Dead Space: Catalyst

by Evenson, Brian

  Swanson shook his head. “No reason to figure it out,” he said. “Better just to go along with it and get paid. People who start trying to figure stuff like that out always end up in trouble.”

  Which is probably exactly where I’m headed, thought Jensi.

  * * *

  By the end of the week, they were more or less friends, with Swanson talking almost as much as an ordinary human though prone to odd fits of silence as well. Several times Swanson slapped him on the back, said he was going to miss him once he shipped out.

  “Maybe a spot will open up,” said Jensi.

  Swanson shook his head. “It won’t,” he said. “But if it does, I’ll put in a good word for you. You’re a picker, but I bet you could do it.”

  Two choices, thought Jensi as he waited in the bar the next day for Swanson to come in, just three days before Swanson shipped out. He could do as his original plan had suggested and simply drug Swanson, make him incapable of showing up for work. He had a twist of ground-up sleeping pills in his pocket that he could pour into the man’s beer. It’d be enough to knock the Swede out, maybe would make him sleep for a few days. And then when he didn’t show up for work, Jensi could be there, asking around for work, just happening to have a specialization in cargo.

  But he liked Swanson, that was the problem. Talbot on the other hand he hardly knew. And Swanson was likely to think to call on him if Talbot didn’t show up for work. The odds were better. But the question was how to bring it smoothly about.

  And as ideas flitted back and forth within his head, he began to ask himself: How far am I willing to go for my brother? I’ll break the law for him, I’ll force someone out of their job just to have a chance to see him, what else will I do? Would I kill someone for him?

  He shook his head. No, he had to be careful. He couldn’t let this quest for his brother—a quest for a brother who might now be damaged enough to not even recognize him if he were to find him—make him into a different person than he was. He couldn’t let go of himself just to find his brother.

  * * *

  That afternoon, he quit his job. His boss was a little surprised and started to protest that he needed some notice, but in the end he sighed, counted out Jensi’s back pay, and shook his hand good-bye.

  Jensi went out and bought a roll of duct tape, then went to the apartment building where Talbot lived. He rang several bells until someone buzzed him in. The apartment was on the third floor, the door a cheap affair, and by leaning into the door and jiggling the knob while forcing a card in, he managed to pop the lock out of its groove and go in.

  Inside, the apartment was immaculate, nothing out of place. Two clean plates sat side by side on the counter with a knife and fork crossed over each in an X, with two glasses arranged in perfect symmetry above them. The cabinets were mostly empty, though one was full of identical cans of food. The bed was made, the bathroom exceptionally clean. In a way, it was hard to believe anybody lived there at all.

  He wandered around the apartment for a while, thinking. In the office he found a pen and a piece of paper and wrote: “Your next job?” followed by the picking company’s vid contact. Was that giving too much away, putting too much at risk? Maybe, but he’d had a hard enough life himself that he couldn’t see himself taking away a man’s livelihood, even a man as strange and repressed as Talbot. He left it on the kitchen table, where it lay awkwardly, the only object in the apartment to seem out of place.

  By the time Talbot had come home from work and had opened the door, Jensi had his balaclava on and was hiding behind it. The small man came through and Jensi hit him hard twice in the temple, quick jabbing blows. Talbot gave a strange breathless cry and fell in a heap. Jensi dragged him over to a chair and taped his arms and legs to it.

  When Talbot was secure, Jensi poured a glass of water and sprinkled the twist of crushed sleeping tablets into it. He waited for the man to come around. But nothing seemed to be happening.

  He waited some more, then pulled a chair closer to him and placed his finger against his neck. No pulse.

  It seemed absurd, an accident of fate. He stripped off his balaclava and quickly unbound Talbot and laid him flat, tried to give him artificial respiration, pumped his chest, but it had been too long. The blood was already seeping lower in the body and pooling, leaving the face pale and waxen.

  He left the body and slumped into the couch, holding his head with his hands. It was his fault: he had hit the man too hard. Or maybe just bad luck: maybe Talbot had some sort of condition that he should have known about, a heart problem, say. In any case, the first thing he should have done when the man went down was check his pulse and made sure he was still breathing.

  Now he had traded the chance of seeing his brother for another man’s life. How many other lives would fall forfeit along the way?

  * * *

  After a while, he got up and removed the remaining duct tape from Talbot’s arms and legs and from the chair. He dragged the man into the other room and positioned him in an armchair in front of his vid, then turned it on to one of the broadcasts. The body was already a little stiff, but it bent for him with a little pressure and settled into the chair. Maybe it would look like he died there.

  He carefully positioned the kitchen chair back where it had been at the table, then washed out the glass containing the water and crushed sleeping pills, arranging it back where it had been before. The note he tore into fourths and slipped into his pocket, along with the twist of paper.

  He took one last look over the apartment and then, thinking there was nothing else he could do, left.

  * * *

  The next morning he was down at the port early, ostensibly to see Swanson off. The big man, upon seeing him, came over and swatted his shoulder with his big hand.

  “No more drinking together, eh?” he said, his eyes twinkling. “Now you’ll have to drink alone.”

