Asimov's SF, April/May 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

"Your operations,” I say. “Like the operation you did on me. Where did you learn the technique? Or how did you perfect it?” His eyes narrow slightly. “Because there's no way—"

  "I experimented,” he says. He continues to eat as if this line of questioning weren't problematic. “But not on people."

  "Should I conclude you operated on primates? You found villainous monkeys?"

  "Sociopathic behavior may be observed in nonhuman species,” he says. “Not only primates. And rats have memory nodes and decision structures like ours. In addition, I had access to . . . obscure texts."

  "I see."

  He sets down his fork. “You were concerned that I had done something wrong."

  "I didn't mean to cause offense."

  "That's not my point.” His hand suddenly shoots across the table to grab my shoulder. He enfolds me. “You're cured,” he says. “You're well."

  When he lets go, I have trouble making my voice loud enough. “I wish I could tell you what those fibers were for.” And then another memory flicks to life like kindling catching fire. “At least the voices are gone."

  The tiny flick of his eyelids tells me it's possible to surprise even him. A single note, an insect's drone, rises from the wall behind me. I turn, see nothing, follow the sound as it shifts, and find myself turning back to face him. He's staring at a point that might be midway through my brain, and I recognize the inhuman sound as his own. Then it stops.

  "This raises a new possibility,” he says. “Perhaps you're insane."

  * * * *

  3. Pendulum

  How could I have forgotten?

  I say voices though it might have been one voice. I say voice though I'm not sure it's proper to talk of sound. Words, yes; there were words. Or clusters of words. Packets of ideas. Sometime shortly before I came back to the States, they started, or at least started in earnest. I'd long talked silently to myself as if to some inquiring intelligence, detailing every task and purpose as if someone had asked me to elaborate. And? it seemed to ask. And? What came later possessed more character.

  I understood that I was mentally disturbed. It explained why I did what I did and how my response to my actions wasn't the response people expected. But as the voices didn't interfere with my progress, they became another element in a life no one could have explained to me in the first place.

  I tell the big man all of this, but as an outline lacking in precision, paraphrasing a past that remains unclear.

  * * * *

  After another long sleep that, I assume, has bridged the night, I rise from bed to find the man himself reading a book in the outer room, wearing a midweight white coat, leather gloves beside him on the table. Before he looks at me, he appears to digest the last passage he's read, measure its significance, and file it away. Then he sets down the book.

  "I have to go out,” he says. When I don't say anything, he stands and collects his mittens and a bag tucked beneath his chair. “I'll be back before night,” he says, as if I have any idea of the time of day.

  I have formed the impression that we're underground. The absence of windows led me there, in part, but also the implications of “safe” in a time such as ours. He's built a bomb shelter, of course, and outfitted it to last through the initial terrors of the full exchange of nuclear weapons. It's discouraging, this notion. He doesn't seem like the kind of man who would hide away while the rest of the world burns, but perhaps it's a wise course of action when facing unwise conditions. With some kind of early warning system, maybe he can hurry his associates here. If he's in nearby, and he has a few minutes . . . and there's that tunnel . . .

  I follow him to a door he hasn't previously explained. At the touch of his hand on an unremarkable spot, the door slides open, and we step into a colder space, a combination garage and hangar. Several snowmobiles, a steel-framed buggy with enormous wheels, and a large sledge stand alongside a small two-engine plane that might seat half a dozen people. “You have dogs for the sledge?” I ask.

  He graces me with a smile. “Not at present.” He steps onto the plane's wing and swings open the cabin door. While I wait, increasingly chilled by the space and a creeping anxiety, he moves about in the interior. Finally he pushes the door open and calls out, “Don't go anywhere."

  "No,” I say seriously. “I won't."

  "I say that for your safety,” he says.

  Of course. I don't even know where we are. How could I leave?

  The plane must possess controls for the hangar. A blank wall becomes ceiling-high double doors that smoothly retract, and cold washes into the hangar. I put up my hand against the sky's empty brightness; straight ahead, the land is a plain of faintly green grasses spotted with flowering purples and yellows. The plain stops at a curving wall of mountains.

