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10

2011

Perhaps a cockroach cleared its throat. I woke up on my feet, in streetfighter's crouch, hands and feet prepared to kill the first thing that moved. A few seconds passed. I tried to laugh at myself, but the sound frightened me even more. I made myself sit on the floor and breathe deeply and slowly. Soon I was calm enough to notice how much my neck hurt. I decided that was all the improvement I could stand and left the bedroom. The door to the medicine cabinet stood ajar. While I was urinating I caught sight of my face in the mirror. It didn't look any more familiar than ever. "Hi, Norman," I said to it. It said the same thing to me. Only one voice heard. Conclusion unmistakable. Shake it and flush, let's us both go have breakfast.

Karen was waiting for me. She had started the coffee. She knew better than to attempt breakfast herself. I mixed up things while the coffee finished dripping, drank some while I cooked. She had the table ready when the food was. We ate. She was halfway through her cigarette when she broke the silence.

"Okay, let's break it down. What do we know for sure, what do we guess, what do we propose?"

I nodded approvingly. "Good. Okay, known for sure . . ." I paused. "Not much."

"We know you look like a man named—"

"No, we don't."

"But—oh. I see."

"Right. Who vouches for Lois Kent? What evidence did she offer?"

"Um. None at all."

"So known for sure is: we are in Halifax, drawing a bead on Psytronics Int. A woman has alleged that I look a lot, but not completely, like her ex-husband. In support of this proposition she offers a detailed circumstantial account that she says convinces her that I am not this gent, but which makes us suspect that I might be. Her story is checkable on several major points, so before we go any further, let's check it out. The whole story could be some kind of ploy by PsyInt, to set us up for something."

"Okay."

I suppose I could have used my terminal. But I was feeling paranoid; we took a bus to the library.

The newspaper morgue backed Lois Kent on the disappearance of her ex-sister-in-law and the spectacular fiery death of her ex-husband. There was a picture of the deceased English teacher. He looked like me—but like me ten or fifteen years younger than I looked now, rather than three or four. The sister had indeed worked for a company in Switzerland, and shortly before she left it, it had been absorbed by the Swiss wireheading outfit that I suspected of being secretly allied to Psytronics International. There was an extraordinary amount of followup for a missing-persons case, even a beautiful female one. Norman Kent must have been industrious.

What tore it were the photos of Madeleine Kent.

I knew her. That is, I had known her. She was the grownup version of the sister I dimly remembered from my childhood but could not name.

"She's different," I told Karen. "She looks like she grew up into a nicer person than I remember. But most kids do. That's my big sister."

"Does the name Madeleine—or Maddy—ring a bell?"

"Not at all. But I do have a vague recollection that my sister went away somewhere when I was in college, and I guess it could have been Switzerland. Let's see . . . assuming Norman's birthday is mine . . . yep, dates match."

"Let's get out of here."

"In a minute."

I found a sound-only pay phone and called the city police. I asked the desk man for Missing Persons. Shortly a voice said, "Missing Persons, Amesby."

"Never mind, Officer—he just came in the door. Bobby, where have you been?" I hung up. Another detail of the nurse's story confirmed: there was a Missing Persons cop named Amesby.

"Now let's get out of here."

We walked to Citadel Hill. It is an amazing monument to the thought processes of generals. I'd read the brochure while dealing dope there. The Citadel—the first Citadel—was built by the British Army in 1749, to protect settlers from Indian attack. Nineteen days after its completion, a group of wood-cutters were attacked and killed by Indians under its guns. For some reason the settlers had refused to help in its construction. It was completely torn down and rebuilt three times in the next century, in response to the threats of the American Revolution, Napoleon, and the War of 1812, and each rebuilding was obsolete well before completion. There has never been a day on which it was not obsolete. No shot was ever fired in anger by or at any of the four Citadels. Haligonians are fiercely proud of this boondoggle, which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. They say it was an important base for the subjugation of Quebec—but was Quebec subjugated? During World War I, it was a detention camp for radicals and other suspicious types. Leon Trotsky is said—falsely—to have done time there. It has been a tourist trap for over forty years. High-rises block its view of the harbor.

Perhaps I'm being harsh. Halifax is a splendid port, and no invader ever so much as tried to take it. Was that because of the Citadel? You tell me.

But you can still see water and sky from there. The entire Halifax Peninsula is laid out around you, the best view in town. The obsolete fort, crumbling in the sun, whispers of entropy and Herculean labor wasted. It is a good spot for thinking.

Karen and I used it so.

