“Trust your judgment, Donny, and in the years to come when you meet someone of character and caring, someone who you know in your gut will believe or at least want to believe, tell them the story I have just told you. And when you have done so, charge them to do the same, on and on. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Donny murmured.
“Very good. Now I’m going to count to three, and when I reach three you’ll awaken with no memory of what just occurred, though the compulsion will remain. But before I do, I want you to do one thing for me now. Repeat this name with me; you’ll need to know it so you can pass it along when you tell this story. Repeat it and invite him in, Kwarum Sivtinzi Lapalla, the only Svenkali ever to be hypnotized.”
“Kwarum Sivtinzi Lapalla,” said Donny. “The only Svenkali ever hypnotized. Come forth.” A shiver rippled through him.
I thought of Fiona for an instant, as I always did when I passed Kwarum along. I felt an echo of her, warm and comforting in my memory. I smiled and searched Donny’s eyes for signs of someone looking back. Was there an answering twinkle there? “Hello, Kwarum,” I said, and counted to three.
Donny took a deep draw on his pipe. He frowned down at it and reached again for his lighter.
“Well,” he said, “either way, it’s a hell of a story.”
Mind Din
The idea for this story has been kicking around int he back of my brain for many years and probably owes its origins to a chapter in A.R. Luria’s brilliant The Mind of a Mnemonist. But there was always some other project that was more pressing and the tale kept falling off my To Do list.
When it came time to relaunch the entire Amazing Conroy series, and redo the short story collection, I realized it was the perfect time to write this story. It quickly turned into a novelette, led to some interesting online conversations about billiard balls, bones, and the difference between ships and boats.
I was in my dressing room, basking in that wonderful state that settles in after a successful Saturday matinee and casts a rosy anticipation for the coming evening's performance, unaware that the Feds were about to burst in with some sad story about alien viruses and paranoid telepaths. It's hard to anticipate that kind of thing. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'd actually come to Atlanta for a meeting with the owners of a Belgian plastics company marketing custom billiard balls beyond the edges of Human Space. No, seriously. Six months earlier, an alien tour group had mixed up an address on their itinerary and wandered into a pool hall by mistake. The aliens had gone crazy over the game. The Belgians were seizing the opportunity. Their PR department had decided the best way to market a human product to alien consumers was to show alien buffalo dogs chowing down on their product, but only if they acted quickly. A day of face-to-face negotiations on the neutral ground of an Atlanta resort had produced a mutually satisfying contract, and we'd followed that with a day-long vid shoot.
The Belgians had transformed our boardroom into a small studio, filling it with a film crew, their gear, and several rented pool tables. For several hours a pair of actors shot pool, only to have their games interrupted when my buffalo dog, Reggie, leapt upon the tables. His tiny hooves frolicked across the felt in a joyous dance for a few moments until the director cued me to signal him, at which point he'd devour several of the brightly colored balls.
At the end of the day Reggie and I had returned to our own suite with a hefty licensing fee and a satchel of leftover billiard balls. I wasn't due back in Philadelphia until Monday, and the owner of the resort was an old friend who owed me a favor. She'd been more than happy to squeeze me onto the schedule of one of their stages so I could do a couple hypnosis shows on Saturday. It didn't matter that the check from the Belgians was more than I'd made in my best year as a hypnotist. I missed performing and tried to sneak in a gig where I could. It made the corporate work bearable.
My matinee had ended ten minutes earlier and I'd retired to a spacious dressing room. My tuxedo coat hung on an old style coatrack in one corner. I had tossed my silk bowtie on the vanity, and propped my feet up. I had a few hours to kill before my evening show, plenty of time to order an early dinner from room service and lob pool balls for Reggie to chase and eat.
The NSA had other plans for me.
