Are You There and Other Stories (25 page)

He was dozing on the sofa when the dead module named Barbara knocked on the interior door.

“Are you there?” she said.

Deatry stared at the door, wondering:
Am I?
Rain ticked at the empty pane. He stared at the door, some kind of urgency churning him. He stared at the door, and in his mind he stood up and opened it.

Transplant

W
hen Laird Ulin came for my eyes—again—I wasn’t there. One set should have lasted that pompous gasbag twenty-five years. Vanity brought him back after a mere ten. Once they left me, my eyes, as with all my other organs, resumed their perishable status. Meanwhile I grew a replacement. Laird couldn’t be bothered with corrective surgery, and besides, the surgeons on-board
Infinity
were primarily harvesters. And I was primarily the farm.

Not being there was the easy part. At about the time Ulin expected me in surgical prep, I was strolling through Venice. Someone had turned the canal water periwinkle. Since no real water was involved, such a transformation was simply accomplished and did no harm, except to the verisimilitude.

Two biomechs sat in front of a café façade (which was real) sipping from demitasses of espresso (which was synth). They were supposed to resemble a man and a woman. And they did, too, if the light was sufficiently dim and you squinted and were perhaps drunk or a little blind.

I sat at a nearby table under the shade of a Cinzano umbrella. The biomechs ignored me. It was a special kind of ignoring. The kind that conveys an insecure species of seething envy. God had touched me: I was a practical immortal; they were puppets with uploaded memories.

I said, “Espresso,” and a thing that looked like a traffic light with four erector set legs clickity-clacked out of the café and placed a thick, white saucer with a demitasse of black synth on the table. You didn’t need periwinkle canal water to spoil verisimilitude.

I sat sipping synth (not out of a seashell by the seashore, thank goodness), pinky extended at the proper angle, until the biomechs got up and walked away. At a certain point they passed through the holographic scrim that presented the illusion of a street continuing in diminishing perspective. The street scene shivered, and two instantly created figures strolled in place of the couple.

I put my demitasse down.

The street scene continued to shiver and wobble. Then the canal turned black, which gave the parked gondolas the appearance of projecting over a stygian abyss.

After that, the whole damn thing crashed.

Which was the beginning of the
hard
part, earlier implied.

How does one while away the years between stars? I mean, after you’ve read everything. For me, sabotage came to mind. Picture
Infinity
as a giant armadillo, twenty kilometers long, half again as tall and five wide. In the uppermost section—the Command Level—dwell the biomechs, a handful of machine people determined to live out the duration of the voyage. Of course, only Laird Ulin and I were “alive” in the usual sense of the word. The biomechs
remembered
being alive, but that didn’t count. Their biomechanical bodies could ingest synthetic espresso and even taste it. They could hold hands if they wanted to, but coitus was a technical conundrum beyond their design.

Meanwhile Ulin’s longevity was dependent upon the miracle of my endlessly regenerative body, as well as a full compliment of rejuvenation treatments developed from studies of my unique genetic material, which at least kept his bones sturdy and his muscle mass relatively limber. Ulin’s medical types regularly extracted small quantities of my pineal excretions, from which they created a neurochemical wash to irrigate Laird’s wrinkly organ (no, not that one). Some would question the efficacy of this treatment over the long haul. One can afford to have funny-looking skin and stiff tendons, but who wants a funny brain? Who needs a stiff thalamus? Laird’s megalomaniacal tendencies were on the rise. His behavior had grown strange. Stranger, I mean.

Despite endless attempts to replicate the result, I remained the only known person with super human longevity—at least at the time of our departure from Earth. Ulin would have much preferred the ability to regenerate his own organs. But money really can’t buy everything—like love, or a spare liver, for instance. Some miracles God reserves for the genetically anomalous freak. In this case, me.

Occupying the middle decks of
Infinity
are the farms and resource reclamation systems. And on the final and largest level: The County, where the general population live, work, love, procreate, and die into the next generation . . . and the next.

