Janus

by John Park

  He had found a route to her deepest fears. That much was clear—she had been terrified. But also, when she tried now to understand where the fear came from, she found no focus for it, only grief and pride in something she could not identify, and inexplicable guilt.

  She recalled some of the illusory images he had conjured before her: waves like the sluggish ripples on stale brown water, and like the intertwining voices of the music that had accompanied it. . . . Why had she thought of that now? She was trying to distract herself when there were things she had to face. Like how she was going to be able to confront Dr. Henry if she did convict him in her own mind. Like what he had stirred up in her and how. Like what those amorphous images and sounds seemed to mean to her. Like guilt.

  And part of the answer was obvious, and she had been skirting it for hours. Somehow, Henry had been knocking on that walled-up room when her past was hidden, and the dry bones were stirring.

  Yes, she thought, that explained the terror. That explained the terror all right. She lay under the dark ceiling with her sweat soaking into the sheets and too exhausted to cry. Desperately, she tried to plan.

  FOURTEEN

  As he hurried to the clinic, Larsen was remembering. Not the snow, the mountains and the narrow waters that were the traditional emblems of his home, but the sights and sounds he had grown up among—the squalid rows of lime-washed huts, their roofs dripping icicles, mongrels fighting for scraps in the frozen slush between them. Here around him was the mythical country of his childhood, the vast depths of sky, the snow-peaked grandeur, and bedecked with glowing creatures from a dream.

  He almost paused to look around at the play of the aurora and the living lights among the trees. But that would just have been to torment himself with what might have been. The worm was in the apple, the snake was in the garden, and had always been, even before one of the children had named him, and he had gone to public trial. So now he hurried, head lowered and hands in pockets, driven more by the fear of failing his precarious ideals than by a rational concern that he might be watched. At the entrance, Sidney Tallis at the desk raised his eyes as Larsen went past, but said nothing. He was committed; if Tallis was Grebbel’s now, Larsen had put his head in the trap.

  In the corner of the analytical lab, he sat at the main terminal. Schneider was at a meeting of the safety committee. Osmon was off duty. If he came back, Larsen would say he had to do some groundwork for a batch of memory restorations, test out some new parameter values for the machine. He had rehearsed the speech in his head until he was almost sure he could make it sound convincing. Anyone else on staff who turned up could be given some doubletalk about his ongoing research project with Schneider into local mutations and zoonoses.

  He brought up the main directory and keyed in the password for the medical databases. As long as no one looked at the screen and asked how he had got access to that dataset . . . He pulled out the file he had created with the list of names and identification codes, their backgrounds and prognoses. He could print out a copy here, while he was sure the information was intact. No—there was too much risk of being interrupted. He spent two or three nerve-wracking minutes copying the file to the open medical bulletin board, and from there to the Settlement datanet, and then hiding his tracks.

  With the screen clear again, he went over his next steps. Print out the list and get a copy, or the file itself, into the hands of Security. The hard copy would be best; he wasn’t sure he could feed a dataset into the Security files without leaving a trail. But first he had to know whom he could trust.

  He switched off and stood up, wiping his palms on his thighs. From the doorway Tallis was eyeing him curiously.

  “Anything wrong?” Tallis asked. “Find something you didn’t expect?”

  “No—no. Maybe I’m coming down with something. Virus, it could be. They must mutate here the way they did back on Earth, I suppose. . . . I was just trying out some new parameters for the machine.”

  “You expect to be using it again soon, then?”

  “Yes, I don’t see why not. Do you?”

  “I’d be careful. Security’s tighter these days—and you can’t be sure of who your friends are.”

  “Yes,” Larsen said. “It’s bad when you cannot trust the ones you must work with. A society that’s built on trust can get along without most laws; without trust, all the law books in the world won’t save it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. People don’t like to think they’re being betrayed. They get nasty sometimes, very nasty.” Tallis eyed him coolly. “It’s not always safe at nights now. I’d be cautious about running unnecessary errands if I were you.”

  “I intend to be very careful,” Larsen said tightly. “Just a few pieces of business to finish off, just one or two, that’s all.” The words dried up in his throat.

  “Right. Be careful how you go, then.”

  “I shall. Very careful. Yes.”

  Grebbel awoke in the dark. With the blinds drawn, he put on the lights and examined his previous night’s work spread out on the table. There were two units in grey boxes, each small enough to fit in his hand. He checked for loose wires, then fitted the covers on the boxes. He picked up the box that had a round button on the top and walked across the room with it. He depressed the button twice quickly, then held it down with his thumb.

  After ten seconds he lifted his thumb. From the unit on the table came a faint click, and a spark leapt between two contacts. Grebbel nodded and folded the two boxes separately in bubble-wrap and wrapped them with his lunch.

  He left his room and walked out into the cold dark. Now he sensed that the net he had woven for himself was constricting. He thought of the sled leaping down the slope. The exhilaration came with the danger, when you were committed and could only hope to ride out what you had started. Then you were alive—then you knew what it was to be human. And at the end you could rip off the mask and feel the air icy clean on your face.

