Busy Dying, page 3
After a full week had gone by, though, Walter called Stepanova and asked how he might make amends for his former derelictions of duty. He volunteered to do anything that Stepanova wanted him to do by way of formal public recantation —
and when Stepanova proved more than willing to take him up on the offer he followed through, and spent the next two days confessing his sins to a series of press conferences. He’d never done that before — but he’d never been bankrupt before, either.
Ironically, it transpired — as Margaret had suggested — that there was money in repentance. He was able to sell a few network interviews, and became solvent again. He began hunting through his files and interrogating his answerphone AI, as if trying to find out whether he really did have any enema still tucked away, and — if so — where they might be. Given that he must have known that he was under surveillance by several different agencies, Margaret wasn’t surprised that the answerphone AI couldn’t or wouldn’t impart this information.
She didn’t see him again until it was time for a routine checkup, and she had little alternative but to play along with him, whether it was all deceit or not.
“Have you remembered why you did it ?” she asked him, conversationally, when she’d checked that he was fully fit in a physical sense.
“I can remember setting myself on fire,” he told her. “But it’s hazy -as if I were just an observer, watching it happening to someone else. I can only remember the outside of the event, not the inside. I can’t remember what I felt.”
“Pity,” she said. “You can’t be sure, then, that your public promise to be a reformed character will stick?”
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “I’m perfectly sincere. Even if I do remember the reason, I can still keep the promise. I’ve listened carefully to all my old interviews — I know how ridiculous much of what I said then really is. I wonder, doctor, whether I might actually have cured myself with the fire —
whether I might have burned away the sickness which was making me do it. Maybe that’s what I was subconsciously trying to do all along. Is that possible, do you think?”
What she thought was bullshit! but she had no intention of letting him know that.
“We can always hope,” she said.
“What do you think made me do it, doctor?” he said, appealing to her with wide and innocent eyes. “Was I somehow addicted, do you think? Or was there something about the act of self-murder, the sensation of dying, which gave me a perverse thrill?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “If you knew before, you were careful to keep it a deep, dark secret.”
“Not this time,” he assured her. “If I remember, I’ll tell you everything.
Everything I can.”
“What about Stepanova’s enems?” she asked. “Will you give those back, if and when you remember where they are?”
He seemed genuinely perplexed. “Mr. Stepanova keeps on at me about them,” he admitted. “He’s really rather angry about them—and I’m not sure that he believes me when I tell him that I really have no idea where they might be.”
Margaret wished that she knew whether or not to believe him, annoyed with herself for her inability to be sure. Oh, Walter, she thought. What on earth did I do to deserve you!
Later, at the hospital, Emily asked how Walter was getting along. Margaret gave her a full and frank account of the state of play, not knowing or caring whether it would get back to Stepanova.
“Do you believe him?” Emily asked, as she was bound to do.
“I want to,” said Margaret, honestly. “If he is a different man, I can’t claim any credit for it — but if he isn’t, I dare say that some of the blame will attach itself to me. I just have to hope that he’ll be okay this time — and that one day, he and I will be in a position to work out what the hell it was all about.”
“You might be able to have him put under permanent restraint,” she said. “For his own good, of course. That way, you’d avoid the possibility that he’s just stringing you along.”
“This isn’t the twentieth century,” Margaret pointed out. “Arguing the case in court would probably do more damage to my image and career than another suicide
— there’s a sense in which I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, unless he really is done with it.”
“Do you think we’ll ever know why he did it?” said Emily, wonderingly.
“According to his answerphone,” said Margaret, “We’re all busy dying —he’s just been a little bit busier than most. Last time, though, there was another subroutine which went on and on about death being the one great mystery, the primal source of existential angst. If only he could be consistent… .
Perhaps it was like climbing Everest; perhaps he did it simply because he could
— and now that Stepanova’s made it clear to him that he can’t, he’ll stop.”
Her beeper sounded then, to remind her that she had other patients to see, and she had to run. Not everyone had state-of-the-art enems to defend them against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and even if Stepanova managed to avoid the congressional inquisition he was so anxious about, the vast majority of people would never be able to afford them.
As things turned out, she was busy in the theater for the next six hours, and it wasn’t until she came out that they gave her the news.
Walter Murray was dead: truly, finally, irrevocably dead. They were calling it an accident. There was no proof — and she had no doubt that none would turn up
— that it was anything else.
She got to him as soon as she could, but it really was too late. There was absolutely nothing she could do, except for a post mortem.
She called Stepanova immediately afterward, knowing full well that she had to keep her tongue under a very strict guard.
“It’s a tragedy,” she said. “If only he really had had some of the stuff still hidden away, maybe he could have walked away.”
“He’d have had to remember where it was first,” said Stepanova, dryly. “Anyhow, if he’d handed it over, his conscience might have been clear enough to stop him stepping out in front of the autotruck.” That, she knew, was the nearest he was going to get to an admission that it might not have been an accident at all.
Needless to say, it hadn’t been a CNI autotruck; that would have been too cruel a coincidence.
“His memory was coming back,” she pointed out. “He might have remembered at any time. He might still have turned it over, the way he promised he would.”
