CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  George staggered away from the whispering oaks, groping through another bout of darkness. Trying not to pay attention to his ribs, where he had smashed into a wall, fleeing from the VI2 facility. He leaned against a railing at the entrance to the Marble Cathedral, drawn by the soft yellow glow from within, and caught sight of his hand—lumpy, thick fingers like ripe pork sausages, blackened nails, calluses that rasped on his cotton shirt.

  Winds whipped his hair into his eyes as he roughly shoved open the big panel doors. Through the antechamber, then into the descending hush of the cool, incense-scented interior. People were milling about the Reverend, who was in the pulpit. They were like shifting blobs of heat and color to George, and then he blinked, and they were only people again, oddly soft and vulnerable beneath the masses of cold stone and glass that towered in swooping grace above them.

  He pressed down the main corridor. With its worn carpet it was like an empty spine to which attached the pews, polished wood that sprouted to each side, going by him now, rik-rik-rik, George counting each as he passed to put his mind in order, to call up the distant and analytical self that he knew he carried and that he would need now. But that side was a puny thing, pale and dwindled somehow by the decades that had slid past now and would never come to him again. He burst toward the altar, and faces turned like spotlights to transfix him in their baleful stares.

  He ignored them, bored on toward the Reverend—who acknowledged his primacy, his weight and momentum as a warrior for the Lord, by turning from the soft others and registering surprise. Then the Reverend’s broad mouth curved up in a fixed smile, and he spoke quickly to the others, dismissing them.

  George said nothing, just stopped and stood by the tarnished brass railings near the altar. The fixtures here glowed with warming light and plush velour absorbed the harsh edges of words. George remembered the enfolding comforts of his many hours here. He ignored the soiled headrests on the Holy Seats, the tattered satins where once Sister Angel had led the congregation in throaty hosannahs, the bedraggled ruby carpet along the side aisles. Then the Reverend was speaking to him, ushering him aside into the warren of vestry rooms, the smooth words slipping by George like a mountain stream over worn pebbles. They went out the back door and across the concrete walkway, beneath a sky stirred with vagrant light and angry clouds. A storm front was now slamming in from the ocean, and the cleansing cut of rain made the air pregnant with fresh weight.

  Nothing registered with George until they were once more in the cedar-scented study, safe from the rising turbulence outside. Sitting in a pool of light was Dr. Lomax, working on blueprints laid out on the Reverend’s broad mahogany desk. The leathery man’s head jerked with surprise, his thin pencil moustache warping. “You don’t get off shift for two hours,” Lomax said by way of greeting.

  “I couldn’t stay there.” George stood in the exact center of the Reverend’s large oriental carpet, seeking some midpoint in all this, willing his warring senses to calm, to stop showing him a world stretched and seized by shifting smells and visions.

  “Why not? That supervisor, McAndrews, he’ll keep a sharp eye on you. I had a lot of trouble getting you in that close.”

  “I know, I appreciate, truly I do.” George felt the words tumble out of him without restraint.

  “You tried for Hagerty first?” Lomax demanded.

  He decided to lie. The truth was too hard to explain—the clashing images called up by the sight of her face, leaping at him out of shadowy memory. “Yes, but it wasn’t right. Too many people around.”

  Lomax shook his head. “Too bad. I learned that the police are talking to her. She’s coherent, they say.”

  “Yes, uh, she is.”

  Reverend Montana stood to the side, hands folded piously in front of him, blending into the cedar bookshelves. “And Cowell?”

  George gathered himself, became crisp. “I tried for him next. I got in, collecting trash in the post-op section. First time I got into the control room, I could see Cowell on the monitors. Out of that molecular bath, unwrapped. Lying flat with a bunch of leads going into the back of his skull.”

  Lomax nodded briskly. “They’re on schedule.”

  “First time, I got maybe a minute alone. I tried talking to him, seeing if there was reaction.”

  “What did the acoustic diagnostics say?”

