Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  When Harry didn’t react, Shane took it as a kind of tacit agreement and continued. “We always invite a group of unsuspecting wannabes that we can use as sexual prey.” He sighed, “Their innocence is so delicious. Those that survive the evening can even become part of the pack.

  “Sometimes, in the morning, I wake up covered in blood and bites and scratches.” He seemed to be talking to himself, his eyes turned inward on that other world. “Sometimes the blood is my own and my muscles ache, and maybe there’s a dead body or two beside me,” he gave a sigh of pure surfeit. “And I feel so wonderful, so clear, and clean, so powerful and pure.”

  He looked up at Harry and saw the horror and revulsion on his face and shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not really murder. They all just resurrect again. Don’t you see? Eternal Life and black ice, together, have given us the ultimate freedom to be the beasts we truly are.” Then he opened his arms wide, did a slow, soft shoe pirouette and roared with laughter.

  Pedestrians, who had been making a wide detour around him, glanced over nervously and then looked down and hurried away.

  Harry had just about had enough. He grabbed Shane by his jacket lapels and shook him. “What about my ex-wife? What about Susan?”

  Shane’s face took on a trapped, furtive expression that he instantly buried beneath a look of aggrieved surprise. “What about your ex-wife?” he said defiantly. “I don’t even know her! I just said that to get your attention.” He held out the spike of black ice. “You need to take this, Harry.”

  Harry looked at him through a red haze, as if all the blood vessels in his eyes had burst. “Maybe you want me to be one of your new crop of wannabes,” he said.

  Shane stepped back and put up his hands as if to pacify him. “Hell no, we’d never do that to you. You’re special. I mean, you’re Harry Neuman! Hell, we’ll even let you make the first kill. You can even pick out the wannabes you want to use beforehand.”

  Harry hit him. Shane never saw it coming and neither did Harry. Something just snapped inside him, and the next thing he knew, Shane was sprawled on the pavement with one hand over his nose and blood spurting between his fingers.

  Harry forced himself to turn and walk away. He knew that if he stayed he would keep on hitting Shane until there was nothing left but bloody pulp.

  He had not gone more than a few paces before a whip lash snapped around his neck and he was dropped into boiling oil, his skin was flayed from his body and he was rolled in salt as every nerve screamed in unbearable agony.

  Without thinking, Harry threw up a pain block and a moment later stood on the other side of an impregnable glass wall, watching a firestorm of pain rage through his nervous system.

  He staggered against the tug of the whip that was lashed around his neck. The son of a bitch hit me with that neural whip, he thought, and it’s short-circuiting all the pain receptors in my body!

  Slowly, he turned and grabbed hold of the flat, black whip cord where it wound around his throat. Then he looked at Shane.

  Shane stood with the butt of the neural whip in his hand and a look of dawning disbelieve on his blood-smeared face. Harry smiled and that smile turned Shane’s look of disbelief into instant terror. Frantically, he pressed the button on the butt of the whip as Harry slowly unwound the cord from his neck.

  Shane realized the whip was useless and panicked. He threw the butt at Harry and turned to run away. Harry caught the butt in midair, pressed the activate button, and flicked the whip. The cord snaked out and slapped around Shane’s neck. He stiffened in midstride and then began shaking uncontrollably, as if he had just stepped on a live high-tension wire.

  Harry dropped the whip with the switch still on. Then he turned and walked away as Shane toppled over backwards, his mouth open in a silent scream. His body convulsed in paroxysms of pain, his boot heels jitterbugged against the pavement and his back arched up as if it had been broken over a log. He foamed at the mouth and his bladder let go and there was no escape.

  Harry didn’t even bother to look back. Instead he called his lawyers. Let them take care of it. They were used to cleaning up his messes.

