Mindkiller

by Spider Robinson

  Jacques blinked, drew a deep breath, and nodded. “I would say so, yes.”

  He lowered the Atcheson then, and stepped gingerly in the window.

  “Joe,” Karen called. “You know this guy?”

  “Bear Withbert. He saved my ass in Africa once. I told you about him.” I smelled eucalyptus just seeing him. You crush the leaves and rub them on your hide for insect protection in the jungle. “If he’s with Jacques, I am.”

  “Honest to Christ, Corporal, you damn near gave me fits for a while there. First you blow Madeleine’s cover, and then you like to blow my own. And you know perfectly well there ain’t more than a five-percent chance of a spinal shot going wrong. I couldn’t figure out how the hell you wanted me to play it. How did you know I was out there?”

  I got to my feet and worked my shoulders. For the first time in a very long while, I felt very good. “I didn’t. I was just trying to divide up his attention too many ways.”

  He stared. “You were bluffing?” He turned to Jacques again. “Sign this one up, boss.” He safetied the shotgun and set it down against the wall. He walked across the room, pulling out a handkerchief. He picked up Amesby’s vertebrae in it. He rolled it up and tucked it into Amesby’s pants pocket. He lifted Amesby’s shoulders; the head dangled by the sterno-mastoid muscles. The metal foil made a crinkling sound. The features were deformed by hydrostatic pressure, eyes burst. “I’m afraid this rug is shot.” He stripped off his black rainproof poncho and used it to wrap the upper portion of the body. He picked it up in his big arms and headed for the outside door. Madeleine held it open for him, then got the outer door. She closed and sealed both behind him.

  “Madeleine,” Jacques said, with just the right amount of irony, “please radio the ship and tell them there’ll be three for disposal. And would you order a new window tomorrow?”

  Karen glared at me.

  “I was bluffing, I tell you,” I said weakly. “It just seemed the logical way to handle the ones you use up.”

  “Jacques, stop teasing him,” Madeleine said. “He was brilliant. I almost believed him myself.” She came close to me, stopped, and looked me over carefully. She nodded slightly to herself. There were pain and guilt in her eyes, but there was courage there too. The pain was not crippling, the guilt not shameful. She was sorry, but unrepentant. “Thank you for saving Jacques. For saving everything. You did a good thing, Joe.”

  It was odd. With that last sentence she reminded me for the first time of the childhood sister I recalled; she had said that to me a hundred times while I was growing up. But she said “Joe,” not “Norman.” With that one sentence it was as though she were offering to transfer her sisterhood from Norman Kent to Joe, uh, Templeton. She saw that register on me, and waited for my response. I noticed that she had stopped breathing. Jacques too was watching me intently.

  “My pleasure, sis.”

  She exhaled and her whole face lit up. Jacques relaxed. Karen got up and put an arm around me and kissed me on the cheek. I put an arm around her too. “So we’re bright enough to be offered jobs, eh? Both of us?”

  “I knew I wanted you both before I invited you here. The question was, did you want me? Yes, you’re both in, and you won’t be ‘like gods,’ but you won’t wear belly bombs either. You probably will die unpleasantly, like Reese and Cutter outside, but you’ll do it voluntarily.”

  “I knew that,” I said. “I had to make the pitch plausible to Amesby’s kind of man. Tell me something: how come I pass now? Why did I fail four and a half years ago?”

  “I offered you the choice then. Join my conspiracy or be mindwiped. You chose the latter. I’ve never been sure why.”

  It was hard to get a handle on. “Can mindwipe change personality that much?”

  “Personality is built with memories.”

  “Joe, let me try,” Madeleine said. “When I got to Nova Scotia from Switzerland, you were in rotten shape. The war had shattered you, busted your philosophy of life apart. You made a superficial adjustment, and in a few years it started to go sour. It all came apart on you. Your work, your marriage, your self-respect. You were suicidal when I arrived. I was confused myself. We leaned on each other. We became close. And so you were set up for the coup de grace.

