Galactic North (33 page)

“How did he end up here? Wouldn’t the authorities have been just as keen to get hold of his remains as his living self?”

“He always had allies. Sponsors, I suppose you might call them. People who’d covertly admired his work. There’s always a market for freaks, Carl—and even more of a market for freak-makers. His friends whisked him away, out of the hands of what little authority was left here upon his return. Since then he’s passed from collection to collection, like a bad penny. He seems to bring bad luck. Perhaps I’m tempting fate just by keeping him here; tempting it even more by bringing him to this state of partial reanimation.” She smiles tightly. “We will see. If my fortunes take a dip, I shall pass Trintignant on to the next willing victim.”

“You’re playing with fire.”

“Then you don’t approve? I’d have expected you to applaud my audacity, Carl.”

Grafenwalder, despite himself, speaks something close to the truth. “I’m impressed. More than you can imagine. But I’m also alarmed that he’s being kept here.”

“Alarmed. Why, exactly?”

“You’re a newcomer to this game, Ursula. I’ve seen a little of your habitat now, enough to know that your security arrangements aren’t exactly top of the line.”

“He’s in no danger of putting himself back together, Carl, unless you believe in telekinesis.”

“I’m worried about what would happen if his admirers learn of his whereabouts. Some of them won’t be content just to know he’s being kept alive in pieces. They’ll want to take him, put him all the way back together.”

“I don’t think anyone would be quite that foolish.”

“Then you don’t know people. People like us, Ursula. How many collectors have you shown him to already?”

She tilts her head, looking at him along her up-curved nose. “Less than a dozen, including yourself.”

“That’s already too many. I wouldn’t be surprised if word has already passed beyond the Circle. Don’t tell me you’ve shown him to Rossiter?”

“Rossiter was the second.”

“Then it’s probably already too late.” He sighs, as if taking a great burden upon himself. “We don’t have much time. We need to make immediate arrangements to transport his remains to my habitat. They’ll be a lot safer there.”

“Why would your place be any safer than mine?”

“I design security systems. It’s what I do for a living.”

She appears to consider it, for a moment at least. Then she shakes her head. “No. It won’t happen. He’s staying here. I see where you’re coming from now, Carl. You don’t actually care about my security arrangements at all. It probably wouldn’t even bother you if Doctor Trintignant did escape back into Stoner society. It’s highly unlikely that you’d have ended up one of his victims, after all. You’ve got money and influence. It’s those poor souls down in the Mulch who’d need to watch their backs. That’s where he’d go hunting for raw material. What you can’t stand is the thought that he might be mine, not yours. I’ve got something you haven’t, something unique, something you can’t ever have, and it’s going to eat you from inside like acid.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I will. I always have. You made a dreadful mistake when you humiliated me, Carl, assuming you didn’t have a hand in what had already happened to the hamadryad.”

“What are you saying? That I had something to do with the fact that Shallice stiffed you?”

He detects her hesitation. She comes perilously close to accusing him, but even here—even in this private cloister— there are limits that she knows better than to cross.

“But you were glad of it, weren’t you?” she presses.

“I had the superior specimen. That’s all that ever mattered to me.” With a renewed shudder of revulsion—and, he admits, something close to admiration—he turns again to survey the distributed remains of the notorious doctor. “You say he can hear us?”

“Every word.”

“You should kill him now. Take a hammer to his brain. Make sure he can never live again.”

“Would you like that, Carl?”

“It’s exactly what the authorities would do if they got hold of him.”

“They’d give him a trial first, one imagines.”

“He doesn’t deserve a trial. None of his victims had the benefit of justice.”

“What history conveniently forgets,” Goodglass says, “is that many of his so-called victims came to him willingly. He was not a monster to them, but the agent of the change they craved. He was the most brilliant transformative surgeon of our era. So what if society considered his creations obscene? So what if some of them regretted what they had freely asked him to do?”

“You’re defending him now.”

“Not defending him—just pointing out that nothing is ever that black and white. For years Trintignant was given tacit permission to continue his work. The authorities didn’t like him, but they accepted that he fulfilled a social need.”

