The Nirvana Plague (35 page)

Karen stopped in mid-step. She was halfway through the open space between the two vehicles. This can’t be happening, she thought. This
cannot
be happening.

“Get back in your car!” he yelled again.

Why was he so frightened? she thought.

“Get back in your fucking car, goddamn it!” he yelled.

But she found that she wasn’t moving. She was frozen in uncertainty. The officer couldn’t handcuff Ally as long as he needed to keep Karen covered too. If Karen advanced, he’d shoot her. If she turned away, he’d hurt Ally. If she stood where she was, his uncertainty and fear would continue to escalate. She looked at Ally.

Ally turned her face toward Karen. Her cheek was flat on the hood of the patrol car. The engine was still running. The lights were flashing. The cars that passed them on the highway were slowing down to see the arrest.

Ally smiled at her. She didn’t seem at all distressed. Her eyes were shining.

Karen looked up at the officer again.

He was crying. Tears were spilling from his dark little eyes, rolling out over his hard round cheeks.

Suddenly Karen felt sorry for him. He looked like he was about to go to pieces. She opened her hands toward him as if to say “I don’t know what to do either.”

Then, all at once, the tension seemed to twist out of his pale face. He was still looking toward her, but his eyes seemed to lose focus.

Ally moved and Karen’s eyes went back to her. She was getting up. She had somehow gotten her arm free, and she was pushing herself up off the hood of the patrol car.

The officer had released her. It seemed to take a long time for Karen to understand this.
He had let Ally go. She was getting up.

The officer took a step back so Ally could stand up. She turned round to face him. They were very close to each other, their chests just touching. Ally was looking right into his eyes.

Karen heard a thud, and saw the officer’s gun on the grey pavement at his feet.

Then Ally put her arms through his arms and embraced him. She held him tight for a long time, though he did not return the embrace.

Karen stood rooted, amazed. The cars and trucks on the highway whizzed past. The red and blue beacons of the patrol car flashed their quick chaotic patterns.

After a minute Ally released him and led him back around the open door of his car and calmly told him to get back inside.

“Now sit here and wait awhile,” she said to him gently. “Don’t try to drive until you feel better. Then go home.”

The officer nodded slightly in reply.

Ally gently shut his door.

The gun was still lying on the pavement near the front tire. Ally bent down and picked it up matter-of-factly, like she was rescuing a turtle trying to cross a busy road. Then with a quick smooth motion she threw the gun over the car and out into the dense brush that flanked the highway.

Ally walked back toward her car. She stopped in front of Karen, and broke into another big smile.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“You have it,” Karen said flatly.

“I’d better drive. Come on.” She gave Karen a little push to get her moving.

Karen walked stiffly round to the passenger side and got in and shut the door.

Ally got in behind the wheel and started the car.

“You have it,” Karen said. “You gave it to him.”

Ally put the car in gear and started accelerating down the shoulder. “He’s all right. He’ll feel better soon. The poor man was in agony.”

“How long have you had it?”

At speed now, Ally merged into the traffic, though there wasn’t much.

“I don’t know,” she said, smiling.

“Does Carl know?”

She considered the question for a minute. “I think he knows,” she said finally. “But he doesn’t know that he knows.”

Ally took the next exit.

“We better get off the interstate,” she said.

Karen nodded, mute.

Delacourt joined Marley for lunch in the Abrams commissary. They lunched together most days. Marley was watching the news on his tablet.

“I watched your interview with Sturgeon this morning,” Delacourt said, sitting down.

“Mm.”

“Benford watched it too. In the video room. She’s keeping pretty close tabs on you and your little experiment.”

Marley nodded but said nothing. He didn’t really want answers to any of the questions that came to mind.

“This one gets to you, doesn’t he?” Delacourt said.

“These cases are frustrating,” he said, without looking up.

“Yes, I’m sure they are,” she said, “from a certain point of view. But this one gets to you specially. I mean Roger in particular. He really throws you off your game.”

Marley finally looked up at her. He wasn’t really following the program anyway. He gulped a mouthful of warm black coffee from a white mug — white, disposable, sterile, hard, plastic.

“I tell you what gets to me,” Marley said. “It’s this goddamn coffee. This goddamn food. This goddamn place.”

Delacourt gave him that critically appraising look he had become familiar with over the last few weeks.

“We’d all like to go home,” she said.

She was smarter than he was. And cooler. He often envied her composure. He affected professionalism. She inhabited it.

“What do you mean,” he said, “‘from a certain point of view?’”

She smiled in a way that let him know she knew he was steering her away from the main point, and she would let him. “Well,” she said, “I just meant you’ve been arguing that we’re looking at this thing all wrong and that’s why we’re not getting anywhere, but you don’t seem to have found another way for yourself.”

“How do you look at it?”

“You mean as a cognitive science researcher? I see it as a very interesting example of the many ways the human brain is capable of organizing itself. I try to resist the temptation to decide which organizations are healthy and unhealthy. But that’s how a researcher works. For you, of course, it’s different. I think that’s why you find IDD frustrating. You can’t find a peg to fit that hole.”

