Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

“You needn’t go any farther, Benedict.” The voice came out of my receiver, but I saw movement to my left in the doorway. “I really hoped you wouldn’t push so hard.”

Another lamp blinked on. It blinded me, but I could see someone behind it. A woman.

She was holding a military pistol, one of those things that blows large holes in walls. I’d gotten so caught up in the search that I’d put my scrambler into a pocket.

Not that it would have made much difference against the cannon she was holding.

“Turn off the lamp,” she said quietly. “That’s good. Now turn around slowly and don’t do anything that might surprise me. You understand what I’m saying?” She stood in the doorway, in a white pressure suit with a Confederacy patch on one shoulder, her face hidden by the helmet and the light. The weapon was in her left hand.

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

“Put your hands straight out where I can see them.”

I complied. “How long have you been waiting here, Teri?”

“Long enough.”

I couldn’t get a good look at her. “Or should I say Agnes?”

I could hear her breathing over the radio link. “You have it all figured out, do you?”

“No. I don’t. I don’t understand how Maddy English could resort to murder. You killed Taliaferro, didn’t you?”

She didn’t answer.

“He was going to talk to Chase. Warn her about you. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Was he going to tell her who he really was? Was he going to blow the whistle on the whole operation?”

“He said no. He promised he wouldn’t do that. But I couldn’t trust him.”

“Too much to lose.”

“Yes. Everything to lose.” She edged into the room. “But there’s no way you can understand what I’m talking about.”

“Try me.”

“You know, Alex, I feel as if I’ve come to know you pretty well.”

“You’re a mystery to me, Maddy.”

“I guess.” She sounded wistful. “Listen, I had no wish to kill anyone.”

“I know that. It’s why you warned Survey when you planted the bombs.”

“Yes. That’s right. I tried to do the right thing. I wouldn’t have killed anybody if I could have avoided it. Especially not Jess. But too much was at stake.”

“What was at stake, Maddy?”

“You know what I am now.”

“Yes. Forever twenty-five. Must be nice.”

“It changes your perspective about a lot of things.” She said nothing for a long moment. Then: “Don’t misunderstand me, Alex. I won’t hesitate-”

“Of course not. Still, it must have hurt when you pushed Tom Dunninger off the cliff at Wallaba Point.”

“It wasn’t Tom Dunninger. It was Ed. Or maybe it wasn’t. I’m not sure anymore who it was.”

“What happened?”

“I didn’t push him.”

“What happened, Maddy?”

“I loved Ed. I would never have harmed him. Never.”

“You loved him? You betrayed him.”

“You’re talking about Dunninger again. They were different people. At Walpurgis, when he was Eddie Crisp, I loved him. And before that, in Huntington, and before that, on Memory Isle. Appropriate spot, that was. Memory Isle.”

“What happened to him?” I was thinking about Wallaba Point, but she answered a different question.

“He wouldn’t give in. After they brought him here off the Polaris, to this place, he still wouldn’t give in.”

“Wouldn’t agree to stop his work.”

“It was too late by then anyway. He’d already done the final test. Taken the nanobots aboard.”

“You mean injected into his own system?”

“Yes. Of course. What else would I be talking about?” She used the weapon to wave me into the middle of the room. “They were here for almost four months.

During that time they could see that he was getting progressively younger. When I got here, with the Babcock, to pick them up, I couldn’t believe what I saw.”

“He was a young man.”

“I wouldn’t go quite that far. But I’d never have recognized him.”

“So Boland did a reconstruction job on him.”

“Yes. Chek wiped his memories. Gave him a new personality. Eventually created a fresh identity and got him a job. We used to take turns watching him. To make sure he was okay.”

“But you had to move him periodically. Right? Because he didn’t age.”

“Yes. He didn’t understand that. He had false memories, implanted by Boland.

But every eight years we had to do it again. Take his memories. Make him someone different.”

“It must have been hard on him.”

The light wavered. “We were killing him. Over and over. That’s what it is, when they do a wipe. Somebody else takes over your body. You’re gone.”

“So you-”

“He used to get flashbacks. He’d remember pieces of his former life. Sometimes as Tom Dunninger. Sometimes as one of the others. By the time we were at Walpurgis, he was in his fourth incarnation. Flashbacks were coming more often, and I was trying to persuade Boland to take him in at Morton, put him with others who didn’t age and give him a permanent identity. But Dunninger kept reappearing. More and more often as time went by. Boland said no. He said a permanent identity would eventually restore him altogether.”

“There was no satisfactory solution,” I said.

“No.”

“So you decided to push him off the summit at Wallaba Point.”

“No. I told you I didn’t do that. I would never have done it. I loved him.

“We used to go up there on summer evenings. We enjoyed the place. It made everything else seem unreal. Ed was good. And funny. And sometimes sad on occasions when he didn’t seem to know why. But he loved me. They were getting ready to move him again. Change his identity. People in Walpurgis were beginning to notice. Every time they did that, we had to start over.

“Whenever Boland was done with him, he never remembered who I was. It was killing me, too. So I decided I was going to explain everything to him that night. Roll the dice. Persuade him to join us. Tell him the truth. And while I was doing it, up there on the brink-God, how could I have been so stupid?-Dunninger came back.

Just like that, it was Dunninger looking at me out of Ed’s eyes, knowing who I was, knowing who he was. And he hated me. Oh God, he hated me.

“But he seemed to have forgotten where we were. He snarled at me and pushed me down. Then he turned to walk away and he tripped over something, a rock, a root, something.” Her voice caught. “He lost his balance.” Her voice shook and trailed off, and she stood a long time without moving. “I watched him flailing on the edge, watched him fall. And I never moved to help him.”

“I’m sorry, Maddy.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, too. We’re all sorry.”

I wondered whether tears were running down her cheeks. It sounded like it.

Tears in a pressure suit are a major problem.

“Once,” she said, “at Huntington, he met somebody else. And married her.”

I watched her lower the pistol a few degrees, and I thought maybe it was over.

That she’d seen what she had become, but when I took a step toward her, it came back up. I thought about trying to charge her, get to her while she was distracted, but the barrel never wavered.

I asked what had happened to the other wife.

“Jasmine. Who the hell would name their kid Jasmine?” She was breathing heavily. “He didn’t like her anyhow. The marriage didn’t work.”

“What happened?”

“Chek came one night, and we just spirited him away. Jasmine never knew what happened. One day her husband was there, the next he was gone.”

The muzzle looked very large. Keep her talking, I thought. “Why was he getting flashbacks? I thought personality change was permanent.”