Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  “Not that secure,” said Steel.

  “I really don’t think they know about that,” Archie answered, “We would have found out. There would have been documentation somewhere. We would have learned about it before we left Eden.”

  “What?” I said. “Found out about what?”

  Archie examined me for a moment, then got up, walked to the door and checked the hall to see if anybody was around. She shut the door again, came back over and sat down. When she started to speak again it was with a quieter voice:

  “You know that the two people who started this place were involved in genetics and nano-technology.”

  I thought. “Yeah, right. Edith somebody and John—”

  “James. James Wesley Burroughs and Edith Stauber. She was a geneticist, he was in nano-surgery.”

  “They helped develop the bio-chip.”

  “And had serious second thoughts about it.”

  “Right.”

  Archie glanced at Steel, at Alice, and then back to me. “We’re pretty sure they worked out a kind of insurance plan to deal with backsliders.”

  “Backsliders?”

  She thought for a minute. “You probably remember what it was like when not everyone could afford to re-boot. You were there, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Yeah, I was there.”

  “I think the two of them knew, instinctively, that the only way a sub-culture like this could hold together was if there was no going back.”

  “How so?”

  Arch glanced at Steel again. Steel put her hand on Alice’s knee and took over: “We know the original pilgrims— the first ones to colonize Eden—were required to undergo a medical procedure. At the time it was thought to be nothing more than a standard, broad-range immunization treatment, just in case there were any indigenous microbes here that might present a problem.”

  “Yes?”

  “We think they did something else. Something more invasive.”

  “What?”

  Steel patted Alice’s knee again. Alice looked like she wished people would stop paying her so much attention. Steel said, “You know Alice had a brother.”

  “Jacob.”

  “Yes, Jacob.” She paused. “After we brought Alice and Jacob back to Earth, he ... was involved in an accident.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was—It was so—”

  Archie stepped in, “He was skiing in Gstaad. In Switzerland. On Earth. He evidently wandered off the main slope and into some trees. There was some trauma to the cranium and brain. Nothing that re-booting couldn’t take care of, just normal trauma. But when we tried to re-boot him, tiny cancers started in every single cell we touched. In a matter of hours, he was gone.”

  “Did you try uploading him?”

  Archie thought hard thoughts about a hard past. “It was a difficult decision. There wasn’t enough capacity on Steel’s system to upload. We had to go online. Nobody knew about either of them. Jacob or Alice. Nobody knew we’d been to Eden. It meant breaking security and opening up everything to Traffic Control.”

  “But we did it,” Steel interrupted, “We decided to do it. We did everything we could—”

  “So—but, wait –,” I was confused, “So people know about Alice now? I hadn’t heard—”

  “No. No one knows,” Arch answered. “Jacob never made it onto the net. When we started the upload his memory structure just fell apart. He was with us one second and the next second he wasn’t anywhere. He was just gone. We shut down as quickly as we could, but it was too late. We couldn’t find him again. That’s what convinced us it was a manufactured condition, not just some random genetic mutation.”

  “So it was—”

  “We think,” Archie said, “we think the original pilgrims knew what was being done to them, that they were being implanted with a chromosomal trigger that would make it impossible for them to re-boot. But the knowledge seems to have faded into myth over the generations. We’ve never been able to find any reference to it anywhere.”

  I made a connection. “But the symptoms resemble Brainard’s plague—the cellular destruction, the widespread—”

  “It bears a superficial resemblance, yes.”

  “Is that what made you think—”

  “It’s what made us hope,” Steel interjected. “We hope to find an answer on Brainard’s Planet. Something we can use.”

  Archie said, “After we lost Jacob we ran some tests on Alice. We basically did a biopsy. We took a little tissue and tried to re-boot it.”

  “And that’s when you knew ...”

  Alice said, “Could we stop talking about this? Please? Please? I mean, I know everybody’s trying to help me—”

  “I’m sorry, Alice,” Steel said.

