by John Park
“We need to know what happened. If a warning got out—”
“There are no guards. That’s enough. He did most of his job. Lafayette must be here too. He didn’t get as far as the control panel, so we’ll have to fake the talkdown ourselves.”
“If they got out a warning—”
“Then we all say sorry and go home. Now let’s get the comlink alive.” He stepped into the control room. “Let’s have the landing lights, but not all at once—and keep them erratic. Look as though we’ve got power problems.”
“They’re coming in on the receiver now,” Hammond called. “We’ve got a voice link. They want to know what’s wrong.”
“Circuitry problems. Don’t be too specific. It’s coming under control. Fake transmission breakup if you have to, but see they get that they’re cleared to land.”
Grebbel, Osmon and four others found ground-crew jackets and put them on over their coats and weapons. Grebbel picked up a personal transceiver and checked that the control room team were reading him. Then he followed the other five outside to wait for the landing.
Stars glittered icily in a patch of clear sky. In the dark at the head of the valley the red and green riding lights of the dirigible were clear now. Grebbel watched them hungrily, and flinched away as the nearest bank of field lights blazed in his eyes. A moment later they were dark again, leaving the world a pulsating black void. “Give us a countdown,” he called into the transceiver. “I can’t see anything from here through the lights.”
“Just over a klick yet. They sound a bit suspicious, but they’re still coming.”
“Deploy, everyone,” Grebbel muttered to his group. “Check your weapons.”
The aurora pulsed turquoise, silhouetting three skeins of cloud above the western range. The light dimmed to sea green, shifted to violet, and was lost against the sky.
“Two hundred metres.”
The Ingram seemed alive in Grebbel’s hand, growing light and then heavy, then light again. Around him, the others were shades, dim faces with flickers of eyes and teeth.
“They’re over the pylon. Deploying the hook now.”
“Okay,” he rasped. “I’ve got them.”
The dark, round cloud above them was swelling and starting to catch the light from the field. He could hear the motor whine beneath the throb of airscrews. Then the grapple on the pylon clacked home. The winch raced and began to pull. Now the airscrews were feathered, idling down to a steady flicker. He watched as the gondola beneath swayed and sank and halted, and found he had been holding his breath.
“They’re opening up. Let’s go.”
The six ran forward and were waiting as the yellow light from the cabin spilled down the extending stairs to the concrete. The first of the crew appeared in the doorway. Grebbel nodded to the others to hold back and started up the steps.
The man in the doorway had not moved. “Hold it right there,” he shouted. “I don’t know you. What the hell’s going on here?”
Grebbel kept climbing. “Security check,” he snapped. “Blue triple-zeta. Flash just came over the satellite link. You should have picked it up. Explosives in the hold. The crew goes down for clearance while we check the cargo.”
“Now you just hold it. Nobody said anything to me about this.” The man turned towards the cabin. “Hey, Rolf, you got anything about a blue triple-zeta?” He turned back to Grebbel. “You got a flash from the satlink? Your whole comset was down—”
Grebbel took the last rungs in a stride and clubbed the man twice with the barrel of the Ingram, then kicked the body off the loading platform. The other five started up the steps behind him. From inside, someone called out, “What’s going on down there?”
“Upstairs,” Grebbel snapped, and burst into the entrance, then up clanging steps to the control room. A pistol cracked twice as he threw the door open. The second shot whipped past his head, and he fired a short burst. It knocked someone down and shocked the air with echoes. Grebbel saw that he’d let himself fire within thirty degrees of the gasbag. Two crewmen froze in their seat, their faces as blank as those of the dead.
Smoke was still eddying up into the air-conditioning vents when Osmon and the others pushed in after him.
Grebbel motioned Carl Davis to the controls. “Set things up and we’ll get the others aboard.”
The man he had shot moaned and tried sit up. Grebbel stared, then went and lifted his head by the hair. “Well, well,” he rasped. “An unexpected bonus. Martin, old friend, old colleague. After all these years. How has life been treating you, eh?” He jabbed with the gun muzzle. “Eh?”
“Grebbel? Is that you?” The man gasped and shook his head. “It’s over, all that. I’m not what I was.”
“Now there’s a funny thing,” said Grebbel. “Neither am I.”
Davis called from the pilot’s seat, “I can’t load the aerodynamics program. And our IFF signal’s dead; we can’t answer challenges.”
Martin nodded weakly. “We had just enough warning. You’d better quit now, before you make things worse for yourselves.”
“We’ll fly this thing on our own if we have to.”
“Where are you going to go? Not back to the Flats without the IFF unless you’re bent on suicide.”
“Then you’d better tell us how to switch it on again, hadn’t you.” He pushed with the gun muzzle, and twisted.
Martin groaned and tried to double up. The blood left his face and he gasped chokingly. Then he lifted his head. “It’s over,” he whispered. “Can’t you understand? There’s nowhere for you to go. Give it up now.”
“Sorry, that’s not what I want to know. Osmon, I’m going to be busy the next few minutes. Do you think you can persuade my old friend here to tell us what we need to know?”
“Oh yes, I think so.”
