CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  “We can’t be. If you had called a day, even two days ago, there might be—”

  “Well, I didn’t. We were all so, so worried. I just…”

  In the long pause that came next Kathryn could think of no comfort to give. The distant woman was spinning frantically, somewhere out above a vast, shadowed abyss. She was suffering through every moment of this call, taking each of Kathryn’s statements as another vital moment forever lost, more of her beloved mother slipping away into the inky grave. And against all logic Kathryn rummaged through her own mind, searching for some way to help this disembodied voice out of the night that carried so much squeezed pain. But from training and experience she knew that there was none. The thicket of law and custom surrounding modern death was thorny, breached only by surgical shears of documents and careful preparation.

  When Mrs. Fiegelman spoke again, after an audible, exhausted sigh, there was a crafty note in her tone. “It’s the money, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all.”

  “There’s always a way to get somethin’ done if you just pay a little extra.”

  Kathryn bit her lip and said flatly, “Not here.”

  “I can write you a check right on the spot, at the hospital.”

  Despite herself, Kathryn’s frustration and sympathy began to slide into simmering irritation. “That would make no difference. As I explained, you cannot give informed consent. Legal authority is unclear. Even financial logistics are usually so tied up in probate that—”

  “I knew it!” Mrs. Fiegelman said triumphantly. “You’re worried about your money! Won’t let simple mercy get you past this bureaucratic logjam you keep talkin’ about. Seems heartless to me, almost like murder itself, to stand around and do nothin’, nothin’ at all, while my mother is down there waitin’ with the ice all around her.”

  “We can’t do this at the last moment,” Kathryn snapped back. “Surely you can see—”

  “I can’t see anything, not while my mother’s dead and I’m losin’ her while you talk and talk and won’t even help!”

  Kathryn let out a long breath. “Mrs. Fiegelman, you have my complete sympathy. I went through what you have, I lost my mother too—”

  “Then in God’s name how can you—”

  “But I won’t expose this company to the risks I know will come if we even attempt to suspend your mother. I’m afraid it is simply too late.”

  “No! You’re just refusing me, bunch of damned—”

  “Mrs. Fiegelman, I feel that we simply have nothing more to say to each other that would be productive. I’m very sorry,” Kathryn said calmly, and hung up.

  She leaned against the big steel desk and discovered that her left hand was clenched in a tight fist. She relaxed it and wiped her eyes with a Kleenex.

  As she expected, the telephone control board lit up again with an incoming call. It was too much to ask that Mrs. Fiegelman give up right away. Reluctantly, after the third ring, she thumbed the system over to automatic response. The recorded corporate announcement ran, Ray Constantine’s dry voice very official and yet friendly. Then a click, and Mrs. Fiegelman shouted from the speaker, “I know you’re there. Talk to me! I demand that—” and Kathryn silenced the strident cry of anger that came knifing down from atop a mountain of grief.

  She stared at the far wall for long moments, not thinking of anything in particular, gazing abstractly at the photos of the suspended patients who lay only a few yards away in their cold oblivion. She had never known any of them. They had never spoken out of an immense night to her, pleaded their case with breaking voices.

  A second call light lit up the board, this time on an unlisted number. Mrs. Fiegelman was still haranguing the recording machine. Without thinking Kathryn thumbed in to overhear. A fast chorus of pips and squeaks told her that this was a data transfer, computers chattering to each other.

  Oops, a data line. She still didn’t have this system down pat.

  Inevitably, cryonics groups were technology freaks, but I2 held the championship. This telemetry message was probably something to do with the MedAlarm system. Every day I2 computers sent a message to the little necklace she wore, checking to make sure the device still worked properly, asking it to squirt a short radio beep back to confirm. There were more complex systems running around the clock, too, far beyond her limited command of computers. Her side of cryonics had always been the personal.

  Sure, she thought ruefully. Your interpersonal skills worked just fine with Mrs. Fiegelman, didn’t they?

