Janus (20 page)

“My god, come in out of the wind.”

In her house they reached for each other and clung together while the world moaned and shivered about them.

“A bad day,” she whispered and wondered how she could have been reluctant to look for him earlier. “You heard what happened in the Square? I was there, I saw it. It was Strickland, the one who lost his girlfriend. I’d talked to him the other day, and then he was just something smashed down at the foot of a wall. And when I got back to work . . . no, never mind.”

“What?”

“No, nothing.”

“It must be something. To do with what happened at the Square?”

“I can’t talk about it; it’s not important anyway. What happened to you today? You’re as tense as I am. Did you have a bad session at the clinic?”

“I had a session, and it’ll be the last one.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” he said. “That’s the trouble. It’s just the same as all the other times. Glimpses of another life, another world. But it’s somebody else’s life, it’s not mine, and I don’t know what my life is.”

“But you’re still going to give up? I’d been thinking it might be best just to let it go after all, but you’re so torn up by this—”

“Torn up. Right.” He gave a harsh chuckle. “My arm’s been shredded, and I haven’t a clue why. Was I a part-time lion-tamer? Or maybe the scars mean what they seem to mean. Maybe the thought of coming here was too much and I tried to open my veins at the last minute. I can’t even tell if that’s ludicrous or not. Or perhaps the leaflets were right, and there’s a file on me in some institution, with a twenty-five-dollar name for what put me there. No I’m not giving up. But I’m not going back to that machine either. There’s enough evidence in my own mind. Whatever they’ve been doing to me, it’s not getting me any closer to finding out real answers. I opened a man’s trachea the other day. I told you. I knew what I was doing, my hands knew.” His gloved fingers slid to her neck, pressed coldly against the cartilage of her throat. “Just there. Quick and clean. I’d been trained to do it. I know that, I’m as sure of that as I am of anything.” He shook his head, whispered: “If I’m really sure of anything, even of you . . . Christ, I don’t know what I mean.”

She resisted the temptation to rub her throat, got up to open the blind and look out.

Snow blew across the window, heavier now; the sky was a mass of churning cloud shot through with pale streaks of light. Her breath started to mist the glass.

“It’s a cheat,” he said suddenly. “A trap. It’s—” His voice lowered. “There’s something dark here, eating away, in here where my life should be. . . . Secrets.” He stopped and turned to her, staring. “You cared too, didn’t you? Now you’re giving up. And you won’t tell me what happened at work today. You too.” He swung her round to face him. “You know and you won’t tell—” Then he stopped. He pushed her away and turned his head to the sky. His eyes were clenched shut but the pale light glimmered on his cheeks. “Oh god,” he whispered. He twisted his head from side to side. “I was ready to hurt you. You’re all I’ve got to hold onto, and I was going to hurt you. I’m scared, Elinda. I don’t know what’s happening. Come here. Please come here.”

When she went to him his arms gripped her so that she could hardly breathe.

After a while, he stepped away, stood beside her. He did not speak but she could hear his ragged breathing. His fingers quivered in hers. The wind shrieked and fell, shrieked again. She cleared her throat. “I think,” she said, “I’d better tell you what I found out this afternoon.”

The next morning, while she and Larsen inspected a new batch of corn seedlings, Elinda told him she had betrayed his confidence.

“When you decide to do a thing, you waste no time, do you?” he said. The dawn wind roared outside. Rain and hail rattled on the window. “Is there something in you that insists on putting yourself in the wrong? I suppose you have a reason for this?”

She started to tell him about Grebbel.

He nodded. “I know of the man. Menzies, his foreman, was my associate. If you know so much, I may as well tell you that. He has mentioned your Mr. Grebbel to me too.”

“Will you help him, then? Will you do whatever it is you’ve done before?”

“After what happened yesterday?”

“But that was because you wouldn’t help her—Erika.”

“Or because I did ‘help’ poor Strickland.”

“In this case, you’d do more harm by refusing Jon. He’s suffering,” she said. “I don’t know what he’ll do if he can’t get help.”

“A suggestively vague threat,” Larsen said. He peered at a discoloured leaf, put the plant aside for examination later. “Meaning, I take it, that what I decide will determine not only this man’s welfare, but perhaps yours and my own as well.” He bent and tightened a clamp on one of the nutrient hoses. “I already told you I’m not the stuff heroes are made of.” He did not look at her. “Give me time to think. If I can schedule something, Menzies will contact your friend.”

In Barbara’s lab the door was open and Osmon, the technician, was coming out. “I have to go in for a minute,” Elinda said. “There’s some data I need for the Greenhouse here.”

He hesitated, then smiled. “As you like. But I’ll have to be locking up in five minutes.”

She switched on Barbara’s computer and entered the password. When she brought up the file directory, it was incomprehensible at first. Then she mentally eliminated files that were clearly part of Barbara’s work. A few stood out. FAILSAFE, for one, and RABBIT.

She debated whether to try guessing Barbara’s other passwords, but then checked the memory storage. Four of the files, including the two she had noticed, were empty.

