Great glass panels, tinted blue against the sun’s ultraviolet, slid aside for them. Alex said something about this being a precaution against the ozone layer depletion, which was still pretty bad, but she ignored him. Her first indrawn breath of fresh air carried a crisp, sweet scent of the far mountains—chaparral, manzanita, eucalyptus, sage. The San Bernadino peaks towered in far, white-crowned majesty, just as they had so long ago. Every jut, valley, and seam was the same as before. A human lifespan, she realized, was just a single snapshot in the slow sway of geology.
It was May. The tangy newborn season caressed her cheeks, kissed her hair. She let her head loll back in the wheelchair as Alex pushed her to the edge of the broad-beamed Douglas fir decking. Sunlight and scents seemed to seep into her, calling forth slumbering pleasures, searching out with their warmth the last recesses of deep cold that lingered in her mind.
This was life. Not the mere sighing of lungs, the thump of heartbeats, electrical skitters in the brain. She had endured enough this last two weeks of medical lingo, of solicitous technicians, of injections and tests, of canned air and phony landscapes. Life was the rub of the real, and every fiber in her yearned for it.
“Lord, you look wonderful.” Alex’s head loomed overhead, a beloved moon against a creamy blue sky.
She started to smile and abruptly jerked her hand up, holding it over her face. For a moment she had forgotten.
“Come on, I don’t mind,” Alex whispered in her ear.
“I know… I know…” But I don’t believe you, she truly thought, though she said, “I don’t like to show it out here.”
He gently tugged her hand away. She cringed from his gaze. An artfully sculpted, skin-tinted pseudonose blended into her forehead. More of the same fleshlike stuff spread around her neck and disappeared down her blue hospital blouse. This high-tech mask concealed the ugly damage beneath—sore, purple tissues engorged with blood vessels, bruised planes, twisted brown scabs, and warped, tough cartilage. Fernandez allowed her this mask for a few hours every day. The rest of the time she had to expose her ruined self to a series of salves and radiations, plus the healing air.
Alex had seen it all, when the doctors insisted that she let it heal in the air. Only Kathryn’s sensitivity had convinced them to allow her this cover. There was no concealment for the rents and grooves carved in the rest of her body below, savage ruin left by the sudden freezing of her murder.
“You’re looking great,” he said, and kissed her soulfully on the lips.
Hesitantly she returned his pressure, creating an acceptable, C-plus-grade kiss. He gave her a quizzical smile and returned to pushing the wheelchair. She rebuked herself. She knew she should cast aside her shyness, her mortal embarrassment, but something in her could not. She felt wounded in her most vital center.
“I love this sun.” She tilted her head back, feeling the welcome sting. She had emerged chalk-white and hairless from suspension, like an albino alien. Her wig helped her forget that further discomforting fact. The blinding radiance beckoned like an immense, elliptical promise. She would have to be careful not to burn.
“You sure know how to lean on Fernandez,” Alex said, plunking himself down in a deck chair next to her. “Talking him into letting you out so fast. I couldn’t get out here until two days ago, and I’m weeks ahead of you in recovery.”
“Must be my winning smile.”
“Seems weird, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“We come through a miracle, something that blows us away—and soon enough, we’re caught up in life’s little details, wangling—literally—for a place in the sun.”
She folded her hands over her blue hospital pajamas. Not a great color for her, but who said the future would be perfect? Then she chuckled at herself, allowing a smile to flicker across her lips. They were still a tad swollen but were beginning to feel like hers again, unlike the nose and even larger chunks of her below.
What he was trying to say was spot-on true. She and Alex now talked about the little things, precisely because you could not speak much of the big things—huge, immutable truths that were easy to state but carried enormous wallop when you truly felt them. Such as, It’s good to be alive.
So you approached subjects obliquely, easing into them. She didn’t feel like a heavy-browed session right now, though. “Ummm. Too philosophical for me. I think I’ll just wallow.”
