“How many more times do you think you can bring me back?"
She looked at me quite oddly, quite fixedly. “I really don't know."
“But you'll keep on till I fail, too."
Her jaw set itself into a strong line. “We'll keep on until we can understand what is happening in your body that isn't happening with the others. We'll keep on until we succeed."
I must have looked skeptical, for she continued. “We're close, and we know it. The discoveries we've already made are remarkable, really. Tricks even the Egyptians never learned about the preservation of tissue, even its healing after death, as in the case of your brain injury."
“The first time I died, you mean."
“Yes.” She waited for a while, then asked, “You don't have anything to say?"
“A question, perhaps."
She leaned forward, as if this were some turning point in our relations. “Go ahead."
“How long was I dead? The first time, I mean. Before your treatment to preserve me."
“We had to give you the first infusion of hyperox before you were taken off life support."
“Before."
“Yes."
I smiled. “You must have a very efficient system for collecting subjects. To find the right kind of dead people, so quickly."
“We had a number of hospitals helping us with the initial part of the study, the part that related to the preservation of organs for re-use. The other portion of our research is confidential. For obvious reasons."
“So when I fell and hit my head, someone called your people as soon as I died. Or just before I died."
“Something like that.” She seemed perplexed, then irritated. “Are you implying some sort of impropriety? We aren't killing anyone. We didn't steal your body out of a morgue. Your own next of kin gave us permission to use you in the research. I can show you all the paperwork if you like."
“That won't be necessary,” I said. “How many more of me do you have? In the refrigerator, I mean. How long can you go on?"
She set her mouth in a line. “What we're doing here could be of benefit to billions of people."
“Of course it could.” I sighed. “That's all. I only had those questions."
She thought about that for a moment. Relaxed, when my tone changed. “I suppose I had expected you to ask about your freedom."
I laughed, and turned away from her, and laughed again.
She gave me the most chilling look, and I wondered if they had already administered the killing specific, if she had brought me to the office to watch me die this time, to witness the exact moment of my passing.
“When I'm dead,” I told her, “before you bring me out of it. There's someone watching me."
She moved her head just slightly. I believe she considered that I might have become unstable in some way, and so I stood and waited in the doorway for a moment.
“Who do you think it is?” she asked.
“I don't know. But it strikes me that maybe someone is there, sending me back to you, over and over again. Keeping me there for a while and then sending me back. Only me."
“Why?"
I shrugged.
But she had heard what I said, and judging by her expression, a vision of the place I was describing arose in her head at that moment, a place in which she was lying suspended in darkness from all sides, darkness and cool air, and above a light, a piercing eye gazing into the center of her. I believe she saw this as I had, hanging in that endless expanse, the feeling of a presence, the unbelievably fierce awareness. She had a look of awe, a whiteness to the eyes, a face of glass, and I said good night to her and she whispered goodnight to me as Taquanda took me back to my room.
One more time they killed me and I woke under the eye, with the wind of that place scouring through me and the searching of that eye above me, never blinking or moving. A voice in my head, not words, only the voice, notes like music, and then my body closed around me like wet clay and I was lying in the room, alone this time, no other corpses to keep me company. Though perhaps somewhere else, in some other room, two rows of beds, faces under white sheets, a sweet smell in the air. Perhaps the doctors had decided to spare me their failures, at least.
The routine had become settled by now, and that first night when I was alive again, or what they called alive, I was allowed to be on my own while the doctors assessed whatever data they had collected during the resurrection. Since I had always been docile, even inert, the security people had become a bit lax, and the security person with me that night was one of those who had fallen under the influence of Farley the cook, who thought me some sort of monster. She hung back from me when I went for a walk and that provided the avenue of escape I needed. By then I knew the layout of the installation fully, and so I lured her into a part of the building that was sparsely inhabited and I strangled her there.
Curious, that I killed her. I had no plan to do anything of the kind, I meant only to immobilize her in some way, maybe knock her out, but instead I put my bare hands around her neck and squeezed with such force that she was quickly gone, despite some struggles to free herself. I let her drop to the floor and turned away. Let them revive her, I thought.
I escaped the place through the kitchen, where Farley was puttering, whistling something rather tuneless, “Waltzing Matilda,” I think; and for a moment I wanted to kill him, too, but I decided it was better to let him go on humming, so that when the doctors learned of my escape he could swear that he had been in the kitchen the whole time, getting their dinner ready, and he hadn't seen me. I slid through the pantry, out the delivery door, and headed into the woods at the edge of the parking lot.
The rest is tedious. I stole a car, I stole some money. I crossed the border into the United States on foot and stole another car and more money. I avoided any more killing though the thought often occurred to me on my journey. I have driven the long way here. Though I am certain there are people trying to find me, people who already know where I've come. So I need to get on a ship going south, to where the sun beats down more strongly from the center of the sky.
