by Ted White
“I wanted to know.”
“And I,” she nodded. “My son.” She shook her head and repeated it: “My son.”
“What did my file tell you?”
“You’ve read it yourself,” she pointed out. “What does it tell you?”
“Not much that I didn’t already know.”
She nodded. “You decided you needed therapy,” she said. “Then you found my name. Did you think you could find valid therapy with me?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I don’t like the ways things have been going lately. I had to do something. And I’ve tried just about everything else.”
“I think I should disqualify myself,” she said.
“For God’s sake, why?”
“I am your mother. Are you relating to me as a therapist, or as your mother? The distinction is important. How could I ever be sure?”
“Look—you’ve set up this whole office like an apt, and you present yourself as a mother, as an earth-mother type. Isn’t it a little disingenuous of you to disqualify yourself just because you really are my mother? If I was somebody else, you’d want me to pretend you were my mother, right? So it’s a little easier, isn’t it? Because, I know you really are.”
“But—”
“Look, Mother—I last laid eyes on you more than twenty-five years ago. I don’t even have a good memory of you! I walked in here, wondering, trying to remember, and I looked at you and I didn’t even know! That’s how much my mother you are. Why, I remember my den mothers, for God’s sake, better than you. Don’t you think you owe it to me to try to help me?”
She shook her head as if confused, tears that looked real glistening in the corners of her large, soft eyes. “I don’t know, don’t you see? That’s just it. What if it’s my fault—that you’re … the way you are…? How could I help you then?”
“Why don’t you tell me why you gave me up?”
“I’ve been listed all these years,” she said. “Why didn’t you ever look me up before?”
I shrugged. Standoff. “I’m here now,” I said, finally.
We regarded each other. Her eyes dropped first. I was making her nervous.
“Well.” She shuffled the printout sheets. Then she raised her eyes again, almost as if imploring me in some way. “Your father and I,” she said, and stopped. “It was a question of priorities,” she said, backing off and starting again. It didn’t appear to take her where she wanted to go. “Tad,” she said, “I’m sorry. I had to do what I did. Perhaps it was wrong.” She stared down at the plastic sheets she was still gripping. “It turned out to be wrong. But nonetheless, it had to be done, then. Your father and I were not happy with each other. We decided to revoke our contract. You were a problem. Contracts are non-revocable where children are involved—I guess you know that. We discussed it. Your father decided to abandon us. Under the law, an abandoned contract is null and void after one full year of absence. I went on Public Care, and you were taken into a public den; it was automatic.”
“And you went on to become a therapist.”
“Yes. It was a matter of years, Tad. It took me twelve years to earn my license. During those twelve years I could not have been a mother also.”
“So you became a counterfeit mother, you earned a license to become an ersatz mother for profit? Did it ease your conscience?”
“How can you talk that way to me?” she cried. “Is that why you came here? To confront me and revile me for abandoning you?”
“No,” I said. “But can you blame me for being bitter?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said in a low voice. “No, I can’t blame you.”
“So,” I said. “Here I am.” I gestured at the file in her hands. “And there I am.”
“Thousands of children,” she said, slowly, as if picking out the words one by one, “maybe millions, are raised in public dens. They don’t all turn out as you have.”
“No,” I said. “Some are worse.”
“Don’t you see, Tad, I can’t—I just can’t handle this situation properly? How could I be your therapist when you already have me feeling so guilty about you, about your problems?”
“I didn’t give you that guilt,” I said. “You did. How are you going to get rid of it? By throwing me out and never seeing me again?”
“I couldn’t do that,” she said.
“Maybe you should take me on as a charity case,” I suggested.
Her eyes blazed angrily, and then subsided, a sudden spark of flame from dying embers. “You didn’t come here with that in mind,” she said.
I shook my head.
“I have an enormous overhead,” she said. “The rent on this office—you have no idea the amount they get for space like this now. And the taxes—! Private enterprise”—she snorted—”is far from what it’s supposed to be. I work here all day, every day of the week, just to keep my accounts straight.”
“I’ve checked your credit rating,” I said.
“I’m not going to give you a free hour every day,” she said.
“I didn’t ask for it,” I said. “I merely suggested a sop for your conscience.”
She frowned and straightened herself on the couch. I found myself sprawling even more indolently on mine. It was a very relaxing couch; no doubt a tool of her trade. “If we are not going to waste the rest of your time—?” she said briskly.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re the therapist.”
“I can’t seem to become involved with people,” I said. “I try, but.…”
“In what way do you try?”
I told her about my visit with Veronica, minimizing what we’d done. “I wanted just to, well, get to know her. You know what I mean?”
“How do you mean it?”
“Well, hell. She’s a girl.”
“You seem to have taken care of that aspect of her,” she observed dryly.
“I wanted something, umm, less physical. I wasn’t a real person to her; I was an object. She treated me like an object.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“How do you treat people?”
“Like people.”
“I don’t think so. Think about it.”
