Free The Divide by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

With the right gestures and the necessary words, he could intimidate almost anyone—play the primate chords of fear, anger, love, or distaste, and do so at will. For a time, when his contempt for humanity had reached its zenith, he did it often. It was a means to an end, as irrelevant to ethical considerations as the shearing of a sheep.
    Or so he had thought.
    That time had passed; but he was pleased by the outcome of the little experiment he had just performed on Tony Morriseau. Old skills intact. So much had been lost, obscured by unconsciousness. But maybe not permanently.
    He had been asleep. Now he was awake.
    He wrote:
     
     
Must leave. Try to understand.
     
     
    He wondered how much more he ought to say. He could summon up Benjamin long enough to compose a more serious message. Could even play at being Benjamin without invoking the real, or potent, Benjamin. But he was reluctant to do that now… it was a mistake he had made too often before.
    He debated signing Benjamin’s name, then decided it would be more honest, and possibly kinder, not to. In the end he simply hung the note (two sentences, five words) on the kitchen cupboard.
    Hurrying to escape these small, crowded rooms.
     
     
    The Corvette protested only a little when he nosed it onto the expressway and into the light midnight traffic northbound out of the city. He had been awake for two days now and some of the old clarity had come back to him. He was able to read the condition of the Corvette’s engine through the grammar of its purrs and hesitations, and his sense was that the vehicle was old but basically sound. Something catastrophic might happen, a crack in the engine block or an embolism in an oil line; but the pistons were turning over neatly, the gears meshed, the brakes were clean. With any luck, the car would get him where he was going.
    The rain that had hovered over the province for the last two weeks had finally drifted off eastward. It was a clear, cold night. Between the glaring road-lights—growing sparse out here in farm territory—he was able to see a scatter of stars. He had always liked looking at the stars and sometimes felt a special connection with them, in their isolation in the dark sky. It was the kinship he felt for all lost, strange, and distant things.
    The road arrowed up a long incline, an ancient glacial moraine, and suddenly the stars were right in front of him. Impulsively, he edged the Corvette’s gas pedal down. It was long past midnight and nothing was moving here but a heavily freighted lumber truck. He took the Corvette past it in an eyeblink. A brief taste of diesel through the cracked wing window, then onward. He watched the speedometer creep up. At eighty-five mph the Corvette was showing some of its age and neglect. He read a whiff of hot metal and oil, the spark plugs burning themselves clean.
    He liked this—the farms and empty autumn fields blurring behind him; the sense of motion. But more than that. It was a private pleasure, uniquely his own. His reflexes and his sense of timing seldom came up against their inherent limits; it was exhilarating to push that envelope a little. He was very far from those limits even now—the speedometer still inching upward—but he was attentive, focused, and energized. Every shiver of the chassis or tremor of the road became significant information, raw data flooding him. He came up fast on a sixteen-wheel Mayflower truck and passed it, left the trucker’s horn screaming impotently down a corridor of cold night air.
    This was a world only he was fit to inhabit, he thought, this landscape of speed and reflex. For anyone else it would be next door to death. For John it was a sunny meadowland through which his thoughts ran in a cool, rapid cascade.
    There was a shimmy now from the rear end of the Corvette.
    And he would have to slow down soon in any case, or risk running some radar trap or pushing the engine past its tolerances. In any case, it was time to fill the