With that, most of the rest began to move, though one or two remained. Bill led both Istvan and the still-stunned and bloody Waldron back to their cells. Istvan sat on his bed until the cell door clanged shut, and then approached the bars, holding on to them and staring out. He caught, down the hall, a fluid flash of black as four or five guards in riot gear rushed from the normally closed security door that led to the next ring through their ring and into the central circle. Then there was the sound of cries; Istvan could not see them, but imagined them setting upon the prisoners who had disobeyed with their truncheons. And indeed, a few moments later two guards rounded the corner dragging an unconscious and bloody prisoner between them. They let him flop down on the hallway, not far from Istvan’s cell. Their faces were covered with plastic shields, the light bouncing off them, which almost—Istvan thought, a little astonished—made them look like they had no faces at all. Or like their faces were made of light. Just like the faces of the other world! One of the guards kicked the prisoner once and then both turned and went back around the corridor and into the inner circle. A few moments later, all the guards went through again, carrying Conn’s corpse out of the penal colony and into the outer ring. The door closed and then there was nothing but silence.
Or almost nothing but silence. Through it, just below it, below even the beating of his own heart, Istvan could hear the whispering of voices, very difficult to hear, almost impossible. But he heard them. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he tried to listen to them nonetheless.
22
Henry Wandrei was unfortunate enough to be on monitoring duty when the convict went crazy. He was there before the monitor, watching Istvan, making sure once again that yes, he had been right, it really was Jensi’s brother, when suddenly his head began to hurt. Goddamn migraines, he thought. Must be something to do with the artificial atmosphere in the dome—he’d never suffered from migraines before. He closed his eyes tight, pinched the bridge of his nose, and waited for the pain to subside. After a few seconds it did, even if only just slightly, and he opened his eyes to see suddenly a strange flicker on one of the monitors. He adjusted that camera slightly and at first couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He focused in and then thought Oh shit when he realized what he was seeing was a man’s arm with a fork sticking out of it.
And then he watched the man’s hand close around the fork and tug it out of the arm, which in some ways seemed like a very sensible thing to do, even if the arm did start bleeding profusely. What was less sensible was the fact that he immediately stuck it in again, even deeper this time. Henry had never seen anything like it. There hadn’t been a single disturbance since he had arrived: no real fights, almost no suicides, and very little violence except the rare times when the guards were sent in to retrieve one of the inmates and bring him to the interrogation chamber. Since Hell was the last stop, most of the convicts had already been pretty thoroughly wrung out before arriving here, and most were political prisoners rather than hardened cons.
He was reaching for the button to alert the guards, watching one of the other prisoners rushing toward the man who was stabbing himself with the fork, when the man tugged the fork out again and buried it in his neck this time, and then pitched backward off the bench.
After that, he could see very little; a man was leaning over the injured prisoner, perhaps trying to give him first aid, and was blocking the camera’s view of him. He did not remember having pushed the button for the guards but he must have for there was a voice in his earpiece now, talking to him, asking him what was up. Stuttering, he tried to explain what he had just seen—prisoner inflicting violence on himself for no discernable reason and having collapsed, probably gravely injured—and then the man who had been administering first aid moved back and the camera could see again and there was no question in his mind but that the man who had stabbed himself was dead.
Henry sat there, a little shocked or perhaps a lot shocked—hard to say. He stared numbly at the body, just as all the prisoners were staring, standing in a circle around it. There was Istvan again, he could see him. He didn’t look traumatized or stressed, seemed hardly surprised, just stood there with his face expressionless, staring on. And then, suddenly, he thought he caught the flicker of a smile.
He’s crazy, thought Henry. Maybe they’re all crazy. He was glad that he was not one of the guards, that he wouldn’t have to be one of the ones to go in there.
He had to stay watching the prisoners until one of the monitors showed him the guards lined up behind the door, ready to go in. Then he triggered the alarm, telling the prisoners to return to their cells. A few of them did, but most of them were still standing there, still in shock maybe. So he followed protocol and turned on the loudspeaker and turned the volume all the way up and gave them their one warning. There was a little confusion, but in the end all of them returned to the cells except for one. He considered issuing the warning again, but no, he knew the rules, he wasn’t to do that. So he closed the cell doors and then called down and warned the guards that there was a corpse and one loose inmate but that that inmate looked stunned, wasn’t likely to be a threat. And then, when he’d had acknowledgment, he opened the doors and watched them rush in.
They beat the loose inmate unconscious. There was no need for it, no reason to do it, and it made Henry think again that he’d made a very bad choice by taking this job, by coming to this planet out in the middle of nowhere to live in the outer circle of a penal colony that not only the prisoners but the guards, too, called Hell. He watched two guards—he couldn’t tell which two because of the riot gear they wore—drag the unconscious man away and deposit him in the ring with the cells in it. Meanwhile, the three remaining guards milled around the corpse.
Henry’s earpiece crackled. “What are we to do with the body?” asked their leader. On the monitor Henry saw him turn and stare up at one of the cameras.
