Bert called after him. “Hey, Norman—catch!” Norman saw something sail at him against the door light, stuck up his free hand, and caught it. It was a large hunk of ham. He smiled toward Bert’s silhouette in the doorway, and chewed off a piece.
“Bon chance,” the old man called. “Be careful, Norman.”
Norman took the advice to heart. The gathering clouds overhead made him risk a hitch up to Phinney’s Cove, but once in that region he stopped being in a hurry. He finished the ham, and drank from one of the many streams that seek the Bay. He took to the trees on foot, following Bert’s directions, and moved as cautiously as he knew how. He spotted the electric fence in plenty of time, cleared it with practiced skill. Half a klick farther downhill he located, identified, and passed a sleeping guard. He was expecting an infrared scanner; he moved as a deer would move, walked where a deer would walk. He did it very well; he was actually in sight of the house before they bagged him.
Suddenly he was very very happy.
10
1999 Perhaps a cockroach cleared its throat. I woke up on my feet, in streetfighter’s crouch, hands and feet prepared to kill the first thing that moved. A few seconds passed. I tried to laugh at myself, but the sound frightened me even more. I made myself sit on the floor and breathe deeply and slowly. Soon I was calm enough to notice how much my neck hurt. I decided that was all the improvement I could stand and left the bedroom.
The door to the medicine cabinet stood ajar. While I was urinating I caught sight of my face in the mirror. It didn’t look any more familiar than ever. “Hi, Norman,” I said to it. It said the same thing to me. Only one voice heard. Conclusion unmistakable. Shake it and flush, let’s us both go have breakfast.
Karen was waiting for me. She had started the coffee. She knew better than to attempt breakfast herself. I mixed up things while the coffee finished dripping, drank some while I cooked. She had the table ready when the food was. We ate. She was halfway through her cigarette when she broke the silence.
“Okay, let’s break it down. What do we know for sure, what do we guess, what do we propose?”
I nodded approvingly. “Good. Okay, known for sure…” I paused. “Not much.”
“We know you look like a man named—”
“No, we don’t.”
“But—oh. I see.”
“Right. Who vouches for Lois Kent? What evidence did she offer?”
“Um. None at all.”
“So known for sure is: we are in Halifax, drawing a bead on Psytronics Int. A woman has alleged that I look a lot, but not completely, like her ex-husband. In support of this proposition she offers a detailed circumstantial account that she says convinces her that I am not this gent, but which makes us suspect that I might be. Her story is checkable on several major points, so before we go any further, let’s check it out. The whole story could be some kind of ploy by PsyInt, to set us up for something.”
“Okay.”
I suppose I could have used my terminal. But I was feeling paranoid; we took a bus to the library.
The newspaper morgue backed Lois Kent on the disappearance of her ex-sister-in-law and the spectacular fiery death of her ex-husband. There was a picture of the deceased English teacher. He looked like me—but like me ten or fifteen years younger than I looked now, rather than three or four. The sister had indeed worked for a company in Switzerland, and shortly before she left it, it had been absorbed by the Swiss wireheading outfit that I suspected of being secretly allied to Psytronics International. There was an extraordinary amount of followup for a missing-persons case, even a beautiful female one. Norman Kent must have been industrious.
What tore it were the photos of Madeleine Kent.
I knew her. That is, I had known her. She was the grownup version of the sister I dimly remembered from my childhood but could not name.
“She’s different,” I told Karen. “She looks like she grew up into a nicer person than I remember. But most kids do. That’s my big sister.”
“Does the name Madeleine—or Maddy—ring a bell?”
“Not at all. But I do have a vague recollection that my sister went away somewhere when I was in college, and I guess it could have been Switzerland. Let’s see…assuming Norman’s birthday is mine…yep, dates match.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“In a minute.”
I found a sound-only pay phone and called the city police. I asked the desk man for Missing Persons. Shortly a voice said, “Missing Persons, Amesby.”