That early on a workday, it was almost deserted. We walked around to the southeast section, closed off for repairs, and found that completely deserted. There was heavy construction equipment here and there, but a strike had kept all the workers home. By our standards it was chilly for August, but not intolerably. The breeze was surprisingly light for such an exposed location. Nonetheless, I shivered as I thought.

After ten minutes I was done thinking.

A deep trench encircles the Citadel. It is perhaps twenty feet deep and thirty across. It prevents access except by the gate on the east or harbor side, and provides a breastwork around the fort, which, like everything else, was obsolete before completion. We were sitting a few yards from the trench. On the far side an iron staircase gave access from the floor of the trench to a sally port in the side of the Citadel proper. I nudged Karen, got up, and went to the trench. Fifteen feet below me, a construction flatbed of some kind stood abandoned. I lay down on my stomach and swung my legs over the stone lip of the trench.

"Joe, what—"

I shushed her. I lowered myself in stages until I was hanging from the edge by my hands. There were footholds in the stone block wall that any spider would have found more than adequate. I glanced down, kicked slightly away from the wall, and let go. I landed well, and waved her to join me, holding a finger to my lips for silence.

Shaking her head, she followed my example. She also landed well. We got down from the flatbed and sat cross-legged on the ground facing each other.

"This strikes me as a hard spot to mike from a distance," I said.

"Oh. Good thinking. And we can go up those stairs to the inside and out the main gate."

"So let's talk."

"Joe—me first, okay?"

"Go ahead."

"I think we should go back to New York, right away."

"Karen—"

"Let me finish! The evidence says that you already took on this Jacques LeBlanc once—and lost. Pretty decisively. I can find something else to do with my life."

"The man who took on LeBlanc five years ago is dead. I am not him. And I carry none of the excess baggage—broken marriage, kidnapped sister—that he had." I chucked her under the chin. "Plus, he didn't have you. Or anybody."

"Then you think we may have a chance?"

"Not for a second. We're dead; question of when."

She didn't flinch. "Not even if we cut and run?"

"Much too late. Think about it, baby. Visualize the enemy. If he can erase specific memories, no wonder the power flow in the wireheading industry has no relation to the money flow! What the fuck would Jacques want with money? If he can scrub brains, suck memories, what is there that he cannot do? We are to him as bacilli to a whale."

"So maybe he'll overlook us."

"You're still not thinking. If I am—if I was once Norman Kent, whose computer is that down in New York?"

Now she flinched. "Oh, my sweet . . . and you recorded that whole scene with Lois . . ."

"Yeah. The really surprising thing is that we woke up this morning. And are breathing now. We're blown, baby."

"Maybe he's not monitoring—maybe we've got some time!"

"Unlikely. But it's hard to argue with the fact that we're alive. But we can't have much time."

"So what's our next move?"

"All-out attack. Crazed-wolverine style. Get out of here, clout a good car, run out to Phinney's Cove. Fake it from there. Maybe turn the car into a bomb and run it through his kitchen. Maybe stick up the nearest Mountie detachment for some automatic weapons. Christ, I wish I had an atom bomb. I wish I'd brought more ammo when I left the house this morning. I wish I hadn't paid the rent last week, I'm never going to see the place again. Well, let's—"

"Joe—something we ought to do first."

"Yeah?"

"Make a record of everything we know."

"What, for leverage on Jacques? To warn the world? Don't you und—"

"No, no, for us."

"Huh?"

"Look, the evidence says, anyway suggests, that Jacques doesn't kill. Doesn't kill bodies, I mean. He doesn't need to; he's the mindkiller. Suppose he follows his pattern: wipes our brains and turns us loose. And then we find a record we left for ourselves . . . get it? He can't steal all our memories if we stash a few. Maybe two or three tries from now we kill him."

"No."

"But—"

"One: no time. It'd take too long to write out even the basics, we're not holding enough cash for a tapedeck, and there's no time to steal one. Two: where would we leave the record? Three: when the mindkiller gets us, he opens up our brains and finds out where we left the record. Let's get moving."

"You're right. Maybe we'll get one clear shot before we go down."

Someone yanked the sun across the sky.

 

Shadows leaped, and froze where they landed. The breeze changed direction and speed radically. The temperature dropped a couple of Celsius degrees in an instant. Internal changes were subtler but no less perceptible. My folded legs were suddenly stiffer. My mouth tasted slightly different. An exhalation was suddenly an inhalation. My breakfast was slightly farther along my gut.