  He introduced Jensi to Captain Martin, who shook his hand. “My friend Jensi,” Swanson said. “One of the best pickers there is, but ready to move on to more serious freight. Keep him in mind if you ever have an open position.”

  Captain Martin just nodded, made small talk for a moment, and then went back to making preparations and overseeing the loading of the shuttles that would take them up to the Eibon, currently in orbit. Swanson shook his hand again and then left.

  Jensi hung around a little bit more and then, not wanting to seem too needy or conspicuous, went home.

  The next few hours were hard ones, as he waited by the vid for them to contact him. What if they didn’t? What if they had someone else in mind or simply decided that they could manage without an additional person to take Talbot’s place? Then Talbot would have died for no reason, and he, Jensi, would have gotten no further toward figuring out how to see his brother.

  He imagined the captain or perhaps Swanson or perhaps someone else realizing that Talbot wasn’t there, then trying to call him by vid, then sending someone running toward his place to check on him and finding the dead body. Would it seem that he had died of natural causes? Would there be a suspicious bruise on his temple where Jensi had struck him?

  An hour went by, then two, without word. He was close to giving up and abandoning it altogether when the vid flicked on and he saw the captain’s face. He accepted the connection.

  “Mr. Jensi Sato?” the captain said.

  “Yes?” said Jensi.

  “Didn’t know that I’d find you at home,” he said. “But here you are.”

  “Swing shift today,” Jensi lied, hoping they hadn’t managed to track down which picker he worked for and discovered that he had quit. “I go in in a few minutes.”

  “Maybe not,” said the captain. “How’d you like to come work for me?”

  “Work for you?” he said. “Sure.” And then felt he had to backtrack and ask, “What’s the pay?”

  The captain gave him a figure that was nearly double his picking job. “You come highly recommended by Swanson,” he said. “I tru
st his judgment. Only catch is that you’d have to start today.”

  Jensi pretended to think about it, then nodded. “What time do you want me?” he asked.

  “Immediately. We’re already in orbit and waiting for you. There’s a shuttle waiting in the port. Pack your things and catch it right way. No delaying now: we’ll leave as soon as you get up here.”

  He nodded and cut the vid. He took a deep breath. He was one step closer to seeing his brother.

  21

  Istvan could never tell when the world was going to change for him. Most of the time that other world was there but deep in the background, a dull whispery rumbling like a voice talking to him from very, very far away. But then, unexpectedly, pain would bloom in his head and the veil would descend again and then it was the world of the penal colony that was almost lost in the background and the whirr and rush of this other place that took over. Which was the real world? Or were they both real? Or neither? Each time that inversion took place, when things reverted to normal, that other world was just slightly less in the background, just slightly louder, just slightly more noisy.

  He could tell that the other prisoners were beginning to feel it, too, though they didn’t know that they felt it. Whatever was making the pain in his head and throwing up or tearing down the veil was simply tickling their hindbrain a little or scratching it enough to slowly rub it raw. They felt it, but didn’t always know they were feeling it. They were more jumpy than they had been, and some of them seemed at times to have difficulty with their heads. They became angry, said things they not only didn’t mean but didn’t understand. For once, Istvan felt like he wasn’t the one who was behind; he could see things that the others couldn’t, and he could see its effect on them, even if they couldn’t.

  He tried to remain calm. He slept in his cell at night. When the alarm went off and the door automatically slid open, he went out with the rest of them, did his best to talk and converse and pretend like he was a person just like the rest of them. But he had never been very good at that, and soon he’d lose the thread. He knew he was different. The three who he’d first sat by at the table—Bill, Michael, and Waldron—seemed to tolerate him best and he found himself drawn to them as well, maybe because of that, or maybe just because he had sat by them first. He could see it affecting them as well, whatever it was, but differently. When the world began to recede for Istvan, it made Michael simply withdraw into himself. Waldron became manic, overexcited. Bill began to mumble to himself, his face slowly taking on a smile, until the world came back and they all became more or less like they’d been before. Though not quite. Each time, they had a little farther to come back, and each time they stopped a hair or two shorter.

  Maybe it was partly the penal colony itself that made it worse. There they were, free in a manner of speaking, but with their world limited to a circle with another circle around it, knowing that there was a third circle that they could not enter and that from there people were watching them. Istvan had always felt watched, had felt there was, just out of his line of vision, someone observing him, but in the past nobody else around him had seemed to feel that way. It was reassuring in a way to know that now he was feeling something that everyone else was feeling, that as far as they were concerned he was right.

  Over the course of several weeks the veil became more and more prominent for Istvan, fading away into a burst of light out of which came figures from his past who spoke to him. It was, though he did not know why, either always the dead or people that were dead to him: at first he might see the face of his brother, even the face of one of his fellow prisoners, done over in white lines and in light like an inverted self, but something about that seemed to trouble him and whatever was sending him these visions seemed to sense this, adjusted itself slightly to fit what his mind would bear. Why was it reassuring for him to see the faces of the dead rather than the living? He didn’t know. He suspected that it wouldn’t be reassuring for most people, might even make some of them lose their minds. But for him perhaps it simply helped him to distinguish between the world of the penal colony and this other, newer world.

