03. The Maze in the Mirror (22 page)

They re-entered quickly, bringing a golden decanter, glasses, and then bowls. Quin Tarn got up from his throne and then took a seat cross-legged on one of the pillows.

"Please," he said, gesturing. "Join me."

I walked up and sat, facing him. He poured what appeared to be red wine from the decanter into two golden goblets, set the decanter back down, then picked up his cup. "To your success," he said, and I took mine, raised it to him, and tasted it. It was pretty good stuff and I said so.

"Thank you. We have our own vineyards in the lowlands developed from the finest grapes from as many worlds. Much of this region below the mountains is temperate and the soil mineral-rich. We have been doing a great deal of development work and planning to create a new society here."

My eyebrows rose. "This is an uninhabited world, then?"

He nodded. "Humans never developed here, and many of the animals and insects are different and some are quite dangerous, but controllable. The differences are easily compensated for, even without the burden of heavy technology. The people are the refuse of a hundred worlds, the refugees, the dispossessed, the former inhabitants of corrugated huts within garbage dumps created by the imbalance of wealth and social class. I have abolished such things. Those who work here share equally in all bounty. Those who do not work will
starve. Tho&e who can not work will be provided for by those who do."

"Utopia, huh? No government, no controls, just sharing and social pressure. And what keeps it that way?"

"Social pressure, as you say," he responded. "That and the unifying religion which defines the rules and the limits of knowledge and technology. It is a peaceful religion, against violence, against selfishness, making few demands and few promises. The distillation of the best of a hundred faiths and my later life's work. You see, sir, they robbed me of my own people, my own world, but this is my legacy and my dream and my refuge. It is already virtually cut off; when the Labyrinth is shut down, it will be totally isolated and yet protected. I will seal it off with me inside before the end comes, so that there will be no connection to the power grid."

This was interesting. "You weren't too keen on closing the Labyrinth, though. Why not?"

"If you ask that then you have not thought the whole thing through. Ask Mancini when you see him. Ask him to tell you the worst case model for the closure and the odds of it. The destruction of the Company world I can not, deep within my soul, complain about. When a place is infested with predatory, carnivorous insects one is forced to fumigate. But a moral man must ask if it makes any sense to use a poison to rid a house of pests if that poison also rids the house of its owners."

The women brought out two big bowls of rice, white and brown, and kept bringing out stuff to put on the rice. You just stuck some rice in the bowl and then put half the portion on top and ate it, not with chopsticks but with a golden fork and spoon. Knives weren't necessary.

Most of it was good, but in spite of my hunger I was getting a gut sourness in my stomach from the conversation that was keeping me from fully enjoying it.

"You're telling me that there's a chance that this thing could blow up everything? Every world? That's why you're going to sever all links before they do it? Sever them and pray that the weak points don't leak the destruction in spite of that."

"I will say no more about it," he maintained, "nor answer any more questions on it. If the others, particularly Mancini, wish to elaborate more fully upon this, then it is their responsibility."

"Fair enough," I agreed. I had heard more than enough for now to give me a picture both of the problem and of Tarn. Of course, he might be playing with me, feeding me a line, but it fit what I was seeing and certainly fit in with some of my theories. "What about Pandross? Speaking as one who was present at the meeting and also as one who knew and worked with the man for many years, not as a mind reader-what was his feeling on this? He must have known it. Would it have bothered him?"

Tarn seemed unprepared for that question, and thought about it. "He might. He was a strange man, a very private one, although always totally capable and dependable. Still, I would say it would not be possible to fully make a judgment on him in any moral matter. He seemed to be motivated only for the challenge, not for any inner moral purpose, good or evil. I always thought that much was going
on beneath his skin, but it was never allowed to be shown to others. He seemed almost more machine than human. Always objective, never divisive. A team player for whatever the team decided to do. Does that help?"

