Kevin turned from the sight, from the strong scent of ghost tobacco in his nostrils. The van was okay, and what harm did it do to let her try? Kevin was past trying, even when, on occasion, she turned to him. Even when something in him trembled response. He wasn’t into surrogate sex.
“Kevin!”
“What?” He slogged over, ready to call off the expedition and resume the endless journey to nowhere.
She pointed at a particularly handsome pine tree. “There. I think it’s there.”
“The snow’s almost all gone.”
“But it was left under a tree, wasn’t it?”
He paused, then nodded. He hadn’t told her that. Lucky guess. She needed no more encouragement, but waded into the Dairy-Queen-soft snow mounded at the fir’s base, digging with bare hands.
Kevin superimposed another image, another woman, over hers. Jane laughing and trotting like a pony about the snow-filled clearing. Jane crying and clinging to Zyunsinth and then himself. Jane leaving. Jane never coming back.
She was on her hands and knees now, spraying snow to either side. The fir’s broad shadow had kept spring sunlight at bay; the snow was still surprisingly deep here. She dug like a dog looking for a forgotten bone repository.
“Kevin—Kevin!”
He leaned down to look. Long amber hairs protruded through the snow, either a dead fox or… Zyunsinth! Kevin fell to his knees, not feeling the cold snow through his worn denims.
“My God—how did you… ?”
She was shoving more snow away now, baring the stiff length of a fur coat.
Kevin saw another fur coat in the snow, saw spring’s relentless softening fingers driving deep into the fur’s center, driving decay and disintegration back into the earth it sprang from—the red, Indian earth of Crow Wing.
Jane would be found soon, if she hadn’t been already, true skin and bones this time, presenting yet another unsolved mystery for the state’s newspapers to exploit.
As the woman before him sculpted the dormant shape out of the snow, so Kevin saw Jane being stripped, revealed, destroyed. Again.
“This is it, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Kevin?”
He forced himself to look at the familiar fur coat she pulled from the snow. He forced himself to look at her. Her eyes radiated brunette warmth. Slightly chapped lips smiled over Pepsodent-perfect white teeth.
“That’s it, all right.” Excitement tingled in Kevin’s stomach despite himself. “That’s… amazing. That you found it. You never were here. You never had those memories of Jane’s to draw on. How—?”
“Kevin. I am her.”
«Not—really.”
“As much as anyone can be. And I’m free of them now. They don’t want me any more than the Volkers did her.”
Kevin took the coat from her hands, brushed snow off the chilled hairs. Suddenly, he swirled the coat over her shoulders.
“I guess it’s yours now. Finders keepers. Jane has her own fur coat.”
She hugged it close, staring over each shoulder in turn to study the coat. “It still doesn’t mean anything to me. Why, if I have all of her memories up to the point we—she— went back into the space vessel? I should care about Zyunsinth as much as she did. And I don’t. I care about you, but not about this—”
“The aliens probably realized that early contact with the race of Zyunsinth had helped Jane disregard her programming. They stripped you of that dangerous emotional response as a safeguard. That’s all.”
Her hand stroked the wide, free-hanging sleeve. “It’s soft and pretty, but something is… missing. Will there always be something missing?”
Kevin stared into her eyes. “Maybe. There will be for me.” Her eyes lowered. “But, hey—you found it! That’s really something. That’s a phenomenon that Turner and the PID would spit into the wind to document. I didn’t think you could do it, and you did.”
“Maybe there are other things you don’t think I can do that I can.”
“Impudent patients don’t get gold stars.” He pinched the coat together across her chest and pulled her up. “But you deserve a reward. Behavior modification therapy, reward positives. Finding this is progress. How about—?”
His arm around her shoulders was guiding her back to the parked van. The fur felt housepet-familiar to his hand; it even smelled familiar, like a wet dog, as his body heat—and hers—warmed it. Sun was leaking through the clouds, pouring down on them like tepid skim milk.
“How about we go somewhere definite for a change? Easter’s coming up and—”
“Easter?”
“Holiday. Religious. Remember all the chocolate rabbits we saw sitting in the shredded cellophane at the convenience store? That’s for Easter.”
“Rabbits are religious? I didn’t know that,” she began seriously.
“Only at reproduction.” Kevin laughed. She stopped walking to watch him. He hadn’t thought it had been that long since he’d laughed. “No, rabbits are the secular part of the holiday. The religious part is about miracles.”
“I know what a miracle is. A miracle is—” she began to recite.
“A miracle is finding a fur coat you never lost.” Kevin smiled and squeezed her shoulders. “Maybe we should go someplace special for Easter dinner.” She nodded hopefully. “Maybe… Elk River.” She waited. “To my folks’ place.”
“Folks are…”
“A nicer way of saying parents.”
“What are your parents like, Kevin? What are any parents really like?”
He stopped and stared at the anonymous van with the stolen license placard. “People. Just people. They worry a lot.”
“Like you worry about me?”
“Sort of. Sometimes.”
They turned back to view the clearing.
“Will it be… dangerous… to go there?” she asked. “Maybe. Maybe they’re still watching the place. Maybe I don’t care anymore. I’m tired. I’d like to sit down after Sunday dinner with a newspaper—I’m tired of hearing about the world over a car radio… voices in the dark. I don’t even know what happened in the Twin Cities after we got away, if they found anything in Crow Wing yet—”
“I can do dishes,” she said.
“What?”
“After Sunday dinner. I can do dishes.”
He stared into her. Serious face. “No.” He grabbed her arms and shook her a little. ‘77/ do dishes. You can read the newspaper.”
“I like to read, too.”
He just shook his head.
“Will your parents like me?” she wondered. “The Volkers didn’t. I mean, they didn’t like… her.”
“They were afraid of her. That’s nothing new. She… you turned out different than they expected. That’s nothing new, either. Yeah, my folks’ll like you; they’ll have to. What they’ll really hate is my beard!” He tugged on the offending hair.
“I like it,” she consoled him automatically.
“You like everything,” he teased back.
“No. There are some things I don’t like at all.” Her eyes darkened.
Kevin guessed that she was remembering Nordstrom and the force she had loosed on him. She was more lethal than her predecessor—and knew it. She smiled into his dawning guilt. “But I like you.”
He turned away, bent down and pressed damp snow into a soggy ball. He hurled it at a distant pine trunk. Thwunck! It hit dead center, splattering like a Big Bang universe. “Why do you want to go to Elk River, Kevin?” she asked. “Sometimes, Jane, it’s just time to come in from the cold and go home.” He nudged her arm. “Come on, sourpuss. I’ll race you to the truck!”
He was sprinting away from her, but she stood there frozen amid the shrinking snow.
Jane.
He’d called her Jane. For the first time since… She didn’t want to think about “since.” She wanted to think about now, about going home, whatever that was. It sounded nice.
Laughing at last, she clasped the bulky fur coat around her and began running through the sogg
y snow toward the road.
Tor Books by Carole Nelson Douglas
Probe
Counterprobe
Sword & Circlet
Keepers of Edenvant
Heir of Rengarth
Seven of Swords
Copyright
Verse on part title pages from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright © 1963, 1964 by T, S. Eliot.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
COUNTERPROBE
Copyright © 1988 by Carole Nelson Douglas
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A TOR BOOK
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
49 West 24 Street
New York, NY 10010
Cover art by Jael
ISBN: 0-812-53596-0
Can. ISBN: 0-812-53597-9
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-12176
First edition: November 1988
First mass market edition: March 1990
Printed in the United States of America
0987654321
Created with Writer2ePub
by Luca Calcinai
CounterProbe Page 35