  I marvel at it until I realize the big man hasn't moved; he's been watching me. “Summer comes to the Arctic as well, you know."

  "It's beautiful.” I've never said such a thing. Every place I've lived, even in my time at the Soviet camps, I saw the seasons change, but I never welcomed them, never felt them in my body. Always, pressed for time, by mortality, I thought of work to perfect. I thought of people lying helpless under my knives, the brain's folded caverns, of watching the experiments play out. What I thought of as a child, I have no idea; I had burrowed into myself and never saw the sky.

  "When you're done admiring the scenery, hit the big button on the wall.” He waves once and pulls the plane door fast.

  The engine starts and the plane rolls forward so slowly, it's unconvincing. Out on the grasses, it readily picks up speed, buzzing, moving more smoothly than I'd think such irregular ground would allow. And then it's aloft. Not two hundred feet up there comes a shriek like a raptor's, and the plane accelerates so swiftly, it's nearly gone from sight by the time the engine's concussive boom hits the earth and bounds through me.

  An absolute silence prevails, until a wind shakes the grasses and stiff flowers. That's when I feel alone. I take in that feeling. It isn't completely awful. I become aware of my blinking and my wet cheeks. My eyes are not bitter eyes any longer. I am merely looking at the chattering grasses of the plain and feeling the absence of the man who rescued me.

  Then I push the fat button flat and watch the doors shut out the astonishing brilliance. As I do, I remember he can control the doors from the plane. He left them open. He let me decide how long to look.

  * * * *

  I eat, read, doze, eat, and try push-ups. Jittery, I wander the rooms he hasn't secured. I don't hear the plane return, that's how sealed this fortress is against the world. As it happens, I'm passing the hangar door when it slides open. The great man fills it, looking right at me, unzipping his jacket.

  "You've been all right?"

  "You startled me."

  "Sorry."

  "Yes . . . I've been all right.” He steps into the room. “Where were you?"

  He takes a breath, and I expect some profound answer. “I went for groceries. Why don't you give us a hand?"

  I follow him back into the hangar, and I see that the “us” wasn't an affect of aggrandizement. There's another man, in his thirties but white-haired, bespectacled, lugging long flat packages. I find myself looking at his burden and not his eyes. “Seal meat!” he says, as if it were wonderful news.

  "David Birdwell,” says the big man.

  "How do,” says the other, but he doesn't pause as he hustles past me.

  "Birdy's going to have a look at you,” I'm told. Then I help unload the plane.

  * * * *

  Birdy is from Minneapolis, and he means to hypnotize me.

  I've never played with hypnotism. The Soviets buried post-hypnotic suggestions in agents who didn't know they were agents—but that proved to be science fiction, just as their hunt for men with the ability to telekinetically disrupt missiles proved to be fantasy. I felt comfortable only with what I could see, the body's chemistry and fleshy wiring.

  We're seated across from each other. Birdy has t
aken a pillow from my bed to prop behind my back, since the success of hypnotism relies on comfort and trust. “The doctor is in,” he says, leaning close and widening his eyes as if this were all for fun. His jacket with elbow patches is so worn, it must serve as his uniform. “Well, he's the real doctor,” he says with a nod at the closed door, behind which, somewhere, the man himself awaits the outcome.

  "You're not a doctor?"

  "I am. Just not the doctor. Anyway, he'll tell you I'm better at this than he is. It's a load of bull, but I do what I'm told.” He's smiling as he says it.

  "I doubt you'll get what you want. I'm not keeping back anything."

  "Well, we could use drugs, but the big guy's not too keen on that solution. Plus, I understand you've already used some things on yourself over the years, psychotropic substances, and we don't want to trigger a flashback or some such thing. This is just a way to maybe get at some information that's been . . . hiding."

  "Do you know who I am?"

  "I know what you've done. Is that what you mean? The big man would say that's not who you are. It's who you were."

  "And who are you?"