  Would they take him as the head of Security? He thought he could make a good enough case, even without the azoplas and the hostages. But that was down at the bottom of the slope, and the ride had hardly begun.

  Osmon met him beside the trucks.

  “How quickly can you be ready to move?” Grebbel asked.

  “You’ve decided, then?”

  “Yes.” The sled was just starting to slide. But every instant, the momentum grew. One more push, and there would be no going back, for any of them. “They’ll stumble on something of ours soon enough. We can’t sit back and wait for them. Some of the azoplas charges are made up, and I know the dirigible schedules. How soon?”

  “As soon as we can contact everyone, but—”

  “That’s good enough. Today, then.” He handed Osmon the wrapped unit with the spark contacts. “I’ll give you the detonator circuit back. I tested it with the trigger this morning. You did a good job. I’m afraid I’m too likely to be watched, so get Joe to install it with the charge.”

  Elinda woke haunted by the music Henry had played her; and when she walked to the Greenhouse the dark air quivered with sinister glissandos. Ominous chords, just above audibility grew like distant thunder. She had a sudden vision of a performance—the triple timpani, two players crouched over the skins, with the cellos sawing away, double basses giving out sporadic plucked notes like approaching gunfire, while the hoarse growl of the trombones began to rise towards fury, and, massed at the back, the horde of human voices was poised to erupt.

  I’m going mad, she thought. That bastard did something to my head with his trick drink. For that piece he had played, whatever it was, had been electronically synthesised—no timpani, or trombones, certainly no massed choirs. But it wouldn’t leave her head. The twin moonlight appeared to her as a sforzando diminished seventh on horns and trumpets, the pale snow fields were piccolo shrieks, the wooded and shimmering slopes were the burnished voices of cellos and violas slithering down from discord to discord.

  “Lovely morning,” said Chris w
hen she reached the office. “Halfway to sunrise and there’s hardly any frost on the window. Do you think winter’s over for this year?”

  “My god, I hope so.”

  “You see there’s a new report of the sea serpent? They picked the wrong hemisphere for the biologists. Schneider’ll be having fits if that thing’s real and nobody’s ready to play Ahab.”

  Somehow she was going to have to work while her head was swimming with last night’s chaos. Chris being sunny and talkative didn’t help. Nor did Larsen when he came in, late, silent and preoccupied. She wondered what he had learned to disturb him, but with Chris chirping away beside her, she had no way to ask.

  Chris tried to ask him about the codings for a promised batch of chick embryos, but Larsen was staring hard at his own terminal and couldn’t help. She shook off her inertia and helped Chris find what he wanted. Then she returned to her own tasks—reports to prepare, production data to evaluate—with her head full of sick tension and hallucinatory music.

  At the dam, Osmon wandered over to a group of men taking a lunch break from the shift in the turbine rooms. He sat down with them on a mound overlooking the river. Another man joined them, wearing a striped rugby shirt over a high-necked sweater and carrying a sports bag. Under the arc lights, the men exchanged sandwiches while they talked and gestured at the caverns on the far bank. When they packed up their belongings, it was not obvious if everyone had recovered his own property. The man with in the rugby shirt went across for the afternoon shift in the turbine rooms. He carried his bulky sports bag with him.

  Elinda worked into the afternoon and then got up and put her coat on.

  Grebbel was not at the dam site. Menzies, the foreman, gave her a sour look and said everything was getting disorganised; who knew which shift anyone was on nowadays?

  She walked to Grebbel’s building and found his door locked; there was no response when she hammered on it. She lowered her hands and forced herself to be calm. The clinic, then. He might be working there. He might still be prepared to help her.

  When she got to the entrance, the lights in the administrative offices were going out. The man at the desk was struggling to carry a large parcel into the room behind, and she slipped in without disturbing him. There was no sign of Grebbel. She paused at the end of the corridor where Barbara’s room was. She wondered what she could achieve by going in, and then wondered why she was looking for excuses not to. Approaching the door, she heard movement and turned the handle. The door was locked.

  She knocked, then called out and tried the handle again.

  “I’ve got the key,” Dr. Henry said behind her.

  He was breathing deeply. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said. “We can continue our recent discussions. In fact I’m quite anxious to do so.” His fingers clamped onto her upper arm. “I think we need a good old-fashioned heart-to-heart.”

  She was still holding onto the door handle, but he pulled her away. “Don’t make a fuss, please,” he muttered. “I’d prefer to avoid messy scenes, but there are still Security staff on duty, and they’d help me if I summoned them.”

  In her pocket she slipped the record switch. “What were you going to do to her?”

  “All in good time. This way, please.”

  “Where are we going? Is she all right? You can tell me that, can’t you? How is she now?”

  “A bit late in your concern, perhaps? Could it be a sign of a troubled conscience? She’s well enough for the time being. In here please.”

  They were in the instrument room. If he tries to lock the door, I’ll fight, she thought—go for the eyes and the balls. I’ll use Carlo’s gun and splatter his brains on the wall. But he guided her to an armchair beside the bench and sat facing her. He was between her and the door, but a visitor would see only the dedicated physician having an informal discussion with his patient.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Patience, my dear.” He seemed in control of himself now, but tense. “We have the whole night ahead of us.” Resting his chin on his fists, he regarded her thoughtfully. “I think we might start by hearing some more music.”

