Janus (36 page)

From the edge of the dam, Grebbel watched a dirigible drift to the landing pole. A cloud shadow slid from it, and the gasbag acquired an orange arc of highlight. He timed the stages of its approach as it butted into the headwind. When the airscrews were clearly idling and the gasbag was anchored, he turned his truck and headed back to the gravel pile. Menzies passed him on the way and rolled down his window as they crossed. “You’ve seen them often enough by now, haven’t you? We’re slipping behind as it is, without everyone stopping to gape at the traffic.” There was more than impatience in his tone.

At the end of his shift, Grebbel met Osmon outside the clinic. “I think people are beginning to notice things,” he said. “The foreman chewed me out for watching how the blimp came in, and I don’t think he was just bothered about the production on his shift. I don’t think he can do much without putting his own ass on the line, but the sooner we’re ready to move the better.”

“Yes,” said Osmon. “The sooner the better. Security found Schuhman’s body this afternoon. I think they’re going to be asking questions, and I saw another party going into the caves. Not the section where the arms are hidden, but they looked ready to make a search.”

Grebbel inhaled sharply and held a long breath. “She told them,” he muttered. “They’re forcing our hand.” Then he nodded, and his shoulders relaxed. “Well, we’re committed now. How far along are the preparations?”

“We’ve checked out the automatics as far as we can. We have the azoplas ready for installation.”

“Right,” Grebbel said and shivered. “The sooner the better, then. This weekend. To be safe, keep an eye on Larsen. Have Tallis help you. I’ll try to watch Menzies myself.”

After two days, Elinda went back to try and see Barbara. She found Carlo talking quietly with Dr. Henry in the entrance to the clinic. They stopped when she approached, and Henry turned to her with a smile.

“The young lady from the tavern. You’ve come to visit your old roommate, I suppose. She seems to be making some unexpected progress. We’re all very happy about it, I don’t need to say.” He took a step towards the door. “In fact, I’m going to indulge one of my many vices in celebration. They won’t let me practise it—or most of the others, it seems—inside here.” He stepped to the door and pulled out a metal case, produced what Elinda recognised as a genuine-looking cigar and a lighter. “It’s an abominable luxury that I really shouldn’t indulge in,” he said, but I find it soothes the nerves at times—helps difficult decisions resolve themselves. Be seeing you, I hope.” He fastened his coat and put a flame to the cigar, puffed vigorously, then walked briskly away.

She turned to Carlo. “She’s getting better? Can I see her?”

He frowned. “It’s not quite that simple. There are encouraging signs, but so far, mainly clinical: we think her alpha rhythms and her sleeping patterns are coming closer to the normal range. Don’t get your hopes up: you may not find a great deal of improvement. You can see her later—someone else is in there now, and she’s sufficiently aware of other people to be tired by too much contact. I’ll have to see how she looks when this visit’s over.”

“You’re not telling me who’s seeing her, but I think I can guess. . . . Did our experiment have anything to do with the change?”

“It’s hard to say. If we look back at her records, we can find indications that things may have started changing a week or ten days back. And there have been other influences on her—it’s not what you’d call a controlled experiment.”

“When can I see her then?” she asked.

Jessamyn came out of the corridor when Barbara’s room was. She stopped and spoke to Carlo. “She’s tired now. I thought I’d better let her rest. But she knew me. She talked to me. She’s going to make it.” Her eyes were wet.

“Does she know what happened to her?” Elinda demanded.

Jessamyn turned to her. “I didn’t ask her that,” she said. “I thought there were more important things to worry about right now.” To Carlo she said, “I’ll make another appointment as soon as I can,” and hurried away.

“Let me see her, Carlo, please,” Elinda whispered. “I won’t disturb her.”

He looked at her, then shrugged. “I’ll have to check on her first.”

He came back a minute later. “I’ll let you have a couple of minutes, but I’ll have to stay and supervise.”

“Okay. Thanks, Carlo.”

