“Killed?” she said at last. She began to rock back and forth on the sofa, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. “I don’t believe it. It can’t be true. You’re not serious, are you?” There was a pause, then: “Oh God. You do mean it. You’re insane, you must be. Do you realize what you’ve done? All those innocent people, dead. Why did you do it?”
There was a longer silence, while Rob and Howard Anson stared at each other. Rob could tell from Anson’s expression that this was not simply a repeat of a previously heard recall.
“I don’t care what they were doing,” Senta went on at last. “It makes no difference. It couldn’t be so bad that you had to kill them. Gregor Merlin was your friend, wasn’t he? You had known him for years, for the longest time.”
Anson flashed a look of fierce satisfaction and sympathy towards Rob, while Senta became once more the prisoner of those inner voices. After a few seconds, tears began to trickle from under the dark blindfold. She was shaking her head.
“It’s no good telling me that, Joseph,” she said. “I know you’re lying. Don’t try and pretend. I was watching the display. I heard the orders you gave, though I didn’t know what they meant. You said burn the building, and set the bomb.” She fell silent for a moment, then muttered again, almost too softly to hear, “Burn the building and set the bomb. But why? Why that? Nothing could be so important, nothing in the world. He said they were already dead when they got there, so they couldn’t have told anything, to him or his wife. I don’t understand what the `Goblins’ were, but it makes no difference.”
She paused again, then shook her head firmly. “No, I won’t. If you refuse to tell me the truth, I’ll find it out for myself. I’ll go to Christchurch, and I’ll visit the labs. Someone there will know.”
After a moment she leaned forward, listening intently. There was a silence, so long that Rob was convinced that Senta had moved to another phase of taliza-trance. He looked at Howard Anson and was opening his mouth to speak when the other man waved him urgently to silence. Senta gasped with a new emotion and put her hands to her eyes.
“God have mercy on you. You don’t seem to understand what you’ve told me. It’s inhuman. If you’re telling me the truth, I can’t stay here. I have to leave, I have to get away.” She was weeping openly, her words broken by deep, heaving sobs. “I can’t stay. You must go and tell them, explain what you’ve been doing. Tell them you didn’t know, tell them that you have been out of your mind. Somebody has to tell the truth. Surely you see there’s no way I can ever forgive this? It’s over.”
Once again she was silent, except for the ugly, choked sound of her sobbing. While Merlin and Anson waited, looking at each other bleakly, the tone changed. Little by little it became a harsh coughing, deep in her throat.
“She’s coming out of it.” Anson reached over to Senta and removed the blindfold. “She’ll need a few minutes to herself. Would you mind coming through into the next room.” He saw Rob’s look. “It’s all right, it’s safe to leave her alone now. She won’t want you to see her condition when she comes back all the way to the present. You go ahead, and let me do what I can for her. I’ll join you in a couple of minutes.”
Rob walked past Anson into the bedroom and closed the door. He went to the window and looked out across the pink and yellow face of the old city. It was almost sunset, a quiet, hushed time. He could hear the bells tolling vespers, far away across the array of rooftops. The evening service would be going on in the great structure two miles to the west, as they had for a thousand years. The air of the city was clear and calm.
And somewhere, somewhere far from Earth, the man roamed free who had murdered his parents; the man who had made Senta Plessey a shattered shell of a woman; the man who made it impossible for Rob to draw any pleasure from the scene before him.
He did not move. After a few minutes the door behind him opened and Howard Anson entered.
“She’ll be all right now,” he said. “I want her to lie down for a moment, then she will come and join us in here.” He took a deep breath. “No wonder she’s been so torn by this. That last session opened up more than I expected. I’ve been getting bad vibrations from the investigation we’ve been doing into your parents’ death, but nothing like Senta’s memories.”
