Janus (23 page)

“Sorry, really. I’ve got too much going on right now to get involved in anything like that.”

“Ah, a great pity. But I know when a lady has her mind made up. Though that doesn’t mean I may not try again when the portents are more auspicious. In the meantime, though, please forgive my unchivalrous departure, but I must try and collect my innocent victim before midnight comes.
Lente, lente currite, noctis equi.
”

He stood and gave a brief ironic bow and was gone.

She turned to look for Grebbel once more, but the mass of faces near the entrance were all unfamiliar. As she turned away, she caught sight of Jessamyn again, watching her from the far side of the room. Jessamyn turned and spoke to the woman sitting beside her, then looked back at Elinda with a gaze that was openly curious.

Elinda looked at her empty glass and decided to get another drink.

When she returned to her seat, a couple of spotlights had been turned on the stage, and Dr. Henry was standing up there with a tall blonde woman. He drew polite laughter by saying he had been asked to justify his place here, and then started talking about the untapped potentials of the human mind and body.

She knew what Grebbel was doing. He was with Larsen, and he hadn’t made the effort to tell her. She wondered if he would know her whenever he saw her next.

Henry was talking in quiet insistent tones to the blonde woman on the stage.

“When I snap my fingers, you’ll remember only that you want to walk to the far end of the stage and come back. What you remember is what you are, and what you are is what you do. What I tell you to you remember is, for the next five minutes, what you’ll be.”

The woman’s eyes closed, her face went slack. Only a moderately deep trance, he told the audience. The woman turned her back and began describing the people at the nearest tables. She accurately recalled hair colours, missing buttons, a cracked lens in a pair of spectacles.

“It might seem from this display,” he said, “that the capacity of the human memory is bottomless. But if the information the young lady is recalling right now is to be available tomorrow, or next week, it has to be stored where it can be found. And here is the problem. When some of us came through the Knot, parts of that stored memory were lost. Not destroyed, necessarily, but mislaid. Imagine editing a play by taking out every speech by one character, every mention of him. You might make very little difference at all, but if it’s a good play, with a job for every character, you’ll change its meaning, you’ll probably reduce it to gibberish. . . .”

Suddenly the performance sickened her. There were too many questions in her head. She picked up her coat.

At the end of that afternoon’s shift, Menzies had approached Grebbel. “Your girlfriend told you about us, I think—Niels and me—that we might help you.”

Grebbel had nodded, tight-lipped.

“I think we might have something for you today, if you still want it.”

“Of course I do!” Grebbel took a couple of breaths. “I’m very grateful.”

“Give me a minute to finish checking this motor here, and we’ll go on over.”

Grebbel put his hands in his pockets and peered past Menzies’ shoulder, then walked round the other side of the truck, watching the ice sheets turn purple-grey and a whorl of clouds build as evening crept towards them. The winds were still quiet; he wondered if that meant more fury when they did rise.

He came back to the front. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Try standing where I can’t see you, or stop fidgeting.”

“Sorry.”

He thought of Elinda, and wondered what they would be to each other two hours from now—who or what he might be. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and looked at them. The fingers quivered. In the dim light the scars were almost invisible. They held more of his past than the shell of memory he had been found here.

“You ready, or are you going to spend the evening moongazing?”

Grebbel turned. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I’m quite ready.”

They walked away from the river. Grebbel could make out footprints in the gravel path, and wheel ruts, but he did not recognise the route they were taking. The sky was a deep violet, with two stars pricking through gaps in the cloud, and one moon shining clear. After a few minutes he heard the sound of a stream.

Menzies muttered, “We’ll stop by the waterfall.”

The fall was about a couple of metres high. The stream billowed over it in a dull roar, making a dim flapping whiteness like sheets on a clothesline. Just below the fall, the path turned inland along the bank and passed a hollow under vertical slabs of rock like a tent at the crest of the falls. Branches tossed in a first gust. Green lights flickered among the undergrowth. A man was standing there.

“Mr. Grebbel, is it?” the man said. “Make yourself comfortable. There’s a dry ledge outside this cleft, and you can sit with your back to the rock. I don’t think we’re been formally introduced, but I believe you know who I am.”

“You’re Niels Larsen,” Grebbel said into the fog of water sound. “This is a strange place for a therapy session.”

“Treat it as an initiation. We have to decide how committed you are to recovering your former identity.” The rush of the falls hid almost tone and inflection, leaving a bare outline of a voice.

“I don’t understand how I’m supposed to convince you.”

“We’ll come to that in a moment. You realise that the restoration is not easy.”

“I’m willing to do anything you want to pay for your efforts.”

“I wasn’t referring to our difficulties, Mr. Grebbel,” Larsen said. “I meant the difficulties of the subject—yourself. For some hours or days the subject must expect to struggle with two identities. There is the personality he has lived as in order to accommodate the memories he acquired here, and the old personality built on the original memories. The subject must identify his true past and integrate his two personalities. The process is difficult, if not actively painful. There is no way to carry out a normal existence and pretend that nothing is wrong while one undergoes it. You would call attention to yourself—and to us—very quickly. The simplest solution is to carry out the treatment while the subject is incapacitated by some genuine injury or illness that can be used to mask his disorientation. In the past, we were opportunistic—we would wait for a suitable virus infection to strike, or an accident at the work site—until we decided to abandon our plans altogether. In the present case, a more direct approach seems necessary, since we must be cautious now. And conveniently, that also gives us a test of the subject’s commitment.”

“I see.”

“I hope you do. We are working in your best interests—but we also must safeguard ourselves. We have trusted you enough to reveal our identities. Now we ask you to trust us in this.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Grebbel asked. “Dive off this rock? We’d both find that a bit hard to explain, wouldn’t we?”

