“Then she can bloody well go to prison for messing us about.”
“Don’t you want to know what she was up to?”
“Couldn’t care less.”
“I want to know,” said Pew.
“And I also. I would like to have a very long talk with her,” said Kwame.
“Dirty old man,” said Olivia, getting an irritated look back in return.
“Olivia. Please,” I said. She huffed and folded her arms. “Elsbet? How would you feel if Liss returned?”
She was still submerged in her own worries. “I don’t know… why do you need to ask me?”
“You’re a member of the group.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. We’d value your opinion.”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged.
“Okay. Iokan?”
“Of course. I’d love to see her come back. I think she needs us. It’s a terrible strain to work undercover like that. She needs our support.”
16. Liss
“Do you want to come back?”
“Is there anywhere else to go?”
“Only prison. We’d like to have you back, if you’re willing to come.”
She sighed. “What do they think?”
“They’ve agreed to it. You’re one of them.”
“I’m not.”
“They’re the only people who’ve been through anything like what you’ve been through. I said this when we started the group: you’re not exactly the same, none of you are. But you all have more in common with each other than anyone else.”
She didn’t reply.
“So do you want me to put things in motion?”
Grudgingly, she nodded.
PART EIGHT — DESIRE
1. Kwame
Liss waited in a holding cell while Security went through their procedures to decide whether or not they’d let her come back to us. I visited Dawa Dorje to explain what Liss had been through, and that she too was the last survivor of a dead nation. Dawa had, as a young man, harboured his own fruitless desire for revenge against those who destroyed Tibet, and withdrew his complaint against her. The Refugee Service offered generous compensation for the damage to his bar, and he was even allowed to keep his business licence on condition that he named his smuggling accomplices and agreed to thorough surveillance to prevent any relapse. Security were left with only the criminal charges to hold Liss on, but since psychiatric care was one of the prescribed sanctions for this sort of crime, it seemed likely she’d be back with the group fairly soon.
The summer went on at the centre. The colours of the forest grew richer while the rain dried up. The trees could cope, but Olivia wasn’t happy with the damage a couple of weeks of drought did to her garden. She spent ever more time among the shoots with a watering can, or plucking out the weeds that kept creeping up even when other plants were suffering.
The forecast for evacuations stayed quiet, though a new world had been added to the apocalypse watch: three commercial factions on the recently discovered world of Kreg were fighting a war that had been going on for centuries, and around which their entire economy revolved. They treated our emissaries with contempt, but were running out of resources to prosecute their pointless war. Their world looked grey and battered from space, the seas an oily poison. Even so, it might be decades before they finally faced up to the inevitable, and no one in the Refugee Service seriously expected an evacuation in the near future. I still had the time I needed to work with the group.
No word came from Bell until a brief message arrived saying he would be returning in a few days — just that, with nothing to explain why he’d been away so long, or any show of affection. But still, interversal messages are expensive, so perhaps he just wanted to keep his credit balance from plunging too far. Or maybe he was finding a way to leave me. Or he could have found someone else already. I theorised altogether too many reasons for his behaviour before I told myself to stop being a fool. I had to get on with my job, and there was news for Kwame.
We’d been monitoring his dreams for a few weeks, and had finally managed to piece together enough images to have something worth showing him. He was understandably nervous when I invited him to my office, and unable to keep his non-spill cup steady in his hands as I lowered the lights and activated the wallscreen.
“I have to warn you, this isn’t what you were expecting. It’s not what we were expecting either…”
“The process did not work?”
“The process worked. I’m not sure we got any images of your wife.”
“But I dreamt of her. Every night you were monitoring…”
“It’s probably best if I just show you what we have. If you’re ready.”
He nodded, and I went on. “This is the most complete sequence, although you’ll notice it’s very fuzzy round the edges, and we lose resolution several times. Are you sure you’re ready?”
He nodded. “I am ready.” I pressed play.
The video was silent. We had only been able to decipher the visual element, and even then the image quality was poor, with faint, washed-out colours. But unlike most dreams, the setting and scene were constant. This was not a spontaneous creation of the unconscious, but a memory stuck on playback.
The setting was a cell; filthy, rust-blotched metal walls and a heavy door that did not need a soundtrack for you to hear weighty clanks and slams. An industrial-age dungeon.
The point of view was locked in one place, but the eyes we saw through could look around, showing us the terrible, stained concrete floor and scratches in the walls where someone had tried to keep track of time before losing all hope. When the dream persona looked down, we saw he was sitting on a chair by himself, wearing mudstained green trousers of cheap cloth. Some of the stains might have been blood. His arms were not visible. They seemed to be bound behind his back in some way. I remembered how Kwame’s arms had gone around his back when he had his flashback in my office, and had little doubt he’d relived the same thing then.
The point of view jumped, and the image skipped for a moment. Kwame looked at me, confused.
