Necropath (43 page)

“What... what the hell?” There were so many questions that he did not know where to begin.

“It’s okay, Jeff. Don’t worry. You’re okay now.”

He thought of his confrontation with Osborne in the chamber. He had been quite prepared for death then, selfishly. Who would have warned the world about the Vaith, if he had died?

“It’s okay, Jeff. I’ve alerted the authorities. They’ve investigated the Church of the Adoration, sent teams to the colony worlds where the Vaith were transported.”

“Are they going to kill...?”

“No,” Patel replied, even before Vaughan had finished the question. “They’ve assembled a team of experts. They’re going to study the Vaith, try to learn the truth of their claims.”

“And New York, Madrid...?”

“All sorted, Vaughan. Don’t worry.”

Vaughan nodded. He considered the Vaith, the human Disciples like Dolores Yandoah and Sinton. How wonderful it would be to have faith, to believe that there was more to existence than mere life and death. He thought of Holly and Tiger. But he had seen the oblivion towards which the dead travelled. How could he put aside what he knew to be true, merely because to believe in something would ease his conscience, heal his pain?

“How... how did I get here?”

Patel shook his head. “We don’t know. You were found unconscious in casualty. We assumed at first that you’d brought yourself in, but the extent of your injuries...”

Patel went on, responding to some enquiry nascent in Vaughan’s mind, “Your occipital console was removed by Osborne. There was some damage to your cerebellum. With luck you should make a full recovery.”

He thought of Osborne. The man had torn out his console-shield, so that he might read Vaughan’s remorse, his guilt at what he had done all those years ago. And, having read how truly sorry Vaughan was, had Osborne stayed the execution, shown uncharacteristic compassion and delivered him to the hospital?

Patel was shaking his head. “No, Jeff. We found Osborne’s body in the secreted chamber. He’d been shot dead.”

“Then... then who brought me here? Who shot Osborne and brought me here?”

Patel could not answer that, and soon Vaughan relapsed into unconsciousness.

* * * *

Days passed.

Vaughan regained control of his limbs. He was aware of the pain in his head, the wound where his console had been removed. But it was a tolerable pain compared to that of the mind-noise he had endured for years, and the surgeons and physiotherapists assured him that in time it would abate.

He was sitting up in bed, staring through the window at the hospital gardens and enjoying the silence, when a nurse peered around the door. “Are you up to seeing a visitor, Mr. Vaughan?”

A visitor? He wondered who might wish to visit him.

The nurse disappeared, to be replaced by the small figure of a shy young girl. He recognised Tiger’s sister, but he could not remember her name.

He recalled their first meeting at Nazruddin’s, and how the music of her mind had caused him both pleasure and pain. Now, without his ability to assess people by the emanations of their minds, he was like a man bereft of a sense he had relied upon all his life.

She hovered near the door, almost as if she might hurry away if he said the wrong thing.

She wore a short skirt, and a red T-shirt, and the very vocabulary of her body language, the way she tipped her head forward, held her right hand nervously to her lips, declared that she felt ashamed of the scar that bisected her face.

He wondered if he should speak, or smile. He smiled.

She responded like a flower opening to the sun. She smiled herself, and took courage, and entered the room. In almost a whisper she said, “Hello.”

He found it hard to know what to say, to know what she wanted him to say. Without his ability, he realised, he had no way of judging her mood, no way of even guessing what she might be thinking.

He recalled her name. “Sukara,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

She smiled again quickly, shyly.

“Sit down,” he said.

Obediently, she sat.

They faced each other like actors in a play, bereft of script. The silence stretched awkwardly.

Then she said, in a voice so small that he could hardly hear her, “I wonder if you okay. I come see you.”

“I’m fine, Sukara. Who told you I was here?”

She frowned, a gesture that made her face quite pretty. “No one told me. I bring you here.”

He stared at her. “You?”

She frowned again, struggling to summon the words to describe what had happened. “I... I find out Osborne bad man. He want to kill you. I follow him, under Station. I hear explosion. I see you. I see him shoot you here, in head. I think you dead. I shoot Osborne.”

“Hey, hey—slow down. Start again, slowly, from the beginning. You said you knew Osborne...?”

She nodded. “I knew him—”

“How? How did you meet him?”

“In Bangkok. In Siren Bar, where I worked. He come, take me away...”

Vaughan listened to her story, stopping her from time to time to clarify a point, ask questions. He listened, attempting to see past her words and gestures to the person behind those words.

Sukara fell silent. She sat staring at her fingers entwined in her lap, unable to look up at him.

From the pocket of her shorts she pulled a scrap of paper, and with a much-chewed stylus she wrote an address in big, childish handwriting.

“I stay in Chandi Road now. Try to find work. Maybe sometime we meet for coffee, beer, yes?” She looked up at him, her eyes large, almost imploring.

He took the address, but could not bring himself to agree.

As if at his lack of response, she said, “Okay, I go now.”

And before he could stop her she sprang to her feet, almost knocking over the chair in her haste, and hurried from the room.

Vaughan lay in bed and stared after her.

* * * *

He recovered slowly over the course of the next few days. The pain in his head diminished and he sat for hours in a chair beside the window, staring out at the sunlit greensward that fell away to the edge of the Station.

Life would be very different from now on. He had been granted the balm of silence—he was no longer beset by the clamorous din of the minds of those around him... but it had come at a cost.

He had never really realised how much he had used his ability to judge people—he had taken it for granted. Now people came to him, nurses and doctors and officials from the police, and he had no way of assessing the essence of these people, their goodness or otherwise.

He realised that if he wished to function in society, then he would have to learn how to read people anew in the same way as did normal, non-telepathic human beings... and to do that, of course, he would have to socialise.

He considered his past, Holly and Tiger.

It came to him, quite suddenly and with something of a shock, that he needed to talk to someone about what he had done.

He remembered the address Sukara had given him. He sat in the sunlight for a long time, staring at her big, loopy handwriting.

He knew he should, for his own sake, contact her. But something stopped him, some awareness that every other relationship he had ever experienced had ended in failure.

He sat and listened to the silence. How could he live in a world of total silence, without contact of any kind?

At last he raised his handset and tapped out the code of the cheap hotel where she was staying.

Seconds later Sukara stared up at him from the tiny screen.

“Hello,” she said, shyly.

“Hello,” Vaughan said.

The sunlight felt warm on his face.