Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (16 page)

He was only partly surprised when they eventually reached the log bridge over the black pool. By now he was gasping for breath.

"Wait a moment!" Tarn yelled to the prime. "We... can't keep up."

Anna was doubled up, but managed a whisper. "I'll be all right... we're nearly back at the road."

"Give me a minute." Tarn took air in gulps.

The prime stood half-hidden by brushferns and watched. It showed no sign of fatigue.

Anna leaned a hand on Tarn as she straightened up, but he shook it off. "Tell me... " she said. "Do you really believe that was Julian's grave?"

"It's possible."

"I wasn't even sure he was real," she confessed. "I'm still not sure."

"So you're
not
his great granddaughter?"

"Hashi said it... I'm a fake."

The prime moved off again and Tarn nearly tripped as he hurried after. "What else did you lie about?" he shouted back.

"Seeing as we're coming clean... the button. I planted it, for the film."

"And what else?"

"The money... I'm not rich, although I do intend to be."

She caught up.

He turned so suddenly that she bumped into him. "I
trusted
you."

"Don't be so superior, Tarn. I know you were lying about being kidnapped by Julian. You're as much a fake as me."

"What makes you—"

"Memories," she cut him off and snatched the yellow cap from his hand.
"This
brought your memories back. But the truth is it's just an ordinary cap with wires. It does nothing. It was all about the film." She tossed it into the bushes.

The prime returned and gestured for them to move on.

"Was everything you told me a lie?" he asked.

"The buckle might be genuine."

"So we're no closer to the truth about Julian now than we were before," said Tarn. "Was it all worth it?"

She held the camera to her chest. "I wasn't looking for the truth... just the chance to make money."

"Two men are dead."

"And what marvelous men they were."

Shortly they burst out onto the road. Tarn's bus remained where he had left it. The elongated shadow of the jungle loomed across the fields as the sun dropped low in a plum sky. Anna leaned against the bus to catch her breath.

Tarn stared at her until she raised her eyebrows in query. "You would have let them kill me," he said.

"Of course not. You misjudge me."

"Perhaps," said Tarn. "But I'll have to report what happened here."

"Of course you will," she agreed. "Hashi and Benedictus were killed by an unprovoked attack by the primes. Who could have guessed they were so vicious, so territorial? A tragic event, but a great story, a great film. That's what happened."

"I can't—"

"You can!" She pulled open the creaking door to the bus. "Or I'll have to reveal that
you're
a fake too. That might just destroy the tour business."

That business was his life. How else could he afford to look after his mother? He could hardly go to the city.

Anna put a hand on his shoulder and he shuddered at her heartless touch. "Sometimes a lie is for the best," she said. Again she gave him that smile. "Surely I don't have to tell you that? You and me, we're just the same."

As she got onto the bus, Tarn looked around at their prime guide, who had been observing the exchange. Tarn nodded a thank you and the prime straightened its back and saluted. A military salute. Then the creature stepped forward with its hand extended. Cautiously Tarn met its hand with his and felt the softness and warmth.

"I suspect that's the second time in my life that you've helped me," Tarn said. Now he was certain who had saved him all those years ago. "I owe you double."

Then the creature ran off into the trees.

On the drive back to the hotel, Tarn's thoughts were in turmoil. The martial primes, the killing of Hashi and Benedictus, Julian's grave....

And Anna.

No, they were not the same—Anna and him. His lies had been born from fear, not greed... and he was no longer afraid. Not of his father. Not of anything.

As he steered the bus along the uneven road, he pulled the black cap from his belt and put it back on.

"So," said Anna. "Is it a deal?"

After a moment's hesitation, he held out his hand and they shook. "Yes."

He had just told his last lie.

As soon as Anna was in flight, Tarn would visit his old friend Prefect Petersen. Anna would arrive at her destination to the welcome she deserved. Tarn expected problems from Petersen—not least the gloating of a man finally proved right—but, whatever the consequences, Tarn was ready to bear them.