“I’m glad to see your talent for self-indulgence was not lost to the liquid nitrogen.”
“You should complain? If I remember right, in bed at least, my indulgence was your indulgence.”
“Now who’s too philosophical? But that does introduce a good subject.”
“Bed?”
“Right. Nothing like the awareness of death to bring out—”
“I think I know how this argument goes. You sound like a bumper sticker.”
He grinned. “Which one?”
“CRYONICISTS STAY STIFF LONGER. Remember?”
“Oh yes, I saw some at the I2 party. How can I remember that? It was nearly four decades ago.”
“Time is relative, somebody said. I wonder if people use bumper stickers anymore.”
“They must,” Alex said wryly. “There’s still plenty to gripe about. The economy’s down, a war somewhere in Asia—”
“Ummm,” she mused, “this is where I came in.”
“Yeah—but look at that air, sharp as a knife. They’ve solved the smog problem. Maybe there aren’t cars anymore. Or bumper stickers.”
“No, I saw some cars in the news. Little boxy things. Maybe they don’t burn gas, though.”
Alex looked skeptical. “Come on, it’s only been thirty-eight years. What could replace oil?”
“Hey, you’re telling me things don’t change so fast? A few months ago we were both solid ice.”
He leaned forward, settling his chin into his hands. His hair was growing back in quickly, and he looked like a marine from the El Toro base. Or did they have marines anymore? Some things were eternal; it would take more than a mere revolution in technology to make them unnecessary. “I wonder if we owe a lot of this to the Crunch,” Alex said.
“What’s that?”
“Oh yeah, you haven’t had time to go through all the orientation stuff. Talk about homework! Near as I can tell, the Crunch was a big crisis in just about everything, stretching from around 2011 to 2018. Then things got better.”
“What solved the problems?”
“I dunno. The terms they use now—what’s a ‘sociologus’?—just don’t translate.”
She gazed out over the broad green lawn. Orchards dominated the nearby hillsides, leafy bowers that shimmered in the refracting heat. “I did see somewhere that the greenhouse effect is easing off.”
“Yeah, in the newspaper—though it isn’t paper anymore. I dug into that, found out they stopped it with a big tree-planting program, plus some neat trick to start patching up the ozone layer.”
“Is that why I see so many orange trees?” Kathryn inhaled the perfumed air. It felt sweet and weighty in her chest.
“Could be. Me, I’m going easy on the homework. Let’s just enjoy all this first.”
The grounds of Vitality–Immortality Incorporated were vast, with graceful gravel walks curving across the breast of the rolling hillside. A gardener squatted nearby, ceaselessly rooting out weeds. A bee buzzed by. Gossamer willows brooded over a wide pond downhill from them, and oaks fringed the distance. The grass here was some new type just laid down, darker green. A few patients strolled along the walks, with friends sometimes helping them. Revival was expensive, Dr. Fernandez had told her—and a lot of people were pretty burned about that. Probably a generation would pass before the procedures became common and people could be routinely saved this way. But it was coming. There was a quiet momentum in this place, a feeling of working toward a future only barely perceptible over the far horizon.
“I thought I’d find you here,” a familiar voice came out of the sky
.
Kathryn blinked, realizing she had nearly slipped into delicious, cozy sleep. Susan grinned down at her, wearing a sensible sun bonnet. “I heard you threw a temper tantrum to get out here.”
“Let’s say I learned a little method acting in my youth.” Kathryn held up a hand covered with purple-brown scabs, wreckage from liquid nitrogen burns. Susan gripped it. All three of them kept their conversation light, matching the sunny day, but with glances and silences they conveyed things that could not be spoken. They were voyagers on a strange sea, and they kept their spirits up in part by not treating everything as if it carried enormous weight. As Dr. Blyer had pointed out, laughter releases some emotions better than crying. Kathryn used a liberal dosage of both; it felt right.