The oddest part was the absence of terror. A parallel example should have been an earthquake. Humans require constant sensory reassurance of reality. When the solid earth dances and a thousand dogs howl, when the evidence of your senses is suddenly placed in doubt, you experience primeval terror. I received, in a single instant, a number of sensory reports that were simply impossible—and the terror did not come. I seemed to be too exhausted to be terrified, as though all my strength had fled from me in that same instant. Karen was gaping at me, clearly as stunned as I.

"What—" I croaked.

And then I got it. It was as well that I was too exhausted for terror, or my heart might have exploded then.

There is an old Zen conundrum: if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Here is a related question: if a man's brain is awake, but his memories are not allowed to form, is he conscious? Does he, in fact, exist?

My (hiatus)es usually averaged five to ten seconds in duration, with fuzzy edges, like a sloppy job of record-muting. This one had lasted at least ten minutes, and it was a clean splice. This one had not been preprogrammed. This one had come from the source. Jacques, or an agent of his, had shut off our minds from a distance.

"Joe, God oh God Joe, God—"

She was staring at the ground between us.

A folded piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper lay there. Excellent paper, a heavy linen parchment, cream-colored. The calligraphic type on it read:

I request the pleasure of your company this evening at my country retreat. Ask for the Old DeMarco Place. Dress informal; weapons optional. I promise to give you both at least temporary possession of any information you desire.

—J.

It was unsigned.

My hands went instinctively to my weapons. They were in place. I looked around, pulled the gun, confirmed that it was loaded and live, and put it away. We both got stiffly to our feet. I tucked the letter into my shirt pocket.

"Well," I said.

Karen could not speak. She trembled just perceptibly.

"Hoy," came a voice from above our heads.

I jumped a clear foot in the air, came down with one arm around Karen. I never even tried to go for the gun. Just for her. We gaped upward together.

A uniformed security guard stood at the edge above, looking down at us with detached interest. I was glad I hadn't tried for my gun. All the Citadel guards are experienced war veterans. He seemed vaguely relieved. He looked quite tidy and dapper, and when he spoke his accent said that he was British by birth, of cultured origins, and had a sense of humor about his job. His left sleeve was pinned up to the shoulder.

"You two seem on friendly enough terms."

Instinct came to my rescue. Agree with the nice policeman. "We are."

"What was all that screaming about a minute ago, then? Two screams, one from each of you. Sounded like black murder being done; I heard you both all the way over in the North Ravelin. You haven't murdered anyone, have you?"

Lie. "Yes."

He raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

"My father. Well, actually, my primal rage at my father. You're familiar with Janov's work?"

"Can't say I think much of it. Particularly in urban areas." He turned his gaze to Karen. "I suppose your father—"

"—makes his look like the Easter Bunny," Karen said. Her voice sounded okay. It held the ring of sincerity.

"I suppose you know you're not permitted to be down there, primal screaming or otherwise?"

"We're just leaving," Karen said.

"Splendid. I'll just meet you round at the Main Gate and see you both safely on your way home."

He didn't buy our story for a minute, but there was little he could do. He checked our ID. I always buy good ID. It's worth the extra money. He arched his brow at me a few times, admired Karen's ass, and let us go.

There seemed no reason to go back to the apartment. At a supermarket I bought ammo, food, and common household items with which I could make a cottage-industry bomb capable of converting a cottage into splinters. I got lucky, stole a four-wheel-drive with real muscle and a rifle behind the seat. Neither of us was hungry, but we ate anyway, and then hit the highway. It was sundown as we left the city behind.

About ten miles farther on, I pulled over at a place that was wall-to-wall forest. We walked a ways into the woods. We both sighted in the rifle and practiced with it a bit. Our unknown benefactor had bequeathed us two full boxes of slugs. The rifle was a thirty-oh-six with good action. It threw high and to the left. Karen, an indifferent pistol marksman, turned out to be damn good with a rifle. We got back in the truck and drove on.

Neither of us had had a thing to say since we had left the Citadel, barring short functional sentences. There seemed nothing to say. As we were passing Wolfville, after an hour of silence, I thought of something, and said it.

"I'm sorry I got you into this, baby."

Karen jumped. "Christ!"

"What?" The truck swerved.

"That's spooky, man. I was just opening my mouth to say those identical words to you."

"To me?" I growled. "What—"

"Yeah," she snapped back. "To you. I'm sorry I got you into this."

"I was into this before I ever laid eyes on—"

"Well, if I hadn't dragged you into this wirehead scam—"

"If I hadn't spoiled a perfectly good suicide—"

"Dammit—"

She stopped, and I stopped, and there was a pause, and then we both broke up. I laughed so hard I had to pull over and put it in park. We held each other awkwardly in the cramped cab and laughed on each other's shoulders.

