“A few more seconds,” Anson said softly. “She has the blindfold, so she won’t go off on some random visual trigger. Quiet now. The wrong words might push her off on some other memory track.”
He sat down on the sofa next to Senta, peering at her closely. Rob felt a shock of recognition. As he watched, Senta’s cheek was losing its shrunken look and taking on the bloom that he had seen at Way Down. Her full mouth was curving again into a faint, secret smile.
“Here I am, Howard,” she said. “I’m feeling good. Now, what game shall we play?”
She laughed, deep in her throat, and wriggled against the soft cushions of the sofa. Her look had become coquettish and full of explicit sexual promise. Anson gave Rob a quick, helpless glance, then bent forward close to Senta’s ear.
“Joseph Morel,” he said clearly. He paused after the name. “Gregor Merlin. Joseph Morel and Gregor Merlin. Say their names to me, Senta. Say them.”
Her look was blank, confused. “Joseph Morel. Gregor Merlin. Yes, I can say them. I’ve said them. But Howard, why do you…”
Her voice trailed away into silence. Once again, the parade of expressions was moving across her face: fear, joy, greed, compassion, lust. As her look stabilized, she bent her head to one side and nodded, then seemed to listen intently.
“Merlin… Merlin has them,” she said at last. She was looking up, a frown wrinkling her forehead and a look of worry and confusion on her face. “That’s right, Gregor Merlin. I just heard it from Joseph, over the video. He has no idea how they got there, but he’s convinced of their location in the labs.”
“Damnation.” Anson bit his lip and looked across at Rob. “I was afraid of that. It’s the same one that you heard before. There was a good chance of it, because I used almost the same key words. Now I’m afraid she’ll have to play it right through.”
Senta was listening to unseen companions, until at last she nodded firmly. “That’s right, there are two of them. No, they weren’t alive — there was no air in the supply capsule. I don’t know if Merlin knows where they came from, but he must have a good idea. He told McGill he had found two Goblins — that’s his name for them — in a returned medical supply box. He sent one of them to another man, Morrison, and now he’s going to try and do the full autopsy. He already knows what has been happening to them, but he won’t…”
Her face was changing, again becoming a melting-pot for all the human emotions. Before the change was complete, Howard Anson was leaning forward, ready to speak to her again. Rob put up his hand in protest.
“Don’t go on with it, Howard,” he cut in. “Didn’t you see her expression? She’s in absolute torment when she goes into that part of her past.”
“I know that, Rob.” Anson’s manner was full of pent-up anger. “I don’t enjoy this any more than you do. But we have to find it before we can exorcise it. We’re doing it for Senta’s sake. Now, keep quiet or we may apply the wrong trigger.”
He leaned forward again. “Senta, once more. Say these names after me. Morel, Merlin, Goblins, Caliban, Sycorax. Do you hear me? Say them, Senta.”
Even before he had finished speaking the reaction to the spoken trigger began. Her features began to writhe and grimace, a travesty of her usual beauty. As her face twisted into grotesque expressions, the veins in her neck stood out, swollen and congested. Her final look was one of mounting horror. For a second, her mouth opened and closed wordlessly.
“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.”