Tonight, he would consider his future, his skills and options, his chances of another job, and—just maybe—the possibility of a new tour.

Tomorrow, he would wash the bus.

Alan Wall is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist. His work has been translated into ten languages. His essays are currently appearing online at the
Fortnightly Review,
and will be published as a book,
Labyrinths and Clues,
next summer. He is Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Chester. In his latest story for us, Alan takes an unsettling look at mysterious and philosophical questions regarding...

"Joe?"

"Harry."

"Settled in?"

"Only been here half a morning."

"And you've already got your first job."

"Look interesting?"

"Looks dead, Joe. Looks seriously dead. Get over here now."

"Where's here?"

"Unit 3, Bioscience. Lab 33."

So it was that the newly appointed head of the freshly formed Special Inquiry Unit was summoned out on his first job before he had even managed to unpack all his files. The week before he had been one more inspector on homicide. Just another investigator into the multifarious stiffs cluttering the streets of a major city. But as of today he was involved in more arcane stuff, procedurals where you might sometimes have to dispense with the normal manner of proceeding. He tried to remember what he should take: camera, laptop, diary, notebook, pen. God, he still had a pen.

The corpse in the white coat on the wooden chair in Lab 33 was (or had been) Dr. Frank Beers. Why a whitecoat flicking his switch to the off position should involve the Special Inquiry Unit was still a mystery to Joe Banks as he walked through the swing doors. Then Harry's finger directed him to the forehead of the dead doctor, slumped over his table. He stared for a moment. It looked as though some embroidered cloth had been sewn into Beers's skin, in a strip above his eyebrows. Incredibly fine. Some sort of filigree work. Banks had never seen anything like it before, not attached to human skin, anyway. Two hours into this job at the SIU and I'm already discovering a new way of dying, he thought. He turned to Harry.

"What is it?"

"Hoping you might tell us. Thought you'd better see it before we ship our boy down to pathology."

"Who's the pathologist?"

Harry checked his notes.

"Dr. Renata Dibdin."

"Any form?"

"Never heard of her. Dead brain specialist."

"She can check you out when she's done with our friend here, then."

"A new job, Joe, but you brought the old jokes with you, I see."

It was six o'clock that evening when Inspector Joseph Banks received the call he'd been waiting for all afternoon: the pathologist had completed the first stage of her inquiry, and could now meet him.

He'd never liked the smell of formaldehyde. Something about morgues and path labs always got him down, even after all these years. Entering a world of dead rubber, frozen sperm, embryos in bottles and vitrines. And the bright white light from above announced that sunlight had now been dissolved forever in disinfectant. He found Dibdin's door and knocked three times.

"Come in."

Small, shapely, with black hair and dark eyes so quick they must have made a pleasing contrast to the dead who were her daily business.

"Banks. Inspector."

"Renata Dibdin. Take a seat."

"There's going to be a bit of a rush on with this one, Doctor. So can I be blunt: what killed him?"

"What killed him was a radiating force which crystallized the area above the brainstem. It appears to have taken approximately one hour to effect brain death."

"But what actually caused it?"

"An unknown force."

"You couldn't be any more specific?"

"If I could, I would, believe me. Never seen anything like it before. New one on me."

"The patch on his forehead?"

"That's a new one too."

"Did it cause the death?"

"I don't know. If it did, then..."

For the first time she faltered, and Banks had the sudden sense that his work of a week ago might not be likely to help much in terms of what was presenting itself to him now. Doctor Dibdin picked up her notes.

"If the force that crystallized the area above the brainstem entered through the forehead, then it left the neocortex untouched while passing through it."

"How can that happen?"

"It can't, according to present medical knowledge."

"And yet it did."

"So it seems."

"You appear perplexed."

"No, Inspector, I don't appear perplexed. I am perplexed."

At that point Banks's cell phone rang. It was Harry back at Lab 33.

"We've found something on Beers's computer. Can your lady friend down there give us a specific time on his point of death?"

"When did he die, exactly, do you know?"

"Seven A.M., give or take a few minutes."

