Buying Time

by Joe Haldeman

Barr:

  Knew you were gonna say that.

  Box:

  Indeed.

  Barr:

  Yeah. [Close on Barr.] You can say that if a thing is alive, then in the process of existing, it moves constantly to states with a higher degree of order. That, of course, is against the law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You’re gonna say that since you go on processing information indefinitely, and since my brain isn’t going to last forever, you are more alive than I am. Quod erat in your demonstratum.

  Box:

  You have a hidden dimension, Mr. Barr. Well hidden.

  Barr:

  Yeah. I’m fifty years older than you are, chum. I’ll always be fifty years older than you.

  Box:

  Until the day you die …

  Dallas

  The cabby apologized to us for the noise. Before the rotor got up to speed, it made a deafening clatter. Once we were over the water it wasn’t too bad.

  He read back the address that he’d punched into the dash. “On the water, eh, mates?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve never been there.” I’d picked up my night shift bodyguard, Merle Browning, an hour early, rather than have him find his own way to the party.

  “Yeah,” Merle said. “Gotta be on the water.” He was an American but knew Sydney like a native. “She’s got some money, livin’ there.”

  “She a Stileman?”

  “Don’t know,” I said quickly. Merle shot me a sleepy look.

  “You guys?” asked the cabby.

  “Sure,” Merle said. “Couldn’t find the keys to the Mercedes.”

  “Right,” he said broadly, and shifted into overdrive. We tilted forward slightly and lifted another half meter off the water, slowly weaving around sailboats. The Opera House and skyline receded.

  It was going to be interesting, though probably not as life-and-death as Lamont Randolph had made it sound initially. When I pressed him for details about the brain death emergency, he had to admit that he didn’t have any; it was essentially a rumor he thought he could use to “get me interested.” Not necessary, really. I would go anywhere in the world, three worlds and fifty rocks, to see Maria again.

  “I got naught against ’em,” the driver said. “I mean, you or me’d do the same, we had the money. No?”

  “Can’t take it with you,” I said.

  “Pre-zackly.” He frowned, tapped the dash compass, steered a little to the right. “I wouldn’t be so bloody stuck up about it, though. You know, most of ’em? God’s gift.”

  “You got that right,” Merle said, with a little too much sincerity.

  The cabby tapped the compass again. “Goddamn computer.” He reached under the dash and flicked a switch. “This is fixed fare anyhow. Swing by the free beach?”

  “Anytime,” Merle said. That was the nude beach on the southwest side of the Harbour. Somewhat out of the way. But of course I didn’t know that.

  I watched the water while the driver and Merle exchanged obvious comments. Immortality did complicate your sex life. Merle could joke about “losing track.” After a hundred or so years, though, it was no joke. You meet a woman socially and, more often than not, the first moment is a mutual hear-the-wheels-turning, did-we-or-didn’t-we exercise in sorting memories. Then perhaps a conspiratorial wink or squeeze—“Majorca, back in ’23, wasn’t it?”—or a carefully neutral friendliness while the wheels keep turning.

  I was mentally reviewing the list of women I’d be likely to meet at Claudia’s party—I do try to keep the past fifteen or twenty years’ worth straight, anyhow—when I realized Merle had said something. “Sorry?”

  “Ever come down to the beach here?”

  “No … always mean to. Happy hunting ground.”

  Cabby shook his head. “Ah. All look an’ no touch. Every slit brings ’er own cob, she does.”

  “Cob” was an oddly direct word in that context, but I knew what he meant. We were getting close enough to see a few pink dots on the rocks. Sunbathing in shadow, this late in the afternoon. The cabby said the female population, though he didn’t use that term exactly, doubled when the beach was in shade. Made sense to me.

  “You Yanks don’t have anything like this, eh?”

  “Not so public,” I said, “except in California.” He angled into the southernmost part of the beach, and dropped speed to where we were just barely off the water; then cruised slowly up. He and Merle waved and the shade-bathers waved back. The polite gentlemen waved their hands.