They went in. Barbara was lying with her eyes closed, half turned towards the door. Elinda bent over her, tried to smooth Barbara’s hair back from her face. Without opening her eyes, Barbara stirred, muttered, smiled. Elinda bent closer and whispered, “What, Barbara? I can’t hear you.”

Barbara muttered and opened her eyes.

When Elinda came out with Carlo two minutes later, she was trembling. Carlo reached for her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said stiffly. “It’s not your fault. She just didn’t know me, that’s all. She thought I was Jessamyn again. It’s not your fault.” She freed her hand. “I’d better go and let you get on with your work. It’s all right.”

But it wasn’t all right. As she walked back towards the Greenhouse, she still felt Barbara’s rejection. What had she tried to say, at the beginning, before she had opened her eyes?
Car? Scar? Scarf?

She remembered helping to carry her out of the bush. The red mud from Barbara’s boots had rubbed onto her parka. It had looked like drying blood and had appalled her afterwards, so that she had spent an hour the next day cleaning it off. But when she had picked up the same mud from the cave in the mountain, it had hardly bothered her. And the day before Barbara had been found, when she might have gone looking, she had been oddly intrigued by the new arrival she had seen walking from the dirigible with Carlo and Dr. Henry.

Her mind swept her away from that, to memories of Barbara since then. The inert figure who had given no response to her until that strange meeting in the electronic unworld. She tried to remember how it had started. Darkness, then a patch of light, then falling into the cell— No. Something else, before that.

Tobacco smoke.

Cigar?

Barbara’s words came back to her: “Do. What remember. Do. Do.”

This time, without effort, she filled in the rest.
What you remember is what you are, and what you are is what you do. What I tell you to remember is what you’ll be.
And then Dr. Henry, the hypnotist, had begun his performance in the bar. . . .

Dr. Henry. The last person to see Barbara before Elinda and Charley found her? Dr. Henry, the puppet-master?

She walked faster to try and control her trembling.

That evening she began to make enquiries. On the computer bulletin board, she found what might be clues: a reference to a rabbit hole, a comment on missing persons, female. But when she tried to follow them up, she found only whispers—something that Marcia had heard from Eric who had overheard Kwan-li talking to Jacqueline at work about what Jean-Luc had been told by someone who could always be trusted.

She went to Carlo and asked in general terms about corruption among the authorities. He insisted he didn’t know anything for certain, but warned her to be careful. He hinted that there were things going on that some of the people back there didn’t approve of, though others did.

There was such an edge of nervousness in his manner that she believed him enough to be sure she was on the right track.

Then she looked for Grebbel. It was the night of the Council meeting, and she was half convinced she was going to have to confront Henry herself.

Grebbel’s room was empty. His heavy clothing and pack were gone. She started to wonder what that meant, then tore herself away and headed for the Council meeting.

She sat at the end of a row near the back, behind most of the usual sprinkling of spectators. She listened impatiently while the group on the platform debated schedules and labour assignments while deflecting most of the questions from the floor. Dr. Henry looked controlled and businesslike, keeping the discussions moving, making sure that voices were heard, opinions recorded.

At the end, as the meeting was breaking up, she approached the front. Henry was involved in a discussion with two other Council members, and she wondered how she was going to attract his attention. But he turned to her with a genuine-looking smile of recognition.

“The young lady I keep running into,” he said. “We should introduce ourselves properly someday. You have some suggestions for running the Council meetings? Believe me, I’ve been looking for some way of streamlining these Procrustean exercises in time-dilation for years.”

“No—actually I wanted to see you about something else—about memory problems.”

“Ah. Something specifically concerning you?”

“Well—not me directly,” she said, letting herself stammer a little. This game was obviously going to be played on more than one level, and something that looked like a transparent excuse might make her more credible as an ingénue with a crush. “A friend of mine—she told me about it. She gets these dreams, you see. She wakes up and she can’t quite remember what she was dreaming about, but she’s sure it was her past. And she’s scared. She’s convinced she did something horrible then, but she doesn’t know what. It’s driving her crazy. She doesn’t know whether she wants to find out what’s the truth behind it all—if that’s possible, I mean—or just make them, the dreams go away. It’s dreadful—you’re scared to go to sleep, and when you wake up in the morning, you know you’ll be thinking about the dreams all day, trying to remember them, and all the time just terrified of what you’ll find. That’s what she told me, I mean.”

