12

In a dream Jensi found himself in an unfamiliar room, strapped into something that resembled a dentist’s chair but wasn’t quite that exactly. Besides, why would a dentist have to strap someone down? Still, it moved like a dentist’s chair, rising slowly up and falling slowly down according to how a technician next to him applied pressure with his foot to the controls. The technician was wearing a white coat, like a dentist’s coat, but he wasn’t a dentist: Jensi could tell because of his teeth. Some were crooked and thrust every which way and others were simply missing and all of them were stained a yellowish-brown. His breath was bad, too, almost unbearable. And his coat was spattered with what looked like old blood.

“What am I doing here?” asked Jensi in the dream.

The technician laughed. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He lifted both hands and Jensi caught a flash of metal in one. “You’ve always been here,” the technician said.

There was, hanging from the ceiling, a strange rubbery contraption, like an inverted dentist’s chair, and once the technician had lifted and lowered Jensi’s chair to his satisfaction he reached up and pulled it down. It was some sort of pliable plasticene substance and it closed around Jensi, molding itself firmly against his body. Mostly it was soft, but here and there it pushed at him, hard little points touching his arms, his legs, in a way that made it difficult to move. What was hidden within it? And then he felt a little pricking as one of the hard points pushed its way farther into him, a needle of some sort, then another, then another, until it was hard for him to breathe since it made the needles, if they were needles, sink in even deeper. The technician slid his hand underneath the plasticene covering and when he slid it back out again it was slick with blood. It was hard for Jensi not to feel alarm, but the harder he breathed the more his chest hurt, the needles jabbing deeper and making him burn, so he tried to breathe in short, sharp breaths and raise his chest not at all. But he was, he suddenly realized, beginning to hyperventilate, his head getting exceptionally dizzy and black spots beginning to appear before his vision—unless the needles were injecting something into him and it was the drug he was feeling.

“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” said the technician, his voice extremely flat.

“No,” said Jensi, and felt a stab of pain.

The technician ignored him. “Let’s start with an easy one,” he said. “What is your name?”

Jensi shook his head.

“Wrong answer,” said the technician. “I’ll ask again. What is your name?”

“I—” said Jensi. “Please—”

“These answers are also incorrect,” said the technician. “Please try again.” He leaned forward, and for a moment his voice wasn’t flat but friendly. “I’m surprised at you!” he said. “This is the easiest question. If you struggle to answer this one, how are you possibly going to manage the rest?”

Before Jensi could respond, the technician leaned back, his face becoming neutral again. “I will repeat the question. What is your name?”

The black spots had nearly overwhelmed his vision. He could barely see the technician now, and what he could see of him was covered in overlapping circles of darkness, as if the man was either just coming into or just fading out of existence. “I—” he tried again, and then screamed as the needles jabbed, and then managed in a half-strangled voice, “Jensi.”

“Closer,” said the technician. “But still wrong. Would you care to try again?”

But no, thought Jensi, trying to plead to the technician with his eyes, that’s my name, that’s really it. I’ve answered correctly, let me go.

The technician waited there patiently, his face expressionless, while Jensi kept taking quick, shallow breaths. Finally he said, “Would you like me to give you a hint?”

Very slowly and deliberately the technician raised his hand, and Jensi saw that the flash he had seen before was not metal after all, but a mirror. For a moment the technician misdirected it and Jensi only saw in it bits and pieces of the walls, and then it caught the light and flashed hard at him, momentarily blinding him.

And then he caught a wavering glimpse of his reflection, and realized that the face he was seeing was not his own, but that of his brother Istvan.

*   *   *

His body was tingling when he woke up. He rubbed his arms, almost expecting to see marks from the needles, but there was nothing there. He had to get up and go look at his face in the mirror, just to make sure that it was really him and not Istvan. For once, he was reassured to see his own haggard face and red-rimmed eyes, the proof of another night of uneasy dreams and little sleep.

After that, he had trouble falling back to sleep, was worried about having the same dream over again. He made the bed and then lay on top of it, thinking.

I did everything I could for Istvan, he told himself. When we were together, I tried to help him and keep him out of harm’s way. Later, I tried to stop him from doing something rash. Later still, I spent months and then years looking for him. I did everything I could.

Still, despite saying it, he did not quite believe it. He had not found his brother. How could he say he had done everything he could when his brother was still missing?

*   *   *

It was a hard day. He was, for one thing, exhausted, even more so than usual. For another, he found his thoughts returning throughout the day to his brother, wondering where he was now. Enough had started to come out now about the methods used by the SCAC against political prisoners and terrorists that he couldn’t help but think that Istvan had likely been through a lot. Maybe they had driven him mad, made him even madder than he already was. Or maybe they had crippled or maimed him. Even killed him.

Did he really want to know what had happened to his brother? Would Istvan even be the same person if he were to get him back?

