“Sure. Inductance—that means wireheading at a distance, right? Jacques—or his agent—used some kind of wirehead field to keep us docile while he picked our brains and left us his invitation. That’s why that guard heard us screaming on Citadel Hill. I bet I screamed first. And loudest.” She sat up and lit a cigarette. “Do you know,” she said, dragging deeply, “that there is a part of me that can’t wait to get to Phinney’s Cove and get another dose of the juice? Even if I don’t get to keep the memory?”
I shuddered slightly. I wanted to say something to break the silence, but nothing came. I listened to the engine idling in the cool evening. I rolled down the window to let her smoke out, and heard some kind of mournful bird call. I wondered if that was an owl.
“Karen? I…” It wouldn’t come out right. “I’m—I’m glad I’ve known you.”
She didn’t react at once. She took two more drags on her smoke, then stubbed it out and turned to face me. “I love you too, Joe.”
We embraced again.
“Maybe,” she said a while later, “he’ll turn us loose together…”
“No!” I said sharply, and disengaged.
“Huh?”
“Don’t think that way. Don’t let there be any favor he can do for us, any boon he can grant, any hold over us. I love you and in a couple of hours we’re going to die and that’s the end of it.”
She thought. “Yeah. You’re right. God, I wish I could make it with you just once.”
I kept my voice even. “Karen, I accept the compliment, and in theory I agree. But the thought makes me twitchy.”
“That’s cool,” she said at once. “I…I think I kind of know exactly what you mean. I used to feel that way when I was with someone I loved.”
“I think I could make you come.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “But don’t. Let’s drive.”
I put the van in gear.
We took the main highway all the way through the Annapolis Valley to Bridgetown, then drove up over an immense mountain. The road resembled headphone cable hanging from the ceiling, an endless upward zigzag. I was glad I’d stolen a good vehicle. Despite the extreme hairiness of the road, we were twice overtaken and passed on blind curves by farmers in battered pickups. Just after the second one yanked in front of us, a half-ton loaded to the gunwales with hardwood appeared round that blind curve, plunging downhill at terrifying speed. Its driver and the driver of the pickup waved to each other as they passed.
Eventually the road yanked around one last vicious bend and leveled out. It stayed level for a good two hundred yards, then began sloping down. About the time that the Bay of Fundy became visible below us in the moonlight, demanding our attention, the slope suddenly became drastic. I had my hands full there for a while. Then the road went into rollercoaster dips and rises for a bit before settling down to a last long downward plunge. There was a stop sign at the bottom of it. I never considered obeying it, but I was very disconcerted to learn that the road turned into gravel just past the stop sign. We damn near went into a ditch.
I got us heading west on the Fundy Trail. It was a lovely drive by moonlight and must have been stunning by day. I drank it in thirstily—and almost succumbed to the road’s last crafty attempt to kill us, with a blind curve/vertical drop/vertical ascent/blind curve pattern that must have afforded the locals much amusement in the tourist season.
A brief flurry of relatively modern houses—say, twenty-five to forty years old—called Hampton, then almost at once we were in farmer and fisherman country. Big spreads, houses well over a hundred years old and widely spaced. Some were kept up, many were hulks. Some had as many as a couple of dozen junked cars scattered around them. All the ones that looked inhabited had a woodpile and a garden. I saw outhouses. Barns. Fishing nets and traps. Great fields of hay and corn. I nearly hit a deer. The Bay was never more than two hundred yards to our right, sometimes as close as a hundred feet. There was no other traffic, and no one walking the road. Most of the inhabitable homes had few or no lights showing—folks went to bed early hereabouts. I began to wonder how we would find the “Old DeMarco Place.”
Just then the headlights picked up a pedestrian, walking in our direction. I pulled up past him and waited.
In the moonlight he looked two hundred years old. He wore a disreputable woodsman’s cap and carried some kind of odd stick in his hand. Stick and hand were equally gnarled.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, and he came to the window.
