Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (8 page)

“What the…”

She picked up the chit, looked it over, then went behind the checkin desk.

“Eight thousand credits, just like he said.”

Her tone was so unbelieving, Bester couldn’t suppress a small grin. She noticed it.

“Did you-what did you do to him?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“Last night, when you were telling me something might come along you meant this! How did you know?”

“I spoke philosophically,” Bester said.

“It’s just that I’ve been around long enough to know you can never guess what’s really around the next corner”

“No. You knew. How?”

“I promise you, I didn’t. Don’t _you think it more likely that your policeman friend got some of his buddies together, off duty? That they went and, ah, ”talked some sense” into Jem? Or maybe he really had a change of heart.”

“No, not Jem. But Lucien-no, I don’t believe that either. He’s too upright, too respectful of the law”

“He likes you. Maybe this attack was just too much for him.”

“Maybe. I don’t believe it.”

“Yes. He knows you don’t like help, like to fend for yourself…”

“Oh, do I?”

Her eyes narrowed again, but this time there was something playful about it.

“That’s my impression.”

“Gathered in only three days?”

“Maybe I’m wrong.”

“No, you’re right. I usually do. But whoever did whatever they did to Jem-has my thanks.”

She held his eyes for a moment, then went back to work. Bester reflected that, if she actually knew the details of what he had done, she would probably take a very different attitude toward it. Still, it felt good, her thanks. Physiology and psychology. It was always good to feel needed-even when you didn’t want to be.

Chapter 6

Garibaldi walked carefully around the room, as if his feet were bare and the floor covered in broken glass.

“He was here,” he muttered.

“I can smell him.”

He couldn’t, of course, not literally. But sometimes he thought he had developed a sort of sense-not telepathy, of course, but something older, deeper, more primal. Animal, even.

“It’s a good bet,” Thompson drawled.

“This house was registered to one Susan Taroa, but that was just an alias. We traced her back through several other fake names, until we came to Sophie Herndon. She was one of Bester’s interns.”

“And that’s the woman they fished out of the drink a couple of weeks ago?”

“Yes. Someone sunk her in a fishing net. But a ship went down in the same area in a storm, and the search and recovery mission found her. When they did an ID check, irregularities popped up. Sheer luck.”

“Not for her.”

“No, I guess not.”

“I want a full tracing team in here. DNA, everything.”

“The local police already did a sweep.”

“They didn’t know what they were looking for. I want another one.”

“Of course.”

Garibaldi continued his survey of the monster’s lair. The clues Bester had left with Thompson hadn’t led anywhere-or more accurately, they’d led everywhere except to any trace of Bester. The man was a ghost when he wanted to be. He could screw with people’s heads, make them forget, make them remember things that had never happened. Make them do things they never wanted to do.

Garibaldi had tried following the money. Bester had to have money, to keep moving like this, but even the considerable Edgars resources had failed him. Some banks really were tamperproof, unbribable, beyond his ability to influence, as perverse and unthinkable as that seemed.

So, what was left to follow? A trail of corpses? Bester was usually careful about that, too. Then again, it seemed as though he was starting to slip up. That was a hopeful sign.

“What are you looking for, Mr. Garibaldi?”

“I don’t know. Something. Anything. How about you? Can you pick up any-I don’t know-psychic signature?”

“No, nothing. Strong telepaths sometimes leave them, it’s true, but they don’t last long. Hours, maybe a day. There’s nothing like that here”

“Damn.”

He went to the drawers of the polished coral dresser and started opening them. Nothing. Searched under the mattress. Nothing. He reached to pat under the bed, and his fingers touched something small, cool, smooth.

“What’s this?”

He got a cloth from his pocket and reached again, came up with a small cylinder.

“This is an ampoule,” he grunted.

He stood and lifted it toward the light.

“Some sort of pharmaceutical.”

“That should be right up your alley.”

“Or on my gravy train, anyway. Yeah, I’ve got a guy I want to see this. And Thompson, I don’t want you talking to anyone about this-understand? Right now this is just our little secret.”

