by Eric Brown
“You’re wasting your time,” Vaughan said.
Chandra turned on him. “How the hell do you know!”
He closed his eyes. “Think about it. They put us down here to freeze, Jimmy. There’s no escape.”
“There might be a way out. If we help each other, one climb on the other’s shoulders...”
Vaughan laughed. “Have you seen how deep this place is? See that overhang? Even if we did get up that far, we couldn’t scale it.”
“I’m not giving up!” Chandra moved around the circular pit, feeling for footholds and handgrips.
Vaughan had seen such desperation before, witnessed the tragic human optimism more terrible than despair. He felt a profound sadness on Chandra’s behalf. What must it be like to so desperately want to live, he asked himself, and to know that in all likelihood you will die?
“Chandra... Sit down. You’re wasting your time.”
“I’m not giving in, Jeff. I’m not just going to sit here and wait...”
Vaughan felt a quick pang of guilt, then, for ridiculing Chandra’s futile efforts to escape.
“Jimmy, listen to me. Take it easy. You’re exhausting yourself. Sit down and get your thoughts together, okay?”
Chandra had made a circuit of the sheer rock face, arrived back where he had started. “I can’t find the smallest toehold. But there’s got to be some way out of here.” There was an edge of desperation in his voice. He sank to the ground, hugging himself.
Vaughan thought of the oblivion which awaited him in death, the oblivion to which hundreds, even thousands, of Disciples had given themselves willingly. If only they could have experienced what he had lived through all those years ago in Canada... He felt a sudden rage towards his captors, a desire to avenge his death even before he had died.
He scanned. The minds of the Disciples were distant now, and growing ever more faint as they headed down the valley towards the waiting flier.
* * * *
TWENTY
NECROPATH
A voice in the darkness said, “An hour’s passed, Jeff. I’m freezing. Let’s... let’s do something. We’ve got to try...”
Vaughan opened his eyes, aware that he’d been on the verge of sleep. He scanned: silence.
He stood, his shoulder throbbing painfully. It was almost pitch black in the pit, the light of the strange constellations overhead providing little illumination. Chandra joined him and Vaughan knelt and said, “Climb on my shoulders, Jimmy. Careful—!” He cursed under his breath as Chandra straddled his shoulders, increasing the pain.
He took a breath and stood, his knees wobbling with the strain. Chandra’s weight eased from time to time as he tried the occasional handhold. Vaughan moved slowly clockwise around the pit, Chandra giving a running commentary.
“There’s nothing around here at all. Move right, further. Stop. There’s something here. I can’t get a decent grip. Damn!”
As they completed the circuit, Chandra became quiet. Vaughan stopped, lowered himself into a crouch. Chandra climbed down and Vaughan felt suddenly buoyant with the release of the burden. He sat down with his back against the rock, kneading his shoulder.
A silence as vast as the universe came between them.
He closed his eyes, felt himself drifting off. He awoke with a start, what felt like minutes later. He was shivering with the cold, the bone-gnawing chill that had forced him awake. His hands were numb, lifeless. He clamped his fists into his armpits, drew his legs up to his chest, and pressed his face into the material of his trousers.
He became aware of a low sound. He listened. It was Chandra, singing. No... he was chanting a mantra, a prayer. A dull, monotonous drone in Hindi. The sound, irrationally, infuriated Vaughan.
“Jimmy, for Chrissake will you quit it?”
The drone continued.
“Jimmy... what the hell?”
“I’m preparing myself, Jeff. I’m preparing myself for the next life.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus Christ,” Vaughan said. He could not stop himself, “Why do you sound so goddamned frightened, Jimmy? If you’re going on to another life, why the hell do you sound so shit-scared?”
He heard the sob in Chandra’s voice. “Because... I am scared, Jeff. I’m scared for Sumita. I’m scared for all those innocent victims of the Vaith. I’m even scared for myself.”
Vaughan shook his head. “Cheer up—you’ll get another turn, right? What about me? What have I got to look forward to but endless oblivion?”
Chandra’s mantra ceased. The silence stretched. At last, in a small voice, Chandra asked, “What turned you into such a bastard, Jeff? Or were you always a bastard?”
“Is my bastardy genetic or conditioned? There’s an interesting one. Maybe a bit of both, Jimmy. But mainly conditioned.”
Chandra remained silent. Vaughan was aware of him in the darkness, looking his way. At last Chandra said, quietly, “Who the hell are you?”
The question hit Vaughan like a blow. He had not been expecting that, a counterpunch from someone he had thought he had beaten into submission.
He rode the silence, hoping Chandra would not press his advantage. Seconds later, a tentative jab, “Well?”
“Well, what?”
Another silence, taunting him. Chandra took a breath. “I... I accessed a program, back at the Station,” Chandra said, stuttering with the cold. “I wanted to know more about you, more than you’d told me. I wanted to know who I was working with.”
