False Memory полностью

He stayed up all night to watch a dusk-to-dawn marathon of old Bela Lugosi movies, ate an entire quart of Rocky-Road ice cream and a big bag of potato chips, swilled down all the root beer and cream soda he wanted, and caught a desert beetle in a big glass jar and tortured it with a match, His personal philosophy had been enriched immensely by Okyo’s three lines of haiku, and he had taken the poet’s teaching to heart: Life is short, we all die, so you better grab all the fun you can get.

Dinner was served with a second round of beers. Having had no breakfast and only a small vanilla milk shake for lunch, Martie was famished. Nevertheless, she felt as if having an appetite, so soon after finding Susan dead, was a betrayal of her friend. Life went on, and even as you grieved, you had a capacity for pleasure, too, as wrong as that might seem. Pleasure was possible in the midst of an abiding fear, as well, for she relished every bite of her jumbo prawns even as she listened to her husband reason his way toward an understanding of the doom hanging over them.

Fingers sprang from Dusty’s fist once again: “Six — if Susan could be programmed to submit to repeated sexual abuse and have memories of those events scrubbed from her mind, if she could be instructed to submit to rape, then what couldn’t she be made to do? Seven — she began to suspect what was happening, even though she had no proof, and maybe just that little suspicion was enough to alarm her controllers. Eight — she shared her suspicions with you, and they knew it, and they worried that she might share them with someone they didn’t control, so that meant she had to be terminated.”

“How would they know?”

“Maybe her phone was tapped. Maybe a lot of things. But if they decided to terminate her and instructed her to commit suicide, and she obeyed because she was programmed, then that’s not really suicide. Not morally, maybe not even legally. That’s murder.”

“But what can we do about it?”

Eating steak, he considered her question for a while. Then: “Hell if I know — yet. Because we can’t prove anything.”

“If they could just call her up and make her commit suicide, behind her locked doors… what do we do the next time our telephone rings?” Martie wondered.

They locked eyes, chewing the question, food forgotten. Finally he said, “We don’t answer it.”

“That’s not a practical long-term solution.”

“Frankly, Martie, if we don’t figure this out real fast, I don’t think we’re going to be here long term.”

She thought of Susan in the bathtub, even though she had never seen the body, and two hands strummed her heartstrings — the hot fingers of grief and the cold of fear. “No, not long,” she agreed. “But just how do we figure it out? Where do we start?”

“Only one thing I can think of. Haiku.”

“Haiku?”

“Gesundheit,” he said, the dear thing, and opened the bookstore bag that he had brought into the restaurant. He sorted through the seven books that Ned had purchased, passed one across the table to Martie, and selected another for himself. “Judging by the jacket copy, these are some of the classic poets of the form. We’ll try them first — and hope. There’s probably so much contemporary stuff, we could be searching for weeks if we don’t find it in the classics.”

“What’re we looking for?”

“A poem that gives you a shiver.”

“Like when I was thirteen, reading Rod Stewart lyrics?”

“Good God, no. I’m going to try to forget I even heard that. I mean the kind of shiver you got when you read that name in The Manchurian Candidate.”

She could speak the name without being affected by it the way she would be if she heard it spoken by someone else:“Raymond Shaw. There, I just shivered when I said it.”

“Look for a haiku that does the same thing to you.”

“And then what?”

Instead of answering, he divided his attention between his dinner and his book. In just a few minutes, he said, “Here! It doesn’t chill my spine, but I sure am familiar with it. ‘Clear cascades… into the waves scatter. blue pine needles.’”

“Skeet’s haiku.”

According to the book, the verse was written by Matsuo Basho, who lived from 1644 to 1694.

Because haiku were so short, it was possible to speed through a great many of them in ten minutes, and Martie made the next big discovery before she was half finished with her scampi. “Got it. Written by Yosa Buson, a hundred years after your Basho. ‘Blown from the west… fallen leaves gather… in the east.’”

“That’s yours?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m still shivering.”

Dusty took the book from her and read the lines to himself. The connection didn’t escape him. “Fallen leaves.”

“My repetitive dream,” she said. Her scalp prickled as if she could even now hear the Leaf Man shambling toward her through the tropical forest.

So many dead: Sixteen hundred had perished in 1836, and hundreds more had been blown away on this January evening, at the whim of the dice and the playing cards. And still the battle raged so savagely.