  Death shatters people’s carefully composed masks, stripping away the polite cushions that keep us from having to recognize the raw emotions that swim at the core of every soul. When the naked underself bursts out, it rips the pleasantries and manners we have learned to wear like clothes, Kathryn thought, and we all feel exposed before the simple, awful truth.

  —And at once the old claustrophobia was back, her aunt Henny’s cloying cape falling over her, damp musty stench and swarming dark. She saw her mother’s skeleton-thin face bravely smiling at her from the sagging, ill-kept deathbed. Skin so pale, like the thin pages of an old book unopened for a century. In her last months her mother had unaccountably taken to writing letters to the editors of the local paper, so that once or twice weekly there was a short paragraph with her name beneath it. They were usually declarations on local matters, parking and development and elections, calling on decades of experience, referring to minor events now smothered by time. These letters stood out to Kathryn’s eyes like bold assertions, evidence of vitality on what her mother already called the “op-ed page,” in her newly acquired jargon. As though her mother’s pen drained life from her, sucking it onto the printed page, leaving behind a hollow husk of a woman.

  And what would your opinion he now, Mommy, of your daughter turning away another daughter? Another who was only trying to do what I so desperately wanted for you—to pull you back somehow, snatch hold of your thin nightgown with the rose embroidery and drag you up from the damp final blackness that I felt opening its arms for you?

  She clutched at the desk for her balance. Did she still truly care now what her mother would think? Yes. If only there was a place where her mother could think, could have an “op” on the op-ed page and hold forth—as she always had, an opinionated woman. No matter what her mother thought, if there were such a place where she still was, even if immobile, beyond all communication but still waiting…

  Kathryn blinked, sniffed, straightened her blouse, and made herself walk back into the recesses of the long building. She left the blinking message light from Mrs. Fiegelman, promising herself to come back and erase it later so that no one else had to chance upon the venom that was no doubt still spewing through the telephone. She headed for the voices and the crackle of the welding job, its actinic flashes and loud pops, the two men like companions crouching around a cheery campfire on a cold night.

  “Who was it?” Alex asked, peeling off his goggles and shield. He and Ray Constantine were finishing the seals on a new suspension chamber. Technicolor stains traced the top and bottom of the long stainless steel cylinder.

  So she told them. It was better to talk about it, she knew, yet the words came reluctantly at first, then in a steady, storytelling rhythm, as if by making it a yarn she could gain some distance on it. Yet she heard her voice straining as she went and knew that they could tell.

  When she was finished Alex said gently, “Pretty tough.”

  Ray nodded. “I took one of those last week. Not as bad as that, though.”

  “You handled it right,” Alex added, taking off the leather jacket he wore while welding. She was disappointed; it gave him an agreeable Brando touch.

  Their reassurance lifted her spirits more than she expected, brushing away old cobwebs in her mind. “What was yours like?” she asked Ray.

  “Guy had his brother in a mortuary. Pretty damned sad. Same thing—only the mortician had already embalmed the body.”

  “Good Lord.” Kathryn blink
ed. “And you said ‘not as bad’?”

  Ray was a thin, wiry man with a wedge of nose jutting out over a ragged brown moustache. Pale green eyes peered through a sprouting tangle of ginger eyebrows, and his decayed smile would have brought despair to the sunniest dentist. All this somehow gave him a look of laconic severity. She imagined that in another century he would have been a Jesuit priest, making minute distinctions about the infinite.

  “It’s easier when there’s no hope,” he said simply.

  After a stretching moment of silence Alex said, “You have to stick by your standards, we all know that. If we take a big legal risk and the relatives of the deceased have second thoughts, we’re dead meat.”

  An unfortunate choice of metaphors, Kathryn thought.

