The Ultimate Undead

by Anne Rice

  The ship breathed. She’s our mother, Reis thought. She’s our mother; we live inside her, in her womb; and if she dies, we die. But she died, and we’re bringing her to life again.

  Someone knocked on the pod lid. Reis pushed the Retract lever and sat up.

  Paula said, “Sir, I’m sorry, but—”

  “What is it? Is Jan—”

  “She’s fine, sir. I relieved her an hour ago. It’s my watch.”

  “Oh,” Reis said. “I didn’t realize I’d been asleep.” He sounded stupid even to himself.

  “My orders were to call you, sir, if—”

  He nodded. “What’s happened?”

  “Hap’s dead.” Paula’s voice was flat, its only emotion this very lack of emotion betrayed.

  Reis looked at her eyes. There were no tears there, and he decided it was probably a bad sign. “I’m truly sorry,” he said. And then, “Perhaps Centcomp—”

  Wordlessly, Paula pointed to the screen. The glowing green letters read: “Resuscitation underway.”

  Reis went over to look at it. “How long has this been up?”

  “Five minutes, Captain. Perhaps ten. I hoped—”

  “That you wouldn’t have to wake me.”

  Paula nodded gratefully. “Yes, sir.”

  He wrote: “Resp?”

  “Respiration 0.00. Resuscitation underway.”

  The ship breathed, but Hap did not. That, of course, was why Paula had called him “Captain” a moment ago. She must have tried pulse, tried everything, before knocking on his pod. He wrote: “Cortex?”

  “Alpha 0.00 Beta 0.00 Gamma 0.00” Centcomp replied. “Resuscitation underway.”

  Reis wrote: “Discon.”

  There was a noticeable pause before the alpha, beta, and gammawave reports vanished. “Resuscitation underway” remained stubbornly on screen.

  Paul said, “Centcomp won’t give up. Centcomp has faith. Funny, isn’t it?”

  Reis shook his head. “It means we can’t rely on Centcomp the way we’ve been used to. Paula, I’m not very good at telling people how I feel. Hap was my best friend.”

  “You were his, Captain.”

  Desperately Reis continued, “Then we’re both sorry, and we both know that.”

  “Sir, may I tell you something?”

  He nodded. “Something private? Of course.”

  “We were married. You know how they still do it in some churches? We went to one. He told them we didn’t belong, but we wanted to have the ceremony and we’d pay for it. I thought sure they’d say no, but they did it, and he cried—Hap cried.”

  Reis nodded again. “You meant a lot to him.”

  “That’s all, sir. I just wanted somebody else to know. Thanks for listening.”

  Reis went to his locker and got out his suit. It shone a dull silver under the cabin lights, and he recalled a time when he had envied people who had suits like that.

  “Aren’t you going back to sleep, sir?”

  “No, I’ll be relieving you in less than an hour, so I’m going hullside to have another look around. When I come back, you can turn in.”

  Paula gnawed her lower lip. He was giving her something to think about besides Hap, Reis decided; that was all to the good. “Sir, the captain doesn’t stand watch.”

  “He does when there are only four of us, dog tired. Check me through the airlock, please, Mr. Phillips.”

  “Of course, sir.” As the inner hatch swung shut Paula said softly, “Oh, God, I’d give anything to have him back.”

  Neptune was overhead now; they were spinning, even if the spin was too slow to be visible. With only a single engine in service it was probably impossible to stop the spin, and there was no real reason to. The gravitational effect was so slight he had not noticed it.

  He found Jupiter and then the Sun, slightly less brilliant than Jupiter or Neptune but brighter than any other star. The sun! How many thousands—no, how many millions of his ancestors must have knelt and sung and sacrificed to it. It had been Ra, Apollo, Helios, Heimdall, and a hundred more, this medium-sized yellow star in a remote arm of the Galaxy, this old gas-burner, this space heater laboring to warm infinite space.

  If you’re a god, Reis thought, why aren’t you helping us?

  Quite suddenly he realized that the Sun was helping, was drawing them toward the circling inner planets as powerfully as it could. He shook his head and turned his attention back to the ship.

