Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (6 page)

“Then I will keep it myself,” the man said, defiantly.

Bester’s heart skipped. He couldn’t have that. There were plenty of other street artists on the square, and most of them displayed sample sketches. How many people walked through this square a day? Thousands? And of those thousands, how many might recognize Alfred Bester, with or without a beard?

So he was on the point of buying the drawing anyway. Strangely, however, Louise, who was still shooing the man, suddenly fell silent. She took the sketch from the fellow and looked at it for a moment. Then still without speaking, she reached into a pocket and produced a credit.

“There,” she said. “Now go away.”

She took the picture and rolled it up. The artist walked off, a bit smugly.

“I told you so,” he called over his shoulder.

“Why did you do that?” Bester asked as they continued on.

“I like the picture.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I like to watch the sky,” she said.

“I like all sorts of skies. Pale, powdery blue, indigo near twilight, or laced up with clouds. But my favorite sky is one with black clouds, when-through the clouds, just for an instant-a crack of gold peeks through.”

“I still…”

But he got it before she explained. It was much the same thing he had been thinking about her, moments earlier.

“You have seen much, I think, and a little of it made you happy, yes? You are like a dark cloud. But there was an instant, a moment ago, just an instant, when your gold appeared. The first since I met you. And this fellow, this street artist caught it. In that, he showed genius of a sort. Enough to deserve a credit.”

“May I see?”

“You may not laugh at me.”

“I won’t.”

She handed him the paper, and he unrolled it. And stared. It wasn’t him. Oh, it looked like him. The man had put the same weary lines in his face, the proportions were right. But the eyes were young, touched by wonder. It made him feel very peculiar, and a little guilty. What the man had seen on his face was him admiring Louise. It was her, reflected in him.

“What will you do with it?” he asked.

“It’s yours,” she replied.

“You should hang it where your mirror is, to remind yourself you can look like that.”

He didn’t want it. On the other hand, if she kept it…

“Thank you,” he said.

He bought a book. The shop across town turned out to be a library, which hadn’t interested him at first. But there had been a time when he had loved to read. An old mentor of his, Sandoval Bey, had given him the taste for it, introducing him to classic and contemporary alike. Even after the old man was murdered, Bester had continued to read-a sort of tribute to Bey’s memory.

But as he got older, the stories he read tasted more and more like the paper they were printed on. And one day he had stopped. Thinking about it, he couldn’t even say when that was. Ten years ago? Twenty? What were people reading these days?

He looked over the bestsellers. Memoirs were hot, especially those of the Excalibur crew and other explorers. One caught his eye in particular: Freedom of Mind: Memoirs of a Telepath Mystic.

He picked it up. He bought it.

The next afternoon he sat in a dim cafe called Le Cheval Heureux, hunched over the last few pages. Little Corinthian columns of cigarette smoke seemed to hold up the low ceiling, and the light from the various table lamps didn’t reach far. Despite all of that, it seemed a popular place to read. Seven or eight other people were doing so. “Insipid,” he grunted, closing the book and making a face. “Indeed?” A gaunt fellow, perhaps thirty, peered at him over old-fashioned wire-framed glasses. These were surely an affectation, given that any defect in eyesight could be corrected by a few seconds of inexpensive outpatient surgery.

“I just read that and found it illuminating. How does it seem insipid to you? Or did you mean the coffee?”

“No, I meant the book,” Bester replied.

“Well, then?”

“Rather presumptuous, don’t you think, demanding an explanation? Perhaps I threaten your opinion, and thus threaten you?”

A hint of curve turned up the man’s lips.

“Perhaps. Shall I ask more politely? Or are you afraid you can’t defend your opinion?”

“It isn’t in need of defense.” Bester turned away, then turned back.

“But if you must know - I found the style gaudy, trite, and simplistic. The philosophy is rehashed twentieth-century quasi-Buddhist sentimentality, which was rehashed even then, with a healthy bit of theft from the Book of G’Quan. The first person, present tense is pretentious, and the stream of consciousness sequences would have made Faulkner reverse his lunch.”