The wind was rising, sounding like a river. Clouds rolled across the stars.

“You went for an evening walk,” Larsen said. “It got dark among the trees earlier than you expected and you weren’t sure of the path any more, so you started hurrying to get back before it got too dark to see. You failed to notice the ledge in time, and you slipped and fell.”

“You think they’d buy that?”

“They will,” Larsen said, “if they’ve no reason to be suspicious; and I wasn’t intending to give them any cause to be.”

“So, if anything goes wrong, it’s my own fault.”

Something screeched twice above them, sailing the wind.

Larsen shrugged. “I’m merely stating the conditions under which we can help you. I understand that you want to postpone the injury, if not the decision itself, as long as possible, but we haven’t got all night.”

Grebbel swallowed. “I don’t think much of your sales pitch—”

“We are not selling soap, Mr. Grebbel. Lives are involved in this.”

“—but if you want proof, I’ll give you proof of sincerity.”

He turned towards the rock and swung his hand. There was a wet thud and his arm filled with sick pain to the shoulder. He staggered, went down on one knee. Then he turned towards them with a rock in his other hand.

His arm came up in front of his face and struck like a snake. Struck again.

Before they could reach him, he had slipped to his knees. He could taste the blood in his mouth.

“Proof,” he gasped. “Proof of commitment. You want more?”

Menzies grasped Grebbel’s wrist and twisted the rock from his hand. He got an arm under Grebbel’s shoulders and tried to lift him. Grebbel wrenched free. “I’ll stand by myself. When I’m ready. Are you convinced? I can do more.” He lurched upright. “Whatever it takes. You talked about trust. What does it take to buy your trust?”

“Enough. That’s enough now,” Larsen said harshly. “Let’s get you some attention. You’re going into shock.”

“I’ll walk. I’ll walk by myself.”

To the south, lightning arced over the mountains. Rain blew into the men’s faces.

The other two stayed on either side of Grebbel, and at the edge of the trees, when the light from the Square reached him and he stumbled from grass to gravel and his eyes rolled up, they reached out and caught him as he fell.

Outside the tavern Elinda hesitated. In a black, churning sky, the moons glinted and vanished, ice-blue lightning arced. The wind sent spiked rags of tree membrane scuttling along the High Street. A few raindrops spattered on the road. She had no reason to go home yet, and there was still the chance that Grebbel would turn up. She walked off at random, aiming to come past the tavern again as often as necessary, until either he did appear or the wind got the better of her.

Then,
No
, she decided.
No.
He had just forgotten. This was a world of erratic memory after all. She would go and give him a polite reminder. Very polite. Icicle-in-liquid-nitrogen polite.

And he would . . . ? Laugh at her? Fall on his knees and apologise? Ask her what the hell she was doing there uninvited? Lower the pseudo-whisky bottle and peer at her in bewilderment?

Or if he was out? If his living room, his home, his bed was empty?

And some other bed was occupied. Or—

It’s colder near the water, isn’t it?
She inhaled sharply at the memory of hiking the trail with Charley.

Then she found she was heading for the clinic, and the tightness in her chest confirmed that she had not gone that way by chance.
He’s late
, she thought,
he’s stood you up, and you’re already seeing him wrapped in bandages or . . . How long have you known him, for Christ’s sake?

She would give him until tomorrow morning. Then if he didn’t turn up, she would go to Security. But not before then. To go now would be to tempt fate.

As she was about to turn away, a side door opened and a man came out of the clinic. He kept to the shadows and walked quickly, huddled against the wind, but she thought she recognised him in the shimmer from the sky. She was curious enough to follow at a distance.

He seemed preoccupied, his hands clenched at his sides, his head lowered as he hurried past the darkened homes and the spidery or convoluted Earthborn evergreens that grew from boxes in front gardens. Even before he turned onto White Falls Crescent, she was sure it was Larsen. But what could he have been doing? Not even he would be checking on the lab experiments at this time of night. She had hardly seen another soul since she had started following him.

Behind her, the row of streetlights went out for the night. Among the scudding clouds both moons shone, and two shadows paced at her side.

Larsen had been doing something in the clinic, not checking on the experiments, and that had to mean—

She started back towards the clinic.

“Why so quickly?” said a man’s voice.

She stumbled, but didn’t look round.

“Such a hurry,” he said. “This moonlight deserves more honour.” His footsteps were suddenly close behind, almost at her side, louder than the wind. The street was dark and empty. She wondered if she should run.

“You don’t honour the moons? I thought all women were Dianas nowadays. Free-spirited goddesses, plucking wild music from the strings of their hunting bows.” Osmon the technician, the paper maker. He was at her shoulder, his shadows entangling her own. She did not look at him. “And yet, here, where the goddess has two lamps to her glory, you scurry away as though you were the one hunted.”

“It’s late,” she blurted. The wind shoved at her. “I’ve got to get home.”

“My dear young lady, do forgive me for not recognising you. You are the one who is interested in paper, who works at the Greenhouse and visits the clinic after hours. You must be nervous these days, after what happened to the dam. All that willful destruction . . . But haven’t you taken the wrong path to be going home? Surely you have. Here, let me guide you.” He moved closer. She waited to feel his fingers on her arm.

She remembered his forearms, his hands in the paper mill. They would grip like steel clamps. It was too late to run. Scream?

“It would be much better if you went home now,” he said. “Believe me, much better.” Without a change in inflection, he went on. “Here there is nearly always a moon to hunt by. Hadn’t you noticed that? I did, long ago.”