As the nine-ball arced across the room two bruisers slammed through my unlocked door. From their sinister dark glasses to their cheaply tailored black suits these two could have stepped right off the cover of G-men's Quarterly. They ignored me completely, barely glanced at Reggie, concerning themselves with staring at their handheld gadgets and scanning the dressing room. Then they took up position on either side of the door, still not acknowledging my presence. The one on the right raised a hand to his ear and spoke into his cuff. A moment later a short man waddled in. He had black unkempt hair that sprang all around in curls and the kind of dark wild eyes you'd expect in a religious leader, an impression that was only increased by his ill groomed beard and mustache. He looked right at me.
“Mr. Conroy, I'm Special Agent Davies. I'm with the National Security Agency. Your government is in need of your unique abilities.” A billfold materialized in his hand, briefly unfolded to flash his credentials, and then vanished again. I know people who have been doing close-up magic for years who couldn't have done it any smoother. Red warning lights began flashing in my mind.
“I'm sorry, Agent Davies, but if the government needs me, they need to go through my agent. Now, if you'll excuse me, I was just about to order some dinner.” I reached for the phone and at a gesture from Davies one of his goons rushed forward and snatched it out of my hand. Reggie leaped into my lap and growled. I wrapped both hands around him and held him in place.
“Please, Mr. Conroy, we're trying to keep this quiet, strictly 'need to know'. There's nothing I can safely tell your agent that would convince you to see me, so I've simply saved us all some time and come right to you.”
I kept any reaction off my face, and made a point of shifting my attention to my buffalito. “Look, if this is about my tax return, the Conroy Institute for Higher Cognition is a legitimate private foundation...”
“The NSA, Mr. Conroy, not the Internal Revenue. But I am here about higher cognition.” Davies paused; he let the silence linger until I looked up at him. He met my gaze and continued, “I assume you've heard of Meyerson's Encephalitis B? It's loose.”
My mouth dropped open, and I rocked back in my seat. Everyone had heard of Meyerson's, the first and only extra-solar virus to find terrestrial life tasty. It was the worst fear of xenophiles and xenophobes alike, an incontrovertible case of an alien pathogen that could affect us. In the decades since first contact, humanity had been assured, over and over, not to worry about ailments from space. That changed in a single day five years ago. One hundred seventeen people in Ohio had been exposed in a restaurant; they all died within two days. The news channels had been full of the story for weeks.
“That's impossible,” I said. “You can contract Meyerson's only from a prepubescent Andromedan, and the CDC doesn't allow any Andromedans out of quarantine if they're that young.”
Davies grimaced. “It was a senior researcher at the CDC who was contaminated. Dr. Jayasuriya. He'd been working with the virus since the original breakout. He had an accident in his lab and lost containment of a sample. No one else was infected, and he isolated himself immediately.”
“So how is this a matter for government agents?”
Davies cleared his throat. “I was called in three days later. His fever broke and he escaped from the facility.”
“Escaped? No, wait, you said three days? I read that Meyerson's burns out a human brain within forty-eight hours.”
“It does, Mr. Conroy, or rather, it has in one hundred seventeen of the one hundred eighteen cases thus far. Dr. Jayasuriya had been working on a cure... maybe he found it. Or more likely, the virus infecting him has mutated. It didn't kill him, and so far it hasn't yet spread beyond him. He encountered more than a doz
en people during his escape and thus far none shows any signs of infection.”
I affected a fictional nonchalance for the mutated alien virus the CDC had let loose in a city I just happened to be visiting. Davies seemed to be having a hard time keeping his story straight.”So what's your problem? You've got a noncontagious researcher roaming around Atlanta. Your FBI boys can't round him up?”
“NSA, Mr. Conroy, not FBI. And while possible contagion is still a concern, we have a larger problem. Ignorance.”
“Ignorance?”
“There are too many unknowns in play. And we've exhausted the CDC's ability to even ask the right questions.”
Reggie had started fidgeting, picking up on my growing anxiety. I picked up a billiard ball and fed it to him to calm him down. To Davies I said, “You don't know what you don't know.”
