by John Park
Grebbel worked through the morning, while waves piled up against the dam and lathered across the causeway; beneath the arc lights, spray flew like diamonds. His arm was stiff and at times sore, but most of its strength had returned.
At lunch, he looked for Elinda, but she did not appear. Instead, as he was leaving, he found Partridge, balancing against the gusts as he struggled with the cafeteria door. Grebbel helped him inside.
“Well, if it isn’t the new boy at last,” Partridge said, beating water off his coat. “Been in the wars, have we?”
“You’re looking great yourself. How’s it been going out here?”
“Just the way it always goes, mate. Three steps forward, three back and a couple of falls on the arse. You look as though you know something I don’t—or you think you do, at any rate.”
The cafeteria shook and hail rattled against the window.
“Maybe I do,” said Grebbel. “But not as much as I need to know. Weren’t we talking business for a while there? You tell me what the wind’s blowing your way, and I look for some better . . . lubricant for you?”
Partridge turned to him, and for an instant the hunger behind his eyes was obvious. “The stuff I’ve been getting lately’s been pretty thin, and that’s the truth. Just about hear my eyeballs grinding in the sockets when I wake up in the morning. What do you want to hear rumours about?”
“For the time being, something fairly simple. The flights to and from the Flats must go on some sort of schedule, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is. I’d like to know when they run. If you can find that out, maybe we can go on from there.”
“Okay. I reckon we can do something along those lines.”
At the end of the afternoon, there was a gap in the storm. High overhead, pink strands of light tangled above the ponderous turning mouth of a great cloud funnel; and beyond the aurora floated the two moons and an icy scattering of stars.
When Grebbel did his voluntary shift in the clinic, he announced that he was going to learn to use the computer program for predicting the biological activities of new compounds from their molecular structures. “I want to be ready for when we start harvesting some of the biosphere around here.” He then managed to work in twenty minutes of exploration of the database where the drug inventory was kept. He got to within a couple of passwords of the inventory itself, and then closed down the search for the day. Too much access time might become suspicious. But when he left the lab he was confident; he could feel his plans coming together.
After dinner, he waited until he met Larsen hurrying through the rising wind away from the Greenhouse, and accompanied him, mentioning the talk they had had in Grebbel’s rooms. “I didn’t say all I had to say then, and I think I was wrong to keep some things back.”
They were almost at Larsen’s home, and Larsen uncomfortably asked him in.
Grebbel paced the living room. He noted its austerity and the cleanliness marred by candle grease on the floor and the soot marks on the ceiling. “A man with a conscience?” he wondered aloud as a window rattled. “Perhaps a badly troubled conscience? I can sympathise. We all have to wrestle with the different sides of our nature—but then what are ‘we’ that do the wrestling?”
“Do you want a philosophical debate? Or is this just your stalking horse for something else?”
“If you’re asking whether I’ve come to a decision—yes I have. But all in good time.” Grebbel stopped and turned to Larsen. “Do you value truth, Niels? I think you must, to have done what you did. And trust. Admirable, courageous qualities—qualities that can ride a man and make him do more than he would ever have believed himself able to do.”
“Whatever you came here for—I wasn’t the one who harmed you. All I did was help you. Your anger should go elsewhere.”
“Time enough for that. For the moment this is just about you, and what you can do to help me again.” Grebbel smiled. “Trust and truth, those are the keys. You see, you have some information that I need. You must have an impressive group of graduates, of alumni, here, and I’m afraid their potential is going to waste. I’d like to discuss some changes in the set-up, in the rules of the game if you like, with the whole membership. Except, you seem to be the only one who knows the membership list.”
“There are good reasons for that,” Larsen said thickly. “As you know quite well.”
Wind made a thin shrieking sound through some part of the building structure.
“Of course there are. Of course. But surely, you must agree, there can be exceptions for exceptional circumstances. I think this particular rule has outlived its usefulness as an absolute and should be waived for once. And, you know, it’s very undemocratic of you to keep this all to yourself. You don’t think so?”
Larsen shook his head.
Grebbel went over to him and rested his arm on the man’s shoulders. “Trust is a great quality, you’re right. Something that is prized in all societies, and rightly so.” His free hand tugged at Larsen’s sleeve. “I’m asking you to give me that gift a little longer, now that I’ve told you about myself. Trust me. Tell me the truth. Won’t you?”
Larsen shook his head and started to pull away.
“A pity,” Grebbel said. “But I had to learn some basic manipulative skills back there, and develop a certain physical strength. And I was good at my work.”
He tensed, gripped—twisted. Larsen gave a short cry and fell backwards.
An hour later, Grebbel rose to leave. Larsen did not hear the door close. He remained crouched against the wall and shivered. Gradually he accepted that it was over and he was alone again. He had broken so easily. Two or three prods in the right places and his will had collapsed. Once he had given up the answer to the first question, it had become impossible to stop. Grebbel had needed little more than the threat of further pressure.
