Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  Two short, bare legs came to a running stop six feet from Saul’s face. He jerked his head up in time to see a boy of about eight or nine retrieving a blue kickball. The boy stared at Saul and the air pistol. “Hey, mister,” he said, “you gonna shoot somebody?”

  “Go away,” hissed Saul. “You a cop or something?” asked the boy, his face interested.

  Saul shook his head. “That an Uzi pistol or somethin’?” asked the boy, tucking the ball under his arm. “It sorta looks like an Uzi with a silencer on it.”

  “Piss off,” whispered Saul, using the favorite phrase of the British soldiers in occupied Palestine when they were confronted with street urchins.

  The boy shrugged and ran back to his game. Saul lifted his head in time to see Justin also running, his back to the parking lot, stick waving in his right hand.

  Saul made a quick decision and walked quickly toward the picnic area, away from the cars. He could see the tan fabric of Natalie’s skirt where she lay on the pavement. He walked quickly, keeping the trees between himself and Justin. No one in the park seemed to have noticed Natalie yet. Two motorcycles pulled into the parking lot with an explosion of noise.

  Saul walked briskly, getting forty feet closer to where Justin stood with his back against the fence above the river. The boy had a fixed, unfocused stare. His mouth hung open and there was a trickle of saliva running to his chin. Saul leaned his back against a tree, took a breath, and checked the CO2 charge in the handle of the weapon.

  “Hey,” called a nearby man in a gray Brooks Brothers summer suit, “that’s pretty neat. You have to have a license to carry one of those?”

  “No,” said Saul, glancing around the tree to confirm that Justin was still staring sightlessly. The boy was fifty or sixty feet away. Too far.

  “Neat,” said the young man in the gray suit. “It fires .22s or pellets or what?”

  Graysuit’s partner in conversation, a young blond man with a mustache, blow-dried hair, and a blue summer suit said, “Where can you buy one of those, fella? K-Mart have them?”

  “Excuse me,” said Saul and stepped around the tree and walked in plain sight to the fence. Justin’s head did not turn toward him. The boy’s blank gaze was fixed on some spot above the roof of the cars in the lot. Saul kept the pistol behind him as he walked along the fence toward the frozen figure of the six-year-old. Twenty paces away he paused. Justin did not stir. Feeling like a cat stalking a toy mouse, Saul covered the last fifteen paces, brought the pistol around, and shot the boy on his bare right leg with a blue-tipped dart. When Justin fell forward, still rigid, Saul was there to catch him. No one appeared to have noticed.

  He restrained himself from running back to the parking lot but still moved at something better than a brisk walk. The two longhaired men who had come in on motorcycles were on the sidewalk staring down at Natalie’s limp form. Neither had made a move to help her.

  “Excuse me, please,” said Saul, squeezing past, stepping over Natalie, tugging the left rear door of the station wagon open, and gently setting Justin next to the battery packs and radio receiver.

  “Hey, man,” said the fatter of the two bikers, “she dead or what?”

  “Oh, no,” said Saul with a forced chuckle, grunting with the effort of lifting her onto the front seat and shoving her as far to the right as he could. Her left shoe slid off and fell to the pavement with a soft sound. He picked it up, smiling at the staring bikers. “I’m a doctor. She just has a little problem with petit mal seizures induced by neurologically deficient cardiopulmonary edema.” He got into the station wagon, dropped the dart gun on the seat, and continued smiling at the bikers. “So does the boy,” he said. “It . . . ah . . . runs in the family.” Saul shifted into gear and backed out, half expecting a car filled with Melanie Fuller’s zombies to intercept him before he made it to the street. No car appeared.

  Saul drove around until he was sure that they were not being followed and then returned to the motel. Their cabin unit was almost out of sight of the road, but he made sure there was no traffic before he carried them in, first Natalie and then the boy.

