All the Lives He Led-A Novel (29 page)

She did.

You know, spending time on something like the
Chang Jang
could get addictive. I found that out when I listened to Elfreda ordering dinner—wild boar ham and fried Peruvian black potatoes and whatever assorted (she told the person taking the order over the phone) vegetables the chefs might recommend, plus salads with three or four different kinds of dressings. Plus breads, and both coffee and tea—US of America tea, she told the woman, none of this Chinese dishwater—and a selection of cheeses and sweets for dessert.

A part of my mind that wasn’t involved in figuring out how to get free of this new kind of captivity was now—metaphorically—salivating. But most of it was just going around in circles of worry.

Anyway, when the food came both Chi-Leong and I were banished to the suite’s luxurious bathroom, with the door closed, while Elfreda supervised the placement of the dining table and the bringing in of the meal. Chi-Leong didn’t talk to me when we were alone there. He sat on the padded rim of the hot tub, watching one of the bathroom’s screens, and he didn’t look happy. I fiddled with the steam chamber, the bidet, and the aroma dispensers, with one eye on him. I was trying to figure out what his part was in this little game. I conjectured that Elfreda had been undercover for quite a while, no doubt picking up crumbs of intelligence for Security from her endless succession of boyfriends. That didn’t seem likely for Chi-Leong.

But a spot of Security blackmail, involving looking the other way from his grandma’s gravy boat, pretty well did.

When the servitors were gone, the door locked and the “Do Not Disturb” sign lighted, Eustace and I were let out. The table setting was for only two persons, but there was plenty of food. “Enough for the three of us,” Elfreda said, but the way it looked to me it was enough for at least six. It wasn’t just plentiful, either. It was about the most expensive meal I had ever had, including a few with Gerda that had pretty nearly busted my budget for a week.

When we had finished eating a major fraction of what the waiters had brought Elfreda disappeared into the bedroom, leaving Eustace and me to make sparse and unfriendly small talk about whether the boeuf en croute had been properly seasoned or not. When she returned she had changed into a monokini and a basically transparent modesty smock. “In case we want to go in for a dip,” she explained, and when I pointed out that I didn’t have a bathing suit she opened her little carryall and showed us the suit of Eustace’s she had borrowed for me. “It’s just a thong, so it should fit you. They fit anybody, don’t they? And, Eustace, hon, why don’t you take a nap or something while Brad and I check the zep out.”

“For what?” he asked.

“For I don’t know what,” she said patiently. “To see if there’s anything we need to know about, and, hon, after we’ve left why don’t you call the steward and have these dishes taken away?”

He sighed and surrendered—not, I mean, without displaying his annoyance, as seemed so often to be the case when Elfreda was pulling the strings. “Oh, very well,” he said, and that was all he said. What he didn’t say was, “Be careful,” but then I didn’t think he was very good at playing his part. Even Security had to work with whatever people it could get.

But what there was, once I had the wit to look for it, was a wall screen that—once I found where the control pad was hidden—was fed by the zep’s main communications links. Since Elfreda and Chi-Leong were presumably asleep in the next room I kept the sound down to a whisper—

And in a moment there he was. Brian Bossert. Not very tall, not particularly good-looking, and not in any respect that I could see resembling the person he was, namely the love of my life. He was a rather ordinarylooking young man, but definitely a man. A man who, to be sure, had murdered at least 13,351 people in his terrorist activities, or perhaps as many as 55,000 or even 150,000 if you included the ones who died of traffic accidents or simple overexertion in New York when he shut down the subways and Las Vegas when he cut off electric power and so on. It was a large number, anyway—though pretty trivial when you compared it with what he, now she, was doing every day.

I went to sleep, wondering at the strange world I was living in.

And the next morning, now that I didn’t have to pretend to be interested in looking at
Chang Jang
’s corridor art, I discovered I was.

There was plenty of it. Right at the bottom of a three-story atrium just down the hall from Chi-Leong’s suite there was about the ugliest three-legged statue I had ever seen. Elfreda read from the plaque at its base. “They call it the Toad God of Wealth. Think it’ll make us rich?”