  Alice got up from the bed where she’d been sitting. “I just don’t see why it has to be such a big PROBLEM! I just want to find my—I want to see my—” She glared at Steel and then kind of deflated. She looked at something, something hopeless and distant and unattainable. “I’m going to bed. I—” She stopped at the door and looked at Steel again, but whatever it was she wanted to say, she must have decided against it. “I’m going to bed.”

  “I’m sure we’ll make progress tomorrow,” Steel entreated, “We’ll find them.”

  Alice glared at her again. “Yeah, sure,” she said, and walked out the door.

  Archie stared after her. “I guess I’ll get to bed, too.” She started to walk out. When she got to the closed door she stopped. She didn’t look back at us; she just spoke to the door. “This research keeps getting more and more expensive,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” Steel answered. “I’ve got plenty of credit. We’ll keep going till we find an answer.”

  Arch put her hands behind her neck and looked at the ceiling. She sighed. “You can be really obtuse, sometimes; you know that?” Steel didn’t answer and Archie didn’t wait for her to. She just said, “Good night,” and walked out the door.

  After a while Steel said, “You make things really difficult.”

  That hit me out of the blue. “Me? What did I do?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing, nothing. I just—I just wish we hadn’t lost Drake. Things would have been so much simpler.” The stress was really getting to her. I started rubbing her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry if I ask too many questions.” She leaned her head back as I dug into her traps. “I just feel like I’m being asked to do this with one foot in a bucket and a bag over my head. Wouldn’t it be simpler if you just told me the whole story?”

  She let her head fall forward again. “You know the whole story. Alice is dying. We have to save her. I have to save her.”

  I thought and I thought. Theories were racing around my head in a surreal steeplechase. Steel finally sighed and said, “What do you want to know?”

  If you ever want to keep a person in total ignorance, ask them what they want to know. Where to start? What question to ask? “I don’t know,” I said, defeated. “Whatever you want to tell me.”

  Steel breathed for a while. I’d stopped rubbing her shoulders and was just holding her. She leaned back against me and snuggled her forehead into the cavity above my collarbone. She breathed some more. Then she said, “I’m too tired. I’m just really, really tired. Can we just go to bed?”

  So we did. That was something else that was getting to me: sharing a bed with one of the most beautiful women I’d ever known, one who’d practically seduced me into joining this crazy voyage, and just sleeping in it. It was a small thing, but it was starting to build up. I didn’t understand it. Steel was tense and under pressure. We all were. The easiest, most natural way in the world to deal with it was to have sex. It was practically assumed nowadays—if someone seemed troubled or uptight, you had sex with them, or at least offered. That is, a woman would offer. Men didn’t initiate sexual intimacy anymore, except with each other. I forget why. It was just the way it had worked for a long time. Except here on Eden. I didn’t sup
pose it mattered, as long as somebody initiated it, but I certainly wasn’t going to initiate it with Steel.

  I wondered if Archie and Alice were having sex next door. No reason not to. Alice was upset and Archie was tense. It was the perfect way to reassure each other they were still on the same side, still supporting each other, still with each other. But maybe they weren’t. We were on Eden; there were taboos. Maybe that was why Steel—but we were supposed to be man and wife. We were in our own room, with the door closed. I couldn’t see any taboo we would be breaking.

  Mr. and Mrs. Morgan were probably having sex.

  Why was I thinking about sex? At a time like this? With all that was going on? I glanced over at Steel. Her eyes were closed, her breathing regular, her soft breasts rising and falling under the thin, cotton sheet. I rolled over and tried to go to sleep.

  I had another nightmare that night.

  Chapter 25

  Things kept getting stranger. It was like the Cheatham family had never existed. We went down to the City Hall and found nothing. There were lots of records about lots of people: marriage licenses, birth certificates, death certificates, criminal records. All sorts of things, all on little, yellowed, brittle pieces of paper that were stored in dusty cabinets in an ill-lit basement. But nothing about the Cheathams. Our Cheathams, anyway.