  Natalie’s EEG sensors were still in place, hidden in her hair but functional. The microphone and telemetry pack were still working. Saul paused a minute before disconnecting the computer and carrying it in. The theta rhythm was gone, the REM peaks absent. The EEG readout was consistent with a deep, dreamless, drug-induced sleep.

  After carrying in the equipment, Saul made Natalie and Justin comfortable and checked their vital signs. He activated the second telemetry pack, attached electrodes to the boy’s skull, and keyed in a code to initiate a program that would display both sets of EEG data on the computer screen at once. Natalie’s continued to show a normal deep sleep pattern. The child’s showed the traditional flat lines of clinical brain death.

  Saul checked the boy’s pulse, heartbeat, and retinal response, took his blood pressure, and tried sound, scent, and pain stimuli. The computer continued to indicate no higher neurological functions whatsoever. Saul switched telemetry packs and sensors, checked the transmitter’s power cells, reverted to a single-display mode, and used more electrolytic paste and two additional electrodes. The readings were identical with the first. Six-year-old Justin Warden was legally brain dead, literally nothing more than a primitive brain-stem that kept the heart pumping, the kidneys filtering, and the lungs moving air through a husk of mindless meat.

  Saul lowered his head to his hands and stayed in that position for a very long time.

  “What do we do?” asked Natalie. She was on her second cup of coffee. The tranquilizer had kept her out for just under an hour, but it took her another fifteen minutes before she could think clearly.

  “We keep him sedated, I guess,” he said. “If we let him come out of deep sleep, Melanie Fuller may regain control. The little boy who was Justin Warden— memories, loves, fears, everything that is human— is gone forever.”

  “Can you be sure about that?” asked Natalie, her voice thick.

  Saul sighed, set down his own cup of coffee, and added a small measure of whiskey. “No,” he admitted, “not without better equipment, more complicated tests, and observation of the boy under a much wider range of conditions. But with indications that flat, I would say that the odds are overwhelmingly against him recovering anything close to human consciousness, much less memory or personality.” He took a long drink.

  “All those dreams of releasing them . . .” began Natalie. “Yes.” Saul slapped down the empty cup. “It makes sense, when you think about it. The more conditioning the old lady has carried out, the less chance of a personality surviving. I suspect that the adults function with a residue of their identities . . . personalities . . . certainly it would do no good for her to have kidnapped medical personnel the way she did if they had no access to their former skills. But even there, extended mental control . . . this mind vampirism . . . must kill the original personality after awhile. It is like a disease, a brain cancer, that grows over time, bad cells killing good ones.”

  Natalie rubbed her aching head. “Is it possible that some of her . . . her people . . . have been controlled less than others? Are less infected?”

  Saul opened the fingers of one hand in a quizzical gesture. “Possible? Yes, I suppose. But if they are conditioned— tampered with— enough for her to trust them as servants, I fear that their personalities and higher-order functions have been seriously damaged.”

  “But the Oberst Used you,” said Natalie without any emotional overtones. “And I’ve been leeched onto twice by Harod and at least as many times by this old witch.”

  “Yes?” said Saul, removing his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

  “Well, have they harmed us? Is the cancer growing inside us right now? Are we different, Saul? Are we?”

  “I don’t know,” said Saul. He sat motionless until Natalie looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just so . . . awful . . . having that scaly old wit
ch in my mind. It’s the most helpless feeling I’ve ever had . . . it must be worse than being raped. At least when someone violates your body, your mind is still your own. And the worst part . . . the worst part is . . . after it’s happened once or twice . . . you . . .” Natalie could not go on.

  “I know,” said Saul, holding her hand. “A part of you wants to experience it again. Like a terrible drug with painful side effects, but as equally addictive. I know.”

  “You never talked about . . .”

  “It is not something one wishes to discuss.”

  “No.” Natalie shuddered. “But that is not the cancer we were discussing,” said Saul. “I feel certain that addiction comes with the intense conditioning these things carry out with their chosen few. Which leads us to another moral dilemma.”

  “What?”

