Again, he tried to think of something to say. Because he knew what the painter had seen in his eyes. He had seen Louise.
"I don't remember," he answered.
She shot him a skeptical glance, but didn't dispute him.
"I got a job," he offered.
"Really."
"Yes. As a literary critic."
"That's a strange job for someone who was in your line of work. Your papers say you were a salesman."
"A boyhood dream. I'm retired, and now it's time to live out my fantasies, I suppose. Live in Paris, write."
"Well, Mr. Kaufman. Welcome to your fantasy." She hesitated.
"This writing job. Is it full time?"
"No."
"How would you like free rent for a while?"
"That depends, of course."
"Help me clean up this mess. I'll pay you a day an hour. It's a good deal."
"So you aren't throwing in the towel, after all."
"I suppose not."
He nodded.
She rose, steadying herself with the table.
"I suppose I'll catch a few winks."
"Good night-or morning, rather."
"Yes. To you, too. And... thank you."
The words surprised him so much he didn't know what to say. That seemed to happen to him a lot, talking to Louise. What had he done to be thanked for? Had he been sympathetic ? To a normal?
He went back over the conversation in his head and realized that he had. What had made him do that? He would think about it later. Destroying and rebuilding Jem had taken a lot out of him. He would be more reasonable after a few hours' rest.
* * *
He woke with the remains of a headache, something like a hangover, but otherwise felt pretty well. He got up, splashed cold water on his face, and began to plan his day. Well, he was a reviewer, now. So he needed something to review.
And something to review it on-a desktop AI or something of the sort. His pocket computer could take dictation, but somehow he felt he ought to use an old-fashioned keyboard, if not pen and paper.
Over the years, writers had generally agreed that the disjunction created by the mediation of fingers between thoughts and the written word was necessary. Writing was a different form of communication than speaking, a different way of thinking-a more considered one. It looked as if the day was going to be a warm one, and all he had was his leather jacket and black pants. Another thing he needed to do something about: he needed to acquire a wardrobe.
Louise was downstairs, already scrubbing the walls.
"Ah. Good morning," she said, taking in his outfit with an up-and-down glance.
"I have some work clothes I think will fit you."
"Excuse me?"
"You are going to help me fix all of this, aren't you?"
"I distinctly remember that I did not agree to help you," he replied.
"And I distinctly remember you talking me into staying here, which makes you responsible. So. Are you going to help or not?"
He eyed the room distastefully.
"I would rather not," he replied.
"Too bad. The clothes are on the counter over there."
"I have things to do."
"You can do them later."
"But..."
Bester frowned.
* * *
Up went the brush, down went the brush. Bester watched the thick paint streak over the grey beneath. At this rate, it would take him all day to paint a single wall.
"You've never painted before," Louise said.
It wasn't a question.
"No, as a matter of fact. Am I doing it right?"
"No. You use the brush to do the trim work, then roll the large sections."
"Trim work?"
"Here."
She stepped over and took the brush from his hand, then knelt down next to him.
"See? I've put tape on the floor next to the baseboard. Now I paint the baseboard, like so."
Her hair, caught up in a kerchief, smelled clean, and faintly of lavender. Also of paint-she had managed to coat a few hairs with it, despite her head-cover. He realized that it had been a long time since he had been so close to a woman.
He hadn't had much luck with women. As a boy he'd had a crush on a girl-another telepath in his cadre. He had unexpectedly come upon her and another boy, kissing, and had the unpleasant experience of psionically sharing the pleasure they got from one another.
Later, as a cadet, he had truly fallen in love, with fiery Elizabeth Montoya, whose passion for him had nearly swept him away. But she hadn't loved him enough-not enough to stay in the Corps with him. She had tried to go Blip, to run away, and he had been forced to turn her in. He had been so angry at her, for forcing him to do that.
Now he felt nothing at all. He couldn't even remember her face. The Corps had arranged a marriage, of course, a genetic match guaranteed to produce telepathic offspring. There had never been love there, though for a time he had thought there might be at least companionship. Until he had come home to find Alisha in the arms of another man.
He supposed he was married still, and his son-if indeed it was his son, which he much doubted-was a stranger. No, probably during or after the telepath wars Alisha had sued for a divorce. Who would want to be married to the terrible criminal, Alfred Bester?
And Carolyn. He had loved her. She had proved to him that his heart wasn't as empty as he had thought. Which in the end only proved he could still be hurt. It wasn't worth the trade. So why was he noticing the smell of Louise's hair, the way her fingers gripped the brush, the stray, white-coated hairs straggling across her face?
Ah. That would be because he was an idiot. She was less than half his age, still young and beautiful. His body was responding to her, that was all, a last gasp of hormones. Or maybe he liked the fact that she needed him, if only a little. He had once had thousands of people who depended upon him, and he had been without that for years. Empty nest syndrome? It was an elementary fact that you could make more friends by making them feel like you needed them than the other way around.
