by Tad Williams
Lost! Alone! Lost!
The voices had captured her completely, powerful and secret as a first kiss. She was to belong to them alone.
She had awakened on the floor, lying in an awkward tangle. Misha was barking fearfully beside her head, each sound sharp as a knife blow. The fiberlink lay coiled like a shriveled umbilicus beside her. Her face was still damp with tears, and her womb ached.
Unable to eat, unable to offer any real solace to terrified Misha, Olga had tried to convince herself that she had experienced some kind of nightmare—or, more plausibly, a nightmare coincident with one of the terrible headaches. If she had been trying to convince someone else she might have been able to make it sound reasonable, but every excuse met the transcendent power of the experience and dropped away.
Had someone dosed her with some kind of bad gear—what was it called? Charge? But she had accessed nothing. Olga could not bring herself to use the fiberlink again just yet, although she could somehow sense that there was more she needed to learn, that the children wanted to speak to her again. She brought her system records up on the wallscreen instead, and proved to her own satisfaction that she had not even moved past the maintenance level of her own system, let alone opened a line into the larger net.
So what had it been? She had found no obvious answer, but knew she could no more ignore it than she had been able to ignore the headaches. If those mysterious ailments had been the precursor to this experience, then at least they made more sense now. Perhaps there must always be pain when you touched something far larger than ordinary life.
Touched, she had thought, a cup of cooling tea undrunk in her hands. That's what's happened. I've touched something. I've been touched. And just as the prophets of old had left behind worldly things and especially worldly distractions, Olga had come to see on that gray morning that she, too, must make herself right. Could she go back to work with the children in Uncle Jingle's audience, selling them toys and clothes and breakfast cereals that screamed when you swallowed them? She could not. It was time to make some changes, she had decided. Then she would go back to listen to the voices again, to find out what the children wanted of her.
It was a call she had to make, but Olga had been dreading it far more than she had worried about leaving her job.
As soon as she returned home and put down Misha's food, she walked into the parlor and shut the door behind her. She paused, bemused—who was she trying to hide this from, anyway? Misha, gobbling so fast in the kitchen that little bits of dog food lay scattered all around the wide bowl? What was the shame in telling a man, even a nice man like this one, that she had made a mistake?
Because she hadn't made a mistake, of course. Because she was about to lie to him. Because she couldn't imagine any way she could explain what had happened to her, couldn't share the way it felt, how true and correct she knew it was. She also realized she might be losing her mind, but if so, she didn't particularly want to share that with the nice young man either.
Even as Catur Ramsey's office number was ringing, she realized that it was way past six; she was enjoying a moment of relief at the idea that she would only have to leave a message when his face appeared on her screen. It was not a recording.
"Ramsey." His eyes narrowed slightly: she had not opened visual link from her end so he was facing a black screen. "Can help you?"
"Mr. Ramsey? It's Olga Pirofsky."
"Ms. Pirofsky!" He sounded genuinely pleased. "I'm really glad you called—I was going to try you this afternoon, but things have been pretty hectic. I have some very interesting new developments to discuss with you." He hesitated. "Actually, I think I'd prefer to go over them with you in person—you never can tell these days who might be listening." As she opened her mouth to speak, he hurried on. "Don't worry, I'll come to you. Do me good to get out again—I've been living behind this desk. When would you be available?"
She wondered what his news was, and for a moment actually found herself hesitating.
Don't be weak, Olga. You've been through a lot, and one thing you know how to do is be strong.
"That . . . that won't be necessary." She took a breath. "I've . . . I'm going to be taking some time off." It wouldn't do any got to lie—lawyers, like police, could find things out easily enough couldn't they? "I'm having some more medical problems and need to get away from stress. So I don't think we should talk any more." There. She felt as though she had finally dropped a large stone she had been carrying all afternoon.
Ramsey was clearly surprised. "But . . . I'm sorry, have you had bad news? About the medical condition?"
"I just don't want to talk about these things anymore." She felt like a monster. He had been so kind, not at all what she had expected from a lawyer, but she knew that more important things called her, even if she wasn't yet exactly sure what they were. There was no sense involving anyone else, especially a decent, rational man like Catur Ramsey.
While he was still struggling to find a polite way to ask what was wrong with her, she told him, "I have nothing more to say," and broke the connection.
She disgusted herself by having a little cry afterward, something she had not done through even the worst pain of the headaches. She was surprised at how lonely she felt, and how frightened. She was saying good-bye, but she had no idea where she was going.
Misha stood in her lap, bouncing on his tiny back feet, trying desperately to reach her eyes and lick away the tears.
The janitor Sandifer's information had come from a doctor who had been on the Feverbrook staff before the hospital was sold. The janitor had run into the doctor at a mall, and in the course of a cursory discussion of old times the doctor had said that the young man who called himself John Dread had died. Calliope got the impression they had been talking about him in the way that people talked about a famously dangerous dog in their old neighborhood.
Before she and Stan had even reached their car in the institution's parking garage, Calliope had tracked down the doctor, who was now retired. He agreed to see them.
