“Yes,” Louise whispered.
“You cause us one more problem, and they’ll throw you out of the arcology and lock the door behind you.”
“What about Fletcher?” Genevieve asked.
“What about him?” Brent Roi said.
“Is he coming down to Earth with us?”
“No, Gen,” Louise said. “He’s not.” She tried to keep the sorrow from her voice. Fletcher had helped her and Gen through so much, she still couldn’t think of him as a possessor, one of the enemy. The last image she had was of him being led out of the big airlock chamber where they’d been detained. A smile of forlorn encouragement on his face, directed at her. Even in defeat, he didn’t lose his nobility.
“Your big sister’s right,” Brent Roi told Genevieve. “Stop thinking about Fletcher.”
“Have you killed him?”
“Tough to do. He’s already dead.”
“Have you?”
“At the moment he’s being very cooperative. He’s telling us about the beyond, and helping the physics team understand the nature of his energistic power. Once we’ve learned all we can, then he’ll be put into zero-tau. End of story.”
“Can we see him before we go?” Louise asked.
“No.”
The two female police officers escorted Louise and Genevieve directly up to the counter-rotating spaceport. They were given a standard class berth on the Scher , an inter-orbit passenger ship. The interstellar quarantine hadn’t yet bitten into the prodigious Earth, Halo, Moon economic triad; outsystem exports made up barely fifteen per cent of their trade. Civil flights between the three were running close to their usual levels.
They arrived at the departure lounge twelve minutes before the ship was scheduled to leave. The police returned their luggage and passports, with Earth immigration clearance loaded in; they also got their processor blocks back. Finally, they handed Louise her Jovian Bank credit disk.
Louise had her suspicions that the whole procedure was deliberately being rushed to keep them off-balance and complacent. Not that she knew how to kick up a fuss. But there was probably some part of their treatment which a good lawyer could find fault with. She didn’t really care. Scher ’s life support capsule had the same lengthy cylindrical layout as the Jamrana , except that every deck was full of chairs. A sour stewardess showed them brusquely to their seats, strapped them in, and left to chase other passengers.
“I wanted to change,” Genevieve complained. She was pulling dubiously at her shipsuit. “I haven’t washed for ages. It’s all clammy.”
“We’ll be able to change when we get to the tower station, I expect.”
“Which tower station? Where are we going?”
“I don’t know.” Louise glanced at the stewardess, who was chiding an elderly woman’s attempts to fasten her seat straps. “I think we’ll just have to wait and find out.”
“Then what? What do we do when we get there?”
“I’m not sure. Let me think for a minute, all right?”
Louise squirmed her shoulders, letting her muscles relax. Freefall always made her body tense up as it tried to assume more natural gravity-evolved postures. Thankfully, the cabin chairs were almost flat, preventing her from getting stomach twinges.
What to do next hadn’t bothered her much while she’d been in custody. Convincing Brent Roi about Dexter was her only concern. Now that had been accomplished, or seemed to be. She still couldn’t quite believe he had taken her warnings particularly seriously; they’d been released far too quickly for that. Dismissed, almost.
The authorities had Fletcher in custody, and he was cooperating with them about possession. That was their true prize, she thought. They were confident their security procedures would spot Dexter. She wasn’t. Not at all. And she’d made one solemn promise to Fletcher, which covered exactly this situation.
If I can’t help him physically, at least I can honour my promise. If our positions were reversed, he would. Banneth, I said I’d find and warn Banneth. Yes. And I will. The sudden resolution did a lot to warm her again.
Then she was aware of a strangely rhythmic buzzing sound, and blinked her eyes open. Genevieve had activated her processor block; its AV projector lens was shining a conical fan of light directly on her face. Frayed serpents of pastel colour stroked her cheeks and nose, glistening on a mouth parted in an enraptured smile. Her fingers skated with fast dextrous motions over the block’s surface, sketching eccentric ideograms.
I’m really going to have to do something about this obsession, Louise thought, it can’t be healthy.
The stewardess was shouting at a man cradling a crying child. Tackling Gen was probably best delayed until they reached Earth.
It wasn’t rugged determination, or even victorious self-confidence which brought him back. Instead, came the slow, dreadful comprehension that this awful limbo wouldn’t end if he did nothing.
Dariat’s thoughts hung amid vast clusters of soil molecules, membranous twists of nebula dust webbing the space between stars, insipid, enervated. Completely unable to evaporate, to fade away into blissful non-existence. Instead, they hummed with chilly misery as they conducted pain-soaked memories round and around on a never ending circuit, humiliation and fear undimmed by time and repetition.
Worse than the beyond. At least in the beyond, there were other souls, memories you could raid to bring an echo of sensation. Here there was only yourself; a soul buried alive. Nothing to comfort you but your own life. Screaming from the pain of the blows which battered him down might have stopped, but the internal scream of self-loathing could never cease. Not incarcerated here. He didn’t want to go back, not to the dimly sensed light and air above, the vicious brutality of the ghosts waiting there. Every time he emerged, they would pummel him down again. That was what all of them wanted. He would go through the same suffering again and again. Yet he couldn’t stay here, either.
Dariat moved. He thought of himself, visualised pushing his bulky body up through the soil, as if he was doing some kind of appalling fitness-fad exercise. It wasn’t anything like that easy. Imagination couldn’t power him as before. Something had happened to him, weakening him. The vitality he owned, even as a ghost, had been leeched out by the matter with which he was entwined.
Fantasy muscles trembled as he strained. Finally, along his back, sensation was returning in a paltry trickle. A warmth, but not on his skin. Inside, just below the surface.
It inspired greed, a hunger for more. Nothing else mattered, the warmth was revitalising, a font of life. It lent to his strength, and he began to rise faster through the soil, sucking in more warmth as he went. Soon, his face cleared the ground, and he was moving at an almost normal speed. Extricating himself from the soil meant discovering just how cold he was. Dariat stood up, teeth chattering, arms crossed over his chest, hugging tight as his hands tried to rub some heat into icy flesh. Only his feet were warm, though that was a relative term.
The grass around his sandals was a sickly yellow-brown, dead and drooping. Each blade was covered in a delicate sprinkle of hoarfrost. They made up a roughly oval patch about two metres long. Body-shaped, in fact. He stared at it, completely bewildered.
Damn, I’m cold!
Dariat? That you, boy?
Yes, it’s me.one question—he didn’t really want to ask, but had to know. How long was I . . . out for?
It’s been seventeen hours.
Seventeen years was a figure he could have believed in quite easily. Is that all?
Yes. What happened?
They beat me into the ground. Literally. It was . . . Bad. Real bad.
Then why didn’t you come out earlier?