by John Kessel
He tries to run back to the Inn, but by the time he reaches it, he’s staggering. The porch door is locked; he doesn’t want to pound on it and explain himself. But when he stumbles to the back, he finds that someone—probably himself, in whatever entranced state in which he left the place—fouled the latch with a slip of notebook paper. The door opens to a tug, and he climbs the back stair doubled over like a child or an animal, hands on the steps, toes so numb he has to watch where he puts them.
In his room again, he draws a hot bath and slides into it, hoping by the grace of God that he’ll be spared pneumonia.
When the water has warmed him enough that his hands have stopped shaking, Harding reaches over the cast-iron edge of the tub to the slumped pile of his pajamas and fumbles free the vial. The nugget isn’t glowing now.
He pulls the cork with his teeth; his hands are too clumsy. The nodule is no longer cold, but he still tips it out with care.
Harding thinks of himself, swallowed whole. He thinks of a shoggoth bigger than the Bluebird, bigger than Burt Clay’s lobster boat The Blue Heron. He thinks of die Unterseatboote. He thinks of refugee flotillas and trench warfare and roiling soupy palls of mustard gas. Of Britain and France at war, and Roosevelt’s neutrality.
He thinks of the perfect weapon.
The perfect slave.
When he rolls the nodule across his wet palm, ice rimes to its surface. Command? Obedient. Sounding pleased to serve.
Not even free in its own mind.
He rises from the bath, water rolling down his chest and thighs. The nodule won’t crush under his boot; he will have to use the pliers from his collection kit. But first, he reaches out to the shoggoth.
At the last moment, he hesitates. Who is he, to condemn a world to war? To the chance of falling under the sway of empire? Who is he to salve his conscience on the backs of suffering shopkeepers and pharmacists and children and mothers and schoolteachers? Who is he to impose his own ideology over the ideology of the shoggoth?
Harding scrubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth, chasing the faint anise aftertaste of shoggoth. They’re born slaves. They want to be told what to do.
He could win the war before it really started. He bites his lip. The taste of his own blood, flowing from cracked, chapped flesh, is as sweet as any fruit of the poison tree.
I want you to learn to be free, he tells the shoggoth. And I want you to teach your brothers.
The nodule crushes with a sound like powdering glass.
“Eyah, eyah. Fata gun eyah,” Harding whispers. “Eyah, eyah, the master comes no more.”
WESTERN UNION
1938 NOV 12 AM 06 15
NA1906 21 2 YA PASSAMAQUODDY MAINE 0559A
DR LESTER GREENE=WILBERFORCE OHIO=
EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY PLEASE ACCEPT RESIGNATION STOP ENROUTE INSTANTLY TO FRANCE TO ENLIST STOP PROFOUNDEST APOLOGIES STOP PLEASE FORWARD BELONGINGS TO MY MOTHER IN NY ENDIT
HARDING
ROBERT REED—NOVELLA
TRUTH
I almost don’t want to tell you anything about this one. In every story, the narrator has control over what information you get and when. In many ways, it puts us in the same position as readers that Lemonade 7 is in as a prisoner. He is reliant on what his captors tell him.
In such cases, what is left unsaid is as important as what is spoken.
One builds an internal narrative of the bits and pieces that slip out, the elements that appear incongruous to the rest of the story become more important. It is the case here. When the story opens you will know nothing about the narrator and Reed keeps it that way, allowing identifying features to slip out during the conversations. This deliberate choice will cause you to constantly readjust the picture you are building in your head of who is speaking and what has happened.
I will tell you nothing more about the story and let you have the fun of trying to piece it all together.
Of Reed himself, I have no qualms in letting you know that he is an award winning writer with a Writers of the Future win, a Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and a Hugo to his name. He has a Bachelor’s of Science and has written over one hundred and forty short stories. He is also a long-distance runner.
One of the preceding statements may or may not be untrue.
TRUTH
ROBERT REED
Three days later, I still hadn’t met our prisoner. But I had invested nearly sixty hours watching what seemed to be a gentle life that revolved around old novels and classic movies. I took note of his postures and motions, and I tried gauging his reactions to what he was seeing on the page and screen. But most interesting to me were those occasional moments when he did nothing but stare off in some empty direction. I wouldn’t let myself guess what he was thinking. But the black eyes would open wide, and the handsome features would quickly change their expression. Smiles lasted longer than frowns, I noticed. I saw flashes of pity and scorn, mild embarrassment and tight-lipped defiance. A few staff members volunteered opinions about the prisoner’s mind. He was reflecting on his childhood, some offered. Others claimed he was gazing into our shared past or the looming future. But what I focused on was an appealing and graceful face that moved effortlessly between emotions—the well-honed tools of the consummate actor.
