But I was still oddly unconcerned about this. There was one suit, and there was still plenty of time. Anyway, I did not believe I was going to die. Dina could have the suit. Dina, whom I expected to recover consciousness soon, could make her escape . . . and I wouldn't die.
"What are you telling me?" I asked Miranda.
She shrugged. "I've been careful not to tell you anything. You're telling me."
"But I'm remembering what you tell me to remember. That Mr. Sylvester was a nuisance to Jota, and he died. That Jota quarreled with me, and I nearly died. That the two boys who led the mob against Jota died. That Squire Badgeley beat Jota, and he died. That Anne Badgeley -- "
"You're missing out some very important things. About all those girls, schoolgirls mostly, but older girls too. Particularly Anne. She could have had anyone in Shuteley, you said. Why did she pick a kid barely into his teens?"
"You're saying Jota did all this. Any man he wants out of the way dies? Any girl he wants says yes?"
She nodded. "He has the Gift. And you're wrong to say any man . What about Anne? When he'd finished with her, he made her die."
"Why would he want rid of her?"
"The oldest reason, probably. She was pregnant. With others he was more careful. With her he was too impatient, too reckless. And it seemed to Jota that it would be better for him if Anne died."
"You're saying he condemned all these people to death?"
"No," she said thoughtfully. "Not that. I imagine that at first, he simply thought, perhaps not even consciously: 'Everything would be fine but for Mr. Sylvester.' And soon Mr. Sylvester wasn't there. But after this had happened a few times, Jota must have begun to realize . . . There's another thing he obviously has found out by this time -- with the ability to attack goes defense. Nobody can kill Jota. No person can kill Jota. Of course he could die by accident, like anyone else -- his power is over people. Originally he died in this fire -- "
"Wait," I said. "That doesn't jell. I just killed him. Yesterday Greg killed him. You say that before you intervened, the fire killed him. Seems that for an indestructible character he gets destroyed a hell of a lot."
Miranda was following her own train of thought, not mine. "Later, in adolescence, he found out something else. After any girl refused him -- "
"No girl ever refused him," I said.
"Oh, yes. Time after time. You weren't there. Neither was I, but I can tell you what happened. The first meeting was always as you'd expect. But later -- a girl who sneered at Jota would come crawling to him, She'd beg him, as I -- "
She flushed. "I think you heard what Greg and I were saying at the bridge. You're wrong if you've any idea that people with the Gift are smooth, practiced lovers. They don't have to be. It's crude, it's bestial. They say: 'I want. you,' and that's it. Not the first time. The Gift needs time to work. When Jota or Greg wants a man dead, he doesn't drop on the spot. It takes time to happen."
The paradoxes and inconsistencies that had bothered me were gradually melting away.
I could see how Greg could have killed Jota. If two people had this Gift, presumably it was canceled out. Greg had no special power over Jota, but then Jota had no special defense against Greg. So the matter was settled simply with pistols. There was also the cryptic exchange between them which I now understood better:
GREG: You're a bit like me. JOTA: In more ways than one. GREG: Remember . . . I killed you. JOTA: Remember . . . I let you.
Yes . . . I understood and accepted that. I also understood and accepted this new explanation of Jota's power over women. He approached them, they reacted exactly as they wished, free to do as they wished (I now remembered I had never been privileged to see any of the preliminaries, only the consequences). Later, when something had worked on them, they became possessed, clay in Jota's hands.
More of the inconsistencies dissolved when I looked at them. Jota had been brutish toward both Sheila and Dina. That was how it started. Later, if he persisted, things would be very different. But instinctively wise in the case of Sheila, I had sent Jota away, unconsciously knowing what Sheila hated me for thinking, that what she thought or wanted or said didn't count, only what Jota wanted . . . And as for Dina, there had not been an Act Two and there never would be.
Then, having prepared the way, Miranda told me about the Gift in her own world.
I don't remember her words. She spoke for a long time. A lot of what she said I didn't believe at first, but gradually disbelief was borne down.
Greg and Jota and three percent of the population in 2097 had a Gift which was quite simply ability to make people die or surrender sexually. It was nothing else.
It was fundamentally a masculine phenomenon. So few women possessed it that they were freaks, usually choosing to conceal, abandon, deny their possession of the Gift.
Those with the Gift, then, were men, and if they didn't rule the world, they prevented anyone else from ruling it effectively.
Most of them, fortunately, were law-abiding . . . but what could be done about the rogues like Greg? Virtually nothing. That was why Greg was present on an expedition aimed at the limitation or even destruction of his kind, able to sabotage it at will, because nobody could stop him.
Miranda conldn't stop him. If Greg cared to decide at any moment that she should die, and simply decided it instead of crudely, impulsively and rashly trying to break her body with one blow, then she would die in less than two weeks. And the cause of death could not legally be connected with Greg.