As they climbed the ramp onto the motorway, the little car whining quietly, Stan reclined his seat a notch. "I hate to say this, Skouros, but I think you're right. Don't get me wrong—it doesn't mean anything, because this case is so old it stinks and all we're doing is wasting our time—but someone in that hospital helped Johnny-boy's records to disappear. I mean, they weren't even smart about it. I couldn't find anyone but new arrivals with files as empty as that."
"But why would someone bury his records? Because he killed somebody after he got out?" Calliope scowled into her rearview mirror. Several cars were stuck in the access lane behind her and were clearly not enjoying it. "That makes no sense—half the people in that place either killed somebody or tried to, and it's not like the hospital is claiming miracle cures."
"I'll bet you fifty we never find out." He leaned forward and began fiddling with the air controls.
Calliope took the bet, but mostly out of Stan-thwarting reflex: she wasn't feeling very lucky.
They met Doctor Jupiter Danney at his local Bondi Baby, a particularly garish chain of 24-hour coffee shops whose chief claim to fame was ultrabright decor and a huge ocean holograph, complete with surfers, which filled the middle of the restaurant. (You could dine waist-deep in the ocean if you wanted, but the roar of the breakers made it hard to have a conversation.)
Dr. Danney was a thin man in his middle seventies, and clearly aspired to nattiness, although his antiquated necktie pushed the whole look into eccentricity. He smiled as they approached the dayglo orange table. "I hope you don't mind meeting me here," he said. "My landlady would put the worst possible construction on a visit from the police. Besides, they do a very nice senior-price dinner, and it's getting to be that time of day."
Calliope introduced herself and Stan, then ordered an iced tea. Her attention was momentarily engaged by the attractively sullen waitress, who had a tattoo that covered one cheek from eye to mouth and looked like she might have spent some time liv
ing on the street. She returned Calliope's stare boldly. When the detective's attention had refocused, Dr. Danney was already finishing his curriculum vitae.
". . . So after I left Feverbrook, I spent a few years in private practice, but it was really too late for me to start over."
"But you knew John Wulgaru at Feverbrook, is that right?" She was distracted again, this time by a holographic surfer wiping out badly at the periphery of her vision. This was exactly the kind of place she hated—why were people so afraid to go somewhere and just talk?
"Oh, yes. He was my prize patient, I suppose."
"Really? There was nothing to show that—there was almost nothing on file about him there at all."
Dr. Danney waved a negligent hand. "You know how these corporate places are—they certainly aren't going to waste space with records they don't need. I'm sure they purged a lot of files when they took over."
"They might have, if they thought he was dead." The waitress appeared and clunked down drinks for everyone before sauntering off; Calliope heroically ignored her, eyeing Danney over the top of her glass. "According to you, he is dead."
The old man showed her his very good teeth. "Not according to me—I never examined the body or anything. Heavens, no. But when I tried to do some follow-up, that's what I was told. The juvenile authority records said he died—goodness, what was it, a year later, two years?—after he left the hospital."
Calliope made a mental note to find out exactly what records these were supposed to be. "Why were you interested in following up? Especially when you were already in private practice."
"Why?" He glanced at Stan Chan, as though Calliope's partner might want to answer the question for him. Stan looked back blankly. "Well, because he was such a rare thing, I suppose. I felt like someone who had discovered a new animal. You might turn it over to the zoological society, but you would still want to go see it every now and then."
"Explain, please." She poured half a packet of sugar in her tea, then decided to indulge herself and emptied the rest in, too.
Dr. Danney blinked his eyes. It took him a moment to respond. "It's just . . . I saw a lot of things in clinical practice, Detective. Most of the children that I dealt with—these were children who had severe problems, please remember—fell into two broad categories. Some had been so crushed by the cruelty of their upbringing that they would never think or act like a normal member of society—they were missing key components of personality. The others were different, either because their childhoods had been slightly less harrowing, or they were a bit smarter, or tougher, whatever it might be. These had a chance. These could at least theoretically lead normal lives, not that many of them ever would."
"And John Wulgaru fit into which category?"
"Neither. That was what was so interesting about him. He had the worst childhood you can imagine, Detective—mother a prostitute, mentally unbalanced and a serious abuser of drugs and alcohol. She had a series of brutal, violent partners who abused the boy. He got thrown into the institutional system early. He was beaten and raped there, too. Every element was in place to create a completely savage sociopath. But there was something more to him. He was smart, for one thing—God Almighty, he was smart." The doctor's dinner came, but for the moment he just let it sit, "He went through the standard intelligence tests I gave him with ease, and although there were holes in his understanding, he had a very good grasp of human behavior as well. Most of the time the sociopathic personality only understands others enough to manipulate them, but John had something that I would almost call empathy, except that you can't have an empathic sociopath—it's a contradiction in terms. I suppose it was just another expression of his intelligence."
"Sandifer, the custodian, said that he was frightening."
"He was! Even when he was demolishing the logic problems I gave him, it wasn't because he enjoyed them or because he wanted to impress me. He just had to do well at those things because he could. Do you see what I mean? It was like dealing with an artist or a mathematics wunderkind—he was driven to perform."
