Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (13 page)

The vacation had been fun, but there was no reason to take chances.

“You were out awfully late the other night,” Louise said.

“Did you have a hot date?”

“You might say that,” Bester replied.

“Really? Anyone I know?”

“No, I was kidding. I was just out, walking and thinking. About what you said-about writing a book of some sort.”

“Memoirs?”

“No, that would be too close to home. A novel, perhaps. Something that would allow me to approach things more obliquely.”

“I think novelists are cowards, sometimes.”

“I thought I was the literary critic here.”

“You are. I would have assumed you thought the same. Novelists put the things they’d like to say themselves in the mouths of fictional characters. It distances them from it. They can always claim it was just the character saying those things, that they were simply portraying an opinion rather than expressing one.”

“Sometimes they are.”

“Yes. An effective smokescreen, I think, for their real thoughts.”

“So you think I should write memoirs.”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know enough about your life to know if it would be interesting without making things up. But I bet it is.”

She put down her brush and looked squarely at him.

“Who are you, Mr. Kaufman? What are you?”

A little chill walked up his spine. She sounded almost… angry. Where had that come from? Had he let something slip, while he was sick? He wished he had a clearer memory of those days.

“I don’t understand.”

“The other day. After the opera, when you wondered where I had been. You thought I was with someone, didn’t you? A man?”

“I didn’t give it a thought. Besides, didn’t you just ask me something similar?”

“Very good,” Louise said.

“In the same breath you say no… I didn’t, and you didn’t like and you didn’t like it.”

He didn’t answer that, just tried to look at her as if she had gone crazy. She shook her head and walked toward him.

“No. You know where I was that night? Walking. Thinking. Trying to make some sort of sense out of a man who would give me a dress fit for an empress, then wiggle out of taking me anywhere in it. A stranger who appeared in the worst hour of my life and was there for me, like no one else has ever been. And for no good reason. Or no reason he will admit.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You either know it or you are stupid. I’ve thought a lot about this. And these past few days… the whole of last week-you seemed… unguarded somehow. I saw things on your face, obvious things. But they’re gone now. Why?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” Bester said, trying to sound irritated, rather than as he felt at sea, almost panicky.

“Must I be blunt? I think you have fallen in love with me. Have you?”

For a second his head rang as if he’d just fended off an attack by two P12s. And try as he might, he couldn’t tear his gaze from the floor, couldn’t confront her eyes.

“Yes.”

He sighed.

She abruptly turned her back to him and paced a few steps. Then she came back, closer and closer, until she stood over him, her arms folded defensively in front of her. He could feel her staring at the top of his head, but he had no sense of what she was thinking at all. None. It was as if he had been given sleepers, as if his psi were turned off.

“You stupid man,” she said.

Then she took his chin in her fingers and tilted it up. She bent and kissed him, softly, on the lips. She took his head in her hands and kissed him more firmly, but finally, finally he understood what was going on, and his lips remembered what to do.

He got his feet under him, and his arms around her, and he was shocked by the warmth, the solidity of her in his arms. Startled by the shape of her back, by the close scent of her, by how different her face looked, this near his own.

He felt like a comet, a million years in the void beyond Pluto, finally approaching the Sun, ice turning to vapor…

Her room was neat, and tidy, and mostly blue, and not something he paid much attention to when they finally reached it. Not when he had her hair, and her sky-bright eyes, and eventually the delicious feel of warm flesh, the tangle and sliding of limb against limb, face against belly, kisses that had long since gone from precious to hungry. He felt like a boy, like a man. He felt nothing at all like any Alfred Bester he had ever known.

He cheated a little-he could feel what she felt, which made him a fast learner. He slightly stimulated certain brain centers at the appropriate time, too-he wanted to give her everything he could. He wished she were a telepath, so she could feel what he did, know what he had just found in his heart. But then she might see how otherwise empty he was, too, and the things he had done, and be afraid.

