Perhaps twenty minutes after the most recent buzz of a drone, Travis sat up into that delicate, busy flocking. Yawning elaborately to prove that he’d been asleep, he held out his hands, onto which a few butterflies alighted and flexed their wings and tasted his skin before taking flight once more.
In ages past, various Indian tribes that roamed this territory had spoken of these butterflies as spirits that entered this world from another to celebrate the spring. Most said that they were omens of good luck and of healthy children soon to be born, although there had been a tribe that saw them as omens of death.
Getting up from the blanket, Travis said, “Time to go home?”
They had more than a two-hour ride ahead of them.
Reluctantly, Gavin rose to his feet. “Yeah, I guess we better scoot.”
The Sara Orangetips did not follow them when they rode out of the cottonwood grove and westward down the canyon.
Gavin wondered to himself, Which are we leaving behind—death or good luck?
2
In the ceiling light box, one of the fluorescent tubes faintly buzzing; fan-driven heat whispering out of a wall vent; refrigerator motor softly humming: a mechanical yet forlorn chorus…
Faster than a cube of ice becoming water in the summer sun, Booth Hendrickson transformed from a vain master of the universe into a willing and obedient prisoner. With the infusion of the third ampule, his terror and horror faded with an alacrity Jane could not comprehend. The inevitability of his oncoming conversion into an “adjusted person,” as he had once so arrogantly named them, seemed entirely to quell his anger, to bleed away any thought of vengeance. More surprising than that, with all options other than conversion denied him, his fate apparently did not depress him, but instead appeared to float him into a tranquil harbor. He relaxed in his restraints and closed his eyes and spoke quietly, less to Jane than to himself, words that might have seemed despairing but were in fact given an inflection that made of them an expression of contentment, “So here I am—it’s lovely, isn’t it?—after all these years, back here of all places, here in the dark alone.”
Jane looked at Gilberto, whose frown mirrored her own.
Hendrickson said, “I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.”
The hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of tiny brain-tropic nano constructs teeming through his blood would take eight to ten hours to reach their destination, pass through capillary walls into brain tissue, and self-assemble into a control mechanism by virtue of Brownian motion. Hendrickson could not already have been in any way affected by their presence in his bloodstream. His inexplicable contentment, mere hours away from the loss of his free will, seemed to confirm a psychology so twisted, so tortured, that unraveling the reason for this complacent acceptance might be impossible.
On the other hand, he was a prince of deceit. Jane had to assume that, even with Hendrickson’s future in chains from which no mortal power could free him, he was nevertheless scheming to use these last few hours to ensure her death, although he would have nothing to gain from it.
He opened his eyes and looked up at her with no evident animosity. “Why wait for the control mechanism to be in place? Interrogate me now. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“The lies you want me to believe.”
“No, listen. Later, when you have total control of me, you can ask some questions again, check those answers against what I’ll give you now. You’ll save a lot of time that way.”
“Why should you care if I save time?”
“I don’t care. But I’d rather not spend these next eight hours just…waiting. The newest iteration of the mechanism installs in four hours. I didn’t know you’d taken ampules from Shenneck’s house. Maybe no one knew. They torched the house so fast, to cover what happened there. But what you took in Napa, what you injected into me, that’s an older version. Takes eight to ten hours. I might go a little crazy—don’t you think?—a little crazy just sitting here waiting to feel it come together inside my skull.”
Jane could imagine her anguish in his situation, and what she had done was a moral weight on her. She felt no guilt, but she recognized a responsibility to ease whatever foreboding he might feel during these hours of transition. Sympathy for the devil. Always dangerous.
When first waking from the chloroform sleep, still under the influence of it, he had revealed something that he wasn’t likely to remember having disclosed. She tested him. “Last week I learned the access sentence that brings an adjusted person under my control. So you people must’ve been busy reprogramming them.”
“Play Manchurian with me,” he said. “That’s the one you know. Lots of plebs are accessed with that sentence.”
“?‘Plebs’?”
“Plebs, plodders, rabble, two-legged cattle. Just other names for the adjusted people.”
His contempt for them seemed undiminished even though he was about to join their ranks.
“How many of them are there?” she asked.
“Plebs? Right now, over sixteen thousand.”
“Dear Lord,” Gilberto said, and he went to sit at the table.
“And what’s the new access sentence?”
Hendrickson didn’t hesitate. “Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira.”
She had a clear memory of their conversation as he had first come out of the chloroform, not fully conscious: Hey, sexy.
Hey.
I got a use for that pretty mouth.
I bet you do, big guy.
Bring it on down here. Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira.
Who is he, then?
No, that’s not what you’re supposed to say.
What am I supposed to say?
You just say, all right.
A few exchanges later, he had dozed off once more.
Now that he’d passed her test, maybe she should invest minimal trust in him. But first she pressed him on his more recent, cryptic statements. “You said here you were again, here of all places, in the dark alone.” She quoted the rest as she remembered it. “?‘I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.’ What is all that? What does it mean?”
Neither the soft voice in which he answered nor his childlike entreaty was characteristic of him. “What I said—all that stuff is of no importance to you, only to me. So don’t make me talk about it now. Leave me a little dignity. If you really want to know…wait till you control me. And then after I’ve told you, just please make me forget I ever did.”
Over Hendrickson had settled a hybrid mood that Jane could not fully read. A melancholy that his circumstances could well explain. But also a note of what seemed like a sentimental harking back. A wistful regret. And a curious sort of longing.
His lotus-leaf eyes were without their former power, and his pride gave way to something almost like humility, his manner that of a mendicant.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s see if we can fill those hours for you—but only if we fill them with the truth.”
3
Gavin Washington let Travis lead the way home on his Exmoor pony, the better to watch over him. The boy wore his riding helmet, which he disliked. But he wouldn’t be receiving his longed-for cowboy hat until he’d had a few more weeks of experience in the saddle.
Samson was a bit restive about the slow pace and would have liked to gallop full-out or at least canter. But the stallion was always mindful of the signals from his reins and his rider’s legs.
Following the pleasant midday warmth, a late-afternoon cooling had begun. Thin high clouds seemed not to drift through the sky, but instead to form on it like a skin of ice crystalizing on the surface of a pond, glazed patches reaching toward one another with growing fractal fingers that blurred away the blue. The fitful breeze had become constant, though it hadn’t swelled into a wind, rippling the sage not yet in bloom, shivering the spidery late-winter flowers of coombe wood.