She switched off. A clumsy, and probably hurried, piece of cover-up. But by whom? Security? She had to assume so, which meant she should stay away from this terminal, in case it was monitored.

She flipped through the desk drawer until she found the memory stick Grebbel had copied the files onto. Stupid not have devised a safer arrangement for getting the files to her. But if Security were still keeping a low profile, maybe whoever had sabotaged the online memory wouldn’t have come into the lab and gone through the backups yet. She put the stick in her pocket and left before Osmon returned to lock up.

Through chilly rain squalls she hurried up the hill to her home, went to the couch and from under the seat cushion she pulled the papers she had found in Barbara’s room. She scanned them quickly, selected half a dozen sheets that looked promising and took them with her.

Then she made the long walk back through the rising wind past the Greenhouse. She opened the office and switched on her computer.

When she loaded them, the files Grebbel had copied seemed to be intact. She looked at the sheets with Barbara’s writing and tried to decide which one might hold the password.

It took an hour. Several times the files erased themselves when she entered too many wrong guesses, and she had to reload them from the stick. But finally she unlocked them.

FAILSAFE contained the text of the leaflet, with instructions to broadcast it if Barbara failed to get in touch the following morning. It must date from the time Barbara had vanished. And it must have been sent over the net, to Jessamyn. She closed her eyes and took several long, deep breaths.

This certainly wasn’t going to get Barbara off the hook. If Security had found this and they were going to try to hang the bombing on her as well, there seemed to be only one way out. She would have to follow Barbara’s tracks and prove that Barbara had been right.

She opened the file named RABBIT. It evidently consisted of some dialogues held over the computer net. The original exchanges must have been in volatile storage, forcing Barbara to make notes afterwards. A few times and dates had been highlighted, and some of the entries had received comments in capital letters: OTHERS BEFORE ME? E.F.? Near the end was an entry that read:
Trap 01:00. Recorder. Weapon?

Elinda winced. Setting traps and looking for hidden things? She shook her head Then finally she remembered what the nurse had said about Barbara’s compulsion to keep moving and her hint about a cave.

“Just what I needed,” said Grebbel. “I’m barely off the shuttle, hardly got to know her, and she drags me up the side of a mountain.” They had stopped on a bend of the trail, where it gave a clear view into the valley. The settlement was spread out below them, as he hadn’t seen it since his first night in the dirigible, but this time clear and detailed in the daylight. A truck edged back across the causeway to the near bank, like an ant on a pencil. As it turned, its windshield caught the light and for an instant became a tiny sun.

Elinda scowled. “Sourpuss. Misery. I even did without the ropes and the ice axe just to make it easier for you.”

“Hah. I bet you wouldn’t know one end of an ice axe from the other.” He paused, frowning, “When we . . .”

“When we what? When we who? Jon? Have you remembered something?”

He paused, then shook his head. “No, just a funny feeling. It’s gone now. So where’s this cave you want to look in?”

“It’s a place Barbara and I sometimes hiked to,” she said. “Farther along the valley and up. I don’t think we’re going to get there before dark. I still think in terms of twenty-four-hour days half the time when I try to plan things.”

And maybe
, Grebbel thought,
you’re not totally happy about bringing another lover to one of your former trysting spots.

“Oh, look,” she cried, and pointed. Out of the sun’s red glare, riding down the wind, the pair of raptors came sweeping towards them. Steel blue wings cut the air like scimitars; the crimson heads and orange crests might have been arrowheads loosed from a titan’s bow. The two creatures passed twenty metres below them, their round, amber eyes staring, the talons at the first wing joint clearly visible, and the needle teeth in their jaws.

“Scaly eagles,” she whispered. “Such an ugly name. I’ve never seen them this close before.” She leaned against Grebbel and he put his arm around her shoulders.

The two eagles dwindled down the length of the valley until they were almost out of sight. Then they banked and turned across it, two drifting flecks of light against the bluish foliage the trees. They soared over the river and back towards the head of the valley, where the elongated bubble of a dirigible was gliding into their territory. If they mobbed it, they were now too far away to be seen.

Elinda let her head rest on Grebbel’s shoulder. “It’s still the same, isn’t it?” she said. “We keep teasing each other, playing games, because we don’t know what’s real behind the play. Even now, even here.”

He rubbed her neck, his gloved fingers stiff and clumsy and comforting. “Let’s leave the masks on,” he said. “Right now, the play’s the thing.”

They followed the trail almost up to what passed for the treeline, where it widened into a clearing that overlooked the valley. Clouds of green creatures the size of houseflies buzzed in the shade, but did not approach them, but once Elinda was bitten by something that lurched away through the air and fell to the ground, twitching.

Slabs of grey stone were thinly covered by earth where spongy turquoise leaves grew among fallen boughs that looked like the limbs of fallen dragons or angels, and the trees formed a living shield between them and the rock face. Spray from a hidden waterfall glimmered in the shade there, and that dark wall swayed and shivered with the voice of the sea.