They didn’t speak afterward, either, as night crept into the streets outside, but curled together and fell slowly asleep, as if both understood that words were pointless. He didn’t sleep long, though. It had been a very long time since he had shared a bed, and he wasn’t used to it. He watched her face in the pale illumination of the small lamp on the dresser.

He got up quietly, to turn the light off, but paused at the window.

He moved the curtain aside and glanced down on the empty street. In his reflection on the dark glass he saw Byron’s face, Byron’s sardonic smile.

You don’t deserve her. You don’t deserve anyone, Byron said.

“Deserving has nothing to do with it,” Bester whispered.

“I have another chance. A real chance. I’ve never been happy, never in my life. I’ve never known how to be.”

He closed his eyes.

“I don’t need you anymore, Byron. You are a part of what I was. You’re a part of what I couldn’t let go. It’s like I fell in a fast-moving river, and for years did nothing more than hang onto the rocks, my arms aching, trying to tear from their sockets. I might have died, holding onto that rock. Instead, I’m going to see where the river goes. I’m turning loose.”

That’s not you, Byron said. That’s never been you. You have to have control. Always control.

“Good-bye, Byron.”

And Byron was gone, unraveled. His haunting was over. Then Bester lay against Louise, and she made a happy sound.

He fell asleep, and he did not dream.

Garibaldi woke up with the sweats, wondering where he was.

There was a certain kind of dream, the kind when you think you’ve done something horrible, irrevocable. There were mild versions-the dream that you had an exam coming up for a class you never attended, for instance. There were darker ones, too-the kind where you’ve committed a terrible crime, which you could try to hide. But not forever, never forever…

In his dream, he’d betrayed the best man he had ever known to the worst people he had ever known, on purpose, with malice aforethought. The thing about dreams like that, usually, was that you could wake up from them and realize that it had been a dream. No exam, no manslaughter, no betrayal.

But for Garibaldi, waking only made it worse, because then he remembered it was true. He’d really done it, and no dream could capture the depth of the harm he had wrought.

And while he would never get over the feeling that some of the blame was his to shoulder, he inevitably came back to one fact. Bester had been the cause. It wasn’t an excuse, nor the old “devil made me do it” line, but the literal truth. Garibaldi had been programmed, like some kind of wet-brained robot.

That’s the alcoholic in you, he thought.

Alcoholics always had excuses explaining why they weren’t responsible for what they did. It was one of the things that had caused him to drink, back when he had done so. It gave him a license to screw up. Well, he’d kicked the bottle. So maybe Lise was right. Maybe Bester was his new addiction. Maybe it was time to kick the Bester habit, too. He lay there for a while, listening to Lise’s gentle breathing, trying to shut down his mind, to get some sleep.

After half an hour, he gave up. He went into the next room, switched on his Al, and stared sleepily at the screen. He called up his choline ribosylase hotlist. No bites. Everyone who had been tested, except the guy on Crenshaw’s World, really had the condition, and no one had applied for an extra dose. Nor had any been stolen.

Wait… Four people in Paris had put in for prescription refills, only hours ago. What was up with that?

Within moments, he had the story. An attempted robbery had gone bad, a drug-crazed mobster had blown himself up when he got caught. It didn’t look like any of the inhibitor had been taken. There was a rundown of everything his company needed to replace, and all four doses of the stuff were accounted for in the drugstore safe. Destroyed, but accounted for.

Still…

He ran down the dead crook’s record. Jemelah Perdue, thirty-two years of age, with a police record that accounted for twenty-three of them. No surprises there. No visible ties to Psi Corps. What about the teeps? He ran them down, too, and they all looked clean, but you could never tell. He shook his head and looked at the clock. Three in the morning. What the hell was he doing?

Lise was right. How many drugstores had been robbed that night? A quick inquiry brought that up, too. Six hundred thirty-three robberies or attempted robberies of drugstores reported. That meant, in all of Human space, there were at least that many again that hadn’t been reported yet, or he hadn’t gotten the record for.

“Say good night, Mike,” he grunted, flipping off the screen.

