Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (30 page)

Now, suddenly, you’ve decided that maybe Psi Corps wasn’t such a good idea, and you want to sweep it all under the rug. You want to pretend it just went bad, somehow, and that it was my fault. You also know that isn’t true.

You blame me for continuing to fight the war that started in 2115? You blame me for defending my people? I suppose you do. Psi Corps was developed to keep telepaths in their place. An act of war, of suppression. You want to know who the real telepathic Resistance was? It was us. Protecting ourselves against you. Sure, along the way we protected you, too, whether you knew it or not, and more than you will ever know.

But in the end, all of us inside knew what was coming. That one day some bright boy would hit upon the ”final solution” for the ”telepath problem”, and there we would be, all caged up and ready for the gas. Only we didn’t play the game that way.

Now you’re upset. Who can blame you? Hitler would have been upset, too, if the Jews in Warsaw had turned out to be armed to the teeth and ready to fight.”

“Oh, come on”

“No, Senator. You come on. You want to pretend a century and a half of continual violence against telepaths never existed? Fine. You want to pretend that Psi Corps wasn’t created by the EA Senate? Fine. You want to silence me, lock me away, maybe even kill me? Well and good. But you know the truth. In your hearts, all of you do. This isn’t over. You’ve divided and conquered, scattered my people. And yet, they still wear the badges, don’t they? They still have to report to be examined, don’t they? They’re still registered at birth, marked more certainly and permanently than anyone who ever wore an armband with a star-because that, at least, you could take off.

In fact, the only thing that has changed is that you’ve taken away our ability to fight back, when the time comes. And, boys and girls, the time is coming. All of your wishing and hoping and praying won’t stop it. The mass of humanity won’t tolerate our existence. Tomorrow, in ten years, in fifty - it’s coming, and this playacting, my trial, its context will become abundantly clear.

So, yes, I have killed, like any good warrior. I have fought the good fight, and I lost. I regret nothing. I would change nothing in my power to change, I would…”

His tongue stumbled. As he spoke, he had been sweeping his gaze over the crowd, and from camera to camera. He wanted every single person watching to know he was speaking to them, personally. To let them know they all shared the blame. And there, six rows back, toward the center… Louise, staring at him with those eyes he knew so well, a faint wrinkle in that forehead he had kissed. Her hair-he could almost smell it, feel it between his fingers. I regret nothing. She rebuked him, by her mere presence, made him the liar. For in her eyes, there was nothing about him. No recognition, no love, only faint puzzlement, perhaps a hint of revulsion. Nothing.

If he hadn’t cut her up, she would love him still, and her eyes would be an anchor, her words a safe harbor, even in the midst of all of this.

He suddenly felt very old, and very tired, and very, very alone. He had killed-the one person in the universe who might have spoken for him. For that, if for no other crime, he deserved whatever came.

“Mr. Bester? Are you through?”

Louise realized he was looking at her, and her brow creased angrily. Even if she didn’t remember him, she knew what he had done to her. Even if he could start over, she wouldn’t love him again.

“Mr. Bester?”

“I’ve said everything I’m going to say,” he murmured.

“You’ll do what you want anyway. I’m through. I’m through.”

Chapter 16

In his dreams he heard the singing mind of Paris. Sometimes Geneva, sometimes Rome, or Olympus Mons or Brasilia-but mostly, usually, Paris. In his dreams, he sat watching the sky wrap up in watercolor shrouds as it died for the evening. He sipped coffee and thought about how much of his life lay ahead, how many possibilities.

Or sometimes, in his dream, he sat with Louise, thinking how much of his life was gone, but how good the rest of it would be. And still Paris sang like an immense choir, with Louise the featured soloist, the brightest, loveliest voice among them. He awoke knowing that it was the city and its sighing mind he had truly loved, and Louise, who represented it, personified it. But both were gone now, forever. In dreams, in dreams. He preferred them. Awake, the world was dead, a cave of bone. But wake he must, at times. He rose that morning as he did every morning, splashed water in his face, went to the window, and looked out upon his childhood. Teeptown.

