Part 19 (2/2)

Dantalion was at the bar. He was smaller and fatter than Powerless Friendless remembered, and his skin was deeply furrowed, the Birastrop sign of old age. Something about his eye his real eye said that he hadn't got long to live, and he knew it. His other eye the metal orb reflected Powerless Friendless's face back at him.

He gazed blearily at Powerless Friendless over a frothing gla.s.s held in one of his lower limbs. 'Yes?' he said, thumping the gla.s.s down. It continued to froth, and something moved inside it.

'You you don't remember me?' Powerless Friendless asked.

'People provide me with financial recompense in return for two services,'

Dantalion said, and wiped the back of his hand across his upper lip. His voice had the careful precision of the very drunk. 'They pay me to stop them remembering something, and they pay me so that I don't remember who they are afterwards.'

'I think I remember you.'

'Then, my friend, you didn't pay enough.' Dantalion burped. 'Drink?' he asked.

'No. I . . . ' Powerless Friendless couldn't force the words out.

'You want your memory back,' Dantalion said softly.

Powerless Friendless nodded.

'When did I excise the unwelcome remembrances?' Dantalion asked.

119.Powerless Friendless shook his head. 'I don't know. Perhaps a few years ago.'

'I was good then.' The Birastrop smiled mirthlessly. 'Better than I am now, at any rate. Have you been getting any breakthroughs? Any memories from your previous life?'

Powerless Friendless nodded. 'Some,' he admitted. 'Flashes. Faces and names. How did you know?'

Dantalion looked away, across the restaurant. Powerless Friendless waited, wondering whether the being had heard the question. Eventually Dantalion picked up his gla.s.s and sloshed the contents around for a moment.

'Long and painful experience,' he said finally. 'People come to me, and ask me to remove selected memories as if I were pulling a rotting tooth. Painful love affairs. Secrets. Tortures. Sometimes a few moments, sometimes a few years. They pay me, and I do my best. And then, years later, they find me again. ”Give them back,” they cry. ”I'm incomplete! I can't live without them!” And I tell them what I'll tell you.' He took a swig from the gla.s.s, and Powerless Friendless could hear him gulp as he swallowed whatever had been swimming in the drink. 'I don't remove memories,' he said. 'I just hide them.

I put them in places your mind won't think to look for them. Sometimes it rediscovers them by accident. Sometimes it searches so hard it finds them despite my best efforts.' He smiled. 'Sometimes they come crawling back into the light and announce their presence anyway.' He banged the gla.s.s down and signalled to the barman. 'What I am trying, in my long and roundabout way, to impart to you is that some memories I can get back for you, but others will have been recycled for dreams or overwritten by other experiences. It's a hit-and-miss affair. Are you still interested in taking advantage of my meagre skills?'

Powerless Friendless nodded.

Something sloshed against the side of Dantalion's gla.s.s, rocking it slightly on the table.

'Why do you drink that stuff?' Powerless Friendless asked, wincing.

'There are some things that even I don't want to remember,' Dantalion answered as the barman placed another inhabited drink before him 'And, as I wouldn't let anybody like me anywhere near my mind, this is the next best solution.'

'Mom!'

'Christopher?'

The small woman in the doorway stared up at Cwej in astonishment. The smells of breakfast irradiated animeat flesh drifted out behind her.

120.Forrester turned to Bernice. 'Why did I let myself get talked into this?' she muttered, and gazed past Bernice, along the hallway. n.o.body was around, but she still felt she was being watched.

'What's the matter?' Bernice asked.

'This just feels like a bad move.' Forrester let her gaze linger at each of the doorways along the hall. Unlike her level, where the entrances to the individual apartments were grey and anonymous, the ones down here on Level Fifty-three were brightly coloured, ever-changing rectangular kaleidoscopes with the names of the families, and in some cases, their smiling simcord images, appearing out of the coloured patterns.

'Christopher! It can't be you!' the woman exclaimed, clapping her hands to her cheeks. 'Oh, let me look at you! We were so worried! We thought you might have been caught up in the riots!'

Riots? Forrester thought as Cwej grinned down at his mother. We've only been gone a few days. What's been happening?

'Mom, I brought some friends.'

'Any friends of yours are welcome,' she said, peering round him and gazing at Bernice and Forrester with warm curiosity. 'Come in, come in. You should have told me you were coming The irradiator's playing up. I think the techbrain's gone again, but the cost of replacements these days . . . '

She ushered them all into a large room filled with furniture and decorated with simcord images of family and friends. A tall, elderly man who had been sitting watching a hand-held centcomp reader sprang to his feet, grinning Forrester, uncomfortable at such effusive hospitality, studied the images intently as an alternative to joining in with the exclamations and introductions behind her. A large number of them seemed to be of Cwej: Cwej as a child, wide-eyed and two-headed; Cwej as a teenager, gangling and awkward, holding a small reptilian pet; Cwej looking uncomfortable in badly fitting Adjudicator's squire's robes; Cwej, bursting with pride at his graduation ceremony on Ponten IV. Forrester found it strange, seeing Cwej without his fur and his bearlike snout. He was so good-looking that he was almost a caricature.

'We were so proud of him,' a voice said from beside her. She turned. The elderly man was standing beside her. His face was deeply lined, and close up she could see that most of the left side of his face was artificial, but his eyes were as bright and as blue as Cwej's. 'I'm Christopher's father,' he added. 'His mother and I were there when he graduated. Pleased as punch. Pleased as punch. First time I'd been back to Ponten for seventy years, of course. Old place hadn't changed much. Reminded me of my own graduation, back in oh-five. I swear some of the lecturers were the same.'

'Roz Forrester,' she said, still ill at ease. 'You were an Adjudicator too?'

121.'Proud to meet you,' he said. 'Any partner of our son is a friend of ours. Yes, I was an Adjudicator, up till four years ago. It's a family tradition.'

Now that she knew, she could see it in his eyes: that searching, questioning, devil-may-care expression that could all too easily turn into world-weariness.

As hers had.

'My father, and his father before him,' Cwej senior added. 'Back as far as we care to look. There was a Cwej on the founding panel of Adjudicators, back when they were more like galactic sheriffs. Forrester. Now there's a familiar name. Could I have served with your dad?'

She shook her head.

'My father didn't well, let's say I don't think you'd have met him.'

'No, I remember what it was,' he said, grinning. 'You were squired to Fenn Martle, weren't you?'

A fist tightened around Forrester's heart.

'Yes,' Cwej's father continued, oblivious to her expression, 'he squired me for his first few years on the job. Good lad. Very promising. Whatever happened to him?'

Forrester bit her lip to stop herself saying something she might regret. This was going to be a long day.

The rising sun shone through the window of the darkened office, casting the shadow of the figure across the translucent desk. Information flickered in the depths of the desk financial, economic, military but the figure did not react.

Like a spider, the figure waited patiently for those faint, tell-tale vibrations of the web.

As the sun rose, its rosy glow slowly edged across the desk and onto the carpet, casting light into the shadowed recesses of the room. As the figure waited, the sunlight crept, inch by patient inch, further across the office, until it lapped against the foot of a large box.

A large, blue box.

The splash of bright colour attracted the figure's attention.

<script>