After an immeasurable time I heard her voice in my ear. "Don't be sorry, Joe."

"You either. I might have lived out my life in New York, never knowing the Mindkiller existed. I might have died never knowing what my mother called me. Now at least I'm going to get some answers before I die." ("Again," I did not add.)

"I'm satisfied too. I told you once I want it should be a shame that I died. Well, if I go down before I get to shoot that mother-fucker in the belly, it'll be the dirtiest shame I ever heard of."

"That it will."

"What do you suppose his game is?"

"Power. What else? As long as he can snip sections out of memory-tape, and keep a monopoly on the secret, he's God. And it looks like he can keep a monopoly on the secret. It's that kind of secret. It has to have something to do with wireheading; remember the joint that blew up just before we left New York, and the inductance patent that wasn't in the files?"

"Sure. Inductance—that means wireheading at a distance, right? Jacques—or his agent—used some kind of wirehead field to keep us docile while he picked our brains and left us his invitation. That's why that guard heard us screaming on Citadel Hill. I bet I screamed first. And loudest." She sat up and lit a cigarette. "Do you know," she said, dragging deeply, "that there is a part of me that can't wait to get to Phinney's Cove and get another dose of the juice? Even if I don't get to keep the memory?"

I shuddered slightly. I wanted to say something to break the silence, but nothing came. I listened to the engine idling in the cool evening. I rolled down the window to let her smoke out, and heard some kind of mournful bird call. I wondered if that was an owl.

"Karen? I . . ." It wouldn't come out right. "I'm—I'm glad I've known you."

She didn't react at once. She took two more drags on her smoke, then stubbed it out and turned to face me. "I love you too, Joe."

We embraced again.

"Maybe," she said a while later, "he'll turn us loose together . . ."

"No!" I said sharply, and disengaged.

"Huh?"

"Don't think that way. Don't let there be any favor he can do for us, any boon he can grant, any hold over us. I love you and in a couple of hours we're going to die and that's the end of it."

She thought. "Yeah. You're right. God, I wish I could make it with you just once."

I kept my voice even. "Karen, I accept the compliment, and in theory I agree. But the thought makes me twitchy."

"That's cool," she said at once. "I . . . I think I kind of know exactly what you mean. I used to feel that way when I was with someone I loved."

"I think I could make you come."

"Yeah," she agreed. "But don't. Let's drive."

I put the van in gear.

 

We took the main highway all the way through the Annapolis Valley to Bridgetown, then drove up over an immense mountain. The road resembled telephone cord hanging from the ceiling, an endless upward zigzag. I was glad I'd stolen a good vehicle. Despite the extreme hairiness of the road, we were twice overtaken and passed on blind curves by farmers in battered pickups. Just after the second one yanked in front of us, a half-ton loaded to the gunwales with hardwood appeared round that blind curve, plunging downhill at terrifying speed. Its driver and the driver of the pickup waved to each other as they passed.

Eventually the road yanked around one last vicious bend and leveled out. It stayed level for a good two hundred yards, then began sloping down. About the time that the Bay of Fundy became visible below us in the moonlight, demanding our attention, the slope suddenly became drastic. I had my hands full there for a while. Then the road went into rollercoaster dips and rises for a bit before settling down to a last long downward plunge. There was a stop sign at the bottom of it. I never considered obeying it, but I was very disconcerted to learn that the road turned into gravel just past the stop sign. We damn near went into a ditch.

I got us heading west on the Fundy Trail. It was a lovely drive by moonlight and must have been stunning by day. I drank it in thirstily—and almost succumbed to the road's last crafty attempt to kill us, with a blind curve/vertical drop/vertical ascent/blind curve pattern that must have afforded the locals much amusement in the tourist season.

A brief flurry of relatively modern houses—say, thirty to fifty—called Hampton, then almost at once we were in farmer and fisherman country. Big spreads, houses well over a hundred years old and widely spaced. Some were kept up, many were hulks. Some had as many as a couple of dozen junked cars scattered around them. All the ones that looked inhabited had a woodpile and a garden. I saw outhouses. Barns. Fishing nets and traps. Great fields of hay and corn. I nearly hit a deer. The Bay was never more than two hundred yards to our right, sometimes as close as a hundred feet. There was no other traffic, and no one walking the road. Most of the inhabitable homes had few or no lights showing—folks went to bed early hereabouts. I began to wonder how we would find the "Old DeMarco Place."

Just then the headlights picked up a pedestrian, walking in our direction. I pulled up past him and waited.

