Janus
Page 18
Fine, he thought, as good as ever.
Except that the chaos Larsen had released in him had not yet stilled.
Except that he was not sure how much was memory and how much dream.
Except that the person named Jon Grebbel on this world was little but a puppet, a painted mask for the real Grebbel beneath. And that deeper reality . . . He lost the thought among glimpses of remembered dreams.
She had been part of the dreams. He remembered her here in this room. He remembered her tears. Were they only tears for the mask?
Mountains, he remembered, like those outside this room. And years of training. Dissections. Treatments for shock and trauma. The easing of pain. The highest calling, the amelioration of human suffering. That was a true mask—the blank green that covers the surgeon’s face, while under it, the lips curl, and with each breath, the whisper: I am! I am! I am!
Only, here they had fitted another mask on him—had grown it into his flesh. And now, when it was prised loose, it tore open, and lacerated him. Slowly he was identifying which fragment of memory was mask and which was the face below. The veins and tendons of a forearm as the fist was clenched. The crease at the corner of a mouth. A ruined body being strapped into a chair. Excitement. Pity. When he had pieced together enough to be sure of which was which, he would decide what to do. To fit the two together, mask and flesh, and live as one. Or to make a choice—which to reject and which to wear in the world. The mask or the face.
Elinda spent ten minutes with Barbara, who stared at the wall and murmured once or twice, but gave no sign of recognising her. Elinda came out feeling empty and began preparing herself for whatever Jon Grebbel might have in store for her.
Carlo was waiting outside the door.
“It’s too cold for spring,” she said at random to cover her surprise. “I’ll never get used to this place.”
“Actually,” he replied, “I don’t think it is particularly cold. Maybe you’re running a temperature?”
“Me? No. Why, do I look sick?”
“You look as though you’re under some strain. I was hoping to meet you; there were some things I felt I should talk to you about.”
“Yes?”
“You’re concerned about your friend in there—about Barbara, I mean. You’re concerned enough to be trying to do something about it.”
“Is that a question, Carlo? If it is, the answer’s yes, of course. I don’t understand how she got the way she is, and no one else seems interested in finding out what happened.”
“I mean, if you’re trying to do Security’s job—”
“They don’t seem too interested in doing it themselves.”
“Have you asked yourself why you’re so compelled?” Carlo went on. “Guilt can be devastatingly—”
“For Christ’s sake, Carlo, keep your coffee-room analyses out of it. What are you trying to say?” And why, she suddenly thought, why are you and Dr. Henry, with all the time and resources you have, unable to do what Larsen can manage to do in secret, part-time? At that moment only her fear of exposing Larsen stopped her from uttering the question.
“If you’re looking for someone,” Carlo went on, “if there really is someone to find, you’d be putting yourself in danger. I don’t know how much you’ve thought of that.”
“As it happened, I took this out of the kitchen drawer a couple of days ago. Something happened that made it look like a good idea, and the rolling pin wouldn’t fit in my pocket.”
He looked at the paring knife she showed him and frowned at her. “Scratch someone with that, and you may cause more trouble than you avoid.”
“I’d more or less worked that out for myself,” she said. She considered, then pulled Barbara’s recorder from her pocket. “I’ve started carrying this with me too. If something interesting looks like happening, I’ll turn it on. So if anything does happen to me, you know what to look for.” She met his gaze. “Do you have any better ideas?”
“You could let it go and stay out of trouble. I’d be a lot happier if you would.”
She pursed her lips and lowered her head. “No I couldn’t,” she said quietly. “Sorry, Carlo, and thank you for the thought, but I couldn’t.” Then she drew a breath and looked him in the face again. “You know more than you’re telling me, don’t you?”
He sighed. “You’re making this very difficult. I’ve seen . . . I want to—help you, but there’s too much I can’t say. I was talking to you about therapy a while ago. . . .”
