Soulminder

by Timothy Zahn

  Sommer gave the Soulminder instruments a quick scan. “It’s all set,” he told her, stomach churning. He’d fought to hold onto some semblance of professional calm through this, but now he could feel the professionalism boiling away like an ice cube on a hot burner.

  Eleven years later, he was once again watching helplessly as David died. “No,” he half whispered, half groaned.

  Once again, hope and wish proved inadequate. Two minutes later, it was all over.

  “Adrian!” Sands barked. “What the hell’s happening?”

  “He’s dead,” Sommer said mechanically, his eyes on the flat EEG trace. “It was … it all happened so quickly.”

  “Never mind that,” Sands bit out tautly. “What about the trap?”

  Sommer broke his gaze from the EEG, recognizing even as he did so that he was afraid to look at the Soulminder instruments. If it hadn’t worked …

  The trap registered active.

  He tried twice before he could get the words out. “It’s got him,” he breathed at last. “Jessica, it worked. It’s really got him.”

  Sands’s shuddering sigh whistled through the phone speaker. “Okay,” she said. “Good. Great. But we’re not out of the woods yet—we still have to get him back in his body—”

  “Hold it,” Sommer interrupted her. On the monitor Dr. Janecki had stepped up to the camera’s microphone. “Dr. Sommer?” she called. “Should we continue with the operation?”

  Bracing himself, Sommer switched on his intercom. “Yes,” he said. “The first stage seems to have worked.”

  Even on the small monitor screen, he could see relief smoothing the lines around her eyes. A cautious and almost disbelieving relief. “I understand,” she said.

  She turned away and began issuing instructions, and Sommer flipped off the intercom. “Dr. Janecki’s going to continue the operation,” he told Sands. “They’re getting the heart-lung machine set up—looks like they’ve got a hypo of neuropreservative, too.” He shivered at the thought. Neuropreservatives were still highly experimental, and what they did for dying brain and nerve cells was usually more than offset by the hallucinations and associated emotional trauma they inflicted.

  But, of course, Danny wasn’t there to feel any of that.

  “Well, she’s the doctor,” Sands grunted. “Probably knows what she’s doing. You think I should go ahead and shut down the backup trap?”

  “No, leave it running,” Sommer said. “There’s no guarantee this one will keep going long enough, and if we really have Danny’s soul here I don’t want to lose it now.”

  “Good point,” she agreed. “Keep an eye on the readouts, and if anything changes let me know right away.”

  “You’ll be the first,” Sommer assured her, a trace of humor seeping through his fading tension. Leaning back in his chair, he took a deep breath, his eyes drifting to rest on the trap. A big, ugly conglomeration of hardware, sophisticated electronics, and software.

  And now the temporary resting place for the soul of a five-year-old boy.

  Or at least, he hoped that was what was there. It could, he reminded himself soberly, just as easily be nothing more than an echo of Danny’s Mullner trace, or a secondary trace made of Danny’s now-gone soul, or something else entirely.

  Only time would tell. Time, and a successful attempt to return the soul to Danny’s body. Only then would they really know.

  For now, all he could do was wait. And hope that Sands’s off-handed comment about pulling someone else back from heaven had been only a joke.

  The operation was a success, with as much of the boy’s tumor removed as the doctors could manage.

  The surgery was followed by two days of recovery. Not nearly enough, in Sommer’s opinion, given the complexity of the surgery. But it was as much as anyone was willing to allow.

  And it was time.

  “Well,” Janecki said heavily, “I guess this is what they call the moment of truth.”

  Sommer grimaced, blinking uselessly against the grit that seemed to have become a permanent feature of his eyes during the past two days. “I hate that phrase,” he growled. “Truth is an ongoing reality. It doesn’t come in moments.”

