Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

“Is that what you want, Anson?”

“No. Not really.”

“Neither do I. Let me see what I can do about finding Andy.”

Where they took him, wrapped and trussed as he was, was LACON headquarters on Figueroa Street, the ninety-story tower of black marble that was the home of the puppet city government. They sat him against the wall in a cavernous, brightly lit hallway and left him there for what seemed like a day and a half, though he supposed it was really no more than an hour or so. Andy didn’t give a damn. He was numb. They could have put him in a cesspool and he wouldn’t have cared. He wasn’t physically damaged—his automatic internal circuit check was still running and it came up green—but the humiliation was so intense that he felt crashed. He felt destroyed. The only thing he wanted to know now was the name of the hacker who had done it to him.

He had heard a lot about the Figueroa Street building. It had ceilings about twenty feet high everywhere, so that there would be room for Entities to move around. Voices reverberated in those vast open spaces like echoes in a cavern. As he sat there he could feel inchoate streams of blurred sounds going lalloping back and forth all around him, above, below, fore, aft. He wanted to hide from them. His brain felt raw. He had never taken such a pounding in his life.

Now and then a couple of mammoth Entities would come rumbling through the hall, tiptoeing on their tentacles in that weirdly dainty mincing way of theirs. With them came a little entourage of humans, bustling along on every side of them like tiny courtiers hovering around members of some exalted nobility. Nobody paid any attention to Andy. He was just a piece of furniture lying there against the wall.

Then some LACON people returned, different ones from before.

“Is this the pardoner, over here?” someone asked.

“That one, yeah.”

“She wants to see him now.”

“You think we should fix him up a little first?”

“She said now.”

A hand at Andy’s shoulder, rocking him gently. Lifting him. Hands working busily, undoing the wrappings that bound his legs together, but leaving his arms still strapped up. They let him take a couple of wobbly steps. He glared at them as he worked to get the kinks out of his thigh muscles.

“All right, fellow. Come along now: it’s interview time. And remember, don’t make any trouble or you’ll get hurt.”

He let them shuffle him down the hall and through a gigantic doorway and into an immense office that had a ceiling high enough to provide an Entity with all the room it could possibly want. He didn’t say a word. There weren’t any Entities in the office, just a woman in a black robe, sitting behind a wide desk down at the far end, about a mile away from him. In that colossal room, it looked like a toy desk. She looked like a toy woman. The LACONs pushed him into a chair near the door and left him alone with her. Trussed up like that, he didn’t pose much of a risk.

“Are you John Doe?” she asked.

“Do you think I am?”

“That’s the name you gave upon entry to the city.”

“I give lots of names as I travel around. John Smith, Richard Roe, Joe Blow. It doesn’t matter much to the gate software what name I give.”

“Because you’ve gimmicked the gate?” She paused. “I should tell you, this is a court of inquiry.”

“You already know everything I could tell you. Your borgmann hacker’s been swimming around in my brain.”

“Please,” she said. “This’ll be easier if you cooperate. The accusations against you include illegal entry, illegal seizure of a vehicle, and illegal interfacing activity—specifically, selling pardons. Do you have a statement?”

“No.”

“You deny that you’re a pardoner?”

“I don’t deny, I don’t affirm. What’s the goddamned use?”

She rose and came out from behind the desk and very slowly walked toward him, pausing when she was about fifteen feet away. Andy stared sullenly at his shoes.

“Look up at me,” she said.

“That would be a whole lot of effort.”

“Look up,” she said. There was a sharp edge to her voice. “Whether you’re a pardoner or not isn’t the issue. We know you’re a pardoner. I know you’re a pardoner.” And she called him by a name he hadn’t used in a very long time. “You’re Mickey Megabyte, aren’t you?”

Now he looked at her.

Stared. Had trouble believing he was seeing what he saw. Felt a rush of memories come flooding up out of long ago.

The fluffy red hair was styled differently, now, clinging more tightly to her head. The five years had added a little flesh to her body here and there and some lines in her face. But she hadn’t really changed all that much.

What was her name? Vanessa? Clarissa? Melissa?

Tessa. That was it. Tessa.

“Tessa?” he said hoarsely. “Is that who you are?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s who I am.”

Andy felt his jaw sagging stupidly. This promised to be even worse than what the hacker had done to him. But there was no way to run from it.

“You worked for LACON even then, yes. I remember.”

“That pardon you sold me wasn’t any good, Mickey. You knew that, didn’t you? I had someone waiting for me in San Diego, someone who was important to me, but when I tried to get through the wall they stopped me just like that, and dragged me away screaming. I could have killed you. I would have gone to San Diego and then Bill and I would have tried to make it to Hawaii in his boat. Instead he went without me. I never saw him again. And it cost me three years’ worth of promotions. I was lucky that that was all.”

“I didn’t know about the guy in San Diego,” Andy said.

“Why should you? It wasn’t your business. You took my money, you were supposed to get me my pardon. That was the deal.”

Her eyes were gray with golden sparkles in them. It wasn’t easy for him to look into them.

“You still feel like killing me?” Andy asked. “Are you planning to have me executed?”

“No and no, Mickey. That isn’t your name either, is it?”

“Not really.”

“I can’t tell you how astounded I was, when they brought you in here. A pardoner, they said. John Doe, new in town and working the Pershing Square area. Pardoners, that’s my department. They bring all of them to me. That’s what they reassigned me to, after my hearing: dealing with pardoners. Isn’t that cute, Mickey? Poetic justice. When they first assigned me to this job I used to wonder if they’d ever bring you in, but after a while I figured, no, not a chance, he’s probably a million miles away, he’ll never come back this way again. And then they pulled in this John Doe, and I went past you in the hall and saw your face.”

There was no hiding from the vindictive gleam in those gray eyes.

This called for desperate measures.

“Listen to me, Tessa,” Andy said, letting a little of that useful hoarseness come back into his voice. “Do you think you could manage to believe that I’ve felt guilty for what I did to you ever since? You don’t have to believe it. But it’s God’s own truth.”

“Right. My heart goes out to you. I’m sure it’s been years of unending agony for you.”

“I mean it. Please. I’ve stiffed a lot of people, yes, and sometimes I’ve regretted it and sometimes I haven’t, but you were one that I regretted, Tessa. You’re the one I’ve regretted most. This is the absolute truth.”

She considered that. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him even for a fraction of a second, but he could see that she was considering it.

“Why did you do it?” she asked, after a bit.

“I stiff people because I don’t want to seem too perfect,” he told her. “You have to stiff the customers once in a while or else you start looking too good, which can be dangerous. You deliver a pardon every single time, word gets around, people start talking, you start to become legendary. And then you’re known everywhere and sooner or later the Entities get hold of you, and that’s that. So I always make sure to write a lot of stiffs. One out of every five, approximately. I tell people I’ll do my best, but there aren’t any guarantees, and sometimes it doesn’t work.”