CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

“Help out?”

  “Well, attendance has been down a little lately.”

  That helped explain the tired air of this man. Montana seemed to gather himself, though, and asked cautiously, “You know what’s been going on?”

  “I have watched from a distance. I have waited.”

  “Waited? For what?”

  “For some new soldier to take up our battle.”

  The Reverend spread his hands helplessly. “The scientists, they’ve changed everything. What could I, one man, do?”

  “Fight them, as before.”

  “My friend, that was long ago, and—”

  “The dead shall remain in the valley of bones until the trump of doom.”

  Montana started to get up. “Well, I know, but—”

  George stepped forward and shoved him back into the chair. “Our work is not done.”

  The face that peered up at him seemed to shoot forward through shrouded years, lighting up its passage with vibrant memories. The firm chin had weakened, the handsome mane had thinned. From the robust jaw a flap of skin now dangled, stealing strength from the face. Compared to the squat peasants George worked among, this man was pallid, his eyes watery.

  George said, “I kept my skills. I saved my money in case I was called again. But you didn’t call.”

  Montana cowered, his papery skin drained of vitality.

  “Then this WOrldNet came in.”

  Montana said hollowly, “I saw something about it. ‘How the World Was WON’ was the title. WOrldNet, WON. I—”

  “In my village they’re already giving away WON identification tags. Coded with retinal patterns and fingerprints. Things I can’t fake. Things there are records of here, with the foster homes people.”

  “A health thing, isn’t it? Everybody gets a number, buried in your skin. So you can carry your vaccination records yourself.”

  “And plenty more. A global ID network, fingerprints, the works.”

  “A blessing, truly so,” the Reverend said automatically.

  George spat back, “Think, Reverend. I’m a gringo, hard to be inconspicuous. If anybody comes looking, WOrldNet will tag me for sure.”

  “But why would they…” Montana’s whispery voice trailed away as he studied George’s face.

  “You and Lomax, you’re clear. But if the chillers remember, they’ll know my face. And they are an abomination on this earth.”

  “I think it’s unlikely, after all this time—”

  “An abomination!” George shouted. He jerked the Reverend out of the chair and lifted him up, making the man dance on his toes. “We have work. My life’s task is not finished.”

  5

  SUSAN

  First thing the next morning, she asked for a newspaper.

  But the specialist nurse brought her a funny leather-bound thing that opened like a book and only had two pages in it. She asked the nurse what this was, but he was already gone. She remembered thinking once that it was too bad every intern could not be given a short bout of a major illness, just so they would know what it was like, being treated as just another problem in someone else’s schedule, a disposable difficulty.

  At least he had shown her how to control her walls. She tuned it for soft winds sighing through pine trees, with scents to match. They had left nibble food, crunchy stuff like fried oatmeal.

  Okay, time to face the future. The book’s spine was a fat cylinder labeled Los Angeles Times. She opened it, and the page, which felt like thick paper of high rag content, leaped into life. DROUGHT WORSENS, GOVERNOR STEPS IN. Beneath the banner in blue was May 11, 2033, 13:46. As she watched it winked to 13:47.

  She thought about decades unfurling as she held stiff, unchanging, in immense cold. Her first thoughts while recovering had been of peering out through a windowpane webbed with blue-white ice crystals. She had blown on it. A spot warmed and spread. She had peered outward through a black night. A night of thirty-eight years.

  Something beckoned, something immense and sorrowful. Tears ran down and off the tip of her nose before she noticed them. She was awash in a sea of feeling, but somehow the images and meanings behind the curtain of forlorn ache would not resolve, would not come to her inner bidding. She had lost some memories, but the terrible weight of it was that she did not even know what memories were lost. She felt gray clouds descend in her mind, blank walls of nothingness. Crystals, ice-hard. But no way to blow upon them, to warm them into opening.

  A tear splashed onto the thick paper, and she brushed it away, embarrassed, afraid she would mark the paper. But the page did not absorb the tear. Moisture beaded on it, a millimeter above the crisp black type of DODGERS SKUNKED IN DOUBLE-HEADER. She could see the letters refracted through the water. The type was buried in the page, the way an image hangs behind a TV screen.