“What do you usually do with the bodies?” asked Henry.
“This is the first one I’ve had, sir, since they converted the morgue to an interrogation room,” the man said.
Don’t call me sir, Henry wanted to say, I’m not one of you. But he knew if he said it, it would only confuse the man. Plus, he wasn’t absolutely sure that it was true. In a sense he was as guilty as the soldiers who had beaten the loose inmate unconscious. “Isn’t there a protocol?” he asked.
“Not that I’m aware of, sir. Before, we left them in the morgue and someone collected them.”
“Who collected them?” asked Henry.
“I don’t know,” said the man. “Someone from the other complex, the one we don’t talk about.”
“Well, we can’t leave the body there,” said Henry. “Bring it inside and put it somewhere until we can figure out what to do. The interrogation room, maybe. I’ll contact the commander and see what he suggests.”
* * *
Once the body was inside, lying flat on one of the metal tables in the interrogation room, Henry established the link. It took a few minutes for it to go through, the satellite that directed the signal first having to assure itself that the link was authorized and then having to encrypt the signal and send the decryption code securely to the vessel circling the planet. It had always seemed strange to Henry that almost all of the military personnel lived not within the outer ring of the prison but in orbit around the planet. It wasn’t as though there wasn’t enough room for them here. But maybe they felt freer where they were. Or maybe from their vantage they could keep watch not only over the penal colony but over the other complex that had been built not far away. Henry had no idea what it was or what purpose it served—he had only caught a glimpse of it when the shuttle landed him here, and then if the light was just right or the darkness deep and hazeless he could see its glimmer there at a distance. But he knew it was there, and knew if it was out here in the middle of nowhere whatever was going on inside of it wasn’t anything he wanted any part of.
Eventually the line crackled and he sa
w the face of one of the ensigns. A thin, awkward fellow with a prim mouth. Orthor, read the name over his pocket.
“Supply ship isn’t here yet,” said Ensign Orthor. “It won’t arrive for a few weeks. You should have more than enough to last you until then.”
Jerk, thought Henry. “That’s not why I’m calling,” he said.
“Oh?” said the ensign. “Then why are you calling?”
“I need to talk to the commander.”
“About what?” Henry didn’t answer, just stayed silent and staring until the ensign said, “Let me see if I can raise him.”
The screen went blank. When it lit up again, it showed the face of Commander Grottor. He had a crew cut and a craggy face, his cheeks covered with pockmarks that most people would have had surgically corrected. A scar, too, ran from one side of his nose through his lip, the skin splaying out slightly.
“Jenkins, no?” he said.
“No,” said Henry. “Wandrei.” He couldn’t help but feel that the commander had deliberately gotten his name wrong.
“Wandrei, of course,” the commander said, and gave a broad but lifeless smile. “Well, what do you need?”
Henry explained.
“A fork, you say?” said the commander. And then said, “Doesn’t sound like a man with all his marbles.”
“No indication of disturbance or madness until now,” said Henry. “Most of these men have their spirits broken. Last thing most of them are up to is any violence toward others or themselves.”
“And yet, here we are. I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Jenkins. You’re not to blame.”
“Wandrei, sir,” said Henry, and watched a flash of irritation cross over the commander’s face. “I didn’t think I was to blame. I’m just not sure what to do with the body. Shall we bury it? Incinerate it?”
The commander hesitated for a moment, finally shook his head. “Probably we should have someone take a look at it, just in case. Store it for now.”
“Store it?”
“You’ve got a morgue, don’t you?”
“We had one, sir, but it was replaced by the interrogation room.”
“Ah,” said Grottor, “I see. Well, put him in a refrigerator.”
“We only have the ones we use for food.”
“Well, clear one of those out and put him in. It’ll only be for a few days.”
“A few days?” said Henry, imagining one of the guards waking up and stumbling into the kitchen and opening a door on a corpse.
“Maybe sooner,” said the commander. “We’ll do what we can.” He reached out and clicked the screen off.
23
Ensign Haley still wasn’t sure if she should be flattered or insulted. She couldn’t decide if Grottor was using her or not, and she wasn’t altogether sure how much or how little of the truth he was telling her. She also wasn’t sure if she could ask him.
You’re relieved of your duties, he had said to her in the privacy of his cabin. I have a more important task for you. He’d explained to her how she would continue to sit at the same console that she’d sat at before, but he’d arranged for an ensign off the bridge to handle her formal tasks, and then she’d be allowed to do what she was supposed to do.
“And what’s that?” she’d asked.
“Why, draw, of course,” he said. “Doodle and draw. Don’t think about it much. Anything that comes to mind or half to mind, just draw it and then vid it over to me.”
“You want me to spend my time doodling, sir?”
He nodded. “You really don’t have any idea, do you?” he asked.
“Any idea of what, sir?”
“You didn’t recognize what you drew?” he asked.
“No,” she said. And then said, “Well, it looked like the Unitologist symbol.”
“That’s right,” he said. “But it’s much more than that. Can I share something with you?” he asked.