Yes, simple physiology and psychology. He wasn't really attracted to her. And she certainly was not attracted to him. Why was he wasting time with this? Perhaps because, against his will, he was painting for the first time in his life.
There was a knock at the door. Her head jerked up, and her cheek brushed against his. He banged his head into the wall jerking away.
"You!" Louise shouted her voice trembling with rage and fear. Jem stood in the doorway. Louise picked up a piece of charred chair leg from a pile of rubble.
"Get out. Get away from here."
Jem's face spasmed with sudden pain. He looked confused. Bester frowned. Maybe he had been more tired than he thought. Maybe...
But then Jem cleared his throat.
"Look, ah, madame, I'm... I went too far. I'm sorry. This isn't good business, this kind of thing, and I shouldn't have done it."
"What? Don't play with me. I'm sick of you. So help me..."
She hefted the makeshift weapon. Jem withdrew a card from his pocket and held it out.
"There's eight thousand credits on that. If it doesn't cover the damage and the lost business, I'll transfer more. Okay?"
Louise just stared for a moment, utterly amazed. Then her expression took a turn back toward suspicion.
"What are you up to, Jem?
Are you going to snatch that away from me, maybe grab my hair, try to give me a good beating? If you do, you'd better kill me."
Jem set the credit chit carefully on the counter.
"There it is," he murmured.
"Check it out. It's real."
His eyes flickered once to Bester, and his face spasmed again. Then he turned and left.
"What the..."
She picked up the chit, looked it over, then went behind the check-in desk.
"Eight thousand credits, just like he said."
Her tone was so unbelieving, Bester couldn't suppress a small grin
. She noticed it.
"Did you-what did you do to him?"
"Me? Nothing."
"Last night, when you were telling me something might come along you meant this! How did you know?"
"I spoke philosophically," Bester said.
"It's just that I've been around long enough to know you can never guess what's really around the next corner"
"No. You knew. How?"
"I promise you, I didn't. Don't _you think it more likely that your policeman friend got some of his buddies together, off duty? That they went and, ah, ''talked some sense'' into Jem? Or maybe he really had a change of heart."
"No, not Jem. But Lucien-no, I don't believe that either. He's too upright, too respectful of the law"
"He likes you. Maybe this attack was just too much for him."
"Maybe. I don't believe it."
"Yes. He knows you don't like help, like to fend for yourself..."
"Oh, do I?"
Her eyes narrowed again, but this time there was something playful about it.
"That's my impression."
"Gathered in only three days?"
"Maybe I'm wrong."
"No, you're right. I usually do. But whoever did whatever they did to Jem-has my thanks."
She held his eyes for a moment, then went back to work. Bester reflected that, if she actually knew the details of what he had done, she would probably take a very different attitude toward it. Still, it felt good, her thanks. Physiology and psychology. It was always good to feel needed-even when you didn't want to be.
Chapter 6
Garibaldi walked carefully around the room, as if his feet were bare and the floor covered in broken glass.
"He was here," he muttered.
"I can smell him."
He couldn't, of course, not literally. But sometimes he thought he had developed a sort of sense-not telepathy, of course, but something older, deeper, more primal. Animal, even.
"It's a good bet," Thompson drawled.
"This house was registered to one Susan Taroa, but that was just an alias. We traced her back through several other fake names, until we came to Sophie Herndon. She was one of Bester's interns."
"And that's the woman they fished out of the drink a couple of weeks ago?"
"Yes. Someone sunk her in a fishing net. But a ship went down in the same area in a storm, and the search and recovery mission found her. When they did an ID check, irregularities popped up. Sheer luck."
"Not for her."
"No, I guess not."
"I want a full tracing team in here. DNA, everything."
"The local police already did a sweep."
"They didn't know what they were looking for. I want another one."
"Of course."
Garibaldi continued his survey of the monster's lair. The clues Bester had left with Thompson hadn't led anywhere- or more accurately, they'd led everywhere except to any trace of Bester. The man was a ghost when he wanted to be. He could screw with people's heads, make them forget, make them remember things that had never happened. Make them do things they never wanted to do.
Garibaldi had tried following the money. Bester had to have money, to keep moving like this, but even the considerable Edgars resources had failed him. Some banks really were tamperproof, unbribable, beyond his ability to influence, as perverse and unthinkable as that seemed.
So, what was left to follow? A trail of corpses? Bester was usually careful about that, too. Then again, it seemed as though he was starting to slip up. That was a hopeful sign.
"What are you looking for, Mr. Garibaldi?"
"I don't know. Something. Anything. How about you? Can you pick up any-I don't know-psychic signature?"
"No, nothing. Strong telepaths sometimes leave them, it's true, but they don't last long. Hours, maybe a day. There's nothing like that here"
"Damn."
He went to the drawers of the polished coral dresser and started opening them. Nothing. Searched under the mattress. Nothing. He reached to pat under the bed, and his fingers touched something small, cool, smooth.
"What's this?"
He got a cloth from his pocket and reached again, came up with a small cylinder.
"This is an ampoule," he grunted.
