The White Mountain (37 page)

It was late night. A single lamp burned in the long, wood-walled room. Chen sat in a low chair across from Debrenceni, silent, listening, the drink in his hand untouched.

‘They're dead. Officially, that is. In the records they've already been executed. But here we find a use for them. Test out a few theories.' He cleared his throat. ‘We've been doing it for years, actually. At first it was all quite unofficial. Back in the days when Berdichev ran things there was a much greater need to be discreet about these things. But now…'

Debrenceni shrugged, then reached out to take the wine jug and refill his cup. There was a dreadful irony in his voice – a sense of profound mistrust in the words even as he offered them. He sipped at his cup then sat back again, his pale green eyes resting on Chen's face.

‘We could say no, of course. Break contract and find ourselves dumped one morning in the Net, brain-wiped and helpless. That's one option. The moral option, you might call it. But it's not much of a choice. We do it because we must. Because our “side” demands that someone does it, and we've been given the short straw. Those we deal with here are murderers, of course – though I've found that that doesn't help when you're thinking about it. After all, what are we? I guess the point is that they started it. They
began
the killing. As for us, well, I guess we're merely finishing what they began.'

He sighed. ‘Look, you'll find a dozen rationalizations while you're here. A hundred different ways of evading things and lying to yourself. But trust to your first instinct, your first response. Never – whatever you do – question that. Your first response was the right one. The natural one. It's what we've grown used to here that's unnatural. It may
seem
natural after a while, but it isn't. Remember that in the weeks to come.'

‘I see.'

‘Some forget,' Debrenceni said, leaning forward, his voice lowered. ‘Some even
enjoy
it.'

Chen breathed in deeply. ‘Like Drake, you mean?'

‘No. There you're wrong. Michael feels it greatly, more than any of us, perhaps. I've often wondered how he's managed to stand it. The mountain helps, of course. It helps us all. Somewhere to go. Somewhere to sit and think things through,
above
the world and all its pettiness.'

Chen gave the barest nod. ‘Who are they? The prisoners, I mean. Where do they come from?'

Debrenceni smiled. ‘I thought you understood. They're terrorists. Hotheads and troublemakers. This is where they send them now. All of the State's enemies.'

Kibwezi Station was larger than Chen had first imagined. It stretched back beneath the surface boundary of the perimeter fence and deep into the earth, layer beneath layer. Dark cells lay next to stark-lit, cluttered rooms, while bare, low-ceilinged spaces led through to crowded guard rooms, banked high with monitor screens and the red and green flicker of trace lights. All was linked somehow, interlaced by a labyrinth of narrow corridors and winding stairwells. At first it had seemed very different from the City, a place that made that greater world of levels seem spacious – open-ended – by comparison, and yet, in its condensation and contrasts, it was very much a distillation of the City. At the lowest level were the laboratories and operating theatres – the ‘dark heart of things', as Drake called it, with that sharp, abrasive laugh that was already grating on Chen's nerves. The sound of a dark, uneasy humour.

It was Chen's first shift in the theatres. Gowned and masked, he stood beneath the glare of the operating lights and waited, not quite knowing what to expect, watching the tall figure of Debrenceni washing his hands at the sink. After a while two others came in and nodded to him, crossing the room to wash up before they began. Then, when all were masked and ready, Debrenceni turned and nodded to the ceiling camera. A moment later two of the guards wheeled in a trolley.

The prisoner was strapped tightly to the trolley, his body covered with a simple green cloth, only his shaved head showing. From where Chen stood he could see nothing of the man's features, only the transparency of the flesh, the tight knit of the skull's plates in the harsh overhead light. Then,
with a small jerk of realization that transcended the horrifying unreality he had been experiencing since coming into the room, he saw that the man was still conscious. The head turned slightly, as if to try to see what was behind it. There was a momentary glint of brightness, of a moist, penetratingly blue eye, straining to see, then the neck muscles relaxed and the head lay still, kept in place by the bands that formed a kind of brace about it.

