Windows

by D.G. Compton

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Rod was a television reporter with the ultimate gimmick. Thanks to the marvels of microsurgery, TV cameras were implanted in his eyes. He could broadcast people's actions without them even knowing it. But when he was forced to spy on a dying woman, he deliberately blinded himself by overloading his sensitive circuits. Rod thought that he could opt out of the tough choice that society was forcing him to make. He was wrong, of course. Dead wrong . . .

Release date: November 14, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 255

Sample

She was very close to me, and spoke softly. “You’ve come back,” she said.

I hadn’t, of course. Nothing is that easy. But I was well on the way. By which I mean to say that I’d taken at least one not inconsiderable step in the right direction. For God’s sake, I was blind, wasn’t I? And it’s hard to be any more not inconsiderable than that. …

Tracey stood by my chair on the lawn, holding my hand. Tracey—my wife, my ex-wife, my future wife … right then I’m not sure exactly how I thought of her. Ten years married, complete with authentic male offspring, a valid Basis for Discussion if ever there was one, and then she hadn’t renewed. I’d been surprised, I admit. But they always say it’s the second renewal that’s the most risky. And I hadn’t blamed her. To be honest, I’d been too taken up with my job at NTV at the time to care very much either way. I was building a career, you see. Making like the big newsman. And loving every minute of it.

Yet here she was, standing by my chair on the headmaster’s lawn, holding my hand. Where are you now that I need you? Correction—why are you, now that I need you? And I hadn’t the faintest idea. Obviously she’d come with Vincent, but never because he’d asked her to. Tracey and the boss of NTV’s Human Destiny Shows didn’t see eye to eye. It wasn’t that she blamed him for me, certainly not for this latest gizmo, this Man-with-the-TV-Eyes gizmo, she was wiser than that. Man like me goes to hell in his own wheelbarrow. No, Tracey and Vincent Ferriman simply didn’t see eye to eye. About anything. Ever.

So here she was, and I didn’t know why. And didn’t dare to ask. Until suddenly I realized that her “You’ve come back” said it all. It was she who hadn’t renewed the marriage contract. But it was I who’d come back.

“What’s Vincent doing?” I asked her.

“Cameras … microphones …”

She didn’t want to talk about it. But I had to know. “What else?”

And she heard the question behind the question. “They’ve got a stretcher,” she said. “Mrs. Mortenhoe looks … asleep.”

Katherine Mortenhoe, Kate, Katie Mo … positively her final appearance. No puke or shit or piss—just asleep. So Vincent had the end of his story. But not through me. And far too late for it to hurt poor Katherine. At least I spared you that, Kate. Spared you, spared myself. The Human Destiny Show, that was a laugh. Rigor, paralysis, coordination loss, sweating, double vision, incontinence, death … none of these anything beside the unspeakable obscenity of the Man-with-the-TV-Eyes. The dying lovingly observed by the already dead. At least I spared us that.

Tracey squeezed my hand. “Vincent tells me it must have hurt.”

I thought about it. “Not really,” I said. “She simply ceased. You know? Like on the midnight air.”

I had misunderstood her on purpose, but she didn’t take the hint. “I meant you, Rod. What you did to your eyes.”

And suddenly her feet of clay, so unfair I was, were unbearable. “For Christ’s sake, Tracey, don’t make me out to be some fucking hero. Of course it bloody hurt—when microcircuits burn out they do just that. They burn out. But was it enough? Tell me that, Tracey—do you honestly think it was enough?”

“If it wasn’t, honey, then d’you want I should stick pins in you?”

The sharpness of her reply shook me. And filled me at the same time with a wary joy, for she wasn’t so thick after all. Sympathy could be offered, never demanded. Dear Tracey. I was, thank God, going to have to watch myself now that she was around.

She waited, tactfully, for the dust to settle. Then she moved round in front of me. “Shall we go now?” she said.

