by Jeff Kamen
His eyes glaze over, remembering. A cold voice answering the phone ...
Ah, hello? Is Doctor Goldschmidt there?
The Doctor?
Ah, yes. I-I wanted to speak to him. Is he there?
Who is this, please?
Ah … is he there? It’s important.
Who’s calling, please?
Ah, well. It’s an appointment. It’s quite urgent, he said to come today.
You have an appointment here?
P-Please, is he there?
If I have your name, I can make sure he calls you right back.
My name?
That’s right. And he’ll call you right back.
Ah …
We just need your name.
I see. Ah, Wilhelm. Just tell him Wilhelm called. I-I’ll try again later.
Wilhelm. What’s your surname, Wilhelm?
Ah, he knows it already, he —
What time is your appointment, Wilhelm?
Ah, look, I’ll try again later, I ...
We just need —
Crashing down the receiver; trembling.
He pictures the jeeps parked outside, the neighbours gathered in the stairway, whispering, all eyes to the door where the police were fencing off the scene with tape. He’d gone pushing through to see the white-haired figure hanging in the narrow hallway like some monstrous punchbag, throttled and purple in the face, scarcely recognisable. The police collecting names, taking statements; a few cadets on duty, frosty and watchful, calling people forward. One of them glancing across at him, then whispering to an officer by the door. Before the officer could react, he’d raced downstairs, vowing never to return.
Until now. Yet now there was nothing to return to.
He turns a corner and goes back among the crowds, merging with them blandly. One grey man among many, fragile, frail in heart. At a kerb he waits for a patrol jeep to go by, then crosses to the nearest essenhaus, a bright canteen mainly serving lab workers. Seated upon a stool he is given a slab meal set in gelo while he stares out the window. Watching, but not observing, the passing faces, the passing shoes.
~O~
A day on he finds himself walking in the direction of the courthouse, in sight of City Hall. He stands regarding the pillars and emblems framing the entranceway.
Alone, he watches the uniformed figures going about their business, some talking quietly on the broad stone steps, a few in full-length gowns. His gaze intensifies. Up there. Almost a decade ago. His parents hand in hand as they read their defence statement to the waiting public. Throngs of students surrounding them, future scientists mixing with a hungry new breed of artists and political radicals, all applauding the brave couple, yelling their support while armed police shoved them back.
If key human characteristics are to be phased out of the Nassgrube genome …
Then we need to ask what the authorities plan to replace them with ...
Heady days.
We believe there are strong grounds on which to launch an appeal …
Another week goes by. Two. The med staff seem happy for him to continue with the pills, and he takes one each day after lunch. He watches the tape and the disk incessantly, prowls the streets where the family once lived. A terrible sickly rage enters his blood, begins to fuel him. He dwells increasingly on the injustice of the situation. Sat in the corner of a canteen, he wonders what to do. Explosives? Is it really the only way? He sketches ideas on a napkin.
Then he notices a shape on the paper. He studies it a moment. Turns the napkin round. A shape he knows from somewhere. A circle tailed off with a little squiggle. His face knots in concentration. He lets a slowly forming image complete itself, and finishes the picture off.
Then exhales. He has it now.
On first reflection, he is not sure whether to be happy or angry with himself. Had he not risked everything before, only to stand a short distance from it? Why had it not occurred to him then? Why? He’d been just yards away. Yards.
He shakes his head. The metsat devices are fired out from a large pod-like chamber located close to the repairs hatch. He jots down what he knows, the pod’s size and dimensions. He realises he needs to find out more about the firing mechanism, its capacity to hold his weight, either at rest or when in use. After a while he glances behind him, taking in the noise of diners wheezing, coughing, engaging in conversation. No one is looking his way, but then again … what had Lütt-Ebbins said about unlocked doors?
He leaves without finishing his meal. Behind him the napkin lies torn and savaged, dark ink staining his plate.
~O~
He is discharged from the clinic a few days later. The long term cure, they inform him, will depend on him balancing work and rest, and avoiding stressful situations.
