F Paul Wilson - Novel 05

by Mirage (v2. 1)

  '"Well, as you said a moment ago, I've changed."

  "You're giving up, then? Should I close the satellite link and -all it quits?"

  "No." She sighed. "Not yet. I'll go back in tomorrow for another look at her memoryscape. If it shows signs of healing, we'll hang in. If there's been no change, I'll try to get back into the volcano. If I can't, we'll... dammit, Mordecai, I can't stand the thought of abandoning her!"

  "You've done everything possible."

  "But I didn't bring her back. And I didn't find out what caused this. What was that last memory?"

  "We'll never know. Apparently it self-destructed when your sister accessed it. It's gone forever, I'm afraid."

  A thought struck Julie with the force of a blow.

  "Wait a second. It's gone from Sam's memory ... but what about mine?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "As much as we fought, Sam and I were rarely out of hailing distance throughout our childhood."

  "So?"

  "So, there's a good chance that whatever awful thing happened to her also happened to me. I could very likely have the same bomb buried in my own memory."

  "Yes ..." he said slowly. "It's possible, but hardly probable. Even if you both experienced the same horrible incident simultaneously, the probability that both of you would completely suppress the memory approaches zero, I'd think."

  "But we're identical twins, remember?"

  "But you're not alike. Your reactions would be completely different from Sam's. Sam might suppress it, or deal with it in her art. You would find a rational way to handle it. No. Not possible."

  He had a point. Still...

  "I guess the only way to find out for sure would be in the memoryscape. Too bad I can't explore my own."

  "Don't even think of such a thing! That could be catastrophic! You could get caught in a closed feedback loop and end up like your sister if you broke it. Or you'd wind up trapped in your own memoryscape forever. Thank God it's not possible, because I'm sure you'd be reckless enough to try it."

  "Right," Julie said. "I probably would. Maybe I'll work on that when I get back."

  "You will not! And that's my final word on that."

  "Only kidding." She sighed. "Look, I'm going to get some sleep. I'll call you first thing tomorrow—eight o'clock your time—and we'll take another look into Sam."

  "Okay. But no soloing in the meantime. Promise?"

  "Promise: No trips into Sam's 'scape till tomorrow."

  "Good. See you then."

  No. No more trips into Sam's 'scape.

  But that doesn't mean I won't try to peek into my own.

  She rose and headed for the bathroom. A shower... not only did she need one, but she did her best thinking in the shower.

  And she had a lot of thinking to do.

  2

  Julie spent the late afternoon in Sam's room, pounding on the computer's keyboard.

  The shower had worked its usual magic. As she'd lathered her body and shampooed her hair, the solution had floated to the surface of her mind. If she looped the outflow from her own headset through Sam's empty headset, she could fool the program into thinking it was reading someone else's 'scape, and make it feed it back to her.

  The changes would allow her to enter her own memoryscape.

  Sounded logical. At least she hadn't yet found a reason why it wouldn't work.

  The question was, Would it work without destabilizing the rest of the program?

  Only one way to find out.

  Julie knew that even under the most controlled circumstances, this was one hell of a risky experiment. To try it alone was downright reckless. Some might even say stupid. But the -nly one she could go in with was Dr. S., and he'd never per-nnt that. She could threaten to quit, to jump off one of the World Trade Towers, to immolate herself in the center of Washington Square, and he'd still refuse to allow it.

  With good reason . . .

  So she was going to go it alone .. .if she could successfully alter the program. And if she could complete the trip before Eathan arrived. He hadn't returned from his previous trip to London until 7 P.M. or so. She hoped he'd be running on the same schedule this time.

  Because by then she hoped to have the answer to the final question: What awful secret was buried in their minds?

  Her fingers ran across the keyboard and she hit ENTER like a pianist ending a concerto.

  There. The last patch of altered code blocked the audio-video feed to New York. It wouldn't do at all to have Dr. S. stroll by a monitor and see Julie's memoryscape flowing by.

