The Administration Series (77 page)

It was, technically, sexual harassment, and he was almost tempted to make a complaint, if he could have stomached the utter humiliation. But Carnac got whatever he wanted from management, and since the fucking was the most bearable part of the whole experience, he probably ought not to tempt fate. At least the man had been quiet now for what? — he managed to check his watch discreetly — for ten blessed minutes.

This was the one kind of fucking which
did
shut him up. He'd never met anyone else who could talk so much during sex. It was frankly off-putting, trying to fuck someone to the accompaniment of musings on proximal and distal causation. Warrick was hardly a model of reticence, but at least when he managed anything more coherent than 'Christ, yes, fuck me harder', it was still closely connected
to
fucking. He didn't start reanalysing the hierarchical structure of I&I.

Now he'd started thinking about fucking Warrick — Warrick begging for him, Warrick pulling on chains and calling his name, Warrick's hair smelling of fresh sweat — and that was sending quite the wrong kind of signals to his cock. Desperately, he tried to force his mind back onto something dull, to buy a few more minutes' peace and quiet. Too late. He managed to hold back for just a few seconds, clenching his fists against the wall. Then he was coming, closing his eyes and saying Warrick's name, in the vain hope that Carnac would care enough to take offence and get a new senior para assigned.

He didn't, of course. He just stood up, wiping his mouth fastidiously and smiling, as Toreth tried to get his breathing back under control and refasten his clothes. There were moments, like now, when he was sure Carnac knew exactly how much Toreth detested him and was merely conducting a twisted experiment into how much he was willing to take for the sake of his CV before he told Carnac to go fuck himself.

Toreth closed his eyes again, imagining how very satisfying that would be. Especially if he added a succinct evaluation of Carnac's sexual prowess, or lack of it.

A delicate cough interrupted the happy fantasy. Opening his eyes, he found Carnac regarding him through a veil of yard-long lashes, which had once, very briefly, been attractive. As usual, he had the unnerving feeling that Carnac knew exactly what Toreth was thinking.

"Shall we get back to work?" Carnac said. No — purred. The man actually purred.

Never, in his entire life, had Toreth wanted to finish an assignment as badly as he did this one.

Carnac loathed the assignment. He'd known that he would even before he'd been told what it was. It had been no more than the expected punishment for turning in the report he had been asked to make on his previous job, rather than the one they had wanted to read. Some things he wouldn't stoop to, though, and falsifying his conclusions was one of them. He might, as he often told himself, be prostituting his talents for the unappreciative Administration, but at least he wasn't faking the orgasms.

Scant comfort at the moment when he was here, at the Investigation and Interrogation Division, assessing the probabilities of the employees becoming infected by the anti-Administration sentiments they heard during their working day.

He hated the place, he hated the people, and most of all he hated the vindictive wasting of his time.

Forcing him to come here was the beginning of the persecution. He could have compiled the report without ever leaving Strasbourg. Predictive analyses of the social and psychological dynamics of large organisations were his bread and butter. From long-term group behaviours down to shorter-term individual futures, he could have dissected I&I no less effectively from the comfort of his office at the Socioanalysis Division.

There was little to no chance of any problems at I&I. The staff, at least those who lay within his remit, were a variety of charming psychological aberrations that the Administration in its boundless wisdom had carefully channelled into the Division. Certainly none of them were ever likely to be stricken by a sudden fit of conscience over the work they did; anyone who might actually possess the requisite emotional development had been weeded out during the rigorous training.

The real danger of subversion lay with the admins and other support staff, who were somewhat closer to normal human beings. However, they had been excluded from his investigation, a move which, he suspected, had been designed purely to layer the icing of pointlessness thickly onto the cake of boredom.

A single day's visit would have been more than enough to sample the uniquely unpleasent atmosphere created by placing so many socially-functional personality disorders in such close proximity. The only entertainment he could expect for the duration was whatever he could make for himself.

When Carnac began an assignment that mandated actual contact with the subjects — always a bad start in his experience — he made it one of his first tasks to have a personal liaison assigned to him. Someone with a reasonable degree of seniority, who would be a direct link into the people under study.

If the assignment mattered or was, God forbid, challenging, he would take care to choose a liaison who would provide the greatest amount of information and insight, and be most useful in smoothing the course of the investigation. If, like this current task, it was a piece of time-wasting nonsense dictated by internal politics, he picked them on looks and orientation.

If he had to be bored, his reasoning went, he might as well at least enjoy some non-intellectual stimulation.

Carnac flirted with even-handed enthusiasm, but he fucked, and was fucked by, men. For preference, by attractive, well-built men with no desire to attempt any kind of intellectual relationship with him, which would only be profoundly unsatisfying for both parties. Val Toreth had been a natural choice on those grounds, and had proved more or less amenable to the physical requirements of his temporary role. He had also proved surprisingly interesting, or at least mildly unusual.

On assignments like this one, Carnac was used to being treated as something made up of five parts CV points, four parts freak and, if he was especially lucky, one part human being. It didn't bother him any more, except when people made painfully inept attempts to cover it up and pretend that they liked him. He knew that he wasn't naturally likeable — physically attractive, perhaps, but not likeable — and he'd long ago given up attempting to pretend to be anything other than what he was, unless being liked was required. That kind of game-playing interfered with his work, and it took up energy better used elsewhere.

Toreth didn't like him, and he didn't pretend to. He had been willing enough to return his interest at first meeting, probably out of curiosity, and to take up Carnac's offer of a drink, a meal and, subsequently, an hour or two in his hotel room. The next day, though, when Tillotson had accepted without question the request for Toreth's more official assignation, the para-investigator had been thoroughly disgusted by the turn of events and hadn't even attempted to hide it.