  "Here, I'm ‘Birdy.’ In the real world, I have a small practice, and I'm connected with a hospital in the city."

  "You're who he calls for psychiatric consultations?"

  He laughs and rubs one knee absently. “No, no. The tasks vary. All kinds of crazy stuff."

  "Like what?"

  Twice more he rubs his knee. Then he says, “The Work,” and I hear the capital letter. “We're all just doing . . . the Work. I trust the big man. Whatever he says to do, it's going to be right. Are you nervous?"

  "No, but I doubt I can be hypnotized."

  "And why is that?"

  I shrug. “My psyche's too damaged. And I've never thought of myself as open to suggestion. Every awful thing I did, it came from inside me."

  "I think we're confusing some issues here,” says Birdy. “Let me show you something.” From his jacket he slips a slender line with a cone-shaped stone attached to one end. “This was a gift from a former teacher. Here. Take it like this."

  I follow his instructions, holding the plumb by the thread, letting it sway in the open air between us. He takes the stone in his finger, pulls it to the side and releases it. “See how it swings left to right and back? Okay. Now, if you're a woman, and I do that, the pendulum will keep that motion. If you're a man, it'll eventually shift to a motion perpendicular to that. Hold on and watch.” The stone swings back and forth perhaps a dozen times, then seems to rotate slightly, keel off from true and, after making several circles, begin elliptical motion completely at odds with its start. Another dozen swings and it moves between Birdy and me as if we drew it like magnets.

  "It's a trick,” I say.

  He stops the pendulum, and I release it into his palm. He asks, “What moved the stone?"

  "It seemed to do it itself. But that can't be right."

  "True. You moved the stone. That's the power of suggestion."

  Already, I feel dozy and ready to unload the burden of my baffled will. “Listen to me,” I say. “This will sound . . . absurd. But I don't know who I am."

  "You've been through a trauma. And I don't mean waking up from the operation. I mean the life you had before the operation. Decades of trauma that you didn't properly perceive or process. You haven't had the chance to find out what makes you tick."

  "And what makes him tick?"

  He opens his palm to show the pendant. I think he's going to use it to illustrate another point, but he merely worries the stone with his thumb. “He's exactly what he appears to be,” he says. “He's . . . complete. He'd never say that about himself. To his way of thinking, he can always do more, be better. But to me . . . he's the only fully intact human I've ever met."

  "Does he have a flaw?"

  Birdy stills all motion. “Why would you ask that?"

  "No, I don't mean it like that. I wouldn't harm him. That's not what I mean. But you're saying he's perfect."

  His jaw works from side to side as he considers. “His weakness is that he's only human. But he'd never say that. He'd say that being human is his greatest strength."

  * * * *

  He uses a pencil. I stare at the pink eraser, he counts backward from ten, I think how foolish and simple this is, like a child's game, so unlike the world I inhabited only days before, and when he dips the eraser forward and down, my eyelids drop, and I think that without a doubt this world with these men is better and that, perhaps, I can do something to help them.

  He takes me back to the moment of my capture. I see again the dim room and the large figure rearing up from where it waited. Then I go back, back. I'm on the street, sweating because I dressed in the morning for a cooler day, and here I am in a jacket on a day of still air and haze.

  Back, back.

  I have money I withdraw from a bank, an account I set up for myself while still in Europe. This is how I live. But what do I do with my days?

  "Where are you now?” asks Birdy.

  "A room."

  "What kind of room?"

  "I see surgical tools. My hands."

  "Can you look around the room?"

  "I can't. I can't move. My hands are moving. This is rather interesting."

  "How did you get to the room?"

  "I'm always in the room."

  He prods me to head in different directions, but I'm stuck. At one point, I open my eyes.

  "Am I awake now?” I ask.

  "Partly. Shut your eyes."

  "I'm not helping."

  "Shut your eyes. I'll bring you up."

  I do what he says. He counts forward, waking my limbs, my head, then opening my eyes.

  I say, “I'm so sorry."