A freak wind corkscrewed itself deep into the bottleneck of the pit, giving a razor edge to the cold. Vaughan felt something icy prick his cheek. He looked up. High overhead, against the star field, he made out a flurry of snow.
Chandra went on, “You were a cop, in Canada... What happened, Jeff?” He paused, then said, “Who are you?”
Vaughan stared into the darkness, trying to make out the shape of Chandra. He told himself that in the brightening light of the stars he could see the whites of the Indian’s eyes, staring at him.
He had never told anyone about his past. To open up, admit to his other, hidden identity, would have been to endanger himself needlessly. Yet now, with only hours to go before the end... what was stopping him now?
“My real name doesn’t matter,” he told Chandra at last. “I no longer think of myself as anyone other than Jeff Vaughan.”
Overhead a keening wind howled across the opening of the pit.
“I worked for the government of the Federated Northern States of America,” he said. “Not voluntarily. I had no choice in the matter. When I was twenty, I tested psi-positive. I was given the chance to volunteer.” He laughed at that. “Volunteer? There was never any doubt about it. They told me they could make me into a mind-reader, that they’d pay me fabulous wages. I was twenty, for Chrissake. I signed on the dotted line. I had the operation, the cut. They only told me later... they said that during the op they’d discovered I had a special talent, which with augmentation could prove beneficial to the government. I don’t know. They probably knew all along.” He fell silent, cursing the psychiatrist who’d smooth-talked the impressionable twenty-year-old into thinking he could become a superman.
Chandra said, “Knew what, Jeff?”
“Knew what they could make me into.” He stopped; he wanted to weep for the boy he had been, the wreck he had become.
“A telepath?” Chandra asked.
“A... a special kind of telepath, Jimmy. Ever heard of a necropath?”
Chandra repeated the word. In the shadows, Vaughan could see him shaking his head. “A necropath? No, I’ve never... Necro—something to do with the dead?”
Vaughan nodded. “Right. You’re right, Jimmy. They made me into a telepath who could read the minds of the dead. I worked for the Toronto Homicide Department.”
Chandra’s silence, this time, was shocked. After seconds he said, “I... I don’t understand.”
So Vaughan told him about the many oblivions he had vicariously experienced.
* * * *
He would never forget his first case.
The victim was a young woman, attacked and stabbed to death during a robbery at her apartment. He was rushed to the scene of the crime, hurried through the crowd of investigators and forensic specialists who looked upon him with gazes of awe and pity that Vaughan had failed to understand at the time.
He had inserted his pin, knelt before the corpse, and scanned.
He accessed the women’s fading awareness, the core of her sensorium still erratically firing fifteen minutes after death, and he relived her last memories, saw the face of her killer, and more importantly found that he was known to her, in fact lived nearby.
But more than that, more terrible than being privy to the women’s terror at the attack, he had ridden her failing mind towards oblivion, the total negation of everything she had ever known in life.
And he had cried and pushed himself from her, clawed the pin from his head, and rolled into a foetal ball in the corner of the room, trying to banish the hell of oblivion from his mind.
He was counselled after that, told that the first time was always the worst, and sent back out.
He read more dead and dying minds, and he developed a technique to try and minimise the pain. He would dive, and find what he wanted, and then hurry to get out before the pain became too much. But always he experienced the terror, to varying degrees. Every day he knew what it was to die. He knew what awaited him when his own brief existence came to an end.
For a while he harboured a desire to kill his instructor, and the surgeon who had made him like this, and the psychiatrist who had first discovered that he possessed psi-ability.
The desire passed, and the pain continued, and he waited for the chance to get away and start a new life without fear of being discovered. Five years after his very first case with the Toronto police, during a job that went very wrong, he knew that he had to get away or kill himself.
Two days later he boarded an orbital shuttle to Bangkok... and he had been running, with occasional stops, ever since.
Chandra was silent for a time, then said, “It must have been hell, Jeff.”
“Hell? Hell... You’ve hit it in one, Jimmy. You asked what made me into the bastard I am, remember? Well, that did, Jimmy. Reading dead minds did...”
The cop murmured, “I’m sorry, Jeff.”
“And you know what else? There’s no white light. There’s no Nirvana or Heaven or Valhalla— no afterlife of any kind. You know what there is? I’ll tell you. There’s one fucking big black ocean of oblivion. I’ve ridden hundreds of minds on that final journey. I’ve read their terror. Christ, I’ve shared that terror, felt it myself, the soul-destroying horror of knowing that the only thing awaiting is a cold, empty nothingness for all eternity, of knowing that when life is over there’s no more warmth or love or anything we take for granted, just oblivion.”
He stopped there, aware that he was shaking uncontrollably.
Chandra did not respond for what seemed like minutes, and then he said nothing to counter Vaughan’s interpretation of the dying experience, as Vaughan had thought he might. Instead he said, “So you quit? Changed your identity?”
