Janus

by John Park

  “She isn’t changing. I can hear her talking sometimes, but she’s still not there with me, she’s talking in her sleep, dreaming. . . . I should go and see her again.”

  Louise and Paulina exchanged looks, and Louise said, “Maybe you should worry about her less. You’re putting yourself under a lot of strain. It’s very good of you to be loyal, but if there’s nothing you can do—”

  “She’s not dead. She’s trapped in a dream. Maybe I can wake her. If not . . .” She fell silent, frowning.

  “What, Elinda?”

  “Maybe there’s a way to get into the dream with her.”

  A chain of creatures like great slow birds flew high across the twin moons. Each pair of wings glinted silver for an instant as it moved out of silhouette, then was lost against the sky.

  Jon Grebbel’s divided shadows strode ahead of him as he made his way to Hut Seven. Osmon was waiting when he arrived, and the others drifted in one by one: Lafayette, Shelling, Hendriks, even Karl Winter, having abandoned his telescope for the evening. They were all early, but Grebbel waited until the appointed time before starting to speak.

  “Thank you all for being punctual,” he began, “and for being patient until I was ready to start. I appreciate that sort of consideration. It shows good social adjustment, and I admire that. Patience, especially—and I know how patient you all are. It takes a particular strength of will, it takes real courage, to continue to live your lives, and know all the time you’re living a fake.” He paused briefly. They were watching him with guarded interest.

  “You’ve all been shown the truth about this place and the truths about yourselves. You all know how you came to be here. And you’ve managed to put that knowledge aside, to go on living as though it doesn’t exist. You’ve fitted yourselves to the clothes they hung on you. You’re model citizens now, well adjusted, patient, punctual—and I admire you for all that. You, Joe,” he said to Abercrombie, who had been leaning back on the crate he was sitting on and looking sceptical, “you’ve made a life for yourself here, haven’t you? You’ve put all that past behind you; you don’t get hankerings after things that are best forgotten. I think that’s admirable.”

  He paused and looked at them all. When it seemed that the questions would start coming, he went on. “Let me confess something. I’m not like you. I’m not cut out to be a model citizen. I’m not a man with the sort of patience you have. If someone insults me, I expect an apology. If they steal from me, I expect the money to be returned with interest; I expect them to be punished so that neither they nor anyone else would be encouraged to steal from me again. If someone injures me, I expect recompense, and I expect them to be deterred from ever injuring me again. I expect them to suffer as much as I suffered. What should I do then, when someone injures me by stealing my own past, my own self, by prying into my brain, my mind, and wiping away the years of my life? If I were like you, if I were a patient man, perhaps I would be content, as you are, and do nothing. As you do.”

  There were stirrings now, shufflings; someone coughed and muttered.

  “You had reputations, all of you. People knew your names. Some of them shivered when they spoke them. You had weight among them, you reminded them that life was not to be taken for granted. And now you’d show them how much patience a human being can possess—except that you can’t show them anything, or you’d stop being the model citizens you’re all so content to be.

  “Or are you? Are you so content? After all, you’re here. You came when I asked, and you could all guess what I wanted to talk about. And you all came here patiently and on time.”

  “We’re stuck here at the arse-end of creation,” Abercrombie called out, “with an armed militia breathing over our shoulders. What do you expect us to do? Storm the U.N. garrison from here?”

  “I’m going to do something. You don’t need to know what just yet. I fully expect to get what I ask without using force. But if I’m wrong, and they turn on us, and force becomes necessary—in self-defence—the militia won’t be the only ones with weapons.”

  “You’re asking us to risk our necks without even telling us what you’ve got in mind.”

  “I’m asking nothing yet. I’m giving every one of you the chance to be what you want to be, not what they tried to make you. If you want in, we take it from there. If you don’t, the less you know the better.”

  Karl Winter stood up. “I think I understand you well enough. This is not my idea of the way to a better life. I’ll leave now. As long as no one is hurt, I will say nothing.”

  “Thank you for you honesty,” Grebbel said. When the door had closed, he paced for a moment, then turned to the others. “The rest of you will want time to think. Let me point out something, though. This colony is important to them. They’ve poured money and time and effort into it, more money than any of us can imagine. They’re not going to give it up easily. And the fact that we’re at the arse-end of creation here, as you put it, cuts both ways. No, we can’t take over the Rio Council, but what sort of police action can they mount from back there—particularly if we don’t force their hand until we’re secure here? The militia aren’t invincible. I know the type of men they are; they can be broken. And remember there are a lot of other colonists here. There’s a name for people like that. They’ve been called adventurers or explorers, the builders of a new civilisation; they’ve been called misfits and escapees. But I’ve got a simpler name. I call them hostages.”

  He looked at them. “Now, if you’re not interested in any more of this, you’re free to leave. But if you’re with me, we can start getting down to business. . . .”

  When the group had left, Grebbel closed his eyes and sighed, then saw that Osmon had remained and was watching him. “Yes? You enjoyed the performance, did you? You’d like an encore?”