“Never mind, Officer—he just came in the door. Bobby, where have you been?” I hung up. Another detail of the nurse’s story confirmed: there was a Missing Persons cop named Amesby.
“Now let’s get out of here.”
We walked to Citadel Hill. It is an amazing monument to the thought processes of generals. I’d read the brochure while dealing dope there. The Citadel—the first Citadel—was built by the British Army in 1749, to protect settlers from Indian attack. Nineteen days after its completion, a group of woodcutters were attacked and killed by Indians under its guns. For some reason the settlers had refused to help in its construction. It was completely torn down and rebuilt three times in the next century, in response to the threats of the American Revolution, Napoleon, and the War of 1812, and each rebuilding was obsolete well before completion. There has never been a day on which it was not obsolete. No shot was ever fired in anger by or at any of the four Citadels. Haligonians are fiercely proud of this boondoggle, which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. They say it was an important base for the subjugation of Quebec—but was Quebec subjugated? During World War I, it was a detention camp for radicals and other suspicious types. Leon Trotsky is said—falsely—to have done time there. It has been a tourist trap for over forty years. High-rises block its view of the harbor.
Perhaps I’m being harsh. Halifax is a splendid port, and no invader ever so much as tried to take it. Was that because of the Citadel? You tell me.
But you can still see water and sky from there. The entire Halifax Peninsula is laid out around you, the best view in town. The obsolete fort, crumbling in the sun, whispers of entropy and Herculean labor wasted. It is a good spot for thinking.
Karen and I used it so.
That early on a workday, it was almost deserted. We walked around to the southeast section, closed off for repairs, and found that completely deserted. There was heavy construction equipment here and there, but a strike had kept all the workers home. By our standards it was chilly for August, but not intolerably. The breeze was surprisingly light for such an exposed location. Nonetheless, I shivered as I thought.
After ten minutes I was done thinking.
A deep trench encircles the Citadel. It is perhaps twenty feet deep and thirty across. It prevents access except by the gate on the east or harbor side, and provides a breastwork around the fort, which, like everything else, was obsolete before completion. We were sitting a few yards from the trench. On the far side an iron staircase gave access from the floor of the trench to a sally port in the side of the Citadel proper. I nudged Karen, got up, and went to the trench. Fifteen feet below me, a construction flatbed of some kind stood abandoned. I lay down on my stomach and swung my legs over the stone lip of the trench.
“Joe, what—”
I shushed her. I lowered myself in stages until I was hanging from the edge by my hands. There were footholds in the stone block wall that any spider would have found more than adequate. I glanced down, kicked slightly away from the wall, and let go. I landed well, and waved her to join me, holding a finger to my lips for silence.
Shaking her head, she followed my example. She also landed well. We got down from the flatbed and sat cross-legged on the ground facing each other.
“This strikes me as a hard spot to mike from a distance,” I said.
“Oh. Good thinking. And we can go up those stairs to the inside and out the main gate.”
“So let’s talk.”
“Joe—m
e first, okay?”
“Go ahead.”
“I think we should go back to New York, right away.”
“Karen—”
“Let me finish! The evidence says that you already took on this Jacques LeBlanc once—and lost. Pretty decisively. I can find something else to do with my life.”
“The man who took on LeBlanc five years ago is dead. I am not him. And I carry none of the excess baggage—broken marriage, kidnapped sister—that he had.” I chucked her under the chin. “Plus, he didn’t have you. Or anybody.”
“Then you think we may have a chance?”
“Not for a second. We’re dead; question of when.”
She didn’t flinch. “Not even if we cut and run?”
“Much too late. Think about it, baby. Visualize the enemy. If he can erase specific memories, no wonder the power flow in the wireheading industry has no relation to the money flow! What the fuck would Jacques want with money? If he can scrub brains, suck memories, what is there that he cannot do? We are to him as bacilli to a whale.”
“So maybe he’ll overlook us.”
