Karges had been a secret telepath who had saved President Robinson's life at the cost of his own. When Bester had been little, they had taught him that Psi Corps had been created by Robinson to honor that sacrifice. That wasn't true-the Corps had existed in essence, if not in name, for decades. It had never been one of the lies he liked-it suggested too much that only by sacrifice did telepaths prove they had the right to exist.
So good-bye, Grabber, and good riddance.
They had tried to shut Teeptown down, as they had the Corps, but it hadn't quite worked out. The scores of private academies that had sprung up to instruct young telepaths hadn't worked very well, just as he had predicted they wouldn't. Over the years, he had watched the Psionic Monitoring Commission gradually reimplement almost all of the old Corps institutions, though in darling new baby-doll clothes.
Once again Teeptown was a campus, a center of telepath life and activity. Many older teeps never left their quarters there-life among normals had proved too hard, too uncertain. And so Teeptown remained a ghetto. Again, as he had predicted. It gave him some small comfort, to be right. It gave him little, though, to know that this maximum security facility was his own creation. He had built it to hold telepaths- and so it did. War criminals.
He heard footsteps in the corridor.
"Good morning, James," he said.
"Morning Mr. Bester," James said, in his faintly mocking tone.
"How're the memoirs coming?"
Bester glanced over at the simple AI on his bed.
"Pretty well," he said.
"I have some news for you."
"Oh?"
"Olean passed last night."
Bester absorbed that silently for a moment.
"How did he manage to kill himself?" he said at last.
"It was pretty clever, but I can't tell you, of course. You might imitate him."
"I'm not going to kill myself. I won't give you the satisfaction."
James, the jailer, shook his head.
"I get no satisfaction from it. I think you know that."
"The world, then. They'd love it. It's what they want. Life sentence-absurd. I was sentenced to death, death by suicide. I just refuse to carry out the sentence."
James hesitated.
"You may be right, there. But you condemned thousands of teeps to the same fate-you made them take sleepers."
"I never did that and you know it. I enforced the law, I didn't write it."
"You understand me, then, why I have to give you this."
He indicated a small gun-shaped device at his belt.
"Skip it this week. Just once."
"I can't."
"Just once. You know I can't escape. I just want to feel again."
"So did Olean, and Brewster, and Tuan."
"Once. One week."
James shook his head.
"If it were up to me..."
"It is up to you," Bester said, gritting his teeth.
"Be a good boy and take your medicine, Mr. Bester."
And so he did, stood still while the needle pricked his arm and the sleepers went in, as they had for ten years now. He barely felt the stupid feeling spread. He had never had the extreme reaction to the sleepers that some did - the listlessness, the deeply drugged feeling. No, they left his mind pretty much intact, so he could be acutely aware of how crippled he was.
James left, and Bester fought the gloom by working on his memoirs. He was nearly done with them, had been nearly done with them for years. He just kept fiddling. He liked to fiddle with his history-it was the only thing he still had control of, his version of things. Let the historians wrangle endlessly about what was true and what wasn't. He knew, and they didn't, and it was the only power he still had.
Well, that and the power of his predictions, of his insights. Those would validate him, one day.
* * *
Two days later, a week from Birthday, he got an early present. The vidcom on the ceiling came on, unannounced. It did that rather rarely-he could request programming and sometimes get it, but it usually took awhile. When it came on of its own accord, it usually meant bad news, some new announcement from the prison director.
This time, however, as he watched and listened, a ghost of his old smile returned to his face. The smile broadened when he understood that most everyone else in the world was starting to weep, or denying reality, or cursing softly. They would look back on this day and everyone would remember where they were, what they were doing. Garibaldi, for instance, probably was not taking it well.
Yes, they would all remember where they were when Sheridan died.
Of course, Bester would-how could he forget?
"Let me see," he imagined himself telling someone.
"That day I must have been-why, yes, I was in prison..."
Sheridan had been no friend of Bester's and he'd been a hypocrite besides. They said the best revenge was living well; it wasn't. It was much simpler than that. It was seeing your enemies die. Now if he could just outlive Garibaldi, then even this life would have a certain sweetness. He listened intently, in the hopes that Garibaldi had been involved and perhaps had died as well. No such luck. Ah, well, he would settle for Sheridan for the moment.
* * *
They were putting up a new statue where the Grabber had once stood. At first Bester thought they were clearing away the pedestal and its pitiful half-leg altogether, but they were just cleaning it off for a new occupant.
This interested him, as nothing had for some time. He entertained himself by speculating who it might be. Lyta? Byron? More likely Byron-he had been the martyr, the one who had acquired everyone's sympathies. Lyta had led them, too, but she had been frightening even to her allies. Still, it was she who had struck the real blows, wasn't it? Ultimately, Byron had been a coward.
A few days later he awoke to find a crowd gathered, and the statue in place, covered by a tarp. He put his face against the monomolecular glass, his heart working oddly in his chest. Oh, come now, he thought to himself, disgustedly. You don't really care that much.