  “If we follow our plan, it will require weeks of conditioning for at least one person— perhaps more— an innocent.”

  “It wouldn’t be the same . . . it would be temporary, for a specific function.”

  “For our purposes it would be temporary,” said Saul. “As we now know, the effects can be permanent.”

  “Goddamnit!” snapped Natalie. “It doesn’t matter. That’s our plan. Can you think of another?”

  “No.”

  “Then we go ahead,” Natalie said firmly. “We go ahead even if it costs us our minds and our souls. We go ahead even if other innocents have to suffer. We go ahead because we have to, because we owe it to our dead. Our families and the people we love have paid the price and now we go ahead . . . make their killers pay . . . there can’t be any justice if we stop now. No matter what the price we have to go on.”

  Saul nodded. “You are right, of course,” he said sadly. “But that is precisely the same imperative that compels the angry young Palestinian to set the bomb aboard the bus, the Basque separatist to fire into a crowd. They have no other choice. Is that so different from the Eichmanns following orders? Responding to the imperatives of no personal responsibility?”

  “Yes,” said Natalie, “it is different. And right now I’m too goddamned frustrated to give a damn about your ethical niceties. I just want to see what to do and go do it.”

  Saul stood up. “Eric Hoffer says that to the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.”

  Natalie shook her head vehemently. Saul could see the fine black filaments from the EEG sensors running into the collar of her blouse. “I’m not hunting for freedom from responsibility,” she said. “I’m taking the responsibility. Right now I’m trying to decide whether to return that boy to Melanie Fuller.”

  Saul’s surprise showed on his face. “Return him? How can we do that? He . . .”

  “He’s brain dead,” interrupted Natalie. “She’s already murdered him as surely as she did his sisters. I have a use for him when I go back tonight.”

  “You can’t go there again today,” said Saul, staring at her as if he did not know her. “It’s too soon. She’s too unstable . . .”

  “That’s why I need to go now,” Natalie said firmly. “While she’s reeling, unsure. The old lady has half her bolts loose, but she’s not stupid, Saul. We need to know that she’s convinced. And we can’t equivocate any longer. I have to quit farting around about who I am . . . a messenger . . . an ambiguous somebody . . . and become Nina Drayton for this old monster.”

  Saul shook his head. “We’re working on shaky premises, based on inadequate information.”

  “And that’s all we have,” said Natalie. “We’re going with it. We’re committed— there’s no sense failing with half mea sures. We need to talk, you and I, until I find something that only Nina Drayton would have known, something that even Melanie Fuller will be surprised at.”

  “Wiesenthal’s dossiers,” said Saul, absently rubbing his brow. “No,” said Natalie, “something more powerful. Something that came out of your two sessions with Nina Drayton when she came to you in New York. She was playing with you, but you were still functioning as a therapist. People open up more than they know.”

  Saul steepled his fingers and looked at nothing for a moment. “Yes,” he said, “there is something.” His sad eyes focused on Natalie. “It is a terrible risk for you.”

  Natalie nodded. “So that we can get to the next phase where you take a risk that makes me sick just to think about,” she said. “Let’s get on with it.”

  They talked for five hours, going over details that they had discussed innumerable times before but which now had to be sharpened like a sword for battle. They were finished by eight P.M., but Saul suggested that they wait a few hours more.

  “You think she sleeps?” asked Natalie. “Perhaps not, but even a fiend must be subject to fatigue toxins. At least her pawns will be. Besides, we’re dealing with a truly paranoid personality here and the invasion of her personal space— her territory— and there’s every evidence that these mind vampires are as territorial as their primitive use of the hypothalamus suggests. If so, then the invasion at night will be more effective. The Gestapo made it standard practice to come at night.”

  Natalie looked at the sheaf of notes she had taken. “So it’s the paranoia we work at? Assuming that she follows the classic symptomology of paranoid schizophrenic?”

