“Is this where we’re going?” he asked. But neither of the guards answered. It felt strange to be weightless, to feel like you hardly even had a body. It was like how sometimes the inside voices didn’t have a body, he thought, and then thought, Maybe I am becoming an inside voice. Or maybe the inside voices weren’t inside at all, he told himself, but in space, where they could exist without a body. He was webbed into his chair, but floating now, jostling gently back and forth against the webbing. But the two guards seemed to be sticking to the floor, something about their boots holding them in place. He didn’t have boots. Why not?
They unwebbed him and, grabbing him by his elbows, propelled him gently through the air, but as they got closer to the hatch, he started to feel his body come back to him and by the time they had gone through and into the station, he weighed nearly as much as he always had. Having a body again was something of a disappointment.
They dragged him down around the wheel of the space station and to a bigger bay where a larger ship was waiting, not a planet hopper but an interstellar vessel. Near it was the gray man, holding a rubberized sack.
“Ah, Istvan,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Why?” asked Istvan, astonished.
“Now that these fine gentlemen have tried their best,” he said, gesturing to the two guards, “it’s my turn.” He gestured to the guards. “Take him in.”
The guards dragged him up the ramp and into the ship. They passed a series of crew members, many of whom regarded him nervously.
“No need to be alarmed,” said the gray man to one of them. “You never saw this.”
The gray man directed them down a flight of stairs and through a thick metal door marked RESTRICTED AREA on the outside. Inside was a chamber lined with metal cabinets, a grate cut into the floor. The room was freshly washed, water still puddled on the floor, but there was nevertheless an odd smell to it, something that Istvan couldn’t quite place. In the room’s center were three reclining rubber and metal chairs, all of them bolted securely to the floor, each equipped with a series of restraints.
“Strap him in, boys,” said the gray man.
Eventually they did. First, though, they removed his restraints, and then removed his clothing, making a neat pile of it to one side. For a moment Istvan thought of trying to break free but he was too weak to do much of anything. They led him to the chair and strapped down his arms and his legs, and then affixed a head strap as well, something to keep him from turning either left or right. Then they saluted the small gray man and left the room.
“They can see you. You’re real,” said Istvan.
“I thought we’d already agreed that I was real,” said the gray man. “Can’t you accept anything as meaning something once and for all?”
No, thought Istvan. No, I can’t. He had been hurt too many times, burnt too often by a world that seemed to be constantly changing, constantly shifting out of his grasp.
The small gray man came forward and stroked Istvan’s hair. “Now we’re alone,” he said, and then he reached into his sack and took out a razor and began to shave the hair roughly away, sometimes nicking and gouging Istvan’s scalp.
“We have lots of things to play with,” said the man, gesturing to the cabinets. “We’ve got a lot of time before we arrive where we’re going and where the fun will really start.” He reached into the rubberized sack, bringing out a hypodermic and a needle in a plastic casing. He affixed the second to the first and broke the casing away. “No reason we should wait until we arrive to get things started,” he said, and smiled.
He primed the needle, and then brought it slowly down until it was no longer within Istvan’s field of vision. Istvan felt a sharp prick in his arm, followed by a burning sensation, and he winced. The burning pushed its way down toward his fingertips and began to climb up his arm.
“How does that feel?” asked the small gray man, almost in a whisper. He was holding the hypodermic up again and Istvan could see that it was empty, the needle slick with blood.
Istvan felt the burning push its way past his shoulder and then insinuate itself into his chest and neck, and then suddenly it felt like the top of his skull had been torn off and the skull filled with liquid fire. He gasped, could see in his wavering vision the smiling face of the gray man.
And the worst part was that—even as he struggled to catch his breath, even as he tried and failed to stay focused and keep a grip on his mind, even as pain rapidly transformed into the worst thing he had ever felt—he experienced a brief moment of lucidity, and couldn’t help but realize that this was only the beginning, and that before it was over it was sure to get much, much worse.
PART THREE
12
In a dream Jensi found himself in an unfamiliar room, strapped into something that resembled a dentist’s chair but wasn’t quite that exactly. Besides, why would a dentist have to strap someone down? Still, it moved like a dentist’s chair, rising slowly up and falling slowly down according to how a technician next to him applied pressure with his foot to the controls. The technician was wearing a white coat, like a dentist’s coat, but he wasn’t a dentist: Jensi could tell because of his teeth. Some were crooked and thrust every which way and others were simply missing and all of them were stained a yellowish-brown. His breath was bad, too, almost unbearable. And his coat was spattered with what looked like old blood.
“What am I doing here?” asked Jensi in the dream.
The technician laughed. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He lifted both hands and Jensi caught a flash of metal in one. “You’ve always been here,” the technician said.