But he did, somehow. The symbol that the slowly reforming Corps chose for itself would tell him much about its character, about its leaders. Would they choose the warrior queen, the mystic martyr-or perhaps even himself, a sort of dark reminder of what not to become?
He watched the crowd, wishing he could p 'hear them. He had heard that when a normal lost a sense-vision, for instance- their other senses sharpened, to take up the slack. Not so with telepathy. His other senses were only fading. Not that any normal sense could begin to replace his birthright.
Speeches began, but he couldn't hear them. The crowd applauded-he couldn't hear that, either.
He hit his call button. After a long delay, James answered.
"Yeah?"
"I wonder if I could get the audio for the ceremony outside."
"The dedication? Sure. Don't see as how that would hurt anything."
A moment later the sound cut in. The speaker was winding up
"...dark days, but they represented hope, created it, held it aloft like a candle. It was their memory that carried us all through to the liberation, their sacrifice that represents the best in us."
Bester nodded sullenly. He thought it had looked like two statues. Byron and Lyta, then.
"And so, all of you, it's my great honor to present our ancestors. Not in fact-for their only child, their great hope, vanished or was killed in the vicious raid on their hidden camp. But spiritually, and morally..."
The speaker paused.
"Those of us who grew up in the Corps were taught that the Corps was our mother, and our father. But if we must look to a common, spiritual mother and father, let us look to those who represented freedom, not oppression. Tolerance, not intolerance. Hope of liberty, not the despair of repression.
"My friends, my kith, my kin, I give you Matthew, Fiona, and Stephen Dexter."
The shroud came off. Time slipped for Bester, a weird plummet between heartbeats.
He sat in a tree, at the age of six, watching the stars, searching for the faces of his parents. Sometimes he could see a hint of them, of his mother's eyes, a suggestion of auburn hair, an echo of her voice.
He was older, on Mars. The oldest and most successful of all the rogues, Stephen Walters, lay crushed against a bulkhead, one leg bent under him in a very strange way, one arm missing at the elbow. He still had his mask on, but Bester had the distinct impression the eyes behind it were open.
I know you, Walters psied.
The hairs on the back of Bester's neck stood up.
I was in New Zealand, Bester replied.
I tracked you here.
No. Before that. I know you. Oh, God in heaven. It's my fault. Fiona, Matthew, forgive- It paralyzed Bester.
The sense of familiarity was like a drug. It wasn't pleasant, it was horrible, but he needed it somehow. Somehow-somehow it was a piece of him that was missing.
What are you talking about?
I know the feel of you. I saw you born - after all I had done, after all the blood on my hands, but they let me watch you come into the world, and you were so beautiful I cried. You were our hope, our dream...
My name is Alfred Bester.
We called you Stee, so you wouldn't be confused with me. They gave you my name, made me your godfather. Your mother, Fiona, how I loved her. Matthew, I loved him, too, but God... a terrible spasm of pain stopped him then, and almost stopped his heart. Bester felt it tremble.
It was me that lost you, Walters went on. I thought I could save them, but they knew they wouldn't make it. All they asked was for me to get you out, keep you free, and I failed them. Failed...
Matthew and Fiona Dexter were terrorists, Bester replied. They died when the bomb they were planting in a housing compound went off early. The bomb they set off killed my parents. Lies. He was getting weak. They fed you lies. You are Stephen Kevin Dexter.
No.
Walters cocked his head wearily, and then he reached up to Bester's face. With a trembling hand he pulled his breather up and off. In the gloom, his eyes were colorless, but Al knew they were blue. Bright blue, like the sky. A woman with dark red hair and changeable eyes, a black-tressed man, both all smiles. He knew them. Had always known them, but he hadn't seen their faces since the Grins had banished them. They were looking down at a baby in a crib, talking baby talk. And Bester could feel a love so strong-was it love? He had never felt anything just like it, because there was no hint of physical desire, no desperate need, just deep, abiding affection, and hope...
He was seeing through Walters' eyes, through the filter of Walters' heart. But then, horribly, another image superimposed itself. The same two people, but looking down at him, and he was the baby in the crib, and behind Mother and Father stood another man, a man with bright blue eyes, as bright as the sun...
They loved you. I loved you. I love you still. Psi Corps killed them and they tookyou away. I tried to find you...
Bester wasn't aware of fording the PPG. Suddenly it was there, in his left hand and in front of him. His hand clenched on it, and Walters' face turned bright green, uncomprehending.
Shut up.
His hand clenched again, another viridian flare.
Shut up.
The mind images were dropping away, but not fast enough. He tried to shoot again, but the charge was gone. He tried and tried, squeezing the contact, throttling the lying glyphs in his brain.
Fiona... Matthew... Walters was still there, pulling the images about him in a blazing cloak. His eyes were still there, too, resigned, full of gentle reprimand. He stood near a gate, the doors of which were just beginning to crack open.
You can't destroy the truth.
And he was gone, and finally the images shredded, a thousand visions of his parents, dancing, fighting, embracing, holding him...
No!
He took it all in his fist and he squeezed until it went away. His fist had never opened again. Never.
