The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk Read online

  There were at least half a dozen people standing around where Charlie lay like a patient in an operating theater. They were all men and he knew none of them. But standing farthest away was Kathy, or Dr. Flemyng, as he had now accustomed himself to think of her. Their eyes met, but she made no acknowledgment of him. There was something blank and, he thought, defeated in her gaze.

  “You do recognize her, Charlie, don’t you? Tell me.”

  “Of course I do,” Charlie said without thinking. Only then did he realize what had happened. He had spoken. His voice had formed words—wonderful, liberating words.

  He looked down at himself. There was no silvery space suit this time, no cables, and no helmet. Instead he wore something that looked like a hospital smock from which his feet and arms protruded. They were hairless and human.

  The man who had spoken was holding something up. Charlie turned his head and saw it was a mirror. In it was his reflection. He was himself again. He was a man.

  “It’s you, Charlie. This is who you really are.”

  “But how… why… why all that… ?”

  He didn’t know what name to give to what he was trying to ask about, and his voice tailed off feebly.

  The man with the mirror handed it to a colleague and leaned over Charlie like a consultant explaining to a patient the treatment he has just undergone or is about to undergo.

  “All in good time, Charlie. There’s still more going on here than quite meets the eye, so try to relax, and all will become clear eventually. My name’s Latimer West, by the way. Dr. Latimer West.”

  Charlie made a move to sit up, but felt himself restrained by something under the smock. West held up a warning hand.

  “Patience, Charlie. You’re attached—not for restraint. It’s your support system. You’ve been here for a couple of days, and that means intravenous drips and bodily evacuation systems. But you’re in perfectly good shape. You’ll find you haven’t lost any muscle tone.”

  Two technicians quickly went to work. In a moment the drips that were in him were removed, as was the streamlined arrangement clamped around his lower parts, like something between a chastity belt and a baby’s diaper.

  “The scenario you’ve just been through was almost real time,” West was saying. “We foreshortened some of the sleep periods, which saved a day. All the same, you’ve been stretched out here for quite a spell. We tried to make you as comfortable as possible.”

  Charlie looked at him from beneath lowered eyebrows. “Okay,” he said, with a touch of menace in his voice now, “if that was virtual reality, show me how you did it.”

  West looked over at Susan and beckoned her forward. She approached, Charlie thought, like an automaton, her face devoid of expression and with a listlessness in the way she moved.

  “Show him, Dr. Flemyng. Show him how we make this work.”

  Charlie searched her face, but she avoided his gaze and reached behind him for something. She produced a curious-looking forked instrument attached to a cable. The forks, five of them, were slim and black, curved in a way that would make them fit easily on the human head. She attached it now to Charlie’s head. The pressure was so light he barely felt it there.

  “It bypasses all your sensory faculties,” she said, still avoiding his gaze. “All we have to do is switch it on and the effect is instantaneous.”

  “Show me,” he said.

  She looked directly at him for the first time. “Are you sure you’re ready? It’s quite a shock.”

  He nodded curtly, not bothering to observe that no shock could be worse than some of the things he had already endured.

  “All right—brace yourself.”

  She reached for a control panel, pressed two switches, then a third. There was a strangely silent explosion inside Charlie’s head. It sprang from the intangible center of his consciousness and fireballed out to encompass his entire universe. He was back, instantaneously, in the body of a chimpanzee, roaring with pain as his opponent’s teeth sank into his side. Spinning around, he grabbed the other chimp’s arm and threw him flat on his back. He began kicking him, but several other males now began attacking Charlie from behind withbites and punches. They didn’t know how to fight and he chased them off easily, but that gave his first opponent time to escape and shin up one of the three tall oaks that had been stripped of all greenery and transformed by constant use into natural climbing frames.

  He was about to chase the terrified chimpanzee up the first of the trees, when he stopped. The sense of deja vu was overpowering. What was happening was real. There was no way he could doubt that. The feel, the smell, the sound of everything, this was neither dream nor hallucination, but reality.