"And why was that frightening?" Calliope gave a stern glance to Stan Chan, who was beginning to make a little cabin of toothpicks on the table.
"Because he didn't care a jot about anyone or anything. Well, that's not entirely true, but I'll come back to that in a moment. But John Wulgaru certainly had no love in his heart for anyone. When he bothered with feelings about people at all, I would guess that what he felt was a sort of detached contempt. And he was physically quick, too—reflexes like an athlete, although he wasn't all that large. He'd look at me across the desk, and I could see that if it took his fancy, he could snap my neck before I could even move. The only thing stopping him was that it was a lot of trouble to go through—the punishment would be irritating, he would lose privileges—and I hadn't done anything to make him particularly angry. But to see that kind of brain sitting across from you, not only a quicker, sharper brain than your own, but knowing that he could kill you if the whim took him, and him knowing you knew, and being amused by it—well, it wasn't like working with a human, even the troubled ones I was used to, not really. It was like being the first scientist to study an alien predator."
Calliope felt her pulse quickening again. This had to be Polly's killer. Was he really dead? For the sake of society, she had to hope so, although it would make closing the case more difficult and less satisfying.
"And you kept records of all this?" she said.
"I did, but most of them were in his file on the hospital system. I might still have some of my own note files at home."
"It would be a huge favor if you could look for us." This felt like a break, although she could not say why. But someone had managed to lose Johnny Wulgaru's records, and even if it had been an accident, she couldn't think of any better reason for wanting to see them. "Just out of curiosity, did he seem interested in myths at all? Aboriginal myths?"
Dr. Danney narrowed his eyes, then chuckled, but it did not have much humor in it. "Funny you should ask that." The sullen waitress thumped the calculatedly old-fashioned little tray with the bill in it down on the table. In the moment's pause, the old man patted at his pockets, then laboriously drew out his wallet. "I suppose I should be getting back," he said. "I mean, if you want me to look for those files." He opened his wallet and examined its contents.
Calliope took the hint. "Let us buy the meal, Doctor. We're very grateful for your help." She would never get petty cash back for this case, so she was buying it herself. She flicked a glance at Stan, but his smile told her exactly how small the chances were that he was going to kick in.
"Kind, very kind." Dr. Danney flagged the waitress down and ordered dessert and coffee. When the server had finished rolling her eyes at the interruption of her journey to some other table, and had trundled on her way, the old man sat back and smiled expansively. "Very kind indeed. Now, where was I. . . ?"
"Aboriginal myths."
"Ah, yes. You said 'interested.' No, he wasn't interested in them. He thought they were a waste of time."
Calliope had to work to keep her disappointment from showing. She had been waiting for Danney to pull a last rabbit out of the hat, but instead the only thing inside had been the lining.
"The reason for that," Danney went on, "was because his mother went on about them all the time. That's what he told me, anyway. Her own mother—his grandmother, whom he never knew—was one of the respected elders, a storyteller. Even though Wulgaru's mother had run away from home to live in Cairns, she still harped on about the old stories—the Dreamtime and so on. It made him furious when I asked about them. He clearly associated them with his mother. I stopped asking after a while."
Calliope found she was leaning forward. It was there after all! She had known it, somehow, and there it was. At that moment she would have bet everything she had that they had identified Polly Merapanui's killer.
"I said that John didn't care about anyone or anything," the old man said. "That wasn't tru
e, of course. Negative emotions are emotions, too, and he hated his mother. I think if she had survived he would have killed her one day, but she died when he was still quite young, while he was with one of his first foster families. Drug overdose. Not very surprising. He used to call her 'the Dreamtime bitch.' "
A holographic wave broke nearby, sending substanceless spray across the next table, and causing Stan Chan to jerk and tip over his toothpick structure. He made a face and swept the toothpicks into a pile where they lay like small discarded bones, the remnants of a miniature cannibal feast.
CHAPTER 10
God's Only Friends
NETFEED/NEWS: Squirt Goes Sour
(visual: first Dada Retrieval Collective "Sea Squirt" broadcast)
VO: A group of information terrorists calling themselves the "Sea Squirt Squad" unleashed their first action in their campaign to "kill the net. " The massive information dump into one of the central networks did not work out quite as its engineers planned. Instead of blanketing family-oriented net channels with raw pornography and downing feed-servers on other parts of the net, the data dump passed largely unnoticed except for some accidental re-scrambling of adult interactives, which drew user complaints,
(visual: anonymated Blue Gates customer)
Customer: "If they'd just been dumping more naked people on the net, that would have been chizz. But the dim bastards locked up the naked people we already paid for. . . ."
VO: The unrepentant terrorists released a sound bite,
(visual: DRC member wearing Telemorphix tote bag as a mask)
DRC: "Rome didn't crumble In a day, did it? Give us a chance. "
"Bes!" a child called. "Mother, look, it's him!" The tiny, ugly fellow slowed so abruptly that Orlando almost tripped over him. As Bes grinned his grotesque grin and raised his hand as if to bestow a blessing, the little girl's mother lifted her up above the garden wall, angling the child toward the procession to intercept even more of the domestic god's radiant presence.