  As time went on, the light slowly faded, this new world took on color and depth, and had it not been for the pain that filled his head when it came and the fact that he could recognize the faces as the faces of the dead, he might not have known which world he was seeing. But why, he wondered, do I see my mother? She might be dead, but he didn’t know for certain whether she was or not; maybe it was as he had thought before, that she was simply dead to him. Or maybe she really was dead and the vision was telling him this by dressing itself up in her face and speaking in her voice.

  But more and more often the face that came to him, the face that slowly gelled and came out of the light and created a world around it, was the councilman he had killed, Tim Fischer. The man came to him with a broken head and a strange clomping stride. He spoke in the same voice Fischer himself had used, though how this might be possible Istvan could not say. For a long time the voice remained strange, simply repeating what Istvan himself said but in a fashion that ran all the words together, as if it were repeating something it didn’t understand.

  “You’re dead,” Istvan might say.

  “Yourdead,” Fischer’s voice would echo back, the head slowly oozing blood.

  “What do you want to tell me?” he asked, and the voice repeated it back. It was a little like being in a nightmare, but fascinating too. How can I understand it? he wondered. How can I make it understand me?

  * * *

  The bursts of power were coming more frequently, and the faces when they appeared seemed more and more attentive, as if they were paying close attention just to him. He found they looked closest at him when he turned numbers about in his head, built structures and patterns with them, as he’d been doing since he was a boy. What interested them about that, he didn’t know. Were any of the others feeling it? He didn’t think so. He couldn’t tell for certain, but each of the several dozen other prisoners seemed to take in the bursts in a different way. And as these bursts increased, people changed in a way that Istvan thought of as their true selves bubbling further out. They became rawer, more erratic, in a way that he understood. And for him, despite his visions being all the more intense, he felt like his true self was already closer to the surface. He could cope with it better than they could.

  One of the prisoners, a man named Brian Conn, couldn’t cope with it at all. It was after lunch. Several prisoners walked the perimeter of the inner circle, a few of them worked out on exercise machines, a few others were still sitting at the tables and reading. Bill and Waldron were talking, mumbling away, their conversation getting more heated as Istvan felt the pressure in his head increasing, the burst of energy starting to come. The veil sprang up again, then the world it contained, and Istvan stayed there as silent as he could, not wanting to speak to the face belonging to Councilman Fischer in front of the others but also not able to see or even really hear the two men sitting next to him. He stayed there with his jaw clenched, staring into the bloody face that stared mercilessly back at him, feeling at a far distance the touch of someone, either Bill or Waldron, he couldn’t tell which. Seconds passed, or minutes, and then the face bleached out again and fell into the void of blankness and the veil became tattered again and he could see the real world again, through the veil, and could hear, too, a sound that sounded like screaming, but was quickly cut off. Waldron was gripping his shoulder hard, not—as he might have thought—because he had noticed that Istvan was having one of his visions, but rather because of what he was seeing in front of him. “What the hell?” Waldron said. He was staring straight ahead of him, and Bill, too, had turned around and was staring, so Istvan stared as well. Conn was there, a few tables over, and for a second, perhaps two, Istvan had no idea what he should be looking at. And then he saw the handle of the fork rising from Conn’s forearm where he had plunged it in.

  Conn opened his mouth and screamed again. He reached down and tugg
ed the fork free and blood began to pump up from the wound, quicker than Istvan would have thought possible. He plunged it in again, a little farther up the arm but just as deep, and screamed yet again.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with him?” asked Bill.

  But Istvan couldn’t think of a way to answer this question that would make sense to Bill. There was too much to explain, and Istvan never knew what words to use. It was as if Conn had touched the other world and he had brought some of it back with him and it had lodged inside his brain. And then it had turned that part of his brain inside out and made it into something else. He didn’t think it meant any harm, that it was just trying to figure out a way to speak with them. But even if it didn’t mean harm, it did not understand how much it could do with a brain without breaking it.

  “We have to stop him,” said Waldron, and started toward Conn.

  But by this time, the fork was out again, and plunged deep into his throat, slicing open his carotid artery and puncturing his windpipe. Waldron reached Conn as he wavered and fell off the bench. He pressed his hand to Conn’s neck as the blood spurted through his fingers and as the man sucked for air and quickly died.

  Waldron kept holding his hand there, staring at Conn as if he were looking at a ghost. The others had to come and pull him away and make him stand back. But after doing that, they didn’t know what else to do. They all just stood there, a few yards away from the body, motionless, not knowing what to do next.

  Conn, thought Istvan, staring at the man, memorizing his face. There would be a new face that would come to him now in the other world, he knew. He would now have a visit from the freshly dead.

  * * *

  They must have been there only a few more seconds when the alarm sounded, calling them back to their cells. A few of them went back immediately, but most of them just milled about until an echoing voice issued from the loudspeaker attached to one of the struts of the dome.

  “Return to your cells,” the voice said. “You have thirty seconds. This is your only warning.”