This was sanity now, but what had it been before when he was
cheerfully destroying his future? It seemed to him that there were two
halves to his brain, each wanting different things. For a moment the
one that had controlled the day was gone, and he was sane again, but
how long would that moment last? What sign had there been when it took
control? Would he know it when it came again?
He remembered that in the tube train that morning he and Pierce had
had a half joking argument about the best short-and-merry life. One of
the happy ones on the list had been the INC agent, because they spent
so much of their lives working into smuggling gangs that they had all
the pleasures and profits of being a crook and an honest man too. Was
that where he had slipped his cog?
Looking back on the things he had done that day he saw that much of it
had fitted an abstract pattern of justice, as if he had been thinking
of himself as an INC man. Or as if--
He thought of the things he had seen in his childhood that they had
called zombies, and jeered at and tormented without fear of any
retaliation or vengeance from their gray-faced victims. Imprisoned
men--they looked normal--but they had been mentally imprisoned.
Law-zombies, memorizing and following laws and being honest with a
simple and terrifying literalness.
He had not known that he had any capacity for terror.
Bryce Carter. He had his name, his identity and his memory, and they
were his own. Sometimes he had had nothing else, only the pride and
strength of knowing his identity, that it was his and stronger than
others, just as his hands were stronger, a thing they couldn't take
from him.
_Could they?_ There was a nightmare he had had more than once, that he
remembered suddenly for the first time, with all its atmosphere of
childish strangeness. The cop psychos were after him. He was trapped
in a big room with lights and they had his head open and were chasing
him around inside his head somehow, trying to catch him, and kill him,
the him that lived in his mind.
Would he know if it was gone?
The black sharp-edged shadows of the crater walls were drawing across
the landing plain outside, bringing to a close the two weeks of
daylight, and the reflected sunlight was dimming in the room. He could
hear the rumble of a heavy ship of a cargo fleet lowering in to a
landing.
His assistant was sitting quietly on the edge of the desk as he had
been for some time, motionlessly watching the thin plume of smoke that
rose from a cigarette in his hand. He was as still as if he were
listening for some subtle sound far away. Rocket jets flashed an
orange glow through the venetian blinds and fell in stripes of orange
light across the dark young face. The brief rumble of a rocket
take-off came, transmitted through the ground and the building. Smoke
curling up from the cigarette was the only motion.
"Roy, is Pierce your real name?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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