Michaelmas (26 page)

"Good enough, Doctor," Michaelmas said. "There's no point attempting to match your breadth of knowledge and my capacity just now." He put the headphones back over his ears. The skin on his forearms chafed against his shut-sleeves in ten thousand places. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cikoumas moving casually and reaching up to another pigeonhole.

".. . fascinating possibilities ... to actually collaborate in experiments with you . . . entities.

Zusykses will be beside himself! How fares the astronaut; is it still viable? How does it act? Does it display some sign it is aware it has been tuned from one probability to another ... to reality, pardon."

"He's well enough," Michaelmas replied.

"It was a waste," Cikoumas said distractedly. He was manipulating some new control up there, both hands hidden to the wrists while he turned his head to look over Michael-mas's shoulder. But he was trying to watch Michaelmas at the same time.

"Ah, that'sss a shame! You had such hopes for it a little while ago, Cikoumas! Perhaps then we should be obtaining the second Michaelmas from not that same probability . . . What's your opinion, gentlemen?"

Michaelmas was on his feet, facing Cikoumas, the flex-cord stretching nearly to its limit as he turned. Something had begun to whine and sing behind him. Cikoumas stared into his eyes, in the act of pulling one hand away from the wall, the custom-chequered walnut grip of a pistol showing at the bulge of reddish white palm and bony thumb. Michaelmas tore off the headphones and threw them at him. The strap for Domino's terminal, hung over his left shoulder, dropped across his forearm, twisted, and caught firmly there below his elbow. Spinning, the angular black box whipped forward and cracked into Cikoumas's thin head. He averted his face sharply and went flailing down backwards, striking loudly against the floor and the angle of the wall. He lay for ever motionless, flung wide.

Michaelmas moved like lightning to the wall. He jumped up to see what Cikoumas had been working. There were incomprehensible knobs and switches in there. He jumped again and snatched the pistol from its cubby. Working at it with both hands, he found the thumb-off for the ener-gizer and the location of the trigger switch. He crouched and faced the white column. Its seams were widening. He stretched out his arms, pointing the pistol. His face con-vulsed. He turned instead and scrambled to his knees atop the stool, thrust the barrel up above eye level into the control cubby, and fired repeatedly. Clouds of acrid odour poured back into the room. Flame rioted among the sooty shadows, sputtered, and died down. He turned back, half toppling, and kicked the stool aside. The portals were no wider; not much more visible, really, than they had been. The singing had gone with the first shot. Now there was something beginning to bang in there; erratic and dis-oriented at first, but settling down to a hard rhythmic hammering, like a fist.

Limberg was standing in the doorway, looking. "Send it," Michaelmas said hoarsely, wide-eyed, gesturing, "send it back."

Limberg nodded listlessly and walked slowly to the con-trols. He looked at them, shook his head, and fumbled in his pockets for a key ring. "I shall have to use the master switches," he said.

He went to the opposite wall and un-locked a panel. Michaelmas moved to the centre of the floor, holding the pistol and panting. Limberg looked back at him and twitched his mouth. He opened the wall and ran a finger hesitantly along a row of blank circles. He shrug-ged, finally, and touched two. They and most of the others sprang into green life. One group went red-to-orange-to-yellow, flickering.

"Hurry," Michaelmas said, taking a deep breath.

"I'm not expert at this," Limberg said. He found an alternate subsection by running a forefinger along until he appeared reasonably confident. He pushed hard with all the fingers of his hand, and the cylindrical white cabinet began to sing again. Michaelmas's hands jerked. But the seams were closing; soon they could hardly be seen. The whining came, and then diminished into nothing. The beating and kicking sounds stopped. Michaelmas wiped the back of his hand across his upper lip.

"He had me in contact with it long enough, didn't he?" he said. "It was faster than it must have been with Norwood."

"Yes," Limberg said. "Norwood had to be individualized for Fermierla with many, many bits from television docu-mentary recordings. There were many approximations not close enough.

Many rejects. In your case, it was possible to present you as a physical model of what was wanted." He began to close the panel. "Is there anything else?"