“I thought you might like a friend,” Susan said, placing a big Persian cat in Kathryn’s lap. Kathryn gasped with delight. Alex smiled—part of the conspiracy, she saw, to surprise her.
“It’s wonderful!”
“He—not it—is an entertainment consultant, under contract with the therapy center. He will allow moderate petting and will deign to eat certain specific foods if properly served.”
“My, what a pretty thing.” Kathryn stroked the silky, aloof creature with agreeable results for all concerned.
“He likes being taken on drives, too,” Susan said. “Let’s go.”
“Already?” Kathryn blinked lazily. She really would rather lie in the sun, but the sweet currents wafting up the opulent hillside tempted her. She reminded herself that she had spent decades inside a steel cylinder. Time to get out a bit, yes.
Alex bundled her up, treating her like a fragile flower—which pleased her more than she would ever admit. He pushed her wheelchair down the ramp and onto a smooth path. Susan chattered on about how surprisingly rapid Kathryn’s recovery had been, throwing in medical detail that Alex lapped up but that all seemed beside the point to Kathryn, who inhaled the honeyed air like a blissfully drowsy child. She felt their conversation more than heard it, and it was like a mellow background of reassurance.
This was a strange world, awesome in its almost casual capabilities, but she had friends here. She was not alone, the way she had been when Alex had died. That life without him, only a few days of it, had been more terrible than anything she had ever experienced. It had taken everything to hold herself together, to get him safely suspended, to convince the others of what they must do.
She honestly wondered how she would have weathered the years that came after that—years without Alex. He had come into her life, caught her up, and then spun away from her just as she had finally opened, given herself the way she had imagined it could be, a blossom bursting its husk. Perhaps her shadowy murderer had done her a weird, inadvertant favor, sliding her across the decades of loss and longing, to arrive here.
She shook herself. That was all gone now, swept away by what was to her a mere flicker, a passing moment that had been thirty-eight years wide.
She took her gaze from the distant horizon and admired the flowers. Alex was pushing her down a smooth path and then onto the odd new emerald grass. The pond further downhill played host to a few fat ducks, quacking over some dispute. Two men were studying the ducks intently. Alex took her past a long fringe of impossibly bright poppies, a riot of yellow and orange peppered by the vibrant blues of rosemary. A gardener looked up sweating from his weeding—
—and her heart lurched.
Weathered, deeply tanned, with a crinkling around the hooded eyes, deep webs of concern at the mouth, hair thinning—but yes, yes, the face leaped out at her.
“Ah! Ah!” she managed to get out, shaking.
“What?” Alex asked, bending forward, concerned.
The gardener’s eyes widened. “Lord Jesus, no!” he wheezed, a rasping whisper.
The voice. It was the same voice.
Thirty-eight years evaporated in a jolting instant.
His face swelled to fill her entire vision. And then the man moved, quick and sure, getting to his feet and reaching for something at his equipment belt, and the air became clotted and close as a sudden frosty hand squeezed her chest, dragging her brutally into the past.
15
SUSAN
The storm of two days ago had cleansed the land. Susan drew in the honeyed air and chattered at Kathryn and Alex. Probably they wanted to be alone, but this ripe morning was too freighted with quiet joy to hold Susan back. These were, after all, the only close friends she had in the world.
They ambled down a pathway, heading down the gently sloping hillside toward a wide stand of eucalyptus trees. Far away she saw guards at the VI2 buildings, and others at the gates. There was a big demonstration outside, shouting, chanting over a bullhorn. Homo sap was a cantankerous species, she mused, and no technomiracles would change that.