In the distance, he could just make out what had once been the cadre houses. Just below him, clearly visible, was the quad common with its statue of William Karges, which he and his friends had called the “Grabber.”

Of course, the Grabber was no longer grabbing. There was nothing left of him but a pedestal and part of one leg. The statue of Karges had been blown up, along with much of the quad, during the wars. Just as well.

Karges had been a secret telepath who had saved President Robinson’s life at the cost of his own. When Bester had been little, they had taught him that Psi Corps had been created by Robinson to honor that sacrifice. That wasn’t true-the Corps had existed in essence, if not in name, for decades. It had never been one of the lies he liked-it suggested too much that only by sacrifice did telepaths prove they had the right to exist.

So good-bye, Grabber, and good riddance.

They had tried to shut Teeptown down, as they had the Corps, but it hadn’t quite worked out. The scores of private academies that had sprung up to instruct young telepaths hadn’t worked very well, just as he had predicted they wouldn’t. Over the years, he had watched the Psionic Monitoring Commission gradually reimplement almost all of the old Corps institutions, though in darling new baby-doll clothes.

Once again Teeptown was a campus, a center of telepath life and activity. Many older teeps never left their quarters there-life among normals had proved too hard, too uncertain. And so Teeptown remained a ghetto. Again, as he had predicted. It gave him some small comfort, to be right. It gave him little, though, to know that this maximum security facility was his own creation. He had built it to hold telepaths-and so it did. War criminals.

He heard footsteps in the corridor.

“Good morning, James,” he said.

“Morning Mr. Bester,” James said, in his faintly mocking tone.

“How’re the memoirs coming?”

Bester glanced over at the simple AI on his bed.

“Pretty well,” he said.

“I have some news for you.”

“Oh?”

“Olean passed last night.”

Bester absorbed that silently for a moment.

“How did he manage to kill himself?” he said at last.

“It was pretty clever, but I can’t tell you, of course. You might imitate him.”

“I’m not going to kill myself. I won’t give you the satisfaction.”

James, the jailer, shook his head.

“I get no satisfaction from it. I think you know that.”

“The world, then. They’d love it. It’s what they want. Life sentence-absurd. I was sentenced to death, death by suicide. I just refuse to carry out the sentence.”

James hesitated.

“You may be right, there. But you condemned thousands of teeps to the same fate-you made them take sleepers.”

“I never did that and you know it. I enforced the law, I didn’t write it.”

“You understand me, then, why I have to give you this.”

He indicated a small gun-shaped device at his belt.

“Skip it this week. Just once.”

“I can’t.”

“Just once. You know I can’t escape. I just want to feel again.”

“So did Olean, and Brewster, and Tuan.”

“Once. One week.”

James shook his head.

“If it were up to me…”

“It is up to you,” Bester said, gritting his teeth.

“Be a good boy and take your medicine, Mr. Bester.”

And so he did, stood still while the needle pricked his arm and the sleepers went in, as they had for ten years now. He barely felt the stupid feeling spread. He had never had the extreme reaction to the sleepers that some did - the listlessness, the deeply drugged feeling. No, they left his mind pretty much intact, so he could be acutely aware of how crippled he was.

James left, and Bester fought the gloom by working on his memoirs. He was nearly done with them, had been nearly done with them for years. He just kept fiddling. He liked to fiddle with his history-it was the only thing he still had control of, his version of things. Let the historians wrangle endlessly about what was true and what wasn’t. He knew, and they didn’t, and it was the only power he still had.

Well, that and the power of his predictions, of his insights. Those would validate him, one day.

Two days later, a week from Birthday, he got an early present. The vidcom on the ceiling came on, unannounced. It did that rather rarely-he could request programming and sometimes get it, but it usually took awhile. When it came on of its own accord, it usually meant bad news, some new announcement from the prison director.

This time, however, as he watched and listened, a ghost of his old smile returned to his face. The smile broadened when he understood that most everyone else in the world was starting to weep, or denying reality, or cursing softly. They would look back on this day and everyone would remember where they were, what they were doing. Garibaldi, for instance, probably was not taking it well.