Chen watched as one of the others leaned across and tightened the bands, bringing one loose-hanging strap across the mouth and tying it, then fastening a second across the brow, so that the head was held rigid. Satisfied, the man worked his way round the body, tightening each of the bonds, making sure there would be no movement once things began.

Dry-mouthed, Chen looked at Debrenceni and saw that he too was busy, methodically laying out his scalpels on a white cloth. Finished, the Administrator looked up and, smiling with his eyes, indicated that he was ready.

For a moment the sheer unreality of what was happening threatened to overwhelm Chen. His whole body felt cold and his blood seemed to pulse strongly in his head and hands. Then, with a small, embarrassed laugh, he saw what he had not noticed before. It was not a man. The prisoner on the trolley was a woman.

Debrenceni worked swiftly, confidently, inserting the needle at four different points in the skull and pushing in a small amount of local anaesthetic. Then, with a deftness Chen had not imagined him capable of, Debrenceni began to cut into the skull, using a hot-wire drill to sink down through the bone. The pale, long hands moved delicately, almost tenderly over the woman's naked skull, seeking and finding the exact points where he would open the flesh and drill down towards the softer tissues beneath. Chen stood at the head of the trolley, watching everything, seeing how one of the assistants mopped and staunched the bleeding while the other passed the instruments. It was all so skilful and so gentle. And then it was done, the twelve slender filaments in place, ready for attachment.

Debrenceni studied the skull a moment, his fingers checking his own work. Then he nodded and, taking a spray from the cloth, coated the skull with a thin, almost plastic layer that glistened wetly under the harsh light. It had the sweet, unexpected scent of some exotic fruit.

Chen came round and looked into the woman's face. She had been quiet throughout and had made little movement, even when the tiny, hand-held
drill let out its high, nerve-tormenting whine. He had expected screams, the outward signs of struggle, but there had been nothing; only her stillness, and that unnerving silence.

Her eyes were open. As he leant over her, her eyes met his and the pupils dilated, focusing on him. He jerked his head back, shocked after all to find her conscious and undrugged, and looked across at Debrenceni, not understanding.

They had drilled into her skull
…

He watched, suddenly frightened. None of this added up. Her reactions were wrong. As they fitted the spiderish helmet, connecting its filaments to those now sprouting from the pale, scarred field of her skull, his mind feverishly sought its own connections. He glanced down at her hands and saw, for the first time, how they were twitching, as if in response to some internal stimulus. For a moment it seemed to mean something – to
suggest
something – then it slipped away, leaving only a sense of wrongness, of things not connecting properly.

When the helmet was in place, Debrenceni had them lower the height of the trolley and sit the woman up, adjusting the frame and cushions to accommodate her new position. In doing this the cover slipped down, exposing the paleness of her shoulders and arms, her small firm breasts, the smoothness of her stomach. She had a young body. Her face, in contrast, seemed old and abstract, the legs of the metal spider forming a cage about it.

Chen stared at her, as if seeing her anew. Before he had been viewing her only in the abstract. Now he saw how frail and vulnerable she was; how individual and particular her flesh. But there was something more – something that made him turn from the sight of her, embarrassed. He had been aroused. Just looking at her he had felt a strong, immediate response. He felt ashamed, but the fact was there and, turned from her, he faced it. Her helpless exposure had made him want her. Not casually or coldly, but with a sudden fierceness that had caught him off guard.

Beneath his pity for her was desire. Even now it made him want to turn and look at her – to feast his eyes on her helpless nakedness. He shuddered, loathing himself. It was hideous; more so for being so unexpected, so incontestable.

When he turned back his eyes avoided the woman. But Debrenceni had
seen. He was watching Chen pensively, the mask pulled down from his face. His eyes met Chen's squarely, unflinchingly.

‘They say a job like this dehumanizes the people who do it, Tong Chou. But you'll learn otherwise. I can see it in you now, as I've seen it in others who've come here. Piece by piece it comes back to us. What we
really
are. Not the ideal but the reality. The full, human reality of what we are. Animals that think.'

