by Roger Elwood
The room was a mess. That bothered me because Matthew was an orderly kid and always kept everything in place. Frankly, I was getting agitated. There were long data sheets from the computer scattered all over the floor and books just piled in sloppy heaps all around. Twenty people wouldn’t use the computer that much in a year. I cleared a place on the bed and sat down.
“All right, young man, let’s stop fooling around. I want some straight answers. What the hell have you been up to?”
I wish now I could forget the whole conversation. I wish to hell somebody had blanked those computers, I mean, everybody knows it all anyway; and I wish somebody had at least kept Matthew from going near them. But nobody did. I sure didn’t. I wasn’t around enough.
Matthew sat down next to his desk. He looked tired. “All right, David. Yuri and I have been exploring the population decline.” The kid just blurted it out like that. It was obscene, pointless. My stomach turned over.
“How much history do you know?” he asked.
“Enough,” I replied.
“Then you know what the pre-Plague population was at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”
“Between five and six billion,” I said. My throat was really dry and I began to wish I had dialed myself a drink before I came upstairs. “Look, Matthew, I don’t think much about this business, and if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think it’s healthy. Now you had better come to the point, because I want to know exactly what you’ve been getting into.”
“After the first Plague,” Matthew said in a toneless voice, “it was down to five hundred million. After the survivors recovered from the devastation, it seems they began to realize that it wasn’t as bad as it might have seemed. There was a high level of technology and enough people to keep things going. The computers were handling most things anyway, and the Plague had hit hardest in underdeveloped areas. Unfortunately, the viruses were still dormant. Twenty years later, the second Plague hit and left about thirty million survivors. It was after this that a vaccine was discovered and the population immunized. Unfortunately, it was also discovered in due time that most of the population was sterile.” Matthew paused. “How many people are alive now, David? You know, don’t you?”
I was shaking. “Hell, I don’t know. A hundred thousand. A lot.”
“An overestimation,” Matthew said. “About seventy-five thousand.”
I was really getting upset. “Now, you listen to me, Matthew. You shouldn’t dwell on this bullshit. We’re doing all right. It’s not the sort of thing people think about.”
He ignored me. “Yuri got a list of Plague symptoms from his computer data center. He got curious. We started looking into it. We found out things. We think someone, or some group, synthesized the virus and deliberately released it without actually realizing how virulent it was.”
I exploded. “Matthew, that’s insane. Don’t even say it.” Matthew picked up a pile of data sheets. “Think about it, David. A world with six billion people, most of them starving. A rising birth rate. Depletion of resources. Most of the wealth centered in a few countries. What do you do? I viewed some old vidtapes. The possibility of genocide was openly discussed as a solution.”
I was shaking. I thought someone had erased those damn things before.
“The Plague broke out first in India and Africa, then South America. We think whoever might have released the virus wanted it confined to those regions. But it spread.”
“Matthew, this is all a lot of morbid ancient history, and there’s no sense going into it now. There isn’t any more Plague. We’ve got a good setup. People can do pretty much what they want.”
“Except have children,” Matthew said.
“Just what are you driving at, Matthew?” I shouted. It was no wonder Athena was upset with the kid.
He just looked at me with those dead eyes. “We’re dying out, David. I don’t know why, but we are. No one wants to think about it. Talking about it isn’t allowed. Everybody gets excited when a baby’s born, but nobody’s doing anything about the problem. Maybe we still carry residual effects from the Plague. But nobody’s doing anything because the whole topic is forbidden. If you think about it, you’re insane, or upsetting things. You’re just supposed to do what you like, dial your drinks or drugs, and enjoy yourself. And you don’t even tell the kids. You can’t even train us anymore so we could do something about it. Do you think we’re all stupid? Don’t you think we should know? You don’t even really use the computers, not really, not for anything important.” Matthew stared at his prosthetic hands. “And look at the kids you do have. Freaks. I’m one. Yuri’s another. I’ll bet we’re not the only ones.”
I was trying to control myself. “Matthew, I think I’ve heard just about enough from you. Now I want you to throw all this damn data into the dispose-all, and then I want you in bed. And I don’t want you thinking about this anymore. Do I make myself clear?”
“Sure, David.”
“All right.” I left the room and went back downstairs. Athena had turned off the TV and was reading.
“They didn’t have the baby yet,” she said, putting down the book and looking up. “Oh, my God, David, you’re upset too.”
“You bet I am.” I dialed another drink, a double. I wanted to be anesthetized. “There’s only one thing to do. I’m going to get hold of Ramon Martinez in San Diego—he knows medicine, and he does a lot of reading on nervous disorders—and then you and I are going to take Matthew out there as soon as possible. If we have to put him on special drugs, we will. And in the meantime, he is not to go near that computer or have any little chats with Yuri.”
“Oh, no, David,” she said. “It’s not that bad, it can’t be.”
“Athena, you’ve got to face facts. I had a pretty hair-raising discussion with our son, and he’s a little too young to be holding psychotic ideas that would unbalance anybody, let alone a kid.” Athena started crying and I took her by the shoulders. “Now come on, honey, you’ve got to face up to it. Nobody should let a kid think about it.”