  People were always helpful. All the civil servants were men and they seemed to fall all over themselves trying to help us. This was for a very old, very obvious reason. There might have been one or two women somewhere in the galaxy more beautiful than Steel, but no one on Eden even came close. Archie’s worry had been warranted: even after our trek through the desert we still stood out. We just didn’t look nearly as worn, as beaten up. Combine the lifestyle we enjoyed with who knows how many re-boots of genetic nips and tucks and ‘I’ve always thought my nose was a little too long’ and ‘if only my hips were a little more this and my breasts were a little more that’ and—well, the local talent didn’t stand a chance against Steel, Alice, or even Archie with her missing arm.

  Me, too, I guess. I mean, take teeth, for example. Everyone on Eden seemed to take fairly good care of their teeth, but our teeth were perfect. Crooked teeth tend to collect food and be hard to clean. That increases bacteria in the mouth and the risk of infection, even things that can cause heart disease. Dealing with those things costs money. If you have to re-boot every fifty-five years instead of every sixty it can really impact your financial situation, so people just don’t have crooked teeth anymore.

  In hundreds of tiny ways we were just more attractive than the Edenites.

  Steel used this power judiciously, but she used it—I’m sure we got to see every file that might have pertained to our search, and quite a few that didn’t. It got annoying, and a little embarrassing sometimes, watching these innocents deal with this rare concentration of sheer physical beauty and irrepressible sexual attraction. The older men tried to maintain some dignity; the younger men had no dignity. All of them were betrayed by their eyes, their hands and feet. They stumbled, they stammered, they knocked things over. They tried not to stare, or they just gave up and stared.

  It was becoming a problem at Mrs. Fogarty’s as well. Mrs. Morgan was becoming visibly uncomfortable whenever her husband looked at Steel. The Courtney sisters seemed to consider her a threat, or at least unfair competition. It was rare that Mr. Keebler could get through a meal without spilling something on himself. It made me wonder about the nature of power. It seemed to me that, given the briefest amount of time, Steel could have become the most powerful person on this planet without voting in a single election, let alone running in one.

  But no amount of attractiveness could conjure up documents that weren’t there. No John Jacob Cheatham, no Alice Cheatham, no Jacob Cheatham. Nothing about Alice’s birth—or Jacob’s. No deeds or titles. No information, nothing. I asked Steel if we might check under the wife’s name, but she brushed me off. She was dealing with a lot of emotional stress, I could tell, and I don’t think she wanted my help.

  One clerk suggested we try at the newspaper office, so that’s where we went next. It started becoming clearer what had happened. Arch and Steel knew quite a bit about the Cheathams, so we knew what dates to check for marriage announcements, birth announcements and so forth. They had been on Eden when the Cheathams got married—I got the impression they’d actually attended the service. In any case, we could go right to the correct issue and check the community calendar for the announcement. But there was no announcement.

  In the city files there just hadn’t been any documents. In the newspapers you could see where things had been removed, cut out, leaving neat, rectangular spaces in the pages. The Cheathams had been removed from the collective consciousness of Nazareth as neatly as if the whole community had re-booted and had all memory of them erased.

  “I don’t want to see her.”

  “What other choice do we have?”

  Steel and Archie spoke quietly, intensely to each other as Alice and I sat on the bed in our room that night.

  “I don’t care,” Steel answered, “She was—I don’t want to see her.”

  “I’ll go see her,” Arch offered.

  “No.”

  “It’s been over forty years—”

  “Not for me, it hasn’t. She—she—if it hadn’t been for her, none of this—” Steel fumed, unable to finish.

  I glanced inquisitively at Alice while Archie tried a different tack. “They’ve wiped the record. It’s all gone. How else can we find them?”

