Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet (36 page)

  
“And you believe that it has changed
you
?”

  
Pope came full circle again and stopped before him with new deliberation. 

  
His eyes wandered around the room and then fixed back on the neuralist, whose
visage grew more ill-omened by the minute. 

  
“Do you recognise this place, Saul?”

  
A strange foreboding bubbled up inside him. 

  
Pope stepped forward and the shadows extended over his features.  

  
“What if I told you that it is the sixth time you have been here?”

  
His heart stirred and the air flow through the mask quickened slightly. Detecting
his sudden rise in pulse, he said nothing. 

  
A long silence later, Pope raised his head, turned away and pronounced loudly:
“Apollo.  File; zero – zero – zero – seven – one – seven – one – six – six –
one – five – zero – triple-eight…  Retrieve.”

  
The string of numbers was followed by a pulse of blue light rippling across the
holoscreen.  When the wave of light diminished, the photons rearranged into
line after unfurling line of text across the 3-D display, and a number of
rotating images.  It was a bio file from the UMC Nexus.  Pope drew the
pen-shaped implement and pointed it at the screen, amplifying one of the
holographic images so that it extended across the whole display.

  
“Do you recognise this woman, Saul?”

  
New visions – glimpses of forgotten nightmares – instantly flashed through his
mind again through a haze of red, when the image of a dark-haired, red-lipped
sapphire-eyed woman appeared before him.  The words “
ubit menya
”
repeated in his mind like a litany.

  
“Who…” he faltered between breaths.  “Who is she?”

  
“The last person you …
loved
,” Pope replied.  “She was a walker from
Durkheim.  The rest of her identity has since been lost.  No record remains of
anyone deceased in Sodom, as you know.  You had begun cohabiting with her
exactly one hundred and thirty-four days before your previous cleaning.”

  
His thoughts stopped on the words “previous cleaning.”

  
“What happened?” he asked.

  
“You killed her.”

  
Pope’s expression assumed its usual severity, as he looked from the cold blue
eyes to the nameless woman, and the same unsourced dread which marked the
beginning and end of all his nightmares flared up inside him again. 

  
“You are lying,” he said.

 
 Pope, seeming to anticipate his answer, bowed his head and gave his back.

  
“Apollo,” he called.  “Subject; Jason Solomon.  Day seventy-three -- sixty-two
-- three hundred and fifty hours.” 

  
The instruction was followed by another ripple of light across the holoscreen.  The
image of the sapphire-eyed woman disappeared and another took its place.  A
sound like radio static filled the chamber.  And then… voices:

  
“
Jason … Jason…
”

  
“
Stop.  Make it stop.
”

  
Pope appeared as a figure of light pacing around him in a holographic
reproduction of the same chamber they were in at that very moment.  However,
given that the second speaker appeared a few seconds later, seated in the same
chair and in the same position that he was now, it took a moment for him to
realise whose the second voice was:  His own.

  
“
Jason
… do you know why you are here?
”

  
“
The nightmares … They just keep getting worse.
”

  
“
Listen to me, Jason.  Focus: Why are you here?
Do you remember?
”

  
“
She is dead
. 
She is dead
.”

  
His voice was wild and chaotic.

  
“
Who is dead, Jason?
”

  
“
I had to.  I could not stop myself.
”

  
“
No.  No you couldn’t
.”

  
“
I
love her.  I love her.  What is wrong with me?
”

  
“
There is nothing wrong with you, Jason.  This is what you are”

  
“I loved her…”

  
“
Don’t worry.  As long as you are alive, you can always start again.  We
will clean you.
”

  
“
I loved her…  I loved her.
”

  
Pope raised the thin pen-shaped device and pointed it at the screen and the
recording stopped.  He turned around and paused upon the mystified look in
Saul’s eyes.

 
 “Jason Solomon,” he pronounced:  “One of your five predecessors.  Each one of
them came to us the same way as Saul Vartanian.”

  
Saul’s eyes shot to and fro behind tightly closed eyelids.  The visions
returned like a chain of explosions: visions of things he could not link with
either dream or memory.  None of it would process.  And he kept coming back to
the same default assumption:
Pope is a liar.  The Commission – all of them
are liars.

  
“Is it really so hard to believe?”

  
He opened his eyes and shot a glance at Eastman, then all around the chamber
and finally, Pope.  His thoughts began to fall into place, slowly making sense
of things.

  
“This is … my past.”

  
“Technically, no,” Pope replied, swiftly.  “Like Martial Solomon, each of your
predecessors all perished along with their pasts.”

  
“We are the same person!”

  
Pope slowly shook his head. 

  
“No.” He began to pontificate again.  “People -- identities -- are the
collections and collocations of memories.  Nothing more, nothing less.  No
memory remains of the individuals who preceded you, either in your mind or
anybody else’s.  They have thus been eradicated from existence and, soon, so
will Saul Vartanian.  All that will be left of you is a body and a blank slate
ripe for the same story to be written again.” 