He stood and lifted it toward the light.
"Some sort of pharmaceutical."
"That should be right up your alley."
"Or on my gravy train, anyway. Yeah, I've got a guy I want to see this. And Thompson, I don't want you talking to anyone about this-understand? Right now this is just our little secret."
"Got it."
* * *
Niles Drennan was a slight, stiff young man, the sort you could never really imagine cutting loose and having fun. Garibaldi didn't like him, but he was one of the best synthesizers in the business.
Technically, his job was to examine the herbal and folk remedies from a thousand worlds and try to isolate their active ingredients. Lately he had worked more on the various biogenic materials turned up in the hunt for a cure for the Drakh plague.
In actual fact, he was a sort of alchemist-inquisitor, someone who could drag the secret out of any compound he was given, no matter how strange or complex. So Garibaldi didn't really care if the guy knew anything about living it up.
"It's choline ribosylase. It controls the production of certain irregular neurotransmitters."
"Which means what? In English? In plain English."
"How much do you know about neurons?"
"Sixth-grade stuff"
"Hmm... Well, nerves are often compared to wiring, or to some other linear, conductive system. It's a bad analogy, on any number of levels. The nervous system-the brain, the spinal cord, sensory and motor nerves-are all composed of specialized cells called neurons. But neurons, strictly speaking, don't act as conductors. They act as generators, in a sense. each one producing its own electrical pulses."
"So far I'm with you."
Drennan's face said I should hope so, but he held his tongue.
"A neuron has a sort of branching tree of dendrites that almost connect it to other nerve cells - I'll get to that in a moment. Each one also has a longer appendage called an axon. When an electrical pulse is generated by the neuron, it flows down the axon until it comes to the next neuron-or, rather, to the gap separating it from the next neuron, the synapse."
"And the pulse jumps the gap or not, right?"
"Not exactly. The impulse itself doesn't cross the space. When the impulse reaches the end of the axon, it triggers small packets, telling them to release a combination of neurotransmitters. These are complex chemical compounds that float across the intervening space and tell the neuron next door what to do-whether to generate its own electrical pulse or not. There are upwards of fifty kinds of neurotransmitters in most people. They're triggered by different sorts of impulses, and in turn cause neighboring neurons to react in different ways. When these neurotransmitters malfunction, especially when they are underproduced, they cause neurological problems. Alzheimer's, for instance, involves among other things the underproduction of a neurotransmitter.
Certain kinds of messages can't be carried from one neuron to another because there is no messenger that will do so. Most psychotropic drugs mimic neurotransmitters in some way, causing neurons to react to stimuli that don't really exist."
"So these are irregular neurotransmitters?"
"There's a long list of them, but I imagine you're interested in the case at hand. There is a rare condition involving a viruslike organism that mimics glial cells-the cells that maintain the biochemical functions of the brain. Imagine them also as the packing pellets that support the fibrous, fragile neurons. Given time, these mutant cells can subvert and replace all of the brain's natural glial cells. What's interesting is that in most cases, this process is harmless, as the invasive cells perfectly mimic those they replace. They have latent genetic machinery that makes them different, but it isn't ever activated. In a minority of cases, however, they st
imulate the production of certain neurotransmitters that don't occur naturally in the human body. This scenario is limited to telepathic individuals, and..."
"Hold it right there. Telepaths?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"We don't know. We still don't know exactly how telepathy works. Telepaths have quirky glial cells anyway, and we've never quite hammered out the link."
"Okay. So this is a disease, right? A virus?"
"Not exactly a virus, but it's not a bad analogy either."
"Natural?"
"Good question. We don't really think so. The imitative cells are too, um, well-designed, so to speak."
"What does it do, this disease?"
"At first, nothing. There actually seems to be some enhancement of telepathic abilities-or more specifically, of the processing of telepathic information and impulses. It speeds it up. But inevitably, the neurotransmitter starts overproducing, triggering functions without threshold electrical potential..."
"It short-circuits?"
"Put crudely, yes."
"And only telepaths get this. I bet they were all Corps telepaths, weren't they?"
"I can check."
"Yeah. The Corps had dozens of black-box experiments designed to make telepaths stronger, or make them telekinetic. Five will get you ten this was the result of one of them."
"They experimented on themselves?"
"Man, have you been asleep all your life? Those guys in Psi Corps did experiments on people that would have made Josef Mengele lose his lunch. What do you think all of those trials were about a few years ago?"
"I don't pay much attention to the news."
Yeah, I'll bet you don't, Garibaldi thought to himself.
Not important.
"Still, I can't imagine this guy volunteer to be a guinea pig."
He scratched his chin.
"Of course, he had enemies in the Corps, or if the insertion was done with a virus, like you said, he may have gotten contaminated accidentally."
He smiled suddenly, clapped Drennan on the back, and indicated the choline ribosylase diagram on the notebook.
Babylon 5 12 - Psi Corps 03 - Final Reckoning - The Fate Of Bester (Keyes, Gregory) Page 6
