Read Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester Online
Authors: J. Gregory Keyes
Tags: #Epic, #High Tech, #Fantasy, #Extraterrestrial Beings, #Space Opera, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #American, #Adventure, #General, #Media Tie-In
My name is Alfred Bester.
We called you Stee, so you wouldn’t be confused with me. They gave you my name, made me your godfather. Your mother, Fiona, how I loved her. Matthew, I loved him, too, but God… a terrible spasm of pain stopped him then, and almost stopped his heart. Bester felt it tremble.
It was me that lost you, Walters went on. I thought I could save them, but they knew they wouldn’t make it. All they asked was for me to get you out, keep you free, and I failed them. Failed…
Matthew and Fiona Dexter were terrorists, Bester replied. They died when the bomb they were planting in a housing compound went off early. The bomb they set off killed my parents. Lies. He was getting weak. They fed you lies. You are Stephen Kevin Dexter.
No.
Walters cocked his head wearily, and then he reached up to Bester’s face. With a trembling hand he pulled his breather up and off. In the gloom, his eyes were colorless, but Al knew they were blue. Bright blue, like the sky. A woman with dark red hair and changeable eyes, a black-tressed man, both all smiles. He knew them. Had always known them, but he hadn’t seen their faces since the Grins had banished them. They were looking down at a baby in a crib, talking baby talk. And Bester could feel a love so strong-was it love? He had never felt anything just like it, because there was no hint of physical desire, no desperate need, just deep, abiding affection, and hope…
He was seeing through Walters’ eyes, through the filter of Walters’ heart. But then, horribly, another image superimposed itself. The same two people, but looking down at him, and he was the baby in the crib, and behind Mother and Father stood another man, a man with bright blue eyes, as bright as the sun…
They loved you. I loved you. I love you still. Psi Corps killed them and they tookyou away. I tried to find you…
Bester wasn’t aware of fording the PPG. Suddenly it was there, in his left hand and in front of him. His hand clenched on it, and Walters’ face turned bright green, uncomprehending.
Shut up.
His hand clenched again, another viridian flare.
Shut up.
The mind images were dropping away, but not fast enough. He tried to shoot again, but the charge was gone. He tried and tried, squeezing the contact, throttling the lying glyphs in his brain.
Fiona… Matthew… Walters was still there, pulling the images about him in a blazing cloak. His eyes were still there, too, resigned, full of gentle reprimand. He stood near a gate, the doors of which were just beginning to crack open.
You can’t destroy the truth.
And he was gone, and finally the images shredded, a thousand visions of his parents, dancing, fighting, embracing, holding him…
No!
He took it all in his fist and he squeezed until it went away. His fist had never opened again. Never.
He shook his head, becoming aware of his cell again. There they were below-the man and woman he had never known, save in dreams, and visions, and from the mind of a dying man. Matthew and Fiona Dexter, the mother and father in bronze. And in their arms, the lovingly held bundle…
Of course it was true. Of course he had always known it. It felt like a cough, at first, so long had it been since he laughed.
He hacked up another, and had to sit back on his bunk. James must have thought he was dying, because he showed up a few minutes later, looking worried.
“Bester?”
“It’s nothing,” Bester managed, waving him away.
“Just the universe. Don’t believe anyone when they tell you irony is just a literary convention, James. It’s a universal constant, like the coefficient of gravity.”
“What are you talking about?”
But Bester shook his head. Another thing that only he knew. No one else on Earth or in the stars knew what had happened to that baby, immortalized in bronze. That the symbol of hope for the brave new world was none other than the most hated criminal of the old.
Maybe there was hope for them, after all.
Still smiling, he lay down on his bunk, trying to frame what to do about it. Would that go in his memoirs? Maybe, but it might be better, more delicious, to never let them know, to never tell anyone.
For now he was tired. He would think about it in the morning. He sighed and closed his eyes, and felt an odd softness in his arm, his left arm. A sort of warmth. And movement, like something unfolding. And he dreamed-maybe it was dream - that his left hand opened like the petals of a flower, and the fingers wriggled, and he laughed in muted delight.
When James found him the next day, it was the first thing he noticed, the hand. Palm up, fingers only lightly curled, free of the fist that had trapped them for so long.
Bester was free, too, a faint weird smile on his lips, his face looking somehow younger. He really did look like he was just sleeping.
Epilogue
Girard wondered again what, exactly, had brought him to the graveyard. It was raining lightly, not a nice day even if you were somewhere pleasant, somewhere that didn’t remind you that you were shuffling ever faster toward the off - ramp of the mortal coil.
He looked out over the garden of marble headstones and shrugged. Well, he had been in the neighborhood, and he rarely got to Geneva. That he should be here when his most famous case died - it seemed, somehow, that he was fated to watch them put Bester in the ground. And he didn’t like to argue with fate too much.
Few others seemed to have felt so compelled. Some thirty people accompanied the body to the graveside, but of those, most were clearly with the press, come for photographic Grendel - heads to assure the world that the monster was dead at last. There were four or five people who might have been family members of Bester’s victims, here to find that assurance in person. Another four or five simply looked curious. The only weeping was from the sky.
No one had come to mourn Bester, only to bury him.
There was graveside service. After the press had been run off, a man in EA uniform checked the coffin. Girard saw him lift the lid, nod, and speak briefly into a recorder. The lid came back down, four men in prison uniforms put the box in the hole, a fifth in an earthmover covered it over, and that was that.
He had half expected that woman to show up-what had her name been? Louise?
She had looked Girard up, years later, to ask him what he knew about her role in things. He had thought she would eventually talk to Bester himself, but maybe that hadn’t been allowed. Surely she knew - his death had made the news everywhere, and even now the sordid details of his life were being rehashed on the networks. But no. The men did their work in almost eerie silence. No words, gentle or harsh, were spoken. No benediction, no blame. He almost felt as if he should say something himself. But he didn’t. Girard watched until the men left. He wasn’t in any hurry. His wife was shopping, and he had nothing to do for several hours. He stayed, thinking that surely, surely someone else would come. He realized he was still waiting for the woman, Louise. After all, it was Bester’s love for her that had gotten him caught…
Merde, but I’m a romantic! Girard thought. Yet here was the proof, love could be destroyed, cut out as if it had never been. And a man really could go to his grave ungrieved. It made him feel better about his own life, his own choices. Despite himself, Girard had people who loved him.
As he was finally walking away, some instinct made him look back. He had just passed into a small copse of trees, and a breeze mingled the scent of clay with the green scent of the leaves fluttering wetly around him. Life mingled with death. It was nearly dark, and at first he thought he had turned for nothing, for some ghost in his own brain.
But then his peripheral vision made out a shadow approaching the grave. As Girard watched it move into the open, it became more distinct. A man, not a woman. The man knelt by the fresh earth, staring at it for a long time. Then he lifted something -Girard couldn’t make out what and put it on the grave. He got up and strode away without looking back.
Girard recognized him then, by his walk. Garibaldi.
He almost went after him, to say hello, if nothing else, but somehow felt it would be inappropriate. There had been something solemn, almost sacred about Garibaldi’s movements, something inviolable.
Still, when Garibaldi was gone, Girard walked over to see what he had placed on the grave. When he saw it, he shook his head and chuckled softly. It was a wooden stake, pushed into the yellow clay as far as it would go.
“Amen,” Girard whispered. And, “Peace.”
Then he left the dead where they belonged. When he reached the street, he flipped his phone open and ordered flowers for his wife. As he walked to the hotel, he began humming to himself. The rain kept up, but it didn’t bother him in the slightest. There were worse things in life than a little ram.
THE END.
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