Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant (25 page)

“You’re a credit to the Corps, Mr. Bester. I expected nothing less from you.”

They met in a restaurant in the city, having been assured that the bill was on the Corps. It was a somewhat awkward moment, the first in a series. Alisha was quiet. She had a conventionally pretty face, with hair not assertive enough to be called either chestnut or auburn, and eyes that could be called nothing but brown.

“I heard you were on Mars,” she attempted.

“Yes.”

“How did you find it?”

“Well, once we were near enough, it was pretty easy,” Al replied.

“We just fell onto it.”

She smiled at the joke and took a rather large sip of her rose.

“And you?” he continued. “Have you been off planet?”

“Twice to the Moon,” she answered. “No farther than that, I’m afraid. I really don’t do well with zero gravity”

“Oh. That’s too bad.”

He sat there trying to think of something else to say, wishing the food would hung up.

“I ahm… you’re from the United States-from Seattle?” She nodded.

“Yes. I don’t remember much about it, though. I was brought into the Corps when I was eight. Have you been there? Seattle?”

“Oh. No. Almost, once - Portland. It rained a lot.”

“That’s what I remember.”

The appetizers chose that moment to arrive, for which Al was grateful. He picked at his mussels, trying to make them last and keep his mouth too busy to talk at the same time. With someone you knew, that wouldn’t stop conversation, of course-you could psi with a full mouth-but by mutual consent, neither of them initiated mind-to-mind communication. It seemed too intimate. Al noticed as Alisha finished her wine and poured her some more.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“So… are you horrified?” she asked.

“Horrified of what?”

“Of marrying me.”

A mussel went down the wrong way, somehow ended up halfway into his nose. He took some wine to try to clear up the problem and nearly choked a second time. In the end it was quite a mess, and Alisha was laughing-a soft, appealing, genuine laugh.

“Sorry,” he said, when he could speak. “I suppose I thought we would avoid that subject for a while longer.”

“I did, too. I guess the wine went to my head faster than I thought.”

“The wine went in my head,” Al said, and smiled again.

It felt real on his face, an unfamiliar sensation. He looked curiously into her eyes.

“I’m not horrified, I find. I always knew that the Corps would eventually suggest marriage, I just suppose I never thought it would be so soon.”

“Well, you are over thirty.”

“You’ve seen my file.”

“I’m in forensics, remember? I can tell you what your cholesterol level is, if you want.”

“Hmm. Well, at least you go in with eyes wide open.”

“Are you in love with anyone else?” she asked.

“No. If I were, it wouldn’t make any difference, not with a match approved by the Corps.”

He thought of Elizabeth, remembered her objections to all of that, despite their compatibility.

“What?” Alisha asked, reading something from his face or surface thoughts. “I don’t mean to pry…”

“An old girlfriend,” he said. “Very old. To be honest, it’s been a long time since I thought about anything but my career.”

“The two of you weren’t compatible.”

“Yes and no. Genetically we were, and I thought we were in other ways.”

He smiled, and this time it felt normal - that is to say, false.

“We were very young.”

“I’m song it didn’t work out for you, especially since you were genetically matched. I think that’s really the most important thing, don’t you?”

He remembered Montoya, the flame in her that had nearly consumed him. There had been ecstasy, yes, and excitement, and love. It had made him stupid, nearly ruined him.

“Yes,” he said softly.

“Yes I do.”

She smiled back, and Al realized that he liked Alisha Ross, that he might manage to like her very much. But he would never love her. That was fine. That was more than fine. He didn’t want to be in love again.

They were married in April. Alisha’s parents came, but they seemed lost among her Corps friends. Erik agreed to stand for Al, but it was clearly out of duty-whatever friendship might have been developing between them was gone. They went on their honeymoon to Bali. They climbed mountains and sunned on beaches. For Al, it was mostly a boring business, vacationing, but at times he genuinely enjoyed himself. Alisha wasn’t bad company, even if she wasn’t exciting company.

