Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (5 page)

“No, actually, I don’t. You have a grudge against Bester. You think he let me live to deliver a lie, to lay a false trail. You seem pretty convinced of it, and you’re even implying I may have cooperated in the whole thing. You seem to have all of the answers, Mr. Garibaldi. So what do you want with me?”

Garibaldi scooted back on the desk and put his hands on his thighs.

“Well, I figure it this way. If you’re on the up-and- up, you may have it in for Bester almost as much as I do. He messed with your head and ruined the life you’d picked out for yourself. In that case, I can use you.

You were the last person known to have contact with him, and you’re a telepath. You might recognize his psychic imprint or whatever. Did I mention I don’t trust telepaths? I don’t. Especially not the ones in the Metasensory Division, which you aren’t, and that puts you a little ahead in my book. On the other hand, if you are one of Bester’s pals, or if he’s put some kinda sleeper program in you that the monitors didn’t catch, I’d rather have you right here where I can watch you.”

“Are you offering me a job, Mr. Garibaldi?”

“You catch on pretty fast, Thompson. I like that. Yeah, I want to offer you a job. And I want my own team to look you over-they won’t dissect you or anything, but I want you examined.”

Thompson shook his head, slowly.

“You’re a very confusing man, Mr. Garibaldi.”

“I try to keep it that way,” Garibaldi replied.

Bester watched his enemies gather, and smiled coldly to himself. This was where it ended, this ridiculous war. This was where he paid them back.

“Proud of yourself?” Bester jerked out his PPG and spun toward the voice.

“Byron! You’re…”

“Dead?”

The younger man’s eyes were contradictions. Sad, compassionate, but at the same time sharp and condemning. Bester hated them. He noticed, as always, the ghostly flames licking up around his one-time student.

“Truth doesn’t die, Bester.”

But Bester’s pounding heart was calming.

“You aren’t the truth,” he said.

“You’re just the memory of a ghost, an imprint in my brain.”

“Yes. When I died…”

“Killed yourself.”

“When I died, you reached out to me, to try to stop me. It was touching, in death, to know how much you cared. And it allowed me to leave you this little gift, this piece of me, like an angel on your shoulder, like the conscience you never had.”

“You always were self-important, Byron-but imagining yourself an angel? You started the war, set telepath to fighting telepath. You began the slaughter when you killed yourself, and neatly ducked out of responsibility at the same time. Coward.”

“You could have given us what we wanted. Freedom. Our own Homeworld.”

“Oh, yes, your little telepath’s paradise, your imaginary Nirvana where you would all live in peace and harmony with your chanting and your candles. A place where the mundane would never bother you, never become suspicious or worried about you. Your fantasy was the ultimate capitulation to the normals, Byron, the ultimate act of cowardice. Earth was our birthplace. It was always meant to be ours, one day. The normals have been trying to kill us from the beginning-from the first pogroms when our kind were discovered, to Edgars’ scheme a few years ago. Do you think they’d like anything better than to have us all in one place? Do you think they could tolerate the idea of a planet full of telepaths?”

“This is what I think,” Byron said.

“I think you did such terrible things in your life, in the name of the Corps, that you couldn’t see any other way without losing your mind. Now that I’m part of you, that’s clearer than ever. What was the girl’s name-Montoya? Your first love?”

“Leave her out of this.”

“But you loved her. I can see it in you, the space where love was, the fossil of it. And you turned her in.”

“She was going rogue. It was my duty. I’m not going to defend myself to you.”

Byron laughed.

“But I’m not me, am I? I’m you, or part of you. You said so yourself.”

He cocked his head.

“Why didn’t you ever have me removed? It would have been a simple matter.”

“Shut up.”

“Maybe you think you need me, since you have no heart of your own. To help you feel the guilt.”

“I feel no guilt. I only did what I had to do. You were the one who divided us, who made me…”

He broke off.

“Made you kill your own kind? The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. You always thought of us as your children. And yet you slaughtered telepaths, tortured them. You made the reeducation camps into killing fields…”

“You did that,” Bester said.