* * * *
When his story began I found it fantastic, but troublesome, and as he continued with it, I myself became quite uncomfortable in the noisy bar. So we interrupted the story to walk to my apartment in the Pontalba Building, and he finished the telling of it in my parlor, with the casement windows open and the breezes stirring from the front gallery. He sat there with his white hands in his lap. I knew he expected some response, but I had nothing to offer, the story itself was so astounding.
“You can't really believe me, of course,” he said, after a moment, “but that doesn't matter, as long as you help me."
“Of course I'll help you,” I said, “first thing in the morning. We have a ship leaving for Caracas, and I'll get you on that."
He seemed very moved by this, settled back into his comfortable chair. I thought he might fall asleep but remembered his story and watched, and he never more than blinked his eyes.
I led him back to my room, helped him to undress, lay him on the bed, undressed myself and laid down beside him. I watched him all night, his good body, his firm jaw, his face that I had remembered from so long ago. We simply lay there, side by side, and I knew I would remember that night, maybe wish we had made love to one another, wish I had tested whether there was any warmth in him at all. To be able to say later that I had made love to a dead man, or a ghost. He never closed his eyes that I saw, though I drifted off myself, in the wee hours. When I woke the next morning he was lying exactly in the same position, gazing upward at the ceiling, high and shadowed, a place into which only he could see.
The captain of the Sylvia Moon did not much like my insistence in the morning when I called him, but he finally saw the wisdom of acceding to my wishes when he remembered who I was, or, rather, who my family was. My friend Roger Dennis set sail immediately for the northern coast of South America.
I had no more idea then than I do now of
what to make of his story. Some people did come looking for him and landed eventually at the office of my family's shipping concern; they were persistent and remained in New Orleans for some days, but they were not able to penetrate through all the veils of the company to me, and therefore I can only speculate as to who they were. But I made certain they learned nothing of the Sylvia Moon or its passenger.
My caution was unnecessary, however. Roger Dennis never landed at any port. The ship's captain later told me, with some fear for his future, I expect, that as the ship was crossing the Caribbean, Roger leapt overboard one noon and drowned. His body was not recovered. The crew gave him a burial service at sea, my captain said, and since I alone knew who he was, could I please notify his family? I promised I would take whatever steps were necessary, and I did make a trip to Ontario, though naturally I saw nothing at all of his family. I checked the records of the hospital at which Roger told me he had died, and after various referrals was able to confirm his original death. Roger Dennis had perished of head trauma after a fall nearly five years before. As if the paper assurance were not enough, I made a trip to a cemetery near Montreal, where my uncertainty finally increased to the point that I could credit him what he had claimed. I can believe his story was true, so far as he himself knew the truth, now that I have seen his grave.
Copyright(c) 2006 Jim Grimsley
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* * *
It's Not Easy Being Dead
by Bruce Boston
After Kermit the Frog
It's not that easy being dead, having to spend each day buried underground.
When I think it could be nicer being alive
And much more interesting like that.
It's not easy being dead.
You blend in with so many inanimate things.
And people tend to pass you over ‘cause you're
Not standing up and talking back
Like others of their kind.
But dead is a natural way to be.
It's so cozy and serene.
And dead can be safe like a harbor
And forever like the sea.
When dead is all there is to be,
You could wonder way, but why wonder why?
I'm dead and it will do just fine,
Someday for you as well as me.
—Bruce Boston
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Kin
by Bruce McAllister
Bruce McAllister has recently sold stories to Glimmer Train, Aeon Speculative Fiction, and F&SF. He's working on a novel tentatively called Emilio and the Water Dragons of Como and on a screenplay version (with former student/close friend/TV and film writer Michael Ajakwe) of his classic SF book, Dream Baby. As a teenager, Bruce corresponded with legendary Analog illustrator John Schoenherr. Bruce was certain that he, too, would someday be an SF magazine illustrator, but Schoenherr told him, “You're crazy, Bruce. Illustration, but it's a very iffy life; if you can write, for God's sake write instead!” The writing life has been rewarding, but Bruce was thrilled when he learned that this month's cover would go to his compelling and evocative tale of what it truly means to be...
* * * *
The alien and the boy, who was twelve, sat in the windowless room high above the city that afternoon. The boy talked and the alien listened.
The boy was ordinary—the genes of three continents in his features, his clothes cut in the style of all boys in the vast housing project called LAX. The alien was something else, awful to behold; and though the boy knew it was rude, he did not look up as he talked.
He wanted the alien to kill a man, he said. It was that simple.
As the boy spoke, the alien sat upright and still on the one piece of furniture that could hold him. Eyes averted, the boy sat on the stool, the one by the terminal where he did his schoolwork each day. It made him uneasy that the alien was on his bed, though he understood why. It made him uneasy that the creature's strange knee was so near his in the tiny room, and he was glad when the creature, as if aware, too, shifted its leg away.
