Lomax made a tent of his fingers and gazed into it. “I confronted new problems. I am a busy man, heading a firm that has had its own troubles. Competition in the medical sciences is intense, quite intense. I’ve had to keep Vitality moving. Immortality Incorporated had solved many problems that Vitality could not, and I was deeply concerned. Their program of freezing people was attracting attention.”
“That was the beginning of our collaboration,” the Reverend said. “The chillers. Alberto here thought that once people truly knew what the chillers were doing—”
“They’d stop it,” George said woodenly.
“You are enough of a technical man to appreciate the enormity of the problem we face, George.” Lomax spoke abstractly, his face distant and strangely intent beneath his lightly frosted hair. “The Immortality Incorporated fanatics have gone blundering ahead of real science, poisoning the atmosphere for the rest of us. For the real scientists who want to study the deep issues of biochemistry. They’ve ignored the orderly processes of research, brought ridicule on the entire field of organ preservation. I was dismayed when I learned years ago that Susan Hagerty was using university support to attack problems I had imagined they would never address. Vitality has been working on those problems for a long time, George, nearly since the time you were born. Preserving kidneys, lungs, livers. But we do not promise anyone a path to revival.”
“That’s the difference between heresy and science,” the Reverend said firmly, using a phrase George had heard before in several sermons. “Dr. Lomax proceeds with his eyes on God’s blessing, not on the prospect of false immortality.”
“Yet the Hagerty woman was discovering some amazing processes. Cryoprotectant techniques that were hard to patent. Worse, some of her papers drew attention to the field. In the long run that would make for more competition.”
The Reverend leaned against his desk and folded his arms. Dawn’s growing glow cast a golden nimbus about his great mane of hair, and he brought forth the powerful, rolling tones of his commanding voice. “So I visited that church of yours, George. Spoke to you. Invited you to come and sit among my congregation, should you be in the vicinity. All very open and hospitable.”
“You gave a wonderful sermon.”
“I didn’t bring up the chillers then. Too soon. I had to get a better sense of you.” The Reverend spoke volubly, his expansive gestures scooping the air. “I knew you would be a soldier for the Lord, but it would take time.”
Lomax said, “Time for you to work your way through your difficulties.”
George nodded, feeling the room flex, spin, sway. He fingered his glinting crystal cross, hoping it would give him enlightenment to comprehend all this. “I—I had some trouble. The police.”
“We know that,” the Reverend said warmly. “We understand and forgive.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you.”
Lomax said, “Your past, your transgressions, are safe with us.”
“I felt that, some way. So when I had to leave Tucson, I came here. To you.”
“And happy we were, my brother George. You came at the propitious time.”
“The chillers were shouting out their claims. It was time to act.” Lomax crossed his arms grimly.
George felt a brimming warmth steal over him. These were his people. He had found a refuge at last. They accepted him. Took him in with Christian charity, even though they knew his misdeeds, his dark sins. The dim ghosts of his parents wavered before his eyes, and he could hold back his tears no more. He gasped, sobbed, and then the room warped and spun, warped and spun, revolving about his hot mixture of sorrow and strange gladness. “Thank—thank you… I don’t deserve fathers like you… I don’t—”
“Oh, but you do,” the Reverend said, putting a hand on George’s shoulder. “You found where the Hagerty corpse is. A great victory. We can now reveal that, and the chillers will pay for their crimes.”
“That’d do the job, all right,” Lomax said agreeably.
“I did—I did, but—well, the woman.”
“Woman?” Lomax asked.
“The Sheffield woman. She works for them. She ran into me while I was getting away.”
Lomax and the Reverend froze. “She saw you? In the dark?”
“She had a flashlight. I tried to hide, but she ran right straight into me.”
The Reverend’s eyes widened. “He’s tied to me. If she knows that—”
“Can’t happen,” Lomax shot back. “He was just a face in the dark.”
“Good, good. But damn it, I told you from the beginning, if any of this got back to me—”
“Wait a second,” Lomax said, waving off the Reverend, staring intently at George’s chest. “Wait. George, did you change clothes after you saw her?”