“We sometimes have problems if there’s too much movement. We think your persona in the dream was startled at this point.” The image reformed and settled on the door. Then looked around again, nervous and harried.
He stared at the screen, perplexed. “Where is this place?”
“You don’t recognise it?”
He shook his head, amazed. “The security services had cells like this. I never saw them.”
“Not even on screen? Or maybe you read about them?”
“Of course, but I was never there…”
“Hm. Well, the dream keeps you here for a while. Presumably they want to scare you.”
“Isolation was a common tactic.”
“I’ll speed on to the next thing, then.” I jumped the video forward to a bookmark I’d set earlier. The point of view looked high on the walls, then snapped to the door. A slat scraped open and eyes peered in, shadowed by a military cap. They glared at the dream persona for several seconds. Then the slat was yanked shut, and the image skipped out again.
When it came back, the door swung open. A man stood in the doorway, wearing a dark uniform. He seemed to be of the same species, possibly the same ethnicity as Kwame. He didn’t move for the moment. Just a hard, threatening look down at the dream persona. Deliberate intimidation.
The picture juddered, losing resolution and colour for a moment. “Our best guess here is that the dream persona is talking, but that’s just a guess,” I said. Kwame nodded, too fascinated to look away.
The image came back and the point of view skipped left, perhaps hearing something in the corridor outside. Another man in uniform came to the door, dragging along a woman in a ragged, filthy dress, yanking her by the belt and head, keeping her doubled over, straggling hair hiding her face. One arm was twisted at an unnatural angle, fingers sticking out in every direction. She’d been tortured.
I paused t
he movie.
“That cannot be my wife. That cannot be…” Kwame looked up at me. “How could I forget something like this?”
“If it was very traumatic, it’s certainly possible. I’m going to press play in a moment, but first of all you should know that one of those people is about to speak. We don’t have any audio, but we did run it through a lip-reading program. As long as the dream persona is looking at someone’s face, we think we know what they were saying.”
He nodded. “I understand. Please continue.”
I pressed the control on my pad. The people on the screen sprang back to life, the woman shaking while the uniformed men stood very still. The first man asked a question from the doorway, and subtitles sprang up, assessed at 91% accuracy: Do you know this woman?
The man did not seem to get a satisfactory answer. I will ask you again. Do you know this woman?
Again, he didn’t get the answer he wanted. It made him angry. He seized the woman from the other man, and dragged her into the cell, right into the face of the dream persona, filling the screen, shouting as he did so: Do you know this woman? And then he yanked up her head and revealed her face.
It was not the face of a woman. The skin was bruised, bleeding, one eye closed from contusions, teeth smashed. But it was not a woman. This was the face of a man.
Kwame leapt straight to his feet and stumbled back, falling into the chair again. His cup fell to the floor and seeped into the carpet.
“Who is that?!”
“We don’t know.” The man on the screen held the face of the ‘woman’ up against the point of view of the dream persona. ‘She’ wept through ‘her’ one good eye, pleading, desperate.
Kwame stared, shaking his head, half in the chair and half out, as the dream persona looked up at the man in the cap. The subtitles caught the end of his sentence: …what you told us. Tell him, little bird. Tell him!
The point of view snapped back to the ‘woman’ as ‘her’ hair was pulled to force ‘her’ to speak through the broken teeth and blood. Please. Kobe. [Koobey?]
‘Her’ hair was yanked again and ‘she’ gasped at the pain. ‘She’ looked back into the dream persona’s eyes. I love you. I… I… I am your wife…
“No!” shouted Kwame. “That is not my wife!”
The man in the cap dragged the ‘woman’ back, nearly to the door. He spoke: I will ask you once again. Do you know this woman?
“That is not my wife,” said Kwame.
The view fixed on ‘her’ as she looked back, hoping, pleading, crying. And then a look of horror and betrayal as she heard what the dream persona said. And a scream: No! No! Kobe!
The man in the cap thrust the ‘woman’ back to the second man, and ‘she’ was dragged away, screaming one final cry of Kobe!
The dream persona looked down at the floor. The image resolution failed again, losing focus.
“We think he’s crying,” I said. “You in the dream, that is.”
The dream persona looked up again, very suddenly, and saw the man in the cap, standing alone in the door.
That was the right answer, Sergeant. You will be released shortly. You will not speak of this again.
He turned and left, pulling the door shut behind him.
I stopped the movie. “That’s it. It goes in a loop. The dream persona keeps sitting there and eventually they bring the other prisoner in again.”
Kwame sat shaking in the easy chair. “That is not my wife.”
“Do you recognise him at all…?”
“He is a stranger to me.”
“Are you certain?”
He snapped: “I do not have sex with men!” The denial was vehement, absolute, and revealing. It hung in the air for a moment before I replied.
“I didn’t ask that question.”