  * * * *

  The big man leans in the doorway. Weakened, I leave the chair and sit propped up in the bed.

  Birdy says, “We've got those voices to consider."

  "Interpretation?"

  "Well, there's nothing in his file,” he says, then looks at me. “—in your file. Sorry to talk about you like you're not here."

  "I don't mind."

  "Anyway, there's nothing to indicate schizophrenia. It's certainly possible, with all the drugs you've used on yourself, that the voices are a type of flashback or the result of brain damage. But I don't know. If we knew what the voices said. Perhaps they're buried memories."

  The big man says, “It's not something my operation would have fixed."

  "With all due respect, you can't know that. I'm not saying you don't know what you're doing, but we're dealing with plenty of unknowns here."

  I'm sure the big man means no threat when he crosses his arms, but his biceps bulge imposingly. “No voices now?"

  "None. Not since I woke up here."

  He slightly lifts one brow.

  "Contemporaneousness doesn't mean correlation,” he says.

  "It strongly implies it,” says Birdy. He pauses. “You're worried."

  "Just thoughtful."

  "For you, that'll do."

  It's a sign of my mental dullness these days that I don't think until later that they could have had that conversation in private. They want me to hear it. They want me to know they still don't fully trust me—and that I shouldn't trust myself.

  * * * *

  I awake unsure I'm awake, the room utterly black for the first time. My eyes are open, but they burn, needing sleep. A voice from inside the pillow says, You.

  "Right here,” I say aloud, not whispering.

  We.

  I think about what to say this time. I reply, “You're not real,” thinking that might end it.

  But the voice comes back: We. Have a task.

  I won't be doing anything you tell me, I say in my head. I picture the words and hear them.

  I push away everything except an image of the big man; I imagine him awake as I sleep, seated as if on a throne, hand to jaw, reflective, watchful, guarding me through the night.

&
nbsp; * * * *

  I hear someone speak. It brings me half-awake, an image from a dream—trees, a river, a metal structure on the other side—superimposed on the room's blank walls.

  Excited, I slap my feet to the floor and rush into the main room without dressing. They're both there, the big man with his arms crossed, Birdy gesturing as he speaks.

  "I had a dream,” I say. Birdy suspends his motions mid-gesture and looks me up and down. The big man barely moves.

  "Tell us."

  "It's big. A big machine. Like in a factory. Or it is a factory."

  "What does it do?"

  "I don't know."

  "Maybe it's not even real,” says Birdy. “It's a metaphor. For your mental state. Or for an elaborate plan."

  "We're missing something,” says the big man, eyes searching. “For now, let's assume you've remembered something. There was the machine from New York. Pieces."

  "Which you told him about. We contaminated his dreams."

  He doesn't nod, but something about how he stands indicates agreement. “We go with what we have. We'll tell Chicago we're looking for something big.” The last he aims at me: “I'll get you a bag to pack."

  * * * *

  4. Hands

  Like the Arctic redoubt, the plane's cabin must be well insulated against noise (and our pilot the finest), because the only indication that we slow to an air speed that won't alarm a traffic control tower or lead to the scrambling of interceptor jets is a lessening of the tension in my neck. The ground finally leaves my window.

  "We're climbing to radar range,” the man himself informs us, perhaps for politeness’ sake.

  "Meigs Field?” asks Birdy.

  "Yes. Fewer questions."

  It's still some time before we near Chicago; I watch Birdy and try to relax, but I'm not practiced in this. Seeing him read a book, I wish I'd brought the Wooster and Jeeves. Several times I catch his eye, and he smiles momentarily before returning to his text.

  I've known leisure, but always an anxious kind of leisure. Strong drink relieved it—or made it pass less consciously, in any case. Drugs. Mostly I immersed myself in work, dreams of crafting a human mechanism that would be perfect because it lacked those things that made us weak. I never thought of honors coming to me or earning anything more than money for more comfortable belongings. They did give me a dacha outside Moscow at one point, but within a year they gave it out from under me to a party official who oversaw cryptographic research. I'd only spent the odd week there in any case.