Janus (27 page)

“No I don’t! I don’t remember!”

“But you could. There needn’t be any trouble. Then you’d know. You’d understand why I needed this, and it wouldn’t have to be between us.”

“I see.” She sat back and looked at the ceiling. Her arms were clutched across her belly. She was starting to tremble. “So I’m worthy if I agree to have my mind tampered with too, but otherwise, I’m just a liability?”

“You’re twisting things. You’ve let them drive you into your little cave, and now you daren’t even stick your nose out to smell the air. You’ve become what they’re trying to make you, and you like it.”

When he had finished, he turned away and lay still. The silence stretched. She could find nothing to say that wouldn’t make things worse. And she wasn’t going to cry in front of him now. Except that if she didn’t, she would hit him, bruises or not. She sat up. “I’d better go.”

“You’re overwrought,” he said. “You haven’t even tried to find out what I remembered.”

“I don’t want to know! If it was something you were proud of, you’d have told me.”

She closed the door quietly behind her as she left.

The afternoon sky arched over Grebbel from mountain wall to mountain wall. He shook his head and flexed his right arm.

“Take it easy, remember,” said Carlo at the door of the clinic. “We can’t do miracles.”

“On the contrary—I feel reborn.” He gave Carlo a broad grin and started toward the dam.

The sign showed 143 days to completion, an increase since the last time he had seen it. Beyond, trucks whirred with their loads of gravel. The river gleamed in the sun, flared white against the growing dam.

A truck turned into the parking bay and stopped. Menzies swung down and waved Grebbel to him. “Feeling better, are you?”

“Still a bit confused, but I’m a new man.”

“That’s good then.” Menzies was eyeing him closely. “Niels would like a talk with you. Can you meet him at your place in half an hour?”

“He said he would,” Grebbel said agreeably. “It’s something I’ve been looking forward to.”

He walked slowly to his building, watching the life around him and trying out a consciously worn mask of amiability.

Larsen arrived a few minutes early. Without preamble, he said as he sat down: “I have a number of questions, but perhaps you’d like some things explained first. I’ll be whatever help I can.”

“Yes, I’ve got questions,” Grebbel replied easily. “One or two. We might start with who you are and how many people you’ve managed to restore. After that I’d be quite interested to hear what they—
they
—think they’re doing and why they imagine they can get away with it. And what are you planning to do about it? Why don’t you start on those questions? I’ll probably find a couple more as we go along.”

“Who I am, in the sense you mean, isn’t important,” Larsen said. “Consider me as what you see: a technician with certain scruples but a preference for a quiet life. What I was before I came here, I keep to myself.” He flexed his shoulders stiffly. “How I started this is a longer story than we have time for. But, in brief, after I’d been here a few months, I found that my apparent self kept slipping away, giving me glimpses of what was underneath. And then I learned—never mind how—to strip away the mask completely.”

“That’s what I call it, too,” Grebbel said. “A mask.”

Larsen looked hard at him, then went on. “I became myself, but I had had the experience of living as the mask; and the two personalities made me whole—for the first time, I think. I felt such a liberation—I wanted to liberate others too. I thought we could gather enough of our kind to compel the authorities to see the error of their ways. At the time, I was helping set up the labs in the clinic, doing some software development. It wasn’t hard to get access to their programs.”

Larsen paused, and lowered his voice. “I moved too quickly, too uncritically. And then I began to understand what I might be liberating. I realised how naive I had been. And yet, what they do, wiping out a human portrait—once, I might have said ‘a human soul’—and replacing it with a charcoal sketch is monstrous. . . .”

“Okay,” Grebbel interjected brusquely. “What about them? I got only the inside view of the business. What’s their game? Whoever they are.”

“At heart it’s a typical bureaucratic compromise. Two social experiments, with controllable parameters—or nearly so. One in the growth of a new society, and one in the reconstruction of criminal psychologies. Add to it the possibility of cheap labour to help develop the new colony here, the remoteness of the social laboratory from the home world, should anything go wrong, and the use of isolation and minor hardship as forms of punishment to satisfy Calvinistic factions, and you have a politically saleable case for what you see around you.”

Grebbel considered. “Fascinating,” he said dryly. “And, remind me again, what were you thinking of doing about it?”

“I still have some plans, but they will have to wait for the right political climate. There’s nothing to be gained by recklessness. At the moment, I see no way to do more than I am at present.”

“As far as I can see, that means just sitting back and watching until somebody twists your arm.”

“Let me explain two things to you, Mr. Grebbel. What I originally did was not done casually. I did it because I was convinced the net result would be to bring more good than evil into the world. But I made errors of judgement. I helped restore personalities that even I must concede should not have been brought back.” Larsen’s gaze was fixed, but it was not clear whether it was focussed on Grebbel or on something beyond the room they were in. “In your case . . . in your case, I have to have faith that I have done more good than evil. But I walk a knife-edge. I will not be a party to violence or disorder.”

Grebbel started to speak, but Larsen cut him off. “Let me make my other point. It relates to what I have just said. The process of restoration is not in practice reversible. It seems that the tissues of the brain, the structures and connections that make up memory and personality, can sustain only so much manipulation by these rather primitive techniques. Twice, the authorities discovered someone who had been restored, and tried to reprocess them. I have seen the results. Of course, the apparatus and the level of expertise here are not all they might be, which must add to the difficulty. But the result, in terms of my portrait metaphor, is not another charcoal sketch, but rather a child’s scrawl, partly erased. The organism still looks human, but a detached observer, I’m sure, would assign it to a zoo. I said I’ve seen this twice. I hope never to see it again. Nor does anyone else who understands what is happening here.”