  Yet he knew that it was not reality, because it had happened before—just like this. The same incident, the same details. Even, now that he stopped to think about it, the same strange sense of detachment from what was going on. He remembered that last time, in the middle of the fight in that tree he was looking up at now, the thought had suddenly crossed his mind that perhaps he was a figure in a computer game. Then his concentration had gone and he had been hurt.

  Aaaaghhh!!!

  Charlie was hit from behind by what felt like a brick wall coming down on him. His concentration had gone again, but this time it had happened on the ground and not, like last time, up in the tree. Three powerful males, he realized, had come at him from behind and were now kicking and pummeling him with all their strength. Vaguely he saw the fourth one coming down from the tree to join in the entertainment.

  He struggled to fight back, to get to his feet, but they were too many and too heavy. This was just as real as before, just as real as anything that had ever happened to him—but worse. This time he was going to lose. This time, if no one intervened, he knew he was going to die or be left a crippled wreck.

  As abruptly as it started, it was over. He was returned to his previous surroundings with an abruptness that was almost more breathtaking than the beating he’d been suffering. The woman Charlie knew as Dr. Flemyng was withdrawing her hand from the switch she had just pressed.

  “As you see, Charlie,” West was saying, “the program is variable according to the feedback from you.”

  Charlie found himself breathless, his heart beating fast— which was ridiculous, he told himself, because he hadn’t been doing anything, just lying here with all these artificial thoughts running through his head.

  “I’d no idea VR was that good.”

  West gave another of his little smirks. “It’s not something we’d want the whole world to know about. There are many things we don’t want the whole world to know about.”

  “But what about… what about my… ?”

  Charlie broke off and shook his head, able neither to frame the question nor come to terms with the reality he was beginning to perceive behind it.

  “What about the rest of your life, Charlie? Is that what you’re asking?”

  Charlie nodded. Yes, West was right—that was what he wanted to know.

  “Your childhood, everything until the time you went to the Farm…”

  West paused, preparing Charlie for the enormity of what he was about to learn.

  “Show him, Dr. Flemyng.”

  Still avoiding Charlie’s eyes, she pressed another switch.

  The noise almost burst his eardrums. A clattering roar of steel combined with the throb of massive diesel engines. He knew at once where he was. It had been exactly like this—the rail yard, the freight train that he and Kathy were racing to board, and the two cops coming after them.

  He grabbed a handle, swung his feet up, and forced open the freight car door. Then he reached down for Kathy, holding out a hand to pull her up before she fell or simply gave up trying to keep pace with the train’s gathering speed. He saw her face plainly as she looked up at him—pale, perspiring, desperate—as she tried to reach his outstretched hand. He remembered in that moment that once, at some point in the future, he had been unable to recall her face, Kathy’
s face. But now it was as much a part of the natural world around him as anything else, something he could never conceivably forget: Kathy, little more than a child, simply dressed, frightened, trusting in him….

  The cop’s nightstick cracked down on his fingers with a savagery that must have broken bones. It was the hand hanging on to the freight car door. He didn’t so much let go as feel the hand cease to function—that was just how it had been, and how it was now.

  And yet, last time, he had still put up a fight—a fight that he supposed he was about to have again.

  He fell hard on the cindered earth, only inches from the thunderous clanking of the rolling wheels, in spite of which he could still hear Kathy’s screams….

  Then a sudden silence cut through the whole thing like a knife. He was back on the operating table, the same faces looking down at him, including Kathy—transformed once again into Dr. Flemyng—her expression and everything about her still strangely muted.

  Unable to contain his frustration and confusion any longer, Charlie gave a roar of outrage and reached for his chief tormentor, the man who’d said his name was West.