Getting from the top of the armadillo to the bottom wasn’t easy without a visa. And the Command structure—headed by Laird Ulin—was disinclined to issue me one. Perhaps it had something to do with my recent attempts to go AWOL in the County (okay, the last one was nine years ago, but that’s still recent by
my
standards). As usual, Laird had located me with uncanny ease and hauled me back upstairs.

He had been my ticket to the stars, but for these nine years I’d been little more than a pampered prisoner—a walking organ sack, always at Ulin’s service. I guess he was afraid to die. Tough. Everybody’s afraid of something.

So I built a virus and named it George. Then I conducted a conversation with
Infinity
’s superquantum computer and arranged for the first sneeze to occur in Venice. I made sure I was in Cinzano shade for the event.

Presently came the sound of magnetic locks releasing. A panel opened in the velvet blackness before which the image of the canal had resided moments ago.

I moved quickly. My perusal of the ship’s design database had informed me that from this point I would be very near the port to a kilometers-long access tube running from the Command level all the way to the floor of the County. Orienting myself, I turned right and followed a corridor between bulkheads until I came to a wider place and a hatch recessed into the deck.

I knelt on the deck and retracted the hatch by turning a hand-operated wheel. The purpose of this tube, as well as several others located throughout
Infinity
, was to provide direct access between levels in the event of a catastrophic systems failure. At such a time one might also assume a loss of gravity, which would make traveling the tube a somewhat less harrowing matter than it was likely to be now, with full gravity—full gravity on
Infinity
being roughly eighty-eight percent Earth normal. It was a very long way down to the County.

The tube was three meters in diameter and there were three platforms, each large enough to accommodate a single passenger. The platforms were attached to pairs of skinny rails on the side of the tube. They were powerless contraptions operated on an elaborate arrangement of counter-weights and had been built with no very great expectation of ever being utilized.

I stepped onto one, secured myself with a strap, released the lock, held on tight and began utilizing the hell out of it.

I dropped at a moderate rate. Amber light illuminated the tube. Looking up made me feel like I was inside a giant straw slipping back after the big suck. My stomach was fluttering with anticipation. It had been a while since I’d rubbed elbows with humanity. I wondered how my people skills had held up. Actually I had one person in particular in mind.

After ten minutes or so the lights began to flicker. Was George making his broader acquaintance with
Infinity
’s intimate architecture?

The lights stuttered a final time and went out. It wasn’t too bad at first, but after a while a flashlight would have been nice. The long, black fall gave me an uneasy feeling. I hadn’t
planned
on any lights going out. Perhaps George had some plans of his own. Perhaps “plan” was the wrong word altogether. All I’d wanted to do was unlock some doors and disrupt a few non-essential functions. Make it hard for Laird to find me. Eventually he
would
find me, of course, but I’d deal with that when the time came.

I was certain of only one thing: I was through with surgery. Ever since my incredible longevity had become known back on Earth I’d been subjected to endless examinations, proddings, and probings, the extraction of various and sundry specimens, the harvesting of my organs, the minute examination of my genetic code, and the dissection of my psyche. No one wanted to believe God would just flat out make an error in my favor. Surely He wouldn’t have chosen such a smartass.

When Laird Ulin conceived his starship and brought it into being by mean force of will, billions of dollars (he designed the first superquantum computers), and an international consortium, he offered me passage to a new world. I was optimistic enough to think it might be a better world (even if it was named after Ulin). Or at least one where I would find my privacy restored. Some suggested I was running away. One such suggester was the guy who looked back at me every morning when I shaved.

I’ve already described the price of my ticket.

The platform encountered a pneumatic brake and shushed to an uneventful halt. I locked the platform, fumbled my safety strap loose, and began groping for the exit.

*

The little girl with choppy yellow hair pointed and said, “The sky’s broken.”

Infinity
was a ship full of skies, especially on the County level. They made everyone feel better about being sealed inside the world’s biggest tin can for the duration.