But I was a coward. “If you want me,” I said, really needing her answer.

“Of course I want you.” She stooped, took both my hands, and pulled. Then she laughed. “Haven’t I always wanted you?”

It wasn’t that she didn’t think his blindness would make a difference. Certainly her life with him would be different, complicated, difficult. But its difficulties—not like before—would be obvious, the sort of difficulties she could cope with. And he had, really and truly, no fooling, come back. The thought made her happy, warm inside. In the profoundest sense he had come back to her, back to their son, back to the decent ordinary world of decent ordinary folk.

She led him away across the dappled grass, away from the technicians, the cameras and microphones, most of all away from Vincent. She thought she remembered reading somewhere that you walked slightly behind a blind man, guiding him with your hand on his upper arm. So she walked slightly behind Rod, guiding him with her hand on his upper arm.

He’d come back. … It was six years, she reckoned, almost to the day, since he had begun to leave her. Six years since that first appointment at NTV House, that irresistible summons to the great Vincent Ferriman—irresistible to Rod, that is, but never to her. Innocent she might be—and the Rod of those days had accused her of innocence as if it were a sin—but hardly so innocent as not to be able to recognize the totally noninnocent. Among whom Vincent was Emperor, Archangel, Corrupter Supreme. So she had fought him in what she was not embarrassed to see as the battle for Rod’s soul. His all too available soul … She’d fought Vincent on that first occasion, and lost. She had continued to lose to him again and again down the remaining three wretched years of her marriage. Till it had come up for renewal, and she’d terminated instead. Not because she thought the non-renewal would shock Rod into seeing what he had become, but simply because she was tired. And she needed more than anything else to know where she was at.

But she hadn’t entirely given up trying. She had fought also in the three years since, on the rare occasions when Rod and she had met. By then she had to fight not only Vincent but her own dangerous longing to have her husband back at whatever the price. Even most recently, when Rod was offered the kingdoms of the world and accepted them, she had fought, in her own way, even then.

And now suddenly, unexpectedly, just when she’d thought he was finally lost to her, he’d come back. Her victory? She rather doubted it, told herself she didn’t even want it. It didn’t matter a damn. Unlike Vincent, who typically saw Rod’s self-inflicted blindness as a vulgar martyrdom, she believed it to be an intensely personal act. For all the blazing publicity, a private expiation. And—though she didn’t go much on expiations as a rule—she accepted this one as suitable, even necessary. The entire Mortenhoe episode had been so outrageous, nothing less would have done.

Gently she led him away across the lawn, towards the parked company helicopter. He scuffed his feet, shuffling ignorantly through the delicate shadows cast by the leaves of the cherry tree. The transitory, unownable beauty of the world, she didn’t like to remember how important it had been to him. A simple newsman he’d called himself, knowing he was more. And she, who knew that even better than he, could still be astonished by the perfection of his work—quite separate from, and vainly begging forgiveness for, its less than perfect creator.

Behind them a cameraman swung his lens in their direction. Vincent, clipboard in hand, checked him sharply. She wasn’t surprised—she’d flown out with Vincent from NTV House, had suffered his anger at what he saw as Rod’s betrayal. They’d get no more coverage from NTV, not in a million years. Which was just the way she wanted it.

Suddenly Rod spoke. “Tracey? I can smell hot oil—we’re near the helicopter, aren’t we?”

Already his words were a blind man’s oddly-articulated and over-loud. “Right first time,” she said encouragingly, to make up for them. “Well done, honey.”

“Not the most brilliant of deductions, I’d say.”

She frowned. Must he sneer at her? Or at himself?

“Anyway,” he went on, “why the helicopter?”

“We’re going home, Rod. Out of harm’s way before this story breaks.”

He stopped walking, so abruptly that they collided. “It would have been nice to be consulted,” he said coldly.

Criticisms already? “For Christ’s sake, Rod, what’s the matter with you? You don’t really want to hang round this place, do you?”

