Alex gave the super his best innocent smile. “I think he gets a kick-back from your broker.”
The super didn’t know how to take that, but he signed anyway. He even accompanied them back to the dock and waved the foreman off. Alex gave the foreman an ironic, exaggerated salute after they forklifted the crate onto the truck bed.
They had a long drive next, up the 405 to the town of Fountain Valley, which was flat and dry and not in a valley. They saw some good personalized license plates, including EARXPRT, N2WORRY, LOV U LA, PAR T, the inviting PHYS MS, CUTE4NR, and MSMARVL, and the perhaps insulting FORK U. He wondered if ILL GAL was sick or just from Illinois.
Reality chose that moment to blind-side him. He glanced leftward and saw his ex-wife buzzing by on his left, a silvery Japanese sedan zipping along in the fast lane. He gulped, chest knocking as though somebody had jump-started his heart.
Just a glimpse, but he was sure. The wasted years came flooding in again, salt-sour in his mouth. He peered after the dwindling car. This was yet one more facet of divorce he had not anticipated—the way a mere moment could yank you back through time and pain. Somebody had said that marriage was like a long meal, with the dessert first. His had opened with a short sweetness, sure, but then stopped halfway through the salad, and the vinegar was still on his lips, ready to sting.
After a moment he realized a second shock. His ex looked a lot like Kathryn. Now, what the hell did that mean?
He forced his attention back on traffic and saw a plate stating GOD IS. It prompted him to wonder aloud, “Is what? Dead? Even if God just plain ol’ is, what are we supposed to do about it?” The chunky man driving the Chevy looked like the type who never entertained such questions. Not that the seven spaces available on a plate left much room for philosophical niceties.
Ray said reflectively, “I’d be happy just to understand that bumper sticker up ahead.”
Alex saw one of the HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS stickers on a Toyota in front. “With all our digitized this and computer that, you’d think we’d do better at communicating.”
Ray chuckled and managed to fall asleep just as Alex followed LZY LAY off the 405 and onto Beach Boulevard, a street name that delivered on its promise. He went east, though, and found Modern Supply. Medical warehouses had to discard sterile supplies that ran past their use dates but that were still perfectly useful on people whom medical science had abandoned to the tender attentions of the worms. Modern Supply let them cart off packages of compresses, pads, and special tape. Alex liked the work of hauling, simple labor that popped major calories.
Their third target was a waste of time; somebody had gotten to the small contract research lab first and made off with a surplus blood pump. Heading back to I2, he took a shortcut out through Lemon Heights and over Loma Ridge, beating the noontime traffic. He had to work the stick shift on the upgrades. He and Ray rode in a comfortable silence that still communicated between them, something he had read about in old married couples but that grew between men who had become friends by shared work they believed in. Ray was telling a new chiller joke as they came down the long slope of the highway and headed east with Rattlesnake Park a froth of green in the distance, and Alex never did get to hear the punchline because as their speed climbed above sixty, he eased down on the brake and it wasn’t there.
The pedal mashed down smoothly to the floorboards, and nothing happened. Their tires howled on the curve. Alex shouted to Ray and grabbed the emergency brake. It came up, held firm—then snapped with a loud spang. “Damn!” Alex pulled at the brake lever frantically, but it was utterly dead.
“All the brakes gone?” Ray said disbelievingly.
“Here—” Alex tried downshifting, but they were going too fast by now and he couldn’t get it out of neutral. “Damn!”
“Weave, gotta weave,” Ray said.
Alex sent them rocketing back and forth across the two lanes available. This lost some kinetic energy and gained time, but at the price of slamming them back and forth in the cab. He tried to think. “Damn! Damn!” was all he managed to say.
Ray shouted, “Look for a turnoff.”
A scenic vista or just a fire road would give them a chance to slow down. There were none. As they picked up more speed going down the long slope, the valley floor beyond spread as if to welcome them.
Alex wrenched the truck across the solid yellow center line, using road friction to steal a little velocity. Oncoming cars honked, startled and angry faces going by in a blur, and he remembered the foolhardy motorcycle rider. A warm wind whipped through the cab.