“You’re still not thinking. If I am—if I was once Norman Kent, whose computer is that down in New York?”
Now she flinched. “Oh, my sweet…and you recorded that whole scene with Lois…”
“Yeah. The really surprising thing is that we woke up this morning. And are breathing now. We’re blown, baby.”
“Maybe he’s not monitoring—maybe we’ve got some time!”
“Unlikely. But it’s hard to argue with the fact that we’re alive. But we can’t have much time.”
“So what’s our next move?”
“All-out attack. Crazed-wolverine style. Get out of here, clout a good car, run out to Phinney’s Cove. Fake it from there. Maybe turn the car into a bomb and run it through his kitchen. Maybe stick up the nearest Mountie detachment for some automatic weapons. Christ, I wish I had an atom bomb. I wish I’d brought more ammo when I left the house this morning. I wish I hadn’t paid the rent last week, I’m never going to see the place again. Well, let’s—”
“Joe—something we ought to do first.”
“Yeah?”
“Make a record of everything we know.”
“What, for leverage on Jacques? To warn the world? Don’t you und—”
“No, no, for us.”
“Huh?”
“Look, the evidence says, anyway suggests, that Jacques doesn’t kill. Doesn’t kill bodies, I mean. He doesn’t need to; he’s the mindkiller. Suppose he follows his pattern: wipes our brains and turns us loose. And then we find a record we left for ourselves…get it? He can’t steal all our memories if we stash a few. Maybe two or three tries from now we kill him.”
“No.”
“But—”
“One: no time. It’d take too long to write out even the basics, we’re not holding enough cash for a tapedeck, and there’s no time to steal one. Two: where would we leave the record? Three: when the mindkiller gets us, he opens up our brains and finds out where we left the record. Let’s get moving.”
“You’re right. Maybe we’ll get one clear shot before we go down.”
Someone yanked the sun across the sky.
Shadows leaped, and froze where they landed. The breeze changed direction and speed radically. The temperature dropped a couple of Celsius degrees in an instant. Internal changes were subtler but no less perceptible. My folded legs were suddenly stiffer. My mouth tasted slightly different. An exhalation was suddenly an inhalation. My breakfast was slightly farther along my gut.
The oddest part was the absence of terror. A parallel example should have been an earthquake. Humans require constant sensory reassurance of reality. When the solid earth dances and a thousand dogs howl, when the evidence of your senses is suddenly placed in doubt, you experience primeval terror. I received, in a single instant, a number of sensory reports that were simply impossible—and the terror did not come. I seemed to be too exhausted to be terrified, as though all my strength had fled from me in that same instant. Karen was gaping at me, clearly as stunned as I.
“What—” I croaked.
And then I got it. It was as well that I was too exhausted for terror, or my heart might have exploded then.
There is an old Zen conundrum: if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Here is a related question: if a man’s brain is awake, but his memories are not allowed to form, is he conscious? Does he, in fact, exist?
My (hiatus)es usually averaged five to ten seconds in duration, with fuzzy edges, like a sloppy job of record-muting. This one had lasted at least ten minutes, and it was a clean splice. This one had not been preprogrammed. This one had come from the source. Jacques, or an agent of his, had shut off our minds from a distance.
“Joe, God oh God Joe, God—”
She was staring at the ground between us.
A folded piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper lay there. Excellent paper, a heavy linen parchment, cream-colored. The typing on it was executive face, quite neat and centered. It read:
I request the pleasure of your company this evening at my country retreat. Ask for the Old DeMarco Place. Dress informal; weapons optional. I promise to give you both at least temporary possession of any information you desire.
—J.
It was unsigned.
My hands went instinctively to my weapons. They were in place. I looked around, pulled the gun, confirmed that it was loaded and live, and put it away. We both got stiffly to our feet. I tucked the letter into my shirt pocket.
“Well,” I said.
Karen could not speak. She trembled just perceptibly.
“Hoy,” came a voice from above our heads.
