Jack McDevitt: The Devil's Eye

"No." Alex sat back, crossed one leg over the other. "Ms. Greene contacted us for assistance. Several days ago." "I see." He took on the demeanor of a man about to deliver bad news. "Well, in any case, she seems to have negated all that. You're aware of the procedure she's undergone?" "Yes." "It severs her old world. She's-" He hesitated. But I got the impression he was only pretending to search for the proper phrase. "She's no longer with us. What kind of assistance did she request?" "She didn't specify, Doctor. She merely asked for our help." "And what kind of help would you have been able to provide, Mr. Benedict?" "We're fairly flexible, Doctor. Is it possible to speak to whoever was charged with her care?" "I think there may have been a misunderstanding. Her psychiatrist is prohibited by ethical considerations from discussing her case with anyone except family members. Or her lawyer. And there are even strict prohibitions on that. It would therefore be pointless to proceed further." He got up. "I'm sorry you wasted your time."

We called Cory again. Would he be willing to see her doctor and ask some questions? No. "It's over," he said. "She's past help now. Let's just let it go." "But somebody may be in danger." "Look, Benedict, " Cory said, " if something unusual had been happening in her life, I'd have known about it. Nobody's in danger."

"You didn't know the mind wipe was coming."

"Just go away. Please."

Naturally they wouldn't give us Greene's new name. Nobody gets that. Not even a spouse or a mother. It wouldn't have mattered, of course. There was nothing to be gained even if we could speak with her. Cory was right. She was gone. Alex sat in the big living room at the country house, staring at logs burning in the fireplace. "After the procedure," he said, "St. Thomas provides her with a couple of people who masquerade as family. I checked before we went out there. They create the illusion of a whole new life." Alex had discovered years before that a close friend had gone through the process. Had lived an earlier life of which he was completely unaware. "Time to walk away," I said. "Sure." He smiled at me. "Take the money and run."

I couldn't see any point in attending the memorial service. It's basically a funeral, and I hate funerals. But Alex insisted on going, so I accompanied him. Vicki had lived in a spacious double-tier early-Valaska manor, surrounded by broad lawns, clusters of trees, and a high fence. Two sculpted fountains flanked the front of the house, made to look like demons and wolves. They were shut down the day of the memorial, maybe because of the continuing cold, maybe because someone thought a functioning fountain would be improper. I wondered who would be getting the property. "They've put it up for sale," Alex said. We were in the skimmer, beginning our descent. "The proceeds will be put into a sealed fund and made available to Vicki's new persona on a periodic basis. She won't know where it's coming from." "Has anybody ever gone through this procedure and later recovered her memory?" "It's happened. But not very often." We got clearance from the AI and came down in a parking area a mile or so away. There, along with a dozen other people, all appropriately subdued, we boarded a limo, which flew us to a pad at the side of the house. We got out and were directed across the frozen ground by two valets. The front doors opened, and we climbed stone steps onto the portico and went inside. A somber young woman greeted us and thanked us for coming. There was a substantial crowd, maybe two hundred people wandering through a cluster of sitting rooms

and spilling out onto a heated side deck. Cory showed up and managed a frigid hello. We tracked down Vicki's editor, an older woman with tired eyes and a clenched jaw that never seemed to relax. Her name was Marjorie Quick. Alex expressed his sympathy and engaged her in a few minutes of small talk, how he was an avid reader of Vicki's work, and what a loss this was. Was there by any chance another book coming? "Not that I know of," she said. "Unfortunately, she took the last year off. Vacationed. Enjoyed herself. Just let it go." "But she'd been producing a book every year, hadn't she?" "Yes," she said. "But that can wear on you." "I'm sure it would." Quick had recognized his name. "Aren't you the Alex Benedict-?" He admitted that yes, he was, and steered the conversation back to Vicki: "I read that she'd gone to Salud Afar," he said. "Yes. She wanted to get away." "It's a long way out. Even with the new drive, it's a month. One way." "I know. But she wanted to go." She started looking around for a way to extricate herself from us. "You say she wasn't working on a book? I mean, that would be the ideal place to work, on a long trip like that." "The reality is that she was always working on a book. More or less." "Did you see her after she got back?" "No. I haven't seen her for eight or nine months." I got the impression that she'd tried to dissuade Vicki from making the flight. "Vicki needed to fill her tank, Mr. Benedict. It's as simple as that." She adjusted her jacket. "If it weren't so far, Salud Afar would be the perfect place for a horror writer on vacation." "Really? Why's that?" "Read the tourist brochures. It has lost seas and beaches where monsters come ashore and God knows what else." "You're kidding." "Of course I am. But those are the stories. I know she'd paid a virtual visit to Salud Afar in the spring. But if you understand writers, you'll understand that's not enough. If you write horror, and you want atmosphere, Salud Afar is your world."