  A faint violet spark shone, died, and rekindled somewhere on section Six, indicating that Centcomp had at least one of its mobile units back in working order. Centcomp was self-repairing, supposedly, though Reis had never put much faith in that; human beings were supposed to be self-repairing too, but all too often were not.

  And deep space was supposed to make you feel alone, but he had never really felt that way; sometimes, when he was not quite so tired, he was more alive here, more vibrant, than he ever was in the polluted atmosphere of Earth. Now Hap was dead, and Reis knew himself to be alone utterly. As he jetted over to check on the mobile unit, he wished that he could weep for Hap as he had wept for his father, though he had known his father so much less well than Hap, known him only as a large, sweet-smelling grownup who appeared at rare intervals bringing presents.

  Or if he could not cry, that Paula could.

  The mobile unit looked like a tiny spider. It clung to the side of Section Three with six legs while two more welded up one of the smaller holes. Centcomp, obviously, had decided to close the smallest holes first, and for a moment Reis wondered whether that made sense. It did, he decided, if Centcomp was in actual fact fixing itself; there would be more units as well as more power available later. He swerved down toward the mobile unit until he could see it for what is was, a great jointed machine forty meters across. Three clicks of his teeth brought ghostly numerals—hours, minutes, and seconds—to his faceplate, which had darkened automatically against the raw ultraviolet from the mobile unit’s welding arc. Still twenty-four minutes before he had to relieve Paula.

  For a minute or two he watched the fusing of the filament patch. The patch fibers had been engineered to form a quick, strong bond; but a bit of dwell was needed just the same. The mobile unit seemed to be allowing enough, working slowly and methodically. In the hard vacuum of space there was no danger of fire, and its helium valves were on off just as they should have been.

  Reis glanced at the time again. Twenty minutes and eleven seconds, time enough yet for a quick look inside Section Three. He circled the hull and jetted through the great, gaping tear, landing easily in a familiar cabin that was now as airless as the skin of the ship. The hermetic hatch that sealed Section Two from this one was tightly dogged still. He had inspected it earlier, just after the hit, and inspected it again when he had come with Dawson, Jan, and Paula to work on the least damaged engine. He threw his weight against each of the latches once again; you could not be too careful.

  Nell Upson’s drifting corpse watched him with indifferent eyes until he pushed her away, sending her deeper into the dark recesses of Section Three to join her fellows. In time, space would dry Nell utterly, mummifying her; radiation would blacken her livid skin. None of that had yet taken place, and without air, Nell’s blood could not even coagulate—she had left a thin, crimson tail of it floating in the void behind her.

  Twelve minutes. That was still plenty of time, but it was time to go. When he left the side of Section Three, the mobile unit was at work on a second hole.

  “Resuscitation underway,” was still on the screen half an hour into Reis’s watch. He read it for the hundredth time with some irritation. Was it supposed to refer to Centcomp’s self-repair functions? Reis picked up the rat and wrote, “Who’s in resusc?”

  “Capt. Hilman W. Happle. Resuscitation underway.”

  So that was that. “Discon.”

  “Resuscitation underway.”

  “Clear screen,” Reis scribbled.

  “Resuscitation underway.”

  Re
is cursed and wrote, “What authority?”

  “Capt. Hilman W. Happle.”

  That was interesting, Reis decided—not sensible or useful, but interesting. Centcomp did not know that Hap was dead. Reis wrote, “Capt. Happle K. Lt. Wm. R. Reis commanding.”

  The screen went blank, and Reis decided to try a general instrument display. “GID”

  The three letters faded slowly, replaced by nothing.

  “Enter—GID”

  That, too, faded to an empty screen. Reis scratched his nose and looked speculatively at the transducer headband. He had ordered the others not to use it—the hard instrumentation was amply sufficient as long as nothing too delicate was being attempted; but it had been sixteen hours since the hit, and Centcomp was still limping at best.