He relayed this information back to Harry. Another question was asked.

"And how long was he dying?"

"One hour, almost exactly."

"Then he must have written this stuff in the last hour of his life."

"So what does it say?"

"You'd better come over, Joe."

He told her where he was going and why.

"Can I come? I knew him—knew him well. I might be able to help decipher the stuff. I do know a fair amount about his work, you see."

"Then come. Glad of any help I can get at the moment."

Twenty minutes later they all stood around the screen, looking at the last words Doctor Frank Beers had typed into his computer, as the oldest part of his brain turned into a crystalline solid and he prepared to die.

"Can we print it out?"

"Better not. Might confuse the electronic record. I'll download it all later. But this is the screen he was in front of. Thought we should look at it in exactly the same form he did, while he prepared to take his bow."

And so they looked on in silence, and read over and over again the words the dying man had written:

SILK OF THE SEAS AND THE ARCTIC FLOWERS.

RIMBAUD WRONG: THERE IS SUCH A THING.

LYSENKO SHOULD HAVE PRESSED ON WITH WHEAT IN THE ARCTIC. EVEN A TYRANT CAN BE RIGHT.

NOTHING TO FEAR FROM THE CROCODILE'S DYING.

NOTHING

NOTHING

NOTHING

NOTHING

NOTHING

A half hour later, they sat in the wine bar two streets away. Banks had a glass of Sauvignon in front of him; Renata Dibdin had a glass of water—"I have to go back to the lab. Might be there all night."

"So how much dying had he done by the time he wrote that?"

Banks had written down the words from the screen in his notebook, reproducing the original format as exactly as possible. It lay open on the table between them. Pens still had their uses, then.

"The crystallization above the brainstem had already begun by then. He had another twenty minutes to go, not much more."

"Not exactly a cry for help, now is it?"

"Not exactly, no."

"Do you know what he was on about?"

There was something about the intentness of Renata Dibdin, the way the compression of her body appeared to be matched by the compression of her mind as expressed through her facial features, that intrigued Banks. He had been divorced for over two years now. His wife had simply stopped interesting him. The person sitting opposite him in this wine bar interested him a great deal.

"The quote at the top is from Rimbaud.
Les Illuminations.
Read it?" Banks shook his head. "Rimbaud writes this image—silk of the seas and the arctic flowers—then later when he's reading it over he scribbles at the side, impatiently,
there's no such thing.
It's generally taken as a sign of what's to come. Rimbaud abandons poetry completely. Takes to unorthodox private enterprise in Africa. Seems keen to please his mother, who'd been pretty seriously displeased when he went to Paris with Verlaine. Only at the end of his life, lying in a hospital bed, does he start to do poetry again. He spoke poetry then, according to his sister who was sitting beside him when he died. She'd never heard anything like it. Sentence after sentence of luminous visions. We have no record of that—only her recollections."

Banks stared at the words in front of him.

"So why does this say Rimbaud was wrong?"

"In those last hours maybe Rimbaud himself was saying Rimbaud was wrong. William Blake said Dante's Inferno was true—not despite the fact that it was imagined, but because of it. Nothing is true unless it's fully imagined. We don't live in a world of fact—we can't—we have to transmute the facts into reality."

"Interesting thing to hear a scientist say. So what's this next bit then, about Lysenko and wheat in the Arctic?"

"Lysenko was Stalin's scientific chief honcho. Seemed to have had some Lamarckian idea that plants could be developed so radically that they could grow in the most hostile conditions. I think the idea at the time was that Darwin was trapped in bourgeois conventions, despite Marx's great admiration for him. In a socialist state like the USSR, we could get past Darwin. Then we'd be able to re-engineer nature to our own requirements."

"Isn't that what we're doing right now?"

"Something very similar, yes."

"So Rimbaud's poetry and Stalinist genetics both had a bigger point than anyone noticed at the time, even Rimbaud and Stalin. So where does the crocodile come in?"

