Angel Eyes (30 page)

Mars wrinkled his brow in annoyance. ''What did the dolphin say?"

"Her name's Arbat," the Hero admonished. "And she doesn't like you one bit."

Mars bit his lip, said as calmly as he could manage, "And did she say why?"

"First, you don't use her name. Second, she says you're not to be trusted."

Mars made a sound of disgust. It was intolerable that he should be forced into having a conversation-if that was what you could call this farce!-with a dolphin. But he knew that in order to engage the Hero, he had to make the effort. He said, "How would Arbat know whether or not I can be trusted? She won't even take the food I offer her."

A flood of clicking was followed by the ???? saying, ''If you give the fish to Lara, Arbat will take it from her."

"I'm disappointed," Mars said, but he dutifully plopped the fish into Lara's palm. Immediately the dolphin dipped her head, scooped the fish up, swallowed it.

"Viktor," Mars said. "We must talk."

"All right." The Hero stared up at Mars. "But why must you insist on calling me Viktor? I told you not to use any of those names."

It was clear that he had once been exceedingly handsome. But something inexplicable had happened to him up there in the heavens. Mars had seen photos of the Hero before he had been fitted into the Odin-Galaktika II spacecraft and was launched into space. This was not the same man. Oh, surely, the configuration of skull and skeleton were the same, although he was far thinner now, and walked-when he could walk at all, rather than being confined to his special motorized wheelchair-with the lack of assurance and the brittleness of a man of ninety. In fact, that is what Mars would have suspected happened to him up there-the answer to the mystery: an unnaturally rapid aging-had it not been for the fact that the Hero's mind had not deteriorated one iota. It merely had been altered. And so the enigma continued to unfold like a complex origami in front of Mars.

"I call you Viktor," Mars said, "because I must. I have orders to do so." He shifted to keep the floating man in sight. "If it helps, I don't think of you as Viktor, but as the Hero, with a capital H."

"A generic," the Hero said. "Like a military rank."

"I don't see it that way. I don't think of you as the Cosmonaut."

"What can I do for you today, Volkov?" The Hero seemed to have had enough of light banter, and his change in tone put the dolphin on guard. She was, so Mars had been informed, extremely reactive to changes in the Hero's mental and emotional states. Arbat swam away from Lara and her fish, popped up beside the Hero. She started her incessant clicking.

Mars had to keep a rein on his temper. Basic interrogation techniques called for a rhythm to be established. Once you got the subject used to answering questions-no matter how innocuous-it was a much smaller step to get him to give you the answers you sought.

It was one thing to be interrupted by a colleague, but to deal with the interference of an animal was too much. He was about to shout when, looking into the Hero's bland upturned face, he began to suspect that this kind of disturbance was just what the Hero had in mind. The Hero was not unaware of the principles of interrogation, and it would be in character for him to use every method at his disposal to deflect his questions.

"Actually," Mars said, "I came here today to tell you that I'm tired of this little play we've been in. It's like being consigned to act in No Exit for eternity. Some kind of bizarre purgatory. I'm willing to call a beet a beet. You've been put here more or less against your will, but so have I.I didn't ask for this assignment, and I haven't been happy with it. As lousy as you feel day to day, I feel almost as bad watching you suffer."

"Do you actually expect me to believe that shit? "

"I'd be naive if I did." Mars rose and, walking about the room, methodically disabled every listening, watching, and monitoring device. Lara stared at him with a kind of terror, but the Hero's face was as bland as ever.

Within thirty seconds they heard shoes pounding on the stairs, and a clutch of the building personnel-two of them armed guards-burst into the room.

"It's nothing," Mars said. "I turned everything off. Go back to your posts."

"But with the machines down," one of the scientists complained, "we have nothing to do."

"Go have lunch," Mars said. "Take a walk. Do what you've never done before, enjoy the sunshine and the spring day with nothing on your minds.''

"I hope you have clearance for this," another scientist said. "What you've done has serious implications."

"Get the hell out of my sight!" Mars bellowed in an uncharacteristic display of temper, and the clot of men disappeared.

In the silence that followed, the Hero said, "I want Lara to stay."

"As you wish."

"And I want to come out of the water."