That was partly Tillotson's fault, of course. It had been painful to watch him antagonising Toreth further with every word. Whatever his administrative talents, staff management did not number among them. Eventually, he'd asked Carnac to leave them alone, but Carnac could easily imagine the rest of the conversation, complete with heavy-handed threats as to what would happen if the unwelcome visitor wasn't kept happy. By the time he'd seen Toreth again, the man had been positively incandescent.

Fortunately, the change of general attitude hadn't affected Toreth's willingness to participate in the less official parts of his assignment; the air of sullen resentment with which he complied with Carnac's requests had its own subtle charm. And as a liaison, Toreth had additional redeeming qualities.

For one thing, he generally stayed silent unless spoken to. When addressed directly, he gave a direct and useful response, and shut up again. This allowed Carnac to continue his own train of thought with minimum interruptions — most other people's idea of conversation bored him terribly. For another thing, he couldn't recall Toreth asking him a single personal question, or even a question about his job as a socioanalyst. On the occasions when he said anything spontaneously, it was work-related, intelligent and relevant. Years of answering moronic enquiries for the thousandth time made this a novel and restful experience.

In another division, his first thought would have been to put his silence down to the man's general dislike of him. However, here in I&I, the explanation was obvious: Toreth simply didn't care. He had no interest in other people's lives, unless he was torturing the information out of them, or hunting for clues or had some other practical use for the data. His psych file described excellent observational skills and memory for details, both material and psychological, and Carnac duly noted the man's need to categorise and gain control over his environment. People as people, though, didn't matter to Toreth. In fact, they barely even existed as anything other than problems or toys. He appeared at first glance to be a classic, and therefore rather dull, result of I&I's policy of recruitment from the tail end of the human bell curve.

Carnac had held that opinion for a day or so until he had, quite by chance, overheard Toreth and Sara talking. It had only been for a few minutes, but it had demonstrated to his satisfaction that to Toreth, Sara was, for want of a better word, 'real'. To a trained observer, the subtle differences in their interaction stood out starkly.

In another situation, Carnac wouldn't even have consciously noted the existence of a commonplace friendship. Here it had broken his model of Toreth, and that was enough to pique his interest.

His first thought had been, why her? Sara herself was nothing special, no more nor less than what she appeared to be. Indeed, whatever interest she held came from the fact that she was so straightforward, a trait he rarely encountered, especially within Administration departments. He marked it as a possible contributing factor to Toreth's attitude towards her.

Suitably charmed, Sara had proved to be a bountiful source of information about Toreth. Carnac had been intrigued to discover the existence of someone referred to by Sara as Toreth's 'regular fuck' (did that make Carnac himself an irregular fuck?), whom he noted as a second potentially real person in Toreth's life. When he discovered this person had held the position for approximately eighteen months, his interest had been sharpened again. Not that the man was exactly a scintillating web of complexity, but he was a mildly intriguing aberration.

So, to occupy his copious free time in this mind-numbing assignment, Carnac had decided to see what it took to make oneself real to a personality-disordered para-investigator. Or at least more real than the general masses.

His own job was, in some aspects, not so very different from the interrogation part of Toreth's, distasteful as the thought was. He sat in his spacious office and wrote his reports, while Toreth worked here, in this awful place with its windowless rooms and hospital smell. They were both manipulators, though, persuading people to do things they may not want to, but couldn't help: Carnac directing organisations with his delicate, subtle alterations of environments and psychological pressures, Toreth focusing on the individual, using his drugs and nerve induction equipment.

It gave them something in common, even if Toreth was unlikely to see the similarities, and it would be interesting to see if the parallels might be turned into an emotional connection of some kind. Considering the time available, he had set himself the modest goal of three or more personal conversations, or an invitation to the man's flat. He would award himself a bonus prize for an offer of an introduction to the regular fuck, who sounded rather interesting in his own right.

Doctor Keir Warrick. He'd met someone of that name years ago at the Data Division Encryption Unit, during one of his first assignments. At the time, the man had been a humble Administration researcher, although even then he had impressed Carnac as someone with
potential
. It was rare enough to meet an original mind, or at least a mind capable of the occasional original thought.

If his old acquaintance was indeed Toreth's regular fuck, it would be a coincidence, but coincidences happened all the time. Only the general mass of humanity, pathetically incapable of dealing with even the simplest probabilistic concepts, would read anything into it. The odds were very high that it was the same man, given the details he had obtained from Sara.

It would be interesting to see how Keir's potential had unfolded, or if, like so many other people Carnac had met, it had been eradicated by the grind of daily life. In this case, the latter seemed unlikely, given his achievements. The concept of computer-simulated realities was intriguing, and also a field Carnac knew delightfully little about. There were few enough of those left.

Toreth hadn't told him anything about Warrick, of course, and it would be a violation of his self-imposed rules for this project to broach the subject without some lead-in. But from the details Sara had disclosed, it was obvious that Toreth's affections, such as they were, were thoroughly engaged. That regrettably decreased the number of available approaches towards him. Carnac had no illusions that mere sex would be enough to generate any meaningful connection. For the time being, he settled for maintaining Toreth's awareness of him as more than part of the furniture by annoying him. It had the advantage of requiring very little more than Carnac's normal, unmoderated behaviour.

It wouldn't be enough, but it would do for the time being. Something else would come along, Carnac felt sure.