He suddenly flashed back to the day Benford drafted him for this job — the black hole on the face of his brand new government-issued tablet.

“What are you grinning about?” Delacourt said.

“Nothing.” He gulped another mouthful of coffee, grimaced.

“So now what?” she said.

“You tell me. Do you have some new tricks the rest of us don’t know about?”

She gave him another indulgent look. He was defensive. She knew it. She let him know she knew it. She said, “Watching you and some of the others interact with our IDD cases makes me wonder if this isn’t what it must have been like when European missionaries started coming into contact with other cultures, people who didn’t share many of their core assumptions about the way things are — about the way the world works, what people really are, what it all means. I wonder if it won’t be a lot like this when the little green men from Andromeda come calling. Perhaps they’ll think of themselves as something like missionaries too.”

“I don’t think the analogy is particularly apt, Xan. We’re not trying to convince perfectly healthy people that they’re actually sick. We’re trying to help people who are already sick find their way back to health.”

“And I wonder if the missionaries didn’t believe the same thing about themselves. Watching your interaction with Roger on the monitor this morning reminded me of the tape we watched yesterday. You made that tape weeks ago, before you started Roger on drug trials—”

Marley scowled. Actually winced.

Delacourt said, “It’s no use trying to sugarcoat it. That’s what we’ve been doing. Unpleasant as it is.”

“Did you watch me with Fred too?”

“Yes. He’s not nearly as far along as Roger. Reynolds isn’t either.”

“Notice how we call him ‘Fred’ now?” Marley said. “Not Dr. Peters. Now’s he just another patient. Just another bambi.”

“I know. But already you can see the Dr. Peters that we knew starting to come out. Impatient, short tempered.”

“Yes.”

“And don’t you think that Roger seems more and more like he was before the drugs, at the time you made that recording that’s all over the news?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s a feature of IDD that’s been present all along,” she continued. “From the very beginning.”

“What is?”

“That they don’t want to play by our rules. They don’t buy into the situation that we’re presenting them with. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s even more than that. Especially with Roger. Maybe because he is so intelligent. He’s not only unwilling to play the patient’s part in the doctor-patient situation, he seems unwilling to let you play
your
part, the doctor part. It’s like he goes out of his way to undermine you. He’s deliberately making it hard for you to play doctor. That’s why he pisses you off. It’s as though every time you go to sit down in your chair, he snatches it out from under you. Then stands there laughing at you flat on your back.”

Marley’s tablet was still quietly buzzing the news between them. He tapped it off. She was so damn sharp. Roger wasn’t the only one that threw him off his game.

“OK,” he said. “That’s interesting, Xan. That makes sense.”

She flashed her stunning smile at him.

“I’m going to talk to him again after lunch,” he said. “The others too. How about observing again and tell me what you think? Over dinner?”

“I’d be happy to, Mr. Spaceman.”

Just outside the next little town they came to was a bright little used car lot — buy, sell, or trade — twenty or thirty cars sitting shiny under red and white streamers, all good as new, all marked down. Ally suddenly braked and pulled into it.

“What’s wrong?” Karen said. “Where are we?”

“Dandy Cars,” Ally said.

“Why?”

Ally was already getting out.

A big man in an electric blue suit was walking toward them from a small glass building at the back of the lot. He had a smile as big as his head. He stuck out his thick hand and shook Ally’s enthusiastically.

“Howdy! Welcome! I’m Jim Dandy.”

“Is that your real name?”

“Yes, ma’am, it is. That is the name my mother blessed me with, rest in peace. Now what can I do you for?”

“I want to get a new car.”

“Well, this is the place for that, ma’am! Lemme show you round!”

Karen opened her door and slid out of the car. She was still feeling queasy from the encounter with the highway patrol officer.

Jim Dandy turned the brilliant beam of his smile onto her too.

“Howdy, ma’am!” he said, “Jim Dandy!” — apparently experimenting with the assumption that she was the one they were buying for. He swept an arm across the vast expanse of his half-acre lot. “Jim Dandy Cars!”

Karen smiled feebly, leaning against the door of the Mercedes.

Jim Dandy turned back to Ally, who was, obviously, the woman in charge of this transaction. “Now let me show you what we have here.”

“I want to trade you this car,” Ally said.

Jim Dandy’s big eyes swelled with greed. “
This
car?” he said. “
This
car?”

“Yes.”

With one thick hand he caressed the black Mercedes’ lithe fender. “This here is a fine little vehicle, ma’am. It’s a ’25?”

“’26.”

Jim Dandy purred appreciatively. “Hm.”

Ally started looking around the lot.

Jim Dandy trotted along with her. “What sort of a trade were you looking for?” he said.

“Something old.”

“Something old?”

“Yes.”

“How old?”

“Do you have any cars here that don’t have one of those transponder things in them?”

Jim Dandy’s eyes narrowed. He pointed his fat chin at her, and his voice came down an octave. “You own the papers on that Mercedes, ma’am?”

“It’s my husband’s car,” she said.

Jim Dandy became dubious. “Well, now, I don’t know,” he said. “Is this a divorce matter, ma’am?”

“No.”

“Well, now, I don’t know.”