Watson, Ian - Novel 10 (4 page)

 
          
“It’s
nice to know I have my uses.”

 
          
“We
all
do.
Everyone’s death has its own
precious usefulness.”

 
          
“As
Mayor Barnes said just now, of Norman Harper’s.”

 
          
Jim
touched Marta lightly on the shoulder. As he well knew from experience with the
dying and with those on the path to voluntary death, one moment of such contact
spoke volumes of persuasion.

 
          
“Will
you show me the refectory? I’d like a cup of coffee before I meet Resnick.”

 
          
Outside
the window, the yucca leaves were green knives. Their shadows stabbed the
furniture. The fuchsia flowers were drops of blood.

 
          
Resnick draped an
arm over Jim’s
stooped shoulders, giving the impression of a circus impresario comforting a
would-be hunchback who had the misfortune to be taller than most other people.
Thus he drew Jim across the room towards a large bean-bag style seat.
A seat like
a pitcher plant; once in, it would be difficult
to struggle out again. Jim subsided into it.

 
          
Since
the Master’s office, lit by fluorescents, was deep inside the body of the House
one entire wall was devoted to a scene-screen. A sunset seascape opened
illusorily out of the office. A woolpack sky was afire with red and
salmon-pink; an orange sun balanced exactly on the sea horizon, and a golden road
stretched across the waters towards the desk. The ocean from whose bourne no
traveller returns,’ thought Jim.

 
          
Alice
Huron stood staring along that road. Presently she turned, to acknowledge Jim
with a nod, then with a second more thoughtful nod — as she remembered him
from the ceremony, he saw.

 
          
“You
don’t mind if
Alice
stays, do you?” asked Resnick. “She’s been ...”

 
          
“Robbed?”
prompted Jim.

 
          
The
Master smiled appreciatively.

 
          
“Quite so.
The whole House was robbed. Egremont was robbed.
In a deeper sense, of course, Norman Harper was most grievously robbed.”

 
          
“ ‘There
is no Enemy, no Thief,’ ” quoted
Alice
bitterly. “But there
was.
Today there was.
Norman
’s death was out there. What a horrid,
obscene thing.” The tall woman summoned a faint smile. “We ought to be
welcoming you, Jim. We were planning ...”

 
          
“To
have a trout roast — I heard. Don’t worry about it.”

 
          
“We’ll
still hold one — on Friday. That, I promise you.”

 
          
And
what else was she promising? Her tone implied that she had a minor score to
settle with him — for watching her in her moment of weakness, when no one else
had eyes for it. But perhaps he was imagining this.

 
          
She
rounded on Resnick.

 
          
“How
can that beast possibly go to a good death after this?” And Jim realized: he
himself was now the custodian of the
beast,
therefore
he was a little monstrous in her eyes . . .

 
          
“Does
one punish a dying man?” parried Resnick. “Does one withhold counselling? Maybe
that’s what he was hoping for!”

 
          
“I
presume that ‘the beast’ has a name,” said Jim.
“Weinberger.
Nathan Weinberger. He was once a guide himself. He left the House years ago. He
rejected his oath and tore up his contract. It was easier to get away with
behaviour like that back then. He’s been working in micro-electronics since —
in Egremont, of course.
Until the crab got him.”

 
          
Cancer.

 
          
“How
long has he left?”

 
          
“Three
to four months, maybe less. Obviously he won’t have to run
that
course to the very end! We were hoping to guide him out in
another week or two. What on earth did he think he was doing? He’s set the
whole schedule back. It’s all so utterly absurd.” “Maybe it isn’t absurd to
him,” said Jim. “As to what he thought he was doing, that’s for me to find out,
isn’t it?”

 
          
“Certainly.
Absolutely.
But this is
a major case. All the Houses will be interested.
The public
too, unfortunately.”

 
          
“Meaning,
am I up to it?”

 
          
“Let’s
see.” Resnick keyed the data console on his desk.

 
          
“If
you hadn’t arrived at this timely — or untimely — moment,” he said, as he
scanned the recessed screen, “we’d have been obliged to call a guide in from
outside.
That
would not have looked
good. As it is, the whole affair stays securely in this House. Your arrival is
. . . yes, timely. I see that you’ve been involved in some afterlife studies in
Gracchus?”

 
          
Jim
realized with a shock that Resnick was reviewing the Todhunter dossier, not
that of . . . what was his name, Weinberger?
Reviewing it
with a third party, Alice, standing by.
Admittedly the Huron woman
wasn’t looking over Resnick’s shoulder — but even so.

 
          
“That
came to an abrupt end.”

 
          
“Well,
that’s the affair of the Gracchus House. Were you hoping to carry on here? My
predecessor was interested in such things. He sound-proofed a room down in the
basement for astral — no, I
shan’t
use that word! —
for
monkeying around with trance
states: out-of-the-body illusion stuff. You people at Gracchus seem to have
been moving in the same direction. As a tactic, I presume, to bolster up weak
minds . . .?” Resnick stared hard at Jim. “So what sent you down the afterlife
path? What was your own earliest death encounter?”

