and move her to the right place. When he did have her standing still in the approximate center of her circle, he returned his attention to the room and nodded, wiping sweat from his cheek and brow.

  “Very well,” said C. Arnold Barent with more than a hint of condescension in his voice, “we appear to be ready. You all know the rules. If anyone survives until sunrise but fails to make a kill, fifteen points will be awarded but the surrogate will be terminated. If your surrogate amasses one hundred points by eliminating the others before sunrise, he . . . or she . . . may be used in tomorrow night’s game if you so choose. Is this clear to our new players?”

  Willi smiled. Harod nodded tersely. “Just a reminder,” said Kepler, resting his forearm on the deep baize and turning toward Harod, “if your surrogate is removed early, you may watch the rest of the game from the monitor room next door. There are more than seventy cameras on the northern part of the island. The coverage is quite good.”

  “Not as good as remaining in the game though,” said Sutter. A film of perspiration beaded the minister’s forehead and upper lip.

  “Gentlemen,” said Barent, “if we are quite ready. The starshell will be fired in thirty seconds. At its signal, we will commence.”

  The first night was a nightmare for Harod. The others had closed their eyes and taken immediate control while he had struggled just to reestablish full contact during most of the thirty-second preparatory period.

  Then he was in her mind, feeling the jungle breeze on her bare skin, sensing as her small nipples rose in the cool night air, and becoming vaguely aware that Jensen Luhar was leaning from his circle ten feet away, pointing at her— at Harod— and saying with that peculiar leering smile of Willi’s, “You will be last, Tony. I will save you for last.”

  Then the red flare exploded three hundred feet above the canopy of palmetto fronds, the four men moved, and Harod turned his surrogate and had her flee headfirst into the jungle to the north.

  Hours passed in a fever dream of branches and insects and the adrenaline rush of fear— his and his surrogate’s— and an endless, headlong, stumbling rush through jungle and swamp. Several times he had been sure that he was almost to the north end of the island only to emerge from trees to find the line of the security zone fence ahead of him.

  He tried to develop a strategy, create some enthusiasm for a course of action, but all he could do as the hours eroded toward morning was block his reception of pain from his surrogate’s bleeding feet and skin lacerated from a thousand branches and have her flee, a heavy stick held uselessly in her hands.

  The game was not thirty minutes old when Harod heard the first scream in the night, not fifty feet from where he had hidden her in a small canebrake. When he had his surrogate emerge ten minutes later, crawling on all fours, he saw the corpse of the heavyset blond man Sutter had been Using, the handsome face staring into the dirt on a neck twisted 180 degrees from the front of the body.

  Hours later, shortly after he emerged from a swamp infested with snakes, Harod’s surrogate screamed as Kepler’s tall, thin Puerto Rican leaped from cover and struck her repeatedly with a heavy branch. Harod felt her go down and rolled her to one side, but not in time as a second blow landed across her back, Harod blocked the pain but felt the stunning numbness spread through her as the Puerto Rican, laughing insanely, raised the blunt limb for a final blow.

  The javelin— a peeled and sharpened sapling— flew out of the darkness to pierce the Puerto Rican’s throat, fourteen inches of bloodied spear-point protruding where the man’s Adam’s apple had been a second before. Kepler’s surrogate clutched at his neck, went to his knees, fell sideways into a thick nest of ferns, kicked twice, and died. Harod forced his woman to all fours, then to one knee, as Jensen Luhar walked into the clearing, pulled the crude spear from the corpse’s neck, and lifted the dripping point to within inches of her eyes. “One more, Tony,” said the huge black with a smile that gleamed in the starlight, “then it is your turn. Enjoy the hunt, mein Freund.” Luhar tapped Harod’s surrogate once on the shoulder and was gone, blending into the night.

  Harod had her run along the narrow beach, heedless of the threat of being seen, stumbling over rocks and roots in the narrow strip of dirt, falling into the surf where there was no beach, always moving farther away from where he thought Luhar might be— where Willi might be.