“Essentially, and what we do know potentially exacerbates what we don't. We believe the virus has altered Jayasuriya, giving him the ability to escape from a state-of-the-art confinement facility.”
“What kind of ability lets a person do that?” I asked.
“Mental ability, Mr. Conroy. Jayasuriya has become the most powerful telepath on record.”
Davies had his men hustle me out of my dressing room and into a waiting vehicle. Amidst my ignored protests I barely had time to grab Reggie and my jacket. His two goons took the front seat and Davies sat in the back with me. He handed me a folder.
“This is what we know about Jayasuriya from before his infection.”
The folder contained only a single sheet, a few paragraphs that told me Jayasuriya's parents had immigrated from the Sri Lankan city of Matara. Back around the turn of the century there'd been a world class cricket player by that name and from that place. There may have been a relation there, because reading further I saw that the Atlanta-born Jayasuriya had displayed a natural athleticism in the form of a killer fast ball. He'd earned a baseball scholarship to Georgia State University. From there he'd gone to Emory for med school, and stayed there to pick up a doctorate in biochemistry. The CDC had recruited him the day after he defended his dissertation. A year later, a pre-teen Andromedan getting her first and only taste of Ohio French cuisine had exploded what we thought we knew about extraterrestrial disease vectors.
I handed the folder back to him. “I don't understand why you think I'll be any help to you, Agent Davies.”
“Less than one percent of humans have had any real experience with telepathy. It's a very small club and you're a member of it, Mr. Conroy. According to your file, you've deliberately lied to the Arconi and gotten away with it.”
“The Arconi aren't really telepaths, not the way you mean,” I said. “They can just sense if you're telling the truth or not. Wait, there's a file on me?”
Davies ignored the question. “According to the report, the Arconi can look into your mind and verify whether you believe what you're saying, right?”
I nodded.
“So how isn't that telepathy?”
“Okay, fine. Maybe it is. See? You know more about it than I do. You don't need me. I'm not an expert.”
“Really, Mr. Conroy? What about your interactions with the Svenkali? And what about the Blintori?”
“The Svenkali don't read minds, they just tap into this collective memory of dead members of their race. And the Blintori, I really can't talk about that...”
“You don't have to, Mr. Conroy, you've already made my point. You're one of only seven people on Earth who have had contact with three psychically enhanced alien races and the only one who is neither a part of the military or the academic world. I don't want to get hamstrung by some general who sees telepathy as a new flavor of weaponry and I don't want some damn professor from the university to give me a lecture. What I need, Mr. Conroy, is someone with practical experience, like lying to the Arconi.”
I tried to shrug that off. There was more to it than his description, but it was a long story and not one I wanted to tell. Besides, magicians and hypnotists never reveal their secrets. Redirection is the preferred technique. “Look, even if that were true, that doesn't mean I'll be any help with your missing research guy—”
“Jayasuriya,” said Davies.
“Whatever. The Arconi are just truth tellers. The Svenkali are walking reincarnations. And the Blintori rewrite your own memory. None of them actually read your mind. You said Jayasuriya's a full blown telepath. How am I going to be of any help?”
“I'm still concerned that Jayasuriya is contagious. What little we know suggests we're dealing with something different from the original virus. Maybe the incubation period is prolonged and not so nearly instantaneous as before. Maybe he has some natural immunity but is a carrier, a Typhoid Mary. He could be on the brink of unleashing a lethal alien disease vector in one of the largest cities in the country. I just don't know. I have too many scenarios and not enough answers. You're not our only course of action. We're trying other options. But Jayasuriya is important to us so we're pursuing every possibility. I hope you'll cooperate with us.”
“And if I don't? You've already kidnapped me. What if I don't want to help at all? I have a show to do in a few hours.”
Davies sighed. “No, Mr. Conroy, you don't. My office has already been in touch with the operations manager of the resort. Your performance has been canceled without prejudice.”