  Multiplication became coitus, division reproduction; to add was to eat, to subtract to excrete. Glowing, Centcomp’s central processor loomed before him, a dazzling coral palace with twice ten thousand spires where subroutines worked or slept. Tiny and blue alongside it, the lone mobile unit sang a Bach fugue as it labored. Smoldering leaves perfumed the breeze, washed away by a fountain of exponential functions that appeared to Reis to be calculating natural logarithms for purposes both infinite and obscure, pungently returning with each fresh gust of algorithmic air. Interactive matrices sprouted around his feet—the lilies, buttercups, and pale or burning roses that allowed his conscious mind to move here as it did, their blossoms petaled with shining elementary rows and columns.

  Hap was sitting astride a tree that sprouted from the coral wall. The smile that divided his dark face when he saw Reis seemed automatic and distracted. Reis saluted, called, “Good evening, Skipper,” and leaped across the laughing rill that had overflowed the fountain’s rim.

  Hap touched his forehead in return. “Hi ya, Bill.”

  Reis said, “It’s damned good to see you here. We thought you were dead.”

  “Not me, Bill.” Hap stared off into the twilight. “You can’t die on duty, know that? Got to finish your tick, know what I mean, Bill boy? You want up here on the bridge?” He patted the tree trunk.

  “That’s okay—I’m fine where I am. Hap … ?”

  His eyes still upon something Reis could not see, Hap said, “Speak your piece.”

  “Hap. I checked your cortical activity. There wasn’t any. You were brain-dead.”

  “Go on.”

  “That’s why it was quite a surprise to run into you here, and I’m not sure it’s really you. Are you Hap, or are you just a kind of surrogate, Centcomp’s concept of Hap?”

  “I’m Hap. Next question?”

  “Why won’t Centcomp terminate resuscitation?”

  “Because I told it not to, as soon as we left Earth.” Hap sounded as though he were talking to himself. “Not just on me, on all of us. We’re all too necessary, all of us vital. Resusc is to continue as long as—in Centcomp’s judgment—there’s the slightest possibility of returning a crewman to his or her duty. No overrides at all, no mutinies. Know what a mutiny is, Bill? Grasp the concept?”

  Reis nodded.

  “Some snotty kid’s trying to take over my ship, Billy boy, trying to push me out through a hatch. That’s mutiny. It’s a certain Lieutenant William R. Reis. He’s not going to get away with it.”

  “Hap….”

  Hap was gone. Briefly, the tree where he had sat remained where it was, vacant; then it too vanished, wiped from working memory.

  Something was wrong; the brilliant garden seemed haunted by sinister shadows, flitting and swift; the chaotic twilight from which Reis had emerged pressed closer to the coral palace. His head ached, there was a chill in his side, and his fingers felt oddly warm. He tried to remove the headband, willing himself to use his real arms, not the proxies that here appeared to be his arms. A hurrying subroutine shouldered him out of the way; by accident he stepped into the laughing rill, which bit his foot like acid….

  A smudged white cabin wall stood in place of the wall of the coral palace. Dawson was bending over him, his face taut with concern. “Reis! What happened?”

  His mouth was full of blood; he spat it out. “I’m hurt, Sid.”

  “I know. Christ!” Dawson released him; but he did not fall, floating derelict in the cabin air. Dawson banged on Jan’s pod.

  Reis moved his right arm to look at the fingers; the warmth there was his own blood, and there was more blood hanging in the cabin, floating spheres of bright scarlet blood—arterial blood. “I’m bleeding, Sid. I think he nicked a lung. Better patch me up.”

  Twilight closed upon the cabin. Reis remembered how they had celebrated Christmas when he was three—something he had not known he knew, with colored paper and a thousand other wonderful things. Surely he was peeping through one of the plastic tubes the paper had come on; the few things he could see seemed small, toylike and very bright. Everything in all the universe was a Christmas present, a fact he had forgotten long, long ago. He wondered who had brought them all, and why.

  “You have been asleep in the medical pod. There is little cause for concern.”

  Reis searched the pod for a rat, but there was none. No backtalk to Centcomp from in here.

  “Are you anxious? fearful? Confide your fears to me. I assure you that any information that I provide concerning your condition will be both complete and correct. No matter how bad, reality is never quite so bad as our fears concerning reality.”