  “I know one doesn’t detract from a historic performance by adding frills to it,” Osmon said softly. “I was just waiting to close up the hut.”

  “Oh,” said Grebbel bitterly. “A devotee, a fan.”

  “I don’t think I understand you. I was impressed. I would think you’d be well satisfied with the way things went.”

  “Understand me?” Grebbel muttered. “I don’t understand myself any more. What the fuck are we doing here—?” He turned to Osmon, who had not moved. “Well, don’t let me keep you from locking up.”

  “Of course. You’ve set things in motion now; there will be changes.”

  “Like the kids’ slide, or the sled,” he muttered, “when you feel the thing starting to move.” And you hear the ice under the runners and you know it’s already too late—you won’t be able to stop it, and the hill curves away, you can’t see where the run ends, and the fear is part of the excitement, the fear of the dark under the trees at the bottom of the slope, at the foot of the stairs, the mewling sounds, the room—

  “For god’s sake, stop staring at me and do your work.” Grebbel turned and left.

  Partridge shifted uneasily under Grebbel’s gaze. “There’s a crate of assault weapons I know about, and five thousand rounds. More than this group of boy scouts could shoot off before their pensions run dry. You think you want some of that?”

  “About a dozen weapons right now, with at least thirty rounds each. If we can get that much out without it being missed straight away, so much the better. But I’ll want more later, maybe at short notice. I know where we can store things now, and I expect more recruits. When we’re ready to go, we’ll take every weapon and every round of ammunition we can get.”

  “Christ on a crutch. You’re dreaming. You been sampling too much of the stuff you’re getting me?”

  “Let me worry about my dreams.”

  “You’ll get caught, Sonny, if you don’t keep it small and slow. Whatever you’re planning, you’ll blow it into the wind if you can’t keep it quiet. And if you go down, I know where that’ll leave me—”

  “Don’t worry. They may start to suspect something, but we won’t get caught, because we’ll move fa
st, before they’re ready.”

  The dreams were no longer waking him, though they still left him with memories of going down—of being compelled downwards—into a darkened space where something crawled and waited. The thing to do was to keep everything focussed on the main goal, keep so busy the mind had no time to wander. And there were more urgent problems than his secret night fears. . . .

  He looked up from the map he had spread under the light. “We’ll have to move on two fronts. That means synchronised operations, and without the chance for a rehearsal. The main thrust will be at the landing field, because we’ll need a blimp. The secondary operation will be within the settlement. Tallis, I want you to be ready to lock up the communications network if necessary.” He turned so that he could meet all their eyes. “Is everything clear so far?”

  “Where: that is clear, yes.” Werner Schuhman the former aerospace engineer. “But I do not understand the how or the why, and certainly not the when.”

  “You don’t know when, because I haven’t told you.” He drew a short flutter of laughter. Encouraged that they were keyed up enough, and on his side enough, to respond to a comment like that, he went on. “Nothing is settled yet, and certainly not the timing. That depends on a lot of things, including the schedules for the blimps. I’ll give you more details as plans become clearer. You’ll get enough warning, don’t worry. As to how—I’ll answer this, since you’ve asked it—how is easy, up to a point. We take the landing field, and a dirigible, and we start detonating explosives here and there until they give us what we ask for. I have some more ideas about how we do that, but I’ll save them for a surprise later. And as for why—if you don’t know that, it’s not something I can explain in a couple of words. I’ll tell you what, though. Give me a hand clearing up at the end, and maybe I can show you something that’ll help.”

  As the others began to leave in ones and twos, Grebbel said to Schuhman, “We may have a use for that training of yours.”

  Schuhman waited, hands in pockets, shuffling from foot to foot.

  “I’ve been wondering about some of the satellites,” Grebbel said. “I think it would be a good idea to keep an eye on them.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. They do not change orbit. They are more reliable than any dirigible timetable.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. But we’d need a telescope. A good optical telescope.”

  “You mean Karl’s—Karl Winter’s. You’d have to talk to him about it.”

  “Come outside a minute, and I’ll show you what I had in mind.” They stepped out into the dark. Grebbel led way up through the trees until the lights were almost all hidden. “You’re a friend of Karl’s, aren’t you? It’s a pity he couldn’t have come in with us.”

  “I’ve helped him grind his mirror sometimes.”

  “So you’d know if it would be available for something like this in a few days.”

  “The silvering went much more quickly than he was hoping. But he’s very protective of it. I don’t think he would let anyone else use it.”

  “You have talked to him about that, then.”

  “We talk sometimes, when we grind the mirror, yes.”

  “And you’re not sure about what you’ve got yourself into here, are you?”

  “A few doubts—that’s only human, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Grebbel. He had positioned himself so that Schuhman was silhouetted against the moonlit clouds. He tensed himself and flexed his fingers. “It’s perfectly human. But very dangerous.”