  Larsen had worked all day, without stopping for a meal. When the other two left, he locked the office door and returned to his terminal. He pulled out the sheets with the names and identifications of the possible conspirators, and worked his way into the files on the status of the workforce, to see if he could find any pattern of absences that might give a clue to what Grebbel planned and how many were involved.

  On the path from the caves, Grebbel stared toward the landing field. The children with their kites were led out and the gate in the fence was locked. He had seen the procedure often enough to recognise it even from this distance. Beside him, Lafayette and Mahmoud fingered their new machine pistols. “All is usual?” Lafayette asked.

  “Yes, so far. Now—we haven’t had time to go over it as well as I’d like—you understand what you have to do? The whole thing depends on your disabling the alarms in the control tower—making sure no one sounds a warning until we’re established.”

  “What is to understand?” muttered Mahmoud. “We make exercise of our skills, we are quiet. We save these”—he gestured with the gun—“for when it is hopeless. These are old rules for an old game.”

  “Then all you have to worry about,” said Grebbel, “is getting in there without raising any suspicions. Come on, let’s go. I’ve got to meet the others.”

  Niels Larsen looked at the pattern emerging on the monitor screen and knew he was too late. The sheets of paper with the names were at his elbow, but the important ones named there were already acting. Several, in office jobs, had reported sick, others were currently untraceable; and there was no response when he tried to test the alarm circuits at the armoury. So he had to assume they had weapons. There was no way now that he could act in time to prevent anything without revealing himself—and he didn’t even know where they would strike.

  He scrabbled at the keys, searching the databases for clues. If he knew where they were, perhaps he would be able to fake an alarm, a fire, anything to get the authorities involved. But sending unprepared firefighters into the middle of an armed attack would be murder. . . .

  Behind him, the locked door thumped, then splintered and sprang open.

  “Working late here, too?” asked Sidney Tallis. “I’ve seen you do that a lot lately. I don’t think it’s good for your health.”

  Larsen tried to bluster, but the words died in his throat. Tallis came and stood over him. He produced a large, pointed knife and flipped the papers at Larsen’s side with it. “You shouldn’t have done that,” Tallis said. He peered quickly through the window towards the landing field. “You’re too late now, unless the sirens start in the next two minutes, and I don’t think you’d got that far, had you? Had you?”

  Larsen shook his head, clinging to any shameful hope that he might yet survive this.

  “But you shouldn’t have done that to us. If I didn’t have to hurry, I’d take some time to convince you of that. As it is . . .”

  “Tallis—it’s me. I brought you back. I did. Don’t use the knife. Don’t—”

  Oh Jesus Christ—if you exist, return and forgive me—

  Jon Grebbel was crouched in the dark beside the wire fence that bounded the landing field. He felt the safety catch on the Ingram machine pistol, and contemplated the level of commitment represented by one motion of a finger. Inside his coat was the trigger switch to the explosives, which might prove more important if they ran into difficulties. Osmon and the others were beside him, below the line of sight of the main windows, and half hidden by the undergrowth. The sky was a great cave of black and silver, and without the perimeter lights, the landing field was mystery of shadows. The moons were setting into a bank of clouds. Until the perimeter lights came on, they were safe from the control tower: anything on the ground in this direction would be lost against the dark of the valley wall. He glanced up at the nearest light mounted above the fence
not fifteen metres from where he waited. If the power went on now, the field would seem incandescent. They would be spotted before they got ten metres. He wiped his hand on his thigh.

  “What’s happening in there?” one of the men whispered. “If they’ve killed the lights, why don’t they signal?”

  “Quiet,” Grebbel rasped. “Keep listening.”

  There was wind, stirring branches on the step hill slopes. There was the rush of the river, the cry of a raptor—a brief flutter of wings. Something else. Grebbel tensed. The beat of airscrews.

  “It’s coming.”

  “Two minutes early.”

  “Shit.”

  “I’ve got its lights. Just below the skyline. Following the beam.”

  “Right. That’s it,” Grebbel said. “The field should have been lit by now, so I’m assuming the power’s been taken care of, and we’re going in. You all hear that? Into position when I move, then go when the fence is cut.”

  He crouched and ran to the fence. Beside him, Osmon bent and sheared the lower half of the wire, and they ran through. They thudded across the cleared field, the control tower bulked low ahead of them. Beside it, the beacon rotating on the landing pylon splashed red light across its slab walls and empty windows.

  “Move it! If the building’s dark, they won’t land.”

  Their boots clattered on the concrete apron, and then the door was swinging open and they were in.

  “Lights!” shouted Grebbel. “Lights first—then get in position.”

  Joe Abercrombie opened the circuit-breaker panel and started resetting the breakers. Lights flickered on in open doorways. In the entrance to the control room, Ahmed Mahmoud lay bleeding from the chest. A dead guard lay beside him clutching a long-bladed knife. Osmon crouched over Mahmoud and shook him by the shoulders, trying to ask what had happened. Grebbel pulled him away. “He’s too far gone. Let him be. Get into position.”