Arcadian's Asylum (13 page)

By the time the bedroom door opened, the building was bathed in light. Two more sec men stood behind the solitary guard who patrolled this level; footsteps and voices from beyond indicated that Ryan’s actions had stirred a hornet’s nest of activity.

From the quirk at the corner of his mouth, this was the reaction he had wanted.

“Ryan, what the—dark night,” J.B. breathed, taking in the situation. “Arcadian’s going to love you for this.”

“That’s the idea,” Ryan said quietly, then added in a louder voice, “Doc’s missing. No way he would have gone off on his own, not without telling Jak. That bastard Arcadian is behind this, and I want to know why.”

The sec men at the head of the corridor broke formation and Sec Chief Schweiz strode through them. His sleekness was ruffled by being rudely awakened, and his temper was as disheveled as his usually immaculate appearance.

“You don’t talk about the baron in that way,” he snapped, his bark punctuated by the clicking catch of his blaster, an obvious warning. Ryan had figured he was edgy and prone to the big gesture, and this just confirmed his notion. Now to play the man.

“Listen, boy,” Ryan said carefully, with just the right edge of disdain, “I don’t talk to the shit carrier, I talk the man whose bucket he holds. You get the baron here, like a good little man, and mebbe we’ll see what’s going down.”

Schweiz’s eyes, no longer hooded by the shades he had worn earlier, were small and piggy in the glare of the lights. They narrowed, and the corner of his mouth quivered as he fought to control his temper.

“You push too far, son,” he hissed in a voice as tight as the line of his lips. His face was drained of blood and he quivered with an impotent rage. “You’re here because—”

“Because they’re my guests, Schweiz, and as such you will have some common courtesy with them, no matter how misguided they may be.”

Arcadian’s voice boomed out from behind the sec men with an authority that made them part ranks instantly. Schweiz turned to face the baron, who strode through to stand firmly in front of the sec chief. He was dressed in a long robe and, Ryan noted, was barefoot and without any kind of weapon. Confident or stupe—a thin line, perhaps.

“Sir, these people have left their rooms, one of them has left the area and is presumably spying—”

“Has been taken by your men, you mean,” Ryan interrupted in a deceptively mild tone.

Schweiz turned back to him, trembling with rage. “Don’t try to cover for your activities by moving the blame onto someone else,” he snarled.

Interesting, Ryan figured. He might be highly strung and barely holding his impulsiveness in check, but he was more perceptive than he seemed. He would need watching carefully.

“My dear Mr. Cawdor,” Arcadian said in a smooth tone, trying to defuse the tension in the situation, “I can assure you that I hold no responsibility on the disap
pearance of Dr. Tanner. It seems obvious to me that his overwhelming curiosity has got the better of him, and he has wandered off to try to discover more about my collection. It was evident that he held it in great fascination. It says more about the slackness of my men—” with which he shot Schweiz an acid glance that made the sec chief tremble with an even greater rage “—than it does about any intent on his part that he has managed to wander off undetected. All quite innocent, I’m sure. Rest assured, my men will do all they can to locate him, and they will do so in a manner that won’t be hostile or threatening…or could be construed as such,” he added with a glare at his sec chief.

“Of course, sir,” Schweiz said through teeth so gritted that Ryan could almost hear them grinding.

“Doc may spook easily if your boys go after him,” Ryan said, casting a meaningful glance at the sec chief, “so mebbe it’d be better if we went looking for him ourselves.”

“No, think nothing of it,” Arcadian said in an easy tone that was belied by the steel in his eyes. “You don’t know the building like my men. It would be easy for you to lose yourselves. Far better if you return to your rooms and get some rest. By the time dawn breaks, your man will be back with you.”

“He’s one of ours, and perhaps it was wrong of him to wander off like that. Least we can do is sort out our own mess, save you the bother,” Ryan explained. It was worth trying, but he could see from the faint flickering of the baron’s expression that it wasn’t going to work.