He shook his head, becoming aware of his cell again. There they were below-the man and woman he had never known, save in dreams, and visions, and from the mind of a dying man. Matthew and Fiona Dexter, the mother and father in bronze. And in their arms, the lovingly held bundle...
Of course it was true. Of course he had always known it. It felt like a cough, at first, so long had it been since he laughed.
He hacked up another, and had to sit back on his bunk. James must have thought he was dying, because he showed up a few minutes later, looking worried.
"Bester?"
"It's nothing," Bester managed, waving him away.
"Just the universe. Don't believe anyone when they tell you irony is just a literary convention, James. It's a universal constant, like the coefficient of gravity."
"What are you talking about?"
But Bester shook his head. Another thing that only he knew. No one else on Earth or in the stars knew what had happened to that baby, immortalized in bronze. That the symbol of hope for the brave new world was none other than the most hated criminal of the old.
Maybe there was hope for them, after all.
Still smiling, he lay down on his bunk, trying to frame what to do about it. Would that go in his memoirs? Maybe, but it might be better, more delicious, to never let them know, to never tell anyone.
For now he was tired. He would think about it in the morning. He sighed and closed his eyes, and felt an odd softness in his arm, his left arm. A sort of warmth. And movement, like something unfolding. And he dreamed-maybe it was dream - that his left hand opened like the petals of a flower, and the fingers wriggled, and he laughed in muted delight.
When James found him the next day, it was the first thing he noticed, the hand. Palm up, fingers only lightly curled, free of the fist that had trapped them for so long.
Bester was free, too, a faint weird smile on his lips, his face looking somehow younger. He really did look like he was just sleeping.
Epilogue
Girard wondered again what, exactly, had brought him to the graveyard. It was raining lightly, not a nice day even if you were somewhere pleasant, somewhere that didn't remind you that you were shuffling ever faster toward the off - ramp of the mortal coil.
He looked out over the garden of marble headstones and shrugged. Well, he had been in the neighborhood, and he rarely got to Geneva. That he should be here when his most famous case died - it seemed, somehow, that he was fated to watch them put Bester in the ground. And he didn't like to argue with fate too much.
Few others seemed to have felt so compelled. Some thirty people accompanied the body to the graveside, but of those, most were clearly with the press, come for photographic Grendel - heads to assure the world that the monster was dead at last. There were four or five people who might have been family members of Bester's victims, here to find that assurance in person. Another four or five simply looked curious. The only weeping was from the sky.
No one had come to mourn Bester, only to bury him.
There was graveside service. After the press had been run off, a man in EA uniform checked the coffin. Girard saw him lift the lid, nod, and speak briefly into a recorder. The lid came back down, four men in prison uniforms put the box in the hole, a fifth in an earthmover covered it over, and that was that.
He had half expected that woman to show up-what had her name been? Louise?
She had looked Girard up, years later, to ask him what he knew about her role in things. He had thought she would eventually talk to Bester himself, but maybe that hadn't been allowed. Surely she knew - his death had made the news everywhere, and even now the sordid details of his life were being rehashed on the networks. But no. The men did their work in almost eerie silence. No words, gentle or harsh, were spoken. No benediction, no blame. He almost felt as if he should say something himself. But he didn't. Girard watched until the men left. He wasn't in any hurry. His wife was shopping, and he had nothing to do for several hours. He stayed, thinking that surely, surely
someone else would come. He realized he was still waiting for the woman, Louise. After all, it was Bester's love for her that had gotten him caught...
Merde, but I'm a romantic! Girard thought. Yet here was the proof, love could be destroyed, cut out as if it had never been. And a man really could go to his grave ungrieved. It made him feel better about his own life, his own choices. Despite himself, Girard had people who loved him.
As he was finally walking away, some instinct made him look back. He had just passed into a small copse of trees, and a breeze mingled the scent of clay with the green scent of the leaves fluttering wetly around him. Life mingled with death. It was nearly dark, and at first he thought he had turned for nothing, for some ghost in his own brain.
But then his peripheral vision made out a shadow approaching the grave. As Girard watched it move into the open, it became more distinct. A man, not a woman. The man knelt by the fresh earth, staring at it for a long time. Then he lifted something -Girard couldn't make out what and put it on the grave. He got up and strode away without looking back.
Girard recognized him then, by his walk. Garibaldi.
He almost went after him, to say hello, if nothing else, but somehow felt it would be inappropriate. There had been something solemn, almost sacred about Garibaldi's movements, something inviolable.
Still, when Garibaldi was gone, Girard walked over to see what he had placed on the grave. When he saw it, he shook his head and chuckled softly. It was a wooden stake, pushed into the yellow clay as far as it would go.
"Amen," Girard whispered. And, "Peace."
Then he left the dead where they belonged. When he reached the street, he flipped his phone open and ordered flowers for his wife. As he walked to the hotel, he began humming to himself. The rain kept up, but it didn't bother him in the slightest. There were worse things in life than a little ram.
THE END.
Babylon 5 12 - Psi Corps 03 - Final Reckoning - The Fate Of Bester (Keyes, Gregory) Page 24