  16

  The Church of She

  Later, as he was crossing an intersection, he happened to glance up and caught sight of the great She Cathedral, devoted to the Goddess in her twin aspects of warrior-defender and compassionate mother of the world. The cathedral had been built on a high jungle ridge, right after the Caliphate War, when the towers of New Hollywood were nothing but a distant glitter on the horizon. Now, the cathedral seemed to float over the city, like some kind of ethereal snowflake with its white marble walls and high alabaster arches rising out of the steaming jungle mist. Those delicate arches supported a great golden dome that looked as weightless as sunlight. The cathedral was considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the Empire, and Harry could not help but compare it to the squat, black cube of the Wolf Temple and its sick, predatory god.

  He didn’t belong to the Church of She, but he knew the Goddess was real because he saw her every time he died, beckoning to him with love and compassion and a promise of everlasting peace. He was beginning to suspect he’d also met the sick, predatory god of the Wolf Temple, chasing him down the resurrection trail of his last rebirth.

  According to the first Book of She, the bible of the Church, the Prophet General of the Goddess led her armies against hordes of demons and fallen angels in a cosmic war that mirrored the struggles of humanity during the Crash. As he turned down a little side street that ran down to the sea, Harry wondered if maybe those hordes of demons and fallen angels were rising again, and their prophets here on earth were men like Anton Shane.

  17

  Follow the Yellow Brick Road

  The little cobblestoned side street looked like something out of mid-twentieth century Miami Beach, all chrome and glass, set in pastel blue or pink stucco with soft, curving art-deco lines. A rustling row of palms trees lined the street that ran down to a white, sandy beach. People dressed in casual beachwear strolled past elegant boutiques or sat beneath brightly colored parasols outside exclusive bistros.

  About halfway down the left side of the street the buildings gave way to a high, whitewashed, stucco wall, topped with a peaked row of red Spanish tiles. The faint blue ionization halo of a high-density, security repeller-field rippled along the top of the tiles like a gigantic, ghostly snake. Beyond the wall Harry could see the top of an old apple tree and beyond that the roof of a large, elegant, town house. All window dressing, he thought, nothing but window dressing.

  He strolled over to a little wrought iron gate set in the wall. Behind the gate was a short, enclosed passage. It led back towards the garden but then turned a sharp corner, blocking any view of it. On the outer wall beside the gate was a simple bronze plate with the word “Chueh’ discreetly engraved.

  It all looked so staid and respectable that Harry couldn’t help smiling because this was the entrance to Heaven’s Gate, the near-mythical secret garden of the most powerful Tong Godfather in New Hollywood. Entrance was by invitation only, and only those select few who met Chueh’s personal criteria got in. It was said that even the Emperor had to wait almost two years before he was finally admitted.

  Harry wasn’t sure what Chueh’s criteria were, but they must have been pretty eccentric to open the gate after only a couple of weeks to a scandal-ridden movie star has-been while the Emperor was left to cool his heels for two years. Harry was under no illusions that it had anything to do with his sparkling personality. He suspected the only reason he got in was because Jericho wanted him in, and Jericho and Chueh went back a long way.

  As he was about to lift the gate’s wrought iron latch, he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye that made him instinctively step back and look up. A man dressed in the simple hooded robe of a za-zen monk was floating serenely over the repeller-field that ran along the top of the wall. He was turned half away with the hood pulled up so that
Harry couldn’t see his face. He sat in lotus position with his back ramrod straight, radiating the absolute stillness of deep meditation. Harry was sure he hadn’t been there before.

  There was nothing unusual about the sudden appearance of a levitating monk in Chueh’s garden. Heaven’s Gate formed the perfect framework for such oddities. At any one time Chueh had dozens of such holographic follies scattered around his garden like surrealistic signposts on the road to nirvana. What was strange was finding one in public, outside of the Garden.

  Just then, the monk turned his head and threw back the hood of his robe, and Harry stumbled back in surprise. The monk’s face was covered with the star-shaped scars of a Norma-gene, and not just any Norma-gene, but the one who had taken him to Susan. The Norma-gene looked at him, raised a warning finger, and disappeared.

