by Joe Haldeman
Baird’s caller beeped. He twisted his ring. “Ulric.”
“Code two in the OR,” a squeaky voice said. “Your patient Vaughn.”
“Who’s on it?”
“Dr. Franklin’s team.”
“If there’s any problem, patch him through. Otherwise I won’t bother him.”
“Very well, Doctor.” It beeped off. He looked up at me, brow furrowed. “That’s remarkable timing.”
Then I recalled that Maria was there as Selena Vaughn. “It’s serious?”
“Yes and no. It’s sort of expected, and it’s happened to her once before. Heart stopped. Good thing the zipper’s still—”
“Heart stopped? She died?”
“No, not at all. Well, only technically. She didn’t feel anything, under anesthetic for the ears. They just pull down the zipper and stimulate the heart into beating again.”
“It’s not a big deal, then?”
“Well … best if it doesn’t happen again.”
Maria
I’d read that some people who died on the operating table and were brought back claimed to have had out-of-body experiences while they were dead. I wouldn’t have minded that. My body would have been a good place to be out of, then.
I died four times. It was not a big deal clinically, Dr. Ulric said. I suppose it’s philosophically trivial, too, since they just start you up again. Not like being thrown into a hole in the ground to rot. And not like resurrection.
But it had religious meaning to me, finally; a negative kind of religious meaning. I can’t believe anymore. I can’t believe in God. Something broke in me; something became clear.
It was the last time I died, and the only time it happened while I was conscious. I was supposed to be out of danger, no matter how much it hurt.
They were replacing my skin, and had completed the first part successfully, from the soles of the feet on up past the knees. For the second part they stripped all the skin and scars, stitches and scabs from thighs, buttocks, abdomen. The only part of me that didn’t hurt down there was the soft tissue of the womb entrance, which had already been scourged. Where this all had started, sixty-some years ago.
I think someone made a mistake with the anesthetic, and someone who was supposed to be monitoring me wasn’t there. Maybe the same person.
I was lying suspended in the pressor field, surrounded by panels of instruments, invaded by tubes, feeling a familiar constant throbbing pain like a bad burn, which I had more or less become used to in the first phase, when it suddenly began to get worse. Each minute the pain doubled and doubled again. I prayed and cried and prayed and screamed—and then there was a new pain, like a thick spike driven down hard into my chest, and then an electric jolt spasming along my left arm, and I knew I was having a heart attack, a bad one, and no zipper this time.
I tried to get my breath, but my lungs wouldn’t do anything. Red lights flashing and a very quiet bell. The room around me started to go black, and I knew with sudden horrifying finality that all the weeks of prayer here had been nothing but habit, while my mind was asking Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?, a million times, why hast thou forsaken me?, and quietly coming to the reasonable conclusion that there was no one, nothing, up there to answer. All the sophistries reconciling a loving, compassionate God with a world full of injustice and pain became just that: sophistries—and I was alone in the last instant of my life, trying to scream with no air, and from the next instant would be nonexistent for the rest of eternity.
Some time later I woke up to normal pain and a fresh scar on my chest, a big ugly one taped shut, and Drs. Lazarev and Ulric communicating the remarkable news that I’d just survived yet another heart attack.
Well, some of me had survived. God used to be part of me.
The rest of the time was just pain, and disorientation. I lost track of the days, but monitored my progress by how far up the pain had crawled, the skin replacement. I think Dallas came in often. Finally the pain got to the top of my neck and held still, fading upwards away from breasts, shoulders; finally just a tired, sunburned feeling. They unwrapped the mummy windings to reveal a body that glowed pink and tight, not a wrinkle nor a hair, like a large and sexually precocious infant’s.
I think they overestimated the psychological trauma of being able to remember the pain, the helplessness, the anxiety. Perhaps we may remember it from regular Stilemans, at some level. The reptilian or the limbic brain, do they have memories? Maybe all of the nervous system remembers things in some primitive way.
Worse things happen, anyhow.
