The D’neeran Factor (98 page)

The end didn't come and didn't come and didn't come, and he lived that way for five years.

Through all of it he clung to music. The flute went with him everywhere. He had always taken lessons, and now, with the quiet exchange of a great deal of money, he took them from the masters of his time. Not necessarily those he would have chosen; some would not have him as a pupil at any price. He did not resent their refusal, but acknowledged their judgment, which had to do with character not talent. After all, there were days when his hands shook too hard to hold the instrument. But as soon as they were steadier he would pick it up again. And he carried a collection of music cubes, too, compulsively. Here was order, when there was no order anywhere else. Also his inclination led him deeper and deeper into the past, so that he learned, in his pursuit of essential harmonies, ancient history and archaic tongues. He had educated himself with fierce determination and he did not care who knew it, but though he acquired a stunning expertise in this one esoteric area, he kept his mouth shut about it. In all human space he shared this part of him only with a handful of other musicians and scholars. He played sometimes for them, but usually for himself, and never for anyone else, clutching music to himself in solitude—as if it could be taken away from him, if people knew it was precious.

Toward the end he stopped playing. Toward the end he acknowledged that he was not worthy of the music. And so he had been right, it could be taken away. Toward the end he could not even hear it in his head.

He was trying to kill himself. Exactly how the fact came to his attention was unclear, though it had something to do with the girl in his bed on Colony One. He did not know what she had done to trigger the rage in him, and he never found out. It happened at the end of a week he scarcely remembered. He was very sick from doping, he could not think, and so he acted entirely from instinct. He got from her the name of a medic who would not ask embarrassing questions, and he went to get the man and brought him back to take care of her. He was filled with bewildering compassion, he promised to stay with her until she was well, he left her only to obtain some things she needed for the time it would take for the bruises to heal, and he bought presents for her, too; and when he came back she was gone.

This happened in luxurious lodgings in a town whose name he could not remember. The rooms the girl had left (his rational mind insisted) were bright, clean, and comfortable: worth the high cost of a few days' stay. But in memory they were dim and grimy. He stood in them knowing he was alone.

By merciful coincidence an express flight for Valentine would leave in a few hours. He booked passage and left with nothing but his silent flute, leaving everything else behind.

He knew before he got to Valentine that this time he was really ill. He couldn't sleep, couldn't keep food down, got weaker instead of stronger even though he had left behind his stock of dope. But he was not suffering from the interruption of any addiction. He was not seriously addicted to anything, and he had altered his habits before when his body became insistent. He had never felt this bad. It came to him that he could not go back to his customary pursuits on Valentine, at least not right away, and so he contacted Kareem from space and arranged for Kareem to find a place where he could stay until his strength returned. Kareem agreed, his face expressionless. Years later Michael still would not know what Kareem thought of him in those
days. He did not ask; the answer might be too painful to hear.

In the remainder of the passage to Valentine, he began to want certain things he had never valued before: simple food, peaceful sleep, solitude, silence. He wanted them very badly and did not look past them, because it seemed to him a given, inescapable, that when he left the sanctuary Kareem had prepared for him, he would return to living just as he had lived until then. Even when he disembarked at Port of Shoreground (moving carefully because his head was light and his limbs treacherous) and climbed into the preprogrammed aircar Kareem had sent for him, he could not read the future in his overwhelming sense of escape.

The car took him north along the coast and then inland—as he discovered only when it had landed and he asked it where he was; during the first minutes of the flight he had fallen into the first real sleep he had had in weeks.

The place was a lodge by the edge of a stream that flowed north to join the network of tributaries of the Black River, which eventually, much farther north, poured into the sea. He had an idea that this was sportsmen's territory, and the lodge one of a string of similar facilities that dotted the area, but he did not realize until later that he knew that because once he had been told he owned some of them. Later, when he took an interest in what he owned, and went back to see if there were ghosts there (there were), he learned that this was the smallest of them. It had few amenities and was intended for the serious hunter who only wanted a base to come back to at night. It had a single mirror that showed him a stranger with heavy eyes and a thickening middle. The cabin did not talk to him; its intelligence was on the most basic level. It was as isolated as it was possible to be, and as primitive as it could be without being a thatched hut, and no one came there without a reason.

So for a little while he had what he wanted. Solitude: which meant that he could not hurt anyone else. Food, sleep: the absolute foundations of existence, as he discovered in his gratitude for being able to eat and sleep again. And silence: but why did he want that, when he was used to the din of voices and machines?

He found out why. It was so he could hear himself.

The weather was dry and hot and Michael looked at the
forest and thought of walking in it, but he was weak, and too many other things screamed for his attention, so he sat on the porch and watched the shadows travel like a compass of the day, pointing west in the morning and east at night. It seemed important to be very still because the ground pitched and yawed whenever he got up. He thought he might be going mad—because though he was alone, somebody asked him questions. Michael thought he knew this stranger, or had known him once, before the dark closed in. He had lived in Michael's head for a long time, but he had been silent or, more likely, drowned out. Now he could be heard. He insisted on a dialogue, and the long conversation went on and on. Michael remembered parts of it word for word for the rest of his life.

“Do you think,” said the stranger, “you're any better than the animals who started you out this way?”

“Sure I am. Look at the
Queen.
I said I wouldn't hurt anybody, and I didn't, did I?”

“Oh, come on. What about the spacer who lost an eye in that bar on Co-op? The one whose head you bashed in at Shoreground last year? Not to mention that girl—”

“They're all right. I made sure they were all right.”