Yes, they would all remember where they were when Sheridan died.

Of course, Bester would-how could he forget?

“Let me see,” he imagined himself telling someone.

“That day I must have been-why, yes, I was in prison…”

Sheridan had been no friend of Bester’s and he’d been a hypocrite besides. They said the best revenge was living well; it wasn’t. It was much simpler than that. It was seeing your enemies die. Now if he could just outlive Garibaldi, then even this life would have a certain sweetness. He listened intently, in the hopes that Garibaldi had been involved and perhaps had died as well. No such luck. Ah, well, he would settle for Sheridan for the moment.

They were putting up a new statue where the Grabber had once stood. At first Bester thought they were clearing away the pedestal and its pitiful half-leg altogether, but they were just cleaning it off for a new occupant.

This interested him, as nothing had for some time. He entertained himself by speculating who it might be. Lyta? Byron? More likely Byron-he had been the martyr, the one who had acquired everyone’s sympathies. Lyta had led them, too, but she had been frightening even to her allies. Still, it was she who had struck the real blows, wasn’t it? Ultimately, Byron had been a coward.

A few days later he awoke to find a crowd gathered, and the statue in place, covered by a tarp. He put his face against the monomolecular glass, his heart working oddly in his chest. Oh, come now, he thought to himself, disgustedly. You don’t really care that much.

But he did, somehow. The symbol that the slowly reforming Corps chose for itself would tell him much about its character, about its leaders. Would they choose the warrior queen, the mystic martyr-or perhaps even himself, a sort of dark reminder of what not to become?

He watched the crowd, wishing he could p ‘hear them. He had heard that when a normal lost a sense-vision, for instance-their other senses sharpened, to take up the slack. Not so with telepathy. His other senses were only fading. Not that any normal sense could begin to replace his birthright.

Speeches began, but he couldn’t hear them. The crowd applauded-he couldn’t hear that, either.

He hit his call button. After a long delay, James answered.

“Yeah?”

“I wonder if I could get the audio for the ceremony outside.”

“The dedication? Sure. Don’t see as how that would hurt anything.”

A moment later the sound cut in. The speaker was winding up

“…dark days, but they represented hope, created it, held it aloft like a candle. It was their memory that carried us all through to the liberation, their sacrifice that represents the best in us.”

Bester nodded sullenly. He thought it had looked like two statues. Byron and Lyta, then.

“And so, all of you, it’s my great honor to present our ancestors. Not in fact-for their only child, their great hope, vanished or was killed in the vicious raid on their hidden camp. But spiritually, and morally…”

The speaker paused.

“Those of us who grew up in the Corps were taught that the Corps was our mother, and our father. But if we must look to a common, spiritual mother and father, let us look to those who represented freedom, not oppression. Tolerance, not intolerance. Hope of liberty, not the despair of repression.

“My friends, my kith, my kin, I give you Matthew, Fiona, and Stephen Dexter.”

The shroud came off. Time slipped for Bester, a weird plummet between heartbeats.

He sat in a tree, at the age of six, watching the stars, searching for the faces of his parents. Sometimes he could see a hint of them, of his mother’s eyes, a suggestion of auburn hair, an echo of her voice.

He was older, on Mars. The oldest and most successful of all the rogues, Stephen Walters, lay crushed against a bulkhead, one leg bent under him in a very strange way, one arm missing at the elbow. He still had his mask on, but Bester had the distinct impression the eyes behind it were open.

I know you, Walters psied.

The hairs on the back of Bester’s neck stood up.

I was in New Zealand, Bester replied.

I tracked you here.

No. Before that. I know you. Oh, God in heaven. It’s my fault. Fiona, Matthew, forgive-It paralyzed Bester.

The sense of familiarity was like a drug. It wasn’t pleasant, it was horrible, but he needed it somehow. Somehow-somehow it was a piece of him that was missing.

What are you talking about?

I know the feel of you. I saw you born - after all I had done, after all the blood on my hands, but they let me watch you come into the world, and you were so beautiful I cried. You were our hope, our dream…