  Janecki threw him an odd look, and he shook his head. “Sorry,” he muttered, making one final adjustment to the waveguide cable arrangement connecting the Soulminder equipment to Danny’s body, motionless except for the slow rise and fall of the boy’s chest with the rhythm of the heart-lung machine. “I’m a little nervous, I guess.”

  “Probably short of sleep, too,” Sands commented, peering closely at the contact band circling Danny’s head. “I’ve never found hospital cots to be all that comfortable, myself.”

  Sommer nodded silently. In point of fact, he’d hardly had any sleep at all the past two nights, and the short naps that exhaustion had forced on him had been filled with nightmares. “What do you think, Jessica?” he asked. “We ready to give it a try?”

  She straightened, and for the first time he noticed the tension lines about her mouth. “As ready as we’re ever going to be,” she said.

  “Dr. Janecki?”

  She stepped over to the controls of the heart-lung machine. “I’m ready.”

  Sommer looked over his shoulder, to where Danny’s parents stood silently against the wall. Then, setting his teeth firmly together, he turned back and reached for the trap release. If I should die before I wake …

  He touched the switch.

  The lights indicating the soul’s presence flicked out, and for a single, terrible, split-second eternity he was sure he had failed. David; now Danny—

  And suddenly Danny’s body twitched violently. “Mommy!” he croaked. “Mommy!”

  She was there in an instant, her husband half a step behind her. “Danny!” she gasped, enfolding him in her arms.

  And even as his eyes blurred with tears, Sommer felt his knees go weak. Turning away, he groped his way to a chair and collapsed into it.

  “You okay?”

  He blinked away the tears to find Sands squatting down beside him, her face shining with disbelief-tinged triumph. “We did it, Jessica,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, taking his hand and squeezing it. “Congratulations.”

  “You too,” he breathed. It was over. After eleven years, it was finally over.

  No. It was just beginning. “We still need to check Danny over,” he told her quietly, forcing back the growing euphoria. “Make sure he’s undamaged; make sure”—it really is him—“his memory and everything else is all right,” he said instead. The thought that someone other than Danny might have somehow been drawn into the trap still gave him the shakes.

  “Dr. Janecki’ll take care of most of that,” Sands assured him. “She’s got a whole row of psychologists and brain specialists lined up ready to go to work.”

  Behind them the door opened, and a nurse looked in. “Dr. Sommer?” she said, an odd expression on her face. “There’s a group of reporters down in the lobby who want to talk to you.”

  Sommer cocked an eyebrow at Sands, got a puzzled shrug in return. “Not me,” she said. “Maybe Janecki or the parents called them.”

  “Jumped the gun a little, didn’t they?” he grunted. Still, since it had worked out all right— “I’ll be right down,” he told the nurse. She nodded and disappeared, and he got to his feet. “You want to come down and get red-eye flashed to death?” he asked Sands.

  She made a face. “I’ll pass, thanks. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather go back to the lab and start analyzing the trap readings.”

  “Yes, well, be sure and leave both traps running,” he warned, digging out his comb and wishing he’d taken the time to shower earlier. “Those neuropreservatives could still drive Danny into shock, and after all this we sure don’t want to lose him in extra innings.”

  “Right,
” Sands nodded. “I’ll just pull the packs and leave everything else intact.” Her lips twitched in a mischievous smile. “You’d better get down there and give them their lead story. And be sure to save something for your Nobel acceptance speech, okay?”

  He stuck his tongue out at her, gave her hand a final squeeze, and left the room.

  The nurse had, if anything, strayed on the conservative side: the mass of reporters resembled a mob more than they did a simple group. A dozen minicams swiveled toward him like gun barrels as he entered the lobby; twice that number of directional microphones were right behind them. Sommer stepped to more or less the focus of the semicircle, raised a hand for silence—

  “Dr. Sommer,” a voice called, “how do you respond to the allegations made this morning by Congressman Barnswell’s attorneys that you have proved the existence of the human soul and of distinct racial differences in that soul?”