“Until you, I never understood how diseased the rogues had become. What you were planning would have destroyed us all. What you did accomplish will destroy us. It will be a slow death, by degrees. Psi Corps was always meant to be a tool for the normals, allowing them to control us.

I fought to take that tool and turn it against them, to put the Corps in control of telepaths. I succeeded, finally, and you chose just that moment to make your grand play, your idiotic attempt to create paradise, just like every other self-deluded messiah with a mindless following. You could never see the big picture, the reality, that the normals are always waiting, waiting for us to relax, until our guard is down. They fear us as they fear no alien race, because we are them, only better. The next step in evolution. And you wrecked it all, gave it all back to them. They’ve won, thanks to you.”

“Now who is a self-deluded messiah?”

“Do you know who backed your precious rebels after you died? Who funded them?”

“My love, Lyta.”

“Lyta. For all her power, she was as much a fool as you were. A child given too big a gun. No, the man behind the rogues was a mundane-Garibaldi. A teep-hating bigot who got his fortune from another teep-hating bigot. To see us destroy ourselves must have given him terrible pleasure. You asked why I keep this little part of you alive? This is why. So you can see what you have wrought.”

“So you can say I told you so.”

“Yes.”

“Petty”

“It’s all that’s left me. Everything I’ve ever worked for lies in ruins. A lifetime of accomplishment swept away. I always believed that if I had nothing else, I had my people, my telepaths. You took even that from me, Byron. Even that.”

“So lie down and die, then.”

“No. I’m not you. I am not a coward. I live with the consequences of my actions. And I live.”

“Well, then, by all means-let’s watch this.”

“No. This is a dream. I can end it.”

“No, you can’t. You know that. Not until it’s done.”

“Let me go, Byron.”

“I can be petty, too.”

He tried to turn away, but the scene just followed him.

It would have been the masterstroke. It would have ended the rebellion, brought the rogues to their knees. Two hundred of his finest, his most loyal…

He could still hear their screams, still feel the terror of their obliteration, the awful snuffing of their lives, their very souls.

“You ran away,” Byron said.

“You found out, seconds before, and you ran away. You saved your own skin and leave your men die.”

“They were going to die anyway. There was nothing I could do.”

“And you call me a coward.”

“Shut up.”

“Listen to them, Bester.”

“Shut up!”

“Listen.”

Byron’s eyes were holes, holes in a skull, and the flames were everywhere. Byron was Satan, surrounded by damned souls.

“Listen!”

Byron was Bester, the cold face in the mirror, smiling without humor.

“Shut up!”

Then he awoke, with someone trying to kill him.

Chapter 4

Old instincts sent his hand darting for a PPG that wasn’t there, but even older ones collected a mental assault with lightning speed. Sometimes the space between two breaths meant life and death. In this case, it was fortunate that between that first waking gasp and the exhalation, he realized he wasn’t under attack at all, that it was Louise standing over him, a look of concern fading from her face like Martian frost touched by first light.

“Monsieur Kaufman? Are you okay?”

For an instant he wondered who she was talking to, but then everything snapped into focus. Claude Kaufman. That was the name he had given.

“What are you doing in my room?” he asked.

“First of all, it is my room-you merely rent it. In the second place, I heard you in here shouting as if you had seen a Drakh. I thought you were in trouble-now I see it must have merely been a bad dream.”

“Yes,” Bester confirmed.

“A bad dream. I’m sorry, it was just confusing, to wake and find you there, especially after that nightmare.”

“You have many nightmares?”

“I have my share.”

“My father used to have nightmares,” she said.

“About the war. The Earth-Minbari War.”

“It’s not the sort of thing you forget, war,” Bester said, dryly.

“No. I suppose it isn’t.”

He noticed lances of pale gold light shining through holes in the curtains, turning dust motes into tiny, furious suns.

“What time is it?”

“Almost eleven o’clock.”

“I’ve missed breakfast, then, haven’t I?”

Her expression softened a bit.

“I think I can find something for you, if you want to come down.”

“I will, then. Thank you.”