“Pigs might fly,” said Stepanova. “My guess is that he knew where it was all along. He would have gone for it when he thought he’d lulled us all into a false sense of security. All that recantation crap was just a ploy. It was only a matter of time before he turned up dead again —dead for good.”
Margaret couldn’t help remembering how eager CNI had been to play along with Murray in the early days, when it had all seemed like good publicity for their technomiracles. They had encouraged him then, and given him all the motivational reinforcement he had needed. All it had taken to change their minds, though, was a change in the direction of the corporate-political wind. Once Stepanova had been brought in, there had been no real question of waiting to see, or hoping that things would ultimately sort themselves out. Men like Stepanova had no compunction about going all the way, just as soon as they felt that the moment was right.
“We’ll never know, now,” she said, hopelessly. “We’ll never understand exactly what happened, why he did it.”
“To tell you the truth, doctor,” said Stepanova, “I don’t give a damn why he did it. That’s your business, not mine. My job is to protect the corporate image of CNI, and I don’t mind telling you that I can’t raise a tear at the thought that Walter K Murray is getting his last little flurry of publicity. After all, he’s got what he always wanted, hasn’t he? He’ll never have to do it again.”
“No,” she said, wondering why she felt so sick, given that she’d learned nothing from the call that she hadn’t already known.
As soon as she’d signed off she went directly to Walter’s apartment. She still had a means of access, and once she was inside she still had the means to seal all the systems and block any traffic. When she’d done that, she carefully winkled out the taps that had been planted there, knowing that their removal wouldn’t trigger any alarms. Then she summoned the answerphone
“Walter K Murray is dead,” she said. “He was comprehensively mangled by an autotruck. A check showed nothing wrong with its programming, so it’s assumed that the fault was his — simple carelessness in observing the rules of the road. In all probability, he was murdered.”
“This is very bad news,” said the answerphone, neutrally. Mourning was way beyond the limits of its programming. It had no imagination to fill it with fear of its own eventual redundancy; no capacity to shed tears or empathize with its maker’s fate; no real sense of the great mystery of death.
“It was bound to end this way, sooner or later,” she said, as though she were talking to Walter himself instead of to his simulacrum. “Everybody has to die, and Walter sailed closer to the wind than most. But this isn’t the way he would have chosen. If his past really was behind him, it’s a cruel fate; if it wasn’t, he’d far rather have gone out in a very different style.”
“True,” said the answerphone, which may or may not have understood what she was saying. How cleverly had Walter programmed it to meet the needs of his future selves?
“We’ll never know, now, what it was all about,” she said. “No one will ever know why he did it. It’s a pity.”
“It’s a pity,” echoed the AI, agreeably.
She didn’t smile. “And no one will ever know where he hid the remaining enems, if there were any left,” she said, and then added: “Unless, of course, you have deeply hidden subroutines which the taps could never reach.”
“Of course,” said the AI, once again echoing her thought, as AIs were ever wont to do.
She couldn’t remember whether she’d ever been to this particular mall before, but the open plaza looked familiar. As she climbed the ugly centerpiece of the fountain people began shouting at her, but it was surprise rather than recognition. Nobody knew her; she wasn’t a celebrity; she wasn’t Walter K
Murray.
By the time she reached her selected coign of vantage, though, a couple of hundred people were converging on the fountain. The design of the atrium was such that the crowds on the second, third, and fourth floors had as good a view as the people at ground level, and the escalators were crammed.
She checked her watch, and took her courage in both hands. Give it ten, she thought, beginning to count down. There was a certain propriety to be maintained. There were bound to be newsdrones on duty; malls were the commercial arteries of the nation, and mallnews was always a big item in the human interest slots.
She grinned faintly at the thought of Stepanova’s probable reaction to the newsvids. It’s all your own fault, she thought. If you hadn’t made certain that this was the only way I could ever find out… .
At five she uncapped the can, and threw the cap into the crowd. At seven she began to pour. At nine she dropped the can into the rippled pool. She struck the match awkwardly on the side of the box. Her pants and sneakers were cold and damp upon her legs and feet, but she knew it wouldn’t matter. The rest of her was soaked with something infinitely less inclined to dampen the spirits.
Someone in the crowd was waving a Thanaticist banner, which had materialized as if by magic. SAINT WALTER THE MARTYR, it said. Saint Margaret the Martyr, she thought, and raised a burning hand in salute.
The flames came up about her with an audible whoosh, and black smoke billowed forth. For a second or two — but it might have been an olfactory illusion —
she thought that she could smell her own flesh burning.
Wow, she thought.
Just for a single fleeting moment, she felt she understood everything
—literally everything.
So dear old Sigmund was right, she thought, wonderingly. It’s in us all, repress it as we may — and all it needs is answering, to show us its ultimate reward.
What a world you’re making, Mr. Stepanova: eternal life and eternal death for everyone… . what a wonderful wonderful world!
The thought required little more than an instant, and that was all she had to enjoy the magical sensation. Hardly had the connection been made before she was left with nothing but the unbelievable agony of being ablaze — and the hope that when she woke up, afterwards, she might be able to recover the infinitely precious memory of the deathwish fulfilled.
It was nothing but hope, but it was something to cling to, something to carry her through.
Wow! she thought, again, before thought itself was finally eclipsed, Wow! Wow!
Brian Stableford, Busy Dying