He levered himself upright against the wall, then lurched to the bathroom. He vomited into the lavatory bowl. At some point during the ordeal his bladder had released. He undressed painfully and washed. Then he looked in the mirror. There, at least, the shell of himself seemed to be intact. Except for the eyes. In them he could see his own destruction. Would he be able to look anyone in the face now without displaying what he had become?
His sanctuary had been violated. The nighttime agonies, the meditations before candles, had been reduced to nothing by the simple fact of applied pain. And it was not over. Nothing had changed, beyond the apparition of one more failure to be lived with, and one more compromise to make with the unforgiving conscience.
He fumbled and set the candles on the dark wooden table, lit them. He stared hopelessly at the bobbing flames. How much pain was a man supposed to bear?
In his room that night, Grebbel emptied the folder he had found in his luggage onto the table. The fabrications on which this life had been built here were spread out in front of him. He shuffled them and placed them like a fortune-teller’s cards. Then, one by one, he began to tear them up. Letters: Dear Son, Jonathon, Hey Lover, Dear Mr. Grebbel. Photographs—smiles and arms round shoulders, shadows and trees and bricks and hands and sunlight on a lake—“Lie,” he whispered, and tore them. “Lie. Lie.”
It was all gone, everything they had tried to make him build on—gone the way of Santa Claus and his dreams of being a shuttle pilot. He sank into his chair. Now his hands shook, tired from tearing, ached to tear again. The quiet suburban neighbourhood they had tried to feed him, the modest technical school obscurity—lies. And here, the menial work, the sense of life lived on a hollow stage without support, without roots. They had been inside him, eating away like a shipworm at his innermost self, inside, inside with their lies, their manipulations. It was all fake, false as makeup plastered over a tumour. . . .
In his mind, two crimson-headed raptors circled over the mist-choked valley. He gave a short cry and pushed himself back from the table.
The gold-painted hatchback was real, and the holding cell where he had looked down the snow slope and kno
wn that he was facing a kind of death. And the room with the whitewashed walls that were always splashed with brown because the cleaners were too anxious to get onto the next corridor—they had heard the sounds made in that room. That was real, and the other rooms, the basement room—dark as a cave, with grimy windows you could see your face in if you went up on tiptoe, and the handle you had to use both hands to turn, gripping in front of your chest, and straining because your hands would hardly fit around and the effort made your chest hurt. But the handle had to turn, had to open—
“Lies,” he whispered once more, mechanically. His hands clenched and opened and clenched again. The retching sound that might have been laughter broke from him again.
Osmon was the first on his list, a kindred spirit, a willing follower, with some animal intelligence to go with his actual muscle. A deputy, an enforcer, a fixer. Grebbel turned to look for foot soldiers.
Réjean Lafayette turned to Grebbel with a practiced-looking smile. He was a small man with bitten fingernails, white, even teeth and a thin grey moustache. There were deep lines between his eyes and curving from his nose around the corners of his mouth. His movements as he chopped vegetables in the kitchen were quick and nervously precise.
“You look happy in your work,” Grebbel commented after they had introduced themselves. “It must be an interesting job you’ve got there.”
Lafayette’s eyebrows lowered fractionally, but his smile did not waver. “Mustn’t complain, you know. You looking for a position here or something? I gotta tell you—they’ll only assign if you go through channels. They got real strict about that lately.”
“Is that right?” Grebbel frowned. “He didn’t tell me that. Just said I should come over and look at the work—even gave me your name. You know the guy, don’t you—Larsen at the Greenhouse.”
“I’ve met him.” Now Lafayette’s expression was carefully bland. “Didn’t know he was involved in work assignments, though.”
“Actually, it wasn’t anything official. He just thought you might be able to help me. Something about you owing him a favour.”
“Said that, did he? I don’t suppose he said what kind of favour?”
“It’s not the sort of thing we’d talk about in public, is it? I suppose I owe him the same. That’s really what I came to talk about.”
“You need help making the pieces stay fitted together, is that it, eh? Sure, I can help you keep your feet on the ground if that’s what you really want.”
“I was thinking we might be able to help each other. If you’re interested in more than chopping vegetables, maybe we can arrange to talk someplace where we won’t be disturbing everyone.”
So the first step was taken, Grebbel thought, and it could have been much less promising. Larsen had obviously been very ambitious and very busy when he started his reclamations. Grebbel decided he could begin by ignoring all those with irrelevant backgrounds—the irredeemable kleptomaniac, the two child abusers, the wife-poisoner—and most of the women. He would still have the makings of a reasonable core of helpers if those he approached were as sympathetic as Lafayette seemed likely to be. He considered his next moves.
He wasn’t sure if there were female sumo wrestlers, but if there were, Karina Fujiwara looked as though she could have been one. He found her in the vehicle maintenance shop, up to her elbows in transformer fluid. She heard him out quietly, without shifting attention from her work. He couldn’t read anything from her manner or her expression while he talked, but finally she nodded.
“You talk some more,” she muttered. “I listen. Then we see.”