  As she turned the sheet she saw the type of page one wink out. Pages two and three lay beyond, but when she flipped the “paper” back, page four appeared where Page 1 had been. She guessed that somehow the newspaper was in fact in the tubular spine of the book and projected onto the page.

  The center two pages held further mysteries. “BEVERLY B” RACES FOR BIRTHING BONANZA seemed to describe a woman who was trying to beat the world record for childbearing. GAME SHOW “STRETCHES LIMITS,” SNYDER DECLARES. The lingo of TRIPLE-DIP RULED BINARY NONCONFORMING proved that lawyers were still carrying out their guerrilla war against the English language.

  MOON SHUTTLE DELAYED Hydrogen Leak Termed “Minor” seemed clear, but OCEANSIDE BANS EATERIE WARPOS “Find ‘em and ‘Fess ‘em,” Says Chief seemed to be about “warpos” who wore offensive clothing. It seemed that if the wearers sat down in a restaurant, they left behind the waste materials that their clothes—“snug-rugs”—had excreted, after digesting the sloughed-off skin, dandruff, and other unsavory elements of “human dander.” The story implied that some snug-ruggers were letting their living coveralls digest other unmentionable aspects of human physiology. “Walking, stinking biocycles,” the outraged mayor charged.

  There was an advertisement for “Grab-Grass Home Security Aid”—a lawn that apparently rolled up to trap intruders. Crime was up—as always. Nasty racial incidents. High unemployment. IMMIGRATION CRISIS WORSENS. By the time she had worked her way through to MEDITERRANEAN SEA “DEAD” SAYS FAYEED AND FEDS INVOKE “UNCLE SUCKER” RULE Economic Downturn “Unfixable” on page four, she had learned how to call up sidebar text on background stories. It would overlay the other stories until she tapped a button on the book’s lower spine. The overlays helped explain the snug-ruggers, but not the “bioverts,” which the newspaper apparently thought everybody knew about.

  A big picture of a sleek jetliner landing on page four moved when by chance her hand passed across it. Smoke plumes puffed behind the wheels as the plane landed, and she learned that it had returned from orbit. The action sequence was in three dimensions and ended with a “movid” star coming down the passenger stairs, looking more green than the grass in the background.

  When she turned back to the first page, it flickered and then gave her further pages in the Times. The book had only two projection-sheet pages in it. Touch commands could take the reader through the entire paper at varying speeds. She popped open the thick spine and saw a small crystalline rod held by clamps, with the date fluorescing along it. Probably tomorrow the intern would insert a different rod and throw this one away—or recycle it. The book remained the same.

  She managed to get it back to page one by tapping a corner of the buffed leather jacket, but she could not figure out how to find an index or table of contents. There might be a piece about her, if she was famous. She fell asleep looking for it.

  The next morning was brilliant, all walls giving a real-time view across the Grand Canyon. A hawk wheeled lazily on the thermals, and it was a while before Susan noticed that she was no longer in the reassuring clasp of the milky fluid. Instead she lay on a kind of sculpted water bed. A nurse brought her breakfast, which stayed warm in its plastic case
even when she became distracted by the Grand Canyon view. Her true hunger was to be outdoors. What an arrogant word, she thought. Outdoors. As though all of nature fell into the category of being leftovers, beyond our dwellings.

  Breakfast was crisp and tasty and unrecognizable. A digital panel on its side said it was “ocean product fajitas.” Seaweed, she guessed. But it had the heft and swagger of steak.

  A nurse appeared, collected breakfast, and did not look surprised when Susan wanted to go to the john on her own. The nurse was a big man with enough brawn to scoop her up if she needed that, and to Susan’s delight she did not. Her muscles held without trembling, joints worked without a pop. She was so proud of herself that she took a stroll around her room. Most of the medical equipment she could figure out, with some help from the nurse, but the biggest surprise was the carpet. She had dropped a fragment of ocean product fajitas on it, and now the carpet rippled, moving the bits along toward a slight depression under her bed. Like the cilia in lungs, she thought, stooping to see the slight dip absorb the garbage.