I shook my head negatively. "Not a bit. I am convinced that getting inside his head, seeing things as he saw them, is the key to all of this, but so far he remains the same enigma his files illustrate." I sighed. "Would you answer me a serious question?"

"Perhaps."

"You are going along with this because you know you are powerless to stop it, but I can sense that you still have deep moral reservations about it. If there were a way to stop it, to take a less drastic course, to return to the original opposition methods, would you do it?"

His deep, black eyes bored into me. "Perhaps. I have often asked myself this very question, particularly in the past few weeks, but I can see no way out of it without betraying my comrades and destroying the entire organization, and that is something I can not do under any circumstances. If the worst happens, I will answer to the gods as an equal with others, but if I were to betray my sacred oaths my soul would wander in the darkness, forever alone."

I nodded. "What about the others? They are all in the same situation."

"Voorhes would happily consign history to end if he could take the Company with it," Tarn responded. "They have left him with nothing but hate in his heart and his soul already in Hell. Kanda and Mancini see it as a grand experiment, a
test of their theories and their own genius. They know the odds but are convinced that they are far too clever for the worst to happen. They are basically secular men imprisoned by their own egos and intellects. One might also include Yugarin in that, since it is ultimately upon his theories that we will all rise and fall. Carlos and Valintina would be the sorts who simply would not care. They lost their souls a long time ago and do not miss them. Cutler-I would say she is in much the same position as myself. Resigned, as it were, rather than eager. Does this explain why we did not fight the decision? We were simply outnumbered."

"Uh huh. But it brings up the question of Pandross once more, and the same wall. I certainly believe you when you say that you would go through with it rather than betray your organization-but I wonder if somebody like him would believe that?"

"What do you mean?" Tarn was at least getting more impressed with me as we went along, which was fine with me.

"I think Pandross had, or
thought
he had, evidence that one of you was going to sell out the organization, the plan, and everything else. Once you are totally committed to this project, with people and materiel, you will, ironically, be totally extended and the most exposed to treason. You would have to be to do something of this sort."

"I see. And not having sufficient hard evidence to convince us that it was not he who was unbalanced, he either revealed his belief to this traitor or confronted him or her, and was killed."

"Not quite that simple, but you are in the right area. But, you see, there are three ways to go here. Was Pandross just doing his job, or was he protecting the project out of conviction or out of a repugnance that there would be a traitor, or, in fact, was it Pandross who saw a way to stop the project? The last is least likely, but that's why I like it."

"Fascinating. And you believe you can unmask this traitor when he could not? As limited as you are?"

"I don't know. I do know that, unlike him, I have no oath of fealty, no loyalty or friendship or comradeship with your group. I can be objective where he could not. An accusation from me would carry far more weight among you if you think it through than one from him if I had any supporting evidence."

He offered me more wine, but I held up my hand. "No more, please, of anything. I am beyond the ability to eat anything else right now."

He smiled, then got to his feet. I did the same, feeling that the pleasant audience was coming to an end. That was O.K.-I'd gotten fed and gotten more than I expected.

"Well, then, sir, are there more questions?"

"Not at this time," I told him. "Perhaps later, after I have talked to everyone and gotten everybody's side of this, but not now."

"But I remain suspected. More than others, because of my beliefs."

I shrugged. "Not necessarily. If you are a moral man as I believe you are, you might well be the least likely to betray it all. I suspect no one and everyone at this stage."

He chuckled. "And yet, is it not ironic that this is at the cost of your own moral sense? If you unmask our traitor, our project concludes. Betray him and you betray your own side."

"I have less love and loyalty to my side than you do to yours," I replied frankly. "We will see when we get there-
if
we get there. Uh-I trust my keeper is getting fed in her room?"

"Indeed. She is most unhappy but I do not wish to even meet her, let alone give her leave about this place. I do not know the ultimate name to which she reports. You understand."

"Perfectly," I assured him. "If I didn't need her I'd suggest just locking her up here and throwing away the key. All right, then. We will be taken back?"

