Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Felorian was all smiles. Behind his empty spectacles his eyes glittered with the sort of fervour Carole usually saw the televangelists putting on for their congregations. Doctor Marco Felorian was a true convert, though, and his temple was the human mind.

  Every so often she felt his glance slide over to her, chill as if he’d laid some errant piece of cutlery against her skin. Once, after the sole sip of his wine that he essayed, he asked, “I assume she’s working well for you…?” His surgical gaze pinned her, anatomising her as thoroughly as though he had her on his table again. “She seems more agitated than usual.”

  Thompson didn’t defend her, but then he didn’t respond much at all while he was eating. Felorian cocked his head slightly, shelving the topic for later. “Anyway,” he went on, apropos of nothing but his own chain of thoughts, “the most recent subjects have a hundred per cent take up rate.” He smiled thinly. “It’s been a curiously backwards journey, in a way. Normally we’d design the headware to suit, but in this case that ship sailed years ago and we couldn’t simply design a bespoke vessel. It’s been more a case of encoding the program, so to speak, to perfectly socket into the existing headware. And of course I have been working on the basis that nothing short of one hundred per cent would be satisfactory. Given the importance of the message.” The smile spread without becoming any less thin, a nearly lipless crescent with all the genuine humour of a crocodile.

  Thompson had stopped chewing and was staring at him. Swallowing a thick wodge of half-ground steak he said, “I want to see.”

  “I’ll make an appointment with our dear Miss Springer, shall I?” Felorian favoured her with that monofilament smile.

  “No,” Thompson decided. “We’ll go now. In my car. Soon as we’re done eating.”

  “I’ll clear your diary, sir,” Carole noted. She’d hoped Felorian might be caught out, his vaunted readiness nothing but bluster, but he took it in his stride neatly enough.

  “Of course. I’d be delighted. And as for the other business…” An airy wave of Felorian’s blue-veined but unwrinkled hand. “Well, it all seems to have gone rather quiet, doesn’t it? Ma Lassi hasn’t been making any statements. She knows how that would go. And that lawyer fellow, Aslan, hasn’t been bothering our lawyers with any correspondence.”

  “That son of a bitch has other things to worry about,” Thompson growled. Now he was smiling, even as he chewed, and it was a dreadful, bestial expression. It wasn’t even attached to a real emotion, Carole knew, just the memory of one. It was the exact smile he’d worn when he’d…

  She shut her eyes. There was a pain in her temple, throbbing away. It had been there all day, and the day before, resistant to any medication she was allowed to take, because any serious painkillers might interfere with her headware. With her special headware, courtesy of Doctor Felorian. Not interfere as in free her from it, not of course that she would ever want that to happen, but interfere as in cause inflammation, immune reactions, other inconveniences. And so she lived with the pain because that was the best way of serving Warner S. Thompson and of course that was what she wanted.

  And she knew that no amount of pills or syringes would loosen this pain’s hold on her. It had come on in the awful, thunderous retort of the gun, when her face and jaw had clenched so very hard; when something within her head had clenched too, recoiling from the sight but not being allowed to look away because he’d said not to. It had begun when Thompson had killed an old, tired circus act of an animal and that woman’s voice and woman’s intellect had been snuffed out with it. And the pain came to the surface every time she thought of it, and that was all the time because the image was inextricably linked to her employer.

  “Are you well, my dear?” Felorian’s hand on hers, cold as his gaze, as his table. The look past the thin rims of his glasses nothing to do with concern. “Ah well, you’re bringing her to us anyway. We can always take another look under the hood. Have you been putting her under any particular strain, Mr Thompson, sir? I know that there’s some push-back against your platform in the Senate. I imagine it’s a taxing time for you.”

  It wasn’t, not really. Which didn’t mean there wasn’t a mounting bloc who were lining up against the populist front Thompson had leagued himself with. And when Thompson was aware of it, he raged, he hated. People trying to call him out, to pry into his business, it brought out the worst in him. But Carole’s job was to manage that; was to make sure that, by the time he went before the cameras, that side of him had let off its steam and sunk back down. To make sure that his response was given through tame networks and talk shows, interviews with people who were already on his side.

  She wondered how she’d feel if someone actually landed a damaging blow to his image. It wasn’t as though Thompson hadn’t been caught out, after all. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t had dealings and statements and associations that would have sunk other statesmen. It was just that he didn’t care about them. They didn’t exist to him, by the time they were dragged up and thrown in his way. He breezed past them like smoke, denied the obvious, belittled the great, passed through it all. Like smoke, Carole thought again. Because he didn’t react the way they wanted, possessed none of the vulnerable targets of conventional anatomy.

  They wrapped up the meal, then there were some major donors on the next table who hailed Thompson on the way out, and he was shaking hands and smiling that tight-lipped smile, being the people-person without run-up or transition, telling them it was all… that they’d got them… give you back your… Broken sentences, and you could read whatever reassurance you were after into the cracks. Carole retreated to Boyo, leant into his shadow, watching Felorian watch Thompson. The scientist held his hat in fidgety hands, the rest of him quite still, as though those twitchy fingers had been transplanted onto him from some younger man.