“Do it yourself, Grebbel!” Martin cried. “Do your own dirty work. You always did before.”
Turning away, Grebbel stopped, and seemed about to reply. Instead he lifted his transceiver and spoke quietly into it. “Let’s refuel and get everyone aboard.”
Osmon put down his pistol and went to crouch over the wounded man.
Dying wasn’t the worst, Larsen thought; it was the pain that destroyed. Pain stripped one bare of humanity, left one grunting and howling like an animal. But even worse than pain was the fear of it. It was fear that humiliated, destroyed one’s own worth. It was fear that crippled the will and paralysed the flesh. That was why he was on the floor now, curled up like a foetus—unable to move or make a sound, hardly to breathe, for fear that he would wake the pain once more and it would blast him.
So it had all been failure, and now he could not even move to undo some of the harm. The computer link was there above him, on the desk. If he risked turning his head a couple of centimetres he would see it. But that would bring the first stirrings of the pain, and for what? To reach for the link, to pull himself up and set his fingers working on its keys, he would have to scale ridge after vertiginous ridge of agony.
That was how it was when you were led by conscience, but ruled by fear and pain. One passion unopposed would shape a life. But to fight fear one needed something as strong. Love? He had neither loved nor hated. In an earlier age, he might have found a god he could have served, and poured his fear and his need into that service until it turned to love. But his times valued knowledge over conviction, and he had acquired knowledge of what was right, without the inner certainty. Now even his knowledge was tainted. And all his pretences at love had been mere callous, squirming betrayals by the flesh.
Here was the final betrayal, as the flesh pinned him helpless even while the life oozed out of it. One betrayal following another. From the parish school and the children, to the university, to the trial, to this place, with half his mind cut away . . .
Deliberately he was working up something to fight the pain, something that began to feel like rage.
Rage then. If not love, then at the end of it all, hate. Something to fight the fe
ar, something as strong as pain. His head turned, and the rent in his flesh seared, but his eyes had found the edge of the desk and the terminal, and they gave him a ledge to cling to. Now. Now.
His breath rasped, and once more the flesh betrayed, his muscles would not move.
Now. Damn you to hell. Now.
He was wrong. Nothing was stronger than pain.
The cry turned to a sob, and then to retching.
It was unbearable. It had to be borne.
It had to be—because now his elbows were on the desk, his fingers, shaken by spasms, were crawling across it and stabbing at keys.
Just five seconds. Three keys. One more breath. And it will all be over.
“Music is perhaps the highest of the arts, don’t you agree?” said Dr. Henry. “At its best, it can evoke illusive and heightened states such as no other medium can approach. And yet it is so much more immediate than most of them.”
Elinda said nothing. The room was full of a strange tangle of sounds whose fragmentary rhythms plucked at her nerves.
“This piece, for instance. I discovered it quite recently. It doesn’t have the exalted scale of the great works, but I think it showed promise. I get the feeling the composer was not quite reconciled to the medium. The sound is all synthetic of course, but notice how closely it’s made to resemble a small classical orchestra. Later, you’ll hear synthetic approximations of voices, too. It’s almost as though the composer would have preferred to write for chorus and orchestra, but knew no one would ever pay for such resources to perform an unknown work.”
“Is this supposed to mean something to me? Or are you just filling in time?”
“I’m talking about potential, creative potential—or just simple, human normality and the prices it can exact. What you’re hearing is the best—as far as I know—and probably the final work of a composer who might have gone on to become famous.”
“Is this some kind of guessing game? Am I supposed to know what this mean?”
“Actually, we could make it a guessing game. For instance: why is this the composer’s last work? No idea? How about a clue? Is she happier being unable to compose or not?”
She stared at him. “It’s someone here, isn’t it? One of your— Someone here, now.”
“Would you like to try the next question? Yes, of course you would. The name. Think carefully while you listen.”
She shook her head angrily. “Fuck you and your games. Get on with whatever you’re doing.”
“I am getting on with it, please believe me. Another clue, then. But not too big a clue, because now you have to think it out for yourself. She had a child, one child.”
“God damn you, stop this.”
“Can you think of a name now?”
“It’s Barbara, isn’t it? Barbara, after what you did to her. I don’t know—how dare you—”
“That’s an interesting response. Let’s change direction for a while.”
“Fuck you! I’m here because of Barbara—we’ll talk about her! Was she onto you for the amnesia fakery or for what you did to Erika Frank? It doesn’t matter does it? She was, what, trying to set a trap, trying to follow a lead, and you got her first? Was it here? You drugged her, hypnotised her, and when you’d finished whatever you did to her, you found her recorder and erased the evidence, you dressed her up again and sent her out into the mountains.”
“Yes. Her and one or two others. A moment ago I was talking about prices. In my case, that means the price of maintaining normality, a functioning personality—means satisfying certain needs that periodically arise. When I am sane and in control, I am much as you see me now. I am calm and rational. I am also a good psychologist and a good administrator—in all modesty, I am of value to this society. But periodically, as I say, the need arises in me, and it rapidly becomes obsessive if unsatisfied. And then there is only one way to restore equilibrium. You understand what I mean.”