  “Spikes on all channels, looked like. He was up and running, so he should have heard me. I spoke real slow, asked him if he recognized my voice.”

  “And?” Lomax demanded irritably.

  “How could I tell? He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t move or anything. You didn’t tell me how to read those other diagnostics.”

  “Because I don’t know how. There’s a limit to—”

  “I checked the situation board. They were holding him in ‘neuro-stasis,’ it said.”

  Lomax slammed his palm on the blueprints, scattering paper that fluttered to the floor. “That’s not the usual procedure! They’re doing something new.”

  Alarms ricocheted through George, anxieties exploding like crimson flashes, jangling his nerves. He hated his failure, having to admit it like this. And he had concealed his perfectly fine opportunity with Hagerty. The fabric of his will shredded into tremors and darting dreads.

  “The board said Cowell was having something adjusted in his eyes. They shut him down while they worked out the trouble.”

  “Worse damned luck.” Lomax grimly stared into space.

  “So I came back a little later. The team got pulled away for some other case, and I got time to look at things. Then I checked the television monitor and he wasn’t there.”

  “They moved him?” Lomax asked.

  “I met him. In a prep room.”

  “What?”

  George shuddered at the memory. “I think he knew me.”

  “By himself? Why would he—”

  “He looked scared and woozy. Maybe it was a side effect of what they were doing to him.”

  Lomax shook his head curtly. “No, there’s no procedure that would make a patient get up off that table and walk away. It was something you did.”

  “I just talked to him, like you said.”

  “He knew you.” Lomax’s pencil moustache twitched. “You scared him, and he went into a fight-or-flight response.”

  “Look, I just did what—”

  “It’s bad news,” Lomax said bitterly, “damned bad. But at least we know for sure now. He recognized your voice. He’ll be able to identify you.”

  The Reverend’s voice came out of the shadows, heavy with pontifical sadness. “Which places you in severe threat, my friend.”

  Lomax said carefully, “A voice identification isn’t convincing evidence, even if they somehow get a lead on you.”

  “Cowell had that vision problem—maybe he won’t be able to recognize me.”

  “You mean, if the company starts looking for the employee he saw?” Lomax thought. “Well, maybe.”

  George finally let his desire to confess burst forth. He turned to the Reverend. “I—I could have killed him.”

  Lomax gave him a sharp look. “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. He looked like Lazarus,” George said, and knew inside himself that this somehow explained it.

  “Anything you could do quickly wouldn’t be permanent, anyway. Injuring someone in a hospital these days”—Lomax waved the idea away—“no point. They’d save him.”

  The Reverend said soothingly, “I am sure you did the right thing, George.”

  “There’s the Sheffield woman, though,” Lomax said. “They’re reviving her next.”

  George’s throat tightened. He swallowed against a painful lump. “Maybe she won’t remember, like the Hagerty woman.”

  “We don’t know that Hagerty won’t recall you later. But there’s no chance Sheffield won’t.” Lomax tapped the desk top with a pencil, his eyes glittering. “She saw you good and clear, right after you did Cowell, days before she died. She’s got your
picture right there in long-term memory storage.”

  George felt power slipping from him, sucked toward Lomax’s forceful presence. He felt a whirling sense of events outstripping him, of this strange new world narrowing down to desperately few choices.

  “George, once they make the connection to the cathedral, the whole affair will unravel.” The Reverend moved solemnly into the pool of radiance at the desk and stood with grave demeanor, staring down forlornly at his lined hands. “This entire congregation will squirm beneath their legal bootheels.”

  “And something’s going to break, I can feel it,” Lomax said sourly. “This is too big a deal. The company is pushing—”

  “The company!” George erupted. “That’s what I want to know. You should have told me that your own business, Vitality, is now part of Immortality Incorporated!”

