Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 169

by Neil Clarke

  “You’re probably right. But I really am rusty.”

  Caius nodded. “You had us worried,” he said. “Did you really need to pack up and leave without a word?”

  “I’m sorry.” Linus twirled spaghetti around his fork. “But once I’d made up my mind, I wasn’t in the mood to have a big debate about it.”

  “About what, exactly?” Caius pressed him. “I wouldn’t have thought it would be too hard to make your case. This place churned out more Fortune 500 CEOs in the last twenty years than Harvard. Who could turn down a chance like that?”

  “Not me.”

  “I’m just surprised it took so long for your hidden passion for the business world to reveal itself.”

  Linus said, “You’d rather I spent my life squinting into the searing light of your genius?”

  Caius laughed, but he was taken aback, less by the words themselves than his own uncertainty as to just how seriously he was meant to take them. “You could have done anything you liked. I know it’s been hard for Silus sometimes, because his interests are so close to mine. But if you’d become a writer, or an athlete, or any fucking thing short of stealing my thesis topic, neither of us would ever have had to feel like we were riding on the other’s coattails.” He shook his head irritably. “Anyway, can we drop the bullshit? I know you’re not here to polish your business acumen.”

  “No? Why, then?”

  Caius thought of trying Hungarian again, but he’d been told there was no need to censor himself. “You’re here because your benefactor wants to exploit what’s in your head.”

  “Really?” Linus feigned astonishment. “Exploit it how?”

  “I was hoping you’d clear that up, but my own tiny hive mind’s consensus is Physalia Mark Two.”

  Linus gestured at the crowd of diners around them. “Do you see anyone else from the boat here?”

  “It’s been sixteen years,” Caius replied. “I wouldn’t recognize them if I was staring right at them. Besides, they wouldn’t need to be physically close to you.”

  “So I’m in Paris myself because . . . ?”

  “I don’t know,” Caius admitted. “The only thing I know for sure is that you’ve never had the slightest interest in anything this place has to teach you.”

  Linus gazed at him with amused defiance, but didn’t contradict him. Finally he said, “Maybe I decided to acquire an interest.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I spent twenty-four years acquiring interests from the three of you. Maybe I decided to look elsewhere.”

  Caius said, “All right. But what exactly did Guinard offer you that made you want to look here, in particular?”

  “A career path,” Linus replied. “Better prospects than I’ve ever had in my life.”

  “And what does he get in return?”

  “Every scholarship holder reports back regularly on their progress. That’s all that’s expected from me.”

  Caius realized he’d been eating too quickly, risking indigestion. He slowed down, chewing his current mouthful thoroughly before swallowing.

  Marcel Guinard was ninety-four years old. Over the decades, he’d thrown money at every crackpot scheme for longevity that had held out its supplicant hands to him, and seen them all come to nothing. No doubt he was still clinging to the hope that an antifreeze cocktail and a liquid nitrogen bath could turn him into something more than Ötzi with a manicure—but he’d made a career out of hedging his bets.

  “You’re sharing memories?” Caius guessed. “With Guinard.”

  Linus remained silent.

  “You need to be discreet, because I’m wearing a wire?” Caius joked. “Or is the problem that you’re wearing one yourself?”

  “I told you, I’ve chosen a career,” Linus replied. “At long last. Isn’t that what you wanted? You should be happy for me.”

  So the course was not a sham, exactly: Linus would wake each morning with his mentor’s reflections on the previous day’s lessons to guide him. Guinard could have had his pick of conventional protégés, far better qualified and self-motivated, eager to hear his advice without any need for such intensive tutoring. But Linus’s value to him was as an empty vessel into which he could pour his accumulated wisdom—on the topics at hand, and much more.

  “Where does this end?” Caius asked. “You graduate at the top of all your classes, then Guinard’s company snaps you up. You rise and rise, the golden child, taking on ever more responsibility, proving yourself to be a steady hand. Until . . . what? People will finally believe that when he’s on his deathbed, he’s handing you the keys to the empire on your merits?”