Twice each day, the prisoner was ushered into a long exercise yard built specifically for him. His gait was always relaxed, long arms swinging with a metronome’s precision and the elegant hands holding five-pound weights, shaped like dog bones and covered with soft red rubber. I thought of an aging fashion model marching on the runway, except he lacked a model’s wasted prettiness or the vacuous gaze. He was endlessly pleasant to whichever guard was standing at the locked door. I paid close attention to his attempts at conversation, his words less important than his charming tone and the effortless, beguiling smiles. Most of the staff was under orders to never speak with the man, which made for intriguing games of will. Somehow he had learned each guard’s first name, and he wasn’t shy about using what he knew. “How’s this day of ours, Jim?” he might ask. “Is it the best day ever? Or is just me who thinks this way? Feel the sunshine. Listen to these birds singing. Doesn’t this kind of morning make you happy to your bones, Jim?”
There was no sun underground, and there were no birds to hear. But after twelve years and five months of captivity, one man seemed to be absolutely thriving.
I watched the five daily prayers, the salat. But I didn’t intrude when the prisoner used the bathroom or shower. (Let others record what he washed and wiped. I could check the database later, if I found reason.) While he slept, I sipped coffee and kept passing tabs on his snoring and the busy dreaming brain. Delicate instruments buried inside his Tempur-pedic mattress tried to convince me that they provided a window into that unknowable soul. But there were no insights, of course. That’s why those nights were opportune times to pick my way through an endless array of summaries and reports, clinical data and highly intelligent, utterly useless speculation.
A favorite teacher once told me that our bodies are epics full of treachery and important residues. That’s why I turned again and again to the medical data. Samples of the prisoner’s fluids and flesh and his thick black hair had been digested and analyzed by a laboratory built for no other purpose. Three thousand years of medical science struggling to turn meat and bone into a narrative that I could understand. But in most cases, my subject’s DNA was remarkably unremarkable—save for a few dozen novel genes tucked into the first and fifth and nineteenth chromosomes, that is. The dental evidence was unusual, but not remarkably so. The first x-rays had revealed an old break in the right wrist that never healed properly. Later, more intrusive examinations had found an assortment of microscopic features that might mean much, unless they were meant to mislead. Only a handful of qualified experts had been allowed to examine that body in full; yet even those few voices managed to produce a chorus of contradictory opinions about the man’s nature and origins. Was our prisoner telling the truth about h
is birth and life? And if not, from where did he come and what could he possibly represent?
Of course those medical masters were shown only a nameless patient and a carefully trimmed, strategically incomplete biography.
In a dozen years, only nine people had been given full access to every transcript, test result, and digital image. I was one of the nine, or so I had been promised. One can never feel too certain about a government’s confidences, particularly when it involves its deepest, most cherished secret.
The prisoner was known as Lemonade-7.
That designation was entirely random. But the copious records showed that yes, he was given that drink once, and after two sips he said, “Too sour,” and ordered that it was never to be brought to him again.
“Ramiro” was the name he went by. And for reasons that might or might not be significant, he had never offered any surname.
“So what about Ramiro?” Jefferson asked.
“What do you mean?”
“When will you actually get to work on him?”
“That’s what I’m doing,” I replied.
Jefferson was the prison’s CIA administrator. This had been his post from the beginning, which was remarkable. In any normal operation, he would have been replaced by a sequence of ambitious, usually younger types. New guards and fresh staff would have come and spent their allotted time and then gone away again. But that would have swollen the pool of individuals who knew too much about matters that didn’t exist, and what the public had never suspected would have soon leaked out into the world.
“I realize you’re doing work,” Jefferson said. “But are you ever going to talk to Ramiro?”
“Actually, I’m speaking to him now.”
Jefferson was a short, squat fellow with thinning brown hair and a close-cut beard that turned to snow years ago. His files gave the portrait of an officer who had been a success at every stage of his professional life. Running this prison was an enormous responsibility, but until last week, he seemed to be in complete control. Then events took a bad, unexpected turn, and maybe more than one turn, and the stress showed in his impatient voice and the irritability that seeped out in conversation and during his own prolonged silences.
Jefferson glared at me, then looked back at the monitors.
“Okay,” he whispered. “You’re speaking to him now.”
“In my head,” I said. Looking at Jefferson, I used my most ingratiating smile. “I’m practicing. Before I actually go in there, I want to feel ready.”
“You’ve had five days to prepare,” he reminded me.
Circumstances put a timetable on everything. Two days had been allotted to a full briefing, and then I was brought here, and for three days I had enjoyed the freedoms and pressures of this ultra-secure compound.
“Collins went straight in,” said Jefferson.
Collins was a certified legend in my little business.
“Right into Ramiro’s cell and started talking with him.” That was twelve years ago, but Jefferson still had to admire what my colleague had accomplished.
“He also stopped the torture,” I mentioned.
Jefferson shook his head. “He liked claiming that, I know. But everything about the interrogation was my call. I’m the one who put an end to the cold rooms and sleep deprivation.”
I offered a less-than-convinced nod.
“And by the way,” he continued, “I was responsible for bringing Collins in from the Bureau.”
“I guess I’d read that,” I admitted.
“And I just happen to be the hero who let your colleague work however he wanted, whatever method he thought was best, and fuck those hundred thousand orders that Washington was giving us then.”
The old bureaucrat still had a belly full of fire and bile. He offered a very quick, completely revealing grin, sitting back in his chair while thinking hard about past glories.
“But you didn’t select me, did you?”
“I guess not,” he said.
