Janus (14 page)

When Grebbel drove off, Menzies picked up his lunch from his own truck and walked from the parking area. He headed along the river, then turned onto a track into the woods, leading back towards the Greenhouse. After a few minutes, Niels Larsen appeared from the other direction. They unwrapped sandwiches and walked together in the wind-shaken moonlight.

“He’s interested,” Menzies said. “I’ve seen the signs. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s building as much pressure as a tank of LOX.”

“It’s too dangerous now. We’ve already gone too far.”

“What about getting a look at his file? He might not turn sour.”

“I can’t risk it since they’ve tightened up,” Larsen said. “I think Carlo may suspect something. And in any case, I don’t think we should trust their files after the last couple of times.”

“What then? Do we just let them keep getting away with it?”

Larsen paced quietly, chewing, swallowing with difficulty. “I’d have to see him if we were going to do anything. . . . No, it’s too risky. We should have stopped as soon as we saw what we might bring back.”

“After Osmon, you mean? He hasn’t actually done anything, and I’d still bet he won’t as long he knows we’re watching.”

“I’ve never shared your certainty about him. And now Strickland looks like making trouble.”

“You think Osmon had something to do with Strickland’s girlfriend going missing?”

“No, I think you’re right there. But then there must be someone we don’t know about. An unpleasant thought but hardly surprising.”

“Yeah. Well, we can’t be responsible for everything. I just thought you should know about this new one.”

“You think he’s going to suffer,” Larsen muttered, almost to himself. “If we acquiesce in evil again, our guilt may make us lose our nerve. I’m speaking for myself of course. But still I need something greater than myself, or—or there’s nothing but ashes. You know some of this, but can you understand it?”

“I think you once learned to judge yourself harshly and you’ve never learned to stop.”

“Well, perhaps. But there are limits to the ways we can change ourselves. That’s the whole point, after all. . . . Perhaps you should keep an eye on him.”

Larsen watched Menzies walk back towards the dam. He remained, trying to finish his lunch, but his appetite had gone. A tenseness in his gut had been returning more frequently of late. Probably he would give himself ulcers if he took up this business again. And he could hardly go to the clinic for stress counselling.

As he walked back to the Greenhouse, he let himself remember his hard-won past—the gabled church where he had found mystery among candle flames enshrined by shadow and dark wood, and then the squalid cold huts under the blazing winter sky, where he had lost his faith, and begun the search for something to replace it.

His greatest fear was that he would succumb to his own weakness, let himself forget, content to let others take the risks, to leave things as they were, and be happy.

Alpha, the first moon, was rising as Elinda descended the path to the lower-level residences and Chris’s party. She had worked late, then gone home and eaten quickly, washed and changed, and then come straight out again, but the air was sharp with frost and her cheeks felt like leather.

A door opened, spilling light on four other arrivals. She hurried to join them, and they trooped into the darkened house, filled with the sound of slow dance music and a thick aroma of liquor and incense.

“Boots and coats in there, please,” said Chris. “Ah—ghoul, Frankenstein and mirth, the gifts of the wise guys,” as Elinda handed over the pastries she had brought. “How clever of you.”

“Wrong time of year, Chris. And Barbara made them,” she added with a momentary pang.

She made her way into the living room, trying not to be obviously looking for anyone. The place was already crowded. Ornate candles and a pair of battery-powered lanterns provided a dusky, golden light. At the far end, the furniture had been cleared back, and three couples were stuporously dancing. Beyond was the kitchen and another crowd. She worked her way towards it. A man in a green-and-white check shirt tried to look down the front of her blouse as he sipped from a paper cup. In an alcove at the edge of the dance floor a man in an astronaut uniform was showing an electronic folder of what looked like satellite photos to a woman hidden behind him.

“. . . perpetual cyclones,” he said. “Worse than here. Even the radar’s patchy. You’d have to go down there and explore, and no one’s going to send a dirigible into weather like that. If you know anyone in the shipbuilding business, they’ve got a career ahead of them.”

Closing down the folder, he bent to put it in a briefcase standing against the wall. The woman thanked him and turned and saw Elinda.

“You’re not at the clinic,” said Jessamyn; “so you must be here investigating, right?” She carried an old coil-backed notebook, opened to pencil sketches.

“Maybe.” Elinda wanted to talk to Robert Strickland if he turned up. The astronaut eyed them both and slipped away. “You’ve got time for your class project, too.”

“I’m just passing through. Shall I give Barbara your love? She’s going to need someone—”

“You said that before.”

“Yes I did, didn’t I?” Jessamyn hesitated, wringing the notebook in her hands until her knuckles whitened. They were blotched with paint. “You mean well, don’t you? I used to think I was a charitable person, once. . . . Enjoy the party. I’d better go before I repeat myself any more.”

Elinda struggled through to the kitchen and found a bottle with a hand-drawn label reading
Extra-Galactic Scotch Whisky.
Probably from Chris’s own moonshine factory. She poured herself three fingers of yellowish liquid and swallowed a mouthful. As the drink seared its way down her throat, she looked around her. A lot of familiar faces, but few with names she could put to them. She realised that living with Barbara had enabled her to isolate herself from life here. One of the faces she didn’t recognise belonged to another uniformed astronaut with a piratical-looking black beard. He was approaching the drinks table with a couple of empty glasses in each hand.