  With that entered, she was ready to give it a try.

  I should feel scared half to death, she thought, but she was curiously exhilarated.

  The nurse gave Julie a funny look when she asked her to wait outside. A new shift had started at 4 P.M., but undoubtedly the day nurse had given her a blow-by-blow description of the strange goings-on behind the locked door, and how she'd had to bandage a mysterious laceration on the patient's sister's arm.

  "This will only be a brief equipment test," Julie said in her most reassuring tone. "Samantha's not even going to be involved in this, so there's absolutely no cause to worry. Twenty minutes, tops. Then she's all yours for the rest of the night."

  The nurse looked unsure. She'd probably complain to Eathan when he returned.

  But every word Julie told the nurse was true. She didn't need Sam for this. The only reason Julie was using Sam's room was because this was where the hardware was set up.

  She locked the door behind the nurse, then hit the Record button on the VCR. She most definitely wanted a record of this.

  Minutes later she was gloved up, goggles and headphones in place, ready to go.

  But she hesitated.

  Okay ... I'm scared, she thought.

  Yes, more frightened than she'd ever been in her life. More than when she'd almost tumbled off the cliffs outside. A different kind of fear. Not visceral. . . almost intellectual.

  One thing to venture into someone else's unknown, but to wander your own memoryscape.... It was almost like examining your own soul, or your karma.

  That could be the ultimate horror.

  For what could be riskier than digging into your own memory, looking to unearth buried secrets, secrets interred for a very good reason: because they're dangerous.

  Only a fool pokes through a toxic-waste dump.

  Then again, if she didn't clean up the toxins now, they could eventually pollute her whole countryside.

  Look what happened when Sam's dump sprang a leak.

  Of course, poking around also risked causing a leak. She could precipitate a catastrophe.

  Still, she had to know. She couldn't go through the rest of her life wondering if she had a ticking bomb in her brain. If it was there, she wanted to find it and defuse it.

  If she could.

  Julie bit her lip and adjusted her goggles. Enough vacillation. Do it.

  Thirty-Four

  Fascinating results from U.C. at Irvine. A group of volunteers was shown a movie about a series of traumatic events. Before the film, half of them were dosed with propranobl to block the effects of adrenaline on the brain; the other half were not. A week later, the group that received the beta-blacker remembered significantly fewer details about the traumatic events in the film, but had excellent recall of the nontraumatic events. This might lead to a means of preventing post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  —Random notes: Julia Gordon

  You've become used to the darkness within Samantha’s ‘scape. The clear blue skies of your own memoryscape come as a shock. You rise and hover, gazing at your own peaceful inner panorama.

  At first glance you're reminded of Lorraine's memoryscape, or any of the dozens of other normal 'scapes you've wandered. Towns and villages dot the countryside all around you, and directly below, an island city of skyscrapers—your own Man* hattan.

  But not like any Manhattan you know. This city is clean and well ordered, laid out comple
tely in a neat grid; even the lower city, where Greenwich Village and Wall Street would be, are methodically gridded.

  You drift over the perfectly laid out suburbs, and then out to the countryside, where each farm is perfectly square and neatly bordered with rows of trees.

  God, you think. This is so embarrassing. Am I really such a compulsively ordered nerd?

  Off to your left, deeper in the countryside, you see smoke rising from a stand of trees. You start toward it, then stop. You can guess what's burning in those woods. The last thing you need is another replay of that scene.

  You look down at yourself and notice that you have a body here, a much more substantial model than you had in Sam's 'scape. And that makes sense—this is your place, after all. In no other memoryscape will you have a more physical presence.

  You head back toward the city.

  So far so good, right? Not so bad, really. Of course, you haven't been down to ground level to observe the nitty-gritty, but you've no time for that now. You've got to find that buried memory—if it exists here.