Their lovemaking was pleasant and companionable, if not inventive. He grew to like the idea of a wife more and more - the comfort of having someone to go home to. And his nightmares retreated, though they didn’t go away. Alisha didn’t ask about them, though he was sure she knew. They changed, his nightmares, even as they lessened in intensity.

For some time he had been haunted by fragments of the fives of those he scanned. Now he dreamed that he himself stood on the liminality, alone. In this case the threshold was the pinnacle of a mountaintop, terribly high, and low mountains receding to every horizon, fading with distance but never actually ending. It was almost pleasant.

He would stand there, feeling that all of the answers were somehow out there. He would hear familiar voices, just below the level of intelligibility. A woman’s voice, low and soothing. A man’s voice. The voice of the rogue on Mars. Of Bey. In the drifting clouds, from the corner of his eye, he would catch hints of the faces, but when he focused on them they dissolved, even as he felt his left arm stiffen, his fingers fusing together into a single mass.

He would wake, not screaming, but indescribably sad. And then he would find Alisha’s warm body next to his, a living thing among his dreams of the dead. A warmth. And he would fold against her in the night. And he was grateful - to her, to the Corps. To the Corps, which had seen what he needed and had given it to him.

Chapter 6

“Here’s to Mr. Bester, who took us to the lair, who smoked out the quarry, who made us well and truly hunters!”

Gavriil Kichgelkhut’s face split in a wide grin as he raised his glass.

Al acknowledged the toast with a modest bow of his head. Gavriil was a romantic who imagined himself in the days of his Koryak ancestors, but he was a good hunter for all of that. Al would teach him to be a great one. Al raised his own glass.

“To the Corps, our mother and our father!” he said, and they all drank again.

Al, of course, drank very little. After that they rehashed the hunt, the long chase through the elaborate and crumbling subways of Brasilia, the moment when they had almost lost the quarry, the final firefight. Gavriil sang a Koryak hunting song, and they got even louder as the patrons of the Common Flamingo gradually drifted out of the place.

Al watched them go with quiet pride. Early on, a few of the bar patrons had looked as if they might become belligerent toward the telepaths in their midst. AI had fixed that with a dark stare and a thought. Even with their crippled senses, mundanes knew he was a cobra while they were mice. The last of them was leaving as his telephone vibrated for his attention. He pulled it out and thumbed the contact.

“Bester here.”

“Mr. Bester? This is Dr. Juan Koabawa. The Blip is dying.”

“I sec.”

“We’ve been cleared for a deathbed scan. I understand you have some experience with them.”

“Indeed I do.”

“Your record shows that you’ve already done six, so I’ll understand if you don’t want to do another. But the brain damage is extensive, and she’s going fast. Ms. Calderon was unable to make good contact…”

“Say no more, Doctor. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

He closed the phone, stood, and took a bow.

“Duty calls, gentlemen. Enjoy yourselves, but I want to see you all clearheaded by ten-hundred. Is that clear?”

He left, buoyed by their earnest cheers. Ten-hundred gave them three hours of sleep more than they had any right to expect. He knew his men - they would drink, but they would not get drunk. To do so would be to put themselves at the mercy of Normals, and he had taught them better than that.

He felt good. It was good to be back in the hunt. Another scan, though-since his marriage to Alisha, his desire to do them had waned. Erik had been right he had been looking for something that lay beyond the liminality, though he wasn’t sure what it was. Something missing, a lost piece of himself. Yet every time he stood with the dying at that doorway, he saw less and less.

He came back feeling not more whole, but diminished, as if part of him had gone with the dead. Each time the liminality manifested differently, depending, apparently, on the person who was dying and the person who was scanning. The truth of the threshold was probably beyond human understanding, but it was that old primate brain again, operating by analogy, trying to make sense out of the inconceivable. He would not have gone out of his way to volunteer for another, but when the Corps called, he answered. Especially as he was coming up for promotion, soon, to senior detective. Seven deathbed scans would make him a legend, after a fashion. Her mind was shredded by approaching death.