  
He stopped, as usual, when he came full circle, as though the act of forming
circles with his paces was meant to convey his purpose.  It was a spectacle, a
sermon and a trial all at once.  It was all rehearsed.  It was all a scheme.

  
“Why am I here?” he asked

  
Pope came forward, a second between each step. 

  
“You are here because we are about to clean you,” he stated, categorical gaps separating
his syllables. “You are at the edge of the abyss, where living or dying makes
no difference, where the only thing keeping you alive is the resilience which
defines you as a martial of your caste.         “However, as is the case with
all virtue: the same thing that makes you strong also makes you stubborn.  You
desire to be cleaned, but your commitment to this illusion you call ‘love’ will
not allow it – that is why you could not kill yourself.  That is why you want
us
to do it for you.  But that will
change.  It
must
change.  That
is why you and I are here, Saul.  It is vital that, before we clean you, you
submit to us as you have done before.  And we know that you will not do so
until you know the truth.  Under no circumstances may we violate your freedom.”

  
“What difference does it make!” he growled

  
“All the difference in the world,” the neuralist replied.  “Freedom is the
necessary condition of progress.  Nothing can flourish if it is constrained.  Thus
we must preserve freedom any way we can if our efforts are to be at all
expedient.  It is, therefore, imperative that you come to us willingly and
unreservedly.”

  
“What you want will never happen.”

  
“Ah but it will,” Pope gasped wondrously.  “The will to die is already there. 
And the final illusion is always the last to fall …  Love …  The girl …” he
whispered and raised his eyes up high.  “She has brought you to this point of
limbo -- neither willing to live nor willing to die.  The paradox is less
unusual than you might imagine.  And there is only one way it may be resolved –
only one way to dispel the illusion.” 

  
Pope paused.

  
“The truth…” 

  
He started to pace around again.

 
“The truth,” he echoed.  “Tell me, Saul:  What is truth?”

  
He detected in the tenor of the question that Pope already knew what his answer
would be. 

  
“Everything that is and was, in all places, everywhere,” he replied after a
long pause.

  
“That would include the past.”

  
“Yes.”

  
“And yet you fear it now more than ever, don’t you?”

  
Pope stopped again and fixed on him with a piercing stare.

 
 “Yes…” he hummed.  “There it is; that fear.  I can see it now as vividly as
that very first day.  It is the thing that turned you against us:  The fact
that we know the answer to your darkest question.”  He paused that the question
would be marked:  “What – brought you – to – our – world?”

  
Pope bowed his head and the shadows formed over his eyes again. 

  
Saul’s pulse soared.  The air pumped into his throbbing chest.  He swirled and
scrambled alone in his skull, a whirlwind of consciousness, and the room began
to spin with him.  He blinked rapidly, squeezing his eyes shut.  The visions
returned, blazing past his mind’s eye.  Then, suddenly, it all stopped.  His
eyes flared open.  And all reality sunk back into the two points of Pope’s
hollow eyes, flashing through the shadows.

  
“Do you remember … Vincent?”

  
“Vincent.”

  
Vincent.

  
Whispers shot through his thoughts:

  
Vincent.

  
I do not want to remember

  
For how long have they sentenced you

  
Life

  
Freedom is all that matters

  
Freedom

  
Will not change what I am

  
What I have done

  
We can, Vincent

  
We can

  
We can

  
We can…

  
“
Saul.”

  
He opened his eyes and looked up. 

  
Pope’s harrowing gaze still fixed upon him from behind the glare of the round
lenses.  

  
“Do you remember…” he asked, taking one step forward, “why you are here?”

  
His breaths had now become so rapid that his body started to lurch from the
mould of his seat and the sweat broke over his brow in a thin film.  All of the
fear and dread climaxed to a point beyond even the imminence of death.  It was
the imminence of truth. 

  
“The truth…” he mouthed.

  
Pope turned his back again and pronounced:

  
“Apollo.  Subject:  Vincent Caine.  Day one…”

   The light from the holoscreen
stirred, the images ran with his thoughts and the jumble of chaotic visions
fell into place, seeming to focus along a line of coherence in time so that
something quite vivid and quite real played out both on the screen and in his
mind.

  
He was in a small, gray room.  A smell of rigorous sanitation was in the air. 
Building surveillance watched him from all four corners.  A black and
everlasting sky was beyond the glazed wall and not a light below it for miles. 

  
It had been a three-hour trip and there were no windows in the back of the
security vehicle that had brought him there.  He had no idea where he was, but
by the palpable change in the atmosphere he knew that he must have been
somewhere on the border with the martial world.   He rubbed the marks in his
wrists from the shackles that had been removed from him by the escort of armed
men in blue gear.  Even though he was still wearing the numbered boiler suit
from the prison, he already started to feel more like a free man.

  
He looked up from his sore wrists at the steel-eyed figure sitting across from
him, who he had met only once before.  It had been more than a year ago, but he
was wearing the same suit and the same hollow gaze anatomised him from behind the
glare in the round lenses of his pince-nez.  There were many Commissioners with
whom he had become acquainted since, but this man was the only one he
remembered.  His name was Pope.