“I assure you, Mr. Cawdor, that Dr. Tanner will be found and returned to you unharmed.”

He held Ryan’s gaze. Finally the one-eyed man said, “Okay, this time we’ll do it your way. If Doc wandered off of his own accord, fine. If not…”

“Then I will have to answer your questions. But I can assure you there will be no need. Now…”

The baron turned away, as if dismissing them, and directed the gathered sec to form a search pattern throughout the building, and to relay this to their fellows via the handsets. Ryan noticed that he did this without going through his sec chief, who stood at his shoulder, without even noticing, in truth, that the man was there.

Looking back, Schweiz knew that Ryan was aware of that, and shot him a look of pure venom before following the baron as Arcadian strode off, directing his men as he went. It was noticeable, however, that the sec man who had previously patrolled the landing was now stationed firmly at the head of the corridor.

“He doesn’t trust us that much,” Krysty murmured.

“He wouldn’t,” Ryan agreed, “but at least he doesn’t think that we were making an organized break.”

“Does that matter?” Mildred asked. “You still landed Doc right in the shit.”

Ryan shook his head. “No, I don’t figure that. Arcadian knows Doc is a loose canon. I reckon he’s the one that the baron’s most interested in, truth be known. If we’d gone after him ourselves from the start, then it would have looked like we were all in it. Now, he figures Doc is curious and we want to play his game.”

Mildred nodded. “Which we do until we find out what it is,” she said slowly.

“Exactly.”

A NDOWER HAD HIS ARM around Doc’s shoulders in a manner that the old man found a little disconcerting. They were walking slowly along the corridor, the sec men eyeing them uneasily. They look very much how I feel, Doc thought. Despite that, he tried to focus on what the self-styled Dr. Andower had to say.

“I must say, when I heard you were coming back here, I was quite excited. Your brief time here only added to the intel that Arcadian had gathered.”

“So your baron had an interest in us before we arrived here? How could that be?” Doc questioned.

Andower looked puzzled for a moment. Then an expression of understanding blossomed. “Ah, I see what you mean. No, you misunderstand me, Dr. Tanner. When I say that your presence added to our already existing—well, Arcadian’s already existing—intel, you have to understand that this wasn’t specifically focused on yourself or your fellow travelers. Although I have to say, you have been both busy and conspicuous over recent times. No, what I mean is this—Arcadian, as part of his plan to reintroduce a civilized manner to these benighted lands, makes it his business to gather information on anything that occurs that may denote a superior mindset at work. Using traders—notorious for their inability to stay silent—or any travelers as a source, along with those forays our own people make, he has built up a not inconsiderable database of information.”

In other words, he gathers gossip, Doc thought, though to hear such terms as “database,” these days sounded strange to his ears.

“Information about what?” Doc questioned further.

Andower shrugged. “This and that, everything and
anything. Information is the key to the future. If we know what those who surround us are doing, then we’re better placed to judge our own actions. If we know of their activities, and the levels that they have reached, we’re better placed to know those who may be our allies.”

“And those who may be your enemies?” Doc interjected.

Andower pondered that. “Perhaps. Enemy in the sense that they may attack us? I wouldn’t consider that. We do nothing at the moment to attract attention to ourselves, and when we do spread the word, then surely it’ll be obvious that it’s for the good of all. Why would anyone wish to go up against us?”

“Because your notions of good and bad are not the same as theirs, perhaps?” Doc said with a wry smile.

The answer was just as he expected.

“That, surely, isn’t debatable. We seek to improve the life of all and to bring a civilized way of living back to the world. Who wouldn’t want to partake of that?”

“Oh, you would be surprised,” Doc said mildly. Then, before Andower had the chance to lunge into an abstract argument that would tell Doc nothing of any practical use, he added, “So I would assume that part of the purpose in gathering this information is to add to Arcadian’s archive of the past. Technology, innovation, advances that were being made in scientific fields before skydark, that sort of thing?”