  With alarm Lomax glanced at the Reverend. “Look, I can—”

  “I saw that logo at work—VI2, Vitality–Immortality Incorporated. How could you—”

  “I had to.” Lomax was on his feet, face congested. “With all the publicity, that ‘cryonics versus crime’ stuff, I2 took off. They got research and development money from all directions. They were leaving Vitality in the dust. I had no choice but to go along with a de facto merger. My own board demanded it. We had some patents they could use, which got us in the door. It was the best strategy in the long run—kept our hands in.”

  “But to help them, to—”

  “There was no choice,” Lomax said coldly.

  “The valley of bones—that is the proper place for the righteous.”

  Lomax frowned. “What?”

  George saw it suddenly, the broad and sunny land between majestic peaks. The great mountains soared to snow-crowned glory, with the same sweeping grace as the Marble Cathedral. Between two proud peaks lay the expanse of aromatic earth, and from that holy soil came a humming, a throaty chorus. The earth split open ripely—here, there, then throughout the great sprawling valley. The bones that Ezekiel foretold, very dry and white, crisp beneath the new sun, were ripping free of the rich loam. When I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up— And so they would come, bones leaping into the air with mad abandon, liberated by the golden glow that beat down upon the holy valley. The bones would hover in air, click and snap and lock into place. Whole skeletons would collect to make full cages of ribs, long femurs and clavicles finding their places, too. Then they would dance, the bodies now passed through the astringent cleansing that was necessary and right. They would frolic beneath the beaming radiance from above, clacking bones now shaped back into people, truly and forever resurrected.

  He opened his mouth to say all this and saw that it was too much for these men, too precious. They were looking at him, worry deepening the lines in their faces. George explained, “Don’t you see? Dr. Lomax, you are a man of science, but you opposed the chillers then, didn’t you? They are still bent upon this path. I don’t know what their science has discovered in all this time, but it cannot change a moral truth.”

  The Reverend said softly, “Quite right, George, quite right.”

  “You’ve got to realize, a lot has happened,” Lomax said warily, holding his hands up in a placating gesture, as though he had seen something in George’s face. “A different world.”

  “How is it possible that people have come to this, that so many permit, so many seem happy to let the dead rise?”

  “It is an age of spiritual malaise,” the Reverend said gravely, the spotlights from above lighting the broad planes of his still rugged face. “An age beset by fleshy rewards.”

  Lomax eyed George and said, “I’m afraid we’ve learned technology without learning wisdom. Even the Reverend is having a hard time.”

  “I hope it is not so hard,” George said, remembering the threadworn carpets, the tarnished brass.

  The Reverend smiled with an echo of the old confidence. “Now, don’t go giving George the idea that we’re so bad off. The cathedral is about to launch a big new TV campaign, get back on the airwaves in a big way.”

  The Reverend’s confidence had a hint of hollow bravado to it now, but George said respectfully, “Wondrous news.”

  “That’s what you busted in on, the meeting out there in the cathedral. We’re going to come back bigger than ever, you bet.”

  It had seemed like a small crowd to George, puny and threadbare, but he smiled to reassure the Reverend, beamed with a confidence he did not feel. Inside himself the image of the golden valley of the joyous resurrected yielded to darker currents, a swampy sensation of being dragged under. Abruptly a clattering sounded through the high recesses of the study, and the three men turned as one. The tall panels of stained glass worked with refracted images as rivulets of rain ran down them. Hailstones struck the glass, clicking and rattling, and a distant light seemed to shimmer and contort as the wind whipped branches around, throwing stretched shadows across the running colors of the glass.

  Hail. Cold and wet, and abruptly George saw a plane of soft black, cold and infinite, stretching away to the horizon. Something dropped into it, and he saw the spreading ripples—the lake—and felt cold dread seep up into him. So cold. Then rising up toward bleached hard light, the waxy faces over him, a face he almost knew even though it was twisted. The terror of reawakening in mortal flesh, not immortal bones that the Lord would make whole on the day of the Rapture. The blaring, coarse light spiked through him, and he saw a face coming—

  “Are you all right?” The Reverend was beside him, hands holding him up.