Chen looked away, hurt – inexplicably hurt. Not knowing why. As if even Debrenceni's understanding were suddenly too much to bear. And, for the second time since his arrival, he found himself stumbling out into the corridor, away from something that, even as he fled it, he knew he could not escape.

Up above, day had turned to night. It was warm and damp and a full moon bathed the open space between the complex and the huts with a rich, silvery light. In the distance the dark shadow of Kilimanjaro dominated the skyline, an intense black against the velvet blue.

Debrenceni stood there, taking deep breaths of the warm, invigorating air. The moonlight seemed to shroud him in silver and for the briefest moment he seemed insubstantial, like a projection cast against a pure black backcloth. Chen made to put out his hand, then drew it back, feeling foolish.

Debrenceni's voice floated across to him. ‘You should have stayed. You would have found it interesting. It's not an operation I've done that often and this one went very well. You see, I was wiring her.'

Chen frowned. Many of the senior officers in Security were wired – adapted for linking-up to a comset – or, like Tolonen, had special slots surgically implanted behind their ears so that tapes could be direct-inputted. But this had been different.

Debrenceni saw the doubt in Chen's face and laughed. ‘Oh, it's nothing so crude as the usual stuff. No, this is the next evolutionary step. A pretty obvious one, but one that – for equally obvious reasons – we've not taken before now. This kind of wiring needs no input connections. It uses a pulsed signal. That means the connection can be made at a distance. All you need is the correct access code.'

‘But that sounds…' Chen stopped. He had been about to say that it sounded an excellent idea, but some of its ramifications had struck him. The existence of a direct-input connection gave the subject a choice. They could plug in or not. Without that there was no choice. He – or she – became merely another machine, the control of which was effectively placed in the hands of someone else.

He shivered. So
that
was what they were doing here. That was why they were working on sentenced prisoners and not on volunteers. He looked back at Debrenceni, aghast.

‘Good,' Debrenceni said, yet he seemed genuinely pained by Chen's realization.

Chen looked down, suddenly tired of the charade, wishing he could tell Debrenceni who he really was and why he was there; angry that he should be made a party to this vileness. For a moment his anger extended even to Karr for sending him in, knowing nothing; for making him have to feel his way out of this labyrinth of half-guessed truths. Then, with a tiny shudder, he shut it out.

Debrenceni turned, facing Chen fully. Moonlight silvered his skull, reduced his face to a mask of dark and light. ‘An idea has two faces. One acceptable, the other not. Here we experiment not only on perfecting the wiring technique but on making the idea of it acceptable.'

‘And once you've perfected things?' Chen asked, a tightness forming at the pit of his stomach.

Debrenceni stared back at him a moment, then turned away, his moonlit outline stark against the distant mountain's shape. But he was silent. And Chen, watching him, felt suddenly alone and fearful and very, very small.

Chen watched them being led in between the guards; three men and two women, loosely shackled to each other with lengths of fine chain, their clothes unwashed, their heads unshaven.

She was there, of course, hanging back between the first two males, her head turned from him, her eyes downcast.

Drake took the clipboard from the guard and flicked through the flimsy sheets, barely glancing at them. Then, with a satisfied nod, he came across, handing the board to Chen.

‘The names are false. As for the rest, there's probably nothing we can use. Security still think it's possible to extract factual material from situations of duress, but we know better. Hurt a man and he'll confess to anything. But it doesn't really matter. We're not really interested in who they were or what they did. That's all in the past.'

Chen grunted, then looked up from the clipboard, seeing how the prisoners were watching him, as if, by handing him the board, Drake had established him as the man in charge. He handed the clipboard back and took a step closer to the prisoners. At once the guards moved forward, raising their guns, as if to intercede, but their presence did little to reassure him. It wasn't that he was afraid – he had been in far more dangerous situations, many a time – yet he had never had to face such violent hatred, such open hostility. He could feel it emanating from the five. Could see it burning in their eyes. And yet they had never met him before this moment.