Blinking eyes, a confused mouth awry. “No. No, I didn’t.”
“Then she saw you wearing the crystal cross.”
George looked down and saw the cross dangling there, his pride.
The Reverend gaped. “My Lord.”
“I—I’m sorry,” George said plaintively. His cross was now a witness, a dagger pointed at the heart of the Marble Cathedral itself. The pain in his belly spread, sucking him into it.
“She may not have noticed,” Lomax said.
“And she may recall it, nice and sharp,” the Reverend spat back bitterly, “once she has a chance to think.”
Lomax said nothing, chewing at his lower lip. George watched the two men, unable to tell what they might be thinking, unable to suppress the growing weakness that seeped up into his chest and squeezed it, until finally a moan escaped him and he fell on his side. Then the others were around him, pulling up his sweat shirt, exclaiming at the mess that he had become, pressing cloths on the matted pus and blood and sour fluids there. George was embarrassed, trembling, weak and fevered, and much of what they said battled through a distant roaring, like water smashing down from a great height.
“He’s too hurt to tend him here,” Lomax said somewhere.
The Reverend said, “I can have some of my people—no, damn it, that would link him to me, a clear tie after this crime.”
“Stop worrying about your ass for a minute and—”
“If I’d known he would go loony—”
“I told you it might get rough,” Lomax shot back.
“To start killing—”
“You knew what he was like.”
“I know your ass is on the line, but I was just helping out, I don’t deserve—”
“Shut up. Look, I can patch him up, give him some biphetimines.”
The Reverend asked slowly, “Why? He needs rest.”
“We’ll never be in the clear on this unless he finishes the job.”
“What? We can’t—”
“The girl—that’s our problem.”
The Reverend said, “True. Not much time to fix it, either.”
Water all around him, and he could not resist. It flowed into him and through him, and he recalled suddenly, the black lake—and chilly, ancient fear squeezed his chest with steel fingers. He sucked in thin air, throat working with a hoarse cry.
And then the other dream, the Lord’s message. It swamped his mind. Awakening into blaring light, twisted faces staring down at him. What it would be like to emerge as a chiller, the dead restored to once-frozen flesh. The Master’s Messages had shown him that, guided him. The horror of it gripped him, and he made himself think instead of the bones, the white dancing bones.
Through blurred eyes he saw the Reverend nod, and then Lomax turned and looked down at George and said something, the words snatched away, lost and floating amid the rushing, storming waters. Lomax pressed something into his face and a short hiss came. A soft breath, like a silvery kiss.
5
KATHRYN
She awoke from drugged, clotted sleep. Sunshine seeped through the blinds of her bedroom and spilled slivers of golden promise onto the carpet. Bleary images coasted through her. For a long moment she drifted and then t
he crushing weight of memory returned. She rolled over and buried her head in a pillow, but it did no good.
Remembrance was insidious. She could force away the full mass of it, but snippets and fragments kept poking through, cutting and quick. Last month they had been waiting in line for a movie, and as usual nearly all the rest of the audience was teenagers. Alex had said, “Hard to breathe, with all these hormones spicing up the air.”
She had said, “Yes, you’re probably the only guy in this line who’s past his sexual peak.”
“Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that yet today.”
And she had laughed out loud, earning a lot of what’s-this-old-fart-up-to? looks from the line.
The memory was a faint note sounding far away, like a love letter you wrote as a teenager, found in a drawer after your second divorce. Anger was red, she had learned, and despair was black. But they tainted the same sucking vortex. Reject one, and you get the other, its twin. She had oscillated between outrage and despair through the long, aching two days in which they suspended Alex. Now, after a long sleep into late afternoon, she had hoped to revive. But this world looked even more bleak. She had awakened in this bed with Alex and now never would again. He had brought smiles and moist sighs here, gasps and guffaws. Passing moments, no less sublime for their momentary passing. They would hang in her memory now, permanent exhibits in her Hall of If Only.