“’Allo,” he said. Up close his face had so many wrinkles as to preclude expression of any kind. He was two hundred and fifty if he was a day.
“We’re looking for the old DeMarco Place.”
“Oh, shoor,” he said. His breath smelled of whiskey. “Hit be up the road some.” He gestured with his stick, and I realized with faint amusement that it was a dowsing rod. “Mebbe two, tree k’lometer. You been dere before?”
“No. How’ll I know it?”
“You got paper, I draw you a map.”
“Are you going that far?” Karen asked.
“A little ways past.”
“Can we give you a lift?”
“Shoor ting.”
He was slow getting in on her side. In the sudden overhead light he looked two hundred and seventy-five. He studied Karen and me dispassionately, and showed us a smile comprising three teeth. We drove on.
“What’re those?” Karen asked, pointing to what looked like three tall billboards, facing the Bay in a row, two to our left and one to our right. The two we could see had large, simple designs painted on them.
“Navigation markers for de fishermen. Line dem tree up, you know just where you are.”
“What do they do when the fog rolls in?” I asked.
“Navigate by potato.”
“Beg pardon?”
“You keep a bunch potatoes on de bow. Every couple minutes, you t’row one over de bow. If you don’ hear no splash—turn.”
Karen and I chuckled politely.
“Dere,” he said after some time, pointing. A mailbox with no name marked the beginning of a rude mud-rutted path that disappeared into the woods on the left. “You follow dat up a k’lometer or so, you be dere. Tanks for de ride.” He got out.
As he walked on up the road, I turned to Karen. “This is it.”
She nodded.
I drove just far enough up that trail to be out of sight of the road. I turned the vehicle around to face the road. I shut it down and arranged the ignition wires so that it could be jump-started again in a hurry.
We sat a moment in silence. My window was down. I smelled fresh sweet country smells I was too ignorant to identify. I heard night creatures I could not name, small things. A car went by on the road. Tall grasses and trees whispered. I felt a sensation I remembered from Africa. An eerie, unreasoning certainty. Someone or something had a dead bead on my head. It might be a sniper with nightscope, or a heat-seeking laser, or a small dark man with a blowgun, or an ICBM silo a hundred miles away, but I was standing on the spot marked X.
Karen lit a smoke. “We’re targets, aren’t we?”
“We’re naked. Scanned, X-rayed, doppler ultrasounded, and the contents of our pockets inventoried. You feel it too?”
“Yeah. Was it like this in the war?”
“No. This is worse.”
“I thought it was. Let’s not bother with weapons. They’re cumbersome.”
“He said they were optional.”
We got out of the van, leaving the firearms in it. I got out both of my knives and the sap and tossed them onto the front seat. Karen added items, then came around to my side.
We looked uphill. The road curved up into forest. She took my hand and we walked. After a few thousand yards the woods gave way to an immense cleared field, perhaps twenty acres, most of it waist-high in hay. At the far edge, where the land turned back into forest and began climbing again, stood a house. It was a big three-story with four chimneys, two of them in use. There were lights on
in the ground floor, and a spotlight illuminating a yard on the right. A jeep, a four-wheel like ours, and a Jensen Interceptor were parked in the light. There were two outbuildings. A barn the size of my New York warehouse home stood to the right of the house, and a smaller building lay to the right of that. No people or defensive structures were in evidence anywhere, not so much as a chain-link fence.
The moon was high above the mountain. It made the scene as pretty as a postcard, and would make us tabletop targets all the way to the house. The hay had been cut back on either side of the path.
“Nice spot,” Karen said, and we kept walking.
After a while we became aware of how much sky there was here. I could not remember the last time my world had held so much sky. I looked up, and stopped walking, momentarily stunned. Karen kept on a few paces, then turned and followed my gaze. “Oh.”
I had forgotten God made so many stars.