  Reis said, “Spare me the philosophy,” though he knew that Centcomp could not hear him.

  “And your condition is not even critical. You suffered a dangerous lesion between the fifth and sixth ribs of your right side, but you are nearly well.”

  Reis was already exploring the place with his fingers.

  “Please reply.”

  “Would if I could,” Reis muttered.

  “You will find a rapid access trace beside your right hand. Please reply.”

  “There’s no God-damned rapid access trace.”

  A latch clicked. Servos hummed. The pod in which Reis lay rolled forward with stately grandeur, and the pod opened. This time it was Jan who was looking down at him. “Reis, can you sit up?”

  “Sure.” He proved it.

  Low and quick: “I want you to get into your sleeping pod with me, please. Don’t ask questions—just do it, fast.”

  His pod was closed, but not latched from inside. He threw it open and he and Jan climbed in; she lay facing him, on her side, her back to the pod wall. He got in beside her, closed the pod, and threw the latching lever. Jan’s breasts flattened against his chest; Jan’s pelvis pressed his. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I hadn’t realized it would be this crowded.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Even if I had, I’d have had to ask you anyway. This is the only place I could think of where we could talk privately.”

  “I like it,” Reis said, “so you can forget about that part. Talk about what?”

  “Hap.”

  He nodded, though she could not have seen him in the dark. “I thought so.”

  “Hap was the one who stabbed you.”

  “Sure,” Reis said. “I know that. With the rat from the med pod.”

  “That’s right.” Jan hesitated; Reis could feel her sweet breath wash across his face. At last she said. “Perhaps you’d better tell me how you knew. It might be important.”

  “I doubt it, but there’s no reason not to. Hap thinks I’m a mutineer because I took charge when he was hurt—I was talking to him in Centcomp’s conscious space. Hap had been in the med pod, and when I woke up in there the rat that should have been there was gone. A rat’s stylus is long and sharp, and the whole rat’s made of some sort of metal—titanium, I suppose. So a rat ought to make a pretty decent weapon.”

  Hair brushed his cheek as Jan nodded. “Sid found you. He woke up and realized he should have been on watch.”

  “Sure.”

  “He yelled for me, and we put you in the med pod when we saw that it wa
s empty. There’s another pod in Section Three, remember?”

  “Of course,” Reis said.

  He waited for her to pursue that line of thought, but she seemed to veer off from it instead. “Hap’s resumed command.” She swallowed. “It was all right at first—he’s the captain, after all. None of us even thought about resisting him, then.”

  Reis said slowly, “I wouldn’t have resisted him either; I would have obeyed his orders, if I’d known he was alive to give them.”

  Jan said, “He’s very suspicious now.” There was a queer flatness in her voice.

  “I see.”

  “And Reis, he’s going to continue the mission.”

  For a moment he could not speak. He shook his head.

  “It’s crazy, isn’t it? With the ship ripped up like it was.”

  “Not crazy,” he told her. “Impossible.”

  Jan took a deep breath—he could feel and hear it, her long gasp in the dark. “And Reis, Hap’s dead.”

  Reluctantly Reis said, “If he really wanted to proceed with the mission, maybe it’s for the best. You didn’t kill him, did you? You and Sid?”

  “No. You don’t understand. I didn’t mean … Oh, it’s so hard to say what I do mean.”

  Reis told her, “I think you’d better try.” His right hand had been creeping, almost absently, toward her left breast. He forced it to stop where it was.

  “Hap’s still running the ship. He tells us what to do, and we do it because we know we’d better. But our real captain, our friend, is dead. Try to understand. The real Hap died in the med pod, and Centcomp’s substituted something else—something of its own—for his soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it. When you’ve seen him, after you’ve been around him for a while, you’ll understand.”

  “Then I ought to be outside, where I can see him,” Reis said practically, “not in here. But first—”

  Jan screamed, a high-pitched wail of sheer terror that was deafening in the enclosed space of the sleep pod. Reis clapped his hand over her mouth and said, “Jesus! All right, if you don’t want to, we won’t. Promise you won’t do that again if I let you talk?”