It went on like that. Back and forth. I tried to explain myself. She forced me into word games, kept me on the defensive. I never seemed to get to the things I wanted to talk about. Finally she told me, “Your problem seems to be that you have difficulty relating to people.”
And I said, angrily, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, dammit!”
It was not a very productive session. And I wondered if future sessions would be any better. I’d always distrusted shrinks; why should I expect more of my mother? What reason had she, of all people, ever given me to trust her? As I left the session I turned black thoughts over in my mind, and wondered how a mother could make money from her own son’s psychological problems, when she was undoubtedly at their root.
I had to skip the following day’s appointment. I was called to Geneva.
Tucker and I took the same HST; he’d come to Megayork the day before, although I hadn’t known it. I found my seat, settled in and prepared to doze off when someone sat down next to me, and a warning bristled in the back of my mind. I turned my head casually, and found myself staring into Tucker’s slate-gray eyes.
“Greetings,” he said.
“I guess you’re coming to Geneva too,” I said brightly. I had not actually confronted him in the flesh since the episode with Ruth. Now he was strapped into the twenty-four-inch slot immediately adjacent to mine. His knuckles grazed mine as he laid his left arm on the armrest that separated us. The recirculating air suddenly made my forehead icy.
He chuckled, and I knew he was enjoying the situation. “That’s right,” he agreed, saying nothing.
“Have you any idea what is going on?” I asked. The demand—or maybe command—for my appearance in Geneva was unprecedented, at least to me. All my pre
vious dealings with the home office had been by infomat.
“Ayup,” he said, volunteering nothing more.
I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking more questions, so I shut my mouth and kept my silence. He chuckled once or twice more, and then became quiet. Maybe he was becoming bored by his own game.
The seatback cushions inflated, pinning us into our seats, the warning lights flashed, and in short order we were rising into a low orbit which would carry us outside 82 percent of the atmosphere, and drop us almost a quarter of the way around the world. The acceleration was brisker than on the west-coast hop, but, because we had a more favorable ballistic curve, the trip took no longer. Soon enough the flash of the sun on the waters of Lake Geneva heralded our touchdown into the late afternoon of another continent.
We were met by couriers and taken by private pod to the Concordat, wherein our Bureau’s offices occupied a secluded niche (although no less grand to my eyes for that fact). We were ushered across an interior lawn under an artificial sun, to an office framed by a living wall of flowering vines. Several men were reclining in sun-deck chairs there, and I felt absurdly out of place in my North Am clothes. I didn’t feel a lot better when I noticed Tucker seemed similarly disconcerted.
We were seated and ignored, while the others conversed in low voices. I was wondering why we had been brought here, if not simply to humiliate us with a better knowledge of the insignificance of our roles in the Bureau, when a man with a young face, but tired, old eyes and dead-white hair turned his chair around and addressed us.
“Gentlemen, the Bureau is indebted to you for your forthright perseverance to your duties as you saw them. I am going to tell you something, and I am going to state it for your ears only—because you have earned the knowledge.
“The girl brought in by Level Seven Agent Dameron has been exhaustively examined by our labs in Lima, and we have definitely established the fact that her body has been entered—invaded—by an alien parasite.”
He spoke in a dead flat tone, almost wearily conversational, as if repeating a common fact for the thousandth time, but the small chill that had been crawling slowly up and down my back suddenly spread its icy fingers and clamped them tight in my intestines.
“We have established,” he continued without pause, “that this parasite has created a second nervous system, directly parallel to her own, with its own nervous center at the base of her neck. The filaments of this parasite not only penetrate her ganglioplexus at many points but also along her spine and her brain. The relationship appears symbiotic. She is in excellent physical health. She claims voluntary control of many body functions, such as ovulation. She also claims that the effects of this parasite in her body are entirely beneficial. This, of course, remains open to doubt, inasmuch as she could easily be under its mental domination.” I’d sensed it all along.
“Sir,” Tucker said. “You’re suggesting this girl has been taken over by an alien parasite? Via Bjonn, the colonist from Farhome?”
The man shifted his gaze directly to my superior and seemed to examine him as coolly as he might have a minor insect. “I stated,” he said, coldly, precisely, “that the girl’s body and brain have been invaded by an alien parasite. I infer that the parasite was brought to Earth by the colonial emissary, Bjonn. This is not a known fact, although it seems very likely.”
“Has—has the girl said anything about how she was given the parasite, sir?” I ventured to ask. My voice sounded shrill in my own ears, but the man appeared to give my question due consideration.
“She spoke only of a religious ceremony,” he said.
I nodded. “The ‘sacrament of life.’”
“Exactly.” He seemed on the verge of thawing a little.
“Then,” I said, a little more boldly, “it’s reasonable to assume that Bjonn established this religion of his for the purpose of spreading his parasites.”
“That is our assumption,” the man agreed. I noticed the others were also watching me now, and I felt suddenly very conspicuous and dangerously out of my own level.
“Exactly our suspicion, all along,” Tucker said, throwing his hat into the ring. I kept a straight face and didn’t risk any sidelong glances at him. “I’m sorry we had to lose a valuable agent to them.”