We watched them for a few minutes together—until the temptation to lie down on our backs and watch them forever became acute. Then I dropped my eyes, and saw Karen drop hers. We looked at each other, sharing the wonder.
“Been a long time,” she said softly.
I nodded. “First time I ever shared it.”
I put my arm around her and we continued on.
The house looked a hundred years old and poorly kept up. It had no door facing the Bay, but several windows, one of them gigantic. We went around to the lighted side and found the door. It had a brass knocker. I used it. The door opened and the Fader smiled at me.
“Hi, Joe.”
“Hello, Jacques. You remember my friend Karen.”
“Enchanted, my dear. Please, both of you, come in and make yourselves comfortable.”
11
1995 Norman Kent no longer wished he could die. He had stopped wishing that hours ago. What he wished now was that he could have died, many months previously.
Preferably at the moment when he had stood on the edge of the MacDonald Bridge, ready to jump. When his biggest problems had been a failed marriage and disgust for his chosen work. When his death would have meant no more than the end of his life.
That had been his last golden opportunity, and he had thrown it away for a hat. A half hour after that, Madeleine had come back, so briefly, into his life, and started him on the treadmill that led to this place and this time.
This time was late evening. This place was the most beautiful, luxurious, and comfortable cell imaginable.
The clock, for instance, which apprised him of the time, was a world standard chronograph of Swiss-Japanese manufacture, simple, elegant, and utterly accurate. The light by which he saw both clock and room was artfully muted and placed so as to complement the room. The furnishings—chairs, desk, shelves, tables, bar, tape system—were quite expensive and exquisitely tasteful. (The bar had not functioned since his arrival; he was on limited fluid intake.) The books lining the shelves were, in his professional judgment, impeccable. So were the audio- and videotapes. The bed in which he reclined was a rich man’s powered bed, a distant and highly evolved descendant of the hospital bed. The large bay window to his left offered a stupendous view of the Bay of Fundy and a cloud-strewn sky, the faint glow of distant New Brunswick serving to hold them apart.
It was very nearly the ideal room. Only two things were immediately apparent as odd about it. First, that such a triumph of wealth and leisure should exist in the most rural part of a rural province, on the third floor of a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house that seemed, from the outside, quite ramshackle. Second, that a room so carefully appointed should lack any telephone equipment whatsoever.
That omission, and the fact that the bay window was shatterproof, and the fact that the door would not open at Norman’s will, made it a cell.
It contained means of suicide in abundance. But Norman could not bring himself to use them. He knew that his end was coming soon enough, and he knew that it would be more painful, and more horrible, than anything he could devise himself. It was interesting to learn that he was more afraid of pain than of horror. It was the latest in a series of unendurably interesting learnings, and he knew it was not—quite—the last.
The door slid open.
He lay motionless, head still turned toward the window, but he stopped seeing the Bay.
“It has been twenty-four hours, Norman. I must ask for your answer.”
Norman turned his head slowly. He marveled again at the absolute nondescriptness of Jacques LeBlanc. The man could have been a fisherman or a night watchman or a bank teller or a member of Parliament. An actor would have killed for his face; he could play any part simply by dressing for it and altering his accent. On any street in the world, from the Bowery to Beverly Hills, from the Reeperbahn to the River Ganges, he could pass unnoticed unless he chose to draw attention to himself. For some reason the eye wanted to subtract him.
“Why ask,” Norman said, “when you can fucking well take it?”
Jacques’s face remained impassive. “Because I prefer to ask.”
Norman considered lying. The lie could not survive longer than ten minutes—but it might not need to. If he could convince Jacques, just long enough to lull the man into a moment’s unwariness, he might get a single chance to…
But Jacques understood that, and the object in his hand said that even the attempt would be pointless.
Norman answered honestly. “I’m against you. With my whole heart. I think you’re the greatest madman the world has ever seen, and if I could kill you now I would, whatever it cost me.”
Jacques nodded gravely. “I expected as much. I hope you are wrong. Goodbye, Norman.”