"It is too late today, and too dangerous," he responded. "Sleep here, and leave at mid-day tomorrow. Not even those who have been here for many years like wandering about out there in the dark."

"Can't blame them a bit," I told him. I walked back to my boots and picked them up, then turned and bowed slightly to him. He acknowledged it, and I turned and walked to the doors. Just before, I stopped, turned, and looked back, and he was gone. Not only him, but the remains of our meal, even the pillows, were gone. I would have loved to know how the hell he did that.

I pulled the doors open, and found Black Robe waiting for me as I expected.

"Home, James," I said to him, and we went back down the hall.

I lay there for a while, not just thinking about the interview but also trying to digest the food that seemed to be packed in from my intestines all the
way up to my throat with the density of lead. It kept me from going to sleep, that was for sure, and since the TV wasn't so hot around this motel there was nothing much to do but run it through my brain.

The thing was, I liked Tarn. I liked him better than Voorhes, because Tarn hadn't died on that same day his world had died the way Voorhes and most of the others did. They were walking dead men; Quin Tarn seemed to be determined to live and make a major mark, almost as if he felt a responsibility to those who'd been murdered as one of the last of his kind to make his life count. He didn't seem to me to be a loony, and considering the organization he sure wasn't any pacifist, but of the ones I'd met so far he seemed the only really sane man.

You get a sixth sense after you've been a detective for a while and it rarely plays you completely false. I thought he was honest with me, and I appreciated that. He was also not unaware that I seemed to understand him and that this understanding alone made him suspect
numero uno
on the list.

What worried me more was his comment on Mancini and the odds. Tarn was a mineralogist- sort of the ultimate hard science but not somebody who was likely to be directly involved in the plan. Yugarin had come up with the idea and he was a geographer. That should be important somehow but I didn't see how yet. Maybe when I talked to him it would become clearer or hit me in the face. Mancini, now, he was the physicist-the one of the whole batch who was most likely to know the physics of the Labyrinth and how to use it and pervert it. The account of the meeting I had indicated that Yugarin took his idea to Mancini first, and maybe this Kanda, the mathematician, as well. That would fit. He'd figured out an idea but he didn't know enough to know what would be involved or exactly how to do it.

So this Mancini's intrigued, contacts Kanda to work out the math, and then comes up with the whole thing, engineered and checked and double-checked. But it's got a hitch to it. There's one chance in-well, who knows?-that things will go wrong, that it'll cause a super disaster. I remember once reading a book about the making of the atom bomb in which some scientists figured out there was a one in a hundred thousand chance or something like that that the bomb would set the atmosphere on fire. That sort of thing fit here.

But it also meant that they weren't trying to pull what the Company had pulled on their old world, since that was pretty safe for the guys doing the pulling. Of course, the Company had complete control of the power regulators, the Labyrinth path, everything, while these guys wouldn't. So they weren't gonna do this Company surge bit but something new, something much riskier, something never tried before and that worked only on paper. They weren't out to blow a world away, not even the Company world; they were out to blow the Labyrinth. Short it out somehow. And there was a chance in there someplace that it might short out a hell of a lot more than just the Labyrinth.

O.K., that framed the debate that must have gone on. I could already see it-the cold science types, the kind of guys who had no trouble building bigger and better H-bombs in the cause of peace and power, who saw this as a neat kind of experiment to prove some theories or something, come in with the thing, and it's so absolute that the walking dead ones like Voorhes embrace it immediately. If it was just Mancini, Yugarin, Kanda, Voorhes, and Mendelez that'd be five out of the nine. Add maybe Carlos and you get six. Tarn and the others could add as well as I could. They put up a fight, pointing out the odds, however slight, of it going all wrong, but they were arguing with the converted. So we get a mineralogist, a zoologist, and depending on Carlos a pharmacologist, against and none of those have the skills or backgrounds to be essential to the plot.