“What does it feel like?” He seemed to gather up his nerve, and asked with more vehemence, “To be a Servant, I mean? What do you see, what do you think about, what do you remember? About death? You experienced it all and came back to us. What did you see there beyond the border?” His eyes looked glazed and distant. “Did you bring anything back with you?”
Guided by his inherent programming, Danal answered the questions in the order they had been asked, without thinking. “I see everything around me with great fascination. I want to learn it all again as fast as I can. I am intrigued by everything, and I want to examine. But I can’t—I am a Servant. Servants have no curiosity.”
“Nonsense.” Van Ryman smiled, apparently satisfied with Danal’s candor. “Here, to show you my goodwill, I’ll let you inspect anything you see, if you wish. I’m a very congenial Master, and I’ll let you do many things.” His eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, but Danal noticed. The line of tiny red pinpricks along his chin became visible again. “But you have to answer my questions in as much detail as you can.”
“I will, Master Van Ryman.”
“Good, good.”
Danal walked slowly around the study, delighted, inspecting the dusty leather-bound books. He tried to show restraint, but he suddenly felt as if he had been freed, to inspect and touch and observe and analyze everything he could find. On the books he saw unusual symbols and strange languages.
Van Ryman broke his train of thought. “And about my other question, Danal? What about death itself? Do you remember anything?”
The Servant stood in front of the glowing laser fireplace, feeling the pleasant warmth from the thermal crystals. Purple light dappled his gray uniform. “Nothing clearly.”
Van Ryman clutched at the ambiguity. His out-of-place eyes lit up and he sat straight on the piano bench. “But you do remember something? A picture, a thought maybe? Danal, this is very important. You have to tell me everything!”
Danal hesitated the briefest of moments as he analyzed the wisdom of confessing his flashbacks to this man. His Master. He wanted to Serve, to do his duty, and nothing else. His programming threatened him, clamping down with iron fingers on his free will. He had no choice.
“Yes, I do recall things. Strange things. I can’t explain or interpret them. They aren’t memories … more like flashes of something bigger buried deep inside.”
“Yes! Tell me.” Van Ryman’s eyes seemed to be ignited with the fires of Hell, and he looked as if he enjoyed it.
With his back to Van Ryman, Danal stared at the white-light hologram in its frame above the fireplace, feeling more comfortable when he could avoid his Master’s gaze. He touched one of the digital squares below the frame, and the angle of the hologram scene changed, panning down the beach and focusing on the rocks on the shore. The sun slanted toward afternoon, washing over the grass-tufted sandstone cliffs that formed a wall to the beach.
“It happened three times, four times. I can’t make sense of the flashes,” Danal answered, puzzled. “I can feel the information there, just waiting to be triggered by … something. And when it does, it comes in a burst, unconnected, like a line of text lifted at random out of a file.”
Danal found a trail of footprints in the sand on the holographic beach, eroding as the tide washed in. The waves were tipped with gentle but dramatic whitecaps as they curled in toward shore, trapped motionless in three dimensions by the hologram. Absently Danal changed the view again, following the footprints.
“And what do these flashes show?” Van Ryman got up to pour himself a second snifter of scotch. Danal could tell by his Master’s careful movements that he remained intent on Danal’s answer. “Anything you see here, perhaps? In this house?”
“Yes,” the Servant said slowly. “Yes, I feel a sense of familiarity about some things. And you, Master Van Ryman—it was very strong when I first saw you in the hall. Does any of this make sense?”
The man stood up with bright eyes, grinning. “More than you can know, Danal.” Van Ryman seemed barely able to contain his excitement. “And these flashbacks, do you think they’re messages? Messages from beyond death, communications from Satan Himself? Pointing out that there’s something special about this house, about me?”
Danal paused, then answered carefully. “I’m not sure, Master Van Ryman. That’s a possible interpretation.” It wasn’t the right one, Danal thought, but Van Ryman already knew what he wanted to hear.
The dark-haired man nearly shouted with excitement and rubbed his hands together. His voice carried a whispered awe that Danal found frightening.
“It means we are expected!”
In the hologram two people lay naked and laughing by a rock outcropping on the wet sand: a man who appeared to be Van Ryman himself, smiling and at peace, with calm eyes; the other, a thin and supple woman, whose clean blond hair had been darkened by sea water and sand.
Julia!
The young woman—Julia?—stared out of the hologram at Danal, taunting his memory with her crystal-blue eyes. Her narrow features were dimpled and elfin, almost wraithlike. A gull hung up in the sky, and tide pools were scattered in the pockmarked black rock stretching out into the water, waiting for the waves. Julia had just tossed a stone into one of the larger pools, and the ripples echoed outward in perfect circles. The Van Ryman in the picture was watching her, though—not the stone, not the waves, not the gull. It seemed so different.
Alarmed, Danal folded the picture completely into his memory with all the speed the microprocessor would allow him. In the study, the real Van Ryman was too excited to notice the people in the picture for an instant, and Danal’s fingers flew to the “Reset” button on the hologram, returning it to the default view of a serene and desolate oceanscape.
For some reason Danal didn’t want Van Ryman to see the quiet, intimate picture. Irrational. Van Ryman was in the picture. But it was a different Van Ryman, one who had … who had discarded the fallacy of the neo-Satanists … under Julia’s urging, all under Julia’s urging. … A Van Ryman who would never have restored the gargoyles to the eaves of the mansion … one who would never look for messages from Satan in the disjointed flashbacks of a Servant.
Everything tumbled around in his head, letting the spurts of memory ricochet off themselves. Nothing resolved itself. Nothing made sense. But his Servant programming threatened to override—Danal had no right to question his Master, nor would he dare to.
He turned to face Van Ryman before anything else could happen, before he could lose his calm and passive Servant facade. “I am very tired now, Master Van Ryman. May I go to my room to rest?”
The man was too delighted to pay much attention to the Servant. “Yes, yes, of course! Thank you very much, Danal. I’ll have to call Nathans right away.”
Pressure built up in Danal’s memory, and he reeled as he wandered out of the study. Too many impressions were striking his underloaded brain, and his mind would soon be a tangled mass of contradictions. Now truly weary, he went toward his room. He wanted to sleep … and to forget.
He left the study and walked down a hall, past a central sitting area and a wide, blue-carpeted staircase leading upstairs; above, a carved railing set off the walkway from where it overlooked the first level. The kitchen and dining areas, as well as the terrarium room, were through the sitting room and in another wing, but Danal walked blindly past the stairs and past the small sauna to a large room, a bedroom.
“Danal! Command: Stop! Where are you going?”
On Command phrase the Servant’s muscles locked up and refused to function. Van Ryman bustled up in his green robe, looking suddenly uneasy again. Danal stood motionless and saw that he had almost entered the master bedroom of the Van Ryman mansion.
“I was trying to find my room, Master Van Ryman.”