I jumped a clear foot in the air, came down with one arm around Karen. I never even tried to go for the gun. Just for her. We gaped upward together.
A uniformed security guard stood at the edge above, looking down at us with detached interest. I was glad I hadn’t tried for my gun. All the Citadel guards are experienced war veterans. He seemed vaguely relieved. He looked quite tidy and dapper, and when he spoke his accent said that he was British by birth, of cultured origins, and had a sense of humor about his job. His left sleeve was pinned up to the shoulder.
“You two seem on friendly enough terms.”
Instinct came to my rescue. Agree with the nice policeman. “We are.”
“What was all that screaming about a minute ago, then? Two screams, one from each of you. Sounded like black murder being done; I heard you both all the way over in the North Ravelin. You haven’t murdered anyone, have you?”
Lie. “Yes.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“My father. Well, actually, my primal rage at my father. You’re familiar with Janov’s work?”
“Can’t say I think much of it. Particularly in urban areas.” He turned his gaze to Karen. “I suppose your father—”
“—makes his look like the Easter Bunny,” Karen said. Her voice sounded okay. It held the ring of sincerity.
“I suppose you know you’re not permitted to be down there, primal screaming or otherwise?”
“We’re just leaving,” Karen said.
“Splendid. I’ll just meet you round at the Main Gate and see you both safely on your way home.”
He didn’t buy our story for a minute, but there was little he could do. He checked our ID. I always buy good ID. It’s worth the extra money. He arched his brow at me a few times, admired Karen’s ass, and let us go.
There seemed no reason to go back to the apartment. At a supermarket I bought ammo, food, and common household items with which I could make a cottage-industry bomb capable of converting a cottage into splinters. I got lucky, stole a four-wheel-drive with real muscle and a rifle behind the seat. Neither of us was hungry, but we ate anyway, and then hit the highway. It was sundown as we left the city behind.
About ten miles farther on, I pulled over at a place that was w
all-to-wall forest. We walked a ways into the woods. We both sighted in the rifle and practiced with it a bit. Our unknown benefactor had bequeathed us two full boxes of slugs. The rifle was a thirty-oh-six with good action. It threw high and to the left. Karen, an indifferent pistol marksman, turned out to be damn good with a rifle. We got back in the truck and drove on.
Neither one of us had had a thing to say since we had left the Citadel, barring short functional sentences. There seemed nothing to say. As we were passing Wolfville, after an hour of silence, I thought of something, and said it.
“I’m sorry I got you into this, baby.”
Karen jumped. “Christ!”
“What?” The truck swerved.
“That’s spooky, man. I was just opening my mouth to say those identical words to you.”
“To me?” I growled. “What—”
“Yeah,” she snapped back. “To you. I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“I was into this before I ever laid eyes on—”
“Well, if I hadn’t dragged you into this wirehead scam—”
“If I hadn’t spoiled a perfectly good suicide—”
“Dammit—”
She stopped, and I stopped, and there was a pause, and then we both broke up. I laughed so hard I had to pull over and put it in park. We held each other awkwardly in the cramped cab and laughed on each other’s shoulders.
After an immeasurable time I heard her voice in my ear. “Don’t be sorry, Joe.”
“You either. I might have lived out my life in New York, never knowing the Mindkiller existed. I might have died never knowing what my mother called me. Now at least I’m going to get some answers before I die.” (“Again,” I did not add.)
“I’m satisfied too. I told you once I want it should be a shame that I died. Well, if I go down before I get to shoot that motherfucker in the belly, it’ll be the dirtiest shame I ever heard of.”
“That it will.”
“What do you suppose his game is?”
“Power. What else? As long as he can snip sections out of memory-tape, and keep a monopoly on the secret, he’s God. And it looks like he can keep a monopoly on the secret. It’s that kind of secret. It has to have something to do with wireheading; remember the joint that blew up just before we left New York, and the inductance patent that wasn’t in the files?”
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