Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (13 page)

Only the woodcutter - who seemed to be merely an observer - had anything approaching an objective view. And yet the film cast doubt on even his version of the story, leaving Al with the frustrated revelation that he could never know for certain the truth of what had happened.

If a telepath had been there, to scan everyone, would it have helped? Maybe not, because the characters seemed to have convinced themselves that things really happened the way they said they did. It would make it very difficult, at best, to investigate the matter. And the telepath would be like the woodcutter, a seemingly objective observer who really wasn’t. Couldn’t be.

Obviously, at some level of reality, there was only one set of events that really happened But no observer could be objective. He certainly couldn’t be, standing, looking foolish, humiliated, and angry. He could see the story only from his own point of view, the point of view of the victim.

In Rashomon, it was arguably the victim’s story that in the end proved most doubtful. And so, since he had nothing better to do, and since he was tired of looking through the eyes of a victim, he tried to imagine himself from the point of view of his tormentors. In a general sense, that was easy.

He found he could understand the children - after all, he had once stood in their place and he found, quite surprisingly, that this dissolved much of his anger toward them.

The older students were different. He had never been in their place. When he was older, he had simply ignored the “statues” on the parade ground. He hadn’t been interested in them. It was thus harder for him to imagine what an academy student, who should have better things to do, would gain from the experience of taunting a helpless fellow. Of course, he didn’t have to imagine, entirely.

He gleaned clues from their surface thoughts, from the surface thoughts of their friends. Little Rashomon images to sift through, to piece together into biographies. It was hard at first, because he fought understanding them - he would have rather despised them - but once he learned a certain simple truth, he quickly got into the spirit of it. Fatima Cristoban, for instance, the woman who had taunted him so cruelly two days ago, was a later, hadn’t come into her psi until she was thirteen. Raised as a normal, she missed the mundane world, was uncomfortable in the academy, and had a deep dislike for anyone who grew up in a cadre, especially Cadre Prime.

One day Brett and the others passed in the distance and waved at him. Fatima was there-putting lipstick on him, actually-and she noticed them. The thin compression of her lips was perfectly consistent with the sudden spike of anger in her surface thoughts. No, it wasn’t just him Fatima hated.

Jeffer Powylles. He wished he had the guts to do what Al had done. On another level, he knew he would never have the guts, and if he couldn’t, then nobody should exist who did.

Jiri Belden. He liked helpless things. It made him feel less helpless. The simple truth was that the joke was on them. Each thing they did, each insult, was simply another clue for Al to puzzle at, another instrument he could use to dissect them. Nothing could be very threatening, once dissected. They became his victims; not he, theirs. He had the power of knowing them, and that was a terrific power, indeed.

At night, Bey’s lessons continued. They weren’t like any lessons he had ever experienced before. Bey would present him with a vid, or a short story, or a poem, or a painting. The significance of the selection often escaped AI for a day or more. But in the end, each piece was like a distorted mirror, reflecting some thought of his own, a thought carried to conclusions he himself would have never reached, and sometimes could not agree with.

He argued with Joyce, Nietzsche, Heinlein, Voltaire, Card, Blake. Bey had a particular fondness for great thinkers from the past. He argued with Bey, too. It was a peculiar kind of learning. It filled him with a strange excitement. He began to see ways he could use it, too. It started to make some of the things he had already learned make a certain sort of sense.

On the tenth day of his punishment, he saw a girl approaching him, her dark, bobbed hair bouncing with her ambitious stride. She looked to be about his own age. She was pretty, but not entirely conventionally so - her mouth was wide, her eyes black in the bright sun.

He began composing her biography, and then understood that she wasn’t really approaching him at all, but merely walking in his direction. That was actually too bad. He had looked forward to picking her apart. Maybe - he tightened his control, touching on her surface thoughts, not a real scan. She seemed deep in thought, and probably wouldn’t notice a very slight.