“All the same, it would have been nice to be consulted.”

She took her hand from his arm and stepped away. “All right, so I’m consulting you. D’you want to go home, or d’you want to hang around here till some other company gets in on the scene? Is that what you want—the big hero bit?”

He turned, his face seeking the direction of her voice. Briefly he groped for her, then stopped himself. It was a tiny movement, but she saw its defenselessness and could guess at the pride that checked it. She felt ashamed. She’d offered him easy praise, like a child. And now she was treating him like a helpless incompetent, to be shifted hither and yon at the whim of its keeper. And he was neither. He was a man: a blind man, but still a man.

“I … I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He smiled at the air some three feet to her left. “Don’t mind me, love. I always was an ungrateful bastard. Of course I want to go … home.”

And in that pause, to compound her shame, was all the newness of the idea of home to him. She could have wept for her crassness. For six years now he’d been a Vincent man, warming himself at the perilous hearth of Vincent’s pleasure.

His hands hung loosely by his sides. She reached out and took them. “Honey—I’m treating you like some crappy parcel. I’m sorry. It’s the mother in me, I guess. All these years of dealing with little Roddie …” And regretted this at once, for the reproach he might think implied in it. All these years of coping on my own, you bastard.

If he did, he gave no sign. He seemed, in fact, hardly to have heard her, for his head was tilted and held strangely high, as if he was listening for someone or something far more distant. “Are they watching us?” he asked.

“They?”

“Vincent. The camera crew. People.”

For a moment she wondered why he should want to know: then his hands tightened unmistakably on hers, drawing her closer. She laughed a little widly, all at once unaccountably nervous. “Does it matter?” she said, giving herself more time.

“I’ll tell you about it one day. But yes, it does matter.”

She glanced round. “Nobody’s watching. Except the helicopter pilot.”

“Him I can bear.”

She let him pull her to him then, and he put his arms tightly around her. Her tenseness faded. For all his blindness he was as real and as strong as he had always been. If he had come home, then so had she. Safe at last, she closed her eyes and he kissed her lightly, lip brushing lip, exploring, rediscovering. … She’d existed without him for so long. Grasping the close, rough hair of his beard, she drew his mouth down upon her own. And lost her awareness of self entirely.

When finally he released her she felt exposed, uprooted, her body where it had touched him now painfully naked.

Life went on. “We mustn’t keep the pilot waiting,” she said.

Rod kept both his hands on her shoulders. He was smiling. “Do I show?” he asked her.

“Show?” It took her a moment to catch on. Then she blushed, was glad he couldn’t see how he was hurrying her. It took time, being married again. She glanced down at his fly. “Only to me, honey,” she told him.

“Thank you.” He bowed slightly to cover a small rearrangement. “Then of course we mustn’t keep the pilot waiting.”

Not that the pilot was waiting—or at least, as far as he knew, not for them. His first duty was to Vincent and the camera crew. She wished now that she’d been a bit friendlier with him on the way out: laid up store, as it were, in heaven. But she’d had other worries then, a dying woman to find, and Rod, and Vincent’s murderous suavity to contend with. At times like those you dealt with fences as you came to them. One by one. As best you could.

She walked with Rod the last few yards to the helicopter and guided his hands to the rim of its open door. The pilot put down the company magazine he’d been too bored to read and looked down at them with little enthusiasm. “You found him, then,” he said, much as if Rod had been a lost umbrella.

Tracey stuck to the approach she’d decided on, casual yet firm. “We’re returning to the city,” she said. “You can radio on ahead for a company car to take us home from NTV House.”

The pilot peered past her, across the broad sweep of the lawn. “No offense, lady, but I’d better check with the big I am.”

“Mr. Ferriman’s tied up. He’s got another hour’s filming here at least.” She gestured lightly. “You can see for yourself.”

“Always check with the boss, lady. That way you can’t go wrong.”

