Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [61]
“Sorry,” she said. “I do like you, but it can’t be the way you want. This is hardly the time or place for such a thing.”
“I’m glad you put it that way,” Odysseus said. “Because there will be another time and place. I’m going to make sure of it.”
“All right,” Troi said. “Someday I’d like to know you better. I admit to curiosity about what happened to your family. In fact, it might make you feel better if you just got it off your chest now.”
“That’s just what I was thinking. See, there you go again.”
Troi wouldn’t be drawn along any farther and waited to see if he would unburden himself on his own.
“I was married when I was in the CS,” he said after a pause. “I was a rising star in the service and had the highest arrest record of any officer. Worst of all, I was dead serious about what we were doing; I thought we were fighting for our lives and the lives of Rampart.
“One day I happened to have a one-eye with me when I came home. I found out my own wife, and my son, who was fifteen then, were Dissenters. They were hiding fiction in our own house. I did what a CS officer had to do—I had them arrested, and they were given the maximum penalty, they were blanked.
“I never saw them again; I wasn’t allowed to. I told myself they’d been put out of their misery. But then I started to have trouble on the job. I kept blowing arrests, The CS pumped me full of military psychogens to keep me going, but I started to hate myself anyway, and I wandered off in a depression and never came back.
“Turns out some of the fiction my family’d hidden was still at the house. I found it and couldn’t stop myself from reading it. The stories helped me cut through the pain. I had to have more of them, and I took up with Dissenters, just to get the stories, at first. When I actually became a Dissenter, I was Odysseus, because that was my son’s favorite story.
“There have been other defectors like me. Through them I found out my wife’s blanking didn’t work, and they had to destroy her body. The body that was my son’s belongs to a CS officer now. He wouldn’t know me if he saw me. He thinks someone else is his father.”
Troi felt that he was relieved to have talked about these things, and that his Odysseus persona was still strong as ever. His fascination with her was part of that Odysseus character—in order to fully live the myth, he wanted a woman from the myth-world, and she was that woman.
But he might, after all, be able to get them into CephCom. He’d once worked there, and he had a strong motive for atonement and revenge.
She asked him some questions about his mission, told him she’d accept his help getting into CephCom, and then bade him a cordial good night.
As Troi walked away she thought she had, as a counselor, figured him out pretty well. But she found herself beset by an unusual melancholy. She didn’t know if it was the effect of talking with Odysseus or some spontaneous mood of her own. She remembered it had happened when she had first met him. Such strong pangs usually were symptoms and shouldn’t be ignored, she knew. But she had to put it out of her mind, because there was just too much else to do.
Troi lay alone in a rough wool blanket, listening to the fugue of dripping and trickling waters, the snores and sighs of the Dissenters around her, and the occasional flapping wings of haguya high overhead.
She would be at CephCom by tomorrow. This would be her last chance to have contact with the Other-worlders. She would either find out what they were now or face Crichton without understanding what he was really about. Just getting into the CephCom building with Odysseus was not enough; she wanted options once she was there.
She lay on the cold stone, asking the Other-worlders to come, though she was sure they would put her through that icy transformation again. This