“So your bones wouldn't rot in jail—”

The voice took him through every remembered incident of his life. It weighed up, evaluated, and interpreted. He began to learn about accountability, though he grasped the concept only dimly; he also began to learn about possibilities he had never considered before. One of the things you could do with money was give it away. One thing you could do if women fell all over you was take a closer look at the ones who did not; it was even possible that pleasing a woman worth pleasing went beyond what happened in bed. It was possible that the mind that had mastered the
Pavonis Queen
puzzle was good for other things as well. The possibilities might mean there were other ways to live, and maybe even that there were things to live for.

These were new ideas. He grasped them, however, eagerly and easily. He did not attribute his quickness to any special virtue on his part. It was only that he had gotten what he thought he wanted, and it was not worth having. And all he felt, when he thought that he might be able to change, was relief so great there was no room for righteousness—or guilt.

The days ran into each other, and when he came to this point where he began to see the astonishing possibilities, he was not sure how long he had been in the forest. He was not in a hurry to leave. It was taking some time to get acquainted with this person in his head, whose name, oddly enough, was Michael, too. He was likable, not bad company at all; he couldn't do anything about the chasm Michael saw sometimes, but he said
What did you expect anyway?
At least he was a thoroughgoing realist who admitted without hesitation that there were more questions than answers.

But finally Michael knew he could not stay there any longer. It was time to do something else. Get a new place to live, only for a long time this time: on the Carnivaltown dome, maybe, close to where he had started from, close enough to see it, but a little distance away. He would buy it empty, furnish it with absolute basics, and take his time filling it up. He would give some thought to what he filled it up with. And he would find out what Kareem was doing with his fortune, and see if he could learn how to do some of it himself, though starting as the most ignorant of pupils.

He had a vague notion of fishing for his dinner on the last night, and went to look at the stream. But it had fallen much lower than when he arrived, and even in the deeper pools downstream there were thick pads of moss on the stones in the shallows, and a smell of decay in the mud at the margins. He wasn't hungry anyway. He walked back to the cabin in the dusk thinking that he might, tonight, take up the flute again, and see if it would let him play it. And he thought he heard a whine high above as he walked, as if an aircar crossed the sky, but that was unlikely, and he was preoccupied, and dismissed the notion.

He went into the cabin and a man was waiting for him.

He thought the man was someone Kareem had sent to get him, or to tell him something. Not that Kareem had ever done anything of the kind before, Michael being unnecessary to anything Kareem did, but he could not think of any other reason for this stranger to be here.

The man did not say anything, so Michael made some polite, questioning remark.

The man said, “You don't recognize me, do you?”

To the best of Michael's knowledge he had never seen the man before. He said, “Should I?”

“I hope not. Ivo Tonson. Remember me?”

Michael said incredulously, “Ivo?” and the other man laughed. Not even the laugh was familiar.

“They did a good job, didn't they? Know what I did a couple years ago? Went back to Earth and looked up my wife. Walked up and asked for directions. She didn't even blink. So how are you, my boy?”

Michael put his hands in his pockets and looked at Ivo Tonson without answering. It was now nearly five Standard years since the
Pavonis Queen
incident. There had never been any repercussions, and he had gradually left behind the paranoia that had, of necessity, affected every breath he took through every stage of preparation for the crime. But now he felt its old familiar touch. There was no good reason, not one, for Tonson to seek him out after all this time.

He said, “How did you find me here?”

“Oh, that was easy. I called up your headman and told him you'd tried to contact me, left a message saying I was to join you, but neglected to say where you were. I may have suggested there was a party getting ready to happen. He didn't ask any questions. I don't think,” Tonson said, “he entirely approves of you, dear boy.”

“That's no news…”

The air stirred a little, sluggishly. Michael had bypassed the cabin's climate control and opened all the windows, thinking the night would turn cool, but the heat of the day still lingered. The thick smell of the parched stream came in, and the smell of danger with it.

He said, “What do you want?”

“Why, the renewal of old ties, of course. Let me tell you what I've been doing.”

“I don't want to know,” Michael said.

“Well, you're going to hear it anyway. We'll do this my way, my boy. We always did, didn't we? And so cooperative you always were. Always pleasant. Always smiling. Even when I hurt you. I always thought you liked it, my dear.”

Tonson looked around and sat down, making himself at home. He had not had his body structure tampered with, whatever had been done to change the rest of him. He was still a little man with no muscle to speak of. He would be easy to handle; but Michael suspected he was armed.

He stood where he was and no doubt appeared to listen,
but he took in little of the talk, which had to do with a series of disastrous investments. Instead of listening, Michael thought of what he had gone through to get this roly-poly sadist's cooperation, the information that was the key to the one big coup he needed to start life over again. It had gotten so he winced whenever he heard the cheery voice across space: “Be in Shoreground in a few days, my dear. You'll be ready, won't you?”

Tonson said something again about renewing old ties, only this time he was explicit about what he meant.

Michael said softly, “I don't do that any more. I'm not for sale any more.”

“A pity. Truly a pity. You look just as fine as you ever did, although,” Tonson said judiciously, “you seem a little unwell. Not due to this unexpected visit, I hope. Still, if old friendships mean nothing to you, I'm prepared to deal on a businesslike basis.”

“I told you, I'm not—”

“Oh, I don't mean that. I don't mean that at all. I came about money. Mostly.”

“Oh, yes?” said Michael, and it was as if a string that ran all through his body, out to the ends of his fingers and toes, drew taut. He knew what was happening now. It only remained to hear the details.

He listened. It was worse than he expected. He heard about the hint already lodged with I&S, the promise of more information to come. “It all depends on you, dear boy. I looked for you on Colony One, to tell you it wasn't safe for you there any more, but I missed you. You'd left in rather a hurry.” He wanted nothing as simple as cash. He wanted a partnership in Michael's growing network of interests.