Janus (29 page)

The next day, Grebbel worked a full shift at the dam. The sun was down, and the evening storm roared. Spears and sheets of blue light leapt among the mountain peaks. Under the ghastly flickering, bleached faces recoiled from the reverberations of distant thunder. Rags of cloud blew low along the valley. Trees groaned and bent.

Grebbel worked through the morning, while waves piled up against the dam and lathered across the causeway; beneath the arc lights, spray flew like diamonds. His arm was stiff and at times sore, but most of its strength had returned.

At lunch, he looked for Elinda, but she did not appear. Instead, as he was leaving, he found Partridge, balancing against the gusts as he struggled with the cafeteria door. Grebbel helped him inside.

“Well, if it isn’t the new boy at last,” Partridge said, beating water off his coat. “Been in the wars, have we?”

“You’re looking great yourself. How’s it been going out here?”

“Just the way it always goes, mate. Three steps forward, three back and a couple of falls on the arse. You look as though you know something I don’t—or you think you do, at any rate.”

The cafeteria shook and hail rattled against the window.

“Maybe I do,” said Grebbel. “But not as much as I need to know. Weren’t we talking business for a while there? You tell me what the wind’s blowing your way, and I look for some better . . . lubricant for you?”

Partridge turned to him, and for an instant the hunger behind his eyes was obvious. “The stuff I’ve been getting lately’s been pretty thin, and that’s the truth. Just about hear my eyeballs grinding in the sockets when I wake up in the morning. What do you want to hear rumours about?”

“For the time being, something fairly simple. The flights to and from the Flats must go on some sort of schedule, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is. I’d like to know when they run. If you can find that out, maybe we can go on from there.”

“Okay. I reckon we can do something along those lines.”

At the end of the afternoon, there was a gap in the storm. High overhead, pink strands of light tangled above the ponderous turning mouth of a great cloud funnel; and beyond the aurora floated the two moons and an icy scattering of stars.

When Grebbel did his voluntary shift in the clinic, he announced that he was going to learn to use the computer program for predicting the biological activities of new compounds from their molecular structures. “I want to be ready for when we start harvesting some of the biosphere around here.” He then managed to work in twenty minutes of exploration of the database where the drug inventory was kept. He got to within a couple of passwords of the inventory itself, and then closed down the search for the day. Too much access time might become suspicious. But when he left the lab he was confident; he could feel his plans coming together.

After dinner, he waited until he met Larsen hurrying through the rising wind away from the Greenhouse, and accompanied him, mentioning the talk they had had in Grebbel’s rooms. “I didn’t say all I had to say then, and I think I was wrong to keep some things back.”

They were almost at Larsen’s home, and Larsen uncomfortably asked him in.

Grebbel paced the living room. He noted its austerity and the cleanliness marred by candle grease on the floor and the soot marks on the ceiling. “A man with a conscience?” he wondered aloud as a window rattled. “Perhaps a badly troubled conscience? I can sympathise. We all have to wrestle with the different sides of our nature—but then what are ‘we’ that do the wrestling?”

“Do you want a philosophical debate? Or is this just your stalking horse for something else?”

“If you’re asking whether I’ve come to a decision—yes I have. But all in good time.” Grebbel stopped and turned to Larsen. “Do you value truth, Niels? I think you must, to have done what you did. And trust. Admirable, courageous qualities—qualities that can ride a man and make him do more than he would ever have believed himself able to do.”

“Whatever you came here for—I wasn’t the one who harmed you. All I did was help you. Your anger should go elsewhere.”

“Time enough for that. For the moment this is just about you, and what you can do to help me again.” Grebbel smiled. “Trust and truth, those are the keys. You see, you have some information that I need. You must have an impressive group of graduates, of alumni, here, and I’m afraid their potential is going to waste. I’d like to discuss some changes in the set-up, in the rules of the game if you like, with the whole membership. Except, you seem to be the only one who knows the membership list.”

“There are good reasons for that,” Larsen said thickly. “As you know quite well.”