Rob had not turned around. “Did you interpret all of that the same way as I did?” he asked quietly. His body seemed frozen, staring rigidly out across the face of the city. “It was murder. Murder for both of them. The fire in the lab, and the bomb in the aircraft — that very nearly got me, too. Another five minutes and I’d have been dead.” He looked down at his hands for a moment, reliving the months and years of operations. “And yet there has to be a lot more that we still haven’t heard.”
Anson nodded. “Much more. For one thing, we have no idea why it all happened. We don’t know who the Goblins were, we don’t know how they are related to Morel and Caliban. It sounded to me as though it was Morel who was responsible for the death of your parents, but we have no proof of that. We may be misinterpreting Senta’s words. I have a problem believing some of the things she said.” He rubbed morosely at his jaw. “We don’t have answers to any of this, and in some ways we have more questions than ever. I guess we have to keep digging.”
“I think you may have enough information already to help Senta. You know that she feels she has been directly involved in murders — and more than just my parents. There were a lot of other people on that aircraft. Can you use what you have to erase some of her painful memories? And maybe you can help me to delve deeper into these things, they involve me a lot more than Senta.”
Rob was beginning to understand the tie between Anson and the tormented woman in the next room. There was a mutual dependence that made simple physical attraction almost an irrelevance.
“We don’t want to involve Senta in this any more than she has been already,” he went on. “Tell me what you’ve turned up about Joseph Morel, and let me take it from there.”
“I might agree to that, for her sake. But Senta never would.” Anson turned abruptly from the window and went across to sit on the bed. “She’ll want to stay with this to the end, until she’s sure she has done everything she can to put things right. I’ll tell you all that I found out about Morel, but tying any of it to what we’ve heard from Senta just now is another matter. I can’t see the connection.”
He leaned back, head against the panelled wall, and closed his eyes. “All right, here goes. Let me try to summarize. Morel’s childhood and early career are no problem. Well-documented, and a pattern that I’ve seen a hundred times. I could show you many similar ones in our files. Strong father, pushing the child along hard from the time that he was one year old. Mother in the background, with no say in how Morel was raised. A prodigy in school, then on to the university when he was thirteen. Alienation there, from everything except his work — no wonder, a thirteen-year-old can’t make social contact with people five or six years older. So. No friends — not even your father, Rob. They were just fellow-students. As you might expect, Morel had a brilliant academic record. His first paper on longevity and rejuvenation was published before he was twenty — and it was a classic.”
Howard Anson opened his eyes again and looked at Rob. “Now for the part that’s different. With Morel’s development to this point, I would have bet money that I could have predicted the rest of it. He ought to have gone on to a career in university research, rising steadily through the ranks until he was a respected, senior authority. He would have always been a little withdrawn and reclusive, but that’s not unusual in a scientist. His friends would be other specialists in the same field of research, scattered all over the System.”
“But it’s obvious that it didn’t go like that.”
“Obviously. It might have, but another factor came along and broke the pattern. Morel met Darius Regulo.”
Anson paused as the door to his left opened and Senta entered. She was chalk-pale, even to her full lips, but her move
ments were steady and her mouth was firm. On impulse, Rob went over to her and took her hands in his. They were warm again, but not with the frenetic heat and tremor of the taliza high. She smiled at him, the first genuine smile that he had seen from her. It was Corrie’s smile. He realized how much the two women resembled each other, and wondered why he had not seen it at once.
“How are you feeling now?” he asked. “You shouldn’t have let us do that to you, just so I could take a look for a part of my own past.”
She shook her head, still smiling. “It’s my past, too, you know. I’m as curious as you are. Ever since I came out of it I’ve been sitting in there wondering what you found out. I’m hoping it was a lot, but I don’t remember a thing.” She licked her lips. “If we need more information, I’ll be willing to try again.”
“Not now.” Anson stepped towards her. “It would be too much for you, and I don’t think we should do anything more until we’ve looked into what we have now. You told us things that we had never heard before. Rob and I need to see where they lead, and that will take a while. But it doesn’t look pleasant.”