“I had to change my identity. A necropath can’t just quit, leave the government. You’re a valuable commodity—they’ve spent millions on you, you’ve solved crimes that otherwise would have gone unsolved. The only way to get away is either to kill yourself—and I considered that often enough—or to drop out, find yourself a new identity.”
“And if they found you now?”
“They’d kill me.” He said it before he realised the irony of what he’d said, then laughed aloud. “They’d kill me, Jimmy. I know too much. I’m too much of a security risk. If I fell into the hands of my government’s enemies...”
He fell silent, then said, “They have someone, a telepath called Osborne. A bastard. A bounty hunter, a trained killer. Whenever a telehead has had enough and gets the hell out, they send him out to track down and kill those strays.”
“You’ve evaded him for years, Jeff...”
Vaughan grunted a laugh. “Yeah. I moved from city to city around the world, frightened, paranoid. I saw Osborne everywhere. Then I cooled down. I knew I was seeing shadows. I thought, where am I least likely to be discovered? I’d heard about the Station. I thought I’d give it a go. When I got to the Station, I made contacts, bought a new identity and became Jeff Vaughan. Then I applied to the ‘port for a job as a ‘head, even though a part of me knew I was placing myself in danger.” He paused, considering. “I don’t know. Maybe I’d had enough. Maybe I wanted to be found. It’d be quick and painless.”
He could see Chandra, watching him, his eyes highlighted in the illumination of the stars.
“You were married?” Chandra asked.
Vaughan released a breath. “No, but there was someone. Didn’t work out.”
Chandra asked, “Kids?”
Vaughan tipped his head back and stared at the silent stars. He shook his head. “No,” he said, “no kids.”
He closed his eyes and hoped that Chandra would ask no more questions. He buried his head between his knees, willing an end to the cold. He knew that if he slept, he would die. He tried to sleep, but the cold bit at his face, gnawing like a hungry rat.
Perhaps an hour passed; Vaughan could not see his watch to check. Chandra began his chanting again, unconvinced by Vaughan’s testimony of the void that followed life. Faith, Vaughan thought to himself. He wished he had faith, wished the bastards at Ottawa Psionics had not discovered him. He had often wondered how things might have turned out, if he had not undergone the operation.
He must have drifted off to sleep. He awoke, startled, sometime later. Chandra was shaking him. There was a note of desperation in his voice. “Jeff. Jeff, for pity’s sake.”
Vaughan looked up. His whole body felt frozen. He had never felt so cold, never realised that the cold could be this painful. “What?”
“Jeff, we can’t give in. We can’t die down here.”
He stared at Chandra in the meagre light of the stars. “Why not?”
Chandra gestured in exasperation. “We’re the only ones who know,” he said. “If we die, who’ll be left to stop what they’re doing?”
Vaughan’s initial response was to find some wisecracking rejoinder to Chandra’s concern. Then he considered the man, and what he’d said. In extremis, facing death, Chandra had thought beyond himself, considered the fate of the victims of the Vaith.
He nearly said, “Does it matter?” but stopped himself. It mattered, obviously, to Chandra.
“Jeff.” Chandra’s voice sounded small, far away. “Look, why don’t we hold each other, share our warmth? Then in the morning... maybe then we can find a way out.”
Vaughan heard the words, felt a sudden despair at the futility of Chandra’s suggestion. But he stopped himself from commenting. Instead he said, “Okay, Jimmy. Okay, we’ll do that.”
He held out his arms, and Jimmy came to him. They hugged each other. For a minute, Chandra’s body heat warmed Vaughan, lessened the pain of the cold. Then, as he became accustomed to the added warmth, the all-encompassing iciness invaded again, creeping up his arms and legs like an army of biting insects intent upon devouring his very heart. He felt Chandra, in his arms, weeping and shivering uncontrollably. He caught the scent-of the Indian’s hair oil, the garlic on his breath, and almost laughed aloud at the stupidity of their situation. If only he’d been more aware while scanning, if only he’d thought to suggest they change into their thermal gear.
He felt Chandra relax, his breathing become even.
“No!” Vaughan yelled, shaking Chandra. “Don’t sleep! If you... if you sleep, you’ll die.”
“I’m so... so cold, Jeff. I’m so tired.”
“Hang on in there, Jimmy. A few hours. That’s all. Hang on for another few hours, okay?”
He tightened his embrace around the little Indian, crushing Chandra to him. He felt himself slipping, growing
ever more tired with every passing second as the cold registered no more as cold but as a scalding heat, a perverse warmth that permeated his every cell, calling to him to relax, submit, close his eyes and sleep.
At one point, Chandra said, “Thanks, Jeff.”
“For what?”
The Indian gave a quiet laugh. “Saving my skin all those years ago, at the ‘port.”
Vaughan smiled. “Don’t mention it.”
They lapsed into silence.
He lost all concept of duration. He nodded off, shook himself awake, stared up at the stars, as if by concentrating on the scintillating points of brightness he might stave off the siren of sleep.