“Chapman Avenue—it’s at the bottom of this hill,” Alex said. “We’ll shoot right through the intersection.”
“Never make it,” Ray said, his eyes jerking in a drawn face. He leaned out the window to look around the long curve of the highway. Alex fought the wheel. They were going fifty-eight.
Ray leaned back in. “Chapman’s coming up. No help that I can see.”
Time slowing, thinking hard. “We’ve got to ditch.”
Ray’s voice was thin, fear-filled. “Where?”
“Away from the edge.”
“Okay.” Ray gazed grimly at Alex. “You pick the spot.”
Alex pumped the brakes. Nothing.
Ray quickly checked Alex’s safety harness, then his own. For the space of a heartbeat Alex swore at himself for not getting air bags retrofitted into the truck. I2 had decided they couldn’t afford it.
Ahead the highway grade lessened for about a hundred-yard span. After that it steepened rapidly, running down in a deep cleft. The road seemed to sink into a groove carved in the beds of sandstone. At the base lay the big, busy crossroads.
Alex imagined the Chapman intersection and knew that they would be doing over seventy by the time they got there. It was tempting to hang on, hope for a break, but he felt with leaden certainty in the pit of his stomach that there would be none.
“Hold on,” he said. “Hard.”
They were already at the easier grade. His calculating time was over. They had left all traffic behind.
He slewed the truck across the highway and got a look downslope. Nobody coming. He swung them back into their lanes, tires screaming, and he thought of the damned air bags and remembered from his old physics class velocity in a gravitational field varies as the square root of the distance descended, and the right tires hit the gravel with an angry clatter.
He lost control for a split instant and the wheel jerked away like a living thing. They veered close to the edge. The right fender banged into the safety railing. Metal screeched. The tan valley looked as though it were directly below them.
They shot along the safety railing, striking a shrieking sheet of yellow sparks into the air. That helped him get the wheel under control. At least he had the power steering to help.
He swept them back across the highway again. They shot over and struck the gravel. Tires splattering rocks into the undercarriage sounded like the brrrrttt of a machine gun.
They went into a skid and struck the dirt berm. A brown shower erupted along their left side. Momentum slammed him into his safety harness. The wheel fought him. Noise exploded around him. Dust swarmed into his nostrils. He choked. Pebbles smacked the windshield. He could hardly see, but he wrenched the wheel to the right.
The truck wrestled free of the hillside, steel protesting, and shot across the highway. He could still see the sleeping sunny valley beyond and knew he could not stop the truck from going over.
The right tires left the highway again and clattered into the gravel. They ripped across it. As he stared out the side window, a wall of rock reared up. Sandstone.
They had reached the cleft. The road was now a gouged-out path with no choices left in it.
Better rock than air. It’s a long way down.
The right tires blew, pop! pop!
They scraped along the rock face. Grillwork and shards of twisted metal sprayed back onto the windshield, peppered the hood. Alex grunted with the eff
ort of pulling the wheel back toward the center again.
With what seemed to be majestic slowness, a big chunk came out of nowhere and starred the windshield. At the center of the spiderweb pattern he saw a smashed plate of glass pop out and hit Ray’s knee. Through this hole gravel spattered. A pebble stung his cheek.
They rebounded from the sandstone wall. Spinning now, out of control. Axles screeching on the asphalt.
The world slipped sideways and whirled about, and here came the other side of the highway, more rock to slam against.
Alex stared at its approach almost abstractly. He still vainly leaned into the steering wheel, which failed to respond. Pieces of the truck flew away from them, as if abandoning ship. Bangs and clatters frayed the air. There was all the time in the world to blink just once.
They struck the rock solidly. The windshield exploded. When Alex opened his eyes again—hands at his sides, now just a passenger—he saw that his vague plan had actually made them ricochet between the stone walls. Robbing them of energy. But at a cost in pain. Ray was slumped over in his safety harness. Blood ran down from his scalp and neck.