Garibaldi had a life to live, and Bester had already taken too much of it. No more. The hell with him. He went to bed.

PART II: RECKONING

Chapter I

Paris in summer. For Bester the days were molds filled each morning with golden heat, ordinary and extraordinary intimacies, flowers, and candlelight.

“I’ve never fallen in love like this,” he told Louise one morning, in a little restaurant called Isabelle, tucked in a corner of the new market off the Rue de Martin.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Like this. Quiet evenings, and moonlit walks, and breakfasts in bed.”

“No? How did you fall in love before?”

“In the war. On the go. Shells falling all around-that sort of thing. Or earlier, in school, when I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Ah. Forbidden romances. The sort they write books about. How does this compare?”

He took her hand, marveling, still, that her fingers gripped him back.

“It doesn’t,” he said.

“Before, there was always something I wanted more than a relationship. I was in love with my goals, my work. And love, however pleasant, was just… in the way.

It isn’t like that now. If I had known you fifty years ago, or even twenty…”

“If this were twenty years ago, you would be arrested for pedophilia, at the very least.”

“There is that,” Bester replied.

“I still don’t know what you see in an old man like me.”

“Age doesn’t matter much to me,” she said.

“So I see.”

“No, I don’t think you do. I think it worries you.”

He shrugged.

“Okay-yes. Maybe not for exactly the reasons that you think. When I was in the military, I held a position of some authority. It attracted young women to me, in search, I think, of the father they had always wanted. One of those psychological things.”

“Electra complex. Woman seeks man like her father because she’s subconsciously in love with her father and knows she can’t have him.”

“That’s it.”

“Would it help if I told you, you are nothing like my father?”

“I’m sure it would.”

“You’re nothing like my father.”

“Well, if you say it, I believe it.”

“Credulity. I like that in a man. What else shall I ask you to accept without question?”

She paused, as if to think about it, then looked him levelly in the eye.

“How about this? You are the very best thing that has happened to me in a very long time. I don’t know what brought you to my hotel, but I’m glad it did.”

“I wouldn’t question that,” Bester said, a bit stiffly.

“I might doubt it, but I couldn’t question it. You make me…”

He searched but everything sounded so trite, so awkward.

“You make me happier, I think, than I’ve ever been.”

“Well,” she said, her eyes flashing, “now that we’ve got the mutual appreciation out of the way, how shall we spend the rest of our day off?”

“Hmm. What’s the one sick, secret thing you’ve always wanted to do in Paris, the one thing no real Parisian would ever be caught dead doing?”

“Oh, that’s easy. The Eiffel Tower.”

“The Eiffel Tower it is, then.”

“Eh. We have to go disguised as tourists, then.”

“Yes, of course. Cameras.”

“Shorts and knee socks for you.”

“An ‘I love Paris’ T shirt for you.”

“And ugly shoes for the both of us. Fine. A perfect idea. And you have to ask directions.”

“But I know the way to the Eiffel Tower.”

She mussed his hair.

“If we are going to play tourist, we have to play it all the way. I don’t want anyone recognizing me. Oh, and sunglasses for the both of us, yes? Big ones.”

“You look hideous,” Louise observed an hour or so later, when they were dressed much as they had discussed.

“The Hawaiian shirt is a particularly awful touch.”

“Thank you, my dear. You look my perfect match.”

“I say we’re ready to go, then. Are you sure you’re up to it?”

“From here on out, I speak no French at all,” Bester replied.

They pretended to be Ugly Americans and gape-jawed Marsies. They asked for “real” ketchup in restaurants and demanded ice in their drinks. When they couldn’t make themselves understood in English, they spoke English very loudly and very slowly.

They were utterly obnoxious, and Bester found he was enjoying himself more than he had in a long, long time. They took a tour down the Seine, wandered around the Louvre, then went to the top of the Eiffel Tower, where they stood with a mixed group of mostly Japanese and Narn tourists and watched the sun touch the horizon.