Lara moved toward him, but Mars motioned her back. He bent down, gripped the Hero under his arms, brought him up over the coping of the pool. Lara went to get the wheelchair while Mars propped the Hero up, began to pat him dry with one of a pile of enormous towels.

The Hero wore no bathing suit when he was in the water, and Mars looked interestedly at his body. His hairlessness was somehow fascinating, and though he had to be pulled like a rag doll out of the damaged spacecraft upon landing, his subsequent muscular rehabilitation had been remarkable. (It was his bones that had been irreparably damaged.) And the color of his sleek skin, which could only be described as a kind of pale silver, like a star, glowed in the indirect lights. For the first time Mars could sense why, bent back or no bent back, Lara and Tatiana found the Hero sexually attractive.

Together Mars and Lara maneuvered the Hero into the wheelchair. Lara draped a fresh towel over his loins. The Hero disliked clothes; perhaps, Mars surmised, because they had become so damned inconvenient to get in and out of. And they, more than anything else in his daily life, reminded him of his disabilities.

"What name would you like me to use?" Mars asked, beginning the interrogation rhythm all over again.

"I don't know. But not Viktor. I'm not Viktor."

"Of course you're not."

''How about Odysseus?" That blank face. ''I promise I won't call you Polyphemus."

Mars waited a moment, unsure whether this was a concession or another joke at his expense. "All right. How are you sleeping, Odysseus?"

"I don't sleep," the Hero said at once. This was a subject he liked. "I dream. It's not the same thing. When you dream continuously, you're not sleeping, you're living, but in an entirely different way. You're in another state of consciousness."

Mars had become used to this kind of talk. "And your dreams?"

"Are filled with the wonder of space," the Hero said, "and of the stars. I dream of the color I saw out there, the color between the stars."

"What color? Red, green, blue?"

"I can't tell you," the Hero said, "because it's impossible to find words to describe it. It's not even as ephemeral a color as you know it."

"What do you mean?"

"There's ... I don't know, a substance to it."

"A substance such as what? Like your spacecraft had substance?"

"No, not like that at all."

There was a long pause during which Mars glanced at Lara. She was sitting with her wrists on her knees, gazing into the Hero's eyes. Mars wondered whether her loyalties were wavering. Then he immediately dismissed the thought. He had chosen Lara and Tatiana himself. He knew their backgrounds intimately, so he knew where their loyalties lay. It was just that he was paid to be paranoid. Nevertheless, he told himself, he mustn't allow the business of paranoia to become an obsession. That would clearly undermine his current work.

The Hero cleared his throat. "I've thought about this ever since I first awoke," he said after a long time, "and I believe that what I saw out there was the color of God."

Mars was interested in this. "Why do you think that?"

"Because it's what the dreams tell me, over and over, in as many different ways as there are faces on the people of this planet."

"Lara," Mars said, "do you believe him?"

"Yes."

The Hero looked at her. "Tell Volkov what you would tell him if this was one of your weekly debriefings.''

Lara was clearly stunned, and Mars only a bit less so. How did the Hero know about the debriefings?

The Hero gave Mars a canny look: "Let's call a beet a beet, yes?"

Mars considered this challenge. Then he nodded at Lara. "Tell me."

Lara looked from the Hero to him.''I believe him,'' she said, her voice echoing out over the gently lapping pool where Arbat was watching them.

Mars took some time to work this through. "Perhaps," he said to the Hero, "your dreams tell you that you are God."

A smile spread slowly from the comers of the Hero's mouth. When it reached his eyes he said, "I'm not mad, Volkov. To intimate so is futile and, worse for you, foolish."

"I withdraw the intimation," Mars said immediately, accepting this little defeat as gracefully as he was able. "You understand it was something I felt compelled to ask."

"And I ask myself why?" The Hero regarded him. "It's not such a great secret, although I'll bet anything you think it is. There's only one thing that makes this discussion meaningful, Volkov, and it's that, like me, you believe in God. No, don't bother to deny it-1 know you're doing it for Lara's sake. You needn't bother. For one thing, Lara, too, believes in God. So does Arbat, so for once we're all agreed on one matter. And a monumental one it is, too. For another thing, Lara belongs to you, hook, line, and soul. Now isn't that ironic, in a country that professes to put no value on the capitalistic notion of possessions. I see your lips moving, Volkov. What's that? Speak up! Heresy, you say? All right. Then we both have heretical thoughts. You see? You're no better than I am, though I can hardly expect you to agree with me."