“Please yourself.”

She wanted nothing from Vincent, least of all his kind permission. But she’d run out of light gestures. Resentfully she watched the pilot disentangle his feet from the central control column. Then Rod let out a sudden glad cry, astonishing them both. “Don’t I know you? Don’t I know that voice? Haven’t we flown before? Don’t tell me … aren’t you that mangy cross-eyed bastard the chaps all called Force Nine? Old Force Nine himself, in person?”

The pilot eyed him warily. “You’ve got a good memory.”

“Some things I don’t forget.” Rod’s chuckle, his heartiness, might have convinced. “Off Iceland, wasn’t it? Blowing half a hurricane and you took us in so low I nearly put my sodding eye out on that poor bloody trawler’s mast. … I tell you, after that little jaunt I banged in a chitty to the company—one pair clean underpants, cowards for the use of …”

She wondered how to interrupt, tell him he was jollying a stone wall. Then the pilot, no sadist, did it for her. “Look matey—it’s no go.” But more in sorrow than in anger. “I can’t do it. He’d have my guts for garters—same as you would in his place. And where the hell’d I find another flying job these days?”

Which was true enough. And that being so—camaraderie oblige and all that—the impasse between them was complete.

To be resolved however by Vincent himself, behind them, his voice suddenly rising above the rhubarb of his gang. “Tracey? I say, Tracey love—a word in your ear before you rush off.”

They turned. Tracey heard the pilot laugh, happy to be freed of responsibility. “See what I mean? Eyes in the back of his bloody head, that one.”

Vincent was coming towards them, so friendly and nice it was beautiful to see. He stopped ten yards away, by the drooping tip of a rotor blade. Roderic tilted his head. “What’s he up to now?”

Her reply was lost in Vincent’s follow-up shot. “Sorry to butt in, but I’ve been watching you two people. And you’ve got it all wrong. I mean, the sighted one ought to walk in front—doesn’t that make more sense? The sighted one walks in front and the blind one a pace behind, his hand on her arm. That way he feels so much safer. You do see, don’t you?”

She did see. Obviously he was quite right. “Would that be the upper arm, please?” she yelled back, bitterly furious.

“Any old part of the sodding arm he can reach, love. I’m not a fussy man.”

He didn’t come any nearer so she left Rod, which was clearly what she was expected to do, and crossed the grass to where Vincent was standing. Possibly he was right: possibly the everything and the nothing that the two men had to say to each other was best avoided. Not that she herself had all that much to say to him either.

“I didn’t know you were an expert on caring for the blind,” she told him.

“We did a feature once. The company, I mean.” He shrugged, secure enough to be able to afford self-mockery. “They tell me this TV business is a great substitute for living.”

She smiled politely. “You wanted a word in my ear. Was that it?”

“Gracious, no. I wanted you to know you could have the chopper, and welcome. And I’ll tell that caricature of a pilot to radio ahead for a car.”

“I already have.”

“I’m sure you have. But the news’ll come better from me.”

He could hardly hope her gratitude would become a burden to him. “What’s the snag?” she said.

“The snag?”

“The snag. The ball-cruncher. What you’ve come all the way over here to tell me.”

“No snag at all. Well, perhaps just a tiny one …” He spread his hands, doing the big film producer—which was safe enough, his treacheries being of a different, far subtler magnitude. “I’ve been thinking, you see. Undoubtedly the company will want to sue—there’s the contract to think of, and all that expensive neurosurgery on your ex-husband. …”

That barbed ex-husband was something she could make herself ignore. “The surgery was their idea, I seem to remember. Certainly not his. But they’ll sue all the same, of course.” She shrugged. “Let them. It’s only money.”