Grafenwalder shakes his head—he’s seen and heard enough. “I thought you were exhibiting a monster, Ursula. Now it looks to me as if you’re sheltering a fugitive.”

“I’m not, I assure you. Just because I have a balanced view of Trintignant doesn’t mean I don’t despise him. Here: let me offer you a demonstration.” And with that Goodglass taps a command sequence into the air, disarming the security system. She is able to pass her hand through the laser-mesh without bringing down the armoured screen. “Walk over to the brain, Carl,” she commands. “It isn’t a trap.”

“I’d he happier if you walked with me.”

“If you like.”

He hesitates longer than he’d like, long enough for her to notice, then takes a step into the enclosure. Goodglass is only a pace behind him. The eyeballs swivel to track him, triangulating with the smoothness of motorised cameras. He moves next to the bubbling brain vat. Up close, the brain looks too small to have been the wellspring of so much evil.

“What am I supposed to look at?”

“Not look at—do. You can inflict pain on him, if you wish. There’s a button next to the brain. It sends an electrical current straight into his anterior cingulate cortex.”

“Isn’t he in pain already?”

“Not especially. He re-engineered himself to allow for this dismantling. There may be some existential trauma, but I don’t believe he’s in any great discomfort from one moment to the next.”

Grafenwalder’s hand moves of its own volition, until it hovers above the electrical stimulator. He can feel its magnetic pull, almost willing his hand to lower. He wonders why he feels such a primal urge to bring pain to the doctor. Trintignant never hurt him; never hurt anyone he knew. All that he knows of Trintignant’s crimes is second-hand, distorted and magnified by time and the human imagination. That the doctor was tolerated, even encouraged, cannot seriously be doubted. He filled the hole in Yellowstone society where a demon was meant to fit.

“What’s wrong, Carl? Qualms?”

“How do I know this won’t send a jolt directly to his pleasure centre?”

“Look at his spinal column. Watch it thrash.”

“Spines don’t thrash.”

“His does. Those little mechanisms—”

It’s all the encouragement he needs. He brings his hand down, holding the contact closed for a good five or six seconds. Under the brain, the stump of spinal matter twists and flexes like a rattlesnake’s tail. He can hear it scraping glass.

He raises his hand, watches the motion subside.

“See,” Goodglass says, “I knew you’d do it.”

Grafenwalder notices that there’s some kind of heavy medical tool next to the brain tank, a thing with a grip and a clawed alloy head. With his other hand he picks it up, testing its weight. The glass container looks invitingly fragile; the brain even more so.

“Be careful,” Goodglass says.

“I could kill him now, couldn’t I? Put an end to him, for ever.”

“Many would applaud you. But then you’d be providing him with a way out, an end to this existence. On the other hand, you could send another jolt of pain straight into his mind. What would you rather, Carl? Rid the world of Trintignant and spare him further pain, or let him suffer a little longer?”

He’s close to doing it; close to smashing the tool into the glass. As close as she is, Goodglass couldn’t stop him in time. And there would be something to be said for being the man who closed the book on Trintignant. But at the decisive instant something holds him back. Nothing that the doctor did has ever touched him personally, but he still feels a compulsion to join in his torment. And as the moment passes, he knows that he could never end the doctor’s life so cleanly, so mercifully, when pain is always an alternative.

Instead, he presses the button again, and holds it down longer this time. The spine thrashes impressively. Behind him, Ursula Goodglass applauds.

“Good for you, Carl. I knew you’d do the right thing.”

The next two weeks are an endurance. Grafenwalder must sit tight-lipped as excited rumours circulate concerning Ursula Goodglass’s new exhibit. No one mentions Trintignant by name—that would be the height of crass indiscretion— but even those who have not yet visited her habitat can begin to guess at the nature of her new prize. Even the most level-headed commentators are engaged in a feverish round of praise-giving, seeking to outdo each other in the showering of plaudits. Even though she has only been in the collecting business for a little while, she has pulled off an astonishing coup. Attention is so heated that, for a day or two, the Circle must fend off the unwanted interest of a pair of authority investigators, still on Trintignant’s trail. The bribes alone would pay for a new habitat.