  Linus said, “You make it sound as if there’s something wrong with me succeeding in my chosen profession.”

  “No, the problem is why you’ve chosen it.”

  Linus’s poker face cracked a little, but Caius wasn’t sure what was showing through. “What was I ever going to make of myself, without this? What could I ever have become? You chose the one thing we could all excel at, but then if anyone else tried to take the same path, they’d just end up having to fight you for space.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Caius protested. “And it still isn’t. You could still do anything you want.”

  “All I ever wanted was what you wanted,” Linus said bitterly. “I never had the power to want anything else.”

  Caius didn’t believe that, but it wasn’t the point anymore. “I’m not asking you to link up with us again. But how long did you wait between pulling the plug on us and letting Guinard into your head? What kind of chance did you give yourself to find a direction of your own?”

  Linus laughed softly. “You make it sound as if I’m a normal person, who could just step out from my family’s shadow and thrive. But you know I’m not like that: I’m a vine, not a tree. On my own, I’d just fall to the ground and die. So I’ve chosen a tree to support me, and to shape my path, instead of tying me up in a race I can’t win. This is what I want, because it’s the best I can do with what I am.”

  11

  Caius was too agitated to call his brothers immediately, so he set about finding a place to stay for the night. His phone offered him four choices, but none had a check-in time before three p.m., so he picked the one that would take that long to reach on foot.

  As he walked, his surroundings barely registered; he felt as if his head was ringing from the aftermath of an explosion. How had he not seen how Linus had seen him: as someone setting the agenda and then seizing it for himself? He’d understood how it had worked with Silus, but that had always felt like a friendly rivalry, in which, for all his vanity, the two of them were more or less evenly matched. And Rufus, though he’d been infused with the same obsessions, had found his own entirely separate way to pursue them.

  But Linus had had his swimming and his books; he had never seemed to have been jostling for space that the others had occupied. Because . . . what, he’d given up his claim on it so early? Caius’s memories of Linus’s days had seemed to be full of tranquility, not resentment. But maybe the link’s imperfectly transcribed version had missed an underlying sense of resignation. If he’d been squeezed out of the light for so long that he could barely imagine regaining it, his numb acceptance might have been mistaken for genuine contentment.

  Caius checked into the motel. He sat on the bed and made the call.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted, after tersely summarizing his conversation with Linus.

  “Guinard must have tracked down everyone from the boat,” Rufus said, “and sent investigators around the world to observe them. And out of all those people, he judged Linus to be the one most receptive to the notion that the brightest future he could have would require his own erasure.” His voice was unsteady with anger and shame. “So what does that say about the way we treated him?”

  Silus looked equally troubled, but he said nothing.

  Caius said, “I keep thinking we should go to the police—but has Guinard actually broken any
laws? Whatever he’s done to install his own link, he could have found a jurisdiction where it was legal for an adult. The fact that Linus has had his link since childhood isn’t Guinard’s fault, in any way that we can prove. And I don’t see how we could force either of them to admit that they’re connected at all, let alone confess to what the endgame is.”

  Rufus was contemptuous of this timidity. “So we stand by and let Guinard bury him?”

  “Have we buried each other?” Silus asked. “Do you think we’re all just clones of Caius by now?”

  “No,” Rufus replied. “But we seem to have squeezed enough life out of Linus, without even trying, that he’s ready to let someone else finish the job.”

  “We need to get him out of there,” Caius decided. “Get him away from that place, and keep him unplugged from Guinard until he’s had a chance to think things through for himself.”

  Silus was skeptical. “You think we’re commandos now?”

  “I’m up for it,” Rufus promised. “I’ll be there on the first flight I can get.”

  Caius addressed Silus. “I’m not talking about breaking into the dorm with knockout gas. We find an excuse to invite him off campus, then take him somewhere with no Internet access for a few days so he can come to his senses.”