Wind made a thin shrieking sound through some part of the building structure.

“Of course there are. Of course. But surely, you must agree, there can be exceptions for exceptional circumstances. I think this particular rule has outlived its usefulness as an absolute and should be waived for once. And, you know, it’s very undemocratic of you to keep this all to yourself. You don’t think so?”

Larsen shook his head.

Grebbel went over to him and rested his arm on the man’s shoulders. “Trust is a great quality, you’re right. Something that is prized in all societies, and rightly so.” His free hand tugged at Larsen’s sleeve. “I’m asking you to give me that gift a little longer, now that I’ve told you about myself. Trust me. Tell me the truth. Won’t you?”

Larsen shook his head and started to pull away.

“A pity,” Grebbel said. “But I had to learn some basic manipulative skills back there, and develop a certain physical strength. And I was good at my work.”

He tensed, gripped—twisted. Larsen gave a short cry and fell backwards.

An hour later, Grebbel rose to leave. Larsen did not hear the door close. He remained crouched against the wall and shivered. Gradually he accepted that it was over and he was alone again. He had broken so easily. Two or three prods in the right places and his will had collapsed. Once he had given up the answer to the first question, it had become impossible to stop. Grebbel had needed little more than the threat of further pressure.

He levered himself upright against the wall, then lurched to the bathroom. He vomited into the lavatory bowl. At some point during the ordeal his bladder had released. He undressed painfully and washed. Then he looked in the mirror. There, at least, the shell of himself seemed to be intact. Except for the eyes. In them he could see his own destruction. Would he be able to look anyone in the face now without displaying what he had become?

His sanctuary had been violated. The nighttime agonies, the meditations before candles, had been reduced to nothing by the simple fact of applied pain. And it was not over. Nothing had changed, beyond the apparition of one more failure to be lived with, and one more compromise to make with the unforgiving conscience.

He fumbled and set the candles on the dark wooden table, lit them. He stared hopelessly at the bobbing flames. How much pain was a man supposed to bear?

In his room that night, Grebbel emptied the folder he had found in his luggage onto the table. The fabrications on which this life had been built here were spread out in front of him. He shuffled them and placed them like a fortune-teller’s cards. Then, one by one, he began to tear them up. Letters: Dear Son, Jonathon, Hey Lover, Dear Mr. Grebbel. Photographs—smiles and arms round shoulders, shadows and trees and bricks and hands and sunlight on a lake—“Lie,” he whispered, and tore them. “Lie. Lie.”

It was all gone, everything they had tried to make him build on—gone the way of Santa Claus and his dreams of being a shuttle pilot. He sank into his chair. Now his hands shook, tired from tearing, ached to tear again. The quiet suburban neighbourhood they had tried to feed him, the modest technical school obscurity—lies. And here, the menial work, the sense of life lived on a hollow stage without support, without roots. They had been inside him, eating away like a shipworm at his innermost self, inside, inside with their lies, their manipulations. It was all fake, false as makeup plastered over a tumour. . . .

In his mind, two crimson-headed raptors circled over the mist-choked valley. He gave a short cry and pushed himself back from the table.

The gold-painted hatchback was real, and the holding cell where he had looked down the snow slope and known that he was facing a kind of death. And the room with the whitewashed walls that were always splashed with brown because the cleaners were too anxious to get onto the next corridor—they had heard the sounds made in that room. That was real, and the other rooms, the basement room—dark as a cave, with grimy windows you could see your face in if you went up on tiptoe, and the handle you had to use both hands to turn, gripping in front of your chest, and straining because your hands would hardly fit around and the effort made your chest hurt. But the handle had to turn, had to open—

“Lies,” he whispered once more, mechanically. His hands clenched and opened and clenched again. The retching sound that might have been laughter broke from him again.

Osmon was the first on his list, a kindred spirit, a willing follower, with some animal intelligence to go with his actual muscle. A deputy, an enforcer, a fixer. Grebbel turned to look for foot soldiers.