“All right, David,” she said tonelessly.
“I’ll call Martinez tomorrow and fix it up.” I heard footsteps and turned around. It was Matthew, with about twelve tons of data sheets. He walked quietly into the kitchen and put them into the dispose-all and then came out.
“I’ll tuck you in, Matthew,” said Athena, and then she walked over and put her arm around the little fellow’s shoulders, and they walked upstairs.
And that was the last time I saw him that way, my only son, probably the only kid I’ll ever have. He must have wandered out of the house early in the morning, and when he didn’t come back, we went to look for him. We walked to an old school playground where Athena said he would go sometimes. He wasn’t there among the rusty swings and the broken see-saw; he wasn’t on the bench where Athena said he usually sat staring at the empty swings.
But he had been there earlier. Athena found his cap by the old bench. We circled back toward the coast, that rocky, savage-looking shore, and as we came to the edge of one of the high rocky cliffs, we heard what he must have heard.
Voices. High, childlike voices on the wind, laughing voices down near the shore.
Athena looked at me, startled by the sound. She began to hurry toward the edge of the cliff, but I grabbed her arm tightly. I didn’t want her near the edge.
It was only the wind, of course. I knew that as soon as the voices faded and the wind died down. We heard only the waves smashing against the rocky shore. We climbed down to the small sandy part of the beach along some rocks near the cliff.
Athena saw him first, a small broken body on the rocks under the cliff, and she began to scream and tear at her hair until I grabbed her hands, trying to restrain her. We knew, even before I went over and picked up his body, even before I carried my son back to her, that he was gone.
We buried him ourselves, near the bench in the school-yard, and then old man Contemanopoulos came to take his daughter Athena b
ack to New York, away from the old house and the rocky shore. She took none of Matthew’s things with her. She never went back, as far as I know. Neither have I.
He must have heard the voices too, that’s what I told Laura, he must have heard them and then lost his balance when he ran to see if there were children on the beach. At least, that’s what I think; maybe it’s more comforting than any alternative would be, the possibility that he might have hurtled off that cliff deliberately. Matthew was too intelligent to believe there actually were children on the beach, but what might he have felt when he heard the voices of the wind?
“He shouldn’t have found out so young,” I said to Laura when I could finally talk about it. “He would have felt differently when he was older, he could have lived with what we have, at least.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe it would have been even harder for him then.”
Hideo and Inger have been sympathetic about the whole thing, but they’re only human, and now they brag to me about their daughter Reiko Birgitta and show her off while I try to smile and hide my feelings.
We went to the beach yesterday, the five of us. Reiko’s starting to crawl now, and we watched her gurgle at the sand and shriek at the gulls. Reiko, one of the last ones, probably, even though she doesn’t know it yet and won’t find out if Hideo can help it.
There’s no point in thinking about the future now, nor the past, which compiled humanity’s dreams and goals; and so I sat and watched the glint of the sun on Inger’s light hair, Laura’s dark feet pressing into the white sand, and Hideo kneeling by Reiko as she explored the shore, little fists grasping the sand, then letting it slip through the small fingers.
THE DEFENSELESS DEAD
by
Larry Niven
The dead lay side by side beneath the glass. Long ago, in a roomier world, these older ones had been entombed each in his own double-walled casket. Now they lay shoulder to shoulder, more or less in chronological order, looking up, their features faintly distorted by thirty centimeters of liquid nitrogen sandwiched between two thick sheets of glass.
We were deep underground. I could feel it I could hear it in the endlessly whispering echoes of our footsteps.
Elsewhere in the Vault some sleepers wore clothing, formal costumery of a dozen periods. In two long tanks on another floor, the sleepers had been prettied up with low-temperature cosmetics, and sometimes with a kind of flesh-colored putty to fill and cover major wounds. A weird practice. It hadn’t lasted beyond the middle of the last century. After all, these sleepers planned to return to life someday. The damage should show at a glance.
With these, it did.
They were all from the tail end of the twentieth century. They looked like hell. Some were clearly beyond saving, accident cases whose wills had consigned them to the Freezer Banks regardless. Each sleeper was marked by a plaque describing everything that was wrong with his mind and body, in script so fine and so archaic as to be almost unreadable.
Battered or torn or wasted by disease, they all wore the same look of patient resignation. Their hair was disintegrating, very slowly. It had fallen in a thick gray crescent about each head.
“People used to call them corpsicles, frozen dead. Or Homo snapiens. You can imagine what would happen if you dropped one.”
Mr. Restarick did not smile. These people were in his charge, and he took his task seriously. His eyes seemed to look through rather than at me, and his clothes were ten to fifty years out of style. He seemed to be gradually losing himself here in the past. He said, “We’ve over six thousand of them here. Do you think we’ll ever bring them back to life?” I was an ARM; I might know.
“Do you?”
“Sometimes I wonder.” He dropped his gaze. “Not Harrison Cohn. Look at him, tom open like that. And her, with half her face shot off; she’d be a vegetable if you brought her back.” Restarick spoke in pity. He felt no horror, no disgust, no squeamish qualms. My own stomach was crawling. “The later ones don’t look this bad. Up until 1989 the doctors couldn’t freeze anyone who wasn’t clinically dead.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why not?”