"The area above the brainstem is the oldest part of the brain. Links us back to the reptiles. At this very moment, you have a crocodile inside your head, Inspector."

"Talk to my ex-wife about it. She'd probably buy you dinner, to give thanks for finding such a sympathetic ear. So why don't we have to fear the crocodile's dying then?"

"The cerebral cortex would take over. We would lose the most primitive part of our brains."

"Is there not a downside to that?"

"Yes. It's the oldest part of the brain that connects up with the body. Take it away and we die."

"And that's what happened to Dr. Beers?"

"So it seems."

"But he was happy enough to go. If this is what he wrote in the last hour of his life, I mean."

"They say that William Blake died singing. It's been argued that if you were about to fall into a black hole, just sliding over the event horizon, then as the atoms in your legs start stretching out like pasta tubes, your brain might possibly be able to clock what was going on."

"So Dr. Beers died a happy man then?"

"He sounds happier dying than he ever sounded alive."

Banks now stared at Renata in silence for a moment.

"You know a remarkable amount about Beers—the way his mind worked. Do you mind if I inquire about the nature of your relationship?"

"He taught me for a while. I attended his lectures and tutorials."

"This is a murder investigation, of course, so I do need to press you. Was that the full extent of the relationship?"

"No. I slept with him for six months, on and off. And to save you time, Inspector, I was sleeping with some other people, too. But I didn't kill him. I'm not sure anybody killed him."

"But he was killed."

"Yes, but not necessarily by
anybody.
I'd better get back to the lab and see if I can help solve that particular problem for you."

Banks was asleep the next morning when the telephone rang.

"I think you need to get over here straight away, Inspector. And I'd leave all your preconceptions at home."

He stared for a moment at his alarm clock. It wasn't yet six. Looked as though Dr. Renata Dibdin had had a busy night.

"Give me half an hour."

When he arrived at the lab, there was a man there as well as Renata. He was tall, thin, bald, and had a most curious smile on his face. It wasn't a smile of happiness. It was the sort of smile a sailor might have after a long night out carousing, as he stands on the harbor wall and watches his boat sailing away without him, all his possessions still down in steerage. Vivid blue eyes.

"Inspector Banks, meet Jeremy Stone. Neurophysiologist."

"So what have we got? Any coffee round here?"

"It's just coming. What have we got, Jerry? Shall you tell him, or shall I?"

"Should I sit down for this?"

"I'd recommend lying down, but the chaps who lie down round here never seem to get up again. Best not to doze off in a pathologist's dormitory."

He already liked Dr. Jeremy, except for one thing: might he be sleeping with Renata? It's not even seven in the morning, and I'm worried about that? Better watch myself. Then Jeremy kicked off.

"You know that part of Dr. Beers's brain crystallized?"

"The oldest part. The part above the brainstem."

"You're an apt student, Inspector," Renata said.

"Looks like I'm going to need to be."

"First thing. If that crystallization took place as a result of this... matter on the corpse's forehead, then the process would be unprecedented in its speed. It normally takes years, many years. A man addicted to methamphetamines could go on for a few decades before such solidity was finally achieved. We call it hitting the crystal. Costs a lot of money. Takes a lot of time."

"So we have an enhanced degeneration?"

"You could say that. Or as we neurophysiologists like to put it, we have an enhanced degeneration with knobs on."

"And what's the stuff on his forehead?"

Jeremy bowed gently toward Renata, who sipped at the coffee that had just been delivered, then spoke with great care.

"It does not correspond to any organic substance I am able to recognize. We'd better wait until the spectroscopic analyses are complete, and I don't want to be melodramatic, but at this moment there would appear to be an atomic structure here that isn't known to contemporary medical science. The matter appears to have been woven into the flesh, with a degree of epidermal binding I've never encountered before. The material is remarkably thin, astonishingly durable and malleable to an extraordinary degree. It appears to be some sort of gossamer graphite. I've sent samples elsewhere, to places with more sophisticated equipment than we have here."

"But how could that stuff on his forehead cause part of his brain to crystallize?"