She had not allowed them to take her gently. Al had hated to use such force against another telepath, but she had been very strong, and in the end-whether the younger man knew it or not it had been her or Gavriil. She could have shattered his mind. In such a case, you had to make decisions. Gavriil had mind-blasted her, not subtly but with all of his strength. Vessels had shattered in her brain, and the once life-giving blood now drowned all she had ever been.

She stood, quivering, at the liminality, a sort of storm front in which each of many lightning bolts was a dying memory, blazing out one last time. In the storm, a black eye was opening, waiting to swallow her forever.

Khol, he said softly. Khol. I have to know why you went rogue. I have to know who led you to your death.

She turned toward him. Her face came and went like a bad transmission. It shifted from large-eyed child to the hollow, gaunt visage they had hunted. It distorted from abstract-like the face of a Grin-to photographic as she tried to hang on to herself. She wasn’t succeeding.

I was a good cop. I was.

I know. You loved the Corps. What happened?

I was… I was good…

A shrieking, then, a terrible inhuman sound that tore into him, that set his teeth on edge, that threatened to rip open his mind. For an instant he knew a terrible attraction in despair, in destruction, and yearned for oblivion so much that if he had had a PPG in his hand he might have turned it on himself.

Lightning struck, and he was on Mars. The sky was still a hurricane, the eye bigger than ever. It struck again, and they were fingering a small object, a black fragment of something - which was now somehow huge, arachnoid, hideous, looming over him - Together, he and Khol screamed, and she was shrieking away from him, into eternity, and he was following, grasping the trail of her dying mind, riding the current of her spent life toward-toward-Something that called him.

A woman’s face. A man’s voice. Answers… Answers he no longer wanted. He felt his ruined hand spasm with the effort of wrenching free, of abandoning Khol’s desperate flight into nothing. She wanted to die, and he did, too, to know what was beyond, oblivion or solace.

The storm had him, he had gone in too far, and he was glad. Then the eye dilated, rushed away, and she was gone. Too late, he redoubled his efforts to catch it, but it was like the old problem of taking half a step toward a door, and then half of that step, and half of that. He could get closer, but never reach it. And he was withdrawing his bare, trembling fingers from her dead face.

He was weeping.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bester,” Dr. Koabawa said. “I shouldn’t have asked this of you.”

“No,” he managed. “I’ll be all right in a moment. Just give me a moment.”

It felt as if something had been cut out of him, something he couldn’t even remember anymore.

Was it true, what they said? That a part of your soul went with those who died? How much of him was left?

Later, on the plane back to Geneva, he felt better. It was Khol’s loss he felt, her trauma. The illusion of damage had been just that, an illusion. Still, he didn’t think he would do another deathbed scan. They wouldn’t ask him again, not after seven. They probably wouldn’t let him if he wanted to, after this performance.

He took deep, calming breaths, as Bey had taught him. He would be better soon. He distracted himself by thinking of Alisha, how good it would be to see her, to not be alone. Maybe this time she would conceive. That would please everyone. He knew she wanted a child, and he himself had begun to think of it as more than a duty. He had seen a lot of death - a bit of life would be nice. A new life that was a part of him, a continuation of him. The liminality represented the past, threatening to draw him to his doom. Alisha, children-life-they were the future, and for the first time in many years it was the future that he wanted. His future, Alfred Bester’s future, not some vague and nameless legacy of parents he had never known.

He squeezed that thought away even as it formed. He had no parents. The Corps was his parents, and that was all he needed, all he cared for. He slept. There were nightmares, of course, but when he awoke, it was to hope.

Back in Teeptown, he bought some flowers and headed straight for his apartment. Alisha probably wouldn’t be there - he was too early for her to expect him, and he didn’t remember her work schedule - but she might be in. If she wasn’t, he would put them in a vase and see what he could do about making a meal, something Alisha would like. Coq au vin, maybe, or duck with olives.

Smiling in anticipation of her reaction, he keyed the door open.

He was so distracted by his plans, he didn’t catch what was in the air until too late. Then he saw the table settings, the wine, and smiled. The smile faded as he understood that the bottle was empty, the food eaten, and only then did he feel the faint palpitations coming from the next room.