“Umm,” she said, startled. But the hesitancy with which she’d responded had made him clam up again.
“It’s tied to our work on the planet,” he had said. “What you’re doing, Ensign Haley, is important work. It might not seem so, but it is. You’ll have to take my word for it. We need to be careful who takes advantage of it.”
She had laughed. “You must be joking, sir,” she had said.
But apparently he was not, for here she was now, sitting at her console, scribbling with her stylus on her digital pad. She had been doing it for more than a week now, and spinning each doodle over to Grottor as soon as she felt she was ready to move on to a new page.
Grottor’s response had been impassive at first; then, slowly, he had begun to express his disappointment. “No,” he finally said, “that’s not it. That’s not helping at all.”
“Perhaps if you’d tell me what you’d like me to draw,” she said, “then I could be of more help.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “If it’s to be of any use to us at all, it just has to come.”
But ever since primary school, she’d been trained to please and she was incredibly frustrated that now, somehow, she couldn’t. She tried to second-guess what Grottor wanted. He’d been initially pleased when she drew some version of the Unitologist symbol, and so she drew it again, and saw for the briefest moment a flicker of excitement when he saw it. But the excitement quickly faded.
“Stop thinking,” he scolded her. “Let it just come.”
Let what just come?
* * *
It might have gone on much longer like that, might have gone on just like that until the moment when Grottor, frustrated, gave up on Ensign Haley and returned her to her duties, but Grottor, luckily, was not a man to become easily frustrated, and, also luckily, something happened first.
They were, Grottor would realize when he looked at the data later, at the point in their loop where they were directly above the man-made facilities on Aspera’s surface. They were also, due to sloppy navigation on Ensign Orthor’s part, closer to the surface than they usually were. And finally, instrumentation would reveal, there had been a burst of energy from the planet’s surface. From the Marker.
Suddenly Haley had given a little cry and clutched her head.
“Headache?” he heard Orthor ask. Every time the man spoke, it filled Grottor with irritation. It was partly because he knew the man was a plant from Blackwell, but in addition the man was simply irritating. Even toying with that technician down on the surface, Wandrei, pretending not to remember his name, didn’t help much.
It must have been a bad one. Ensign Haley had her head in her hands for twenty or thirty seconds, and seemed a little dazed after. What was it? he wondered. Simply a migraine? Why had it seemed to come along so suddenly? He watched her for a while. For a few moments she was still and then she picked back up her stylus and continued her task.
“Ensign Haley,” he said.
She raised her head, gave him a tired look. “Yes, sir?” she asked, her tone flat.
“Leave the bridge and take a few moments to gather yourself,” he said.
For a moment, he thought she was going to protest, as she had before, but instead she gave a curt nod, spun what was on her pad over to his vid, and stood up to leave.
She was halfway to the door when he realized what she’d sent him.
“Wait a moment, Haley,” he said.
She stopped and paused on the far side of the bridge, waited while he took a closer look.
A new series of equations. Crystallization counter-sequence, the gray man had called one part of the first set, or something similar if not exactly that. He recognized a few of the equational gestures that he’d seen alongside the first sketch, but he didn’t know enough to be able to judge how important or genuine they were. He would have to send them along, see what the gray man felt they amounted to. The image alongside them didn’t look at all like the Marker but there was a small rough sketch of the Marker lower on the page and he realized that the rectangle he was seeing was a cutaway, a cross se
ction from the Marker.
“Leave the bridge, Ensign Orthor,” he said.
“What?” said Orthor. “I’m not the one with the headache,” he said.
“Sir,” said Grottor, flatly.
“What?” said Orthor.
“It’s: ‘I’m not the one with the headache, sir,’” said Grottor. “Leave. That’s an order.”
Orthor stood, face livid with suppressed anger, but left. “Now the rest of you,” Grottor said. “All of you. Except you, Ensign Haley.”
There was a moment of stunned silence and then the bridge crew started up and cleared up, a dull rumbling going through them. It took them a few moments, but soon he was left alone with Ensign Haley.
There was a long silence, which she finally broke. “What am I supposed to do, sir?” she asked.
“Do your task,” he said.
“My task?”
“Draw,” he said. “I want you to sit in that chair and draw until you can no longer see, and then I want you keep drawing.”
Confused, she sat and began; almost immediately it was clear that something was happening. She quickly entered an almost trancelike state, and what came pouring out was complex and strange: equations and models, plans and structures. He had always known she was special, but he hadn’t realized just how special.
She drew for hours before it began to fade and just became ordinary doodles again. He was not disappointed with the results. And, more importantly, neither was the gray man.
24
There was a static, a whispering, when the bursts came. It stayed with Istvan for more than a little while, even once the visions had begun to fade, and within it, if he listened hard enough, he could hear voices. They were incomplete and partial, but they were voices, he was sure of it. Or nearly sure. And they were not, as the other voices had been, merely a squashed repetition of words he had said himself. No, these were voices. Now all he had to do was train himself to listen hard enough so that he could hear them.
Dead Space: Catalyst Page 14