No one was looking at Tucker. They were still watching me. I felt suddenly apprehensive. They hadn’t called us all the way to Geneva just to tell us this.
“You said this was for our ears only,” I said, surprising myself a little. But what the hell; I was already on the spot. “Why? What do you plan to do with Bjonn and his Church?”
The man smiled and nodded; it was like the sun breaking through a winter overcast. “You’re right,” he said. “We are not going to interfere with Bjonn at this time. Religious freedom is always a touchy issue. Instead, we want you, Agent Dameron, to join his Church.”
It sure sounded easy—on the surface. That’s why I had cramps in my stomach and strong misgivings about the whole plan, all the way back to Megayork. They’d rather carefully outlined the whole plan to us. I was to infiltrate Bjonn’s Church, but without becoming a host to one of those parasites. I had a valuable talent: my intuitive sense of situation and my ability to grasp by hunch the key to non-apparent problems. I was to exercise my fine talent—which had, after all, been the first to alert the Bureau to the problem—to get in deeper and decipher the colonist’s motives and purposes. You bet. It made a certain amount of sense, if you didn’t ask yourself certain key questions, like What more is there to find out? and How will this help contain the spread of these parasites? and also, Why aren’t they acting against Bjonn now? I had the distinct feeling that I was being neatly maneuvered, that I was a rather minor pawn in a much larger game. You can record it officially; I was less than pleased with my new assignment.
The girl was to be brought to Megayork; I was to ferry her back to the Church. I spent an hour in my office staring at the dreary Sound, and then went down to the office lounge. My time-scale was shattered by the intercontinental hops and I had another hop upcoming. I decided on a brief nap.
The dimly lit lounge looked deserted when I went in. The odor of marijuana incense floated in the air, and I flopped on a couch and let my mind loose. I rarely used the lounge, despite the fact that everyone in the office is urged to take a break here at some point in his day. I’ve never liked the idea of artificial relaxation; I preferred to take my tensions home with me and sleep them off. Just now, however, it seemed like the easiest way to kill time.
“Say, hey there, Tad.” It was Ditmas’ lazy voice, still full of vitamins, from a couch on the far wall. I rolled my head and saw a vague shape sprawled out there.
“Didn’t see you when I came in,” I said, feeling a minor irritation at this intrusion on my mental privacy.
“I figured you didn’t,” he said.
I said nothing more. It was my profound hope that Ditmas would reciprocate.
“That guy from Farhome,” he said, breaking the silence after what may or may not have been a long time. “Wasn’t he your baby?”
“What about him?” I asked, tightening my fingers into fists.
“Just wondered, that’s all.”
“I was in charge of him,” I admitted. “Why?”
“No real reason,” he said. His voice was distant. “They’re setting up the next run out to Farhome, and it just occurred to me he was your baby, that’s all.”
“What’s that you said?” I asked, suddenly alert.
“It just occurred to me, you know, when I was thinking about it, that he was your man—the fellow from Farhome, I mean.”
“Not that,” I said, sitting up. I felt dizzy. “Before. What you said about a run to Farhome.”
“What about it?”
“What run to Farhome?” I demanded. I felt like screaming. “There’s no return expedition planned for another year, yet.”
“They changed it,” he said, dreamily. “They changed it around.”
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“How do you know?”
“Gave me the assignment,” he said. “I’m going out with them. How about that, huh? Next time I see you, you’ll be a lot older, ol’ Tad.”
Ditmas was Level Eight. He didn’t have a black mark in his files. No one had classified him “unfit for space.”
Chapter Fifteen
I met the girl at the terminal. She was accompanied by a grizzled-looking woman, who spoke in an incongruously sweet voice as she said goodbye to Lora. Lora clasped the woman’s hand for a moment, and it looked as if they’d become genuinely friendly. I wondered how she’d receive me. I made a small noise in my throat to signal my presence.
She turned confidently, and said, “Hello again, Mr. Dameron.”
“Hello,” I replied, feeling a little awkward. “I know it’s not part of the schedule, but I wonder if you’d mind sharing the last leg of your trip with me?”
“Back to the Church, you mean?” She was calm, very calm. Her escort had already vanished into the crowd. She knew her business, that one did.
“That’s right.”
“Why? Why should you want to come back with me?”
“I guess it’s, well”—I did a figurative toe-scuffle in the nonexistent dust—”I guess I just feel responsible for you. I mean, for grabbing you like that, and all.”
“They didn’t hurt me, you know. They didn’t take me apart and string me out over their laboratory.”
“I know. I mean, I knew they wouldn’t really do that. I was trying to scare you.”
“Why?”
“It seemed to be what was called for—then, I mean.” She wasn’t making it any easier for me.
“Now you regret it?” she said.
“It was my job.” I shrugged my shoulders, unhappily. “Where does it say I have to like my job?”
Her eyes seemed to pierce mine, and for a moment I felt she was looking directly into my mind. “I can see that,” she said. “You are unhappy, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” No lie.
“What good do you think it would do to go back with me?”