“Sartorius has convinced Snaut that you hoodwinked him. Now they’re doing the same to you. They’re pretending to assemble the X-ray equipment but they’re actually building a field annihilator.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Did you not hear what I just said to you? I’m trying to warn you!”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. Listen up: you’ll need a weapon. You can’t count on anyone.”
“I can count on Harey,” I said. I heard a low rapid sound. He was laughing.
“Sure you can. Up to a certain point. In the end you can always do what I did.”
“You’re not Gibarian.”
“How do you like that. And who am I? A dream of yours maybe?”
“No. Their puppet. But you don’t know it.”
“And how do you know who you are!”
That made me think. I wanted to get up but I couldn’t. Gibarian was saying something. I couldn’t understand the words, I only heard the sound of his voic.; I was struggling desperately with the weakness of the flesh. I made one more colossal effort, jerked my body… and woke up. I gasped for air like a half-suffocated fish. It was completely dark. It had been a dream. A nightmare. But just a moment… “a dilemma we’re not able to resolve. We persecute our own selves. All Polytheria did was apply a kind of selective amplifier to our thoughts. Seeking a motivation for this is anthropomorphism. Where there are no humans, there are none of the motives available to humans. To continue the projected research we’d have had to destroy either our own thoughts or their material realization. The former is beyond our powers. The latter looks too much like murder.”
In the darkness I listened to the distant, measured voice that I had recognized at once: it was Gibarian. I stretched out my hand. The bed was empty.
I’ve woken into another dream, I thought.
“Gibarian…?” I said. The voice broke off at once in mid-word. There was a soft click and I felt a faint puff of air on my face.
“Really, Gibarian,” I muttered with a yawn. “Following someone from one dream into another, come off it…”
There was a rustling sound next to me.
“Gibarian!” I repeated more loudly.
The bedsprings moved.
“Kris… It’s me…,” came a whisper right by me.
“Oh, it’s you, Harey… Where’s Gibarian?”
“Kris… Kris… surely he’s… you yourself said he died…”
“He might be alive in a dream,” I said slowly. I was no longer at all certain it had been a dream. “He was saying something. He was here,” I added. I was fearfully sleepy. If I’m sleepy, I must be asleep, I thought to myself idiotically. I brushed Harey’s cold arm with my lips and arranged myself more comfortably. She said something in reply, but I was already plunged in oblivion.
In the morning, in the red sunlight of the room, I recalled the events of the night. The conversation with Gibarian had been a dream, but the things that had happened next? I’d heard his voice, I could have sworn it; I just didn’t quite remember what he’d been saying. It hadn’t sounded like a conversation, more like a lecture. A lecture…?
Harey was getting washed. I heard the splash of water in the bathroom. I looked under the bed, where I’d shoved the tape recorder a few days before. It wasn’t there.
“Harey!” I called. Her face, dripping water, appeared from behind the locker.
“You didn’t see a tape recorder under the bed by any chance, did you? A little pocket-sized one?”
“There were various things under there. I put them all over on that shelf.” She pointed to near the medicine cabinet and vanished back into the bathroom. I jumped out of bed, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for.
“You must have seen it,” I said when she came back into the main room. She combed her hair in front of the mirror and didn’t reply. It was only now I noticed she was pale, and that when her eyes met mine in the mirror there was a searching look in them.
“Harey,” I began again insistently, “the tape recorder isn’t on the shelf.”
“You don’t have anything more important to tell me?”
“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “You’re right, it’s not that big of a deal.”
That was all we needed — to start an argument!
After that we went to get breakfast. Harey was doing everything differently than usual that day, but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly had changed. She was looking closely at everything around her; a couple of times she didn’t hear what I was saying to her, as if she’d suddenly gotten lost in thought. One time, when she raised her head I saw her eyes were glistening.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, lowering my voice to a whisper. “Are you crying?”
“Let it be. They’re not real tears,” she stammered. Perhaps I shouldn’t have left it at that, but there was nothing I was so afraid of as “heart-to-hearts.” Besides, I had other things on my mind. Though I knew Snaut and Sartorius’s scheming had only been a dream, I’d begun to wonder if there was some kind of handy weapon on the Station. I’d no idea what I would do with it; I just wanted to have it. I told Harey I needed to swing by the hold and the depositories. She followed me in silence. I searched among the crates and rifled through the capsules; then, when I went all the way down to the lowest floor, I couldn’t resist the temptation to look in on the cold room. I didn’t want Harey to go in there though, so I just half-opened the door and checked the whole place over with my eyes. The dark shroud bulged over the elongated figure beneath, but from where I was standing I couldn’t tell if the black woman was still lying where she had been. It seemed to me that her place was empty.
I didn’t find anything I could use, and I was in an ever-worsening mood as I wandered about, till all at once I realized I couldn’t see Harey. She appeared right after that — she’d stayed back in the corridor — yet the very fact she’d tried to distance herself from me, something that was so hard for her even for a moment, should have made me think. But I was still acting offended at no one in particular, or just generally behaving like a jerk. I’d gotten a headache, I couldn’t find any aspirin and, mad as hell, I tipped out the entire contents of the first aid kit. I couldn’t be bothered to go back to the surgery; I’d rarely been such a mess as I was that day. Harey was moving about the cabin like a shadow; from time to time she’d disappear. In the afternoon, after we’d eaten lunch (though in fact she rarely ate at all, while I’d lost my appetite from the headache and didn’t even press her to have something). All of a sudden she sat down next to me and began picking at the sleeve of my shirt.
“How’s it going?” I murmured absently. I had an urge to go upstairs, because I had the impression the pipes were carrying a faint echo of knocking sounds, meaning that Sartorius was tinkering with the high-tension apparatus. But I lost interest when it occurred to me that I’d have to go with Harey, whose presence might have been semi-understandable in the library, but there, among the machinery, might have led Snaut to make some inopportune remark.
“Kris,” she whispered, “how are things between us…?”
I gave a sigh despite myself. I can’t say it was a happy day for me.
“Couldn’t be better. Why do you ask?”
“I wanted to have a talk with you.”
“Fire away.”
“Not that kind of talk.”
“Then what kind? Like I said, I’ve got a headache, I’ve all kind of things on my mind…”
“A little good will, Kris.”
I forced myself to smile. It couldn’t have been impressive.
“What is it, darling? I’m listening.”
“Will you tell me the truth?”