“They’d have been up for murder. When what they were doing was saving lives.” He shrugged angrily. “Sometimes they’d stop a patient’s heart and then restart it, to satisfy the legalities.”
Sure, that made a lot of sense. I didn’t dare laugh out loud. I pointed. “How about him?”
He was a rangy man of about forty-five, healthy-looking, with no visible marks of death, violent or otherwise. The long lean face still wore a look of command, though the deep-set eyes were almost closed. His lips were slightly parted, showing teeth straighted by braces in the ancient fashion.
Mr. Restarick glanced at the plaque. “Leviticus Hale, 1991. Oh, yes. Hale was a paranoid. He must have been the first they ever froze for that. They guessed right, too. If we brought him back now, we could cure him.”
“If . . .”
“It’s been done.”
“Sure. One out of three ain’t bad. He’d probably take the chance himself. But then, he’s crazy.” I looked around at rows of long double-walled liquid nitrogen tanks. The place was huge and full of echoes, and this was only the top floor. The Vault of Eternity was ten stories deep in earthquake-free bedrock. “Six thousand, you said. But the Vault was built for ten thousand, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “We’re a third empty.”
“Get many customer these days?”
He laughed at me “You’re joking. Nobody gets himself frozen these days. He might wake up a piece at a time!”
“That’s what I wondered.”
“Ten years ago we were thinking of digging new vaults. All those crazy kids, perfectly healthy, getting themselves frozen so they could wake up in a brave new world. I had to watch while the ambulances came and carted them away for spare parts! We’re a good third empty now since the Freezer Law passed!”
That business with the kids had been odd, all right. A fad or a religion or a madness, except that it had gone on for much too long.
The Freezeout Kids. Most of them were textbook cases of anomie, kids in their late teens who felt trapped in an imperfect world. History taught them (those that listened) that earlier times had been much worse. Perhaps they thought that the world was moving toward perfection.
Some had gambled. Not many in any given year; but it had been going on ever since the first experimental Freezer Vault revivals, a generation before I was born. It was better than suicide. They were young, they were healthy, they stood a better chance of revival than any of the frozen, damaged dead. They were poorly adapted to their society. Why not risk it?
Two years ago they had been answered. The General Assembly and the world vote had passed the Freezer Bill into law.
There were those in frozen sleep who had not had the foresight to set up a trust fund, or who had selected the wrong trustee or invested in the wrong stocks. If medicine or a miracle had revived them now, they would have been on the dole, with no money and no trace of useful education and, in about half the cases, no evident ability to survive in any society.
Were they in frozen sleep or frozen death? In law, there had always been that point of indecision. The Freezer Law cleared it up to some extent. It declared any person in frozen sleep, who could not support himself should society choose to reawaken him, to be dead in law.
And a third of the world’s frozen dead, twelve hundred thousand of them, had gone into the organ banks.
“You were in charge then?”
The old man nodded. “I’ve been on the day shift at the Vault for almost forty years. I watched the ambulances fly away with three thousand of my people. I think of them as my people,” he said a bit defensively.
“The law can’t seem to decide if they’re alive or dead. Think of them any way you like.”
“People who trusted me. What did those Freezeout Kids do that was worth killing them for?”
I thought: they wanted to sl
eep it out while others broke their back turning the world into Paradise. But it’s no capital crime.
“They had nobody to defend them. Nobody but me.” He trailed off. After a bit, and with visible effort, he pulled himself back to the present. “Well, never mind. What can I do for the United Nations police, Mr. Hamilton?”
“Oh, I’m not here as an ARM agent. I’m just here to, to—” Hell, I didn’t know myself. It was a news broadcast that had jarred me into coming here. I said, “They’re planning to introduce another Freezer Bill.”
“What?”
“A Second Freezer Bill. Naming a different group. The communal organ banks must be empty again,” I said bitterly.
Mr. Restarick started to shake. “Oh, no. No. They can’t do that again. They, they can’t.”
I gripped his arm, to reassure him or to hold him. He looked about to faint. “Maybe they can’t. The first Freezer Law was supposed to stop organlegging, but it didn’t. Maybe the citizens will vote this one down.”
I left as soon as I could.
The Second Freezer Bill made slow, steady progress without much opposition. I caught some of it in the boob cube. A perturbingly large number of citizens were petitioning the Security Council for confiscation of what they described as “the frozen corpses of a large number of people who were insane when they died. Parts of these corpses could possibly be recovered for badly needed organ replacements. . . .”
They never mentioned that said corpses might someday be recovered whole and living. They often mentioned that said corpses could not be safely recovered now; and they could prove it with experts; and they had a thousand experts waiting their turns to testify.
They never mentioned biochemical cures for insanity. They spoke of the lack of a worldwide need for mental patients and for insanity-carrying genes.
They hammered constantly on the need for organ transplant material.
I just about gave up watching news broadcasts. I was an ARM, a member of the United Nations police force, and I wasn’t supposed to get involved in politics. It was none of my business.