  George guessed that somehow he had slipped or something, lost his balance, and to cover his embarrassment he gave a little laugh. It came out wrong, hollow and forced, almost like a cough.

  “Look—he’s been hurt,” the Reverend said.

  Lomax inspected the cut Cowell had inflicted. It was unimportant, George knew that, and he did not resist the shot the doctor gave him. It took effect immediately, and he felt himself giving way. They made him lie down, and he dozed off for a while. The years were adding up. As he came to on the Reverend’s sofa, he heard Lomax saying, “We’ve got more to block now. It’s coming closer to the surface. Even with the new neurotransmitter inhibitors we can’t always—”

  “Quiet, damn it.” The Reverend’s face loomed close to George’s, sincerity and concern in every line. George wondered what they had been talking about and then relaxed, feeling again the enduring comfort of this place, warm and close, a secure bastion against so much, a sturdy frame he had needed so deeply ever since he was a boy. He had that here, and he would do anything to keep it from harm.

  He would be resolute, swift. Soldier of the Lord. He gathered his energies and sat up. A little setback, that was all this amounted to. He had faltered before both Hagerty and Cowell, sure, but that had been surprise, nothing more. He was over that now. “I got to get to them. All of them.”

  “True enough,” Lomax said, all business. “I don’t believe you understand quite how difficult it is to kill someone and have them stay truly dead these days.”

  George grinned without humor. Lomax was smart, but he was older, weaker. He could be used, and George saw that in the worn, veiled face. Lomax held secrets, probably dirty little matters of money, but they were unimportant to George’s task. His entire life was defined by this mission, like bookends at the beginning and end of his days. Now came the completion he had sought. “You find a way. I’ll make it happen.”

  Lomax said, “I’ve already got you a postdated labor history at VI2, says you’ve worked there for months.”

  “I’ll need a job that lets me move around.”

  “Look, what I’ve done took a lot of slick work, believe me—getting into coded data files, tricks I’d nearly forgotten. But yes, it can work. Everybody will think you’re a transfer from another subsidiary of the firm—it’s a big, growing enterprise now. In a few days I can get you into a new job.”

  “Do it.” George thought a moment. “I don’t
suppose I can carry a weapon in with me?”

  “No chance.”

  George said, “Then you’ll have to rustle up something in the lab, some way to keep them dead.”

  Lomax grinned suddenly, eyebrows arching in thin lines that matched the moustache. “I like technical problems. They’re so much cleaner than human ones.”

  George nodded, and Lomax went on, talking details. He was calm again, filing away the information that Lomax laid out. Disconnected, analytical. Inside him, great sullen masses moved. He felt them as deep, coiling presences, slumbering beneath a surface that had been calmed in Santa Isabella. But the smooth plane was deceptive. Cold and waiting, flat, the moist chill of it hung in his storming mind even when he closed his eyes. He did not tell them of it, could not describe the unforgiving air of silent menace. He caught glimpses of something moving like an immense beast beneath the apparent calm, something that dwelled in shadowy depths and robbed all color from the dim, filtered blades of wan sunlight. The cool, seeping grays and somber blacks of the scene would not leave him.

  But the other side of himself listened carefully to Lomax with a strange, impatient relish.

  14

  KATHRYN

  She insisted on going outside. The walls of her spacious room gave wonderful, utterly convincing scenery—but you still knew it was only a crafty illusion, and that drained the comfort of it from her, somehow.

  She asked Alex to push her wheelchair. He had told her gruffly that it was foolish to do any more than she had to, that she should follow the doctors’ advice, that the sanitized comforts of her room were far better for her—and finally she had given in. She knew very well he would deny her nothing, but it gave her a mischievous thrill to see him hold out for a while, frown and bluster and paw the ground a little. The same old Alex, she thought, and somehow that recognition brought slow, seeping tears.