Cryoburn-ARC (9 page)

The bobbing light receded to his right; he turned after it, thinking of will-o'-the-wisps luring unwary travelers to their doom. As he followed, he became aware of tiny twinkles dancing in the corners of his vision like floating fireflies, adding to the night-swamp effect. He blinked, and they resolved into scattered indicator lights, green for all's-well, tacking randomly up the corridor walls on either side.

Reluctantly, Miles reached out and let his hand trace across the now-familiar bumps of closely-set banks of cryo-drawers. Except these were not abandoned and cleared, but working, or a portion of them were. Well insulated, the drawer faces were at room temperature—there was no danger of his skin freezing to the surface and trapping him in a growing cocoon of icicle-glass, really. He drew in his hands anyway, making his way down the center of the corridor by witch-light.

He stopped short as, at the end of the corridor, another door opened. Ordinary office-lab-living-quarters glare temporarily blasted his eyes, making a nimbus around a hairy head that fortunately did not turn around. The door shut, and Miles was plunged into blackness once more. As his night vision came slowly back the dense dark was relieved, if that was the word, by the scattered green specks. He could just make out his corpse-light sleeves.

So, he hadn't found the pumping station or the electrical transformers. He'd found the deeper secret of this place—working cryochambers. A number of mysteries fell neatly into place.

Suze and companions were running a secret cryocorp. No—a cryo-
cooperative
. And, unless he missed his guess, unlicensed, untaxed, and uninspected. Clandestine, off the books in every way.

Kibou-daini—a whole planet so obsessed with cheating death that even the
street people
managed to scavenge hope.

Which beat living, and dying, in a cardboard box all to flinders, Miles had to admit. He opened his mouth in what might have been a silent laugh.
And I thought
I'd
pulled some audacious stunts in my time
.
.
.
How the hell Suze and whatever helpers she'd suborned had managed to palm an entire facility, back when this place was being decommissioned and stripped, its patrons shifted to the elegant new Cryopolis on the west end, gaudy with its floodlit pyramids, was a tale Miles was suddenly dying to hear.

Bad choice of phrase, my Lord Auditor
.

Less than a third of the cryo-drawers in this corridor sported those glow-worm lights, and how many other corridors might there be? Plenty of room for more customers. And, because his mind worked that way, he considered how easy murder by cryo-drawer would be. The ultimate shell game, one live body hidden among hundreds of dead ones. Asphyxiation would come quickly in the sealed black box, even without the freezing, and no one would know where to look till much too late.
.
.
.

It's nothing I haven't undergone before.

It was curious how much that reflection
didn't help
.

He stepped forward to the end door, raised his hand to touch the cool metal surface, and just stood there for a minute. Then, curling his fingers into a fist, he knocked.

The creak of a chair. The door opened partway, and a hairy face thrust through. "Yah?"

"Tenbury-san?"

"Just Tenbury. What did you want?"

"To ask a few questions, if I may."

Beneath shaggy brows, dark brown eyes narrowed. "Did you talk to Suze?"

"Jin took me to see her this morning, yes."

Tenbury's lips pursed amid their thatch. "Oh. All right." The door swung wide.

Miles did not correct the misperception that Suze had therefore gated him into this covert community, but slipped inside at once.

The room was part office, part control chamber for the banks of cryo-drawers, and part living space, or so the unmade bedroll by one wall and the piles of personal junk suggested. Beyond, another door stood open on what might be some sort of repairs facility. Miles glimpsed workbenches and racks of tools in its shadows. There was only one station chair, by which Miles guessed this Tenbury was less sociable than Suze, but the custodian politely gestured his guest into it and leaned against a control console. Miles would have preferred it the other way around, so as not to risk a crick in his neck, nor the embarrassment of swinging his short legs above the floor. But he dared not impede the useful exchange he'd started, so he sat and half-smiled upward.

Tenbury cocked his head, and echoed the cook's observation. "You look too young for us. You sick or something?"

Miles repeated the reply that had seemed to work before: "I have an incurable seizure disorder."

Tenbury winced in sympathy, but said, "You'd do better to go back to the docs. Off-planet, maybe."

"I have. It was costly." Miles turned out his empty pockets as if to demonstrate.

"That why you ended up here? Broke, are you?"

"In a sense." It wasn't as if Miles was trying to beat a fast-penta interrogation through excessive literalism, yet he found himself oddly reluctant to lie outright to this man. "It's more complicated than that."

"Yah, it always is.'

"Can you show me what I might be getting into? If I stayed here, that is?"

The hairy eyebrows jerked up. "You've nothing to worry about with
my
work. Come on, and you'll see."

Tenbury led through his shop, which seemed half-engineeering-half-medical. Dismantled freezer parts lay strewn across a workbench. "I keep a portion of the chambers usable by cannibalizing the others," Tenbury explained.

Miles encouraged the tech to expand upon the arcana of his craft with much the same noises he'd used on Yani, to better effect. When Miles had absorbed as much about how cryochambers were built as he could stand, he asked, "But won't you run out of parts?"

"Not for a while yet. This facility was originally set up to serve twenty thousand patrons. In twenty years, we've only accumulated about a ten-percent occupancy. I admit we started much smaller, back when. We can go for decades yet. Till I'm gone, for sure."

"And what then? Who are you relying on for your revivals?"

"We don't need anyone to do the revivals, yet. Anyway, they're much trickier."

Indeed
. "Who does the cryoprep, then?"

"Plant nurse. You'll meet her sooner or later. She's real good, and she has an apprentice, Ako, too. I need to get myself a couple of youngsters like that, I guess."