In the moonlight he looked two hundred years old. He wore a disreputable woodsman's cap and carried some kind of odd stick in his hand. Stick and hand were equally gnarled.

"Excuse me, sir," I said, and he came to the window.

" 'Allo," he said. Up close his face had so many wrinkles as to preclude expression of any kind. He was two hundred and fifty if he was a day.

"We're looking for the old DeMarco Place."

"Oh, shoor," he said. His breath smelled of whiskey. "Hit be up the road some." He gestured with his stick, and I realized with faint amusement that it was a dowsing rod. "Mebbe two, tree k'lometer. You been dere before?"

"No. How'll I know it?"

"You got paper, I draw you a map."

"Are you going that far?" Karen asked.

"A little ways past."

"Can we give you a lift?"

"Shoor ting."

He was slow getting in on her side. In the sudden overhead light he looked two hundred and seventy-five. He studied Karen and me dispassionately, and showed us a smile comprising three teeth. We drove on.

"What're those?" Karen asked, pointing to what looked like three tall billboards, facing the Bay in a row, two to our left and one to our right. The two we could see had large, simple designs painted on them.

"Navigation markers for de fishermen. Line dem tree up, you know just where you are."

"What do they do when the fog rolls in?" I asked.

"Navigate by potato."

"Beg pardon?"

"You keep a bunch of potatoes on de bow. Every couple minutes, you t'row one over de bow. If you don't hear no splash—turn."

Karen and I chuckled politely.

"Dere," he said after some time, pointing. A mailbox with no name marked the beginning of a rude mud-rutted path that disappeared into the woods on the left. "You follow dat up a k'lometer or so, you be dere. Tanks for de ride." He got out.

As he walked on up the road, I turned to Karen. "This is it."

She nodded.

I drove just far enough up that trail to be out of sight of the road. I turned the vehicle around to face the road. I shut it down and arranged the ignition wires so that it could be jump-started again in a hurry.

We sat a moment in silence. My window was down. I smelled fresh sweet country smells I was too ignorant to identify. I heard night creatures I could not name, small things. A car went by on the road. Tall grasses and trees whispered. I felt a sensation I remembered from Africa. An eerie, unreasoning certainty. Someone or something had a dead bead on my head. It might be a sniper with nightscope, or a heat-seeking laser, or a small dark man with a blowgun, or an ICBM silo a hundred miles away, but I was standing on the spot marked X.

Karen lit a smoke. "We're targets, aren't we?"

"We're naked. Scanned, X-rayed, doppler ultrasounded, and the contents of our pockets inventoried. You feel it too?"

"Yeah. Was it like this in the war?"

"No. This is worse."

"I thought it was. Let's not bother with weapons. They're cumbersome."

"He said they were optional."

We got out of the van, leaving the firearms in it. I got out both of my knives and the sap and tossed them onto the front seat. Karen added items, then came around to my side.

We looked uphill. The road curved up into forest. She took my hand and we walked. After a few thousand yards the woods gave way to an immense cleared field, perhaps twenty acres, most of it waist-high in hay. At the far edge, where the land turned back into forest and began climbing again, stood a house. It was a big three-story with four chimneys, two of them in use. There were lights on in the ground floor, and a spotlight illuminating a yard on the right. A jeep, a four-wheel like ours, and a Jensen Interceptor were parked in the light. There were two outbuildings. A barn the size of my New York warehouse home stood to the right of the house, and a smaller building lay to the right of that. No people or defensive structures were in evidence anywhere, not so much as a chain-link fence.

The moon was high above the mountain. It made the scene as pretty as a postcard, and would make us tabletop targets all the way to the house. The hay had been cut back on either side of the path.

"Nice spot," Karen said, and we kept walking.

After a while we became aware of how much sky there was here. I could not remember the last time my world had held so much sky. I looked up, and stopped walking, momentarily stunned. Karen kept on a few paces, then turned and followed my gaze. "Oh."

We watched them for a few minutes together—until the temptation to lie down on our backs and watch them forever became acute. Then I dropped my eyes, and saw Karen drop hers. We looked at each other, sharing the wonder.

"Been a long time," she said softly.

I nodded. "First time I ever shared it."

I put my arm around her and we continued on.

* * *

The house looked well over a hundred years old and poorly kept up. It had no door facing the Bay, but several windows, one of them gigantic. We went around to the lighted side and found the door. It had a brass knocker. I used it. The door opened and the Fader smiled at me.

"Hi, Joe."

"Hello, Jacques. You remember my friend Karen."

"Enchanted, my dear. Please, both of you, come in and make yourselves comfortable."

 

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