  “Oh sure, saves a cube of work,” the nurse said, still hovering to catch her. “Sweeps up just fine. There’s one of them new hungry rugs down the way, eats what it can.”

  Susan gingerly maneuvered back into bed, more tired from her trip than she wanted to let on. “What happens if I toss this bed dress on the floor?”

  “It’ll try to move the dress awhile and give up. Too big.”

  “It’s alive?”

  “Yeah. Smart grass, I call it.” The nurse showed her how the carpet cilia hung on to her shoes to stop her from slipping.

  “How about cockroaches?”

  “Ummm, the favorite dish around here. Only now that the rug’s been gobbling them up, we don’t see anymore.”

  She thought awhile about a rug eating the fur off a dog while it slept, or making a banquet out of socks that weren’t picked up right away, and wondered how a biological engineer designed against such malfunctions. She thumbed through her wall screen image inventory, asked for a lawn scene, and was startled to see a bed of poinsettias that were gold and magenta. What looked like an olive tree flaunted not the small black fruit but pendulous scarlet things like flagrant eggplant.

  She was slowly putting together a picture of how different this world was. The nineteenth century had been dominated by the science of chemistry, the twentieth by the many products of physics—airplanes, atomic bombs, rockets, computers. This twenty-first century, barely a third over, was clearly the era of biology. As a physician, she was plainly out of work.

  She fell asleep and dreamed of the eggplant-olives.

  But a vagrant silhouette flitted through her troubled visions, a wisp of dark memory she could not catch.

  6

  GEORGE

  Dr. Lomax was haggard and grizzled. His deep tan had turned upon him, and now his skin looked like old boot leather.

  “All these years I figured you for dead,” Lomax said without preamble. His voice was still gravelly in the soft silences of the Reverend’s study.

  George smiled. The idea of something stopping him, killing him, before he completed his mission, was so absurd. “I took a little rest.”

  “And my brother knew all along.” Lomax’s lips pinched thin and white in controlled anger. Barely controlled, George judged.

  The Reverend started to say something, but George overrode him with, “He’s a good man. He covered for me.”

  Lomax glared at Montana. “I kept worrying you’d turn up, blow the whole thing. And all the time, he knew.”

  Best not to tell Lomax that his brother had even sent the mission occasional money for George. Not that he had needed it; there were ways of earning something extra and serving the Lord, too. George had killed people in the cocaine trade, both for the cash and to strike a blow for righteousness. No one had ever suspected the quiet gringo missionary worker.

  George stood in the exact center of the room, facing Lomax, who was the key to this. “Wouldn’t have done you any good if you knew where I was. I got friends there, fine people. Fly down there, come snooping after me, I’d know before you got dust on your shoes.”

  “Why would I pursue you?” Lomax asked with convincing candor. George had to admire how the man gave no hint of what he had surely planned—to kill George. It had made no sense not to.

  “Maybe to spray me with that little cylinder of yours.”

  Lomax grimaced and sipped at a glass of wine. The Reverend had tried to put a veneer of politeness on this meeting, even setting out little dishes of macadamia nuts. George spent the night here, resting up for the trials to come. The place needed a paint job, but it had prompted him, in the way that smells and photographs conjure up long-dead moments, to remember how Lomax had controlled him.

  “That was necessary,” Lomax said curtly.

  “I was on your side, remember?”

  “You had also done some unwise things.”

  “Things you damned well wanted done.”

  Lomax got up, his legs lacking the springy quickness George remembered, and began to pace. His face bunched with fitful energies, his cheeks were lined, and crows’-feet fanned from his eyes. He sported a pencil-thin black moustache that flexed as his mouth worked. “True. Still, I had to be careful. You were experiencing dissociative disorders.”

  “What’s that?” George hated jargon and people who used it like a crutch.