She tried to fall back into the fuzzy world of half sleep, but her body wasn’t having any of that. Your sense of yourself followed your strumming senses, she thought irritably. It didn’t just sit at home in the head that was processing those senses. The world seized you. At the moment the principal siren call of reality was pressure in her bladder. She got up, perched on the seat—and thought of how often she had blundered in here and plopped down onto chilly porcelain. Her revenge had been a loud whoop, waking the culprit, who never remembered to put the seat back down.
A tear splashed on her knee. She got up and knew she had to stay away from the bed now. Better to stir around, letting busyness fill in the moments. She pulled on stretch denims and a red cotton blouse, wryly noting that maybe the colors would keep her mood out of the basement.
She padded into the kitchen in high-top sneakers, nearly stepping on a cockroach, which scuttled under a baseboard. She poured low-fat milk over raisin bran and filed a mental note to get some insect spray, and then thought about the Technicolor South American cockroaches that had terrified her a thousand years ago. She did not fight the spiral of memory, but instead let its vortex whorl draw her into something Alex had said only a week or two before, while mulling over Susan’s death.
We kept feeling ourselves as individuals, he had said, bottled up in bodies. But the natural world treated us as a species. Our survival depended greatly on what countless ancestors had done, only a bit on what we did. People of the distant past had died early of inheritable disorders and so had eliminated themselves from humanity’s gene pool. In a sense, those ancient deaths had protected us against diseases, against the errors of errant kidneys or lungs. And what was The Lord thinking during all this?
In the cool eye of Dr. Darwin, after all, primates were no more significant than a trillionfold cockroaches. Species were myriad special cases that all looked the same seen from above. Nothing special about that old one-note song, me me me me me. How could there be, when there were such a multitude of species, and each one held so many individuals? The sheer masses of souls overwhelmed her imagination. An afterlife for humans—a place beyond death? Preposterous. She would love to believe it now, but the numbers alone swamped the concept.
Kathryn remembered Alex and his mad cockroach caper. A trillion cockroaches, cast into the rude world, all so that the Idea of Cockroach shall live, O Lord? What waste! Cockroaches and humans alike, the quirky specialness of us died by the zillions, felled by grand catastrophe and invisible microbe alike. Did cockroaches die so that their Idea will be made manifest somewhere down the timeline? Will the cockroaches inherit the earth as part of some Divine Plan? Or are they a side note, a minor irritant to us—us, the Crown of Creation, Inc.—so that when we barged into our kitchens, there came that quick scurrying retreat, to remind us of the Idea of Cockroach?
Kathryn sniffed, brushing away tears, not knowing how long she had been crying. She had loved Alex’s quirky, loony logic. Now she found that her own mind ran in his eccentric channels. A sadly comforting legacy.
“Hey girl, you look kick-dog down.”
Kathryn jerked her head up and saw Sheila grinning through the open kitchen window. “Uh…”
“Okay I drop in?”
“Sure, uh…”
“This time of day, I figured prob’ly wouldn’t be interrupting something big, like that time?”
While Sheila walked around to the side door Kathryn had pulled herself together enough to ask, “That time?”
“I came strutting in, all bright-eyed, and the two of you looked like minks in heat.”
Kathryn hoped the pang she felt did not show in her face. Sheila obliviously busied herself, saying, “I got off the early shift, feeling full of talk and empty of coffee.”
“That’s Brazilian, pretty good.”
“Gal, you are down. Your voice sounds like somebody stepped on it.”
“I—I’ve been working hard.”
“For those chillers? Creepy people.”
“They’re different, that’s all. They’ve got guts, too.”
“Terrif, but this hiding bodies, that’s creep stuff.”
Kathryn opened her mouth to defend them and realized the gulf that now separated her from Sheila. Only two days ago she had been cutting up with Sheila in the stockroom of Fashion Circus, trading chiller jokes, hip and swift and tart of tongue.
“They had to. The coroner was going to—”
“I know, you told me the skinny, remember? Me, I don’t want somebody dragging my body around like that. Death’s bad enough without having to move all the time, too.”
“I don’t think Susan minds.”
“Hey, who knows?”
“Next you’ll tell me you want your casket lined with velvet padding.”
“People snatch at anything, when they’re grieving.”
“Quite true,” Kathryn said stiffly. And why am I talking about this? Pleading for help?