I did have a recurrent nightmare where the surgical zipper was back in place and I managed to free my hands and unzip myself and scoop out my insides and throw them all around that awful room, dying but feeling wonderful. The organs looked like the holos in a life sciences textbook that used to give me nightmares when I was a young girl in ginnasio. Real ones look worse.
The dream stopped once I was well enough to make love with Dallas, so I suppose it’s pretty obvious what that zipper really was, and it was infinitely better to have him opening it.
I hope he’s still alive.
I wish it were him with me in this tiny space instead of this awful filthy little man.
I wish the nightmare hadn’t come true that way. I can’t make myself stop seeing it. I’m afraid I may lose my mind before we get to Earth. “Lose one’s mind” is an odd idiom. There are parts of this mind I would love to misplace. The colors were so bright with my new eyes, bright blood and strings and globs of yellow fat the blue and grey guts and brains sparkling splinters of bone
CRIMEWATCH CERES
25 apryél
RESIDENCE BURGLARY
0944 Somebody broke into Hod Abramson’s place and stole two signed & numbered Picasso lithographs, each worth about forty thousand rubles. If somebody’s dumb enough to try to sell them to you, you might give Hod a call at 37/995. Ask him what a good price would be.
DUEL (MURDER?)
1334 This one depends on who you ask. Just outside the Loony Toonz Café, right after having lunch together, Robert Hughes killed Vladimir Repka with a knife. Robert says it was a duel and Vladimir an’t talking. Two of the wounds were in the back, which Robert says was just good technique, a clinch. No eyewitnesses. Vladimir’s wife says Robert owed them money. Check your mail for jury call.
SPACESHIP THEFT
1449 Routine position check of parked properties at the Synchronous Orbit Repair Facility revealed that a small craft belonging to Baird Ulric was missing. Maintenance had been completed on it but Ulric was leaving it at SORF until next week. The craft is a stealthed four-passenger Rocketdyne. Being stealthed, it could be anywhere. Let’s everybody send a sympathy card to Baird, who shouldn’t of left it unlocked.
STOP THE GODDAMN PRESSES DOUBLE MURDER
2319 People investigating one hell of a noise at 220 34th found that the people renting the place had redecorated it with blood and guts. At least one person, apparently impossible to identify, was blown to bits by some sort of concussion weapon. Another was lying dead in the hallway without a mark on him, possibly killed by the same blast. Quick check with our mayhem editor says could happen, maybe. Stay tuned on this one, boys and girls.
There was enough blood and gore around for several corpses, but they only found two hands and two feet. And Dallas, who was unmarked but obviously dead. They scraped most of the remains up into a bag for the recycler and were going to do a double garbage run, John Doe and Cassius Donato, when one of the volunteers noticed that Dallas’s eyes were open and wet. People who’ve been dead for a while may have open eyes, but they have a peculiar dull, sunken aspect, like fish eyes in a market, and Dallas remained unrecycled because this woman had seen that and remembered it.
They left the rest of the garbage and carried his apparently lifeless form down to the clinic, unaware that his heart was beating slightly six times a minute. A nurse took a sample of cool blood and ran it through the machine. He couldn’t interpre
t the results, so he called the hematologist Tolliver Bierman, who was startled to see that the patient, or corpse, was Dallas, with whom he had spent a few pleasant evenings. Then he puzzled through the large molecules the machine had flagged, and was relieved. It was just a zombi analog.
Zombi, officially called Vitaslow, was a fantastically expensive drug with one clinical application and a certain usefulness to the criminal world. It would put a person into suspended animation for five or six days, slowing down everything while you waited for a transplant to become available, for instance. It was also handy if you wanted to stuff somebody into the trunk of a floater for a few days or mail him bulk rate to the Moon. Or have him enjoy being buried while wide-awake, or cremated.
Dallas
This zombi shit gave me some idea of what Eric must feel like, locked up in that box thinking. I never wanted to make a TI before, and I doubly don’t want to now. Don’t want to put my ghost through that after I’m dead.