  “What would you do?” she whispered. She hadn’t even intended to speak. She didn’t know what she meant.

  Boyo cocked an ear. “What he wants,” he murmured back, mouth not moving at all.

  The headache ratcheted up a notch. “But if he didn’t…” Hard to even form the thought. “If you didn’t have to…” As unfinished as Thompson’s own rhetoric, hoping Boyo would fill the gaps with the right words. “What if you could choose?”

  She heard the faintest whine from him. “What he wants,” the dog repeated.

  “If he wasn’t here, what?” she asked him. “This life, for someone else?” And then, before he could even start to answer. “Would that someone else be like him?”

  Boyo’s eye was on her, anxious, huge. He whined again. “There’s no-one else,” he told her.

  “He might die right now.” Saying the words, even as a hypothetical, some bizarre worst-case scenario, seemed simultaneously appalling and liberating, like running into a fire because beyond it is escape. “His heart, a stroke, something. Something not to do with us. Nothing we could stop. What if he did? What would you do, if suddenly he was gone?”

  A shudder went through Boyo and his whine was loud enough that the next Bioform along shook an ear.

  “Don’t make me think about it,” he growled, and she knew what he meant. Even holding the thought in her head was like pushing opposing poles of a magnet together. It wasn’t something she was supposed to think, even as a thought experiment. She was Thompson’s creature.

  She thought of ancient kings whose slaves had been buried with them, servitude and chains that defeated even death to survive into the next world.

  Then Thompson was striding over, looking buoyed up from the gladhanding, and they all went down to the car. In the back, Thompson sat and stared at the screens, one of his political opponents making a speech against the new Collaring proposals. She knew he was hating, deep inside, charging up like a battery. Felorian sat next to her with his hat on his lap. After a while his pale hand migrated to her knee, not hard, not the steel vice she shied from, but the light, husk-like touch of a shed snakeskin.

  There was a moment when s
omething in her tried to break; she would slap him off, she would shout, she would weep, she would… something, some way of connecting the outward show to the woman she was inside. And then she wasn’t going to do any of it, of course. That wouldn’t be doing her job. That wouldn’t be what Thompson needed. He wanted a perfect girl who dressed impeccably, always had a smile and performed every service without a flinch. And if Thompson’s chief accomplice wanted to touch her, that was part of the service she performed.

  She called ahead to have the flitter ready for take-off, all the permissions filed, no waiting. Thompson hated waiting. There would be another car just as spacious waiting on the runway at their destination. This was what she did. She made sure all the stepping stones fell into place just as Thompson put his foot down for them, so he could walk through the world like smoke and never touch any of it himself. This was what everyone did for Thompson, and they smiled like she had to smile because, in the moment when he passed them by, he smiled back, and it was almost like they mattered.

  *

  Domestic flying was a boom industry. The upsurge of electric cars, last generation’s eco-legislation that had been simultaneously revolutionary and too-little-too-late, had hit the fossil fuels industry hard, but electric planes weren’t a thing yet and the slogan ‘Flight Is Freedom’ and ‘Freedom of the Skies’ had been drilled into every American’s mind. Euro-style cross-continental rail was still regarded as faintly disloyal, an admission of poverty. The airport had been crowded, but Thompson had marched through every barrier like it wasn’t there, held his head up, the famous jut of that chin, those hard cheekbones, the bulging forehead. An ugly man, by any standard of aesthetics save his own, which was the only one that applied when he was present. People took photos. People cheered him and blessed him. Boyo growled when anyone got too close. Thompson didn’t slow, just swept through the fog of their adulation. And Carole saw the faces of the others, those on the far side of the divide in the increasingly polarised political picture. Scowls and frowns and turned heads but nobody willing to make a scene. Because nobody knew what Thompson might do, if bearded; because he’d already got away with the unthinkable so many times.

  She felt proud. That was the appropriate emotion. He was her guy, her boss. He was a winner.

  On the flitter she reviewed the details of where they were with Aslan and Lassi, because she was allowed not to trust Felorian when he said it was all sorted. Because it meant she could ignore the man himself sitting too-familiarly beside her. The little VTOL craft pushed off from the private hangars at JFK under the expert hands of one of Thompson’s properly vetted pilots, its departure holding up the commercial flights all those cheering people had been waiting for. Thompson always got out ahead of the crowd.

  Ruthanne Lassi’s son had been returned to her. Felorian had made the call, because the woman had made a big media fuss already, and losing the kid in the system seemed likely to make things worse. Felorian had been adamant at the time that all the headware was deactivated, all the conditioning removed. One son, intact, hardly abused at all.

  Except the kid had flipped right there in the Braintree visiting room, all of it kicking in. For two and a half minutes, all the time before the Braintree staff had realised what was going on and intervened, Ruthanne had seen the end result of the experiment that Felorian was running for Thompson. Had seen it in a manner that tied it to Thompson in a personal way.