She stopped, rather abruptly, and her gaze darted to his. Blocks shut out everything. She cocked her head thoughtfully. Well, he had her attention, anyway. He felt an embarrassed flush color his face and wished he could control his body as well as he could his mind.

She came toward him, sauntering almost. She was planning something now, or wanted him to think she was. She was slim, her arms long and coppery. Her gaze stayed fastened on his. He thought briefly of a cobra, swaying toward its prey. Her lips were slightly quirked. He tried to put himself in her place, to see the scene as she saw it, but came up blank. She stepped up on the podium with him, cocking her head this way and that as he noticed they were the same height.

He could smell her now, a scent with some flower in it. She kissed him on the lips. Twice. The second time she took his lower lip between hers and stretched it, so that the contact lingered sensuously. His knees actually buckled. Her eyes flashed dangerously, and then she abruptly laughed.

She walked away, still laughing. It took every ounce of willpower he had not to turn his head and follow her. Biography? His mind was blank. About this girl, he didn’t know one damn thing, except - she was fire inside, combustion thinly disguised by skin. He would like to know a lot more.

But she didn’t show up the next day, or indeed for the next four. But Bey did, on the fourteenth day. He came across the green, smiled conspiratorially, and said, “Your time is up, Mr. Bester. You may rejoin the animate.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He paused awkwardly.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for everything.”

“You are quite welcome, Mr. Bester. Good day.”

He placed his hands behind his back and started away.

“Sir?” Al said again.

“Yes, Mr. Bester?”

“I was wondering-could we-ah-talk sometime? Face-to-face?”

“Of course, Mr. Bester. Why don’t we meet in my office, tomorrow, about 06:00?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Go on, Mr. Bester. You have a lot of catching up to do. Fourteen days will set you back considerably, and exams are only a month away.”

“I’ll manage, sir.” “I’m sure you will. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Chapter 8

Al looked forward to his meetings with Sandoval Bey. He never knew what the older man was going to say, but it was almost always something interesting, offering a perspective he hadn’t considered. Bey’s thoughts had mass, inertia - they were bodies in motion. Sometimes they entered Al’s brain like bullet trains, sometimes like stealthy thieves, but they always seemed to find a place.

He liked Bey’s office, with its odor of coffee and cigar smoke, shelves packed with books, some with crumbling spines, some so new he could still smell the ink. He liked the Gauguin print with its wide-eyed beasts and cavernous jungle. He liked the faint baroque interplay of Bach or Telemann that underscored most of their conversations, or the occasional, surprising days when instead it was Wagner or-on one startling occasion-the wild discords of Stravinsky.

“This one started a riot when it was first played in Paris, you know,” Bey had murmured that day.

He had been a little strange, subdued-and yet somehow more taut-than usual. Al later discovered that Bey had been forced to kill a Blip that morning. He was curious about Bey - he wanted to know everything about him, but he took things as they were revealed, relishing the small details and broad strokes as he built his portrait of the man.

He didn’t look at Bey’s public record, or even search for articles about him in publications. Most of Al’s life was spent in a whistling gale, frantically struggling to win this contest or pass that test, but his time with Bey was the eye of the storm, a place for long, deep breaths. He didn’t want to spoil that by making Bey into another project.

What he did know was that Sandoval Bey was an important man. He knew that because his office was in the administrative building, because even high officers deferred to him, because he had challenged the director and still had his job.

He had once been an executive officer in MetaPol - maybe the chief - but had retired from the position after only two years, to become station chief of Geneva. He was an instructor at the Major Academy, teaching advanced criminology. As station chief, he still wore the MetaPol uniform sometimes-internally for certain purposes, but also when a member of the Corps went Blip. That was why he had been called in on Al’s case.

Usually he just directed operations, and it was rare for him to actually take to the field. Al felt most fortunate that he had benefited from one such unusual event.

Bey’s father was Turkish, from the hill country, a poor boy who rose to political prominence. His mother had been the British ambassador to Turkey, and they had lived there until he was six, when his father was murdered by a political dissident. Thereafter, Bey had been raised in London, and had spent long summers with a grandfather who lived near Madrid. He had joined Psi Corps as a teen - Al really wasn’t sure exactly when or under what circumstances. He was a widower, and it was a subject he studiously avoided. Today the music was Wagner, the overture to Tristan and Isolde.