  “I had left Switzerland because I discovered, accidentally, that the man I had come to love was someone I did not know at all. I knew almost nothing—hints, little things that didn’t add up—just enough to know that Jacques was something more than what he claimed to be. I presumed this to be sinister. International espionage, drugs, I suspected one of those. I left him without telling him I was leaving. I came to Canada, where I thought he could not find me, to think things through. And I smuggled a present for you through customs. A phonograph record. Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, mint condition. It got past customs, but an agent of Jacques scanned my luggage more thoroughly and reported the package to him. He had to assume it was a floppy disc full of damaging computer data that I was planning to use against him.”

  “It hurt to think that,” Jacques said. “I had her watched very carefully for a few weeks. She did nothing alarming, but finally I decided I could not afford to leave the situation unresolved. I ordered her kidnapped and taken into the country. I planned to come at once and interrogate her, but I was delayed.”

  “An assassination attempt,” Maddy said drily. “He was a week recovering in hospital. Then he came here and told me who and what he was, and…well, we’ve been together ever since.

  “But by that time it was too late to undo my ‘kidnapping.’ There was no explanation I could give you or the police, and besides, I could be of more use by remaining underground. I had to leave you in the dark; you were in no shape to handle anything like this.

  “So you had the last pillar knocked out from under you. After a while, all that sustained you was fury at whoever had taken me from you. You kept digging until you found Jacques, and you came after him with a gun. Much like Amesby did tonight. Except that you were out for vengeance rather than gain.”

  “You weren’t as good as Amesby then, Joe,” Jacques said. “You never got close. I must say you did a much better job of stalking me the second time.”

  “I had more information this time. So you bagged me.”

  “By then,” Maddy continued, “you had too much invested in hating Jacques. You couldn’t shift gears. You didn’t want to. You knew mindwipe was a kind of death, and you’d been wanting to die for some time.”

  “Jacques, why didn’t you just kill me? I would have.”

  “I begged him not to,” Maddy said, her voice firm and strong. “I argued that if you were taken back to the war years, and allowed to start all over again, you might just take a different path from there.”

  I grimaced. “So I spent four years doing nothing whatsoever and then became a crusader.”

  “Not so,” Maddy insisted. “You spent four years coming to terms with the war.”

  “War can be exhilarating, exciting,” Jacques said. “That is its dirty secret. A life-threatening situation is stimulating. If you know that, it is because you are the one that survived. So, if you are an introspective, sensitive man, you may mistakenly decide that it is killing that excites you—when in fact the exciting part is almost-being-killed. To encourage you to stay underground, I gave you enough illicit computer power to plunder banks at will—yet you chose to become a burglar. To put yourself on the line, to give your victims, and the police, a fair crack at you. You used the computer only to give you an edge. In that four years you had some very narrow squeaks, and you acquired some interesting scars, and you never killed anyone. Look at you: that little dance you just did with Amesby got you high, didn’t it? The crucial element that was missing in the war, and that has been present in your life since I set you down in New York, is ethical confidence. You believe in the causes you fight for now. Or else you don’t fight. I know I can trust your commitment, because you fought for me.”

  “How did the Bear co
me to work for you?”

  Madeleine answered. “He and his wife, Minnie, moved to Toronto shortly after you moved up here. They came back to visit you just before you dropped out of sight. You told them the whole story, and so when you did disappear, Bear and Minnie decided that Jacques had had you killed. It bothered them both—they both loved Norman Kent—but there was nothing they could do. They couldn’t go off commandoing like you, they had responsibilities. Minnie was tied to her job, and Bear was inhibited by Minnie’s being pregnant. Then, four months later, she was killed in an auto accident. When he was over his grief, Bear decided it would be good therapy to go look up Jacques. He went through much the same thing you have today—without the floor show. He’s been with us ever since.”

  There was no way to take this all in; I filed it for later. Bear married, and widowered. I wondered if I had liked this Minnie, if Norman would have mourned her. “Everything has ripples, doesn’t it?” I had a sudden alarming thought. “Hey! How badly is Amesby’s planted evidence going to mess us up?”

