Gone for all these years.
In the hospital, long after, he had wanted to take himself away from this rotted world. But Lomax and the others knew his desires and stopped him, gave him no chance at a sharp edge or a simple length of cord. Until they had adjusted his injections properly, they said.
No chance. Just as now. His cell was narrow and bare, as clean as the bleached bones of Mommy and Daddy that would dance on that distant day.
They said they could fix him. Let me go, he had shouted at them. Let me die. But they wouldn’t.
Even the Reverend had nothing to say now. George had asked to see him. The man apologized and explained and finally begged for forgiveness. George had thought he would try to kill the Reverend in some way that the doctors could not fix, make him like Lomax so that there was not even any point in turning him into a chiller, too.
But the Reverend had seemed small, shrunken, pitiful. He had fallen to his knees and asked George to join him in prayer.
For a long time George had stared down at the ruined face full of doubt and finally turned his back on the man and walked to the far end of the interview room, thinking of the lake.
So they said now they would fix him. People had been fixing him all his life.
There was only one way to fix him through and through, and it would come to him sometime. He just had to wait. He could do what they said, ape their cues. Con them, just as he had conned people and computers alike, all his life.
They would declare him all repaired and then would let him out of this place without edges. He would pretend to be anything they wanted. It would bring that day closer.
Then he would find another dark lake, one without watchers. Then he would go to his mommy and daddy.
To dance. The bleached bones. It was simple, really.
4
SUSAN
She watched the wall as it rather pedantically explained itself. Susan had found that the brutality of days before had calmed her somehow. She was content to stay in her new room, enjoying the quiet pleasures of reading, listening, watching the walls.
At the moment the illustrated lecture she had requested showed her a glittering cityscape. It zoomed in on a slender building, gossamer sea-blue steel and glowing glass. A tapered peak caught the sunrise, refracting the radiance onto the plain of trees around it.
A green splotch had wrapped itself around one edge of the steel and glass. It was huge, the size of a football field and about the same color. This was one of the new biofilm cleaners, the wall murmured, working its way with excruciating care while it absorbed dirt and tarnish. Another technofix, shaped from the traits of grass and plant digestive systems.
Susan watched the immense brown cleaning plant crawl another few inches over the glass cliff. Safer and more thorough than putting humans up there. And the biofilm lived off the waste it ate. Tidy.
It was a small part of a vast strategy for dealing with the greenhouse crisis, she had learned. The world was warming, the poles beginning to melt. Oceans had already risen a meter, and dikes held it back, bulwarks from Orange County north to Ventura.
So all the immense miracles around her were matched by fresh problems, equally huge. Maybe it had been that way down through countless centuries. Humans were the species that went forward by putting a foot in front, losing its balance a bit, and then catching itself.
She clicked the wall into a soft sapphire sheen. Enough homework.
She was learning to not think obsessively about how close all three of them had come to a second death, out on the broad lawn. The terror of it still tightened her jaw, she noticed clinically, and increased her heart rate. No wonder, really. She still saw George’s demented face, if she closed her eyes.
It had been a near thing, a damned near thing. Only George’s deep confusions had slowed him enough for Kathryn’s disfigured face to shatter his resolve. That had tipped him into his personal abyss.
Susan shook herself to break her mood. Brrrrr! Madness drew back the curtains of civilization, revealing naked savagery.
Dr. Blyer had given her a preliminary analysis of George’s multilayered psychosis. So many assaults upon the fragile cradle of a young mind! His parents, rotting in their wrecked car. His wrenching suicide. The trauma of freezing and slow revival. Then having to relearn how to live, with a brain damaged in subtle ways. The “treatment” by Lomax, a brilliant but unprincipled man who used hit-and-miss methods.
And when they yielded a boy with muddy emotional patterns but high intelligence, Lomax had consigned him to the casual brutalities of the foster home system in Arizona. No wonder George had clung to his religion, made it the fulcrum of his warped, lonely life.