  Claudia’s place was about two kilometers north of the beach. It was conspicuous even from that distance. Cantilevered out over the water with no supports below, an extravagant display of space stuff. No earthly material could take the strain; it must have been those carbon filaments or something. I don’t keep up on it.

  A bright red warning strobed on the windshield: APPROACH LANDSIDE. With a noisy surge the cabby banked to the left and climbed, missing the roofs of cliffside dwellings by a few meters. People who had moved out here for peace and quiet.

  Another red strobe: HOVER UNTIL GREEN. “God damn,” he said. “Wonder what they’d do if I tried to come in?”

  Merle was fascinated. “Wanna try?”

  “Let’s not,” I said.

  The cabby laughed. The vehicle bobbed in a good imitation of a small boat in a heavy sea, the rotor building up to a banshee scream. An impressive entry. APPROACH NOW, the green strobe said.

  He set it down pretty smoothly on the redwood deck; blessed silence when the rotor disengaged. The tab was fifty dollars; I punched sixty, and the driver nodded vacantly, staring at our welcoming party. There was an exceedingly pretty woman, wearing about five square centimeters’ more clothing than the shade-bathers, and a nice smile—and two frowning gorillas cradling H & R assault lasers. It wasn’t legal for private citizens to own them in Australia.

  “Mr. Barr,” the young lady said, “come with me. Everyone is having drinks by the pool.” She looked at Merle. “Mr.…?”

  “Browning. I’m Mr. Barr’s bodyguard.” The cabby raised a couple of eyebrows at this, and noisily engaged the rotor.

  “Go with these gentlemen, please.”

  “Uh, I don’t think—”

  “It’s okay, Browning,” one of the gorillas said. “Bodyguards got their own party.” I nodded, and Merle went off, looking doubtful.

  The pretty one introduced herself as Cynthia—“Call me Sin,” all right—Claudia Fine’s mate. Unless my instinct was off, she wasn’t immortal, not yet. All original equipment. Low mileage, one owner. Oiled regularly.

  The pool was spectacular, a crystal bowl a couple of meters deep by twenty in diameter, floating suspended at eye level in an elaborate sprawling rock garden. Pretty things of both genders swam naked in the clear water; whenever someone dived from the edge, the pool bobbed slightly. So it was held in place by a tractor/pressor field. Expensive.

  “Dallas. It’s been forever!” Claudia was dressed in her usual restrained style, or undressed: nothing from the breasts up, and only a silver sheen of body metal from the bottom of her breasts down. Head shaved up to a medusa ruff crown (some electrostatic thing kept it writhing slowly).

  Her kiss was strawberry. She turned around and stood gracefully on one toe, displaying. “How do you like it?”

  “The face? It’s … different.” The back of her head was shaved as well, and decorated with a holo tattoo, gargoyle face with pearl teeth and shining ruby eyes. “That’s the style now?”

  “Not yet, dove.”

  Exactly one buttock was bare, healthy pink over hard muscle, but with dozens of puncture marks on the side. “What’re you poking?”

  “Mostly grief; a little cream tonight. Want some?”

  “You know I’m not …” I shrugged.

  “People change.” She took my arm and steered me toward the bar. A nipple brushed my bare bicep and immediately sprang up hard. She giggled. “That’s the cream. You should try a little. What it does to men …”

>   “I’ve seen what it does. No thanks.”

  “Regular men. Not the bangoff creeps.” Terminal cream addiction leads to pretty bizarre behavior. “Now you’re gonna tell me not to poke.”

  “Your business. I never did understand poking, though, not when you can afford to pop or punch.”

  “Yeah, well. You don’t understand pain.”

  “Tell me about it.” We came up to the bar and I pointed at a small box of Foster’s. “Spent nine months last year in a body cast, broken back and neck, crushed rib cage. Liver, spleen, and heart transplants. I do know pain, Claudia.”

  “Not the same. Not like wanting it.”

  “Guess not.” The lager was so cold it hurt my teeth. “How much grief?”

  “Forty if I cocktail it. Fifty straight.”

  “Good God, Claudia.” Fifty-grief would be lethal to a nonaddict.