They clanged and rasped their way down another few hundred yards of highway, confined by the rock that at each fresh collision shredded steel away from them like a giant petulant child tearing the packaging from a Christmas gift.
All this was to Alex quite abstruse and distant, events played out in hollow air. He was concentrating on his left shoulder, which hurt rather badly.
And… was that the oily smell of something burning?
2
KATHRYN
The annual Immortality Incorporated turkey party was always held at the spacious Craftsman-style home of Boyd Zeeman, which crowned a tawny hill with angular slabs of wood and glass.
Compared with the coastal cities, a home at the eastern edge of Orange County typically had twice the lot size and square footage for half the price. Throughout a century’s tides of go-go real estate, this simple rule had held. It was as deep an article of faith as the county possessed.
Boyd was the only I2 member who could conceivably host the throng. By tradition, the mob began arriving at dusk and soon spilled out onto the ample lawn.
Kathryn pulled Alex’s Volvo into the long swooping driveway and stopped at the top of the arc, beside a splashing fountain. “Boyd recycles his water onto his lawn,” Alex said, peering rather glassily at the stand of jacaranda trees that lined the walkway up to the house.
“You sure you’re up to this?” Kathryn asked.
His mouth stiffened. “Sure. Good to get out. Flap the wings.”
He lifted his left arm a few inches, all that the white sling allowed, and imitated a wounded chicken trying to fly. His left shoulder had broken in two places in the accident. The orthopedist had kept Alex on the table three hours rebuilding the socket with steel pins and doing rotator cuff repairs. After a week at home Alex was going buggy, he said, and needed a party.
“Let me know if you start enjoying yourself too much,” she said, helping him out of the passenger seat.
“I’m off the pain-killers,” he said, starting up the walkway. “Think I’ll try some other anesthetic.”
He strode ahead, attacking the slope like a test on this first outing. His off-white shirt looked a bit baggy from the weight the operation had taken off. The tan slacks still fit nicely, she noted, particularly in the most important area, the rear. She had never liked pleated trousers on her men and so had been happy to note that Alex favored slim hopsack cottons with a slight bell-bottom flare. They were coming back into fashion, but she suspected his were holdovers from the last cycle of lean-jean popularity, at least a decade back. So he was thrifty; no character flaw there. But the Indian leather belt—the kind of thick, byzantinely worked thing bought in an airport gift shop when your flight had been delayed yet again, and then unaccountably never given up—that had to go.
“So you can have a glass of wine,” she said, catching up. He was puffing slightly from the little climb. “One.”
“I am captain of my own chemistry,” he said sardonically.
“Ummm! You’re getting downright surly, sitting at home.”
“Daytime TV. It clouds the mind.”
They passed through the broad double doors and into Boyd Zeeman’s expansive arms. He was a big man, gruff and barrel-chested and wearing a western tie with a turquoise clasp that exactly matched his eyes—accidentally, Kathryn deduced, since his pink shirt and twill trousers clashed.
Boyd swept them up with an ample air, bombarding Alex with questions about his accident and giving Kathryn a conspiratorial wink that said, Let’s look after him together. As unpaid president of I2 he somehow made the job seem like managing a football team.
He steered them to a couch like a scalloped-out flower, saying, “Rest here and the whole damned party will pass by, shake your paw. Too bad you don’t have a cast to sign.”
“I’d just as soon not, thanks,” Alex said. “As it is, I’ll be in this rig for weeks.”
“How’s Ray?” Boyd asked.
“He’ll be here,” Kathryn said. “In a wheelchair, though.”
“His leg’ll be okay?”
“So they say,” Alex said. “I had to wrench it some to get him out of the cab.”
“You didn’t have much choice.”
Alex shrugged. “The gas had started burning. Anyway, Ray says he’s all right otherwise.”
Boyd nodded reflectively. “Damn lucky, you ask me. Those highway patrol guys report yet?”