Your brain just races out of control. You can see and hear, after a fashion (sounds are lowered in pitch and stre-e-etched out), but you don’t feel anything, or taste or smell. And all you can see is what you’re pointed at; you can’t move your eyes.
I was pointed at the door when the guy went after Maria. He took about a day to step over me and get into position. Hiding in the hallway, he fired one slow dart, which must have missed. He stepped inside the bedroom, gliding for about five minutes, took aim while he was in the air, and disintegrated in slow motion. The explosion from the shattergun sounded to me like tons of gravel rolling down a metal chute.
It must have hit him off center, because most of his right side stayed intact. It was sort of fascinating to watch. The shock wave ripped his clothes off and an instant later he popped open like a soft vegetable stomped. The skin pulled away in large sheets twined with shredded clothing, and his body spun, spraying blood and pulverized organs, and the reflected shock wave picked me up and thumped me against the ceiling somehow. It didn’t hurt, but I saw a bright blue flash and passed out. I woke up on the floor again, facedown, so I never saw what happened to Maria.
I slept and woke and slept and woke, always waking to the monotonous sight of out-of-focus Stiktite. Ages later somebody slowly turned me over, looked at me, and left. I couldn’t see anything but the ceiling for about a year. People were talking, but I couldn’t make out any words in the low growl.
I studied the streaks of blood on the ceiling. You don’t normally think about how blurry things are outside of the very center of your field of vision. I was allowed to think about that for a few weeks. I blinked once, which took about a minute. That gave me a rough measure of how much time was slowed down. If it takes you a tenth of a second to blink, then I was cranking along at about one five-or six-hundredth of the normal rate.
I didn’t think about zombi at the time. I thought this was what you got when you died.
A woman I vaguely remembered from the hospital crawled into view and stared at me for a long time. I tried to make myself blink, but no go. With infinite slowness she reached down to touch my face, my chin; I think she wiggled my head. The part of the ceiling I was looking at rocked back and forth gracefully. She growled something and picked me up, all six pounds of me. Two and a half kilograms.
We proceeded to the clinic. I am the universe’s authority on East Thirty-fourth Corridor, having studied it for a month or so as this woman ran, towing me toward Tsiolkovski. I know a lot about those two blocks of the main drag, too.
It dawned on me that this was something other than death, or she wouldn’t be in such a languid hurry. Zombi slows down your reasoning somewhat, and blocks out big chunks of memory—I should have remembered about zombi from magazine articles, and I even had a German business partner who’d been kidnapped with its aid a couple of dozen years before; but those were blanked-out areas.
Weeks of running down hospital corridors. A blood test that I unfortunately could watch, longer than a Wagnerian opera and even more tiring. They leaned me up in a corner and finally a guy I recognized as a blood doctor crept into the room. Seasons changed while he surveyed a wall monitor. Then he studied a trayful of poppers, looked at one for a long, long time, then ambled over and gave me a pop.
The world came back in a blast of smell and pain: the antiseptic/cotton/alcohol/blood/cold metal hospital smell; tiny pain from the popper and big ache on the top of my head. I reached back and felt an egg-sized bump; no blood on my fingers.
“Somebody popped you with zombi,” the doctor said. “The effect is like—”
“Yeah, I know. Where’s Maria?”
He shrugged and looked at the other people. “You were the only one there,” said the woman who had brought me to the clinic. “You and that corpse you spread all over two rooms. What did you use, concussion grenade?”
“Shattergun, Maria used it.”
“There were footprints in the blood,” a man said. “Somebody was walking around right afterwards.”
“It sure as hell wasn’t me.”
We hurried back to the villa and did find a few footprints, easy to differentiate from the investigators’, since the blood was partly dry by the time they showed up. There were three small footprints going toward the bed, then several overlapping while he stood at the bed and did something, two footprints leaving; three in the hall. The woman who’d noticed I was still alive pointed out that these footprints were slightly more distinct; he was probably carrying Maria.