“Collins picked me,” I said. “Last year, wasn’t it? Not that anybody told me, of course. But in case he couldn’t serve anymore, I was his first choice as a replacement.”
Jefferson shifted his weight, saying nothing.
“I’ll grant you, the candidate list is short. But you’d have to admit, I’m rather well regarded.”
Jefferson shrugged.
“If you want,” I mentioned, “I can suggest a viable candidate to replace me. In the event you lose all faith in my methods.”
He was tempted. I saw it in his face, particularly in the sly smile.
“But that would mean more delays,” I warned. “And I doubt if my replacement would be as effective as me.”
“You’re a cocky gal, aren’t you?”
“It has been said.”
“Help you get ahead, does it?”
“It helps keep me sane, mostly.”
Jefferson turned away, staring at the largest screen. The prisoner was sitting at his desk, reading Jane Austen in Portuguese. The date and time were fixed in the bottom right corner: August 5th, 2014. Three minutes after three in the afternoon.
“Before I go in there,” I began.
“Yeah?”
“Tell me about the first days,” I said. “Before you brought in Collins. Right after Ramiro was caught . . . what was your mood, early on?”
“My mood?” His smile grew bigger and sourer, wrapped around a painful memory. “You can imagine what I was thinking. March 2002, Osama was still the big monster, and some stateless warrior slips across the Canadian border with five kilos of bomb-grade U-235. That’s what I was thinking about. But his luck hit a stretch of black ice in Montana, and the state trooper found his Maxima flipped on its back, this bastard behind the steering wheel, unconscious.”
I had seen hundreds of images of the crash scene.
“The man’s fingerprints were unknown. His passport and identity were quality fakes, but we couldn’t tell which foreign power had done the work. Nobody knew who he was. Al Qaeda, or Iraqi, or was he something else? All we knew was that, at the very least, our prisoner was part of somebody’s A-bomb project.”
“You needed to know everything, and as fast as possible.”
“How many like this guy were there?” Jefferson turned in my direction, but never quite made eye contact. “And would his associates be happy hitting New York or Washington? Or did they have more terrible targets in mind?”
I found it interesting: The person most familiar with the full story was still jolted with a simple replay of known events. Jefferson tensed up as he spoke about that heavy lump of gray metal, shaped like a cannon ball and hidden by the spare tire.
“We didn’t know anything,” he continued, “but it was obvious our man was the biggest trophy in the ongoing war. That’s why another Maxima and a compliant corpse were rolled off that Montana highway, the crash restaged and the wreckage burned up. It was treated like an ordinary accident. Now our prisoner had a good reason to miss his next clandestine rendezvous, wherever than might be. Because he was officially dead.”
“You unleashed a lot of specialists,” I said. “Working their delicate magic on his stubborn corpse.”
Jefferson didn’t like my tone.
“You had to make the call,” I continued. “The stakes seemed treacherously high. The proverbial fuse was burning down.”
“Don’t give me that attitude,” Jefferson warned. “Your career has seen its share of hard interrogations.”
I admitted, “It has,” without hesitation. “And believe me, I will never question those early decisions.”
What was the point now, after all?
Jefferson heard resignation where none was offered, and because he was a good career officer, he made his features soften.
“A frustrating subject, the records say.”
“He was.”
“Hard interrogations and potent drugs, in tandem. But how much good did all that do?”
He didn’t answer.<
br />
I asked, “So who figured it out first?”
“Figured what out?”
“Ramiro’s list,” I said.
With only his eyes, Jefferson smiled. “It’s all in the files.”
“I don’t always believe what I read.”
“No?”
“But here’s my understanding of the story,” I said, leaning forward. “For five months, that man was abused relentlessly. Every half-legal method was applied to him, often several at once. Then you brought in a fresh crew—old KGB hands, as I understand it—who brought tricks that made everybody feel Hell’s breath. And what did you get in the end? Nothing. Your prisoner gave us nothing. He didn’t offer any name. He didn’t even utter an intelligible word. He screamed on occasion, sure. But only after his elbows were pulled from their joints. And the curses weren’t in any known language.”
I paused, waiting.
Jefferson said nothing.
“And then one day, when his arms were working again, he motioned to his interrogators. He indicated that he wanted a paper and a pen. And when those items were delivered, he filled several pages with letters and numbers—peculiar looking to the untrained eye, if not out-and-out bizarre.”
The original list was sitting in an important vault. I pulled out one of the three copies that had been made since, the writing neat and legible, with a few artistic flourishes, particularly in the 5s and Ts.
“So tell me,” I said. “Who figured this puzzle out?”
Jefferson named one of his staff. Then he quietly reminded me, “It’s all in the records.”
“No,” I said. “I think the genius was you.”
Surprise turned to wary pleasure. With a smug little wink, he asked, “How could it be me?”
“Because you would have gotten the first look at his list. And you’re a bright, bright fellow with a lot of hobbies. I know that because I’ve checked your files too. I think what happened is that something he wrote jogged a leftover memory from your school days. In particular, from astronomy class. The first sequence in each line is obviously a position in the sky, if you know the subject. But it takes a bigger leap to realize that the second sequence is a date.”