There was, hanging from the ceiling, a strange rubbery contraption, like an inverted dentist’s chair, and once the technician had lifted and lowered Jensi’s chair to his satisfaction he reached up and pulled it down. It was some sort of pliable plasticene substance and it closed around Jensi, molding itself firmly against his body. Mostly it was soft, but here and there it pushed at him, hard little points touching his arms, his legs, in a way that made it difficult to move. What was hidden within it? And then he felt a little pricking as one of the hard points pushed its way farther into him, a needle of some sort, then another, then another, until it was hard for him to breathe since it made the needles, if they were needles, sink in even deeper. The technician slid his hand underneath the plasticene covering and when he slid it back out again it was slick with blood. It was hard for Jensi not to feel alarm, but the harder he breathed the more his chest hurt, the needles jabbing deeper and making him burn, so he tried to breathe in short, sharp breaths and raise his chest not at all. But he was, he suddenly realized, beginning to hyperventilate, his head getting exceptionally dizzy and black spots beginning to appear before his vision—unless the needles were injecting something into him and it was the drug he was feeling.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” said the technician, his voice extremely flat.
“No,” said Jensi, and felt a stab of pain.
The technician ignored him. “Let’s start with an easy one,” he said. “What is your name?”
Jensi shook his head.
“Wrong answer,” said the technician. “I’ll ask again. What is your name?”
“I—” said Jensi. “Please—”
“These answers are also incorrect,” said the technician. “Please try again.” He leaned forward, and for a moment his voice wasn’t flat but friendly. “I’m surprised at you!” he said. “This is the easiest question. If you struggle to answer this one, how are you possibly going to manage the rest?”
Before Jensi could respond, the technician leaned back, his face becoming neutral again. “I will repeat the question. What is your name?”
The black spots had nearly overwhelmed his vision. He could barely see the technician now, and what he could see of him was covered in overlapping circles of darkness, as if the man was either just coming into or just fading out of existence. “I—” he tried again, and t
hen screamed as the needles jabbed, and then managed in a half-strangled voice, “Jensi.”
“Closer,” said the technician. “But still wrong. Would you care to try again?”
But no, thought Jensi, trying to plead to the technician with his eyes, that’s my name, that’s really it. I’ve answered correctly, let me go.
The technician waited there patiently, his face expressionless, while Jensi kept taking quick, shallow breaths. Finally he said, “Would you like me to give you a hint?”
Very slowly and deliberately the technician raised his hand, and Jensi saw that the flash he had seen before was not metal after all, but a mirror. For a moment the technician misdirected it and Jensi only saw in it bits and pieces of the walls, and then it caught the light and flashed hard at him, momentarily blinding him.
And then he caught a wavering glimpse of his reflection, and realized that the face he was seeing was not his own, but that of his brother Istvan.
* * *
His body was tingling when he woke up. He rubbed his arms, almost expecting to see marks from the needles, but there was nothing there. He had to get up and go look at his face in the mirror, just to make sure that it was really him and not Istvan. For once, he was reassured to see his own haggard face and red-rimmed eyes, the proof of another night of uneasy dreams and little sleep.
After that, he had trouble falling back to sleep, was worried about having the same dream over again. He made the bed and then lay on top of it, thinking.
I did everything I could for Istvan, he told himself. When we were together, I tried to help him and keep him out of harm’s way. Later, I tried to stop him from doing something rash. Later still, I spent months and then years looking for him. I did everything I could.
Still, despite saying it, he did not quite believe it. He had not found his brother. How could he say he had done everything he could when his brother was still missing?
* * *
It was a hard day. He was, for one thing, exhausted, even more so than usual. For another, he found his thoughts returning throughout the day to his brother, wondering where he was now. Enough had started to come out now about the methods used by the SCAC against political prisoners and terrorists that he couldn’t help but think that Istvan had likely been through a lot. Maybe they had driven him mad, made him even madder than he already was. Or maybe they had crippled or maimed him. Even killed him.
Did he really want to know what had happened to his brother? Would Istvan even be the same person if he were to get him back?
* * *
I’ll think about him for a few days and then slowly forget about him again, he told himself. Life will continue on as normal. Even if I didn’t find him, I can hardly be blamed. But a few days came and went and he was still thinking about his brother, unable to help himself. And so he did what he usually did when this happened: he filed another request with the military to be allowed to have contact with his brother, knowing that it, just like all the petitions he had filed before it, would simply vanish. It would not even be acknowledged. But at least his conscious mind could now tell his unconscious that it had tried to do something.