“I thought it was poetic and insightful.”

“Well,” Bester said, “you were wrong. Don’t blame me.”

The young man stuttered a little, contemptuous laugh.

“Would you care to put that in writing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I edit a small literary journal. Paris is full of writers these days, and most think they are quite brilliant. Most aren’t. I think some sorting needs to be done, and I need critics to do it.”

“But we don’t agree about this story.”

“Agreement is beside the point. To read, to think, to express what you think…

…to sell your opinions to those who can’t think for themselves?”

“Yes, exactly. Or, in a few cases, to those who will argue against you. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people, had I challenged them on their opinion, would have capitulated or turned away. Why bother, eh? It’s only art, not worth arguing about-except that it is, because nothing is so pointless as undiscussed, uncriticized art, yes, and so…”

“What does this pay?”

“Oh. The inevitable crass question. It pays ten credits for every hundred words. You are interested yes?”

Bester, to his own great surprise, heard himself answer,

“Yes.”

He returned to the hotel. It had rained, so his shoes broke pastel puddles, wet canvases left by the downpour and painted by the sunset. The silver-winged silhouettes of swallows spun in the lambent air, and for an instant he saw, not birds, but Black Omega Starfuries coursing across the universe-devouring face of Jupiter. His ships, his people, unstoppable. He trembled, with the thought of what he had been. He brought down governments, diverted rivers of destiny to fill new oceans. Without him, the Shadows would have won, destroyed all of humanity.

That never seemed to come up, at the hearing. He had never seen it once in any of the gory stories about him.

Sheridan knew. Sheridan the hero, the one honest man. He knew, but remained oddly silent. Garibaldi knew, too.

Of course Garibaldi wasn’t a big-picture sort of man. Garibaldi only cared about Garibaldi-what Garibaldi liked or didn’t like. What had given Garibaldi pleasure, what had hurt him. Especially what had hurt him. There was probably a wasp somewhere that had stung Garibaldi when he was five, that his operatives were still trying to track down…

His mind was wandering. Where was he? Ah, yes, the next street over.

He had commanded thousands, saved the world, saved his own people-whether they knew it or not, appreciated it or not.

Now he was going to write a column for a third-rate literary review? Well, that certainly wasn’t something Alfred Bester would do. Garibaldi and his Psi Corps lapdogs would be a long time searching before they started to check the literary reviews. He turned the corner and found the street busy, confusingly so. There was a crowd, and police cycles, and a fire truck. The excitement, the lust of the crowd struck him. They wanted to watch something burn down, to see Human forms come writhing out in flames. Just like the crowd at the hearing, screaming silently for his blood…

Wait. That was the Hotel Marceau, Louise’s hotel. The place where he was staying. He began pushing his way through. The crowd was going to be disappointed. The blaze had been a small one, and it was nearly out. The front window had been shattered, and the small dining room blackened, but otherwise the hotel seemed to have survived.

Louise stood, watching the firemen work, her face blank with shock. As Bester arrived, the cop, Lucien, was talking to her, though she didn’t seem to be listening.

“Nobody saw anything,” he was saying.

“Of course. Louise, you must…”

“Leave me alone,” she said, distractedly.

“Just… leave me be.”

A swift anger passed across the policeman’s face, but then he gave a little Gallic shrug and did what she asked. Bester stood for a moment, wondering if he ought to say anything. She noticed him.

“Monsieur Kaufman,” she said, in a small voice,

“I withdraw what I said earlier. I won’t charge you extra for leaving early.”

Bester nodded. He was about to tell her he would have his things out as soon as the fire died down. After all, he was trying to avoid attention, not court it. And there were bound to be reporters. No. There was already one here, pushing forward, news-taper close behind. He felt, suddenly, like a trapped animal, his heart picking up several beats per minute. If his face appeared, even on a local newscast…

He stepped quickly away, ducking into the crowd. He touched the reporter and found no image of himself in the man’s surface thoughts. He hadn’t been noticed, and he wouldn’t be remembered. The camera, though-had it seen him? If it had, it would probably be edited out.