He hesitated an instant.

“Thank you for your concern.”

“It is nothing,” she replied.

“Imagine the trouble I’d have if someone died in one of my rooms!”

“Ah, yes. Coroner’s inquest, what to do with the body, cleaning up the mess. You have a way of making a man feel special, Ms…”

“Bouet,” she said, after a second’s hesitation.

He thought he caught another name, floating on her surface thoughts. Colis? A great deal of pain associated with that name. A name that was also a wound. Much like his own.

“Where are you going?” Louise asked him after breakfast, as he made his way toward the front door.

“Just walking,” he replied.

“I haven’t been in Paris for a long time. I’d like to see it again.”

“How long?”

“More than twenty years.”

“Oh. Does it seem to have changed, to you?”

“That’s what I want to find out.”

She hesitated.

“Are you going anywhere in particular?” she asked.

“No. Why-do you need me to pick up something?”

“No, but I was going to the market this morning, and to a shop across town. I could use some help carrying things, if you have nothing better to do.”

Bester studied her for a moment. Her face was neutral, but beneath he could sense that she felt sorry for him. She thought he was a lonely old man. Well, so he was, but the pity galled him. Still, there was also an undercurrent of truth. She wasn’t lying, she could use help carrying groceries.

“Who will mind the hotel?”

“Francis-an employee of mine-will be by shortly, if you can wait.”

“I’m in no hurry,” Bester replied.

As promised, Francis - a gangly, teenaged boy with olive skin and black hair-arrived a few moments later, and Bester and Louise started out. She wore a checked blue-and-black skirt, ankle length, and a navy sweater over a white cotton shirt.

He noticed, for the first time, that she was a little shorter than he. He was at first distracted by the strained silence between them, but as they both became more comfortable with the fact that they weren’t going to chat, he relaxed, and was surprised to find that, despite the events of the evening before and the ensuing dream, his sense of vitality had returned.

It didn’t come so much from within as from without, from the bustling throngs they moved through. The removal of the Drakh plague had been a global reprieve from the gallows, and like a condemned man suddenly freed, humanity was full of joie de vivre, bursting with a sort of energy that he simply did not remember from his Earth-bound childhood or any subsequent visit. And Louise was part of it.

Oh, she was reserved, cautious, but as they walked along he felt the crackle of joy in her step, the pleasure she took in the air, the feel of the breeze, the scent wafting from a patisserie as they walked by. He tried not to listen, but her voice was as compelling as the city itself, not because it was simple, or pure, but because it was alloyed. It was the joy of someone who had known sorrow, but whose heart still worked.

They walked up the hill to the Sacre Coeur. As they reached the top, he noticed Louise was watching him, an odd expression on her face.

“A bit out of my way,” Louise admitted, “but if you’d like to play the tourist…”

She shrugged. He sensed that she felt she had been rude to him, and wanted to make it up. Pity, again.

“No need for that,” Bester said.

“We can just walk where you are going.”

As they crossed the sightseer-packed square, a man-a street artist-practically leapt in front of him, sketchbook in hand.

“You have an interesting face,” he said.

“Surely you want a souvenir to remind you of your visit here.”

He was already sketching, his hand describing a series of arcs with his charcoal.

“Not today,” Bester replied, and moved on.

“No, no, wait. You don’t know how cheap this will be, practically nothing. And when you see how I have captured you…”

He stopped, noticed Louise.

“Oh, but of course-you would rather have a sketch of the lady?”

“No, of neither,” Bester replied, still walking.

The man followed, his hand moving ceaselessly.

“You’ll thank me when I am done, monsieur, do not doubt it.”

Bester wondered if he shouldn’t give the fellow a little mental push. A sudden fear, nausea. He decided against it. Telepaths still had to be registered, and the last thing he wanted was to call that sort of attention to himself. He glanced at his naked hands ruefully. There had been a time when the mere sight of him and his gloves would spare him this sort of harassment.

“Look, he isn’t going to pay you,” Louise told the man.

“We aren’t tourists, and we know this game.”