  For a long moment Sommer just stood there, hand still raised, as the universe seemed to gently tilt around him. Barnswell—Sands’s secret sale of their Mullner-trace data to him—the work of the past two weeks had completely driven all of that from his mind. “Ah—yes,” he managed at last. “It was my understanding that Congressman Barnswell would discuss any implications of our work before he released it.”

  “Do you confirm his results, then?” someone else asked, clearly uninterested in anything as common and un-newsworthy as betrayed trust.

  “I confirm that our work has proved the existence of a human soul—or a lifeforce, if you prefer,” he added, remembering Sands’s own reluctance to use the more theologically loaded term. “But as to whatever these racial implications are that he thinks he’s found, I would say they are at the very least exceedingly premature, and more likely a whole-cloth fabrication of his followers’ prejudices.”

  “Are there, then, different types of souls?” someone pounced.

  Sommer gritted his teeth. “There are differences in souls, certainly,” he said. “Each one of us is a distinct individual—how on earth could our souls not be different? Again, though, there is absolutely no evidence at this point that there are any significant differences between racial, ethnic, or any other sort of group.”

  “Dr. Sommer, it sounds as if you haven’t actually seen Congressman Barnswell’s conclusions yet. Is that true?”

  “It is,” Sommer nodded.

  “May I ask, then, how you can dismiss them out of hand?”

  “Simple.” He glanced around the battery of minicams, a small fraction of his mind wondering just how Barnswell was going to take this. “As I said, Congressman Barnswell’s representatives promised not to release our data without our permission. To make sure he didn’t go back on that promise”—he took a deep breath—“I took the liberty of scrambling the personal profiles and Mullner traces of our subjects. Whatever patterns the Congressman’s people think they see, therefore, simply don’t exist.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Then, the whole mob seemed to explode at once into a blizzard of shouted questions. Once again Sommer held up his hand; eventually, the wordstorm dwindled and died. “Ladies and gentlemen, as far as I’m concerned, Congressman Barnswell and his theories are old news, and not very interesting news, at that.

  “Now, if you’re interested in a real story … ”

  It was, he thought more than once during that long day, as if he’d dropped a tactical nuke into the middle of the news industry. The shock wave of his announcement utterly shattered their neatly prepared list of events and stories to be covered, sending them scrambling for background and interviews and commentary. By early afternoon the shock wave had reached the political arena, prompting instant speeches from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and assorted foreign capitals. And as afternoon shaded into evening the wave jolted the nation’s religious leaders into statements of their own, ranging from reflexive denunciation on one extreme to cautious wait-and-see acceptance on the other.

  Most of the sound and fury Sommer got only second-hand, mainly in the form of references within the never-ending stream of questions thrown at him by successive shifts of media people. Local media interviews, long-distance phone calls from the international news services, live network interviews on the evening news, late-evening commentary programs—he was put through the entire gauntlet. Occasionally he was asked about Barnswell, but it was clear that the Congressman’s big bombshell announcement had been completely lost in the glare of the Soulminder story, and by the evening commentary shows all such questions had disappeared.

  Finally, just after midnight, it was finally over.

  “Is that it?” Sommer asked as the red light on the camera went out and the monitor showing his face went blank.

  “That’s it, Doctor,” the station manager nodded, stepping forward to help him unfasten the mike from his coat. “Nightline was the last one on your schedule.”

  “Your schedule, you mean,” Sommer reminded him wearily. “None of this was my idea, if you recall.”

  The other smiled. “You should have thought of that before you became famous,” he joked. “Anyway, the morning programs start at six—”

  “Do me a favor and tell them I died overnight, will you?” Sommer told him, digging his knuckles into his eyes. “Death by overexposure, or something.”

  The manager chuckled. “Don’t worry about it, Doctor—everyone’s got enough of you on file to cover half a dozen programs if they have to. Not to mention a hundred people standing in line to comment on your discovery. You have a car here?”