We followed the footprints up the ramp and into the living room, where six of them besmirched the Persian rug. They led to the air lock and stopped.
“He couldn’t have been wearing a space suit downstairs,” I said. “They don’t make boots that small.”
“Maybe he had one stashed inside the air lock,” the woman said. “Maybe one for her, too.”
“I don’t see how. You can’t open it from the outside.”
“Maybe he had an outside accomplice.”
“But where could they take her?”
“Maybe they just wanted to dispose of the body.” I looked at her. “Oh. Sorry.”
Report of Outside Investigation ad hoc Vigilante Committee Big Dick Goodman, head
21 apryél
This is a sketch of what we saw outside of the air lock on top of 220 34th, being rented by Cassius Donato and Selena Vaughn, who have one big housecleaning bill ahead of them. The disturbed area on the other side of the rise could of been caused by a small spacecraft landing and taking off. We got a call in to the Akademia Nauk sizemologiests, however the hell you spell it, and they’re gonna find out whether there was a pair of taps there between 2200 and midnight last night.
I wouldn’t of been able to see a ship sitting there from the ground control station 4.7 klicks away, on account of the rise, and a pretty good pilot could probably bring it in and take off again without anybody noticing except they were out walking around outside.
The footprints going to and from the disturbed area are different sizes, with the ones going to it on top. So it’s gotta at least be a floater or something. What must’ve happened was that someone landed it and came over to wait by the air lock. Then this guy comes up with Vaughn, dead or unconscious, probably with the zomby stuff. He lets the other guy in and probably gets a space suit from him. Plus one of those plastic EVA rescue balls. He stuffs Vaughn in there, which makes the circular marks in the dust, then they go back to the space craft and zip away.
It does look like it leaves one guy sort of unaccounted for, since there’s only one set of footprints going back, but there’s all sorts of ways to account for him, really. Like he takes off the space suit and goes downstairs and out the door. There’s no spare space suit stashed around the house, but the guy who went back outside could of been carrying it. Hell, he could be carrying it with the other guy in it. Just leave one set of footprints so as to fuck with our brains.
Nobody can figure out how the two guys—the one who snatched Vaughn and the one she Kweezi
narted—got inside in the first place. The apartment is isolated but it’s got spy cameras and alarms and it’s damn solid. They must have got a key somehow.
Maria
I was lying in bed watching the cube, a twentieth-century American flatscreen adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, which was funny and fascinating, and I must have become too absorbed in it. Dallas had gone to the kitchen to get us some wine. I didn’t notice how long he’d been gone, and I almost let the first attacker sneak up on me. If he’d had better aim he’d be alive.
I can’t feel much remorse for killing him. Disposing of him. Nothing but disgust. This other little man disgusts me too, but in a different way, many different ways. I know him in such excruciating detail.
I sat up and was reaching for the cube controls, to turn up the sound, when a little dart hit the sheet stretched between my knees. It was like the stinger darts, with a bit of bright orange string attached. There was a shattergun right next to the control box—we had shatterguns like some houses have ashtrays—and I picked it up without even thinking, and when the big stranger, huge, sailed into the room, aiming a gun at me, I thumbed the trigger.
Dallas said there was no way you could miss with a shattergun, but I very nearly did. It wasn’t even pointed at him when I jammed down on the trigger.
There was a sharp bang, and the walls and the bed were drenched with blood. Half his body was spinning like a crazy top, bouncing off the walls and floor and ceiling. The other half was everywhere. The air of the bedroom was full of globs of blood, bright red spheres that pulsed as they fell slowly toward the floor. Intestines draped a crazy blue design across the far wall and the cube console. White bloodstreaked bone fragments twirled and glittered. Globs of yellow fat. His heart bounced off a wall and the ceiling and drifted toward me, still beating.
I didn’t notice all this in the time it took me to draw one breath and scream. But then I felt a sting, and there was a dart in my left breast, and the universe crawled almost to a stop.