I protested at this. Had no murder charge ever been brought against one of these people? When the Gift was known to exist, when threats had been made, when a death duly took place exactly as forecast, surely . . . ?
"Think, Val," said Miranda wearily. "Take the clearest possible case . . . imagine the clearest possible case, and then think about it. The detectives who built up the case would have to be immune. The cops who arrested the accused would have to be immune. The jailers, judge, jury, and lawyers would have to be immune. And in common justice they'd have to prove that the accused had the Gift, and had used it deliberately to end another person's life."
She shook her head. "It can't be done. Especially since the actual cause of death is always natural -- illness, accident or suicide, with no physical intervention by the real killer."
So Greg was with the Shuteley party. Some of those who had tried to stop him had died. Threats were enough to silence the others. Miranda's attitude, a perfectly reasonable one after all, was that she could at least keep an eye on him and try to defeat him.
In addition to ordinary people and those who had the Gift, there were some who were simply immune. They did not possess the Gift; but those who did could accomplish nothing against them. Unfortunately there were fewer of these than those who had the Gift.
The Gift, and immunity, were hereditary. This did not mean that the Gift was often passed on. It merely meant that it could be passed on.
Miranda's world, the world of the giants (women of five feet four were as rare in her world, she told me, as women of four feet eleven in ours) was a good world on the surface, and a seething cesspool of fear and chaos and self-destruction underneath.
And all because of the Gift.
The sexual side of it, she pointed out, was virtually unimportant. That was merely a by-product, a side issue. It existed, probably, because sex as well as survival was basic. Anyone who could control life and death could also control the sex impulse.
That was nothing. A small minority of Casanovas could be a nuisance, but they couldn't push a whole world over a precipice.
The threat of death was another matter altogether. There was no need for any Greg to be educated, clever, handsome, careful, obliging, efficient or self-respecting. Anyone who said or did anything a Greg didn't like could be rubbed out and forgotten. It was senseless to be brave when faced with a Greg. After he had eradicated you, he could quite easily, on the merest whim, eradicate your wife and family as well.
As far as
anyone knew, the Gift was a chance mutation. Immunity was probably allied to it, though no one could be sure. Immunity might have existed always, unrecognized, purposeless, until the Gift emerged.
Twisting of time was only one of the desperate measures tried in an attempt to restore sanity to the world of 2097. Miranda hinted at others, refused to tell me about any, and said that anyway, they had all failed miserably, sometimes tragically.
I started to suggest one angle that occurred to me, the arrangement of accidents, since Gregs could be killed in accidents like anybody else, and she cut me off rather impatiently. Such attempts were the most disastrous of all. They made all people who possessed the Gift, including those who steadfastly refused to use it, band together for their own survival.
So we came to the purpose of the Shuteley operation.
Clearly if everybody possessed the Gift, or if everybody was immune, or if everybody was one or the other, the problem would cease to exist.
According to the river-of-time theory, the people of 2097 would continue to exist no matter what was done to the past, short of a major diversion which would force the flow into a completely different course. But their capacities might be changed. Miranda might, after certain changes had been made, find herself immune. Or she might have the Gift. Or nobody might have the Gift.
It was a desperate scheme, born of desperation. It was carried out in a manner little short of insanity, in a completely useless attempt to get the whole thing done under cover.
It was entrusted to an ordinary history class in an ordinary school under an ordinary teacher.
A history class would go back and see the Great Fire of Shuteley, 1966 A.D. They would do nothing to alter the flow of events except remove Garry Carswell . . .
That was the cover: a minor operation like many others (none of them directed against possessors of the Gift), of no particular interest to anyone not directly concerned. Miranda knew all about it, but none of the students did. As far as they were concerned, the rescue of Garry Carswell, and a few others, was all that was involved, apart from the opportunity to see the Great Fire.
It might possibly have worked.
But three percent possession of the Gift meant that one in thirty-three adults, teenagers or children had it. So no school was free of it.
Greg was in another class, a lower class. He applied to join the expedition to 1966. The headmaster, the far more important people behind the headmaster and the less important people below, all knew that the inclusion of Greg would ruin everything.
But Greg had made up his mind, and nothing else mattered. It wasn't even possible to cancel the scheme. Greg, if he felt like it, could easily block the cancelation.
Greg went with the party.
"Now Jota," I said. "Tell me why you want Jota."
She hesitated. "It's only a theory that if we saved Jota the situation might improve. Perhaps it would be worse . . . You've been baffled in the last twenty-four hours by what we know and what we don't know, Val. We knew that Jota would arrive at your office at 3:10 this afternoon, but I didn't know Dina existed. We had pictures of you, so I knew you when I saw you in the bar, but we had no picture of Jota, and that's why I came to your office -- to see him, to be able to recognize him, so that there would be no possibility of mistaken identity later. We didn't know, of course, that you and he would go to the camp, because that was a new train of events altogether."
