A Darkness in My Soul Read Free

black holes where the eyes should have been.
        They mumbled things in their alien language, and they prodded me with cold instruments.
        When my vision cleared, I could see it was a strange triumvirate: Harry, Morsfagen, and some unnamed physician who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue against his cheek like someone had told him doctors were supposed to do when they couldn't think of anything intelligent to say.
        "You all right, Sim?" Harry asked.
        Morsfagen pushed my lawyer/agent/father-figure out of the way and thrust his bony face down at mine. I could see hairs crinkling out of his flared nostrils. There were flecks of spittle on his lips, as if he had been doing a lot of shouting in rage. The dark blue of his close-shaved whiskers seemed like needles waiting to thrust out of his tight pores.
        "What happened? What's wrong? You don't get paid without results."
        "I wasn't prepared for what I found," I said. "Simple as that. No need for hysterics."
        "But you were yelling and screaming," Harry protested, insinuating himself between the general and myself.
        "Not to worry."
        "What did you find that you didn't expect?" Morsfagen asked. He was skeptical. I could have cared more, but not less.
        "He hasn't any conscious mind. It's a vast pit, and I fell into it expecting solid ground. Evidently, all his thoughts, or a great many of them, come from what we would consider the subconscious."
        Morsfagen stood away. "Then you can't reach him?"
        "I didn't say that. Now that I know what's there and what isn't, I'll be all right."
        I struggled to a sitting position, reached out and stopped the room from swaying. The hex signs settled onto the walls where they belonged, and the light fixtures even stopped whirling in erratic circles from wall to wall. I looked at my watch with the picture of Elliot Gould on the face, calculated the time, assumed a properly bland expression, and said. "That'll be roughly a hundred thousand poscreds. Put it on my earnings sheet, why don't you?"
        He sputtered. He fumed. He roared. He glowered. He quoted the Government Rates for Employees. He quoted the Employer's Rights Act of 1986, paragraph two, subparagraph three. He fumed a bit more.
        I watched, looking unshaken.
        He pranced. He danced. He raved. He ranted. He demanded to know what I had done to earn any pay whatsoever. I didn't answer him. He finished ranting. Started fuming again. In the end, he put it down in the book and vouchered the payment before pounding on a table in utter frustration and then leaving the room with a warning to be on time the following day.
        "Don't push your luck," Harry advised me later.
        "Not my luck, but my weight," I said.
        "He doesn't take to a subordinate position. He's a bastard."
        "I know. That's why I needle him."
        "When did the masochism arise?"
        "Not masochism-my well-known God-syndrome. I was just passing one of my famous judgments."
        "Look," he said, "you can quit."
        "We both need the money. Especially me."
        "Maybe there are other things more important than money."
        Someone pushed us aside as equipment was trundled out of the hex-painted room.
        "More important than money?"
        "I've heard it said…"
        "Not in this world. You've heard wrong. Nothing's more important when the creditors come. Nothing's more important when the choice is to live with cockroaches or in splendor."
        "Sometimes, I think you're too cynical," he said, giving me one of those fatherly looks, something I inherited along with his last name.
        "What else?" I asked, buttoning my greatcoat.
        "It's all because of what they tried to do to you. You should forget that. Get out more. Meet people."
        "I have. I don't like them."
        "There's an old Irish legend which says-"
        "Old Irish