  Sommer shook his head. “I left it back at the hospital. Probably got fifteen parking tickets on it by now.”

  “No problem.” The other caught the eye of one of the security guards, beckoned him over. “Blake, Dr. Sommer needs a ride home. Make sure he gets there all right, and fend off any late-night vultures and paparazzi, okay?”

  “Sure, Mr. Hardin,” the guard said genially. “My car’s out front, Dr. Sommer.”

  Sommer swallowed as the other led the way through the maze of cameras and cables and lights. The thought that reporters and commando photographers might be lurking in wait for him at all hours was one that hadn’t occurred to him before, and it sent an unpleasant chill down his back. To lose all chance of a private life in a single day—

  No, he told himself firmly. It’s just a temporary notoriety. That’s all. Nothing that’ll last past the end of the month.

  Still, he felt his stomach tensing as he and Blake headed across the lobby toward the big glass doors. No one was visible, but there were lots of places out of view where the paparazzi could be hiding. They stepped out into the cool night air …

  No flashes went off. No one jumped from behind the low shrubs shouting questions.

  “This way, Dr. Sommer,” Blake said, leading the way across the circle drive toward the front parking lot.

  Sommer followed, feeling relief and, paradoxically, a faint stirring of disappointment. He scowled at the latter; he was not—was not—going to be one of those who became addicted to fame—

  He’d reached the middle of the circle drive when, fifty feet away, a pickup truck suddenly lunged away from the curb and headed toward him.

  He paused, feeling his emotions re-mix themselves. So there had been a reporter lying in wait for him …

  And with fatigue and resentment dimming his brain, it was another second before it registered that the truck wasn’t slowing down. Was, in fact, still accelerating.

  Directly toward him.

  He tried to run. But it was far too late for that. Dimly, through the sudden rush of blood in his ears, he could hear Blake’s shouts as the other sprinted back in a futile attempt to help. Could hear the screams of the driver, slurred and angry and obscene.

  Could feel the awful impact as the truck rammed into him, sending him hurling into darkness.

  He seemed to be in a long tu
nnel, a tunnel that glowed with a dim but uniform light. For a moment he wondered where he was, and then he remembered. The truck, the impact, the darkness.

  And it occurred to him that he was dead.

  Dead.

  For a moment he studied the word, and the concept behind it, waiting for the inevitable emotional reaction to hit him. To his mild surprise, there was none. Apathy, he thought at first, or perhaps a completely mind-numbing despair. But it was obvious that neither label even came close to describing how he felt. It was, he decided, more like a deep and restful peace, one that permeated his being so thoroughly that it filled every corner, leaving no visible edges by which it could be defined or even really noticed without a deliberate effort to do so.

  Ahead—a long way ahead, so it seemed, though he could sense that distance didn’t have much meaning here—he could see the end of the tunnel he was traveling through. Beyond it was a bright light; bright, yet not in any way hurtful … and it was from the Light, he suddenly understood, that the sense of peace radiated. He willed himself forward; in response, though there was no sensation of movement, the tunnel walls increased their silent speed past him.

  So gradually that he didn’t notice at first, the movement of the walls slowed. Slowed, and then stopped.

  There was no way to tell how long he waited there, hovering motionlessly in the center of the tunnel—time, like distance, seemed to have lost all of its meaning. Ahead, the Light beckoned to him; not insistently, like a siren being deprived of her victim, but like a friend, waiting with patience for him to finish the journey. Once, he tried explaining that the delay wasn’t his doing, but even as he searched for a way to make himself heard at so great a distance he could sense that the Light already understood what had happened.

  By the time the walls again began to move, Sommer understood, too … and so it was with no surprise at all that he found the walls were moving in the wrong direction. The Light faded as he moved, disappeared entirely—

  And abruptly pain flooded in on him.

  He gasped, feeling the sensation of inrushing air as something almost alien. A blinding stab of fresh pain lanced through his chest as he did so—