  Grebbel lurched against a tree and stumbled into a patch of moonlight. His hands were dark and sticky. They looked like talons grafted onto his wrists.

  Water. He could hear a stream. A few seconds with running water and those hands would be his again. A few moments more and his heart would cease its hollow battering, his throat would ease, he would be able to breathe again. There was enough moonlight, but the world swam and blurred. The cold was making his eyes water, that was it, or sweat was running into them. It was important to explain these things, to keep a grip on reality, so there would be no doubt who he was and that he was still in command of his actions. Otherwise the mewling idiot that was trying to take control of his brain would come back, and they would have beaten him after all.

  The ground slipped from under him and he almost rolled into the stream. For a moment he wanted just to lie there. But that was the weakling too. He had to do something. To wash his hands, remove the evidence. The first, he thought suddenly, the first here.

  He plunged his hand into the water.

  The cold bit his flesh. He watched dark stains unravel into the current until his fingers gleamed through the ripples like ice. Crouched on the bank here, he could only reach one hand into the water at a time. It would have been easier if the bank were lower here, or there were stepping stones in the water. . . .

  The moonlight glittered into his mind from the scale-backed stream. Silver ropes and handfuls of coins tumbled and vanished and returned. Finally he pulled his hand out and stared at it. From each finger colourless liquid dripped. The flesh must be wrinkled and pulpy now, but the light wasn’t strong enough to show that. His mouth whispered, “. . . a long snow-slope, with a fence at the bottom, and Orion rising above it.” And a night breeze stirred the branches.

  He shivered and plunged the other hand, thrashed it about in the water, then pulled it out, and rubbed the two together. Clothes, shoes—he would have to do a proper inspection. Osmon must have done his job by now. It was just a matter of keeping them off his trail until he was ready to strike. They would find the bodies in a few days, and then the search would narrow. He would have to be ready to act before they closed in on him.

  Elinda met Carlo outside the clinic. “Come in,” he muttered. “We’ll be less conspicuous inside than out.” It was after hours and stars glinted among high clouds.

  “I’m not worried about being seen,” she said.

  “You may be, later. In any case, I am.”

  “You said you wanted to talk,” she said briskly as they went in. “That’s fine, because I need help in reaching Barbara, and it looks like you’re the only one who can provide it.”

  “You’re very cold. You’re not making it easy for me.”

  “I’m sorry, but I haven’t got a lot of spare sympathy any more. If you don’t want to talk, let me tell you what I’ve been thinking.”

  “I don’t know what we can do for Barbara that we haven’t already tried.”

  “Some time ago Dr. Henry was talking about your machine being like a surgical tool, a light-pipe. It took me a while to make the leap, but finally I got there: does it mean you could go into someone’s mind, that you could look around in it, and find out what was wrong and help them, even if they couldn’t talk to you?”

  He frowned. “Things like that have been tried. But it’s not easy, and no one’s proved there’ve been any real benefits. There are problems in matching two brains, maybe two minds, separating what looks like real communication from illusions created in the connection, or even one’s own submerged fantasies—the thing behaves more like a badly cracked mirror than like a window. I think I can guess why you’re interested, but I’m not going to encourage you. There are some real risks for the users, too—one or two psychoses have almost certainly been triggered by experiments like that.”

  “I’ll leave the clinical therapy to you; what I want is to find out what happened—that’s all I can do for her for now. And you’re saying this idea might work.”

  “You’re talking about leaping off a cliff that might be two metres high or twenty kilometres.” Carlo took a step away from her. “Supposing it does work, you manage to get into her mind, you do find something in there, and you both come back after the experience—how are you going to be able to trust it? We’re fishing in very muddy waters here, polluted as likely as not, and some of the things down there can bite.”

  “If it’s come from her mind, I can check it out afterwards.
”

  “It may not be that simple,” he said. “These machines—I’ve been trying to make you understand—they play with both your minds, you might stir up fantasies from your own subconscious—you might never make contact with her at all. Or, if you do make a link, god knows what sort of illusion the two of you could unknowingly produce.”

  “I understand that. It’s a risk I’m prepared—”

  “Let me finish this, please. Or I’ll never be able to say it. These machines—one of their functions, not their main function, is to impress illusions on a suitably prepared mind. These illusions can be quite abstract; the machine and the operator look into the subject’s mind and find images, sense-data that will make them real.”

  “You use the machine to create a fiction—an imaginary life.”

  “A legend, it might be called in some areas. But of course. there’s a major difference. The fiction is written into the subject’s mind, so it is no longer fiction as far as that subject is concerned: it becomes part of the mind. It can amount to a new personality.”

  She was staring at him. “You said—the other night you said you’d created me.”

  “My job here is to implement the instructions given me—to install past histories compatible with the required personality types I’m asked to shape. You were one of them. I was given a program to break you out of certain behaviour patterns. In some respects at least, I haven’t done very well. But still . . .” He hesitated. “I don’t know all of what you were before, but what you are now is in large measure a product of the machine and my own efforts.”