Alex and Kathryn accepted glasses of chardonnay from Boyd’s wife, Evelyn, who exchanged quick greetings and flitted away into the crowd, the busy hostess. Alex sampled it and murmured approval. “They just filed. The brakes were so smashed up, they had trouble. The way I ping-ponged us off that rock, the front end took a beating. The brake fluid lines got all burned away. Looks like routine failure.”
“Can these experts explain why the emergency brake failed?”
Alex shrugged again. To Kathryn, this feigned indifference verged on macho posturing, but he had a vulnerable quality in his face that belied that.
“It came loose some way,” he said. “The insurance guys are listing it as an accident.”
“Think it was?” Boyd asked, mouth skeptically skewed.
“Dunno.” Alex started to shrug and winced, rubbing his shoulder. “Damned funny accident.”
Boyd said, “Maybe I’m just suspicious, but…”
Kathryn shook her head in disbelief. “You honestly believe people hate you that much?”
Boyd grimaced, gazing moodily off into space. “I’ve had relatives slug me, protesters splash blood on me, strangers sling garbage, neighbors throw me out of their parties.”
Kathryn spotted Susan Hagerty and exchanged light conversation, but Susan was quiet, probably depressed by the harassment she had suffered at UCI. Women bonded with blab, and men through sharing work or sports, but Kathryn felt a certain connection with Susan based on their link through I2. They strolled through Boyd’s home, which sported great walls of worked granite, well-oiled cedar planking, and huge oval windows looking down on the sprawl east of Anaheim Hills. Gazing out over the city, Kathryn reminded herself that the night inverts things: swaths of light brim with activity but are concrete playgrounds; the dark patches—fewer every year—are in fact alive, the realm of plant and animal. Man’s works look best in the night.
She stepped onto the vast, wraparound patio and caught the dry valley breeze, fresh and smelling of reasons to live. The I2 crowd was as varied as any she had seen in a state noted for the offhanded bizarre. Most people, when they first heard of cryonics, assumed that the members were palsied, scared old folks grasping at a last chance. But the house was packed with people in their thirties and forties though, many bouncing to pop music or diving into the kidney-shaped pool. These were the on-call laborers who made I2 work: suspension team members, willing doers of scut-work, seldom seen at the facility but vital.
There were a lot of intelligent-looking men; somehow, cryonics appealed less to women. Ladies seemed to feel it was unnatural—and of course it was, just like the smallpox vaccine and indoor plumbing, two other activities that had lengthened the human lifespan.
Sic transit, Gloria, Kathryn thought, strolling in a bemused state back into the house. After a leisurely talk, skirting around major stuff. Susan left early. Kathryn wandered again. Most talk was about the perpetual legal battles I2 had to fight in the courts, against the mortuary lobby or the local coroner. Two or three of these conversations were quite enough.
Many here were computer specialists. It was easy for them to see their personalities, their identities, as software programs running in the hardware of their brains and bodies. Since their software selves would be trapped in the fast-decaying body-hardware when they died, what was more natural than freezing the hardware to save the self?
This dispassionate way of viewing themselves—dem ol’ mind-body duality blues, she reflected—was probably why men took to cryonics better. Women were more tied to their times, their friends and family. The idea of being ripped out of their social network and awakening into a distant future, all alone—that was nearly intolerable. They’d literally rather die. Even though, of course, the first time they had come into this world, they hadn’t known anybody either…
“Kath babe!”
Sheila had just pulled up into the driveway in a car that looked like a traveling scrap heap. Kathryn was glad to be tugged out of her meditative mood; she walked down to greet her. Sheila’s Ford bore the undoctored wounds of at least three separate collisions and sported a bumper sticker GEEZ, IF YOU LOVE, HONK US.
“Your friends may be crazy, but they got the bucks,” Sheila approved as they went into the house.
“You were whining so much about your boyfriend, I thought this would broaden your horizons.”
“That’s boyfriends, plural. Never know when you’ll need a spare.”
“Not very romantic.”
“Romantic?” Sheila snagged a glass from a passing drink tray and arched her purple-tinged eyebrows in comic alarm. “Romantic love sounds to me like clinical depression. Self-inflicted delusion.”
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