“Get ahold of yourself,” Bester he told himself.

“No one noticed you.”

But his heart was still beating too fast. How he hated this feeling, this helpless, watched feeling. That’s when he noticed Jem and his buddies, observing it all, wearing wide, bestial grins. Suddenly his helplessness turned to cold anger-an old, comfortable friend. Here was something he could deal with. Jem hadn’t noticed him. Bester went up an alley, until he could just see the thug, and there he waited.

Soon night fell. Jem and his friends left, but they didn’t leave alone. Bester followed them down the narrow streets, his step quiet and purposeful. This was what he was, a hunter. Bester had been meant to chase prey, not run from predators. In the old days, a rogue knew his days were numbered when Alfred Bester was on his trail. He smiled thinly at the familiar rush. He followed them to a set of apartments a few blocks away, which they entered, laughing and slapping one another on the back. Bester kept watching, waiting.

Hours passed, and an orange moon rose into the faintly hazy sky. Bester was patient - he knew more about waiting than perhaps anything else. He listened to Paris; he hummed old tunes to himself. Finally, well after midnight, the gang members began to slip of He counted them as they went, until he knew Jem was alone. Then he brushed his jacket with his hands, adjusted his collar, and walked up to the building.

It was an old building, but it had a fairly good security system. There were a series of contacts and a small widescreen. To enter, he would either have to bypass the system, which he hadn’t brought the tools to do, or get Jem to buzz him up. He could go back to his room, get the matrix chip that had allowed him to pass Earth security-but no, where was the challenge in that? He could make Jem open the door.

Closing his eyes, he tuned out the mind of Paris, bit by bit, as though through a sieve, running everything through it until finally only a faint something remained. Very faint.

Without line of sight, making contact with a normal was almost impossible, even for a P12. But Bester had been at this for a long time and found that the limits of his abilities were extended by his belief in them. He couldn’t scan Jem from here, couldn’t burst the blood vessels in his apelike brain. But he could touch him, just a little. He could suggest that one of Jem’s friends had just buzzed…

Jem’s mind was already confused. It was a rough sea, queasy to the touch, thickened and slowed by alcohol, salted with drugs of some sort. He was already hearing things that weren’t there. If Bester had asked him to make himself more vulnerable, he could not have.

Still, it took fifteen minutes of terrific concentration before he heard the lock click. The outer door opened, revealing two more doors on either side and a stairway going up.

He felt Jem above, and so took the stairs. When he stood in front of what felt like the right door, he knocked softly. An instant later it opened, and Bester found himself staring down the ugly hole of an automatic pistol.

Chapter 5

“Well,” Jem grunted. He wore a black tank top and sweat - pants.

“If it ain’t my old friend grandpa. Come in. Now.”

He extended the gun meaningfully, and Bester noticed it was an old Naga l2mm, probably with mercury-filled slugs that would leave an exit wound the size of a softball.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Bester said, calmly.

Jem watched him with bloodshot, small-pupiled eyes. The apartment was large, and furnished in moderately expensive but poor taste. Gaudy. A poor boy’s idea of what having wealth was all about. Bester noticed a bottle of red wine and picked it up.

“Ah, the ‘67 Chateau le Ridoux,” he said.

“Not a bad year-a poor choice with pizza, however.”

He’d noticed the delivery boy coming in earlier, and the remains of the meal were scattered about on a large wooden table.

“It costs a hundred credits a bottle.”

“Oh, well, then it must go with anything,” Bester replied.

He went to the wine rack, selected a glass, and poured himself a bit.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“You know,” Bester observed, “you were cheated. This is a cheap Cote Du Ron, rebottled. I would say you paid ninety-five credits too much.”

“You’ve got about six seconds to live, old man.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

He took another sip of wine.

With a sort of animal growl, Jem jumped forward, swinging the gun at Bester’s face like a club. Bester seized his voluntary nervous system and watched him go down, felt the bright tinkle of pain, like the sound of glass breaking. Only it was Jem’s nose that had broken, on the parquet floor. And several of his teeth.

“Yes, please, make yourself comfortable,” Bester said.