“No, I don’t understand! All right. Question and answer. Did some of the criminally insane come through the Knot?”
“I think you know they did.”
“All right. Then how many? How many are there?”
“You’re sure you want me to tell you?”
“How many?”
“About thirty percent, of course.”
“What do you mean? The Knot—”
“The Knot does practically nothing to the human mind.”
“Then what happens, the memory loss . . .”
“. . . is done on the other side, before the criminal leaves. Theirs is the simpler task. They just delete memories, wipe away areas of the psyche, sketch an outline of the replacement. Here we develop and integrate the new personality.
“This place is an experiment. You’re an experiment, I’m an experiment. Your friend the technician is particularly an experiment. We’re rehabilitating the psychically damaged. Recovering good from evil. But, of course, there mustn’t be any way to go back and find out that you really lived on a houseboat on a canal. Secrecy. And secrecy about secrecy, because if hints get out that something is being hidden, the whole starts to unravel. . . . So not everyone can know. Here or back there. And among those who know—here or there—not everyone approves.”
He stood up and began loosening his shoulders, flexing his fingers. “Of course secrecy also serves some of my own interests.”
She groped for something to keep him talking, to delay what was coming. “And Carlo?” she asked.
“A well-meaning simpleton. He knows just enough to keep his mouth shut.”
“Oh god, he’s covering for you, now.”
He shook his head, frowning as though she had questioned his professional judgement. “I don’t put my trust in simpletons.”
Even as her fear rose, Elinda felt one of the knots in her stomach loosen.
Henry put the heels of his hands together in front of his chest, and pressed until his arms quivered; he seemed unaware of the effort he was making.
“Security’s on our side naturally; she’d have to be. Here it’s not too bad in fact. People mostly either go along or understand they shouldn’t ask the wrong questions. Back there . . . well the wrong kind of publicity could be damaging to us.”
“But you, you’re just another of the monsters. You’ve said so. Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “Out here rather than safe in some gold-plated research complex back home?”
Henry got to his feet and began pacing back and forth with a pensive, withdrawn expression on his face.
“There were rumours,” he acknowledged. “A near-scandal, even, but no proof. I was offered a new appointment about as far away from my indiscretions as anyone could imagine. I do regret all this of course, but surely you see it is better to have a sane man in charge here than a ravening wolf—and the price, after all, is a life that would have contributed little to this or any other society.”
“What—what did you do to her?”
“Oh, I think you can imagine. Though you might be glad to know that my needs do not require inflicting much overt damage. . . .”
“To her mind! What did you do to her mind? One of your hypnotist’s games, was it, with your toys here to make it stick? So she walks into the woods and dies—with no overt damage. No one to accuse you, no corpse to dispose of, is that it? And the same with Erika Frank? My god, how many times have you done this? Sent someone crawling away to bury herself in the hillside like a dying animal? They must have known, the ones who sent you here, who set this place up. Were they still human back there, or had they plugged themselves so far in a datanet they didn’t need bodies and didn’t care about anyone who had a body? A field experiment—is that what we all are? Is that what I am to you, to them—a white rat to observe and play with and dispose of when you’re tired of? Tie off her tubes and see if we can turn her on to women? See if we can switch her back, make her fall? What else? Did you care what you ruined? And Barbara? What about her music? A life that wouldn’t have contributed, you said. What about the
music you’re playing now?”
He stopped pacing and gazed at her, his hands at his sides, fingers gripping and kneading the empty air.
“Oh, now, please think a little,” he said. “Even without seeing her past profile, do you really believe your Barbara would have written that, or wanted to—or had a child? You know better.”
“What? What are you saying?” She raised her hands to ward off something she could not yet see. “You’re trying to tell me—” Her throat tightened, her cheeks were wet. “No. You’re lying. You’re lying to me to get yourself off the hook.” She choked, forced the words out. “You want to destroy me too, to save yourself. You want me to believe that, that I—drowned, my, my . . .”
“Elinda, I haven’t said any of that. . . .” He was watching her with interest. “But it was a fine piece of music.”
“Damn you!” Now words were helpless against her despair. “Oh, damn you, god damn you to hell!”
“Yes, certainly. That goes without saying. But how do you judge me now?”
“Unfit to rot in the same ground as her!”
“Like you?”
“Yes! Like me!”
From the direction of the landing field, the wail of a siren rose into the night.
Grebbel came back and waved Osmon aside. He wrapped his fingers in Martin’s hair and jerked his head back. “Come on. I can’t hear you.”
Martin retched. His face was bloodless, his lips like bruises. He mumbled and Grebbel shook him again. This time his words were audible. “Why couldn’t you take what you had? It would have worked. No prison, no punishment? No suffering.”
“No suffering?” Grebbel swung his scarred fist in front of the man’s eyes. “You know what it meant to me. Look at this. Scars the length of my arm, so I’d remember. I’d have done more if I could. So don’t think I’ll turn back now. I want the IFF code.”
Martin flinched, then shook his head.
“This is what you asked me for,” Grebbel said. “Osmon, hold his arms.”