"Leave it open, Doctor." Michaelmas frowned and cleared his throat. "Leave it open," he tried again, and was better satisfied. He went back to where his headphones still hung from the wall, and started to lift them. He looked at the pistol in his hand, safetied it, and tossed it into the nearest cubby. He slipped the headphones over his ears. There was almost nothing to hear: ". ..

sss .. . err . . . mass ..." and it was very faint. He put one fist around the cord and pulled the jack out, removed the headphones, and laid them gently on the workshelf. He turned to Limberg: "Shut it down. Everything on your end; all the stuff Cikoumas has wired in over the years."

Limberg looked at him, overwhelmed. But he saw some-thing in Michaelmas's face and nodded. He ran his hands over the controls and all of them went steady red. He bowed his head.

"I'm in. I'm here," Domino said. "I've got their household systems. Where's the rest?"

"Wait," Michaelmas said. Limberg had left the panel and gone over to where Cikoumas lay. He sat down on the floor beside him and with his fingers began combing the lank hair forward over the wound. He looked up at Michaelmas. "He was attempting to protect humanity," he said. "He couldn't let the astronauts reach Jupiter."

Michaelmas looked back at him. "Why not?"

"That's where the creatures must be. It is the largest, heaviest body in the Solar System, with unimaginable pres-sures and great electrical potentials. It is a source of radio signals, as everyone knows. Kristiades discussed it with me increasingly after he saw all your broadcasts with the astronauts. "Such men will find the race of Zusykses," he said. "It will be a disaster for us." And he was right. We are safe from their full attentions only as long as they think we are not real. We must remain hidden among all the accidental systems."

"Yes," Michaelmas said. "Of course."

"He was a brilliant genius!" Limberg declared. "Far worthier than I!"

"He sold out his fathers and his brothers and his sons for a striped suit."

"What will I tell his family?"

"What did you tell them when you said you'd send the grocer's boy to Paris ?"

Limberg's upper body rocked back and forth. His eyes closed. "What shall I do with his body?"

"What was he going to do with mine?" Michaelmas began to say. Looking at Limberg, he said instead: "Your systems are being monitored now, and you mustn't touch them. But a little later today, I'll call you, and you can begin to reactivate them step by step under my direction."

"Right," Domino said.

Michaelmas watched Limberg carefully. He said: "When you've re-established contact with Fermierla, you can shift out this Cikoumas and shift in —"

Limberg's creased cheeks began to run with silent tears.

"For his family," Michaelmas said. He turned to go. "For their sake, find one who's a little easier to get along with, this time."

Limberg stared. "I would not in any case have it want to be here with me. I will send it home to him." He said: "I felt when first you began here with us that you were a mes-senger of death."

"Domino," Michaelmas said, "get me a cab." He pushed through the door and out into the hall, then along that and past the auditorium, where convalescent ladies and gentlemen were just chattily emerging and discussing the psychically energizing lecture of the therapy professor, and then out through the double doors, and waited outside.

He said little to Domino on the ride to the airport, and less on the flight back to New York City.

He made sure the Papashvilly interview was going well; otherwise, he initiated nothing, and sat with his chin in his hand, staring at God knew what. From time to time his eyes would attempt to close, but other reflexes and functions in his system would jerk them open again.

From time to time Domino fed him tidbits in an attempt to pique his interest:

"Hanrassy has reneged on her promise to grant EVM an interview." And a little later:

"Westrum's speaking to Hanrassy. Should I patch you in?"

"No. Not unless she takes charge of the conversation."

"She's not."

"That's good enough, then:" He thought of that tough, clever woman on the banks of the Mississippi, putting down her phone and trying to reason out what had happened. She'd alibi to herself eventually—everyone did. She'd decide Norwood and Gately and Westrum were conspiring somehow, and she'd waste energy trying to find the handle to that. She'd campaign, but she'd be a little off balance. And if it seemed they might still need to play it, there was always the ace in the hole with the income tax official. And that was the end of her. Somewhere among her fol-lowers, or in her constituency, was the next person who'd try combining populism and xenophobia. It was a surefire formula that had never in the entire history of American democracy been a winner in the end.