“Got it.”

Niles Drennan was a slight, stiff young man, the sort you could never really imagine cutting loose and having fun. Garibaldi didn’t like him, but he was one of the best synthesizers in the business.

Technically, his job was to examine the herbal and folk remedies from a thousand worlds and try to isolate their active ingredients. Lately he had worked more on the various biogenic materials turned up in the hunt for a cure for the Drakh plague.

In actual fact, he was a sort of alchemist-inquisitor, someone who could drag the secret out of any compound he was given, no matter how strange or complex. So Garibaldi didn’t really care if the guy knew anything about living it up.

“It’s choline ribosylase. It controls the production of certain irregular neurotransmitters.”

“Which means what? In English? In plain English.”

“How much do you know about neurons?”

“Sixth-grade stuff”

“Hmm… Well, nerves are often compared to wiring, or to some other linear, conductive system. It’s a bad analogy, on any number of levels. The nervous system-the brain, the spinal cord, sensory and motor nerves-are all composed of specialized cells called neurons. But neurons, strictly speaking, don’t act as conductors. They act as generators, in a sense. each one producing its own electrical pulses.”

“So far I’m with you.”

Drennan’s face said I should hope so, but he held his tongue.

“A neuron has a sort of branching tree of dendrites that almost connect it to other nerve cells - I’ll get to that in a moment. Each one also has a longer appendage called an axon. When an electrical pulse is generated by the neuron, it flows down the axon until it comes to the next neuron-or, rather, to the gap separating it from the next neuron, the synapse.”

“And the pulse jumps the gap or not, right?”

“Not exactly. The impulse itself doesn’t cross the space. When the impulse reaches the end of the axon, it triggers small packets, telling them to release a combination of neurotransmitters. These are complex chemical compounds that float across the intervening space and tell the neuron next door what to do-whether to generate its own electrical pulse or not. There are upwards of fifty kinds of neurotransmitters in most people. They’re triggered by different sorts of impulses, and in turn cause neighboring neurons to react in different ways. When these neurotransmitters malfunction, especially when they are underproduced, they cause neurological problems. Alzheimer’s, for instance, involves among other things the underproduction of a neurotransmitter.

Certain kinds of messages can’t be carried from one neuron to another because there is no messenger that will do so. Most psychotropic drugs mimic neurotransmitters in some way, causing neurons to react to stimuli that don’t really exist.”

“So these are irregular neurotransmitters?”

“There’s a long list of them, but I imagine you’re interested in the case at hand. There is a rare condition involving a viruslike organism that mimics glial cells-the cells that maintain the biochemical functions of the brain. Imagine them also as the packing pellets that support the fibrous, fragile neurons. Given time, these mutant cells can subvert and replace all of the brain’s natural glial cells. What’s interesting is that in most cases, this process is harmless, as the invasive cells perfectly mimic those they replace. They have latent genetic machinery that makes them different, but it isn’t ever activated. In a minority of cases, however, they stimulate the production of certain neurotransmitters that don’t occur naturally in the human body. This scenario is limited to telepathic individuals, and…”

“Hold it right there. Telepaths?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know. We still don’t know exactly how telepathy works. Telepaths have quirky glial cells anyway, and we’ve never quite hammered out the link.”

“Okay. So this is a disease, right? A virus?”

“Not exactly a virus, but it’s not a bad analogy either.”

“Natural?”

“Good question. We don’t really think so. The imitative cells are too, um, well-designed, so to speak.”

“What does it do, this disease?”

“At first, nothing. There actually seems to be some enhancement of telepathic abilities-or more specifically, of the processing of telepathic information and impulses. It speeds it up. But inevitably, the neurotransmitter starts overproducing, triggering functions without threshold electrical potential…”

“It short-circuits?”

“Put crudely, yes.”

“And only telepaths get this. I bet they were all Corps telepaths, weren’t they?”

“I can check.”

“Yeah. The Corps had dozens of black-box experiments designed to make telepaths stronger, or make them telekinetic. Five will get you ten this was the result of one of them.”