  You wish you'd been able to browse Sam's 'scape before the cataclysm, and seen if there'd been any surface clues to the location of her deadly memory. You don't care how deeply it's buried; a memory that toxic has got to leave traces on the surface.

  You start above the center of your city and begin moving outward in a widening gyre, searching the terrain below for something, anything, out of the ordinary. One good thing about this anal-retentive layout is that the slightest warping effect will stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.

  But the cityscape remains perfect: clean streets, smoothly flowing traffic, a subway stop every ten blocks, a verdant, mugger-free Central Park. Even the South Bronx has been tidied up.

  Your concentric circles take you over the suburbs. You note with approval that your subways continue out here as elevateds. How convenient. Tight-ass Julie hasn't missed a trick. And out here in suburbia the story is the same as in the city: nothing out of the ordinary.

  It's a mathematically perfect world.

  Which isn't all bad, you think. If you don't find anything amiss, you'll never know what Sam was hiding from, but at least you won't have to worry about a ticking bomb inside your own mind.

  You increase your speed as you leave the populated areas and hit the countryside. You notice that the tracks of the elevated subway once again disappear into the earth at the outer edge of the 'burbs. Is that their terminus? Or do they continue under the countryside? Below you lie farms and fields in varying shades of green and gold, with corn and wheat and soybeans filling field after field. You're getting bored. You're beginning to feel safe.

  And then you see something ahead that looks a little out of the ordinary. The color is off, and it doesn't have the sharp right angles of the rest of your 'scape.

  Your gut winds into a slow knot as you zoom toward it, then pulls tight as you recognize what it is.

  A bare spot.

  Neatly laid out grain fields and orchards surround you on all sides, but here in this roughly circular patch, maybe two hundred feet in diameter, nothing grows.

  Nothing. Not even a weed. No hint of green mars this dry, cracked expanse of sterile earth.

  Poisoned, you think. Poisoned from below. Bad soil. Bad earth. Bad bedrock.

  Something wrong below.

  You fight the sick, weak feeling that threatens to overcome you. Here is what you were looking for. Here is what you'd hoped you wouldn't find. Here lies the secret that can leave you like Sam. And now that you've found it you can't walk away.

  You're going to have to deal with it.

  But how? How to get it? Dig it up? With what? You have no virtual tools. And you'll have to be careful—extremely careful. One false move and you'll be a vegetable. But there has to be a way.

  You turn and see the spires of your city. Maybe there ...

  As you glide over the outlying suburbs you notice the tracks again. One set runs in the direction of the bare spot. Is it possible?

  Deciding it's worth a try, you descend to the northbound platform outside the tunnel and check the train map. Yes, the tracks run for miles under the countryside with regular stops along the way. But not forever. They stop at a place called, appropriately enough, End of the Line.

  You don't like the sound of that.

  You turn and the sight of a waiting train startles you. The doors are open. As you step into the front car, they slide closed behind you and the train lurches into motion. And into the tunnel.

  The well-lit, clean, neat—of course—train car hurtles through the subterranean darkness with a minimum of noise and wobble. Every so often an empty subway platform flashes by, but the train never stops. Why should it? You're the only passenger.

  Finally it slides to a halt at a station and the doors hiss open. A voice announces, "End of the Line. All passengers off, please."

  This may be the end of the line, but this isn't your destination. You look out the front window and see that the tunnel goes farther. A line of widely spaced incandescent bulbs curves off into the darkness. You knock on the engineer's door.

  "Hello? Is anybody in there?"

  The door swings open and you gasp at the sight of Eathan sitting at the controls.

  "End of the line, miss," he says officiously. "All trains stop here."

  You shake off the shock, reminding yourself that anything can happen in a memoryscape, even yours.

  "Can't you take me farther? I need to go—"

  "End of the line, miss," he repeats. Then his features soften and he looks at you. "I've taken you as far as I can, Julie. You'll have to finish the journey on your own."

  You nod. On your own ... you should have known this is how it would end.