Brave brass sang out over the storm growl of low strings as Al approached the door. He rapped the heavy wood, wondering what they would discuss. He had just read Hobbes’ Leviathan and wanted to talk about it, but Bey would most likely surprise him again. He did.

“Good morning, Mr. Bester. What does the rest of your day look like?”

“I…”

He had a test to study for, an important one, but Bey was dressed in black Psi Cop garb, smiling enigmatically.

“I’ve an open flight plan, sir.”

“Good, good. How would you like to accompany me on a hunt? See how it ought to be done?”

“I would like that very much, Dr. Bey.”

“I thought you might.”

“Are we leaving now?”

“As soon as we prepare.”

He handed Al a photograph.

“This is the runaway.”

AI took the picture, then gave a vague start. It was Fatima Cristoban.

“You know her?”

“Sort of. She used to come by and bother me when I was the statue of the day. Put lipstick on me, and such.”

“But you aren’t friends.”

“No”

Bey nodded.

“Good. I’ll leave you to prepare.”

Al looked up, a bit startled.

“Sir? How do I do that? We haven’t been taught that.”

“Yes you have. I taught you, in fact. You may use my office. I’ll be outside when you’re done.”

Al watched him go, a bit perplexed, then looked back down at fawn-colored Fatima Cristoban. He remembered her self-satisfied sneer, and the deep uncertainty it hid.

Why? He silently asked the portrait. Why would you betray the Corps? They offered you everything.

But he knew part of the answer. After all, he had assembled a biography of her, in his mind. He tried to recall her telepathic signature, impose it upon the photo. He tried to imagine her speaking the anger and fear she felt, her insecurities about the Corps.

Was this what Bey meant by preparing? To try to remember Cristoban’s “scent,” the better to track her? Somehow, he thought Bey wanted something more of him than that. He concentrated more deeply on the photo, willing himself to understand Fatima Cristoban, to be able to anticipate her movements. The hunter becoming the prey.

After a few moments, he closed his eyes in frustration, aware that Bey was outside, aware that he still had not done whatever it was the older man imagined he should have learned by now. Cristoban remained a photograph.

You have to love those you hunt, Bey had once said.

And that recalled something else, something from long ago. When he had played cops and blips with Brett and the rest. When Brett had insisted a Blip could only act in certain ways because they were stupid or evil… But that wasn’t the case. To kids, Blips had no motive: the point of view was always that of the cop, even when you played the Blip. You never really stepped into the Blip’s shoes. That was why, that day, he had chosen to pretend he was really a Psi Cop being chased, rather than accept the role of a rogue.

Think of Rashomon. As insane as it seemed, Fatima wanted to escape the Corps.

To understand any of it, he had to look not at her eyes, but through them. He turned slowly in Bey’s office, and his gaze came to rest on something he had always considered odd - a small mirror in a frame of plain, polished wood.

Bey kept a neat appearance - his mustache, in particular, was always elegant and trimmed. But he had never seen the station chief preening in front of that mirror, or even glancing in it. In fact, he couldn’t imagine Bey doing so. Bey was not, AI was sure, a vain man. But there was the mirror, out of place in the cluttered, scholarly office, hung almost like an icon. He felt a flutter of excitement.

Know your enemy. Love your enemy. Be your enemy.

He held up the photo so he could see it and his own reflection in the glass. He remembered Fatima again, but this time placed those memories and perceptions into his own reflection. Long ago, he had projected himself onto Brett, to fool the others. Now he projected Fatima Cristoban onto himself. Concentrating.

The room beyond the focus of his gaze began to blur. For a long moment he felt as if he were pushing against some flexible but impenetrable membrane, a tension on some surface of the universe he had never imagined existed before - and then, subtly, he seemed to slip through.