  Silus said, “There is nowhere in Europe without Internet access.”

  “Then we put him in a Faraday cage.”

  Silus grimaced in disbelief. “Just listen to yourself! You want to kidnap your brother, drag him off to a cabin in the woods, and force him to wear a tinfoil hat?”

  Caius shared his dismay at the prospect of resorting to coercion, but he couldn’t see any other choice. “We can’t let him walk away from his life, leaving nothing but an empty space for someone else to stand in. If the old way left no room for him, and he’s convinced himself that he can’t survive alone, the only way to put things right is to show him that we can support him from the outside. We need to do whatever it takes to prove that, without getting back inside his head.”

  12

  As Linus walked along Rue de la Libération, glimpses of the woods behind the wall that lined the road kept evoking memories of Marcel’s youth. He’d got drunk here with some friends on a summer night, in 1976. Linus could see a woman’s face, and he felt a nostalgic affection welling up . . . but he pushed the image away irritably. Tonight he had to be entirely himself, if he was ever going to get his brothers off his back.

  Trudging around the long arc in the road, he could envisage the earnest entreaties ahead. It had been naïve of him to hope that talking to Caius alone would have settled anything; the others were never going to be content with remembering the conversation secondhand. They would need to see him in the flesh and hear the words straight from his mouth. Even the link hadn’t told them, clearly enough, exactly where he’d been headed; they’d just padded out his fading presence with their own ideas of him, and never really noticed how little of the original remained.

  It was dusk when he reached the motel. He lingered by the roadside, working up the courage to take the last few steps. He’d prepared a long speech earlier that he’d hoped would convey what needed to be said, but running through it in his head now it just felt clumsy.

  He walked across the parking lot and knocked on the door. Caius opened it, but the others were right behind him.

  In the face of a quadruple reunion, Linus couldn’t help himself. “Me and this army!” he proclaimed, in his most triumphant meerkat voice.

  Silus laughed, but no one else seemed to have retained their sense of humor. Rufus stepped forward and embraced him, so forcefully that Linus caught himself anticipating reliving the gesture from the other side. But that was never going to happen. The best he could guess was that it was meant as a message: an offering of strength in a common purpose. Linus thumped his back amiably in return, but they no longer shared a purpose.

  “I know this is hard,” he said, once they’d parted, turning to take in Silus as well. “But you have to accept it. I can’t go on as a spare wheel, and I can’t go on by myself. I know you think Guinard is exploiting me, but he’s the one who’ll be giving me a clear direction and then stepping out of my way.”

  Silus grew stony-faced. “If you can stand on your own feet once Guinard is dead, you can do it right now.”

  “How would you know?” Linus retorted. “Whatever goals we had, the three of you divided them up between yourselves a long time ago. Just because I clung on as your backup drive—”

  “We’re not a fucking computer network,” Silus interjected angrily. “That might have been what the cult wanted, but they didn’t succeed.”

  “And we’re not four ordinary people,” Linus said. “That might have been what the Coopers wanted, but they didn’t succeed either.”

  “We’re just asking you to give it a chance,” Rufus pleaded. “Stay unplugged from us, and from Guinard too, and see what happens.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Linus replied. “Guinard suggested exactly the same thing. I didn’t start sharing his memories until a week after I unplugged from you.”

  “And what was that week like?” Rufus asked, though he didn’t sound as if he wanted to hear the answer.

  Linus said, “It felt like I was vanishing. It felt like I was dissolving into the air.”

  Rufus glanced at Caius, as if this revelation had given him pause. But then he said, “Guinard was still pulling strings, though: fixing your test score, buying you plane tickets. What if you came back to Adelaide for a while, and just tried living by yourself?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  Linus said, “There is nothing I like, myself.”

  “You don’t like swimming?” Rufus protested. “You don’t like Balzac?”