  One of Chueh’s holographic follies? Harry doubted it. How would Chueh know about the Norma-gene? And if in some improbable way he did, what was he up to? And if not…? Harry stared at the spot where the Norma-gene had been and wondered what the hell was going on? He finally decided the best way to find out was to ask Chueh, although the odds of getting a straight answer weren’t always that great.

  He turned back to the gate and lifted the wrought iron latch. After a momentary resistance, the gate swung open with a welcoming creak. Deceptively welcoming, he thought, because Chueh’s wasn’t for everyone, and even if you were welcome one day, you might not be welcome the next. If not, the little wrought iron gate would not budge. Harry had no idea how Chueh determined if you were welcome or not. He had been refused admittance a few times and could never figure out why.

  One thing he did learn, when he forced the gate once, was that it would eventually open, but when he walked down the passage and around the corner, he came out not in Chueh’s secret garden but in the little overgrown garden of the town house that he could see from the street. After a little while, a brawny gardener appeared and told him he was trespassing and asked him to leave. Harry didn’t try to force the gate again, even though he was refused admittance for almost two weeks afterwards. He figured it was Chueh’s garden and Chueh’s rules…whatever they were.

  The gate closed behind him with a discreet click and he followed the enclosed passage back to where it turned the corner and after five or six feet disappeared into an impenetrable wall of fog. Just before it dissolved into the fog, someone had scrawled on the inner wall, “SAY GOOD-BYE TO KANSAS, DOROTHY”.

  “You can say that again!” Harry grinned and stepped into the fog. For a moment, the mist swirled around him as cold as an arctic blast. Then, he stepped out into warm sunshine someplace between Middle Earth and the Magic Kingdom. The walls that guarded Chueh’s, the enclosed passage, even the frigid wall of fog were all gone and in their place was a vast panoramic landscape.

  No matter how many times he came here, this view never ceased to fill him with wonder. He found himself standing on the edge of a high cliff, overlooking a wide flood plain with a broad, lazy river snaking through it. In the distance, a range of hazy, humpbacked, Chinese mountains faded into a powder-blue horizon. The mountains seemed to float in midair, as their rich, green, shadowy valleys slowly filled with mist. It was like being inside one of those exquisite Chinese landscape paintings from the classical period that Chueh was so fond of.

  But no painting could be this real, Harry thought. He could feel the cool breeze blowing up from the edge of the cliff, bringing with it the heady scent of pine and cedar mixed with the tang of wet earth and blossoming wild flowers. Above him a pair of eagles rode the thermals into the blue-violet stratosphere.

  He turned slowly to the south, following the edge of the cliff with his eye. It seemed to go on for miles before meeting the sheer, granite slope of a mountain. In actual fact, it did go on for miles. Harry knew because he had walked it one day out of curiosity, but when he reached the distant slope of the mountain, he discovered he could go no further. As he started to climb it, he suddenly found himself walking back down again. He tried again and the same thing happened. Every time he reached a certain point a little way up the slope, he would suddenly be facing in the opposite direction, walking back down. It was the oddest, most impossible of sensations.

  But no more odd or impossible than all this, he thought, letting his eyes follow the slope of the mountain up and around to the west, where it met the slope of another mountain. Cradled between them was a green upland valley, with the silver thread of a stream spilling down to the cliff on which he stood. In the distance beyond the valley, framed between the two mountains, rose an enormous snowcapped peak. It towered so high that he almost had to lean back to see the top. Now, how did you fit something like that into the back garden of a New Hollywood townhouse?

  He asked Jericho about it once and the old man replied, “Have you asked Chueh?” When Harry said, “No”, Jericho nodded and said, “Don’t”, and that was that.

  Harry took a deep breath of the cool, clean mountain air and felt tension knots in his neck and shoulders loosen as muscles relaxed. The Garden always had that effect on him. No matter how bad the day had been, and today had been particularly bad, Chueh’s garden always took the edge off it. The place radiated profound peace. He could feel his whole body settling into it as his mind gradually quieted down and the events of the day slid away into silence. This was what Chueh’s garden was all about, he thought.