  He had not seen Barent’s man with the crew cut and wrestler’s physique since the beginning of the game but knew instinctively that the surrogate would have no chance against Luhar. Harod found a perfect place to hide deep in the vine-filled ruins of the old slave plantation. He made his surrogate wedge her bruised and torn body deep in the web of leaves, trailers, ferns, and old beams along a burned-out wall in the deepest corner of the ruins. He would not receive any points for a kill, but the fifteen points for surviving until sunrise would put him on the board, and he would not have to be with his surrogate when Barent’s security patrol terminated her.

  It was almost dawn and Harod and his surrogate were on the verge of dozing, staring dazedly up through a hole in the foliage at a small patch of sky in which clouds and dimming stars exchanged places, when Jensen Luhar’s face appeared there, the grin grown wide and cannibalistic. Harod screamed as the huge hand descended, dragging her up by her hair, throwing her into the sharp-edged pile of rubble at the far end of the slave house.

  “Game is over, Tony,” said Luhar/Willi, his black body, oiled in sweat and blood, blocking out the stars as he leaned over Harod.

  Harod’s surrogate was beaten and raped before Luhar grabbed her face and the back of her head and snapped her neck with a single, sharp twist. Only the kill added points to Willi’s score; the rape was permitted but irrelevant. The game clock showed that Harod’s surrogate died two minutes and ten seconds before sunrise, thus denying him his fifteen points.

  The players slept late on Monday. Harod awoke last, showering and shaving in a daze and going down to an elaborate buffet brunch shortly before noon. There was laughter and story-telling among the other four players, everyone congratulating Willi— Kepler laughingly vowing revenge in that night’s play, Sutter talking about beginner’s luck, and Barent being his sincere, smiling self while telling Willi how good it was to have him aboard. Harod took two Bloody Marys from the man at the bar and sat in a remote corner to brood.

  Jimmy Wayne Sutter talked to him first, approaching across an expanse of black and white tile while Harod was working on his third Bloody Mary. “Anthony, my boy,” said Sutter as they stood alone by the broad doors to the terrace that looked down a long swale to the sea cliffs, “you’ll have to do better to night. Brother Christian and the others are looking for style and enthusiasm, not necessarily points. Use the man to night, Anthony, and show them that they made the right decision letting you into the club.” Harod had stared and said nothing.

  Kepler approached him while they were all touring the Summer Camp facilities for Willi’s edification. Kepler bounded up the last ten steps of the ampitheater and gave
Harod his Charlton Heston grin. “Not bad, Harod,” he said, “almost made it to sunup. But let me give you a little advice, OK, kid? Mr. Barent and the others want to see a little initiative. You brought your own male surrogate along. Use him to night . . . if you can.”

  Barent had Harod ride with him in his electric cart as they returned to the Manse. “Tony,” said the billionaire, smiling softly at Harod’s sullen silence, “we’re very pleased you’ve joined us this year. I think it might sit well with the other players if you worked with a male surrogate as soon as possible. But only if you want to, of course. There’s no hurry.” They rode in silence to the estate.

  Willi came last, confronting Harod as he left the Manse to join Maria Chen on the beach in the hour before the evening meal. Harod had slipped out a side door and was finding his way through winding garden paths recessed below ground level, the maze further complicated by high banks of ferns and flowers, when he crossed a small, ornamental bridge, turned left through a miniature Zen garden, and came across Willi sitting on a long white bench, looking like a pale spider in an iron web. Tom Reynolds stood behind the bench, his dull eyes, lank blond hair, and long fingers making Harod think— not for the first time— that Willi’s second favorite catspaw looked like a rock star turned executioner.

  “Tony,” murmured Willi in his husky, accented tones, “it is time we talked.”

  “Not now,” said Harod and started to pass. Reynolds slid sideways to block his path.

  “Do you know what you are doing, Tony?” Willi asked softly. “Do you?” snapped Harod, knowing instantly how feeble it sounded, wanting only to be away from there.

  “Ja,” murmured Willi, “I do. And if you tamper with things now, you will be destroying years of effort and planning.”

  Harod looked around, realizing that they were out of sight of the Manse and of the security cameras in this flowered cul-de-sac. He would not retrace his steps to the estate and Reynolds still blocked the way out. “Look,” Harod said, hearing his voice rise with tension, “I don’t give a fuck about any of this and I don’t have the least fucking idea what you’re talking about and I just don’t fucking want to be involved, okay?”