  She’d already signed the NDA by then, just to be allowed past the fence. She spent the next twenty-four hours effectively in illegal incarceration with Braintree’s legal team, being told that, through no fault of the establishment, her son had been sent to them incorrectly. Being offered money. Being informed that any attempt to tell anyone would be met with the full force of the law. Being threatened, being deprived a chance to legal counsel, being bullied until at last she’d agreed and signed and taken the blood money. And when her son was finally returned to her he’d had an accident, wasn’t himself, too much of the boy taken out when they went back in to scrape away the last of the proprietary headware. The stuff that was technically illegal here on Earth but was OK so long as you could file it in the Building Mars ledger. And Ruthanne Lassi had left with her ruined son and a fat pay off and a ton of legal paperwork and Felorian had assured Thompson that would be all there ever was of that.

  And Carole, not trusting Felorian, had put a tail on the woman, physical and digital surveillance, and seen her go to Aslan Kahner Laika, and known that Felorian had screwed up. Ruthanne Lassi should have had an accident, too, however public her profile. You could always cover it up. Nothing would have stuck. Thompson wouldn’t have said no, if she’d presented it to him in her role as sybil standing between the world and the god.

  I was disloyal. She should have taken that step. She should have been stronger. But the idea of sending Scout and the Trigger Dogs to snatch the grieving mother and make her disappear had hurt her. And she’d talked her way around the restrictions in her head and decided that maybe things would work out without taking that fatal step. And so she’d become complicit.

  And it was true that both Aslan and Lassi had gone quiet in the last week. And Thompson could always deny everything. He and Felorian had been photographed together at Costain’s and he could still claim never to have met the man and have half the room believing him. And what did Lassi have, exactly? No recordings, no evidence, just a wild story and a son who was going to need expensive care for the rest of his life, that she couldn’t afford once Braintree’s lawyers sued her into penury. There should be no more trouble from that quarter. That was what the money said.

  Carole found she didn’t believe it. She found she still had the Trigger Dogs on standby and an eye on Aslan’s offices.

  *

  In the new car, Boyo driving, they headed off to where Braintree sat, surrounded by semi-desert, surrounded by fences and barbed wire and electronic countermeasures. Braintree, where technological innovation met the penal system to mutual profit. Felorian grew more animated as they approached his domain. He was talking about the future, patents, advances, an entire paradigm shift in the way the world worked. He and Thompson clinked glasses from the minibar, toasted ‘the new prosperity, the new posterity’, as Felorian put it. He was all smiles. Thompson had no expression, face just flesh hanging from bone, the animating spark crouching in the centre of him, watching all the pieces it had accumulated around itself do their thing, make its will happen. He didn’t understand any of the things Felorian was nattering about, she knew. He didn’t have to. He didn’t know how to fly a plane, either. He had people for that, part of a long list of people he had to do all the other things he didn’t understand. The one thing he did know how to do was make people want to do all those things for him, up to and including the impossible things, the dreams nobody else would ever consider. And now Felorian was telling him it was possible after all.

  “Mr Thompson, sir, we tried a forty-man test,” the scientist was saying. “The hierarchical cascade worked perfectly. We have a recording we can show you. Obviously we couldn’t keep them around…”

  Forty. Forty people who had become a number that had become a statistic, to be fed back into the machine so that the process for the next batch of people could be refined. Forty who hadn’t had Ruthanne Lassi making a stink about their incarceration, whose appeals hadn’t come through, who were lost in the system. She had no idea how many Braintree had consumed now, from felons to furnaces and no trace of them ever to see the light again. Carole had set up a whole raft of contingencies for when people in power started asking awkward questions, at the start. She’d been ready with legal and extra-legal responses, with false records, tangled bureaucracy, buck-passing. She was still surprised at how few eyebrows had ever been raised about a prison where people went in but seldom came out. Braintree wasn’t so special, she’d realised. Nobody important cared.

  Forty. As though Thompson had pulled the trigger himself. The headache ramped up again and she shr
ank down in her seat. In her mind’s eye, the gun, the thunderous retort. Taking the picture of Thompson with his foot on the poor old bear’s tumbled corpse, the great hunter. Scout’s faint whine, because he was a Good Dog and an obedient dog and maybe in that moment he hadn’t been able to square the two.

  She realised she was holding something cold and hard-edged, attached to the lapel of her blouse.

  But I didn’t put that on… And yet there it was. The brooch, the one that she had been given by… she frowned. The details were fuzzy. By that woman at Live With US, but why had she given Carole a pin?

  The chain fence was coming up ahead, and she had a weird sense of urgency, that something had to happen now.

  The brooch, the one she couldn’t remember pinning to her lapel that morning, or even quite how she’d come into possession of it; the brooch seemed to shiver under her fingers, as though it was more than simply the representation of an insect. As though it was a cocoon, hatching. And yet she didn’t pull away, just closed her grip more tightly about it.

  I should say something. She remembered talking to earnest, cheerful Jennifer Wiley who absolutely wasn’t ever going to interview Thompson because he’d want her, and he’d destroy her. She’d be paid off and warned off and never work again if she breathed a word of him grunting and shuddering over her and get off me get off me get off.

  She kept the spasm of panic down, because Felorian was right there and she didn’t want to give him any excuse, and she’d had a lot of practise in hiding what she felt. In denying what she felt. Because feeling that way was disloyal, was wrong, was bad. Was forbidden.