But regardless of the exact nature of the tangled emotions, attitudes, motives, and hopes, Jack McBryde was the one person in the entire galaxy with whom Herlander Simões was prepared to be totally honest. He was also the only person who could take Simões to task for something like the scientist's self-flagellating habit of watching the recorded imagery of Francesca night after night without triggering Simões' instant, self-defensive anger.
"Let's be honest here, Jack," the scientist said now, smiling crookedly. "Sooner or later you're going to decide it's time to pull me. I know as well as you do that my efficiency is still dropping. And I'm not exactly what someone might call the life of the party when it comes to the rest of the team's morale, now am I? It's not even actively destructive, anymore. Not really. It's just this slow, grinding, wearing away. I'm so frigging tired, Jack. There's a big part of me that just wants to stop. Just wants it to beover. But there's another part of me that can't stop, because if I do, Frankie's just gone forever, and those bastards will just go ahead and forget about her. Sweep her under the rug."
His voice had hardened with the last two sentences, and his hands locked around the beer bottle, squeezing it. Throttling it, really, McBryde thought, and wondered if he should try to distract Simões from his anger.
He knew he really ought to be consulting with the scientist's assigned therapist. He should have been offering his information to her, and asking her advice on how he could most constructively respond to Simões. Unfortunately, he couldn't. To his surprise, part of the reason he couldn't was because it would have been a betrayal of Simões' confidence. Despite what he'd said to the other man at their very first meeting about respecting his privacy, he'd never actually violated it, and he suspected that Simões knew it.
The other reason was more disturbing, when he allowed himself to confront it (which he did as seldom as possible). He was afraid. Afraid that in discussing Simões' mindset and anger, he might reveal altogether too much about certain thoughts of his own . . . especially to a trained Alignment therapist who was already thinking in terms of the potential security risk her patient might present.
Should I try and pull him up out of the anger, or just let him vent? He needs to let some of that pressure out, but it doesn't just go away when he does, does it? McBryde shook his head mentally. Of course it doesn't. It's like letting the pressure out only lets more oxygen in. Only makes the fire burn hotter in the end.
"You're still pounding away at Fabre and the rest, aren't you?" he asked out loud.
"You're the security guy," Simões riposted with just a flash of anger directed at him. "You're already reading all my mail, aren't you?"
"Well, yes," McBryde admitted.
"Then you know, don't you?" Simões challenged.
"The question was what's known as a conversational gambit," McBryde said just a bit flatly. "A way of edging into a point that needs to be discussed with at least a modicum of tact, Herlander."
"Oh." Simões' eyes fell for a moment, then he shrugged. "Well, in that case, yeah. I'm still . . . letting them know how I feel."
"Somehow I suspect they've already got at least a vague idea about that," McBryde said dryly, and Simões surprised both of them with a chuckle. A harsh chuckle, but still a chuckle.
Despite that, it wasn't really a laughing matter. Simões hadn't—quite—degenerated to the point of issuing actual threats in his twice-a-week e-mails to Martina Fabre, but the degree of anger—of hatred, to use an honest word for it—in those messages was distressingly clear. In fact, McBryde had quietly advised Fabre to take a few additional security precautions of her own. Had the man sending those messages been one whit less important to the Alignment's military research efforts, he might very well already have been arrested. He certainly would have been put under precautionary surveillance . . . except, of course, that in this case he already was under precautionary surveillance.
It was like watching a slow-motion holo of an avalanche, McBryde thought. And in many ways, Simões' sheer brilliance and the mental agility, focus, and stubbornness which had made him one of the Alignment's star researchers only made it worse. Whether he wanted to or not (and McBryde had come to the conclusion that he actually did want to), the hyper-physicist was actively applying that same focused refusal to quit to his campaign to make Fabre and the members of the Long-Range Planning Board fully aware of the searing depth of his hatred and resentment. In some ways, that campaign was all that was keeping the rest of his life afloat, the only thing giving him the momentum—and the will—to go on facing the wasteland the rest of his life had become.
Yet not even that was enough to halt the grinding collapse of who and what he had once been. It wasn't happening overnight. It wasn't merciful enough to happen overnight. But despite all of the effort being mounted to salvage Herlander Simões—or, at least, the asset he represented—the scientist continued his slow, steady, inexorable collapse. They'd managed to slow it down, and his therapist credited McBryde with the lion's share of that accomplishment, yet nothing seemed able to arrest it.
I don't think anything can arrest it, McBryde thought somberly. I think it's his own impotence driving it. I have read those e-mails, so I know exactly what he's been saying to Fabre, and if I were her, I'd have already demanded that he be placed in preventive custody. As a member of the LRPB, she'd get it if she asked for it, too. I wonder why she hasn't? I suppose it's at least possible she feels sorry for him. That she genuinely does feel responsible for having created the circumstances that ripped his life apart. But there's so much anger inside him, so much need to punish someone—someone besides himself, or in addition to himself, maybe—for what happened to his daughter. One of these days, he really is going to work himself around to the point of trying to kill her, or someone else on the Board, or anyone he can punish for what happened to Francesca. And that's going to be the end.
When that day ultimately came, McBryde knew, it would be his job to stop Simões, and the awareness gnawed at him. Gnawed at his sympathy, and at his own doubts.
Because the truth is that Bardasano's actually right about how quickly we're finally coming up on Prometheus, he thought. I never really expected it to happen in my own lifetime, which was pretty stupid, given how young I am, and how much I knew about what was going on on inside the "onion." But we've been working towards that moment for so long that, emotionally, I never really realized I might be one of the ones to see it. Now I know I will be . . . and Herlander's kicked every one of those doubts I didn't really know I had fully awake, hasn't he?
How many more Herlanders is the Board going to create? How many people—and just because they're "normals" doesn't keep them from being people, damn it!—are going to find themselves in his position? Hell, how many billions or trillions of people are we going to end up killing just so that the Long-Range Planning Board can steer the entire human race into the uplands of genetic superiority? And how willing are we really going to be to accept Leonard Detweiler's challenge to improve every single member of the human race to our own pinnacle of achievement? Are we really going to do it? There'll have to be at least some beta lines, of course. And probably at least a few gamma lines. Obviously we won't be able to do without those, now will we? We'll find plenty of reasons for that, and some of them will probably even be valid! But what about Manpower's slaves? What about all those "normals" out there? Are we really going to treat them as our equals . . . aside, of course, from the unfortunate necessity of dictating what children they're allowed to have? Assuming, of course, that their chromosomes offer sufficient promise for them to be allowed to have children at all? And if we don't treat them as our equals—and you really know we damned well won't, Jack—are the children we allow them to have really going to end up our equals? Or will they be sentenced forever to never climb above the gamma level? And who the hell are we to tell an entire galaxy of it has to do things ourway? Isn't that the very thing we've been so pissed off over at Beowulf for so long? Because the sanctimonious bastards insisted that we couldn't do things our way? For telling us what to do, because that's what it comes down to in the end, however high the motivations we impute to ourselves.