  Chapter 42

  CONTROL FOLLOWED the two guards and waited as one of them unlocked the heavy steel door. He nodded to confirm what he had told them already, that he was to be left alone. Then he stepped into the cell and heard the door shut behind him.

  The cell was of reasonable size, far bigger than a police cell, at least fifteen feet square. It was painted white, with a table, chair, washbasin, toilet, and a single bunk attached to the wall. Charlie, wearing a tracksuit and running shoes, was sitting on the edge of this when the door opened. He got to his feet when he saw who his visitor was.

  “Good morning, Charlie,” Control said.

  “Good morning, sir,” Charlie replied stiffly.

  “Sit down, relax. Tell me what’s been going on.”

  As he spoke, Control pulled the chair around so that he could face Charlie, who resumed his place on the edge of the bunk.

  “Isn’t it about time you told me what’s been going on?” Charlie replied with a note of sullen defiance that he didn’t normally display in Control’s presence.

  Control regarded him from beneath slightly hooded eyes. There was a trace of something playing at the corners of his mouth, not a smile so much as an acknowledgment of the mood he found Charlie to be in.

  “I’ll ask the questions, Charlie, and you’ll answer them. Is that clear?”

  He paused, requiring an answer before he went on.

  “Yes, sir,” Charlie murmured, resentful but obedient.

  “I’m told that you attacked Dr. West.”

  “I wouldn’t say attacked. I guess I grabbed his collar without really thinking what I was doing.”

  “And…?”

  “I blacked out, and woke up here.”

  Control nodded, as though Charlie’s words confirmed what he already knew, and he just wanted to check Charlie’s version. He reached into one of the pockets of his jacket and produced a small black object.

  “Someone used one of these on you.”

  Charlie recognized the object at once. It was no more than two inches long, a little more than an inch wide, and about a quarter of an inch thick.

  “Kathy had one of those things that night in her apartment. What is it?”

  “You have something planted in here, Charlie,” Control said, vaguely indicating an area somewhere on his own chest. “It stops you dead in response to a signal from this.”

  Charlie’s hand involuntarily rose to the upper part of his body, as though feeling for the thing that Control had described there.

  “Of course,” Control continued, still displaying the little black object on his palm, “not many people have access to one of these—for obvious reasons.”

  “That guy downtown had one,” Charlie said, thinking back to the image of Marijuana Shirt standing in traffic and pointing something at him. “At least I think he did. He pulled something on me and I blacked out in the back of the cab I was in, but not for long. There was a truck that got in the way, maybe cut the signal.”

  Control nodded. “I gather that’s what happened. That was a bad business, Charlie,” he said, more serious now, “you going rogue like that.”

  “Rogue?”

  “What else would you call it?”

  Charlie shrugged. He didn’t, when he came to think of it, have an alternative word for what he’d done.

  “We knew you’d lied to us, Charlie. You told us you’d never seen that woman at the beach before. Of course the truth was you hadn’t, but you thought you had. The proof was that you went looking for her the first chance you got. It showed us we’d successfully planted the memory of her, which was good; but it turned out the memory was so powerful that you became more loyal to her than you were to us, which wasn’t so good. We need to be one hundred percent sure of you, Charlie, if you’re going to go on being of use to us.”

  Charlie looked at him with a distrust bordering on hostility. “Where are we? Still in that place I followed Fry to?”

  “That’s where we are, and where you’re going to stay—until we’re satisfied you’re back on track.”

  “Back on track?” Charlie echoed. “How is all that monkey stuff you put me through supposed to get me back on track?”

  Control sat back on his chair and crossed one ankle over the other knee. He wasn’t a young man, but he still had some of the easy-moving ranginess of an athlete.

  “Charlie, let me tell you something about yourself. You remember that story you heard when you thought you were a chimpanzee, about how we were trying to create a kind of superagent, faster and stronger than any man on earth? Well, it’s not just a theory, Charlie. Not even a plan. It’s an achievement. And you’re it. You’re the prototype. On an operational level you’ve scored high, even better than we dared hope. I don’t have to tell you what you’ve done and what you’re capable of doing. You’ve carried out some difficult and dangerous assignments, and we’re very aware of that.”