They recommend he continues with the pills, taking care not to exceed the dosage; half-yearly blood tests are booked in. He makes contact with Derring’s office, and when a clerk puts him back on the rota, he prepares for his return.
He is due to leave the City in two days. There is nothing to do for the moment but make a pact with himself. And no one to help him make it but those recorded figures so full of love.
On his last night they are still with him, long past the time he’d planned to go to bed. While the disk plays on he sits musing on how, since that first showing long ago, the old woman has never again appeared to meet his eyes. Nothing about her has ever retained the same feel or energy: if anything, she seems rather to be looking away from the lens than towards it. Peculiar, he thinks, how convinced he’d been at the time, caught in shock, no doubt, vulnerable to the recording’s impact on his imagination.
He watches his father devotedly. Watches him working, talking, going about his tasks. Close to tears, he tells him he will not be back again to watch the recordings; tells him it is time to destroy them lest they be discovered in his absence. He promises to see him soon.
For the very last time, then, he sits watching the blood and the anguish and the come-and-go of life, the carers holding up the infant, the bunched purple cord getting cut. He watches it right through to the point where they wrap the infant and lift her away. A child with the swarthy face of her mother, the face of the woman she will become.
Spluttering, black hair glistening with amniotic fluid, dark eyes caught in a glint of agony.
He sits forward to study her, presses rewind. Stop. Then play.
Thick black hair glistening with amniotic fluid. He pauses her there.
Eyes caught in a glint of agony.
Caught in a glint of agony.
Glint of agony.
Studying her closely, he wonders how it will be to meet her face to face. Wonders what lies in the mind of a Genetik. What lies within her soul.
Chapter 11 — Sandor
She is running through the woods of the eastern uplands, late from leaving the area above Grethà’s cave, where she has sought respite that day, away from crowds and voices.
She ducks, pushing through the laced and vicious branches, avoiding potholes, untrusted water pockets, then descending, searching ahead with a sense of coming night and unholy trespass, her dark eyes cutting at all angles as the path twists and drops again. Fighting her way out to where the raw winds blow, where the gaunt peaks stand in twilit profile. She leaps a gap, loose stones spraying as she goes.
She is preparing her excuses when powerful black wings slash across her view. A lammergeyer, swooping down over the ledge. She slows, watching as it falls away down the heights like something broken, vanishing in flapping silhouette. As she goes on, a screech arises from below. Such a harsh and empty noise, she thinks, coming from a living creature. Like some dark affirmation of things, reminder of a sleepless addiction to death. She is picking up her pace when an instinct says stop and she does so, staring like a deer into the woods.
She goes back a short way, panting softly, searching for movement. There. Something rustling in the trees. She draws her knife.
Soon to find a bearded
figure leaning casually against a rugged pine trunk, half hidden by a sweep of branches. A figure watching her.
‘I can see you,’ she says. Her tone is neutral, but already her heart is thudding. The man does not reply, and the faint cry of birds is the only sound in the woods. She shakes her head as if in pity. ‘I’m going,’ she says, furious to think she might be involved in some kind of chase-game all the way to the settlement, and then he comes forward.
‘I scared you,’ he says, with a glint of teeth. His voice is low and coarse, almost a growl. A voice like danger. ‘Did I scare you?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Did I scare you?’ She sees the teeth again.
‘I was making sure you were alone.’
‘Well, don’t. I don’t want you watching me. Ever. I’ve told you before.’
He says nothing. She looks away.
‘It wasn’t you I was watching,’ he says.
He is standing by a ditch. She notices a smell of mildew in the air, of old wooden decay.
‘What were you watching, then?’
He spits aside. ‘You don’t need me to tell you.’
‘Then why make me ask?’
He weighs her up with a wary expression before turning, walking away.
She waits for him to stop, to yield to her, but he continues, treading silently as he goes. The shape of him grows dark and she feels a flutter of pain.
‘Sandor.’
On he strolls, quietly whistling.
‘Sandor,’ she repeats, her voice tired and raw.
This time he stops.