“Well, freezing people, it sounds like throwing a drowning swimmer a strand of barbed wire.”
Kathryn took an offered cup of coffee and sipped on it eagerly. Even an artificial lift to her spirits was welcome. Sheila said, “You been sleeping all day?”
“Just a little.”
“That’s as believable as slippers on a fish. Girl, whatever you been doing, you need a remake just to cover the major damage.”
“Things have been rough.”
Sheila said shrewdly, one eyebrow arched. “Trouble with Alex?”
She suppressed a mad laugh. Her chest felt tight, and the enormity of her situation finally struck her. She had to grieve for him in silence, forever. In a few days people would notice his absence, and she would have to say nothing. She fought away tears and sipped coffee.
“Ah, it is him. He been stepping around on you?”
“No, look, I can’t go into it right now.”
“Any connection with those bucks you borrowed from me?”
“No, that was something else,” Kathryn said guiltily. Sheila had given her the first installment on the insurance policy tied to her suspension agreement with I2. “You were sweet about that.”
“Hey, friend needs cash, I’m here.”
“I’ll tell you about that, too, but—”
“I know, I know—Real Soon Now.”
In the hard light of day her gallant gesture to Alex, signing up in his cause, looked pathetically irrelevant. Kathryn simply didn’t feel up to facing Sheila’s probable reaction—eye-rolling disbelief.
Again the impulse to bray with despairing laughter. Her emotions were lurching all over the landsc
ape. Kathryn stood up shakily. “My mother used to say, a good meal sets things right.”
“Ummm.” Sheila studied her. “Your mother didn’t have a Nazi diet like mine.”
“Come on, I’ve got a refrigerator full of stuff that will just go bad unless we use it.”
There were some foods that held the Americana Good Vibe images, and without noticing it, Kathryn had been stocking her refrigerator with them. Against the tensions of her recent life she had shored up homey provisions. Snap beans, with their flavor of farm kitchens in the afternoon. Cornbread. Pie mixes. Somehow peeling spuds or gutting chickens didn’t do it. Shucking corn did, or homemade ice cream, or patting out tortillas. They cooked and baked and ate, and Kathryn had to invent a spat with Alex, manufacture dialogue, and then sit through Sheila’s cool-eyed appraisal, finishing with racy suggestions for a reconciliation. That was the worst of it, not being able to tell a good friend while pain pierced her heart.
But she got through it. She turned in a credible role and ushered Sheila out as dusk closed a murky hand over the lawn outside. The air was sharp with a desert chill, and even in twilight the nearby trees had the clarity of a good idea. Sheila sensed that Kathryn was not coming across with the whole story, though, and as she was leaving gave a snort of exasperation. “You’re hiding something for sure.”
“I’ll tell you someday.”
“You look pushed out of shape, whatever it is.”
“Someday. Someday.”
Sheila rolled her eyes heavenward. “Lord give me patience—and right now.”
She could not sleep again, not so soon, though fatigue dragged at her. She found herself climbing into her car and was halfway there before she knew she was going to Immortality Incorporated. The night slipped by, rimmed in neon. She wondered at all that had happened to her in the last few months, the move here, Alex, cryonics. They were all woven together. Take away one, and the others seemed improbable.
An idea like cryonics could only flourish in a place like this. There used to be lots of nicknames for Southern California, she remembered Alex telling her. Somebody had called it Moronia. Then it was Smogville. Some press agent labeled it Double Dubuque, for its provincial natives. Forty Suburbs in Search of a City. Lotus Land, Nowhereville, Capital of Kitsch, the LaLa Land of mindless weightlifters and suntanned bleach blondes. Angeltown. L.A. was handy and definitive. St. Louis wasn’t S.L., San Diego wasn’t S.D., New York wasn’t N.Y. Somehow L.A. made music in the ear, easy and evocative. So did the Big Orange, though there were damned few of them left. Maybe now we should call it Gridlock, Kathryn thought grimly in the grip of commuter traffic, but then she was gliding down Silverado Canyon and the old severe California of brisk air and lean vistas was there again, waiting patiently behind the billboards and consumer goulash.
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