She was telling them about the oddments of the media she had come across, the telltale signs of glacial shifts in the ways people thought. Political talk no longer used the traditional division between left and right, she had found. There seemed to be a two-dimensional picture that everyone used matter-of-factly, arraying liberals and libertarians in entirely opposite patches of a grid. She could not understand what the two axes meant, but the appeal of it was obvious—left versus right was an entirely too simple, one-dimensional way to view a complex world. She could tell from their expressions that Kathryn and Alex found this matter less than thrilling, but Susan could barely restrain herself. The day was warm and full, and she felt expansive. She shifted to music, and was telling them about mistaking the latest pop songs for static on her audio player, when Kathryn suddenly cried, “Ah! Ah!”
Startled, the Persian cat leaped from the wheelchair. Susan started after him and saw a gardener pulling what looked like a large spray can from his belt. The man wore tan work slacks, a blue shirt, and a Dodgers cap. He leaped from the flower bed onto the grass and the cat darted between his legs.
Susan gasped. The man was older but robust, tanned. The contours of his face brought memory rocketing into her mind, from a time when she had seen those fevered eyes peering at her.
Fixed, fanatical. Among the shadows behind the Immortality Incorporated building.
Time had blurred his body, softened the slabs of muscle, but the intent gaze and the fixed thin line of the mouth were the same.
Recognition came instantly, and a jolt of emotion struck her like a fist. Fingers of fear spiked through her, but even stronger was a profound, buzzing anger at the insult of it—how could he be here? A ghost of the dark, lost past, now running lightly along this strange, slick grass in bright sunlight—as clashing as a tarantula served up on bone-white china.
“You! You’re—him!” Susan shouted uselessly, rage tightening her throat.
His large head swiveled. The eyes were still strangely calm, his face lined by strain. He brought the spray can up and thumbed it. Susan turned in confusion and saw Alex bending over Kathryn, concern knitting his brow. He had not noticed the man at all.
Outrage boiled over within her. She understood none of this, but by God this bastard wasn’t going to get away.
She threw herself at him. The spray can spun away as she slammed into his chest. Her fists thumped him. He grunted in surprise, chopped at her, slipped free. His baseball cap tumbled away as his head veered back and forth—jerky, reptilian.
He’s not trying to get away at all, she realized. Confusion danced in his eyes. He crouched to retrieve the spray can.
“Hey! You!” Alex’s alarmed shout came behind her.
The cat. It hissed and spat, its back arched.
The man seemed transfixed by the cat. His hair fretted in the slight breeze, tufts like exclamation points above eyes now wild.
Alex shouted, “Who the hell—?” and then she heard his strangled surprise. She knew what it meant.
So this man had killed Alex, too. A twisted logic was playing out.
But there was no time to think. The man stood up, lips whispering in what seemed to be a pr
ayer. He trembled, eyes darting from them to the cat. Across his face played a struggle she could only guess at, as the man’s lips contorted, his caterpillar eyebrows clenched.
She took two steps toward him and the cat jumped away, howling. The man brought the spray can around. With a small pop a slug of yellow spat out. It smacked into the cat’s head.
16
GEORGE
He stood dazed and irresolute on the hillside, ignoring the stench and biting fumes rising from the cat.
A strange fog frayed the sun’s blaze and sheared the air, condensing with the suddenness of a new idea. Images sprayed like shrapnel before him, mingling with the mustard vapor smell. Everyone moved as though underwater, torpid, and he knew he had plenty of time to catch them. Shoot them with the compound that would erase them forever.
But he had to fight away the memories beating like moths at him, past days fluttering their wings madly in his face.
The Sheffield woman had shouted, her eyes holding a bleached white terror. Then the doctor, Hagerty.
Screams of rage. Pain. Retribution. Now Cowell, silent anger twisting his face.
All looking young, powerful, as they had then.
While time’s slow work had stolen clarity from him, had left wrinkles and twinges.
Somehow George could not look directly at them. He had faced each long ago, carried out the solemn tasks a soldier of the Lord must do, and so he should be able to do it again. But whirling insect confusions made him blink, shudder, and force down the bedlam within him.
He really should keep on. That was what a soldier did. Plan, prepare. Then go forward, no matter what.
CHILLER Page 58