Grafenwalder’s adult-phase hamadryad, meanwhile, brings no repeat visits. Now that it has lost its novelty value to the other collectors, Grafenwalder feels his own interest in it waning. He thinks of it less and less, and has increasingly little concern for its welfare. When his keepers inform him that the animal is suffering from a dietary complaint, he doesn’t even bother to visit it. Three days later, when they tell him that the hamadryad has died, all he can think about is the money he paid Captain Shallice. For an hour or so he toys with the idea of bringing the dead thing back to life with electrodes, the way Goodglass animated her specimen, but the idea that he might be seen to be playing second fiddle to her rises in him like yellow bile. He gives orders that the animal be ejected into space, and can’t even bring himself to watch it happen.

Six hours later, he contacts Rifugio.

“I was beginning to think I wouldn’t hear from you again, Mister Grafenwalder. If you’d left it much longer I wouldn’t have anything to sell you.”

Grafenwalder can hardly keep the excitement from his voice. “Then it’s still available? The terms still apply?”

“I’m a man of my word,” Rifugio answers. “The terms are the same. Does that mean we have a deal?”

“I’ll want additional guarantees. If the specimen turns out to be something other than claimed—”

“I’m selling it to you in good faith. Take it or leave it.”

He takes it, of course, as he had known he would before he placed the call. He’d have taken it even if Rifugio had doubled his asking price. A living, captive Denizen is the only thing that will take the shine off the Circle’s new fondness for Goodglass, and he must have it at all costs.

The arrangements for payment and handover are typically byzantine, as necessity demands. For all that he distrusts men like Rifugio, they must make a living as well, and protect themselves from the consequences of their activities. Grafenwalder, in turn, has his own stringent requirements. The shipping of the creature to Grafenwalder’s habitat must happen surreptitiously, and the flow of credit from one account to another must be untraceable. It is complicated, but by the same token both men have participated in many such dealings in the past, and the arrangements follow a certain well-rehearsed protocol. When the automated transport finally arrives, bearing its precious aquatic cargo, Grafenwalder is certain that nothing has gone amiss.

He has to fight past his own keepers to view the specimen for the first time. At first, he feels a flicker of mild disappointment: it’s a lot smaller than he was expecting, and it’s not just a trick of the light due to the glass walls of the holding tank. The Denizen isn’t much larger than a child.

But the disappointment doesn’t last long. In the flesh, the Denizen appears even more obviously real than the swimming creature in the movie clip. It’s sedated when it arrives, half its face and upper torso swallowed by a drug-administering breathing device. Rifugio’s consignment comes with detailed notes concerning the safe waking of the creature. First, Grafenwalder has it moved into the main viewing tank, now topped up with cold water under one hundred atmospheres of pressure. The water chemistry is now tuned to approximate conditions near one of the Europan thermal vents. He brings the creature to consciousness in utter darkness, and monitors its progress as it begins first to breathe for itself, and then to tentatively explore its surroundings. It swims lethargically at first, Grafenwalder viewing its moving body via heat-sensitive assassin’s goggles. By all accounts the Denizens have infrared sensitivity of their own, but the creature takes no heed of him, even when it passes very close to his vantage point.

After several minutes, the creature’s swimming becomes stronger. It must be adapting to the water, learning to breathe again. Grafenwalder watches the flick of its tail in mesmerised fascination. By now it has mapped the con fines of its new home, testing the armoured glass with delicate sweeps of its fingertips. It is intelligent enough to know that nothing will be gained by striking the glass.

Grafenwalder has the main lights brought up and shone into the tank. He slips the assassin’s goggles up onto his brow. The creature attempts to swim away from the glare, but the glare follows it remorselessly. Its eyes are lidless, so it can do little except screen its face with one delicately webbed hand. The wide gash of its mouth opens in alarm or anger, or both, revealing rows of sharp little teeth.