Ken Lubin, for all his quirks, was doing something worthwhile. He was hunting the other Lenie Clarke, the real one. The Lenie Clarke that Achilles Desjardins had been tracking was a mirage. There was no great conspiracy after all. No global death cult. Anemone was a drooling idiot. All it knew was that tales of global apocalypse were good for breeding, and that Lenie Clarke was a free pass into Haven. It had only connected those threads through blind dumb luck.
It was a blazing irony that the person behind the words actually lived up to the billing.
Lubin's problem. Not his.
But that was dead wrong, and he knew it. Lenie Clarke was everyone's problem. A threat to the greater good if he'd even seen one.
Forget Lertzman. Forget Alice. Forget Rowan and Lubin and Anemone, even. None of them would matter if it wasn't for Lenie Clarke.
Worry about Clarke. She'sthe one that's going to kill us all.
She'd come onto the Oregon Strip, moved north to Hongcouver. Inland from there; she'd got through the quarantine somehow. Then nothing for a month or so, when she'd appeared in the midwest, heading south. Skirting the edge of a no-go zone that stretched across three states. Two outbreaks down at the edge of the Dust Belt. Then Yankton: the head of an arrow, pointing somewhere in the vicinity of the Great Lakes.
Home,Lubin had said. Sault Sainte Marie.
Desjardins tapped the board: the main menu for the N'AmPac Grid Authority lit up his inlays. Personnel. Clarke, Lenie.
Deceased.
No surprise there: bureaucracy's usual up-to-the-minute grasp of current events. At least the file hadn't been wiped.
He called up next-of-kin: Clarke, Indira andButler, Jakob.
Deceased.
Suppose she couldn't get to her parents? Rowan had wondered.Suppose they'd been dead a long time?
And Lubin had said, The people she hates are very much alive…
He called up the public registry. No Sault-St.-Marie listing for Indira Clarke or Jakob Butler in the past three years. That was as far back as public records went. The central archives went back another four; nothing there either.
Suppose they'd been dead a long time? Sort of an odd question, now that he thought about it.
Forget the registry, Desjardins thought. Too easy to edit. He tried the matchmaker instead, threw a bottle into Maelstrom and asked if anyone had seen Indira Clarke or Jakob Butler hanging out with Sault Sainte Marie.
The hit came back from N'AmPac Directory Assistance, an inquiry over seven months old. By rights, it should have been purged just hours after its inception. It hadn't been. Indira was not the only Clarke it mentioned.
Clarke, Indira, went the transcript.Clarke with an 'e'.
How many Indira Clarkes in Sault SainteMarie?
How many in all of N'Am, professional affiliation with the Maelstrom fishery, with an only female child born February 2018, named Lenie?
That's not fucking pos—
Lenie Clarke's mother did not appear to exist anywhere in North America. And Lenie Clarke hadn't known.
Or at least, she hadn't remembered…
And how did they choose recruits for the rifter program? Desjardins reminded himself.That's right—"preadaption to stressful environments"…
Deep in his gut, something opened one eye and began growling.
He was a special guy, these days. He even had a direct line to Patricia Rowan. Any time, she'd told him. Day or night. It was, after all, nearly the end of the world.
She picked up on the second ring.
"It was tough, wasn't it?" Desjardins said.
"What do you mean?"
"I bet antisocial personalities make really bad students. I bet it was next to impossible, taking all those head cases and turning them into marine engineers. It must have been a lot easier to do it the other way around."
Silence on the line.
"Ms. Rowan?"
She sighed. "We weren't happy about the decision, Doctor."
"I should fucking hope not," he said. "You took human beings and—"
"Dr. Desjardins, this is not your concern."
"Yeah? You’re confident making that kind of call, after the last time?"
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean."
"ßehemoth wasn't my concern either, remember? You were so worried about some other corpse getting a leg up when it got out, but there was no way you were going to come to us, were you? No ma'am. You handed the reins to a head cheese."
"Dr.—"
"Why do you think CSIRA even exists? Why chain us all to Guilt Trip if you aren't going to use us anyway?"
"I'm sorry, Doctor—were you under the impression that Guilt Trip made you infallible?" Rowan's voice was laced with frostbite. "It does not. It simply keeps you from being deliberately corrupt, and it does that by linking to your own gut feelings. And believe it or not, being especially tied to one's gut is not the best qualification for long-term problem-solving."
"That's not—"
"You're like any other mammal, Doctor. Your sense of reality is anchored in the present. You'll naturally inflate the near term and sell the long term short, tomorrow's disaster will always feel less real than today's inconvenience. You may be unbeatable at putting out brush fires, but I shudder to think of how you'd handle issues that extend into the next decade, let alone the next century. Guilt Trip would herd you toward the short-term payoff every time."
Her voice gentled a bit. "Surely, if we've learned anything from recent history, it's that sometimes the short term must be sacrificed for the long."
She waited, as if challenging him to disagree. The silence stretched.
"It wasn't such a radical technique, really," she said at last.
"What wasn't?"
"They're a lot more common than you might think. Even real memories are just—cobbled together out of bits and pieces, mostly. After the fact. Doesn't take much to coax the brain into cobbling those pieces together in some other way. Power of suggestion, more than anything. People even do it by accident."
She's defending herself, Desjardins realized. Patricia Rowan is actually trying to justify her actions. To me.
"So what others did by accident, you did on purpose," he said.
"We were more sophisticated. Drugs, hypnosis. Some deep ganglionic tweaks to keep real memories from surfacing."
"You fucked her in the head."
"Do you know what it is, to be fucked in the head? Do you know what that colorful little phrase actually means? It means a proliferation of certain receptor sites and stress hormones. It means triggers set at increased firing thresholds. It's chemistry, Doctor, and when you believe you've been abused—well, belief's just another set of chemicals in the mix, isn't it? You get a—a sort of cascade effect, your brain rewires itself, and suddenly you can survive things that would leave the rest of us pissing in our boots. Yes, we faked Lenie Clarke's childhood. Yes, she was never really abused—"