  “Not just that,” said Saul. “We have to remember that we’re dealing with a Kohlberg Level Zero here. Melanie Fuller has not gone beyond the infantile stage of development in a number of areas. Perhaps none of them have. Their parapsychic ability is a curse, not allowing them to move beyond the level of demanding and expecting immediate gratification. Anything that thwarts their will is unacceptable, thus the inevitable paranoia and addiction to violence. Tony Harod may be more advanced than most— perhaps his psychic ability developed later and less successfully— but his use of that limited power merely serves to gratify the masturbatory fantasies of early adolescence, at best. Combined with Melanie Fuller’s infantile ego and advanced paranoia, we have the caldron of schoolgirl jealousies and unrecognized homosexual attractions inherent in her long competition with Nina.”

  “Great,” said Natalie, “in evolutionary terms they’re supermen. In psychological development, they’re retarded. In moral terms, they’re subhuman.”

  “Not subhuman,” said Saul. “Merely non ex is tent.”

  They sat in silence for a long interval. Neither had eaten since breakfast twelve hours earlier. The oscilloscope pattern on the computer screen showed the active peaks and valleys of Natalie’s scurrying thoughts.

  Saul shook himself. “I’ve solved the posthypnotic trigger stimulus problem,” he said.

  Natalie sat up. “How, Saul?”

  “My mistake was in trying to condition a response to the theta rhythm or the artificial alpha peak. I cannot create the former and the latter is too unreliable. It is the waking REM state that has to be the trigger.”

  “Can you duplicate that while you’re awake?” asked Natalie. “Perhaps,” said Saul. “But not reliably so. Instead, I will develop an interim stimulus— perhaps a soft bell— and use the natural REM state to trigger it.”

  “Dreams,” mused Natalie. “Will there be time?”

  “Almost a month,” said Saul. “If we can cause Melanie to condition the people we need, I can prevail upon my own mind to condition itself.”

  “But all those dreams you’ll have,” said Natalie. “The people dying . . . the hopelessness of the death camps . . .”

  Saul smiled wanly. “I have those dreams anyway,” he said.

  It was after midnight when Saul drove her to the Old Section and parked half a block from the Fuller house. There was no equipment in the station wagon; Natalie wore neither microphone nor sensors.

  The street and sidewalk were empty. Natalie lifted Justin out of the backseat, tenderly brushed back a strand of hair that had fallen over his forehead, and said to Saul through his open window, “If I don’t come out, go ahead with the plan.”

  Saul n
odded toward the backseat where twenty pounds of remaining C-4 plastic explosives had been parceled into packets and clipped onto a web belt. “If you don’t come out,” he said, “I’m coming in to get you. If she’s hurt you, I’ll kill all of them and carry on with the plan as best I can.”

  Natalie hesitated and then said, “Good.” She turned and carried Justin toward the house that was illuminated only by a green glow from the second floor.

  Natalie set the unconscious boy on the ancient couch. The house smelled of mildew and dust. Melanie Fuller’s “family” had gathered around like so many ambulatory corpses— the huge, retarded-looking one the old woman called Culley, a shorter, darker man whom Natalie imagined to be Justin’s father even though he had not so much as glanced at the boy, the two women in dirty nurse’s outfits, one of whom wore thick makeup so poorly applied that she looked like a blind clown, another woman in a torn, striped blouse and mismatched print skirt. The only light was the glow from a single, sputtering candle that Marvin had carried in. The ex-gang leader held a long knife in his right hand.

  Natalie Preston did not care. Her body was so full of adrenaline, her heart pounding so fiercely, her mind so filled with the persona she had poured into it during the preceding weeks and months, that she just wanted something to start. Anything was better than waiting, fearing, fleeing . . . “Melanie,” she snapped in her best southern belle honky drawl, “here’s your little toy. Don’t ever do that again.”

  The mass of white flesh called Culley ambled forward and peered at Justin. “Is he dead?”

  “Is he dead?” mimicked Natalie. “No, my dear, he is not dead. But he could be and possibly should be and so might you. What on earth were you thinking of?”