* * *
He was still working the same picking job as he had been four years earlier, back when his brother had disappeared. He piloted a small cargo ship designed to shift freight from local orbital spacecraft to the larger shockpoint ships in orbit and vice versa. He showed up in the morning, was given a series of deliveries and pickups, and worked with a small crew until they were done. If everything went right, he could do the job in eight hours or so. If anything went wrong, though, he’d have to stay until things were taken care of, and even if he went over his eight-hour shift he never got overtime. But it was a job and the economy was bad—he was lucky to have anything at all. The piloting was far from intense—nothing beyond what he might be trained for in the first few weeks of military flight school except for the docking procedures—but it was something anyway. He wasn’t making much money, wasn’t saving any, but he was getting by.
* * *
And then, a few weeks later, he came home to find a vid message waiting for him. It was from his mother. It was surprising: he hadn’t heard from her since her confinement in the asylum where, he could tell from the background the vid showed, she still was. She looked relatively okay, though: her hair combed, her eyes drifting a little but not darting about like they used to do. Plus, she was able to form coherent, unslurred sentences, even if she only said a few words.
“Jensi,” she said. “I need to see you. Come see me.”
It didn’t make sense. Why would his mother call? She’d always blamed him for Istvan’s disappearance, and the few times, early on, that he’d tried to see her, she’d turned his requests to visit down. Even then he hadn’t particularly wanted to see her, but he’d felt obligated. He didn’t want to see her now, but at the moment, still worrying in the back of his mind he’d failed Istvan, still feeling guilty about his brother, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to contact her. But by vid rather than in person. No, in person would be too much.
It took a while for the hospital staff to acknowledge that he had a right to communicate with her, and then even longer for them to track her down and bring her to a vid. She didn’t look as good as she had in the first vid. Her hair was sticking out in all directions now, and her face had a slackness to it as well, as if she had perhaps just been medicated. Seeing her like that, he couldn’t help but say:
“You haven’t called me for years. Why are you calling me now?”
He had to repeat it twice before she understood what he was saying. For a moment she stumbled over her words, babbled almost, and then managed to say, “But I’ve finally forgiven you.”
“Forgiven me?” said Jensi. “For what?”
“For what you did to your brother,” she said. “I forgive you.”
Jensi felt himself beginning to fill with rage. “But I didn’t do anything to Istvan!” he said. “Whatever happened to him is not my fault. Whatever happened to him, he brought upon himself.”
“I need you to come,” she said, her voice strange now—high pitched and screeching.
“Why should I come? What did you ever do for me?”
“Come and receive my forgiveness,” she said. “Come and be saved.”
He cut the feed, angry as hell, feeling it had been a mistake to humor her and talk to her at all.
* * *
A few hours later, he had a brief prerecorded message from Henry, who was now working off world, doing security for a special facility. “Very hush-hush,” he said, and winked. “Can’t tell you much about it. Very lucrative as well. It’ll give me the step up I need, the capital to start something decent back on Vindauga. I hope you’ll be part of it.” When he tried to examine the location marker of the message, Jensi found it had been stripped. Not only did it not indicate a particular location, it didn’t even pinpoint a specific planet or even solar system. What could Henry be up to?
* * *
His dreams had faded and he had almost forgotten about Istvan again, when he had another live vid feed from the hospital. Thinking it must be his mother, he rejected it, but the call came back immediately, this time with an emergency designation. Curious despite himself, he accepted it.
It was the director of the asylum. “There’s no easy way to put what I have to say,” he said.
“Then just say it,” said Jensi. His mind was racing out in front of him, imagining his mother going berserk and attacking another patient or a doctor or a visitor. Or imagining the director saying that the public assistance funds had reached their end and that they could no longer take care of her. Because of that, paradoxically, it was almost a relief when he learned that his mother was dead.
“She had a cerebral hemorrhage,” the director informed him.
“A cerebral hemorrhage?”
“She’d had a brain scan not long before and nothing was there to make us worry. But things can change quickl
y. There was probably nothing that could have been done.”
Jensi thanked the man and hung up the telephone. He sat down and tried to feel something, but wasn’t sure what to feel. He felt some anger, some loss, some grief, but it was nothing compared to what he felt over the disappearance of his brother. And his mother was gone, was dead. His brother might still be alive.
I need to find him, he thought. I haven’t done enough.
But he was helpless to know where to start.
13
Grottor sat up on the bed and ruffled his hair, then leaned over and answered the vid. On the screen was one of the men who Blackwell had introduced him to.
“Ah, it’s you,” Grottor said.
“Expecting someone else?” said the man.
Grottor shrugged. “Do you know what time it is here?” he asked.
“Last I checked, you were on a ship rather than a planet,” said the man. “Which means time doesn’t really apply.”
Grottor grunted. “What am I even supposed to call you?” he asked. “What’s your name?”
The man gave a strange smirk. “You can refer to me as the gray man,” he claimed.
“The gray man?”
“It’s a name that someone gave me,” said the man. Yes, Grottor realized, his face did look somewhat gray. “It’ll serve as well as any other.”
Dead Space: Catalyst Page 9