I said, “I wish,” just to be sociable. The thing was big enough, four meters tall at the least. If it had really been carved ivory, as it looked, it would certainly have weighed a couple of hundred kilos—far more mass than the zep’s designers would have permitted. It wasn’t real, of course, but just another virt.

We weren’t the only passengers patrolling the zep’s corridors, in the search for additional ways to get rid of their surplus cash. Actually, it was kind of interesting. Up until then I hadn’t really known what people with excessive money actually did with their time. I discovered that they weren’t idle. In fact, they were often frantically busy, just not busy in any way that produced anything of value. On the Yellow River deck groups of twenty or thirty practiced ancient dance rituals like the Twist and the Charleston, under the tutelage of skilled instructors and to the tune of appropriate music from virt instrumentalists. Non-virt servitors stood by to offer definitely non-virt champagne to the overexerted. Up on the sun deck scantily, even negligibly, clad passengers stretched out on deck chairs, in pursuit of a golden tan. They weren’t going to get it from the actual sun in the actual sky, of course. The whole bulk of the zep’s lift ballonets were between them and it.

The tanning rays for the passengers came from halogen tubes, and they wouldn’t burn any passenger skin because the hard, carcinogenic frequencies were left out. When we peeped into the dining room at the forward end of the uppermost deck, a couple of artists with mini-chainsaws were putting the final touches to an ice statue of a bride in a flowing snow-white dress. I might have wondered what they were doing that for, but not for long. One of the wedding chapels was just down the passage.

For a moment I was puzzled by the thought of loading the zep with all this extra mass, not less than four or five hundred kilos, I was sure. The sculpture wasn’t a virt. It couldn’t be. We were feeling the proof of that, because we got a steady trickle of ice particles flying off the saw. But (Elfreda told me, amused at my ignorance) there was a difference between the toad sculpture and the ice bride. Water was water, whether in a frozen state or not, and however much frozen water the ice sculptors used simply became part of the ship’s ballast when it melted back.

There was a burst of music as the chapel door opened and ten or twelve people spilled out. I could tell which ones were the bride and the groom. They were the drunkest of the lot.

That was another puzzle. See, every passenger on the
Chang Jang
had news screens in their cabins. Some of them must at least have sometimes glanced at them. They could not be totally ignorant of the hell that was eating up the human race. But if those stomach-turning scenes of dissolving flesh had made them afraid for their own lives there was no sign of it in the way they scarfed down the zep’s edibles and intoxicants.

Elfreda was observing them with the benevolently critical smile of a woman who had never been married, but might not reject a reasonable offer out of hand. It seemed like a good time to try to get a straight answer from her … .

But I didn’t, and the moment passed, and it didn’t return. I lost my best chance of it in the middle of that night. Chi-Leong had reasserted his privileges, so I had been assigned the couch in his sitting room, while he and Elfreda tucked in on his vast, air-cushioned bed.

I wasn’t jealous, you know. Morose, maybe. I didn’t begrudge Chi-Leong a romp with Elfreda, I just resented the fact that the world in general was better off than I in just about every aspect I could imagine.

Well, except for the people who were actually dying of that unwished gift Maury and Gerda seemed to have given to the world.

Those live but doomed people weren’t better off than anybody. They weren’t getting your tactful and unhurried old-man’s-death passing, where you just go to sleep and don’t wake up again, and who could ask for a nicer croaking than that? No. These particular dying people did not go gently into that good night. They were all wide awake when it happened, and the reason they were awake was that the agony of having their flesh rot and dissolve on their bodies kept them from any hope of being sound asleep ever again. Along with the particular nastiness they called necrotizing fasciitis the victims got a breakbone fever that had them sobbing or whimpering, or sometimes screaming out loud, before the poisons in their flesh interrupted the communication of cell to cell, and the overtaxed heart failed, and then they did die, usually—mercifully!—within a few hours of the beginning of their body rot.

And time passed.

Time passed, and the
Chang Jang
faithfully followed its published itinerary, and I did nothing.