“It doesn’t sound as though your friend’s in an immediate crisis,” he said. “Has she had any help from the clinic? They’re the people for something like this.”

“She did go for a while. But it didn’t seem to be helping. If it was doing anything at all, it was making things worse. But then she heard somewhere that you could sometimes help people like that—you being the inventor of the machine. So she asked me, since I’ve talked to you before, to come and ask if you could do anything for her. She’d—we’d both be very grateful.”

“It’s welcome to see someone so anxious to help a friend. I don’t know if I can do much myself, though. I get so little time to do clinical or experimental work these days, I’m afraid my meagre talents are getting quite rusty.”

She had a sudden urge to say,
All right, we’ve both shown we know the script: can we just skip ahead to the end of the scene and get on with the next?
Instead, she shook her head—no, she was certain he was being too modest, everyone talked about how brilliant he had been—and he had no idea how important it was to her—her friend, she meant.

And so the scene played itself out. He reluctantly agreed that he might be the best one to help her; he realised that the rest of his evening was free and suggested they discuss the problem in more comfortable surroundings. They walked through the divided moonlight to his darkened home.

Inside the entrance hall, he reached around her shoulder, and dim yellow light filtered from hidden places in the walls and ceiling. She was in a long, narrow and curved room with the highest ceiling she could remember seeing in a private home. The two longer walls were covered with unfinished logs set vertically to give the impression of a dense forest. The air was filled with the scent of pine overlaying the tang of tobacco.

“One of the few indulgences my position permits,” Dr. Henry said. “I always found those low-ceilinged little boxes so sterile and oppressive.” Instead of recognisable furniture, there were large, semi-rigid cushions in broad stripes of pastel shades scattered across the floor. He pushed a couple into shape and beckoned her. “I think you’ll find these more comfortable than you might expect. But then you don’t remember the tiny little lunch boxes most of us had to live in back there; so you see, being without a past can have its advantages.”

“It’s my friend who has the problem,” she said, wondering if he was trying to trap her. “I didn’t say I had.”

“Right. Of course. I was merely recalling our earlier conversations. I didn’t mean to imply anything else. So what do you think of my little solitary indulgence?”

“It’s very nice. Is that a real fireplace?”

“Yes. Two things I love particularly, and I had them built into this house—my own ideals of luxury: natural materials and illusion. The fireplace illustrates the first—I can burn hardwood logs or other things if I choose in that grate, and they will burn well, with little soot and smoke. As to the second”—he reached forward and picked up a flat remote-control unit—“part of the attraction of illusion is the way it can reveal unsuspected truths about ourselves. Let’s see what we can find here.”

With a faint whirring, a section of the log wall pivoted about a vertical axis and was replaced by a boxlike machine with an astonished-looking cluster of lenses at its centre. He pointed the control unit again. Light flickered from the lenses towards the lower part of the wall in front of her, and the wall glowed and seemed to recede into oceanic depths.

“From some points of view,” he said, “we live by manipulating illusions.” Beneath his voice, orchestral sound began to stir. “Words are masks we’ve learned to recognise in place of the things they label. We count them like coins, valuing them for the face they bear—just as the coin itself is a bronze or nickel mask for the true gold—which in turn is a mask for what we would use it to achieve. You see, what lies behind all the masks is something within the skull, within the mind, something that lies hidden among our dreams and fears. We may look back along our lives and think we glimpse the secret in memory, but memory can be the most precious and most deceiving coinage of all. Memories shift and merge or vanish when we try to examine them. They fade like a half-developed photograph if we ignore them, but distort under the glare of too close a scrutiny. Yet what would we do without them? Do you like this music?”