In one of the workshops behind Hut Seven, Kurt Winter was using finely powdered rouge to grind the blank for an astronomical telescope. “It’s a bit more than a hobby with the boss,” he told Grebbel, “and a bit less than top priority. No question, though, we could use a mirror this size, in a permanent mounting. We’ve got a site marked out for the dome, and we hope to start building this summer.” He explained how he had helped modify the spare furnace and adjust the composition of the charge to cast good blank discs. He pretended to glance over his shoulder and winked. “I learned this back there. I think the boss guesses I’ve got more old circuits working than I used to have, but she says nothing, I say nothing, the work goes on.”
“You like being a glorified window cleaner?”
“Hey, when I was a kid, this was my dream. To build a real telescope. Like Newton, you know, like Galileo. Only I grow up and find they do everything by robot, unless you got three doctorates in engineering and a computer degree. Anything else, it’s just a toy. You wait for a power cut to take the streetlights away, and no cloud, and then you can see the power sats, if you’re lucky, through the photo-smog. And even the secretaries down the road, they all close their blinds before they get ready for bed. . . . Here, what I make is real. Even with the orbiters, even through this deep an atmosphere, there’s enough here for everyone. We’ll be doing real measurements with this one, a year from now, if she silvers right. That’s always the tricky part, getting the surface down good with what we’ve got to work with.” He seemed to be relishing the challenge.
“So all you were back there is behind you now.”
“Back there, I was someone who wanted to make telescopes. What else I was isn’t important, it isn’t real any more. It’s gone. Done with.”
“Say it often enough and maybe you’ll believe it,” Grebbel snapped, and immediately knew he had gone too far.
Winter peered intently at his mirror. “I’d imagine we’d both have more important things to be doing than talking about what’s best left alone. I can tell you I have.”
“Then I’ll let you get on with it.” Grebbel turned and walked out into the sunlight.
After Kurt Winter, he found Hendriks, Shelling, Abercrombie, DeWitt. Enough for the time being. He resisted the urge to cast his net wider and increase the risk of being discovered. He felt vibrant, confident in his decisions, so that where they led was almost irrelevant. If he had believed in such things, he would have said he had found the path to his destiny.
He met Partridge and delivered a package.
“Manna from heaven,” whispered the astronaut. “Ah, you’ve got a good heart in you, mate. The nights have been pretty rocky recently, I don’t mind telling you. And what do you want from the wind’s whispers for next time?”
“I’m curious about weapons,” Grebbel said.
Elinda watched the clouds blowing across the mountain peaks as she walked, snow and cloud mixed against the deep purple sky. She was haunted by unformed memories of liver-coloured skies and dark, greasy water. On days like this, when the memories seemed ready to congeal into reality, angular rhythms would sound in her head, like the outline of something from another room heard faintly in the night.
She knocked at Grebbel’s door and went in.
There was excitement in his manner when he saw her. “Surprise, surprise,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Where else?” she asked. “You haven’t been around anywhere else I’ve looked.”
He seemed uncomfortable for a moment. “I’ve been busy. Making plans. I’ve . . .” He shook his head and stared at her. “What’s been happening to you? You’re looking exhausted.”
“I’ve been planning, too,” she said. “Or trying to. Hard work, this planning, isn’t it?” She stifled what felt like the start of a hysterical giggle. “I think I need some help. Because I’ve gone so far now, I can’t give it up.” She tried to unknot her fists. Her arms were trembling as though she had been up to her elbows in icy water. Now he was closer to her than he had been for days, and there was a restlessness in his eyes, an animal intensity that suggested to her a predator turned prey.
“It’s in you too, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s fear—the fear you feel when you know you’re going to walk through the graveyard at night, and you could back out, but you won’t because you’ve committed yourself and something in you would break and die if yo
u changed your mind.”
He looked at her steadily and nodded. “Break and die. Yes.” He had moved close to her. The corner of his mouth twitched, but his eyes still stared. He swallowed and seemed about to reach for her, and she felt herself quiver like a drum. Then he closed his eyes and twisted away.
He sat down at the desk by the window and pulled a box toward him. “I tore up all the props they gave me, all the mementos of my so-called past life.” He gave a short, choking laugh. “I was wondering what I would replace them with, when you came in. . . . You’re right: I’ve been avoiding you.”
She sat down. Now she was cold all over. “Because of what you’ve remembered?”
He nodded, not looking at her.
“What is it,” she said hoarsely, then cleared her throat. “What have you remembered?”
“Lots of things,” he said, so softly she could barely hear him. “A white stuccoed house on a quiet street. The colour of the first car we owned. My father’s aftershave when he kissed me goodnight. The smell of gin that sometimes went with it. The pictures in the anatomy texts I used to sneak away and read—the nightmares they gave me. And the cat. Lots of things, from a normal childhood.”
She swallowed, and uttered the words calmly: “What else?”
Slowly he turned to look at her. His eyes were steady, watching for her reaction. His lips thinned in what might have been meant for a smile. “I was a doctor.”
TWELVE
She was compelled to listen.
He talked for a long time, in a quiet, controlled voice, describing what he had been and what he had done, giving details, all the time with his gaze fixed on her, hardly blinking. He was tense and still, making no gestures, hardly ever turning his head or looking away while he found the right words. The speech came out of him as if he were reading it from the air between them.