“This is a farce. You have taken some scene from a television programme, or from something else!”
“Okay, Kwame, if you don’t want to discuss it now, I can understand that. But I can assure you that was your dream. Those memories are in your head. It may be that your trauma predates the nuclear war—”
“It does not! Those are not my memories! I did not do those things!”
“We can talk about this next time.”
“There will not be a next time.”
He stormed out, and I called Veofol to monitor him. He contacted his legal counsel and complained about our methods, but got nothing other than a promise to investigate which I could answer simply by telling his lawyer the truth, so long as it remained privileged: his dream was real, but we could no longer say the same about any of his other memories.
2. Iokan
I was still thinking about Bell and his cryptic message when it came time for Iokan’s next session. In the minute before he arrived, I sent an interversal message back to Bell, regardless of the cost. Where had he been? Was it a nice holiday? What was he up to? Please send me a message and let me know. Love, Asha.
Iokan was his usual happy-go-lucky self, the opposite to my fretfulness. He whistled his way onto an easy chair in my office, gathering up his robe and seeming keen to begin therapy. Which probably meant he’d thought of a way to avoid it. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, in excellent Interversal.
“What about?” I asked.
“The Antecessors.”
“You surprise me, Iokan.”
He ignored the gentle sarcasm. “I think I know what happened.”
“Really? You know why the genocide happened?”
“Oh, I knew that. No, I’ve figured out why they were different when they came back.”
So he’d been having theological thoughts. Hopefully this was a sign of theological doubts. “How exactly were they different?” I asked.
“Well, they never seemed especially… compassionate, if you know what I mean. They changed the world to their liking and didn’t let anything get in their way…”
“Like animals, for example.”
“Exactly! They changed everything to suit them, nothing like the way you run this planet. They wouldn’t have thought twice about getting rid of the native species and adding their own instead. But when they came back, they weren’t like that at all. They gave us an option. They gave us a chance to say no.”
“Did anyone want to say no?”
“Of course not. They were offering an eternity in heaven, with them! Who’d refuse that?”
“I thought you said you refused?”
“I… avoided them. I thought they were the way they used to be. But finally they found me and showed me the truth.”
“As you’ve said. But you were saying you’ve realised why they had a change of heart?”
“They went into space!”
“Okay…”
“No, think about it. Why do we go to other universes? Because the stars are so far away! No one can get past lightspeed. We can see there are other species out there on some worlds, but they’re hundreds, thousands of light years away, and we can never reach them. But what if you were made of light? Like the Antecessors? Light can travel at lightspeed, it has to! And you wouldn’t have to experience all those light years, you’d feel like you travelled the distance almost in an instant! You understand relativity, yes?”
“I understand the basic principle.”
“So they disappeared for three thousand years. Imagine what they might have found! There must be amazing things out there… beautiful things. Divine things.”
“But this is just speculation…”
“Something must have happened. It must have!”
“Iokan… have you been having doubts?”
“Doubts?”
“About the Antecessors.”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why are you trying to figure out how they became good?”
“I’m just trying to understand them better.”
“You didn’t seem this concerned until recently. Are you sure you haven’t had doubts…?”
He seemed at a loss to expl
ain things to me. “Well, you see, it’s like…” he sighed. “You’re not going to believe me unless I explain, are you?”
“I’m finding it difficult, yes.”
“Part of my job — yes, that job, the secret job — was to investigate them.”
“I see.”
“Every country in the world had a unit dedicated to investigating them, either to find things we could use, or to make the relics safe…”
“And that was what you did, after you finished with special forces?”
“Not straight away, they put me in their own special forces unit to begin with, just for a probationary period, and then I had to go back to school to pick up all the skills I needed, but then, yes, I was an investigator.”
“What was the organisation called?”
“Do you really need to know?”
“It helps to put a name to things.”
“All right, I suppose if you have to put a label on a file… D0”
“That’s it? Dee-Oh?”
“That’s enough.”
“And this organisation investigated the Antecessors?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you give me any examples?”
He sighed. I was exasperating him. “Well… well, there was the time we found an ancient bodyformer.”
“Which is…?”
“It was a device that created human bodies. Copied them, either with the personality intact or with some other mind. And, as sometimes happens with that kind of thing, it was set off accidentally and made copies of the investigative team.”
“So you didn’t work alone?”
“There were three people in each team — me, Feren, Soferenata. We got trapped in there when the machine made copies of us, and of course everyone thought they were the real ones. We got out in the end, but the copies made a complete mess of things on the outside. They went off on another investigation and screwed up because, well, they weren’t exactly perfect copies.” He shook his head. “We had to destroy them.”
“You killed them?”
“They planted a bomb in D0 headquarters and threatened to set it off unless someone explained what was going on. They thought they were in a parallel universe.” He smiled sadly. “We didn’t have a choice.”
The Last Man on Earth Club Page 28
