“It is beautifully clear, though perhaps difficult for an untrained mind. Can I read your memoir?” His eyes strayed curiously to the table.
“When it’s finished,” I said. “It’s almost done now. In a few days perhaps; I should be most curious to see how it strikes you.”
“Well, I won’t take up any more of your time. I hope you’ll let me come to see you.”
“Nothing could give me more pleasure.” And then, with a pat on my shoulder and a kind suggestion that should I choose Cavesway he would be willing to administer the latest drug, Jessup departed.
I remained very still for some minutes, holding my breath for long intervals, trying to die. Then, in a sudden rage, I hurled my pillow across the room and beat the mattress with my fists: it was over. All was at an end except my own miserable life which will soon enough be gone. My name erased; my work subverted; all that I most detested regnant in the world. I could have wept had there been one tear left in me. Now there is nothing I can do but finish this narrative ... for its own sake since it will be thought, I know, the ravings of a mad man when Jessup reads it, as he surely will after I am dead.
I have tried now for several hours to describe my last meeting with Iris but I find that my memory is at last seriously impaired, the result, no doubt, of that tiny vein which broke this morning in my brain. It all seems a jumble. I think there were several years in which I was in opposition. I think that I had considerable support and I am almost sure that, until the attempted assassination of Iris at Seattle, I was close to dominating the Council of Residents. The idiotic attempt on her life, however, ruined everything. She knew of course that I had had nothing to do with it but she was a resolute leader and she took this opportunity to annihilate my party. I believe we met for the last time in a garden. A garden very like the one where we first met in California. No, on the banks of the Hudson ... I must reread what I have written to refresh my memory. It is all beginning to fade rapidly.
In any case, we met in a garden in the late autumn when all the trees were bare. She was white-haired then, though neither of us was much over forty.
I believe that she wept a little: for we were the last who had been close to Cave, heirs both though now adversaries, she victrix and I vanquished. I never loved her more than at that last moment; of this I am sure. We talked of possible places of exile. She had arranged for my passage on a ship to Alexandria under the name of Richard Hudson (yes, she who erased my name, in her compassion, gave me a new one). She did not want, however, to know where I intended to go from there.
“It would be a temptation to the others,” she said. I remember that one sentence and I do remember the appearance of the garden though its location I have quite forgotten: there was a high wall all around it and the smell of moldering leaves was acrid. From the mouth of a satyr no water fell in a mossy pool.
Ah yes! the question and the answer. That’s it of course. The key. I had nearly lost it. Before I left, I asked her what it was that Cave had said to her when he was dying, the words the rest of us had not heard. At first she hesitated but then, secure in her power and confident of her own course, she told me: “He said: 'Gene was right.’” I remember looking at her with shock, waiting for her to continue, to make some apology for the monstrousness of her deeds, for her reckless falsification of Cave’s life and death. But she said no more: there was, I suppose, no explanation she might have made. We parted without farewells, without more words.