“Hi,” he said. “Just get here? I’ve been here just long enough to spot a new face. I’m Martin Aguerro. They gave the shuttle crew some ground-time, but only a few of us had the good sense to come along here.”

“Hello,” she muttered, then introduced herself. “I’m one of the farm labourers around here. You can tell from my blunt typing fingers. Are you new in this part of the cosmos, then?”

“Just here a month now. We’ve been setting up the new communications satellite net. So you people won’t get lost when you finally get time to explore down here properly.”

“Then you didn’t have to go through a lot of retraining? You didn’t lose it when you came through the Knot?”

“Oh, no—we were lucky. Or maybe someone’s starting to figure out how to get people through safely. The whole crew came across intact. I’ve heard it’s the personal details that get lost most.”

“Yes, it was that way with me.”

“Oh,” he said, “you had some bad luck, did you? Why don’t you come into the other room; a group of us are talking about that sort of thing, and they’re waiting for these refills.”

“You remember everything, and you’re happy out here? Or do you expect to go back?” she asked as she followed him through the crowd. No sign of Strickland. Nor of Jon Grebbel.

“No. I like the challenges. And the company”—with a quick smile over his shoulder—“and yes, the chances of regular two-way travel are looking better. If they can work out a good fix for the amnesia thing, you might find yourself going back and visiting in a few years.”

“Maybe, but I’m still wondering what brought me here. Maybe I had some huge ambition that could only be fulfilled here—ruler of a galactic empire or something—or I’d run away with the secret to making turkey goulash. If I knew why I’d come, perhaps I’d be making plans, starting an army or a cooking school.”

She followed him to a corner of the living room where a large terracotta mushroom was mounted on the wall. It didn’t look like the usual work of Karl and Hannah over in Building Materials. Maybe Chris or one of his group had made it. A couple of other astronauts—an oriental woman and a short, red-haired man—were part of a group talking to Carlo. He blinked when he saw her and made introductions, then turned to listen to the woman.

“In the lab I’m keeping a rider and its host apart,” she said, “and if I present the host with a stuffed oviphagus, the host goes into normal protective behavioural mode and attacks. Quite savagely. Now this rider has been conditioned from hatching to identify with the oviphage; it’s almost a case of classical imprinting. In my experiment, I let it go to the host and present the oviphage again. Then the host treats the eggstealer as one of the family. I believe with a bit more work we could get it to try to copulate with the ovirattus. It’s fascinating because only the local fauna show anything like this intensity of mental symbiosis.”

“Does the, the host behave any differently to the rat thing after the rider has been so friendly towards it?” Elinda asked. “Does it remember what it did when the rider had control of it?”

“The trouble is, no one really understands memory,” Carlo said, after the woman smiled and shrugged. “We probably know less about how it works now than we thought we did twenty years ago. They used to talk about it in terms of holograms—each individual item stored as a pattern in the whole brain. Now that seems to be too simple. The way you can lose particular chunks of information on the way here, it seems that different types of information are stored in different areas—or maybe stored in special ways. . . .”

“If you’re so much in doubt,” a voice said diffidently, “how do you go about treating people after we get here?” Elinda half turned and found Grebbel at her shoulder. He gave her a thin smile. She had the impression he had been listening for some time, hidden on the fringe of the group. His face was pale and she could see vertical bands of muscle in his cheeks.

Carlo shrugged and smiled. “It’s the boss’s area. He’s a genius at what he does, but I don’t think even he
really
knows why most of it works. Still, the technique does get results.”

“Well, that’s all that matters, isn’t it?” said the woman astronaut, with just enough suggestion of sarcasm to make Carlo and Grebbel both look at her. Martin, who had been eyeing Grebbel intently, gave her a hard look and emptied his glass.

“What have you lost, after all?” said one of the others.

“That’s just the point, isn’t it,” Grebbel said. “Who knows? And then why should we care?” He spread his arms theatrically, slopping his drink. The scars on his wrist were livid pink. “All the baggage of our past lives—cast off, abandoned, sent to another airport. Has that ever happened to you? Or you? Are you sure? You don’t remember! Congratulations! Give the lady another drink.”

He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Don’t breathe a word, but neither do I—isn’t it wonderful? Freedom! All of that burden gone, sloughed off like an old skin, an outgrown chrysalis. And you—how do you manage to go through the days, with that much history bending your shoulders? I bet you can even recall things like your tenth birthday party, or what it felt like to be given a puppy, or the first time you put on a condom. Shit, I bet you can even remember what you
called
the things then. How can you stand it? And when you pick your nose like that, you can remember your mother scolding you. My god—maybe you even have some idea what makes you do it. With all those memories, I’ll bet you can actually work out some of what makes you the way you are. Intolerable! Thank god I’m free of all that pressure—I don’t even know what makes me talk like this, what makes me so happy about it all. . . .”

There was some uncomfortable laughter as Grebbel’s audience tried to decide how much of his performance was foolery.

He lifted his glass to his lips, and Elinda saw how the liquid shook in it.

“A joke,” he said to the group at large. “Or is it?”

“Whatever it was,” said Martin, “that’s enough of it.”

Grebbel turned and stared at him. “You don’t like the show? Strikes a bit close to the bone, somehow? Now, how could that be?”