Even so, she had assumed that George would go to prison. Blyer seemed startled. “With his ingenuity throughout this entire matter? He is a valuable person of superior intelligence. If we can fix him, get to the root of his disorder, we will learn something of postcryonics mental trauma. Prison is a waste! A very twencen idea. With such intelligence and resourcefulness, his talents might be of considerable use.”
“Uh—twencen?”
“Oh, it means ‘twentieth century.’ ‘Old-fashioned.’”
They seemed assured, as though murderers could obviously be patched up into model citizens. It was just another example of how far the world had come—or thought it had.
There was still the customary craziness, of course. In scrolling through the newspaper she had come upon an advertisement for help in crucifying a man, who wanted assistants to play the Roman soldiers. “Historically accurate, real swords used.” Another article recounted a sighting of the Madonna by three housewives, and Susan had read nearly to the end before realizing that the apparition was not of the Virgin Mary, but of some rock singer of decades before, since perished. Not all craziness was curable.
And just to underline her own limitations, there was a big, 3-D advertisement for a new restaurant, based on “90s nostalgia.” The gay nineties, the 1890s? Nope—her own seemingly bland 1990s, which she had filled with work. Apparently, she had failed to live through her own times. She made a note of the restaurant’s address.
For a moment she recalled her now-distant past and the people who had not made it to this strange land. Blevin, who had apparently worked for Lomax, dead of liver cancer. Many of her colleagues at UCI General, succumbing to the usual erosions of age.
And even some cryonicists. Poor Boyd Zeeman, who gave such generous parties, drowned while swimming off Huntington Beach. No technology could protect you from the random rubs of fate.
She sighed, sat before a mirror, and tried to remember how to put on makeup. Lipstick, blush, eyeshadow. Ancient crafts.
Time to move on. There were better things to remember.
She had felt the subtle yet remorseless pressure in her, the wedges of forgetfulness like stone slabs in her mind. She had battered against their cold solidity, but nothing got through.
After the mess with George had calmed a bit, she had sat Dr. Fernandez and Dr. Blyer down and told them directly that something was wrong deep inside her. The two had glanced oddly at each other, the way they had several times before, and then decided to admit the truth.
There were memories she carried in long-term storage that they had feared would make her recovery more difficult. Stern had argued that they could easily disturb her recollection of her murder, too.
Memories deep and powerful. They knew the locations in her brain and had simply blocked them with microtechnology. She had flared into anger, shouted, thrown a cup into the wall screens. And before the coffee had run down the wall, she had been sobbing, head in her hands.
All without knowing what the memories were, or why they might be so damaging.
Susan stood at the large transparent patio door to her new room and gazed out over the long, sloping grounds. She slid the glass aside and caught the heady scent of orange blossoms from the great sweeping groves that began a short distance away. They were part of the global strategy fo
r taking carbon dioxide out of the thick air, she knew, but that was nothing compared to the luxuriant wealth they brought to the simple act of breathing.
Again, after too long, there were grand orange groves in Orange County.
An hour before, Dr. Fernandez had come with his staff. In mere minutes they had canceled the blocks. Her mind was her own again.
The richness had come flooding into her. Heart-thumping moments of passion. Quiet, dear interludes. Laughter and spitting anger and long walks on the beach.
The most amazing thing was how they had been able to do it at all. They had erased a fact at the core of her life. And somehow the many threads that dovetailed into that nexus had not led her to it, when she recalled them. It had been like a blind spot in her vision, a dead place whose very absence went unremarked. She had felt it several times—an acute, congested discomfort—but never was able to trace it down.
She saw Kathryn and Alex in the distance and waved, hoping they were heading this way. More than anything she wanted contact, the rub of ordinary life. She had been sealed within herself for a long time, she saw. It was time for the blossom to finally crack through the crusty husk that had grown around it through the years.
Not that she wouldn’t have use of some crusty nature in this strange world. She had a thing or two to say about the medical ethics of depriving patients of their memories, the very essence of themselves. Whatever the Crunch had brought, not every change was an improvement.