  Jacques smiled. “Not too badly, I think. You pumped him well; I believe he left leads only with the RCMP and Interpol, and we have both of them under control. It may even be possible to recover the evidence before his death is known.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  His smile widened. “Lots of places, Joe. Lots of places. I intend to loose mindfill on the world, for good or ill, in a little more than five years. We will be busy.”

  I was shocked. “Five years?”

  “That soon?” Karen gasped.

  “I’d like it to be longer. But I can’t keep the lid on forever, even with mindwipe to help. The leaks keep getting harder to patch, and the assassins keep getting better. As it is, I don’t know if I’ll live to see even the first-order results of what I have done.”

  “But how can you get the world ready for a trauma like that in five years?” Karen shook her head. “Sounds to me like World War Three and a new Stone Age. You read the papers. The world ain’t ready.”

  Jacques nodded in agreement. “It will be necessary,” he said in a perfectly normal, conversational tone of voice, “to conquer the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the Union of Africa, without letting anyone know.”

  “Oh,” she said weakly. “Well, as long as you’ve got it worked out, okay.”

  “Jacques,” Madeleine said reprovingly, “you are an awful tease. Karen, honey, come here.” She led Karen to the couch and sat them both down. “Who is the most powerful man in the United States?”

  She gestured with her head toward Jacques. “Besides him?”

  Madeleine smiled. “Yes, hon. Besides him.”

  “The President.”

  Madeleine kept smiling while she shook her head. “No. It’s the man who pulls the President’s strings, dear. For decades now, it has been impossible for a man suited to that power to be elected. Stevenson was the last to try. The rest of them accepted the inevitable and worked through electable figureheads. There hasn’t been a president since Johnson who wasn’t a ventriloquist’s dummy. Some of them never knew it. The present incumbent, as a matter of fact, has no idea that he is owned and operated by a mathematician from Butler, Missouri. They’ve never been introduced. But we know—so we needn’t waste time and energy trying to get past the Secret Service.”

  “I’m beginning to see how I can be of help to you,” Karen said.

  “You’re very quick.”

  They smiled at each other. They were going to be friends.

  I had reached that state of mind in which nothing can surprise. If Amesby had walked back into the room, on fire, I’d have offered him coffee. “So we conquer the world…”

  “A necessary first step,” Jacques agreed. “Then it gets harder.” He laughed suddenly. “Listen to me, eh, Madeleine? All my life I have thought of myself as a rational anarchist. Albert Einstein said once, ‘God punished me for my contempt for authority by making me an authority.’”

  “Darling,” my sister said, “lay out the Grand Plan later. Right now Joe has a choice to make.”

  He blinked. “Yes, my dear. Quite right.”

  Choice to make? Sure, anything, go on, ask me anything.

  “Joe, would you like your memories back?”

  I stopped moving. I stopped breathing. I stopped seeing. I stopped thinking. I kept hearing.

  “You received the most primitive form of mindwipe. I spoke of it before. The memories themselves were not actually erased. They…they were hidden from your mind’s metaprogrammer. The access codes were removed from the files. And placed, as carefully as the state of the art allowed, in my files. I can put them back now if you want.”

  He waited in vain for a response. He went on, his voice strained, “Some damage will always remain. If I restore your access to those memories, they will…” He reached for words. “Joe, one day soon I will play into your head a tape of my memories of the last thirty years. It will take a few hours. When I’m done, you will have access to everything I’ve done and seen and thought. You will be able to recall it all, experience it through the eyes of the viewpoint character. But you will not confuse those memories with your own experiences. The identity factor will be attenuated. The memories will have a kind of ‘third person’ feel—the experiences of someone not-you. Ego knows its own work.

  “Memory is a living process—continually shuffling and rearranging itself. By fencing off some of your memories for so many years, I weakened them, blurred them slightly. The gestalt they were part of no longer—quite—exists. Those years I stole from you will, at best, always seem like something that happened to someone else. But they are not necessarily completely lost to you.”