He gave Senta a summary of what they had heard from her while she was under the influence of the drug, quoting the words she had spoken verbatim — Rob envied him that remarkable memory. When he had finished Anson looked at Senta inquiringly.
She shook her head.
“I don’t have a conscious memory of any of it. So far as I’m concerned, it’s something I’m hearing for the first time. Thank God for small mercies. I wouldn’t want to live with that all the time. Something horrible happened back then, and it sounds as though Joseph Morel is a murderer.”
“You have no idea what he might have been trying to hide?” Rob asked. “I don’t like the man, but even he wouldn’t murder for no reason.”
“That’s logical, but I couldn’t begin to guess what he might be covering up.” Senta chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip, now returned to its natural full red. Her face was still pale, but a touch of color was creeping back into it. “Maybe he was trying to hide another murder. What are the two of you planning to do next?”
“I’ll try and follow up on this,” said Anson. “Rob is going to be off with the beanstalk, he can’t do much else for a while. It shouldn’t be rushed if we’re to do a thorough job. I suppose you could say it can wait a little longer, seeing how long it has waited already. But I don’t see it that way. I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but this thing may still be dangerous. If someone was willing to kill twenty-seven years ago to keep a secret, it’s more than likely they’d kill for the same reason now.”
“If it’s Morel, there’s no way he could hurt us here, when he’s on Atlantis.” Senta turned to Rob. “If you go back there, you must take care. He can’t know what we’ve found out, but he obviously knows that you are the son of Gregor Merlin.”
“I’ll take care, don’t worry about that. But don’t assume that you’re safe down here. There are ways that he could cause trouble even when he’s not present. People can be hired to do anything. Don’t take chances, and keep your eyes open.”
“I’ll be on the lookout, too,” Anson said. “I don’t know Morel, but I’ve been building up the picture of him and it’s not a good one. He’s very intelligent, and he has a lot of experience.”
“How old is he, anyway?” Rob recalled Morel’s expression of mingled innocence and experience.
“Sixty. He had one rejuvenation, but even so he looks younger than he ought. I think he must have been following his own techniques for life-prolongation. I saw his picture and placed him at thirty to thirty-five, but I’m quite sure of his age. I’ve seen copies of the birth record. He was twenty-three when Regulo came to see him for the first time. That was soon after he had refused a full professorship at Canberra. I don’t know what Regulo offered him, but it was enough. He went off to work in Regulo’s labs and he has been there ever since, continuously for the past thirty-seven years.”
“Working on rejuvenation?” asked Rob. “I don’t think so. That may have been where he started, but I know he’s doing other things on Atlantis. For one thing, he has Caliban.”
“Caliban.” Senta shuddered a little, as though a trace of taliza was still working within her. “That’s a name I haven’t thought about for a long time. When I first met Morel, that was all he would talk about. Caliban can do this, Caliban will do that. He has been working with that animal for many years. Even at the beginning, he said that he would make him do things that no squid had ever done before — he used to make him do tricks.”
“He still does that, and more,” said Rob. “You mean he had Caliban with him when he was here on Earth?”
Senta frowned, her dark brows drawn into a line over her wide-spaced eyes. “I find these things hard to remember. They seem vague, as though they happened to somebody else. I’m sure that he had Caliban then, but I don’t know if it was on Earth or off it. It was definitely thirty years ago, and that would make it three years before Regulo moved his operation away from Earth completely. So Morel must have been working with Caliban here, on Earth.”
“You mean that Regulo has been living in space for all that time — for the past twenty-seven years?” Rob’s face expressed his surprise. “I thought he had gone there much more recently, when he got old. That’s another thing I don’t understand. Morel is supposed to be a big expert on rejuvenation, one of the top authorities in the System. And Regulo is loaded with money, so expense isn’t an issue. Why hasn’t he had rejuvenation treatments? I know some people refuse them for religious reasons, but I doubt if that’s a factor with Regulo — his god is engineering. If that’s what he hired Morel for, why doesn’t he use him? And why does he go around with all the scar tissue on him, instead of using grafts and regeneration treatment?”