“And I said I wasn’t ready to stir all that up again. That’s even more true now. I’ve got enough to worry about.” Including how far I can trust you or anyone else, she suddenly thought. “What can’t you tell me? Why not? Come on, Carlo. You’ve been claiming you’re my friend. How can I believe you if you won’t trust me?”
Carlo winced, then said slowly, “I still think you’d be more comfortable if you had come to terms with your past. But that wasn’t the point I wanted to make now. The therapy machines—how they work is, they feed signals into the brain. If the signal matches a pattern that was there before—a latent memory, that pattern is reinforced and can be made conscious. But the input signal always comes from outside. And even if the signal doesn’t match anything already present, with enough applied energy—”
“Stop bullshitting me. Get to the point. Why can’t you restore my memories? Jon’s? Are you really trying?”
He hesitated. “There are . . . limits on what we can do. There are safety precautions and other restrictions. I’ve been doing everything I can to help you.”
“You have? Really? Why am I supposed to believe that? And you didn’t answer my question did you? What do you mean by helping me? Why can’t you talk about it?”
“It’s . . . political. Not everyone agrees about this place, not here or back there. Not everyone knows . . .” Before Elinda could respond, he turned away, muttering, “I’ll explain it later.”
Dr. Henry had come in. “Good evening to you both,” he said brightly. “Spring is definitely in the air these days, isn’t it? Ah, it’s the young lady with the unusual taste in music. You found your friend that evening, I trust, or I’d be regretting my tact in abandoning you so easily. Did I hear Carlo telling you about our new developments? Much more eloquently than I could, I imagine. We’re still working on them, so we shouldn’t be giving out news until we’re sure of our results, but I think we can say it’s looking promising. I’ve always maintained this machine had the potential to be a major therapeutic tool.” He looked quickly at his watch, as though timing the length of a scene. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us now. We have a case to discuss.”
She watched them leave, stifled a couple of curses, then checked at the desk and went on to Grebbel’s room. The bandages had been removed from his face, and the sling from his arm. His face was swollen but he seemed to be sleeping when she went in, and she waited, peering at his eyebrows, at the faded bruise on his cheek, the way his hair straggled across the lines on his brow. His lips were slightly parted, making him look both vulnerable and brutal. She listened to his breathing and watched his closed eyelids twitch and flutter. Finally she stepped forward and stroked his hair back from his eyes. He shook his head weakly, but did not wake. She sat on the bed, and after a moment lay down beside him, uncaring of the open door behind her. Her muscles felt waterlogged; she just wanted to lie there beside him and sleep.
Grebbel stirred and blinked at her. For a moment his face seemed riven by turmoil, and then it was a mask. It took him two attempts to find his voice. “Elinda. I wasn’t expecting you.” But his gaze never left her face, and just then that was more important than anything else.
A breath she hadn’t realised she was holding quietly escaped through her lips.
“I think that’s what I like most about you,” she said. “The passionate greetings.”
“I’m sorry. I was dreaming, I think. I haven’t come back from it yet.”
“You want to tell me?”
She reached out and put her hand on his chest. “You’ve remembered, haven’t you? Niels did something.”
He nodded, his closed eyes turned to the ceiling.
“How much? How much have you got back?” He did not move. “You did go to Larsen, didn’t you? You wouldn’t tell me, and you ended up in here. You’re here because of what he did, aren’t you? Jon, talk to me. I’ve been scared enough these last couple of days. Talk to me.”
He turned slowly to face her. First his good hand, then both hands reached up to grip her shoulders. When she heard his breath grate in his throat, she forced herself not to flinch. His fingers were like icicles, but she felt his gaze on her face like the glare of the sun. She told herself that it was the dim light that made his expression so unreadable.
“You—came here.” His voice was barely recognisable. Slowly he nodded. “It’s all back, or all that matters. I’m everything I was.” His eyes stared. She could see a red vein in the white above the pupil. Then his face twisted. “And you came here.” He released her and rolled onto his back. His breathing was rough with what might have been laughter.
She swallowed. “Then you’ve got what you wanted. Are you happier for it?”