  Steel looked at Alice with a desperate grief in her eyes, imploring, asking—what? Forgiveness? Grace? Reprieve, maybe. I think Alice would have given it had she known how, but she didn’t. She tried. She started to say many things, but settled on: “I want to find my—I want to see—I want to be a family again. I just want—Is that so bad? I just want to be together again. To visit. To remember ...” She faltered.

  “Of course you do, Alice,” Steel reached out to her, to touch her hair. Alice recoiled.

  “No,” she said, “don’t. I don’t want to be nice. I don’t want to just go along. I don’t want to do what you think is best. I want to see my f– my f– I WANT TO FIND MY FATHER! OKAY? I want to find my father.” She stood and crossed to the door, then turned back. “I’ll stay here by myself if I have to. You can’t make me leave again.”

  Steel looked stricken. “But—but, Alice, sweetheart, you can’t live here. You—you’ll die if you stay—”

  “I DON’T CARE. All right? I don’t care.” She looked at Steel for a moment, but there was nothing else to say. “I don’t care,” she repeated, turned, and walked out, closing the door quietly behind her.

  The next morning I stood beside Archie on the porch of the Lockridge house, hoping to find Louise Lockridge, née Cheatham, at home. Alice stood a little behind us. Steel was back at the rooming house, having refused to come.

  It had been a little while since I had knocked on the door and we were just about to give up when a ghostly figure appeared behind the lace curtains. The door creaked open and we faced a handsome, older woman, her face jowly, her once black hair mostly gray.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Archie picked up her cue pretty quickly. I think she was getting used to the change that all the Edenites had undergone while she’d been off flitting about the galaxy. She looked at the woman for just a moment and said, “Louise?”

  “Yes?” the woman answered.

  Archie waited, then she said, “Do you remember me?” She turned and brought Alice forward. “This is Alice. Alice Cheatham. Your niece.”

  Alice said, “Hi, Aunt Louise.”

  The woman put a hand to her breast, her face opened in wonder. “Alice ...”

  Alice replied, “It’s me. I’m all grown up now.”

  Aunt Louise looked for words. Her glance shifted to Archie, to me, back to Alice, searching, unable to comprehend, to accept. “Alice?”

  “It’s really me,” Alic
e replied, naked, unassuming. “Can ... Can we come in?” she asked.

  Louise’s eyes kept dancing between the three of us. She didn’t recognize me, of course, but I could tell when she recognized Archie. I’m sure Alice had changed so much that she had to simply accept that it was her and not some impostor. Finally custom overcame confusion and she said, “I’m sorry. Of course, come in, come in.” She stood aside and ushered us into her foyer. A sitting room stretched through an archway to our right, a dining room opened to our left. Wooden stairs ascended to a railed balcony on the second floor. She led us into the sitting room and then turned to face Alice once again.

  She reached out and touched Alice’s cheek. “It really is you?”

  “Yeah, it really is.” Alice gave a little laugh and shrugged.

  “But you’re—wouldn’t you be—? It was true, then.” She turned to Archie. “What you and Mr.—I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your last name.”

  “Drake,” Archie replied.

  “Yes, you and Mr. Drake. What you said. It was true.” She gazed back at Alice in open awe. “You went away, off the world.”

  “We did, Aunt Louise. I’ve been all over. You wouldn’t believe some of the things ...”

  Aunt Louise looked pale and unsteady. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I guess it’s the—I need to sit down.” I led her to an upholstered settee and helped her sit. “Won’t you all sit? Please.” Alice sat beside her. Arch and I pulled up chairs. “Just give me a moment to collect myself.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She looked at me. “Who are—I don’t remember you. Are you—?”

  “I’m just a friend of the family,” I said. “We’ve never met.”

  “Oh.” She turned back to Alice. “But, Alice, you—you’re so young.” She turned to Arch, “It really is true, what you said, that people don’t, don’t get old? Don’t age?” She turned back to Alice. She didn’t know where to turn, who to look at. “But you’ve grown up. You’re so pretty. I knew you would be.”