Fire Pattern

CHAPTER 8

The day which had begun with the near-fatal accident had been a long and tiring one, and yet at the end of it Jerome found himself unable to sleep.

It might have helped had he been able to darken his bedchamber completely, but some illumination was spilling into it from the ceiling globe in his other room—and Dorrinian light fixtures could not be extinguished. Jerome had at first been surprised by that feature, believing it to represent a considerable waste of power, then he had discovered there were no Earth-style central generating stations in Cuthtranel. The globes continuously emitted light because psi engineering had modified their molecular structure. Using the same techniques, it would have been possible to make them automatically darken themselves at ‘night’, but the Dorrinians had phobias about darkness as well as about vacuum. The tunnel-streets of the capital—many of them as old as the pyramids—and all its dwellings were permanently washed by a chill white radiance which withered Jerome’s spirit.

It would also have made sleep easier if he had been able to lie in silence, but there were no doors to serve as barriers against sound. The citizens of Cuthtranel disliked being pent up any more than the environment dictated, and their sole concessions to privacy—even for toilets and bedrooms—were blind entrances. Lying restlessly on his couch, Jerome could hear the life of the Precinct going on all around him, an unending murmur of voices punctuated by occasional laughs or distant shouts. At intervals there would be unidentifiable low-frequency sounds, rumbles and strange mechanical groans, which emanated from the heart of the city and rolled outwards through its networks of shafts and galleries.

On several occasions, soon after his translation, Jerome had walked to the central sector of Cuthtranel, motivated by curiosity and a desire to escape the confinement of the Precinct’s narrow tunnels. There were no restrictions on his movements, and on his rest days he was allowed to wander at will through the huge caverns which corresponded to public squares or which housed air, water and protein production plants. Had the circumstances been different, had the old Rayner Jerome been granted a miracle holiday on Mercury, he would have found a fascinating field of study in the underground city and all the unfamiliar technologies which kept it alive. But too much had happened. His personality had been bludgeoned by monstrous events, and he was cowed and utterly depressed by the sight of thousands of human beings reduced to the scale of termites, going about their incomprehensible lives in a sunless warren. He had soon retreated to the Precinct, where he could at least have the thin comfort of hearing his own language spoken.

The dormitory section of the Precinct consisted of a main corridor, known simply as the Road, with eight numbered offshoots which were referred to as Streets. In the past the area had housed transplanted Terrans of many nationalities, but now an overwhelming proportion were from North America, Britain and Western Europe—a reflection of the fact that as their great project neared its climax the Dorrinians were concentrating their attention on the US space programme and the CryoCare organization. Jerome had been able to congratulate himself, belatedly, on having noticed the preponderance of Occidentals in the recent history of SHC during his first obsessive study of the subject. In retrospect he could see that he had been too quick to dismiss the imbalance in the statistics, but there was little ground for reproach. Although the clue had been clearly visible, nobody could possibly have guessed the fantastic truth lying behind it.

Looking back over the events of the day while he courted sleep, Jerome decided that it was counterproductive to keep on antagonizing the maintenance supervisor. The reason the work shift had been extended was that Glevdane had insisted on adjusting the door of Lock 16 and then on checking air valves all the way out to the far end of the tunnel. It could have been his natural reaction to the Birkett incident, but Jerome guessed the supervisor had been punishing him for continuing to be outspoken about the weaknesses of some branches of Dorrinian engineering.

The difficulties with the tunnel, Jerome had pointed out, sprang from flaws in the basic design concept. With a reliable tunnel structure there would have been no need for people in it to wear vacuum suits. Conversely, given good suits there would have been no need for the tunnel to be pressurized in the first place, and most of its maintenance problems would never have arisen.

His arguments had been countered every time by the simple statement that the system had been conceived by Guardians.

Jerome pondered tiredly on that aspect of what he was beginning to see as the typical Dorrinian mentality. He had already noted their unconscious ruthlessness as regards anything connected with the racial goal of transporting the Thabbren to Earth, and it seemed to him that Glevdane’s attitude reflected the same totalitarian principles. Poor engineering was good engineering, provided the Guardians said so—a philosophy which echoed that of Earth-based regimes in which the policies of the state had been known to take precedence over scientific truth. What was it that Pirt Sull Conforden had said during his placement interview?

An overt Dorrinian presence on Earth will have tremendous potential for good.

At the time—with his mind overwhelmed by the remorseless flood of new concepts—Jerome had been inclined to accept the statement, but now…He tried to look into the future, to visualize a Dorrinian state newly created on Earth. Where would its territories be? And did Conforden really believe that the factious nations of the third planet would welcome an alien newcomer in their midst? Was there a man, woman or child anywhere on Earth who would not feel revulsion, fear and loathing at the spectacle of four thousand revived corpses emerging from their icy stronghold to make demands on the world’s fading resources?

In his weariness Jerome found the whole complex scenario too difficult to contain. On returning from work he had eaten lightly in one of the communal refectories and had gone straight to his chambers in Street Five. Art Starzynski, now a bushy-haired, doe-eyed man of about forty, had invited him to play chess, but he had refused on the grounds of his tiredness.

Starzynski had accepted his new incarnation with a great deal of stoicism, claiming that the extra decades on Mercury more than compensated for the loss of a matter of weeks on Earth, but he shared Birkett’s fondness for nostalgia sessions and used chess games as occasions for reminiscing about Whiteford. Recreation of former lives was an almost universal pastime in the Precinct. In one form of the pursuit, a group who had common knowledge of a place on Earth would spend many hours drawing a wall-sized picture of it, filling in a wealth of detail, arguing pleasurably over the exact wording of a store sign or the shape of a light pole.