  Ray nonchalantly related a case in which CrossTime, the cryonics firm in Northern California, had suspended a retired banker. The banker’s son, a lawyer, slapped CrossTime with a suit as an “accomplice” in defrauding his father. The son attacked the trust fund his father had set up to pay for the continuing costs of the suspension. Much of the fund’s assets went down the rat hole of an eventually successful defense. CrossTime now kept the banker suspended, paying the liquid nitrogen bills themselves. And they had settled out of court with the son, who walked away with lined pockets and reportedly felt quite good about the transaction.

  “We’ve got to protect the people in there,” Ray finished, pointing to the rows of tall cylinders around them. Beneath the high lamps of the bay, the gleaming suspension vessels were like modernist buildings in a miniature city. “If we get into a big legal hassle, we might lose the money they left to keep them suspended. It’s for them that we don’t take risks like this woman wanted.”

  “And for ourselves,” Alex added.

  “Mind you, some say we ought to charge more from people who can afford it,” Ray said pensively, “and use that to support last-minute call-ins.”

  “So people with foresight should be taxed for people who don’t plan?” Kathryn asked doubtfully. Through all this she was acutely conscious of the fact that she wasn’t signed up for suspension. Nobody at I2 ever referred to it, and she wondered what they thought about that.

  Alex said with a lopsided smile of amused experience, “I don’t know what the path to success is, but I do know the path to failure. You get there by trying to please everybody.”

  Kathryn nodded, still hearing the tight voice of Mrs. Fiegelman. In a real sense, she thought, everyone alive was in the same state of quiet, unexpressed desperation. Here they were, trapped in an era whose medicine would be outstripped by future research. Someday, if medicine continued on its present paths, it would be able to halt or even reverse the slow but yearly more visible ebbing of the body.

  Yeah, she thought, even this wonderful machine with its trim thighs (fifty leg-lifts a day), flat stomach (endless sit-ups), and pleasing curves (ah, the cream and second helpings and succulent desserts passed up!). Sure, maybe right now you’re a bird of paradise in a chicken run, but you’ll fade. Even this gorgeous cellulite-free wonder is going to go, kid.

  And none of them here would probably live long enough to reach that life-saving medical help. Just as her grandfather had died of lockjaw, two years short of tetanus injections that were now routine.

  But seldom did anybody think of it this way. People forgot that the future will be qualitatively different from the present. Smallpox no longer scars your friends, so you blithely forget how it ravaged your ancestors. Fevers and flu are now interruptions in our schedules, not knocks on the door from the man with the scythe.

  For cryonicists, the only alternative was to go on a desperate voyage across a chasm of time and happenstance, a journey against vast but unknown odds, into a strange and scary future. But not utterly alone, no.

  “Family,” she said abruptly.

  Alex and Ray gave her puzzled looks. “How’s that?” Ray asked, pulling on the bill of his California Angels baseball cap.

  “You talk high tech all the time, but you’re really like a family. A synthetic one.”

  “More like gamblers, I’d say,” Ray said, “placing one last bet.”

  Kathryn was appalled. “No, I’m just catching on to what really holds I2 together. You’re in this together. We’ve agreed to be a kind of long-term family for each other.”

  Alex’s mouth twisted with mild surprise. “And the first obligation of any family is the well-being of the family.”

  “Ummm.” Ray looked skeptical. “Us versus them?”

  “You don’t pull homeless bums off the street and invite them in for supper if your own family is going without, do you?” Kathryn persisted.

  “No, but your analogy—”

  “Or to share your house for the night. Much less for the rest of your life.”

  Ray raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, you’ve got a point.”

  “It’s important to realize it, too,” she said earnestly. “You men never talk about things like this, but you should.”

  Alex chuckled. “We understand each other better if we just do stuff together and don’t say much.”

  Kathryn snorted. “The Gary Cooper school of communication.”

  “Yup,” Ray said.

  Alex grinned. “Yup.”

  4

  SUSAN

  Marie Lowenthal’s funeral consumed most of Susan’s morning. The cancer had already spread by the time Marie had come into UCI. She had declined sharply and refused further chemotherapy. Her family was quiet at the service and seemed stunned, disbelieving. Susan always went to a patient’s funeral, but she was never sure that it did any good.