He did not have to look up to see the Antalou's features. That one glance in the doorway had been enough, and it came back to him whether he wanted it to or not. It was not that he was scared, the boy told himself. It was just the idea—that such a thing could stand in a doorway built for humans, in a human housing project where generations had been born and died, and probably would forever. It did not seem possible.
He wondered how it seemed to the Antalou.
Closing his eyes, the boy could see the black synthetic skin the alien wore as protection against alien atmospheres. Under that suit, ropes of muscles and tendons coiled and uncoiled, rippling even when the alien was still. In the doorway the long neck had not been extended, but he knew what it could do. When it telescoped forward—as it could instantly—the head tipped up in reflex and the jaws opened.
Nor had the long talons—which the boy knew sat in the claws and even along the elbows and toes—been unsheathed. But he imagined them sheathing and unsheathing as he explained what he wanted, his eyes on the floor.
When the alien finally spoke, the voice was inhuman—filtered through the translating mesh that covered half its face. The face came back: The tremendous skull, the immense eyes that could see so many kinds of light and make their way in nearly every kind of darkness. The heavy welts—the auxiliary gills—inside the breathing globe. The dripping ducts below them, ready to release their jets of acid.
“Who is it ... that you wish to have killed?” the voice asked, and the boy almost looked up. It was only a voice—mechanical, snake-like, halting—he reminded himself. By itself it could not kill him.
“A man named James Ortega-Mambay,” the boy answered.
“Why?” The word hissed in the stale apartment air.
“He is going to kill my sister."
“You know this ... how?"
“I just do."
The alien said nothing, and the boy heard the long, whispering pull of its lungs.
“Why,” it said at last, “did you think ... I would agree to it?"
The boy was slow to answer.
“Because you're a killer."
The alien was again silent.
“So all Antalou,” the voice grated, “are professional killers?"
“Oh, no,” the boy said, looking up and trying not to look away. “I mean...."
“If not ... then how ... did you choose me?"
The boy had walked up to the creature at the great fountain by the Cliffs of Monica—a landmark any visitor to Earth would take in, if only because it appeared on the sanctioned itineraries—and had handed him a written message in crude Antalouan. “I know what you are and what you do,” the message read. “I need your services. LAX cell 873-2345-2657 at 1100 tomorrow morning. I am Kim."
“Antalou are well known for their skills, sir,” the boy said respectfully. “We've read about the Noh campaign, and what happened on Hoggun II when your people were betrayed, and what one company of your mercenaries were able to do against the Gar-Betties.” The boy paused. “I had to give out ninety-eight notes, sir, before I found you. You were the only one who answered...."
The hideous head tilted while the long arms remained perfectly still, and the boy found he could not take his eyes from them.
“I see,” the alien said.
It was translator's idiom only. “Seeing” was not the same as “understanding.” The young human had done what the military and civilian intelligence services of five worlds had been unable to do—identify him as a professional—and it made the alien reflect: Why had he answered the message? Why had he taken it seriously? A human child had delivered it, after all. Was it that he had sensed no danger and simply followed professional reflex, or something else? Somehow the boy had known he would. How?
“How much...” the alien said, curious, “are you able to pay?"
“I've got two hundred dollars, sir."
“I sold things,” the boy said quickly.
The rooms here were bare. Clearly the boy had nothing to sell. He had stolen the money, the alien was sure.
“I can get more. I can—"
The alien made a sound that did not translate. The boy jumped.
The alien was thinking of the 200,000 inters for the vengeance assassination on Hoggun's third moon, the one hundred kilobucks for the renegade contract on the asteroid called Wolfe, and the mineral shares, pharmaceuticals, and spacelock craft—worth twice that—which he had in the end received for the three corporate kills on Alama Poy. What could two hundred dollars buy? Could it even buy a city rail ticket?
“That is not enough,” the alien said. “Of course,” it added, one arm twitching, then still again, “you may have thought to record ... our discussion ... and you may threaten to release the recording ... to Earth authorities ... if I do not do what you ask of me...."
The boy's pupils dilated then—like those of the human province official on Diedor, the one he had removed for the Gray Infra there.
“Oh, no—” the boy stammered. “I wouldn't do that—” The skin of his face had turned red, the alien saw. “I didn't even think of it."
“Perhaps ... you should have,” the alien said. The arm twitched again, and the boy saw that it was smaller than the others, crooked but strong.
The boy nodded. Yes, he should have thought of that. “Why...” the alien asked then, “does a man named ... James Ortega-Mambay ... wish to kill your sister?"
When the boy was finished explaining, the alien stared at him again and the boy grew uncomfortable. Then the creature rose, joints falling into place with popping and sucking sounds, legs locking to lift the heavy torso and head, the long arms snaking out as if with a life of their own.
The boy was up and stepping back.
“Two hundred ... is not enough for a kill,” the alien said, and was gone, taking the same subterranean path out of the building which the boy had worked out for him.
Asimov's SF, February 2006 Page 15