And he activated the thing in his hand, and Norman Kent became ecstatic.
When Jacques turned on his heel and left the room, the ecstasy went with him, and Norman Kent followed it. Doggedly. Mindlessly. Urgently. And, since his legs were adequate to the task of keeping up with ecstasy, happily.
Jacques led him downstairs, and through a living room that made Norman’s cell look like servants’ quarters. Jacques activated an instrument board against one wall. “Make sure the area is not under observation,” he muttered to himself, summoning up reports from various security installations. Shortly he needed both hands. He put the device that was the source of Norman’s ecstasy down on an end table, then met Norman’s eyes. “If you touch this,” he said, “it will stop working.”
Norman more than half believed that Jacques was lying. But he did not dare take the chance. He waited patiently while Jacques monitored the electromagnetic spectrum for Heisenbergian observers who might seek to interact with him by the process of observation.
None was apparent. Jacques cleared the screen and retrieved his ecstasy generator. He put on a coat, and made Norman put on his own. He opened the front door onto a combination woodshed/vestibule, which only a very discerning eye would have realized was also a serviceable airlock. He led Norman into it and thence to the world outside.
It was very cold now. Norman laughed and wept with joy at the sight of snow falling from the sky. He watched individual snowflakes as he followed Jacques, for he did not need eyes to follow the ecstasy. Then he tripped over a chopping block and roared with laughter. The laughter changed in an instant to a bleat of terror as he felt happiness slipping away, and from then on he used his eyes to help him follow his perfect master.
They walked past the larger of the two outbuildings, which seemed to be a barn, to the second one, which Norman had taken for some kind of workshop. The rustic, poorly hung door, which fastened with a piece of wood spinning around a nail in the jamb, revealed behind it a more substantial door with a Yale lock. Jacques used a key in that lock, then knocked two bars of “Take Five” and said, “Open.” The door gave way and both men stepped through it.
They left their coats and snowy boots in an anteroom that Norman did not bother to examine. It gave onto a room that strongly resembled an operating theater. There were six fully equipped tables, but no sur
geon or support team visible.
Jacques set down the ecstasy generator. Norman stopped in his tracks. “Sit down, please,” Jacques said, pointing to a table. Norman complied at once, anxious that no thought or deed of his should offend the lord, from whom all blessings flowed. Jacques touched an intercom. “Come,” he said.
Two people entered the room, gowned, gloved, and masked in white. Norman became slightly uneasy, but relaxed when he saw that they were as loyal to the master as he.
“Prepare him,” Jacques said, and left the room. An air conditioner clicked on as the door closed.
The two undressed Norman with efficient skill. He experienced orgasm as they removed his trousers and shorts. The only reaction they displayed was to clean him carefully with disinfectant-impregnated toweling. They helped him to lie down, and arranged his head on a complicated cradle. He felt supremely comfortable, and grateful that his ending place had been so thoughtfully prepared for him. They strapped him down at ankles, thighs, waist, wrists, biceps, and head. The head straps were complex and kept his skull immobile. The shorter of the two attendants carefully shaved Norman’s head to the scalp, then painted that with disinfectant. When this was done, the taller one caused the table to “kneel” at one end, so that Norman’s cranium was raised to working height and conveniently deployed. The shorter one rolled a large, ungainly machine from the wall to a place near the table, and began separating and arraying a series of leads from the machine for easy access. On Norman’s other side, the tall one prepared instruments of neurosurgery.
Visualizing his death in nuts-and-bolts detail for the first time, Norman came again. A catheter accepted his ejaculate.
Jacques reentered the room. He too was surgically clothed now. Without a word he took up a tool and laid open Norman’s scalp.
It felt wonderful. It felt exciting and holy. The sensations of craniotomy were nuggets of joy, and when the living brain had been laid bare and the first probes inserted, Norman was slightly disappointed to learn that there was no such extra surge of pleasure; for the brain cannot feel.
Mindkiller Page 22