*   *   *

I’ll think about him for a few days and then slowly forget about him again, he told himself. Life will continue on as normal. Even if I didn’t find him, I can hardly be blamed. But a few days came and went and he was still thinking about his brother, unable to help himself. And so he did what he usually did when this happened: he filed another request with the military to be allowed to have contact with his brother, knowing that it, just like all the petitions he had filed before it, would simply vanish. It would not even be acknowledged. But at least his conscious mind could now tell his unconscious that it had tried to do something.

*   *   *

He was still working the same picking job as he had been four years earlier, back when his brother had disappeared. He piloted a small cargo ship designed to shift freight from local orbital spacecraft to the larger shockpoint ships in orbit and vice versa. He showed up in the morning, was given a series of deliveries and pickups, and worked with a small crew until they were done. If everything went right, he could do the job in eight hours or so. If anything went wrong, though, he’d have to stay until things were taken care of, and even if he went over his eight-hour shift he never got overtime. But it was a job and the economy was bad—he was lucky to have anything at all. The piloting was far from intense—nothing beyond what he might be trained for in the first few weeks of military flight school except for the docking procedures—but it was something anyway. He wasn’t making much money, wasn’t saving any, but he was getting by.

*   *   *

And then, a few weeks later, he came home to find a vid message waiting for him. It was from his mother. It was surprising: he hadn’t heard from her since her confinement in the asylum where, he could tell from the background the vid showed, she still was. She looked relatively okay, though: her hair combed, her eyes drifting a little but not darting about like they used to do. Plus, she was able to form coherent, unslurred sentences, even if she only said a few words.

“Jensi,” she said. “I need to see you. Come see me.”

It didn’t make sense. Why would his mother call? She’d always blamed him for Istvan’s disappearance, and the few times, early on, that he’d tried to see her, she’d turned his requests to visit down. Even then he hadn’t particularly wanted to see her, but he’d felt obligated. He didn’t want to see her now, but at the moment, still worrying in the back of his mind he’d failed Istvan, still feeling guilty about his brother, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to contact her. But by vid rather than in person. No, in person would be too much.

It took a while for the hospital staff to acknowledge that he had a right to communicate with her, and then even longer for them to track her down and bring her to a vid. She didn’t look as good as she had in the first vid. Her hair was sticking out in all directions now, and her face had a slackness to it as well, as if she had perhaps just been medicated. Seeing her like that, he couldn’t help but say:

“You haven’t called me for years. Why are you calling me now?”

He had to repeat it twice before she understood what he was saying. For a moment she stumbled over her words, babbled almost, and then managed to say, “But I’ve finally forgiven you.”

“Forgiven me?” said Jensi. “For what?”

“For what you did to your brother,” she said. “I forgive you.”

Jensi felt himself beginning to fill with rage. “But I didn’t do anything to Istvan!” he said. “Whatever happened to him is not my fault. Whatever happened to him, he brought upon himself.”

“I need you to come,” she said, her voice strange now—high pitched and screeching.

“Why should I come? What did you ever do for me?”

“Come and receive my forgiveness,” she said. “Come and be saved.”

He cut the feed, angry as hell, feeling it had been a mistake to humor her and talk to her at all.

*   *   *

A few hours later, he had a brief prerecorded message from Henry, who was now working off world, doing security for a special facility. “Very hush-hush,” he said, and winked. “Can’t tell you much about it. Very lucrative as well. It’ll give me the step up I need, the capital to start something decent back on Vindauga. I hope you’ll be part of it.” When he tried to examine the location marker of the message, Jensi found it had been stripped. Not only did it not indicate a particular location, it didn’t even pinpoint a specific planet or even solar system. What could Henry be up to?

*   *   *

His dreams had faded and he had almost forgotten about Istvan again, when he had another live vid feed from the hospital. Thinking it must be his mother, he rejected it, but the call came back immediately, this time with an emergency designation. Curious despite himself, he accepted it.

It was the director of the asylum. “There’s no easy way to put what I have to say,” he said.

“Then just say it,” said Jensi. His mind was racing out in front of him, imagining his mother going berserk and attacking another patient or a doctor or a visitor. Or imagining the director saying that the public assistance funds had reached their end and that they could no longer take care of her. Because of that, paradoxically, it was almost a relief when he learned that his mother was dead.

“She had a cerebral hemorrhage,” the director informed him.

“A cerebral hemorrhage?”

“She’d had a brain scan not long before and nothing was there to make us worry. But things can change quickly. There was probably nothing that could have been done.”

Jensi thanked the man and hung up the telephone. He sat down and tried to feel something, but wasn’t sure what to feel. He felt some anger, some loss, some grief, but it was nothing compared to what he felt over the disappearance of his brother. And his mother was gone, was dead. His brother might still be alive.

I need to find him, he thought. I haven’t done enough.

But he was helpless to know where to start.