  “A couple of hobbies don’t make a life. You want me to sit around living on your charity, struggling to find a reason to get up every morning, hoping that some kind of grand vocation will suddenly crystallize in my brain? Here, I have a curriculum to follow, a guaranteed career that starts at a six-figure salary, and a good chance I’ll be a billionaire before I’m forty.”

  Caius said, “You, or Guinard in his new body?”

  Linus shrugged. “How much of any of you is your own work, alone? Maybe I’m the only one of us who really faced up to what we are, but whatever you think about yourselves, it’s what I know about myself that counts.”

  Rufus regarded him dolefully, and when he approached Linus braced himself for a farewell hug, but instead he found his hands forced together behind his back, while Caius stepped in and put cable ties around them.

  “What the fuck is this?” Linus demanded. He contemplated bellowing for help, but a part of him flinched away from the sheer embarrassment of having a stranger walk in on this family dispute. “You’re so used to dictating what goes into my head, you can’t bear the thought of me choosing for myself?”

  Rufus groaned. “Guinard would say that, wouldn’t he?” Caius pulled a long strip of white cloth from his pocket and proceeded to wind it between Linus’s lips and the back of his neck, before switching to a second loop aimed at holding his jaw closed. As a gag, the whole thing seemed less than ideal, but he guessed they were too afraid of choking him to shove a wad of material into his mouth—and too viscerally defensive of body parts they could all personally recall him using to breathe, eat, cough, and kiss.

  As they maneuvered him onto the bed to tie his feet together, Linus caught a glimpse of the scene in a mirror: the bandages around his face looked like he was being prepared for a role as the Invisible Man. He fought down the urge to keep arguing and complaining, reluctant to reveal how much noise he was still capable of producing. But when they started wrapping the blanket around him, he couldn’t help himself: he began to yell. Rufus knelt on his chest and clamped a hand over his mouth while Silus set to work with a roll of duct tape.

  When he was cocooned in several blankets, he could still feel Rufus on top of him, t
rembling from the adrenaline. “Just stay still and keep quiet,” he begged Linus. “We don’t want to have to drug you.”

  They lifted him and carried him out of the room. When they started lowering him into the trunk of a car, he needed to assume a near-fetal position in order to fit, but he cooperated placidly. If anything, he was more mortified than ever by the thought that they might be caught in the act. This had moved beyond a motel-room scuffle into a scene that police might treat as the prelude to a burial in the woods, and he wasn’t going to risk drawing a bullet into anyone’s brain.

  Someone closed the trunk. The stale air around him smelled of scented cleaning products. Linus heard the soft purr of the motor and felt the car reversing, then moving across the lot. They couldn’t imagine they had any hope of spiriting him out of the country, but perhaps they’d rented a place where they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  To what end? They genuinely believed he’d die if he stayed, so they’d do whatever they had to in order to protect him.

  The car braked hard, and he heard tires squealing. Someone shouted in French: “Get out! Get out!”

  Linus felt it through the chassis when the doors were flung open. Moments later, he was being lifted out of the trunk, laid down on the ground, and his bindings unwrapped.

  As he rose to his feet, he saw his brothers kneeling beside the car with their faces downturned and their hands behind their heads. He turned to the security guard beside him. “Don’t you dare fucking hurt them! And you can’t call the police.”

  Linus had never seen the man before, but he nodded respectfully. “Of course. We will release them when you’re clear. They will be fine.”

  Linus wanted to reply, “Merci,” but Marcel caught the word in his throat. He works for us. He works for you. Don’t thank him for doing his job.

  13

  Linus swam through the dark water, away from the boat. He paused and looked back over his shoulder: Rufus, Silus, and Caius all stood on the deck, wretched and abandoned, watching him escape. Why would he leave them behind? His guilt and horror at the thought of his betrayal cut into him like a cord around his skin, and as he moved his arms he saw it: a loop of fishing line, tangled around him, biting into his shoulders and torso.