Nothing but enjoy the
Chang Jang’s
multitudinous creature comforts, anyway. Under the right circumstances I could see that that would be enough—defining the right circumstances as, say, if I had a Gerda with me to enjoy them. But those circumstances didn’t obtain. The ones that did included quite a long and unpleasant list—

1.
Maury’s murder.

2.
The strong possibility that Gerda was the one who murdered him.

3.
Old Dan and Marilyn Sheridan, often in my mind as I thought of them hopefully watching the mail machine every morning for the remittance that wasn’t going to come anymore.

4.
The mighty force with which Security was leaning on me, which was what led me to escape in the first place.

5.
The fact that, as I was now convinced, that whole escape was a Security setup, which meant I was in even worse trouble than I’d thought, because the stakes had evidently become higher.

And 6, 7, 8, all the way up to the highest number I could think of. That was the lack of Gerda—plus the horrid knowledge that Gerda wasn’t really much of a Gerda, insofar as that name denotes gender, at all.

That’s a funny thing, isn’t it? If a fraction of what I knew or suspected about Gerda were true I wasn’t going to want her back, was I? But it sure as hell felt like I did.

So the days passed, and each hour of
Chang Jang
’s cruising brought me an hour closer to wherever it was I was going.

The identity of that place, however, was slow to appear. I didn’t get off at the zep’s first stop, which was the island of Malta. Elfreda did, for a short visit—would never get another chance to see where a tattered handful of European knight-crusaders could fight off ten or twenty thousand infidels, she said. (But I thought maybe she was just going to look for a secure line to talk back to Security HQ.) Anyway she made sure that Eustace Chi-Leong stayed aboard to keep an eye on me. Which he did by setting us up in the ship’s library, me at one carrel, him at another between mine and the door. I used the opportunity for checking out every place on the zep’s schedule, hoping that one would reveal itself as the ideal place for me to sneak away and be finally really free of Security.

None did.

I didn’t try to jump ship at the second place, either. That was Lepus Magnus, too small for me to hide in. Then Petra: even smaller, not to mention with no useful way to get out of there except another zep.

The next stop on the tour was good old Cairo.

I woke up early and headed for a window as the zep was gliding toward its mooring place outside of the city. The captain had taken the long way around, and we were coming in right over the Sphinx itself, all bright red and gold and green when the virt replays of its appearance were switched on, the familiar sandblasted ruin when reality was allowed to show. And then from behind me someone cried—screamed—“Oh, my sweet Jesus God!”

It was Elfreda, looking scared. No, terrified. She was standing in the bedroom doorway, and a trickle of sound from behind her showed that she’d been listening to news. She was wearing a kind of baby-doll nightie that she hadn’t bothered to pull anything over, and hadn’t been wearing anything under, either. “Did you hear?” she yelled. “Christ, we’re really in it now.”

I looked at her in surprise. No doubt the Flu was scary, but I hadn’t thought that even the death in agony of a few million people would get her that upset. I said, “Yes, it’s a pretty serious epidemic, all right, but—”

“Oh, Brad,” she groaned, “who’s talking about the goddamn epidemic? It’s the
quarantine
. The zep isn’t going on to Aswan! It’s grounded here in goddamn Cairo, because somebody else has been shooting holes in zeps and nobody’s going anywhere until they make it stop!”

Behind her Chi-Leong had appeared, standing in the bedroom doorway and glowering. He wasn’t wearing whatever he usually wore to bed, if that was anything at all. He had put on a kind of Cossack cavalry officer’s leisure robe—I guess—and he had taken the time to button all the score or so of buttons before exposing himself to my eyes. He said, in a tone of deep indignation, “That is extremely troublesome for me, Sheridan.” He didn’t say why, but I could figure that out easily enough by myself. He didn’t say why he looked like he was blaming me, either, but that was almost as easy: He was blaming me for everything he didn’t like.

I stopped paying attention to him as soon as I got the wall screen on. Then I knew what Elfreda was talking about, and I could see why she was scared. From a small boat in the Gulf of Finland somebody had shot down a Russian aerozep dirigible with an incendiary missile on its run from St. Petersburg to Helsinki. Everybody on board was dead, and every passenger zep in the world’s skies was ordered grounded while Security figured this new thing out.