  She laughed. “You’re such a plank, Dal.” She stirred through a silver bowl of poppers, stamps, and needles and pulled out a ten-cream. “Cream’s hard to find once the party gets going. Be a gent here.” She unripped my breast pocket and slipped an ampule in. “I’ll come get it later.” She gave my crotch a friendly squeeze and glided off. The bartender took a sudden interest in rearranging his bottles.

  She stopped abruptly and walked back, standing at an awkward distance. “Uh, you just got out?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Need some?”

  “Don’t think so. Thanks for asking.” Delicate business. I was almost broke, but you had to be careful about the markers you put out. Claudia wouldn’t have let herself get addicted unless she was going in pretty soon. So if I took her money now, I’d be giving it back in a few months, technically in defiance of the Stileman contract. That would unnecessarily complicate things, so early in my own tenth career.

  Claudia and I had lived together in New Orleans about forty years ago. She used to share my caution toward drugs. They didn’t have cream back then, though, and grief was a sure killer.

  Nowadays, a lot of people let themselves become addicts before they check in for rejuvenation. The Stileman Process does cure you of physical addiction, but if it’s a manifestation of some deep psychological problem, you’ll of course still have the problem when you get out.

  There can’t be many immortals who are “natural” drug addicts, their chromosomes lined up so as to make them need it no matter what. People with that affliction don’t put together their first million. People like Claudia just get physically bored, I guess. Grief turns you inside out, but nobody was ever bored by it. Cream just makes you into a sex machine, as far as I can tell: very intense orgasms refreshed at will. After a few years you’re impotent without it, though; not a great selling point.

  I would have thought Claudia would go for dizney, if any drug. She always liked exotic places. With dizney you can visit a dozen solar systems without leaving your chair, always different ones. Some people never quite get back, of course.

  Dizney and grief are more potent to immortals than ’phems, they say; a lot of drugs affect us differently. And it varies from individual to individual; aspirin deadens my sense of smell, but I’ve never heard of that happening to anybody else. Eric Lundley, an Australian immortal who once was my business partner, got auditory hallucinations from antihistamines.

  I wondered how many of the forty or so people here were immortals. A few I recognized; a few more were obvious from physical modifications, hardheads and strongarms. My own skull was a Kevlar replacement, but with bone and skin culture grafted over it. Real hair. If I wanted to look like someone other than Dallas Barr, it was relatively easy. Wouldn’t be if the top third of my head was a shiny silver dome.

  I realized that the man I was staring at, a hardhead, had detached himself from a conversation and was walking toward me. Just in time, I recognized him, and bowed ten and a half degrees.

  “Sun of friendship breaking through mist,” I said in pretty bad Japanese.

  He answered my bow and greeting and we shook hands. Atsuji Kamachi, the first person I’d called after I got out of the clinic.

  “Hardly recognized you with the silver skullcap.”

  “Platinum. You should have one.”

  “Maybe someday.” I kept the Kevlar secret. “Feel different?”

  “It is colder to the touch, of course, and a bit heavier. When I hit my head on something, the sound is like a temple gong.” He tapped his head twice but it just sounded like knuckles. “Inside, of course.”

  He looked around and lowered his voice. “I did complete the transaction that you requested.” Inscrutable half-smile.

  “A hundred thousand pounds?”

  He shook his head. “More than ninety, less than ninety-five. As I told you, steel is soft this quarter, not only in the East.”

  “Which made people eager to do business, eh? Some people?”

  “Some.” He stroked a wisp of white beard. American and Australian immortals tended to look like tennis players and models; Oriental ones, like sages and empresses. “This Frenchman I dealt with, M. Neuville. He does not really exist, true?”

  “Well …”

  “I know the law firm is real.” He spoke in an amused, conspiratorial whisper. “But that supposed fortune is so much gossamer. More margin than substance.”

  “Kamachi,” I said with real pain in my voice.

  “Ah.” He held up one finger. “I ask you no questions, you tell me no lies. Is that how the saying goes?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Know this, then.” He looked to the left and right, elaborately. “A lot of steel will be sold for gossamer this week, perhaps next week. Singapore.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I am not being totally unselfish. If it were necessary for your M. Neuville to appear—in the flesh—in Singapore or Hong Kong this week, would that be possible?”