“Undoubtedly,” Andower stated. “The more we find out, the more we can add to our store of human knowledge. There are gaps we can fill in ourselves, of course, and in some senses we have progressed beyond the
levels that had been achieved before the nukecaust. But there are still gray areas, and even the barest scraps can sometimes bridge gaps that seemed to be beyond our reach.”

“I see,” Doc said slowly. “So Arcadian wishes to take the world back to where it was before the sky rained bombs.” Despite his desire to know more, Doc found this arrogance starting to irritate. The bile rose in his gorge in a manner that he hadn’t known for a very long time. The reason he had felt at home in the ville when they had arrived, the familiarity that was like a comfortable bed into which he could seek, all of this was the flipside to the things that had driven him to the point of madness when he had first arrived in the late twentieth century. And in spite of his wish to know more, he was finding it hard to control his anger. The words nearly choked him as he uttered them.

“He wishes to return things to how they were. To the stupidity that caused this mess in the first place. How, pray tell, can that be a constructive move?”

Andower stopped, astonished at Doc’s bitter tone. His hand gripped Doc’s upper arm, and although the old man wished to pull away, he was mindful of the sec men watching his every move.

“But my dear Doctor,” Andower said softly, in the kind of voice people used for addressing Doc when he was first trawled by Chronos, “of course it is constructive. We aren’t bringing the shit from the past. We’re cauterizing those wounds, burning out the cancers. Only the useful will survive.”

There was such a sincerity in Andower’s tone, a kind of disingenuous innocence, that Doc was drained of his
anger. By the Three Kennedys, Doc thought, this man truly believed, like the worst kind of zealot, that he was doing nothing but good. His was a type that permeated history with awful deeds that were meant for the best. Doc had read of them when young, and seen them happen in his lifetime, and the lifetime of those who should have lived after him.

His anger was useless. Andower would never see, never understand why Doc held him in such horror and contempt. As that anger flowed out of him, Doc remembered the reason he had begun this mission. It was time to get some concrete facts to take back to Ryan and the others.

“Perhaps you are right,” he murmured in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone. “You must understand that in our journeys, the people I am associated with have seen some terrible things that have been perpetrated in the name of human advancement. I may, I confess, have judged hastily.”

Andower smiled. It was the smile of the evangelical, believing he had another convert and could close the deal.

“My dear, dear Dr. Tanner, given the things that we know go on in the outside world, and against which we know we have to fight, then your attitude and suspicion are perfectly understandable. Please, let me show you what we are doing here, so that you may have a better grasp on one of the ways in which we hope to improve the world.”

Well, Doc thought, at least that saved him having to engineer an opportunity. Ironic that all Andower wanted to do was to give him what he wanted, and his temper
almost got in the way and blew away the chance. Doc knew he would have to keep himself in check.

And as that ran through his head, he said, “Nothing would give me greater pleasure. What, pray tell, do you actually do in these buildings?”

“Not just these buildings,” Andower said excitedly, guiding Doc along the corridor, through swing doors that led into an adjacent block and then up a flight of stairs. “This whole sector of Arcady comes under my control.”

“Ah, you did say something about the heads of different sectors becoming aware of our presence. I meant to ask—”

“But of course, Dr. Tanner, of course. You haven’t had the time for Arcadian to really explain to you the full extent of how he puts his theories into action. You see, there are eight sectors within the boundaries of Arcady. Each is kept distinct, though it comes under the central administration of the whole. And each is devoted to following a particular set of sociological, psychological or biological theorems.”

“Really?” Doc was a little astounded, if not surprised. That Arcadian should pursue such a course was an obvious step on from the theories that he had espoused to them the previous evening, and certainly made sense of the strange shanty settlement they had encountered on their oblique entry to the ville. But to hear a man in these times calmly use such terms with an assumption that they would be plainly understood was still something that was vaguely amusing, if a little disturbing.