He reached above his head, set the rotor blade bouncing lightly. “Forgive me, love, but I didn’t say they’d sue—I said they’d want to sue. Personally, I’m sure they’ll never get round to it. As you so rightly say, it’s only money. No, the real snag in all this—”

“If not money, then what else does NTV care about? Of course they’ll sue.” There was something Vincent wasn’t yet saying. “They’ve lost a star reporter—not to mention this filthy Man-with-the-TV-Eyes thing. With any luck they’ll have been made to look ridiculous. Of course they’ll sue.”

“You may be right. Certainly some kind of public gesture would seem to be called for. …” He screwed his face up, her conspiratorial friend. “Still, I’m sure we’d all much rather be merciful. It’s so much better for the company image—after all, in the circumstances it would hardly be kind to add to poor dear Roddie’s burden. Not seeing that he’s been and gone and committed suicide on us all.”

“Professional suicide, you mean.” Rod was still alive. It was an important point.

“What else?” Vincent hesitated, studied his fingernails. They were, she saw, surprisingly grubby. “There’s funny thing, you know, about suicide—people still refuse to see it as the action of a sane man. They even have a special legal phrase for it: while the balance of his mind was disturbed, they say.” He looked up, met her eyes unflinchingly. “Poor Roddie was crazy, love. Deranged. Not accountable for in law. I’m sure you’ll agree.”

“Crazy?” When he’d never been saner?

“Overwrought, then … But you know how people are, how they like to simplify. Crazy’s the way we’ll have to play it.”

“Christ Almighty …” It was obscene. But she ought to have seen it coming. It was logical enough, given Vincent’s framework. He was, she knew well, a very fast thinker. “Christ Almighty—all Rod did was spoil your pissing little program. Do you really hate him that much? Isn’t it enough to have him blind? Must you have him insane as well?”

Of course he must. Anything less left Rod the wiser, better man.

She was shaking, scarcely able to see for the intensity of her anguish. If he had smiled then, if he had showed just a glimmer of his satisfaction, she would have struck him. And rejoiced. She could imagine it, not a woman’s puny gesture but a blow from high above her head, downwards, both hands clenched together, felling him, shattering the bones of his neck. And he would be dead.

But he was far too shrewd, far too much Vincent, to give her the excuse. He registered nothing at all, for even an assumed regret would now have been dangerous.

“I don’t think you understand, my dear. You see, the project was mine. The photoelectric implants were my responsibility. The money was spent on my advice. All this puts me in a very difficult position. The only factor I couldn’t be expected to make allowance for was Roddie’s mental stability—that was the province of Dr. Klausen. Put bluntly, it’s Klausen’s head for the company chopping block or mine. You see? Roddie has to have been mad. …” He risked a small sigh. “Anyway, who would believe otherwise?”

Tracey’s anger was weary now, chilled by disgust. So there was to be no hatred, said Vincent, only the unfortunate mechanics of expediency. She could hardly blame him, he said, for trying to defend his own position at whatever the cost to others. He was a corporation man, just as Rod had been. And corporation men knew the rules, he said.

A corporation man, just as Rod had been … “We’ll fight you,” she said, wondering if he honestly believed he’d hidden his malice from her.

“Of course you will.” He sighed again, not at her or for himself, but simply on account of the predictable perversity of things. Then he moved slightly so that he could see past her to the helicopter. “Pilot,” he called. “Pilot—I won’t be needing you for an hour or so. Take these people back to the House, will you? And radio a car for them from the pool.”

Since he was a reasonable and forgiving man, driven only by regrettable necessity, such generosity was unavoidable. She hoped it broke his heart. Behind him, away on the far side of the lawn, order had been established in the group around the dead woman on her neat stretcher. They were standing, waiting for Vincent so that they could begin. He had a good team: they worked fast. They had arrived in the helicopter—she also—hardly fifteen minutes before. Had she really only been with Rod for so short a time?

“Have you finished, then? Wasn’t there another snag you mentioned?” She drove herself, needing to know if there could possibly be worse. “You called it the real snag. It’d better be good.”

He hesitated again. “I m. . .