"Why didn't you do some preliminary scouting?"
"For several reasons, but the main one was to try to rush this through without attracting the attention of people like Greg. It wasn't supposed to be a big, important operation, just -- "
"Just a sight-seeing tour," I said.
"Well, yes. Anyway, one thing we do know for certain is that around you here in Shuteley in 1966 there were important elements in the Gift-immunity hereditary lines. Some were strong, some weak . . . it's possible that the whole situation developed from a single latent mutant who lived here thirty or fifty or eighty years ago. But we haven't been able to trace any such person."
"You hoped saving Jota would give more people in your time the Gift. Or better still, immunity without the effect."
"That's it exactly. Leaving Jota to die, as he did originally, obviously didn't stop the spread of the mutation. Historiaus believe that saving his strain may do what you just said. One thing we are sure of is that the immunity strain is here too, if we can somehow develop it. But all we can do, all we know about to try, is to save Jota. He was the first, by far the first, to possess the Gift complete. Decades were to pass before anyone appeared with the power so fully developed -- "
"And he really had no children?"
"We think not. We're almost sure that . . . "
She stopped suddenly.
I followed the direction of her eyes and saw Greg.
He was carrying a spare suit, which he dropped when he saw Miranda. His expression answered one question. He had meant to kill her, and thought he had.
Yet he didn't say "How did you get here?" He demanded: " What have you done? "
She stood up. "What could I do?" There was a slight emphasis on the "I."
"I've lost it," he said hoarsely. "Something's taken it away from me. I felt it go . . . I couldn't test it with death, that takes too long, And I wanted to know. I tested it with girls. With Harrie, Wendy, Mary, Chloe. They couldn't understand it either . . . But they all hate me, can you understand that?"
Miranda seemed to grow as tall as Greg. A great joy flooded her. "You've lost it?" she said. "Maybe there is natural justice after all. You're just a kid now, a great overgrown kid. And helpless."
"Helpless?" he almost shouted, drawing himself up to his enormous height. Yet he was almost blubbering. Curiously enough, I could understand him. I'd known Jota for a long time. Jota had a strange Gift, and, I now believed, very little else. His power, his personality, his success had all come from something he couldn't help. He had Something; he wasn't Somebody.
It's not necessarily true, as you're always told when you're a kid, that a bully must be a coward. Yet there is a weakness, if not necessarily in courage. A strong, brave, whole man or boy doesn't have to prove himself at the expense of the weak. He may trample carelessly on the weak, as strong men do. But he doesn't seek out the weak to torture and humillate them. He'd rather engage in a real contest with someone his own size.
Jota and Greg had this in common, I now saw, that the thing that set them apart was important to them, vital to them. They weren't like a banker who happened to be a talented violinist, enjoying playing the violin for his own pleasure and that of others, but with no compulsion to tell every new bank client at once that he was a brilliant violinist. As far as I knew Jota hadn't used his Gift to kill more than half a dozen people. But he'd had to go on making amatory conquests -- he'd been forced to go on. Now that I had the key I could see his Don Juan activities in a different light, and no longer envied him in the slightest. Every girl who didn't want him had to be made to want him . . .
Greg, however, was the problem of the moment. As he and Miranda faced each other, I knew that the way this whole thing would go depended on what happened now between Greg and Miranda -- and me. Because I mattered, too.
"Yes, helpless," I said. "But you knew that quite a while ago, Greg, didn't you? You just didn't want to believe it."
He looked at me as if astonished to see me there. Then, remembering, he looked around. His gaze passed over the sleeping Dina without stopping. "Where's Jota?" he said.
I had become strong and confident. I felt it, as Greg had felt his reduction to size, but the opposite way. I didn't even have to stand up. I was still sitting on the burnt earth.
"I killed him, Greg," I said. "He was trying to add Dina to his list. I didn't mean to kill him, but I'm not sorry he's dead. I'm beginning to think his death was necessary."
"You killed him," Greg murmured. " You killed him."
"Why pretend to be surprised? You wanted to kill me, and co
uldn't. You had to save me instead. I guess you managed to convince yourself that you didn't need to kill me in the fire, that it was neater and cleverer and just as efficient to bring me here to die when the stasis was removed. But the truth was, you couldn't kill me. The most you could do was place me in circumstances where I might die."
It was Miranda's turn not to be able to follow what was going on. She had a glimmering of understanding, but there was still a lot she couldn't fit into place.
Greg understood. He stared at me with naked hate, and clothed fear. "Who are you, Val Mathers?" he whispered.
"Nobody in particular," I said. "But once Jota wanted to get rid of me. He nearly got rid of me, and I came back. And the next time he wanted to get rid of me, I didn't feel a thing. And an hour or two ago, you tried to kill me. But you couldn't, could you? You had to bring me here instead, and just hope I'd die. And when Jota and I fought, he died."
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