Miles didn't marvel at this. Emergency cryoprep was a common enough medical procedure that even he had learned it, at least theoretically, as part of military field-aid. Under nonemergency conditions there were doubtless more refinements, resulting in less cryo-amnesia and other unwanted side-effects, after. Less trauma to start with left less trauma to recover from, but to choose to go down to that darkness in cold blood, so to speak, while still breathing
.
.
.
"It's still frightening to think about," he said honestly.

"For most folks, it's a last choice, not a first one. We all come to it in time, though. No one wants to go of a coronary in the night and not-wake-up warm and rotting. Safer not to wait too long." Tenbury's lips twisted. "Although some of the corps are trying to increase market share these days by encouraging folks to freeze early. I'm not sure if the math works out."

"It does seem an inelastic demand, yes," agreed Miles in fascination. "More customers now can only mean fewer later. A short-term strategy for such a long-term enterprise."

"Yah, except maybe for those who'd miss their chance."

It was Miles's turn to tilt his head in consideration. "I suppose they're not up to one-hundred-percent market saturation, even now. What about the religious types?"

"Oh, yah, there are still a few refusers."

"Refusers?"

"You're not from around here, are you? Figured from your accent, but I'd have thought you must have been on Kibou longer. In order to end up here, I mean."

"It was something of an accident. I'm glad I stumbled on you, though."

Refusers,
like
revives,
were another item the careful corps tours had neglected to mention, but they hardly needed even Tenbury's brief explanation, which he obligingly supplied, for Miles to figure out. Tenbury's judgment was that those who chose burial over freezing for superstitious reasons were a self-limiting phenomenon. Miles thought of those fringe utopian communities that had practiced strict celibacy and thus died out within the first couple of generations, or non-generations, and nodded provisional agreement.

Tenbury then kindly took Miles through the far door, out of the workshop and into another corridor—thankfully lit, though even with illumination the general effect was of an unsettling cross between a space station corridor and a morgue. There he opened an empty cryo-drawer, recently reconditioned, and pointed out its features, rather like a very restrained used-vehicle salesman.

"It seems
.
.
.
small," said Miles.

"Not much head room," Tenbury agreed. "But you're past sitting up suddenly by the time you arrive in it. I've often wondered if folks would retain any memory of their time in these, but the revives I've met all say not." He slid the drawer closed and gave it a fond thump to seat the latch.

"You just go to sleep, and then wake up in a future somebody else picked for you. No dreams," Miles agreed. "Blink out, blink back in. Like anesthesia, but longer." An intimate preview of death, and doubtless a lot less traumatic when the
blink out
part wasn't accomplished by a needle-grenade blowing out one's chest, Miles had to allow. He spread his palm on the drawer-front. "What happens to all the poor frozen people"—or
frozen poor people
—"if this place is discovered by the authorities?"

A brief, humorless grin ruffled the beard-thatch. "Well, they can't just let us thaw and rot, then bury us. That's illegal."

"Murder?"

"Of a sort. One of the grades of murder, anyway."

So this place was not as futile an effort as Miles had first guessed. Somebody
was
thinking ahead. How far? Who might find the future legal responsibility for these frozen souls on their hands? The municipality of Northbridge? Some unwitting entrepreneur, buying the rediscovered property for back taxes without inspecting it first?
Cheating death,
indeed. "Illegal at the moment, then. What happens if the law changes?"

Tenbury shrugged. "Then several thousand people will have died calmly and without pain, in hope and not despair. And won't know the difference." He added after a thoughtful pause, "That would be an ugly sort of world to wake up in anyway."

"Mm, I don't suppose the authorities would go to the trouble and expense of reviving folks just to let them die again immediately. Blink out, and
.
.
.
stay blinked." There were worse ways to arrive at an identical fate. Miles had seen many of them.

"Well, I need to get back to work," Tenbury hinted away his uninvited visitor. "I hope this helped you."

"Yes, yes it did. Thank you." Miles let Tenbury shepherd him back through the shop to the first corridor. "I suppose I'd better go feed Jin's pets. I did promise the boy I would."

"Odd kid, that. I had hopes for a bit he might apprentice to me, but he's more interested in animals than machinery." Tenbury sighed, whether in regret or bafflement Miles was not quite sure.

"Um
.
.
." said Miles, staring up the darkened corridor.

"First door on your left," said Tenbury, and thoughtfully held his office door wide to light the way till Miles had found it in the gloom. The stair rail and a careful count of the turns guided Miles after that. He emerged again in the basement near the cafeteria, and from there found his way back up to Jin's roof via the interior stairs.

Emerging into the daylight and greeted by milling chickens, he thought,
Damn, but I hope the boy makes it back here soon.

The big downtown tube-tram transfer station was just as confusing going back as forward, Jin found when he'd taken his second wrong turn. The crowd made him nervous, and it was only going to get worse as the time edged toward rush hour. He needed to get out of here. Scowling, he turned around a couple of times, reoriented himself, and made his way upstream through an entry corridor, bumping a lot of folks going the other way.

What was in that big thick envelope Counsel Vorlynkin had handed to him? It crackled against his skin. Entering the second-level rotunda, he dodged out of the way of a woman with a pram, then leaned his shoulders against a pillar and fished out the letter. To his disappointment, it wasn't sealed with a bloody thumbprint, but it was certainly sealed. No peeking. He sighed and thrust it back inside his shirt.

He finally found the right escalator, and rode it up two flights to the top-level gallery. He was worried about his animals. Would Miles-san take proper care of them? You never could tell, with adults. They pretended to take you seriously, but then laughed behind your back at the things that were important to you. Or said that because you were just a kid, you would forget it all soon. But Miles-san had seemed to genuinely like Jin's rats, letting Jinni sit on his shoulder and nibble at his hair without flinching. Jin could tell when grownups didn't really appreciate how sleek and funny and friendly rats could be, and they didn't bite hard at all unless they were accidentally squeezed, and who could blame them for that?