  “Memories of traumatic experiences get locked away,” Lomax lectured, “particularly severe childhood events. In the most extreme form, these memories are available only to one of the several personalities that the person sustains. Memories are rewritten, distorted, misunderstood.”

  George gritted his teeth but kept the rage inside. This kind of quackery infuriated him. “Yeah?”

  Lomax was startled by something in George’s face. “I didn’t mean anything by that, really. I—I expect you were just under strain.”

  This last part did not ring right. Lomax edged uneasily away from George. He was hiding something. Despite George’s self-control, remembered anxieties played like bright striations in him. He closed his eyes and saw blue-white lightning dancing on zig-zag legs against a bleak horizon, the landscape of a fretful mind.

  “Don’t try anything like that cylinder business again.”

  “Fair enough,” Lomax said briskly.

  “What was that stuff you sprayed me with?”

  “They were a very sophisticated set of neurotransmitter inhibitors. Quite specialized, a Vitality Incorporated product, and very expensive. But I can see you do not need any of the consolations of chemistry now, George.”

  “No other tricks, either.” Lomax had seemed relieved to rattle off some technical detail, so that wasn’t what he was concealing.

  “The serpent turns,” the Reverend said obscurely, settling behind his desk. He leaned back in the big leather chair, which squeaked, and put his feet up on the bare mahogany. The surface was marred and had circles of water stains here and there.

  “I have the information you wanted,” Lomax said, moving on with executive crispness. “Once I give it to you, I never want to see or hear of you again.”

  “I make no promises.”

  “Well then, I don’t—”

  “I got enough to sink you if I want. Stop stalling.”

  “What? What evidence?” Lomax’s eyes were like slits.

  “I think you know.”

  This was mostly bluff. George had a lot of threads but not a whole piece of cloth. Certainly Lomax had some interest in the chillers, probably some research angle. Setting the police to sniffing around would be bad for Lomax. Something in Lomax’s jittery pacing had made George take the risk.

  It worked. Lomax glanced at the Reverend, chewed his lip, and visibly made up his mind. “I used my contacts, got the information. The company that holds the three chillers—to use the old word—has revived one. Hagerty.”

  “She’s fully conscious?”

  “My source
says she is.”

  Resurrection outside God’s plan. Vagrant impulses whipsawed him. The news media had not divulged any details of who was being revived. To hear Lomax say it flat out—

  A pounding in his cars made the study seem to vibrate. The stained-glass windows seethed with broken radiance. Dissociative disorders. He gasped, as if rooms were popping open in the worn estate of his inner self. When he looked up at Lomax, he saw muscles bunching in Lomax’s lined jaw. He felt his analytical self shudder. To his rising fright he saw that the muscles were not causing it at all. A lump seemed to crawl beneath Dr. Lomax’s skin, down from the weathered cheek and along the hinge of the jaw. The jutting mouth worked with its own energy; Lomax was saying something, but George could not hear. The tight ball crept along the jawbone, a knot as thick as a thumb, picking up speed, slithering now with crablike clenchings as if small legs drove it forward. It slid off the jawbone and down into the neck, merging with the loose wattles there, easing into the soft flaps of fat. As this eerie slug worked its way across Lomax, the man himself kept talking soundlessly, and then there was a wet, strangled gurgling in George’s ears and the room snapped back into solid focus again. Lomax’s voice returned, sandpaper rough, and George understood that it had all been some kind of delusion, a mirage.

  Or a sign. A sign from God that would take time to fathom. He sucked in the deep scent of aged cedar and oak paneling and tried to make sense of what Lomax was saying.

  “—can’t get solid information because the whole damned thing is under max security. I’m retired and that makes it harder. Never thought I’d have to tend to this. But I’ve got my contacts going, used some of my friends. It looks like the Hagerty woman is doing okay. She was the easiest, so they tried her first of the three. Her personality framework is intact. They’re getting so they can try revivals from that era of early transglycerol technology. She’s the initial case from then, after the experimental animals worked. We can—”

  “Three?” George whispered.