‘What do you want?’ she says.
He shrugs, then comes back unhurriedly.
She watches him, controlling her breathing, determined to stand her ground.
‘I’ve brought you something,’ he says. ‘Thought you’d be hungry.’ He takes from a soiled gunny sack a pair of small birds, their heads cocked oddly in his fist. ‘Squab. You like squab.’
‘I can’t. I’m supposed to see someone.’
‘Someone. Who’s that?’
‘Nobody you know.’
‘Don’t start on me, girl.’
She snorts. ‘Or?’
‘Please,’ he says, wincing. ‘Please don’t start.’
She hesitates, then says, ‘Annie. I’m already late.’
‘Her? Forget her.’
‘Don’t say that. You’ve no right.’
‘You’re supposed to see me.’
‘You? Why should I see you? Give me one good reason.’
‘Because you need me.’
His voice is calm, but she can hear the pressure in it.
‘No,’ she says sadly. ‘Because other women don’t want you. Because you’re desperate.’ She leaves the words to hang before him, turn dryly in the air.
He moves closer, expressionless. She keeps her ground as he comes before her, his green eyes flickering, searching. For a while they stare at one another, neither giving way; two cold statues in the warm evening woodlands.
He is the first to move. His lips part and he looks aside with a lost expression. As might a child, an animal. As if he has just woken, and is surprised to find himself there.
‘Well?’ she says. ‘Are you going to speak, or am I leaving?’
His lips close. She catches an odour of sweat and smoke and garlic. So painfully familiar.
Then he looks over her face. ‘Listen,’ he whispers. ‘I’ve brought you food, I’ve brought you myself. I’m bringing you my time. This is our night together.’
She shakes her head, feeling the return of an old unwanted fear.
‘Why are you so disappointed?’ he whispers. ‘I’m never going to be all the things you want me to be. You want a dream.’
‘Do I?’ she says. For a long time she searches the depths of his eyes, and for all her turmoil it feels as though a weight is lifting, the weight of the doubt she carries with her every day. She sees a grief in him she’s not seen in months; a grief she knows and understands. Still she explores him, sensing herself arriving at the brink of a deep abyss. Tempting, so very tempting, to let go and fall.
‘I’m less than what you want,’ he whispers, ‘but I’m much more than a dream. I’m here. Now. You won’t find another who gives what I can give you. Not in this world.’
He returns the birds to the sack, and then with a faint smile reaches inside a pocket. He takes out a tiny wreath of flowers, offers it across. The neat ring of petals so very pale upon his sunburned skin.
‘What’s that for?’ she says, tensing.
He looks into her face. ‘It’s an empty world. Don’t use me to fill it up for you. You’re always looking for things to blame for your unhappiness, but don’t blame me. You know where to go. You know what to do. Don’t come to me for that. Come to me for other things. Be noble.’
‘You’re not noble, you’re cruel.’
His eyes flicker. ‘That’s not fair.’
‘Not fair?’ she says, tempted to laugh. ‘Not fair? I gave you everything.’
‘Not everythi—’
‘Don’t you dare, Sandor. Don’t you dare.’
‘Look, Jaala, I’m … I’m trying to talk, that’s all.’
‘No. No more. Now it’s different. I need something back from you. Not words. You want to prove yourself to me? You do that. But I want trust. That’s what I want. That’s all I ever wanted from you.’
His teeth glint. She watches him stonily.
Then in the same coarse whisper, he says, ‘I look in your eyes … I see a storm. You look at me, you see the same. We’re two of a kind. I never forced you to be with me, you never forced me. We’re just here. We’re alive in the same way. We belong, we’re like the same thing, the same creature. That’s why you came to me. That’s why I knew where to find you. That’s why we’re here now.’
She looks down at the tiny wreath, and as though tiring of him she sighs. But she isn’t tired. She goes to take it but he whispers something and she raises her eyes to him. Then he reaches behind her head and pulls at the cloth cone that ties up her hair. As it comes away, her thick black locks fall around her shoulders.