  He stopped talking again for a time. Then: “It is the only restitution I can offer for what I have done to you. If you refuse, I will understand.”

  Then he shut up completely.

  I sat down on something. Hot wetness occurred in my mouth. Coffee the way I like it. I swallowed. My vision cleared and I saw Karen staring into my eyes from a foot away. “Thanks,” I said, and took the cup from her.

  She turned to Jacques, her expression angry. “Will it make him whole again? Or mess him up more?”

  Madeleine answered. “Karen, listen to me. I have in my skull the memories of more than a hundred people, in whole or in part. Jacques has nearly three times that many. Between us we know more about human psychology than anyone now alive. This will make him whole if anything can. It will be up to him. It always is.”

  I put down the cup. I got up and went to Madeleine. She was standing near the fire. It was only coals now, but still quite warm. I put my hands on her shoulders.

  “Were there any good times in there at all, Maddy?”

  I recognized her now. The expression on her face I had seen often in childhood. When I broke my tooth. When I failed Social Studies. When I got mugged. When my first love left me.

  “Yes, little brother. A few, at least, that I know of; I’ve never audited your tapes. Not many, I won’t lie to you. Those were not your best years, Norm—Joe. A man sets a mine that very nearly kills you, to further a cause that he believes in, and your mind can find no good excuse to hate him and your heart can’t help it. That’s hard to integrate. It got worse from there, steadily. But yes, there were good times. Just not enough. We got to know each other, at least, at last, and I loved you.”

  “Did I love you?”

  “You needed me.”

  I turned to Jacques. “Do it. Tonight. Now.”

  They took me to a white sterile place like a cross between an operating theater and the bridge of the Space Commando’s starship. They laid me down on a very comfortable table. They spoke soothingly to me. They placed under my head and neck what felt like a leather pillow. It was comfortable. They folded parts of it over across my forehead and secured them. My heart was racing.

  Karen’s face appeared over mine. Her voice was the only one that didn’t seem
to be coming from underwater.

  “Joe? Remember how I’d forgotten most of that stuff about my father? And then after I told you about it, I could handle it? You’re a brave son of a bitch, Joe, and someday I want to swap memories with you, if you’re willing.”

  My mouth was very dry. “I love you too.”

  She kissed me, and her face withdrew. A tear landed on my chin. I tried to wipe it, but my arms seemed to be restrained.

  “Now, Jacques!”

  Like two decks of cards being shuffled together.

  First, large cuts, thick stacks.

  I fought in the jungle burgled apartments taught English befriended pimps and thieves bungled a marriage found Karen in the living room found Maddy in the living room hunted the man behind her death hunted the man behind her death tracked him to Nova Scotia to Phinney’s Cove died killed.

  Then individual cards.

  The hoarse panting breath of the mugger beside him on the MacDonald Bridge. The terrible smile on Karen’s face as I cleared the doorway. Weeping in Maddy’s arms, the top of his head bruised and sore. The smell of Karen’s cigarettes. Naked at the door and Lois grinning at him from the hallway. The sound Karen made when she came the first time. Minnie in his arms, calling his name, “—coward, what’s he doing?” The nurse calling me “Norman” and fainting. The Bay of Fundy as the sun goes down, magnificent and indifferent and I know I’m going to die soon. She’s sorry she got me into this, and the sky is so full of stars! That luxurious cell, Jacques will be here soon for my decision. The flat, anechoic sound of the shot that killed Amesby. My God, what if Maddy’s never coming back? The bitch broke my nose. God damn it, Sarge, the poor bastard’s dead we’ve got to bug out now! He has to be the spitting image of her old man, oh, Christ. It’s not really you I’m screwing, Mrs. MacLeod, it’s your husband. The shock doc has the emptiest eyes I’ve ever seen. I’m gonna find that son of a bitch and kill him twice. This one’s my size, no relatives, he’ll do just fine. It’s his computer, Karen, we’re blown. We can really change the world. I love you too, Karen. Heinrich Dreser gave us both heroin and aspirin. God is an iron.