“Scar tissue?” Senta was frowning at him in surprise. “Which scar tissue? I don’t remember any scars.”
“It must be part of the memories that you’ve lost,” said Rob. He had stood up and was pacing up and down in front of the window. “He has scars over his whole face. You must have seen them, he got them from the solar fly-by that he did, fifty years ago. Corrie told me all about it. Did you forget all that, too? His face is a nightmare.”
Senta, seated on the sofa, was silent for so long that Rob was afraid of some new attack from her drug addiction. She seemed to have gone into another trance, her face puzzled and thoughtful. Finally, she nodded her head.
“I think I know what has happened,” she said. “You’ve been putting pieces together logically, and they seem to make sense. But you have a piece missing, because Cornelia left out an important fact.”
“Don’t play games, Senta,” said Anson quietly.
“It’s not games.” Senta patted Anson’s hand, while keeping her eyes fixed on Rob. “My memory has bad patches, but I’m quite sure of this. Regulo did get scars from the close approach to the Sun, but they could be removed. And they were removed, soon after he returned to Earth after that fly-by. Removed without trace. When I first met Regulo he was a handsome man. Rob, did Cornelia tell you why Regulo can’t ever have a rejuvenation treatment?”
“No. I didn’t even know that he can’t. I think I started to ask her about rejuvenation and the scar tissue once, soon after I first met Regulo, but something interrupted us and I never got an answer. She told me why Regulo didn’t like bright lights, and I just assumed that he got his scars in the same experience. She never raised the subject with me again.”
“And I can guess why.” Senta was nodding. “Did you ever hear of diseases called Cancer crudelis and Cancer pertinax?”
Rob shook his head. “What do they mean?”
“I don’t know what the words mean,” said Senta. “But they—”
“Ruthless cancer, and persistent cancer,” Howard Anson said. “That’s taking a literal translation. Sorry for interrupting, Senta, but when you have a rubbish heap for a mind, the way I do, you have to use it when you can.”
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br /> She smiled at him tolerantly. “You have your uses, Howard. No need to prove that to me. Anyway, Rob, they are two forms of cancer, as you might have guessed.”
“Old diseases?” suggested Rob. “I assume they were once killers, the way that most forms of cancer used to be killers.”
“That’s the difference.” Senta was leaning forward, her manner more lively. “They are not old diseases. They still exist. Very rare, but they are two of the only forms of the disease that can’t be cured — and they are both killers. Darius Regulo doesn’t have scar tissue on his face from the solar fly-by. What he has is cancer pertinax. It’s the rarer form, and it is very slow-growing. But it can’t be stopped, and it can’t be reversed. He has had it getting on for fifty years. It will get him in the end, in spite of the treatments and the operations. He had it already when I first met him, and it was just beginning to get noticeable. That was the main reason why he had to move off Earth — his system couldn’t take full gravity once the cancer had taken firm hold. I doubt if Darius will live to be ninety. You see, the disease acts as a double killer. Apart from the direct effects and the disfigurement it causes, it has a side effect that inhibits the effects of any rejuvenation treatments on the sufferer. They simply won’t work on someone who already has the disease established in his system.”
“That means he’ll lose more than half his life.” Rob thought suddenly of Regulo’s powerful and fertile mind, imprisoned behind the ruined face in a failing body. “Do you realize what a tragedy that is? I don’t just mean a personal tragedy — though it’s that, of course. I mean a loss to everyone. He’s one of the great men of the century. And I’ve never heard him ever complain that he is sick, only that he gets tired easily. He still has more energy than you’d believe, once he starts to work on a problem that interests him.”
The Web Between the Worlds Page 14