  She had a brown-bag lunch of the usual virtuous foods, fruit and grain bars and carrot sticks, and then she sat for the remaining few minutes and looked at the wood-framed photograph on her desk.

  Roger. His wryly self-aware smile beamed out at her from a summer day frozen in the frame. Taken five months before his heart attack, it seemed to speak of an era as distant as the pharaohs. She needed him so much now, her chest ached with the longing, like a fist that squeezed her heart—classic heart attack symptoms, she knew, but due to “mere” emotional distress. He still had the power to reach into her life and grasp her inner self. It had been years and yet she still awoke, tangled in sweaty sheets, full of longing for his firm muscles and restless, insistent energy. Sometimes it even seemed that he hovered in the shadows over her, about to plunge down and into her, again and again, and she had cried out more than once, in the long years, for that.

  Whoosh! Get that pulse rate down, doctor. Lust will do you no good today.

  She stood, adjusted her formal blue suit with conservative white blouse, redeemed by a maroon bow at the throat, and walked across the sprawling medical grounds to her inquisition.

  Her old friend Rachel had advised her not to fire until she saw the whites of their eyes—size up the committee first, then play to the members. Strategy comes out of personality—yours and theirs, Rachel had said. Susan tended to think in terms of principle—a rather masculine view, Roger had pointed out once—but med school politics was a different game.

  She arrived at the committee room atop the principal UCI Medical building with one minute to spare, put her hand on the lever doorknob, and thought, I hope this doesn’t turn out to be the second funeral I attend today.

  Marie Lowenthal’s MRI scans had set off her rudeness to Blevin, she remembered, like a pebble that brings on a landslide. Now here came Blevin himself down the astringent light of the corridor. Stonily he nodded to Susan as he approached. She jerked the door open and entered, to avoid acknowledging him.

  The committee room was far better appointed than the usual seminar rooms. The thick carpeting and heavy paneling hushed the greetings she received from the dean and two other faculty members. She spread her own notes before her at the end of the long oak-finish table.

  The dean took this as his signal to sit at the other end. Blevin and the others murmured together
while the dean’s executive secretary came in with a valise and set up the recording equipment. The omnidirectional mike and small cassette recorder, once on, created a stiff, subdued atmosphere. Blevin sat on the right hand of the dean and the two other medical faculty—Marilyn Jacobs, a white-haired oncologist, and Jack Aronski, a bald, intense surgeon—sat on the dean’s left. Susan was isolated at the other end of the long table.

  “This ad hoc committee is convened under my direction, Dean Maxwell Wronsky, for the express purpose of reviewing alleged violations of university medical school standards by Dr. Susan Hagerty,” the dean said crisply. His gray eyebrows matched his well-tailored suit perfectly, and he lifted them at the end of his announcement with theatrical effect. “I believe Dr. Blevin has reviewed the case and will present the salient facts.”

  Blevin rubbed his angular nose with an air of reluctance at having to broach such matters, then glanced at his notes. “As substantiated in documents prepared by me, acting for this committee, and offered as appendices to this report, I maintain the following points: One—Dr. Hagerty knowingly and repeatedly used experimental chemicals developed here at UCI under joint National Institutes of Health and UCI funding, in operations conducted off campus, without authorization. Two—Dr. Hagerty performed experiments on a canine without undergoing scrutiny of her procedures by the Human and Animal Subjects Review Board. Three—Dr. Hagerty knowingly associated activities in her UCI laboratory with those of a firm called Longevity Laboratories, which deals exclusively with the freezing of the dead, an area long deplored by the medical community.”

  The dean nodded. Susan saw that each member already had a thick binder containing Blevin’s documentation. She had gone over the elaborately buttressed files for days, and she had to admit that the case was airtight. Wrong-headed, but tight.