Somebody had put a picture of Vicki Greene in the center aisle. She looked bright and happy, holding a kitten in her lap. They could have used an avatar, of course, and a lot of people do that. You go to a funeral, and they have a replica of the deceased delivering a few final sentiments. It's always struck me as creepy. Instead, they'd settled for a picture. Vicki had been a lovely woman. I don't think I'd realized how lovely. As ten o'clock approached, the guests wandered toward the main room. It wasn't big enough to accommodate everyone. We joined the crowd, watching the proceedings from a passageway. Precisely on the hour, somebody sat down and played "Last Light," the moderator appeared, and the service began. There was no religious element, of course. According to all reports, Vicki and her family were believers, but she wasn't really dead. So it was a memorial, and no more. Friends and family members went forward one by one to talk about her, to remember her, and to express their regret that, for whatever reason, she had resorted to such extreme measures. "So many of us loved her," said one man, who described himself simply as a friend but could not hold back tears. "Now she's gone from us." It was the first time I'd attended a service for someone who was still technically alive. Who could have walked through the doors at any moment. The last of the speakers finished, and the moderator turned things over to Cory, who thanked everyone for coming and announced there'd be refreshments in the dining room. He hoped, he said, everybody

would stay. Some did. Others began to drift away. We wandered through the gathering, offering condolences, looking for someone who might know why she'd done it. I got introduced to a few other people whose names were familiar. "Horror writers," someone told us. "They're a pretty close-knit bunch." I tried to imagine what an evening at a bar would be like with a group of people who wrote about swamp monsters. She had a lot of friends. Women talked of good times, men spoke admiringly of her abilities, which were supposed to be references to her writing, but which I came to suspect were code words for Vicki's lustrous brown eyes and her up-front equipment. But maybe I'm selling them short. She'd had a lot of boyfriends, one of whom had apparently put together an avatar of Vicki and now sat talking with it for hours at a time. I wasn't aware of that fact when I met him. Found it out later in the day. But I remember sensing that he was obsessed with the woman. Most painful for him, probably, was knowing she was still alive, her personality more or less intact. But whatever he might have meant to her was gone. He was not even a memory. I found only one person who'd seen her since her return from Salud Afar: Cass Jurinsky, a craggy, ancient-looking female author who wrote about the horror genre. When she asked what I did for a living and I mentioned Alex's name, she got excited. "Vicki was a big fan of his," she said. "She used to talk about using him as a character in one of her novels." Alex in a horror novel. I tried to imagine him playing tag with a poltergeist. "Seriously." She looked at me with sad eyes. "I guess she never got in touch with him, did she?" "Not exactly," I said. Maybe it explained why she'd come to us for help. "What was her state of mind when she got back from her vacation? Did you notice anything unusual, Cass?" "She seemed depressed," Jurinsky said. "I don't know what it was. It was as if all the spirit had gone out of her." She had white hair and a lined face. But her eyes took fire when she talked about Vicki and her diabolical creations. "Nobody was better at it. She didn't have the biggest audience because she wrote a subtler kind of horror than the rest of them. But if you were tuned in to her, nobody could scare the pants off people the way she did." "Where did you last see her?" I asked. "A few weeks ago. At the World Terror Convention. It's for horror fans." (I could have figured that one out.) "They hold it every year in Bentley. Vicki showed up without warning. She wasn't on the schedule, but at one point I looked up and there she was. I didn't even know she was back." "You got to talk to her?" "Oh, yes." She sighed. "I loved that woman. I asked her how the trip had gone, and she said it was all right but she was glad to be home. And I remember thinking she didn't look glad." "How did she look?" "You want the truth? Frightened. And older. She'd aged while she was away." Jurinsky stopped, and I saw her replaying the scene in her mind. "I asked if everything was okay, and she said sure. She said it was good to see me again, then somebody interrupted and I drifted away from her." "That's it?" "That's it." Her lips tightened. "I should have paid more attention. Maybe I could have helped." We stood quietly for a moment. She seemed far away. Then I brought her back. "Why do you think she went to the convention?" "Well, she usually attended World Terror. She enjoyed spending time with her fans. Or, maybe she was looking for someone to talk to." "You?" "I'd guess anybody. Looking back now, I think she just wanted to be in a crowd. A crowd that knew her. But I was too busy to notice." She took a deep breath. "Too dumb."