  Charlie stared at him. “Are you telling me,” he asked after a longish moment, “that I’m a chimpanzee?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you, Charlie. Mutated, but still a chimpanzee.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Control gave a faintly tired smile. “That whole virtual reality program—the ‘monkey thing’ as you call it—wouldn’t have worked with anybody else, at least not so well. It depended on your having the genetic predisposition to buy into the experience that the scenario offered.”

  “I still don’t see the point—”

  “The point,” Control said, interrupting him, “was to find out which you felt yourself to be. Stripped of external reinforcement—your human self-image, your lifestyle—what would you perceive yourself as in your own mind?” He paused, regarding Charlie for a moment with a look that was almost affectionate. “Interestingly, you never let go of the idea that you were human, did you?”

  Charlie nodded. “No, I guess not.”

  He was acutely aware that Control, despite his relaxed appearance, still held the small black object, the “zapper” in one hand. No doubt the guards had theirs, too. Charlie knew that physical power was no use to him here.

  “I need some proof. Before I believe what you say, that I’m a chimpanzee, you’re going to have to prove it to me.”

  Control looked at him awhile, still with a certain odd affection, but also as though he was measuring him in some way. Then he made a decision.

  “Charlie, there’s somebody I think you should meet. Come with me.”

  He got to his feet, rapped on the door to have it opened, then beckoned Charlie to follow him.

  Chapter 43

  THEY WALKED DOWN a long windowless corridor. Charlie suspected they were underground, but there was nothing to indicate how far below the surface. Nor was there, for that matter, anything to suggest whether it was day or night.

  “I think it’s time you m
et your parents, Charlie,” Control said.

  The idea shocked Charlie more than anything he could have imagined, even at this stage of his displacement from reality. It offended him in a way that he found surprising. “Parents? I have no parents,” he said sharply.

  “Oh, yes, you do. Your parents are alive and well.”

  They turned into another corridor, then Control pushed open a door with a small glass panel in it. The room they entered was unlit, though Charlie could make out the bars of a cage on one side. He heard something move and saw a dark form rise from the cage floor. Then Control found the light switch he’d been looking for and turned on a couple of overhead strips. Charlie found himself looking through the bars at two full-grown chimpanzees.

  “This is the real thing, Charlie, not VR,” Control said, warning him, “so be careful you don’t get your hand bitten off— they’re not going to recognize you any more than you recognize them.”

  Charlie approached the cage slowly, not taking his eyes off the two creatures in it. They gazed back at him uncertainly. Something that he didn’t understand filled him with an emotion he hadn’t felt before. Perhaps, he thought, it was just the improbability of what he was being asked to believe. Or perhaps it was just the emotive power of the word parent to someone for whom it had never had concrete meaning before. Or perhaps, somewhere at the back of his mind, there was a recognition that this was the truth, and these creatures were his flesh and blood.

  The two chimps moved away from him at first, showing signs more of distrust than of open hostility. Then, despite the agitated, anxious chatterings of her mate, the female edged forward a few steps to get a better look at him. She tipped her head slightly to one side, and there was an intelligence as well as an intense curiosity in her gaze, as though something about this humanlike stranger seemed to find an echo in her memory. Her eyes locked with Charlie’s, and she came right up to the bars, wrapping her long black fingers around them.

  Charlie too drew closer, and their mutual gaze remained unbroken. Very slowly she freed one of her hands and held it out to him. It was a tentative gesture, not a threatening one, and when he didn’t back away she began, very gently, to stroke the smooth side of his face with the hard skin of her hand. Charlie heard a soft intake of breath from Control behind him. “Isn’t that interesting! I can’t believe she recognizes you, and yet… just look at that.”