They come and they go, he thought. He rubbed the skin on the backs of his hands, which seemed drier than last year and more ready to fold into diamond-shaped, choppy wrinkles, as if he were a lake with a breeze passing across it.

The EVM crew staked out in Gately's anteroom finally found him consenting to receive them.

"I'd like to take this opportunity to announce to the world," Gately said, "that we are to have the honour, the privilege, and the great personal gratification to welcome Colonel Norwood to these shores on his impending visit." He had changed out of his sweatsuit and was wearing a conservatively cut blue vested pinstripe that set off his waistline when he casually unbuttoned his jacket. He looked almost young enough to go back on active status himself, but his eyes were a little too careful to follow every move-ment of every member of the interview crew.

Time passed. President Fefre had a mild attack inter-preted as indigestion. A man in Paris attempted to leave a flight bag of explosives in the upper elevator of the Eiffel Tower, but police alerted by a fortuitous tap into a political conversation arrested him promptly. Another man, in Flor-ence, was found to have embezzled a huge amount of money from the fluids of the provincial lottery. He was the brother of the provincial governor; it seemed likely that there would be heightened public disillusion in that quarter of the nation. Rome, which had been a little dilatory in its super-vision, would have to be a bit more alert for some time, so who was to say there was not some good in almost any-thing? And most of the money was recovered. Also, a small private company in New Mexico, composed of former engineering employees striking out on their own, applied for a patent on an engine featuring half the energy con-sumption of anything with comparable output. The presi-dent of the company and his chief engineer had originally met while coincidentally booked into adjoining seats on an inter-city train. Meanwhile, a hitherto insignificant indivi-dual in Hamburg ran his mother-in-law through the eye with a fork at his dinner table, knocked down his wife, went to the waterfront, attempted clumsily to burn his father-in-law's warehouse, and professed honestly to have lost all memory of any of these preceding events when he was found sitting against a bollard and crying with the hoarse persistence of a baby while staring out over the water. But not all of this was reported to Michaelmas immediately.

Domino thought and thought on what the world might be like when a completely even tenor had settled over all its policies, and there was nothing left for the news to talk about but the incessant, persistent, perhaps rising sound of individual people demanding to assert their existence.

Two trains were inadvertently switched on to the same track in Holland. But another switch, intended to stay closed, opened fortuitously, and the freight slid out of the path of the holiday passenger express.

In the systems of the Limberg Sanatorium, there was nothing overt.

"All right, then," Domino said, "if you don't want to listen, will you talk? What happened at the sanatorium? Lim-berg's keeping everybody out of the room with Cikoumas's body, seeing no one, sitting in his office, and obviously wait-ing for someone to tell him what to do next."

Michaelmas grunted. He said: "Well, they were labora-tory curiosities and the person in charge of them is senti-mental and intrigued. When they proposed something in-genious, such as moving something coherent from one ar-bitrary frame of reference into a highly similar frame, they were indulged. Why not? The experiment may be trivial, or it may be taken as proof that there are no orders of greater or lesser likelihood among sets, but in either case it was suggested by a member of the experiment. You have to admit that would intrigue almost anyone, let alone a poet in heat." Michaelmas smiled as though something had struck his mouth like a riding whip. "Poke around, now that you're inside Limberg's system. Open one part of the circuitry at a time. You'll meet what's been chasing you. Be careful to keep a firm hold on the switching."

There was a pause. Then the machine was back. "It... it seems we here are considered an effect." Domino paused again.

"We are an effect," Michaelmas said. "They have a means of scanning infinity. When they want a model of an ele-phant, they tune out everything that doesn't look like an elephant. When they deduce there's a human race, they get a human race. Warts and all. The difference between the model of the elephant and the human race is that the repre-sentatives of that race can speak; they can request, and they can propose. They can even believe they think they repre-sent
the
human race. But in all of infinity, the chances are infinite that they are only drifting particles."