Mars glared at the Hero, as if with his gaze he could burn out the mysterious alterations the void of space had worked on that mind.

''The presence of God,'' said the Hero, "is something we all feel. It's what binds the four of us, even though four more divergent creatures could hardly exist in one place. Or perhaps it's our belief in Him that has brought us together.''

''I don't want to speak about God,'' Mars said.

''Then by all means, we'll change the subject,'' the Hero said sardonically. "I wouldn't want you to feel discomfited in any way." He smiled, although it was hardly a benign expression. "But before we do, I'll say one thing more. I've got your weakness down pat."

Mars found to his shame that his mouth was dry. He longed for a glass of water, but to ask Lara to get him one would be unthinkable; he could just imagine the Hero laughing at him. "And what is that?" he managed to get out.

"It's essentially this: you don't know what happened to me up there, so no matter what stories I give you, no matter what I say, you cannot altogether disbelieve me. Because, even though I don't think of myself as God, in one sense I've become like God. You know absolutely nothing about me."

"You're a man, just like I'm a man. We're both human beings, nothing more." But Mars said this with far more conviction than he felt.

"You know, Volkov, the two of us remind me of a pair of rival Spanish Gypsies. We've challenged each other to a duel. We're bound together by a six-foot cord. But we've somehow lost our stabbing knives, our conventional weapons, and now we're desperately trying to come up with an alternate way inside each other's defenses. Stalemate." That smile, hard as steel, widening. "Or is it? Have you figured it out yet? Haven't you seen its shape emerging from the darkness? Hasn't our duel, rather, evolved into a war of wits? "

"We're not on opposite sides," Mars said. "I'm not sure where you got the idea that I am your enemy.''

The Hero said nothing. He was watching Arbat in the pool.

"What do you and the dolphin talk about?" Mars said suddenly.

"Arbat."

"Arbat," Mars conceded.

''We discuss the universe,'' the Hero said, still looking at the dolphin. "The complexity of existence, the diversity of knowledge. We also contemplate the nature of death."

Mars was staring at Lara, but apparently she did not think this exchange at all amusing or even odd. Mars abruptly felt an acute sense of dislocation. What is going on here? he asked himself. One of us in this room appears to be mad, but the curious thing is, I don't know who it is.

"What happened up there, in space, in Odin-Galaktika II?" Mars said. "We lost contact with you; the event took place. I know it was a long time ago-"

"Not for me," the Hero said. "It happened yesterday."

"Well, I know, in some circumstances it must seem like-"

"It happened yesterday," the Hero repeated. He raised his hands, cupped them into a hollow sphere. "Because I've learned how to bend time in the same way you've learned how to bend light rays."

And that was another of his disconcerting, dislocating idiosyncrasies. The ???? kept saying "you" instead of "us," as if he no longer belonged to the human race.

''How many times in the past fifteen months since I came out of the coma have you asked me what happened? And how many times have I told you?"

Too many to count, Mars thought. The trouble was, no one believed him. How could they?

He said, "Nevertheless, I'd appreciate it if you would tell me again."

"Again?" the Hero asked. "Or one more time?"

The two men grinned at each other, and Mars thought. He's quite right, this is a war of wits. I must ensure that he doesn't win it.

''We had put the Mars module components together in Earth's orbit," the Hero began. "Everything was going just fine. We were working well together. I guess, in the end, you were right in paring the crew down from ten to two. We never would have made it in such a huge module. It was very difficult putting together the sections of the smaller module you sent up in different payloads.

"We blasted out of Earth's orbit into the Mars injection trajectory. We began the next phase of the mission. We were well past the gravitational pull of the Moon. How incredible it was to see that satellite up close. For those moments of the flyby, I was a child again, staring up through a clear winter's sky and wondering, What's it like up there? Now I knew, and it was giving me the chills. I was actually sick from the sight of it, as if it were too much to take in, as if I were Moses approaching the burning bush. But, of course, I was wrong. That would come later.