It was an activity which Jerome studiously avoided. He found his existence in the grey tunnels of Cuthtranel sufficiently intolerable without make-believe visits to Earth and subsequent all-too-real returns to Mercury. Similarly, he had remained aloof from all of the community activities organized under the leadership of Mel Zednik, Joe Thwaite and their committees.

The only way you’ll get my support, he had once told them, is by forming an escape committee.

His instinctive rationale was that allowing himself to be integrated with the community life of the Precinct would mean he was accepting his lot and in some way forfeiting his right to walk free on Earth. And that could never be countenanced—not even symbolically.

Conforden had spoken of the possibility of the general migration beginning after ten years. That estimate seemed wildly optimistic to Jerome, but it was a message of hope in that a term had been placed on his imprisonment, and it had given him a clear sense of purpose which was infinitely more sustaining than retrospection.

Working to the limits of his endurance had a valuable spin-off in that it usually enabled him to achieve sleep within minutes of lying down, but on this particular occasion the magic was proving ineffective. He knew from experience that it was disastrous to become irritated or to start pursuing sleep like a hunter. The trick was to relax and rid himself of all tensions, trusting nature to take its course. Sex was the classical antidote to insomnia—unhurried, peaceful and thorough love-making with a familiar partner—but Donna had told him she had other commitments for the night.

Jerome swore at himself for having let his thoughts turn in her direction, thus adding to his difficulties. She was reticent about her true age, but he suspected she had been perhaps sixty at the time of her transplantation. Her dedication to getting full value out of the lush young body she had inherited from a Dorrinian supertelepath seemed obsessive to him at times, but on this night he would have been happy to give her his full co-operation.

You’re going about this the wrong way, he told himself. If you can’t stop thinking, try to regard that as a benefit. Capitalize on the excess mental energy. Try to penetrate the future…

The Thabbren was due to be placed on the surface in twenty-two days’ time, and soon after that the Quicksilver would reach Mercury and manoeuvre into a polar orbit. It gave Jerome a curious poignant thrill to visualize the tiny shell of metal which at that very moment was slowly overtaking Mercury as it hurtled around the Sun.

The three men on board had taken many weeks to accomplish the journey he had completed between heartbeats, and for one of them it was actually a return trip. Astronaut Charles Baumanis, as he was known on Earth, was a Dorrinian supertelepath who had made the mental transfer twelve years ago. After touchdown, and while his two companions were concentrating their attention on the supposed fragment of an interstellar ship, he would stray a short distance to where the Thabbren was waiting and surreptitiously put it in his pocket. Few people apart from Guardians had ever seen the repository of the Four Thousand, but Jerome had been told that it resembled a small opal. It was a paradox of the Dorrinian mind that their psychic engineering talents enabled them to perform the incredible feat of storing four thousand human personalities within the molecules of a single crystal, while at the same time they turned out large-scale artifacts which could have been bettered by Henry Ford.

The lenticular jewel of the Thabbren had been set in a ring of platinum so that the Dorrinian, Rithan Tell Marmorc, would be able to transport it inconspicuously to the CryoCare base. Jerome could picture the projected train of events up to that point, but his imagination baulked at trying to encompass what would follow…

“May I come in?” The woman who spoke was standing in the doorless arch of the entrance to his room.

“Why so formal all of a sudden?” Jerome raised himself on one elbow, startled but relieved that Donna had changed her plans, then saw that the silhouette in the doorway was of a young woman in Dorrinian dress. “I…Do I know you?”

“We met before—once. My name is Avlan Fell Commelva.” The woman advanced to the side of his couch and stood looking down at him. Her face would probably have been pretty in the harsh light of the corridors, and in the subdued illumination of the bedchamber it had the inhuman beauty of an Ancient Egyptian princess. The expression was enigmatic, a blend of hunger and disdain.

“I’m afraid I don’t remember,” Jerome said, drawing himself up to a sitting position from which he could get a better look at his visitor. The ribbon blouses worn by Dorrinians of both sexes were without practical function, no covering being necessary in the hothouse conditions of Cuthtranel, and in this case the blue-grey strips had parted to reveal the woman’s breasts. Jerome felt organic switches click all through his body as he saw that her nipples were erect.

“I was in the recovery room when you transferred,” the woman said.

Jerome called up a memory image of his first moments on Mercury, again saw a woman covering her face, being led away in obvious distress. “I think I understand.”

“I’ve been avoiding you ever since.” The woman’s voice was low and intense. “I loved Orkra Blamene—and I hated you for invading his body.”

“I didn’t have much choice in the matter.”

“That goes without saying. I was out of my mind.” Avian slowly extended one hand and touched Jerome’s face, tentatively, as though half-expecting her fingers to encounter nothingness. “I couldn’t bear to think about Orkra at first, then I began to feel that I would be taking part in his murder if I denied he had ever existed. I’m learning to enjoy my memories of him, and I want to enjoy them to the full—but it isn’t fair to you.”

“The honesty makes it fair,” Jerome said, lying back on the couch. “Well…more fair than anything else that has happened to me recently.”

“Thank you.” Avlan paused in the act of unfastening her skirt. “I might call you Orkra.”

Jerome thought about the wife who had been part of another and far-off existence. “That’s all right—I might get your name wrong as well.”