  Jericho told him that Chueh had hired the greatest landscape artists and feng shui masters to create just this effect. Here every hill, river, and lake was part of a perfect pattern whose sole purpose was to bathe the senses and mind in such peace, harmony, and beauty, that the busy, busy stresses and strains of daily life were washed away, leaving the mind free to settle into the quiet depths of itself, perhaps even down to where the ka waited at the door of the spirit realm, a non-space usually reserved for shamans, saints, fools and madmen. He sometimes wondered which category he fitted into. After all that had happened today, he was tempted to linger here and maybe find out, but he had to meet Jericho and was already late.

  A worn path that led from the edge of the cliff up through a small alpine meadow offered the quickest way across the garden to where he knew Doc was waiting in Chueh’s legendary Silver Slipper Saloon. There was another more direct entrance to the Silver Slipper but it was many miles away on the other side of the city (another one of Chueh’s impossibilities). By cutting across this corner of the garden, he had less than a mile.

  He strode across the meadow and dropped down into the forested valley beyond. The forest hadn’t been there the last time he had walked through here. Harry just smiled and accepted it. Chueh liked to move the furniture around every once in a while.

  The feng shui masters and landscape artists had created what Chueh considered to be a baseline on which he could build, and he was constantly remodeling after some inscrutable plan of his own, or maybe just for the hell of it. The trees, rocks, or buildings in his garden could be real or just computer controlled repeller fields, textured to feel like the real thing and then wrapped in a holographic sheath of light and color.

  Chueh was a master at the art of sculpting repeller-fields, and it was almost impossible to tell his creations from the real things. Of course, he had the backing of the most powerful nano-quantum computers in the Empire and a staff of the best and brightest programmers to carry out his ideas. Harry imagined him like the great Disney, striding through his studio filled with artists and technicians eager to turn even his wildest fantasies into reality.

  In his garden he was like a playful god, molding and remodeling, creating any environment he felt appropriate. Sometimes, Harry had a feeling that this reworking of reality was ongoing, purposeful, and aimed at specific individuals as they wandered through the garden. The sometimes absurd or shocking holographic follies that Chueh scattered across his garden were only the most obvious examples of this.

  Harry noticed that the forest trees were mostly mountain oak and cedar, moss covered
and twisted with age. Suddenly, an Alice in Wonderland, Cheshire cat materialized in front of him. For a moment, it hung by its tail from the branch of an old oak tree and then slowly disappeared into a broad, keyboard grin. It was Chueh’s signature image, the artist signing off on his work. Harry had seen it many times in scattered places across the garden and touched the brim of his baseball cap in a casual salute of recognition.

  The forest was so skillfully constructed that it looked like it went on for miles, but after a few hundred feet, the dirt path became raked gravel, and he pushed through a stand of bamboo into a classical Japanese garden that he recognized from the last time he was here.

  A small brook fed into a little, looking-glass pond filled with lily pads. A simple wooden bridge arched over the brook. The clearing was surrounded by overgrown bonsai conifers. Harry heard the faint reverberation of temple gongs and spotted the familiar pavilion of a brightly colored Shinto temple set back among the trees. The mountain rising over it was new, one of Chueh’s holographic follies, a distant view of Mount Fuji lifted straight out of a Hokusai print. It rose in silent, stately majesty out of a sea of clouds that blended seamlessly with the surrounding sky.

  Two young businessmen sat beneath an overhanging willow tree on the opposite bank of the pond. They had their trousers rolled up with their bare feet dangling in the cool water. Harry was surprised to see them. You could usually walk through Chueh’s garden and not see anyone.

  That was one of the garden’s attractions. It offered privacy and security in a mind-expanding environment. If you wished to meditate or hallucinate undisturbed, Chueh’s provided holographic privacy screens complete with repeller-fields to create a bubble of serene, private beauty. If someone happened to stray off the paths, he might wander across an open forest glade only to suddenly come up against the soft invisible wall of someone’s privacy shield. The glade would still seem to stretch away before him, but it would be impossible to go any further.