He swung back towards her. “I feel as though I’m just waking up from a long dream. I’m learning to walk again, I’m feeling the wind on my face.” He shook his head angrily. “I—I can’t describe what I feel.” He had lifted his clenched fists but seemed unaware that he held them quivering between himself and Elinda. “Happiness has nothing to do with it. The first fish struggling up the beach into the air and the sun—did it care about being happy?”
“Then you’re not happy.”
“Haven’t you been listening?”
“I’ve been listening to you trying to convince yourself that you’re better off than you were. How do you expect me to believe it if you don’t?”
He shook his head, still staring at her. “I can’t explain it any better. You wanted it too, you wanted to be whole again. Now it’s happened to me. If you don’t like it—”
“You can’t explain it at all, because you don’t like it.” She had to struggle to keep herself from shouting, but when she lowered her voice, she could hear how close it was to breaking. “If it’s so wonderful being whole again instead of a fish in the sea, why aren’t you telling me what you remembered? Come on—you’re whole again, you’re what you were before, back there. What was it?” She did shout then, and his face seemed to close against her.
“I see,” he said. “It’s fear, isn’t it? You’re scared of what you might find in yourself if you looked—you can’t bear to think that someone else might still need the truth.”
“To wallow in it, you mean. To sink back, to turn into . . .” She broke off. “Yes, I’m scared. I’m terrified of what’ll happen—that we won’t know each other any more.”
He gazed at her, and now his eyes narrowed, his cheeks were drawn up, in pain or concentration. “I’ve regained my past,” he said slowly. “I—haven’t thrown away what I am . . . was.”
She exhaled raggedly, and listened to the wind buffeting the walls of the clinic.
“You’re like me,” he said. “You wanted yourself back, and now you’re scared, but we’re the same. By the stream that time, it started to come back. A snow slope, a road and a fence with lights. Remember? The wind cutting through our blankets, snow up to our knees. Blankets and rain gear, one groundsheet, that’s all we had, and fifty klicks to the freeway junction. Then the sirens when they found we were gone. And the searchlights. Remember? Eight of us made that break. I knew just two of them. One of the strangers was a woman. We were together when the choppers came over and the others scattered. We knew nothing about each other; we didn’t talk much, that night we had together with the choppers going over every twenty minutes, before they found us and brought us back. Remember, Elinda?”
“No I don’t! I don’t remember!”
“But you could. There needn’t be any trouble. Then you’d know. You’d understand why I needed this, and it wouldn’t have to be between us.”
“I see.” She sat back and looked at the ceiling. Her arms were clutched across her belly. She was starting to tremble. “So I’m worthy if I agree to have my mind tampered with too, but otherwise, I’m just a liability?”
“You’re twisting things. You’ve let them drive you into your little cave, and now you daren’t even stick your nose out to smell the air. You’ve become what they’re trying to make you, and you like it.”
When he had finished, he turned away and lay still. The silence stretched. She could find nothing to say that wouldn’t make things worse. And she wasn’t going to cry in front of him now. Except that if she didn’t, she would hit him, bruises or not. She sat up. “I’d better go.”
“You’re overwrought,” he said. “You haven’t even tried to find out what I remembered.”
“I don’t want to know! If it was something you were proud of, you’d have told me.”
She closed the door quietly behind her as she left.
The afternoon sky arched over Grebbel from mountain wall to mountain wall. He shook his head and flexed his right arm.
“Take it easy, remember,” said Carlo at the door of the clinic. “We can’t do miracles.”
“On the contrary—I feel reborn.” He gave Carlo a broad grin and started toward the dam.
The sign showed 143 days to completion, an increase since the last time he had seen it. Beyond, trucks whirred with their loads of gravel. The river gleamed in the sun, flared white against the growing dam.
A truck turned into the parking bay and stopped. Menzies swung down and waved Grebbel to him. “Feeling better, are you?”
“Still a bit confused, but I’m a new man.”
“That’s good then.” Menzies was eyeing him closely. “Niels would like a talk with you. Can you meet him at your place in half an hour?”