He places the wreath upon her head like a miniature crown, then draws her closer, so that their faces almost meet, and once more they stare long and hard into each other’s eyes, each silently exploring.
‘I need you,’ he whispers. ‘You know that. We need each other.’
She wants to reply, but lets the silence grow while she takes in the sight of him, the smell of him, the feel of him so near. Then they embrace, she doesn’t know who moved first, and they hold each other tight, hands clutching as they whisper their knots and desires, all their complications. Then they kiss, the wreath sliding off her head and dropping to the ground and neither noticing. Thoughts of Anya, other obligations, quickly depart. She knows he has crossed a great and terrible boundary to be with her that night, and that he is right: their time is now, and has to be taken. They loosen their embrace, and with the wreath returned to her, they go off to a quiet place where they can be alone.
In a cleft in the rocks they make a fire. They cook the birds on a spit and drink raw wine from a flask. They eat, all greasy lips and fingers, and they drink and talk, and then at some point, getting lost as she tries to recount a story from another life, another night around a fire, she falls quiet, observing him with a smile. He sits watching her, humming, and when the crown tumbles from her head this time, he replaces it more slowly, more deliberately than before, his words suffused with promises. He anoints her with a kiss. They stand up slowly with twining arms, and before that low and hissing fire she undresses him. Stroking his body. Long fingers refinding him, retracing him. He undresses her as they kiss again, both nuzzling, kissing soft and hard, soft and warm, kissing fiercely and with tender familiarity. Then she pulls him to her breasts and they sink down together and make love on their scattered clothing. Lovingly, ferally at times, finding and losing each other, almost wrestling as they couple.
Later
, flushed, the damp hair hanging down her face, she sits rocking over him. Gently, almost placatingly, looking down at him as though from a dreadful height. Searching his eyes as she moves in rhythm, those green green eyes; rediscovering him, finding the storm there, the same storm consuming him as that which consumes herself. ‘I feel so close to you,’ she whispers. ‘I want to be with you. I want to be close.’
‘You are,’ he says. ‘You are close.’
She stops, hunching over him. ‘Sandor, I’m scared. Will we be together?’
‘We will. We’ll be together.’
‘I want us to be together.’
‘We are. We’re together.’
‘Tell me we’re together. Tell me.’
‘We’re together,’ he whispers. ‘We are. We’re together.’
Chapter 12 — A Sighting
The moment he disembarked at Van Hagens he was searched thoroughly, body, bag and clothing. As he stood with his hands raised, he noticed a group of officials unveiling a plaque on the wall above the main entrance.
Among them senior department heads, Derring included. The paunchy, white-haired man seemed to glance across at him as he had his pass returned, then looked awkwardly away.
The guard motioned him on and he went on hesitantly, trying and failing to catch Derring’s eye. Approaching the entrance, he saw engraved upon the plaque the first three lines of the Creed:
Though I live in hardship, hard work will prevail.
Though my hands are weak, they are building mighty foundations.
Though I live in the shadows, a new day is dawning in Nassgrube.
As a patter of applause broke out among the officials, he noticed there were more guards around than usual, muscular figures in black uniforms, freshly drafted in from the south. A vague discomfort began in him that rose to alarm on his way to his quarters when he found himself being stopped twice more to have his pass checked, his bag inspected. As he went on again, he noticed a gleaming new representation of the flag set along the walkways and in public areas where workers gathered to snack and talk. And not just new, he thought, but enhanced, embellished, as if somewhere it had been decided to launch an imagistic upgrade. He took a moment to study a photoplate screwed into a foamboard wall. The same design, but different, somehow more powerful, even threatening. The great tower that stood above the earth now glowing in the light of a furious Sun in Splendour, a spiked orb grimacing in the heavens like some furious sphere of war. And that was not all: the giant figure framed within the tower no longer wore an expression of stern and noble aspiration; now it appeared to be roaring out at the viewer in bestial rage, its eyes narrow and unforgiving, its demeanour impatient, intolerant, wrathful. He wondered who had ordered the changes, and what purpose they served. Who they were for.