  I thought fast. “What would he have to know?”

  “Something about the marketing of steel—”

  “Military?”

  “No. General construction … plus the details of your late transaction.”

  “This Paris-Bonn-Tokyo-Singapore one?” He nodded. “By when?”

  He pushed a button on his watch. “The twenty-fourth, Greenwich date. Evening in Singapore.”

  That was more than two days. “No problem. I may have to go to Paris tomorrow. You’re still with Demarche there?”

  “Immortals stay together.”

  “Yeah, sometimes. She can be trusted?”

  “With everything, yes.”

  I wasn’t so sure, but then I didn’t have to tell her everything. “One detail. I can’t fly for free—”

  “Verify,” he said, making a tent with his fingers, or a cage. “The transaction should have been completed by now.”

  I thumbed my credit card, and it flashed almost a quarter-million Australian dollars. “Okay. I’ll get right on it.”

  Kamachi bowed and left. There was a phone by the pool, but that might be too distracting. I asked the bartender, and he directed me to a private phone in a small grotto uphill.

  It was a voice-only, sitting on a concrete mushroom, too cute. I decided that in terms of security it was about as private as shouting from the rooftops, but I could make my secure call later. All I did was punch the bank and have it transfer most of the money to Switzerland, and then call a travel agent to unravel a visa for me by tomorrow. France was difficult. I had him book both the 1:00 and 6:00 P.M. suborbitals from Woomera.

  When I set the receiver down, I noticed a slight tremor in the left hand. My heart was beating fast. A little adrenaline song. It felt good to be back in the saddle. Wheeling, dealing. Have to call Gabrielle LeCompe and see about hiring an actor. It wasn’t quite 9:00 A.M. in France. I could call after the meeting. An actor who could learn fast and forget faster.

  The beer was still cold. Almost a tenth of my fortune nailed down, and the beer was still cold. Start money rolling, and it picks up money. I probably owed Kamachi
about a third of it—he wouldn’t be so crude as to mention that now—but he might forgive it if this “Neuville” ruse made him enough. A good man to work with. His only principle was honor among thieves.

  I sat in the grotto, finishing the beer, figuring out various angles … How could I use the Singapore information without jeopardizing Kamachi’s margin juggling? Of course if I were a crook, and stupid, I could undercut Kamachi. Make my million, possibly, and go hide. And be found.

  I had no ambition to be sushi.

  The party had about doubled in size while I was gone. A little annoying; this semisecret meeting wouldn’t happen until all the ’phems got liquored up and left.

  Maybe not. Claudia was not known for her subtlety. Maybe at eight o’clock she’d ring a bell and chase out everyone less than a hundred years old.

  I picked my way down the hill toward Lamont Randolph, the American who’d invited me here. In the bar, wearing a business suit, that artificial paunch had given him a sort of gravity. Here, wearing fluorescent shorts and huge Hawaiian shirt, he just looked outrageous. And harmless, which he’d claimed was the point.

  He was talking to a beautiful woman, a head taller than he, who looked amused. I had to cough to get his attention.

  “Ah, Dallas—Dallas Barr, this is Alenka Zor. She’s Yugoslavian.”

  She touched my hand. “Slovenian, actually. We’re a separate country now.”

  “Or again,” I said. She smiled; two points.

  “I’ve heard of you,” she said. “You do all that mountain climbing and so forth.”

  “That’s right.” She was wearing an odd scent, like cumin.

  “I’ve never understood that. An ephemeral, yes, I could see him doing that, because he’s not risking so much; decades.” She took a sip of fruit juice, staring at me over the glass. “You risk centuries. A millennium. Why?”

  “If I could answer that, maybe I could stop doing it.” Too glib.

  “I’m sorry. An obvious question deserves an obvious answer.”

  “Maybe it’s because you’re a Texan,” Randolph said.

  “But I’m not. I was born in New Jersey. My mother never would tell me why she named me Dallas.”