“They experimented on themselves?”

“Man, have you been asleep all your life? Those guys in Psi Corps did experiments on people that would have made Josef Mengele lose his lunch. What do you think all of those trials were about a few years ago?”

“I don’t pay much attention to the news.”

Yeah, I’ll bet you don’t, Garibaldi thought to himself.

Not important.

“Still, I can’t imagine this guy volunteer to be a guinea pig.”

He scratched his chin.

“Of course, he had enemies in the Corps, or if the insertion was done with a virus, like you said, he may have gotten contaminated accidentally.”

He smiled suddenly, clapped Drennan on the back, and indicated the choline ribosylase diagram on the notebook.

“Doesn’t matter. What happens if he doesn’t take this?”

“Oh - first euphoria, heightened senses, faster cognition. Like being on a stimulators. That’s followed by hallucinations and seizures, and finally the collapse of the nervous system.”

“Any other treatment?”

“Not that I know of. The mutant cells are resistant to gene tampering. You can insert a replacement sequence to try and normalize them, but within weeks they return to the state they started in. We think they somehow code their genetic information in non-DNA form in the neural net itself-another good indication that they are engineered. In fact, in that way, they resemble the Drakh plague. You can’t kill them all and replace them with normal cells, either, because in the meantime the neurons they keep alive, functioning, and supporting would die. Besides, there aren’t enough people who have this to make the research worthwhile, and it doesn’t seem to be communicable.”

“But if the man using this inhibitor takes this medication every-how often?”

“Once a month.”

“Once a month, he’s okay?”

“Yes. The drug is a hundred percent effective, when used on schedule.”

“Yes!” Garibaldi said.

“That’s great. Thanks, Drennan.”

The fellow nodded, but he’d turned away. Apparently the whole conversation had already been forgotten in favor of whatever he was working on. Garibaldi left the lab whistling.

“One of your own damn bugs bit you, Bester. Serves you right. And now I’ve found your little trail of breadcrumbs. When I find you, you’re gonna wish the wicked witch had just eaten you.”

But at that a thought dampened his spirits, if only a little. Bester was sick. What if he couldn’t get the treatment? What if he was dying? No. Nothing could beat him to the punch-nothing. Garibaldi took comfort in knowing something about his enemy, and that included one very important fact: Bester wanted to live. And nobody and nothing got between Bester and what he wanted.

In that one way, he and Bester were alike. Here was something he could trace, something Bester had to have.

At last he had a real lead.

Chapter 7

“Always dark clothes,” Louise said, her voice somehow laughing and complaining at the same time.

“I’m a winter,” Bester replied, checking the price tag on a gabardine suit.

“Even in winter it isn’t always nighttime. What about this?”

She held up a deep burgundy jacket with a flaring collar. Big collars had come back in style while he had been gone, apparently.

“Not me,” he replied.

“So you ask me to come shopping with you, and now you disregard all of my advice.”

“I didn’t ask you to come shopping with me,” Bester replied, mildly.

“Well, you should have. You have terrible taste. You dress like a gangster.”

“Maybe I am a gangster.”

She put her chin between her fingers.

“Yes. That would explain why Jem has been so nice to me for the last several weeks. You put the squeeze on him, as they say.”

Bester shrugged.

“Maybe he was just intimidated by my massive physical presence.”

“And your black clothes. Come, just let me select one outfit for you.”

He cocked his head and looked over at her.

“Okay. On one condition.”

“No more painting?”

“That’s not it.”

“What then?”

“You let me pick one outfit for you. And pay for it.”

Her mouth dropped open as she realized that she had been trapped.

“Pick it, yes, though I warn you I won’t wear black. Pay for it - I can’t”

“Yes you can. You haven’t bought anything new since I met you. I insist.”

She looked as if she were preparing another objection, but then she arched one eyebrow.

“I pick out any outfit for you, and you will wear it?”

Uh-oh.

“Within reason. And given my conditions.”