“He said he would,” Grebbel said agreeably. “It’s something I’ve been looking forward to.”
He walked slowly to his building, watching the life around him and trying out a consciously worn mask of amiability.
Larsen arrived a few minutes early. Without preamble, he said as he sat down: “I have a number of questions, but perhaps you’d like some things explained first. I’ll be whatever help I can.”
“Yes, I’ve got questions,” Grebbel replied easily. “One or two. We might start with who you are and how many people you’ve managed to restore. After that I’d be quite interested to hear what they—they—think they’re doing and why they imagine they can get away with it. And what are you planning to do about it? Why don’t you start on those questions? I’ll probably find a couple more as we go along.”
“Who I am, in the sense you mean, isn’t important,” Larsen said. “Consider me as what you see: a technician with certain scruples but a preference for a quiet life. What I was before I came here, I keep to myself.” He flexed his shoulders stiffly. “How I started this is a longer story than we have time for. But, in brief, after I’d been here a few months, I found that my apparent self kept slipping away, giving me glimpses of what was underneath. And then I learned—never mind how—to strip away the mask completely.”
“That’s what I call it, too,” Grebbel said. “A mask.”
Larsen looked hard at him, then went on. “I became myself, but I had had the experience of living as the mask; and the two personalities made me whole—for the first time, I think. I felt such a liberation—I wanted to liberate others too. I thought we could gather enough of our kind to compel the authorities to see the error of their ways. At the time, I was helping set up the labs in the clinic, doing some software development. It wasn’t hard to get access to their programs.”
Larsen paused, and lowered his voice. “I moved too quickly, t
oo uncritically. And then I began to understand what I might be liberating. I realised how naive I had been. And yet, what they do, wiping out a human portrait—once, I might have said ‘a human soul’—and replacing it with a charcoal sketch is monstrous. . . .”
“Okay,” Grebbel interjected brusquely. “What about them? I got only the inside view of the business. What’s their game? Whoever they are.”
“At heart it’s a typical bureaucratic compromise. Two social experiments, with controllable parameters—or nearly so. One in the growth of a new society, and one in the reconstruction of criminal psychologies. Add to it the possibility of cheap labour to help develop the new colony here, the remoteness of the social laboratory from the home world, should anything go wrong, and the use of isolation and minor hardship as forms of punishment to satisfy Calvinistic factions, and you have a politically saleable case for what you see around you.”
Grebbel considered. “Fascinating,” he said dryly. “And, remind me again, what were you thinking of doing about it?”
“I still have some plans, but they will have to wait for the right political climate. There’s nothing to be gained by recklessness. At the moment, I see no way to do more than I am at present.”
“As far as I can see, that means just sitting back and watching until somebody twists your arm.”
“Let me explain two things to you, Mr. Grebbel. What I originally did was not done casually. I did it because I was convinced the net result would be to bring more good than evil into the world. But I made errors of judgement. I helped restore personalities that even I must concede should not have been brought back.” Larsen’s gaze was fixed, but it was not clear whether it was focussed on Grebbel or on something beyond the room they were in. “In your case . . . in your case, I have to have faith that I have done more good than evil. But I walk a knife-edge. I will not be a party to violence or disorder.”
Grebbel started to speak, but Larsen cut him off. “Let me make my other point. It relates to what I have just said. The process of restoration is not in practice reversible. It seems that the tissues of the brain, the structures and connections that make up memory and personality, can sustain only so much manipulation by these rather primitive techniques. Twice, the authorities discovered someone who had been restored, and tried to reprocess them. I have seen the results. Of course, the apparatus and the level of expertise here are not all they might be, which must add to the difficulty. But the result, in terms of my portrait metaphor, is not another charcoal sketch, but rather a child’s scrawl, partly erased. The organism still looks human, but a detached observer, I’m sure, would assign it to a zoo. I said I’ve seen this twice. I hope never to see it again. Nor does anyone else who understands what is happening here.”