Grebbel had pushed himself to his feet. He paced stiffly then turned to Larsen. “I see,” he said. “That’s how you keep your merry men in line. I take the warning.”

“I’ve been telling you why I do what I do, and under what terms. Now I have a few questions for you.”

Grebbel tensed, then exhaled deeply and leaned back against the wall. “I suppose you’ve earned the right.”

“Thank you. First, you have regained your past. What were you back there, and what made them decide to send you here?”

“I was trained in medicine. . . . No. If you have your pride and shame, allow me mine. What’s your next question?”

“I could insist,” Larsen said after a moment. “But we shall have to start trusting each other sometime. However: you know what you did, and you have lived another life for some weeks now. How do you feel when you look back?”

Grebbel gazed at him and did not speak. His jaw muscles tightened, his hands locked on each other. “They took away my past,” he whispered. “They—tore it out by the roots. . . .”

“You see,” said Larsen, “if you won’t tell me what you did to be sent here, I must at least know what you plan to do with yourself now. Have you been making plans?”

“I thought you talked about trusting each other.”

“Believe me, I try to and I want to. But you have to understand that you can’t have complete freedom now—none of us can. We’re too closely tied to each other. If one of us draws the attention of the authorities, we are all endangered—”

“Only if he’s stupid enough to get caught and weak enough to talk; and this doesn’t look like the sort of setup that goes in for heavy interrogations. Or is that something else you didn’t tell me about?”

“They’d threaten you with re-treatment. And, as I said, that would probably leave you barely fit for a zoo. What would you do then, Mr. Grebbel?”

“I’d cut my throat,” Grebbel whispered. He met Larsen’s gaze and lowered his voice further. “I’d dig my fingers into my eyes and rip them from the sockets.”

Larsen flinched and looked away.

Grebbel took a step toward him. More calmly he said, “I mean, Niels, I’m not one to betray a trust. Not to someone who’s helped me as much as you. But I value my privacy. I have my own plans, for my own life, and they don’t concern anyone but me, unless I invite them to share it.”

Larsen stiffened himself visibly and said, “I must insist. I need to know now and in the future what actions you intend—”

“You need know nothing that doesn’t concern you,” Grebbel snapped. “And I’ll be the judge of what that is.”

In a ragged voice, Larsen persisted. “If necessary, with a few words in the right places, I could have you reclassified as a psychiatric case. You’d find your freedom to determine your own actions much more severely curtailed then, I assure you.”

Grebbel smiled and approached him. “But, Niels, what do you think they’d find if they examined me? And I could put a few words in the right places too, couldn’t I? No, don’t get up.” He placed his hand on Larsen’s shoulder, and Larsen sank back into the seat. “I think you’ve more to lose than I have. You’re not one to take risks. And you’ve just bankrupted your authority by making a threat you can’t back up.” He moved back a pace. “Niels, you’ve put the whip into my hand.”

He rocked back and forth, clenching his fists and flexing his damaged arm. He watched Larsen with a faint smile as he did so.

“As a gesture of good faith,” he said, “I think I will tell you what you wanted to know—why I was sent here. It may amuse you. First, though, let’s think about masks and faces a little. Let’s say we each have a mask, something we’ve learned to use to hide our secrets from the world. And what’s behind the mask is unsure of anything but its own existence and its mortality. How am I to know I am real and safe, and myself, unless I can be sure I’m separate from you? How can I know that you—the real, vulnerable, quivering you—acknowledge me as real, if all I see of you is the mask you wear each day? Well, I
can
prove I am real and different from you, I can split your mask a little and see what’s inside it. Have you guessed how?”

He snapped his fingers in Larsen’s face, and the tendons in Larsen’s neck jerked as he held himself from flinching away.

“It’s simple,” Grebbel said. “It’s if you hurt and I don’t.”

He looked at Larsen, then went back to his chair and sat down. “I was a doctor,” he said conversationally. “I told you that, didn’t I? A healer of the sick, the infirm, a comfort to the dying. Where I worked last, the-patients had a name for me. They’d tell newcomers what to expect. I’d built up a reputation, you see—by hard work and initiative, the way one is always supposed to.”

He paused and rubbed the bruise in his jaw reflectively. “It started small, of course. At the beginning—this was in my home town, still—I’d be on call at the station when they brought in a suspect. Often he’d struggle, try to use his knee or his feet—occasionally it would be a woman—but there were always four or five officers to one suspect, and they’d carry him if they had to. I’d see them go into the interview room, and then one of them would come out and turn up the rock station on the ghetto blaster outside the door, and go back in. Afterwards, they’d explain about the slippery stairs in these old municipal buildings, and ask me to do some tidying up and pay no attention to any delirious accusations I might hear.

“After a few weeks of this, when they decided I was reliable, they showed me where the real work was done. I had to learn to treat the effects of certain drugs, often given in conjunction with electric shock or other procedures. That treatment chair almost brought back memories the first time I saw it. The work was quite delicate—not just patching up breaks and contusions—it was often a case of keeping the patient conscious, or alive, long enough for the business to be concluded successfully.

“Then I moved to the big city and, with my references, I was able to do the same work there. And when I went abroad on an international aid program, I was welcomed into the government anti-terrorist team. I had got to be quite good at the work. I was able to make suggestions. I found I was often able to judge what approach would be most fruitful, or when a different one should be adopted. Then I began to devise improvements. They knew my worth by then, and encouraged me to experiment. I did. I learned to improvise, and when we went into the mountains after the guerillas, I acted as intelligence liaison officer and was in charge of all interrogations. About that time, I gathered I had acquired a reputation and a name. Of course, when the coup happened, it wasn’t a good idea to be famous in that way. . . .”