Already she felt an itch to get back into medical practice, to fathom the implications of all this gleaming technology. And to have a fight or two over it, she was sure.
A knock at the door.
She thumbed the release. The door slid aside. And there he was.
“Roger. You’re—”
“The same?” His smile still had the funny dip in the left corner, his eyes the crinkling laugh lines. His resonant baritone struck through her. “Nope, I’m better.”
Then they were in each other’s arms, and there was a long time when she thought of nothing at all.
It was some hours before Roger suggested they go out for a walk.
She stretched with a catlike luxury she had forgotten in her long years of loneliness. “Ummm, I’m having more fun here.”
“Part of my rehab program. Five miles a day.”
“I suppose I’ll be doing that soon. Come to think of that, how come you could be revived when the rest of us were? I mean, I used an earlier type of transglycerol for your suspension, not the one that Alex and Kathryn and I had.”
Roger shrugged. “They say it worked well, saved the structure. There’s more than one type of perfusate that’ll do the job. I was just lucky.”
“So am I.” She kissed him deeply, sliding hands over him.
“Come on, I’ve got to do my exercises—vertical ones, not horizontal.”
“Sure? What if I just…”
“I may be rebuilt and all, but I’m still just a man.”
“Can’t prove it by me,” she said. “That last bit of horizontal exercise was divine.”
He made a funny joke while they got dressed, and she had to stop herself from laughing so hard, sensing that somehow she had no right to feel this good, that this was the territory of the gods. Then she kissed him, light and airy, and slipped on her sandals.
Stern and Blyer had suppressed her constellation of memories associated with Roger, sure they were doing the right thing. Now that she felt her full memories of Roger, with all their passion-laden crispness, she knew they had been wrong. Nothing justified intrusion into her personality itself. She could see she had her work cut out for her in this brave new world.
Alex and Kathryn were on the brow of the far hill. They had been waiting the whole time, she guessed.
She waved and started toward them, keeping one arm around the man who had been her husband once and now would be again. She was different, but he was the same, and there would be problems with that, but that was what life was, simply—problems that you enjoyed.
A gangly form darted by Alex and loped across the grass. The Irish setter’s coat was glossy, and it tossed its head with a certain jubilant air. Susan felt a burst of heart-stopping surprise.
Sparkle carried a tennis ball in her mouth, bounding merrily with youthful energy, bright and sure beneath a new sun, and ready to play.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel is based on the existing cryonics movement and especially on the Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s site at 12327 Doherty Street, Riverside, CA 92503. I thank them for innumerable conversations in which I learned how cryonics works. However, my fictional Immortality Incorporated should not be taken as a depiction of Alcor or any other specific cryonics organization. All present-day cryonics technology depicted here is that used in the early 1990s.
I am grateful to Mike Darwin, Saul Kent, Mike Perry, David Pizer, Arthur McCombs, Ralph Whelan, Fred and Linda Chamberlain, the late Jerry Leaf, and Dr. Thomas Donaldson for much time spent with me. For advice on the manuscript I thank Dr. J. Jones, Dr. C. Brigham, Dr. D. Brin, Dr. M. Coleman, Charles Platt, Jennifer Hershey, Elizabeth Mitchell, Lou Aronica, and Wayne Baglin.
For advice on both technical and narrative issues, I especially thank Dr. Stephen Harris and Dr. Mark Martin. Hugh Hixon made innumerable cogent suggestions. Sheila Finch gave me the benefit of a detailed reading of the manuscript. Throughout this work I was greatly helped by my agent, Ralph Vicinanza.
None of the famous people named as having been cryonically suspended were in fact suspended, to my knowledge—though such matters are highly confidential, and all expressed interest while alive. In summer 1992 there were forty-one persons suspended by the three public cryonics organizations, and two known to be privately suspended.
The position taken on cryonics by the Society for Cryobiology, representing international medical research in this area, remains as depicted in this novel: they refuse to publish, or allow presentation at meetings, of any research relevant to the suspension of humans, but not that applied to human organs such as skin, kidneys, and the like.
Sterling Blake
September 1992
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