  You exit the train, hesitate a moment on the platform as you contemplate the dark maw of the tunnel, then you glide toward it and begin the last leg of your journey.

  As you follow the trail of bulbs, hurrying from one pool of Sight to the next, the cool dampness seeps through your skin and chills you. The thought of the unknown terror you are approaching sets off an even deeper chill.

  You pass an abandoned train stop, exit gate bricked up, platform strewn with trash, walls marred with graffiti.

  No question about it. The environment is deteriorating.

  Farther down the tunnel, the tracks disappear. The lights are spaced farther apart, and dimmer, and soon there are no lights at all. You're moving through perfect darkness. And as you push on, you notice a foul odor, a mixture of mold, mildew, and putrefaction.

  Death is here.

  And fear.

  Where is all the orderliness now? This is like something from Sam's 'scape. You fight the urge to run, reminding yourself of that wonderful Exit button that's always available. You can bail out anytime you feel too threatened. So you press on.

  And suddenly there's a sharp turn in the tunnel, and dim light leaking around the corner. This could be it. Taking a breath, you make the turn...

  And find the tunnel blocked. Twenty feet away, a seamless wall of granite. And seated before it in a cone of light, a man at a desk, writing furiously in a notebook. As you take a step forward he stops his scribbling and looks up. You freeze.

  Nathan.

  The man you thought of as "Daddy" until yesterday, looking just as he did twenty-three years ago when he ran back into the burning house. And suddenly you know that he's behind it all. Nathan did something to you and Sam, something worse than the neurohormones, something horrible.

  And now he's here, guarding the memory of it.

  "Couldn't stay away, could you, Julie," he says, his tone a mixture of contempt and amusement. "Couldn't leave well enough alone." He tsks and shakes his head. "Too bad. I had such high hopes for you. Now you're going to be left with the intellectual capacity of a cabbage. What a waste."

  You begin to back away, begin to reach for that blessed Exit button. You'll come back some other time and face this. With Dr. S. You're not ready for this
now. You—

  "Don't run off," he says. "It will do you no good. You've al' ready set the machine in motion." He points to the digital clock behind him as it begins counting down by seconds from one hundred. "That's all the time you have left, so you might as well stick around and see if you can buy yourself some more."

  You stop. Is he lying? But this isn't really Nathan. This is an image constructed from your own mind. And you wouldn't lie to yourself. Would you?

  "Come closer," he says, gesturing to the straight-back wooden chair before his desk. "Have a seat and we'll play a variation on our little game. You remember our game, don't you?"

  Trembling, eyes fixed on the spinning dial of that clock, you approach the desk. And as you do, you shrink ... or he becomes larger. No, it's you. You're a little girl again. Four or five years old, and Daddy's going to play the math-quiz game. You climb up on the seat and glance briefly at him before returning your attention to the shrinking total on the wall.

  "Pay no attention to the clock, Julie dear. It will only distract you. Listen well. Here's how our little game works: When I ask a question, the clock stops. If I give the right answer first, it starts again and continues until I ask the next question. If you give the right answer first, it stays stopped until I get one right again. Fair enough?"

  You have to ask: "What happens when it reaches zero?"

  Nathan smiles. "You lose."

  "I lose what?"

  "Your mind."

  An icy hand grips your heart. You know this is no joke. You've seen what happened to Sam.

  Another glance at the clock. You've lost forty-two seconds already.

  "Can we start? Now?"

  "Of course. First question: Compute five thousand seven hundred and twenty-one multiplied by twenty-one."

  The clock freezes and so does your mind.

  You always scored well in the game as a child, but that was simple addition or subtraction. And who does math in their head anymore? Nowadays you'd probably use a damn calculator to count your toes.

  Suddenly Nathan is tapping keys somewhere on his desk-top. A buzzer sounds. The countdown resumes.

  "The answer," he says, "is one hundred twenty thousand, one hundred and forty-one."