 
          
In
common with all guide applicants Jim originally had undertaken self-analysis,
aided by hypnosis, of his own childhood discovery of death. The results of
this analysis — and consequently the answer to the Master’s question — were
certainly in the dossier. And the dossier had been transferred from Gracchus to
the Egremont computer at least a week ago. Had Resnick not bothered to scan it
till now? If not, surely he wouldn’t have appointed Jim as guide to Norman
Harper’s murderer? Unless, of course, he was at his wit’s end . . .

 
          
He
must want to hear the answer from Jim’s own lips. One’s interpretation of such
things sometimes altered as the years went by.

 
          
Or
was Resnick doing this for Alice Huron’s benefit — as a sop to recompense her
for her loss of Norman Harper?
Or even because ... she was
the real decision-maker hereabouts?
Had he left it to someone else to
scan the dossier for him: someone who already knew exactly what it said, and who
was in the room right now?

 
          
Alice
Huron was once more inspecting the everlasting sunset, as though Resnick’s
questions were of no consequence to her. The engorged sun prepared to dip
beneath the waters, bringing the darkness of night; but it never actually did
so. Jim thought briefly of the freezer freaks, suspended — yet in reality dead.
There was nothing of poised golden evening about
their
experience: their complete lack of experience.

 
          
Alice
Huron. Jim had agreed that she could stay, and now she would eavesdrop on his
earliest death encounter — if she was not already privy to it. ‘Always check
the small print,* he reflected wryly. Already he had got himself into something
of a knot with Marta Bettijohn. Why had he allowed a similar situation to develop
with this other woman? Because he
wanted
her to be present — having seen her naked, too, when she wept.

 
          
At
this point Jim decided that
Alice
must certainly be Resnick’s mistress; and he felt an irrational sense
of loss at this discovery — as though somehow she ought to belong to him
because they both had to contend with ungenerous doorways.

 
          
‘I’m
eroticising things childishly . . . And imagining the same about other people .
. .’ Actually, Marta had been doing just that. Quite definitely she had been
eroticising this afternoon’s tragedy. In many respects a House of Death was an
erotic hothouse. Inevitably relationships developed between the guides.

 
          
“Well?”
asked Resnick.

 
          
“I
fell into a river,” Jim said. “I drowned. I saw the radiance, I experienced
bliss. Then they pulled me out and revived me.” It had all been a very long
time ago, but how clearly the experience remained with him! “I wanted to show
other people the same light, and let them know how we can die filled with joy.
I wanted to show them how not to be afraid.”

 
          
And
perhaps, through his clients, he had wanted to catch reflected glimpses of that
radiance, to be sure that it was still available.

 
          
“Mr
Ananda considers that the ‘death light’ is simply a brain reaction: a
perception thing,” remarked Resnick. “Not a tunnel into heaven.
Just something natural, not supernatural.”

 
          
“It’s
very valuable to know that you will feel joy at the end.”

 
          
“Surely.
And death therapy has to be tailored to suit the
clients, not dogmatised. But really, afterlife research has led nowhere. We
mustn’t promise falsehoods.”

 
          
“Doses
of opium,” muttered
Alice
.

 
          
“Afterlife
research has got nowhere for one simple reason,” said Jim.
“Because
no one is brought back from death nowadays.
Instead, everyone is eased
into it. So there’s no evidence. Except for odd cases like mine — rescues from
drowning.”

 
          
“So
it’s all hypothetical,” said
Alice
sharply. “Fantasies about death are
dangerous. They lead to events such as
today’s
.”

 
          
“Well,
I don’t dogmatise — I tailor, as Noel so neatly puts it. Though frankly, there
is
a way of glimpsing that light: by
death mimicry, by playing possum. That’s what was going on in Gracchus: Project
Possum.”

 
          
“Yes,
and I hear that one guide played possum so successfully that he did genuinely
die,” said Resnick. “That’s where the real danger in the afterlife concept
lies. It can lead to a denial of
this
good
world — to a fevered intoxication with some ‘other side’, and even to suicide,
which is violence against society. We’ve seen enough violence today to last us
a lifetime.”

 
          
“Where
did Weinberger get the gun?” asked Jim, to change the subject.

 
          
Resnick
dangled a key. “Ask him. He’s in room 302.”

 
          
“
Aren’t
the P.Os questioning him?”

 
          
“He
retired, remember? He’s in
our
custody. I don’t think it matters very much where he got the gun. Not all
firearms can have been recalled and destroyed. People hang on to the stupidest
of things.
Medical poisons.
Pills.
No, it’s what he
did
with it. And he
did it on his own. Weinberger was a loner, and I guess he was a looney too. But
he kept a low profile — right until he popped up on the firing range.”

 
          
“You’ve
got that the wrong way round,” said
Alice
. “Traditionally, it’s the target that pops
up.”

 
          
“Oh
well yes, I know that. But who needs a tradition like that?” Resnick swung back
to Jim.

 
          
“I
realize that it’s your very first day here ...”

 
          
“I’ll
get on the job. That’s why I came.”

 
          
“But
take your time. Weinberger has to adjust. And
that
can only come from inside him. Obviously he’s a very long way
off that right now. But people will want to hear that he adjusted
successfully, and it’ll have to be the truth. At the moment he’s a gross
example of stage-two anger. He hid it very well — quite as well as he hid the
gun! We thought he was into stage-four depression, just prior to acceptance. I
suppose his training as an ex-guide helped him mislead us. Here, I’ll give you
his cassette — you’ll want to play it before you visit him.”