“But—”
He waved me to silence. “The President has ordered this entire operation a matter of national security. Since you know about Jayasuriya I'm afraid we'll have to detain you until the operation is finished. How long that takes might be up to you. Your cooperation can only speed your release.”
We pulled into an underground garage at the CDC and parked. Davies and his people escorted me to an elevator, up to the top floor, and then down a corridor until we arrived at what a week ago had probably been the cushy office of a high ranking CDC official. Now it was Davies's office. The wall behind the desk was mostly glass and looked out on the CDC campus, two of the other walls had doors, one we'd come in through and the other led to a private washroom. The remaining wall held a polished breakfront overflowing with books of poetry, which surprised me a bit. Fancy 3D art that looked like stylized complex molecules hung above a seductive couch of butter soft leather located along the same wall as the door to the bathroom. Davies gestured for me to take a seat behind the desk in a fancy chair that was a mate to the couch. I set Reggie on the floor so he could explore. Davies slid sections of the breakfront to either side, revealing a large flatscreen monitor.
“I'd like you to review the vid record that was made from the moment Jayasuriya contracted Meyerson's. Take your time with it. The console is right there on the desk; speed through what you think is irrelevant.” Davies ushered the suits back out into the hall and paused at the door. “There's a fridge with some soft drinks and sandwiches in the corner behind you. I'll check back with you when you're done.”
“How long do you expect me to spend on this?” I asked.
“There are three days of video, Mr. Conroy. I expect you to take as long as necessary.” He closed the door from the other side, the lock clicking into place.
I watched the video and sent up a prayer of thanks for the fast forward button. Whoever had designed the CDC's quarantine isolation chamber had struggled with whether to equip it as an apartment or a meeting room. One wall had a series of cubbies with several days' worth of one-size-fits-most pale blue microfiber jumpsuits, cartons of bottled water, stacks of Insta-meals, a small waver, an entertainment console, and two shelves of books with last year's best sellers. There was also a broad conference table laden with yellow pads and cups full of writing implements. A large whiteboard completed the picture. During the first hours, after a team of hazmat-suited technicians had hustled him into the room, I witnessed an ashen-faced Jayasuriya systematically go through the five stages of impending death, three psychotic diatribes, a religious epiphany, and at least two pairs of undershorts. Zipping through the video
at hyper speed didn't make it any easier to watch, it just concentrated the experience. The man knew he was going to die, probably knew it better than anyone on the planet. Meyerson's Encephalitis B was his specialty. The drama played out as he rallied and tried to be the heroic scientist. He paced the perimeter of his room, chugging bottles of distilled water as he reported his experience in the kind of bizarre stream of consciousness you'd expect from someone who's spent the past five years studying a virus from another planet. He wanted— needed—to document everything as he waited for the disease to ravage him, but he couldn't sustain that kind of objectivity. Emotion leaked into his voice telling the rest of the story, the desire to surrender to the irony of it, to rant and plead and beg and deny and demand explanations from an unanswering god.
It became clear that the CDC's protocol was to simply let the disease run its course. It's not like there was any treatment for it. Still, every six hours Jayasuriya drew a vial of his own blood for testing, sealed it in a bag, and placed it in the transfer box for his captors to examine. It was after the fifth of these, well into his second day in isolation that Jayasuriya began scribbling a lengthy chemical formula on the room's whiteboard, several different versions each in its own color. “This is the neuro-blocker I've been working on. It could help,” he said pointing at the board, imploring whoever was watching. “It might lessen the effects, deaden the brain's ability to receive outside thoughts. Please. Let me try it, while there's still time!”
About an hour later, the telepathy set in.
Jayasuriya knew as well as anyone at the CDC about the psychic symptoms. They'd figured it out from the first wave, those one hundred seventeen luckless bastards. In the second day of infection, human neural networks started shifting into overdrive, coalescing in telepathy. The ability was short range, raw and untrained but undeniably real. And then their brains burned out, every last one of them.
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