But this sky was broken: A large, irregular section had gone black. All around this black wound, horizon to horizon, a high blue and fleecy white summer was in progress. It was impossible to distinguish the real clouds from the holographic facsimiles. Down here
Infinity
generated her own limited weather phenomenon, the rest was vivid illusion. However, embedded in my virus was a tutorial on storm craft, which I had hoped to see manifested shortly after my arrival and—fingers crossed—reunion. Just a mild thunderstorm, a little sound, not much fury. It was the romantic in me. Tinkering around with the idea I’d felt positively Byronesque.

It was hot. I had come upon the girl in the Town Square of Bedford Falls, sitting on a bench in a red jumpsuit eating a vanilla ice-cream cone. I guessed she was about six. She made such a pretty picture that I approached her and said hi. It had been quite a while since I’d last seen a child. Up close this one looked familiar. As soon as I greeted her she got a look on her face and started pointing at the sky, pale lips puckered worriedly.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s probably just a minor malfunction. Hey, watch out, you’re melting all over the place.” I sat beside her. She wouldn’t stop staring up. Those eyes.

“The
sky’s
wrong,” she said.

“What flavor’s your cone?”

“Huh?”

“I said what flavor’s your cone?”

“What flavor does it look like?” she asked.

“Strawberry?”

“It’s vanilla.”

“That was going to be my next guess. What’s your name?”

“Alice Greene.”

I nodded. “I bet I know your mom’s name.”

“Bet you don’t.”

“Delilah.”

She licked her cone. “Everybody knows everybody.”

“Yeah? You don’t know me.”

She shrugged, then shouted: “Mommy!”

A woman had stepped out of the Bedford Falls Hotel and was crossing quickly in our direction. The resemblance was obvious, the hair, especially the violet eyes.

“There’s my girl,” she said, picking Alice up and holding her.

“Something’s wrong with the
sky
,” Alice said.

“Don’t look at it, Honey.”

“Why not? Will it unbreak if I don’t look?”

“I’m sure it’s just a minor glitch,” I said. “Hello, Delilah.”

She stared, bestowing upon me the same stupefied gawk her daughter had given the broken sky.

“Ellis—”

“I was on my way over when I bumped into your daughter.”

“On your way over. It’s been
ten years
, Ellis.”

“Nine, actually. But it feels like ten to me, too, dear.”

“Mommy I wanna go inside now,” Alice said.

“Just a minute, baby.”

“Cute kid,” I said.

Delilah gave me a measuring look. “Ellis, what are you doing here?”

“Hey, I thought absence was supposed to cause various internal organs to grow fonder.”

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Naturally not. Neither have you. Beautiful as ever.”

She smiled, but said: “Yes, I have. Changed.” She didn’t mean the crow’s feet, which I hated myself for noticing.

A hot breeze scurried through the square. Since I had arrived the ambient temperature had risen by at least five degrees. That was at ground level. I estimated it was a lot cooler a kilometer or so above, where George was playing with alterations in the atmosphere, orchestrating temperature and pressures changes. Real clouds formed rapidly over the County. There was something disturbingly aggressive about it. I thought of dark tubes and black wounds slashed into the sky.

“It might not be a bad idea for you to get inside,” I said to Delilah.

“Go inside, Mom!”

“What’s happening, Ellis?”

“I’m not sure. All I had in mind was a little wind and a rumble or two. This feels bigger.”

She regarded me strangely, her fair brow was misted with sweat. “Come inside with us.”

“I think I’ll sit and watch for a while.”

Delilah hesitated a moment longer, glanced at the sky, then turned and walked swiftly toward the hotel. Alice hung over her shoulder and dripped a trail of creamy yellow-white spots, in case she wanted to find her way back to Uncle Ellis.

The square was filling with people. They emerged from storefronts and restaurants and work centers. They halted on the sidewalks, stood straddling bicycles. Bedford Falls was modeled after an idealized small American town of the mid twentieth century, though it was more Main Street Disney than an authentic reproduction. A nice place to raise the kids. The other towns in the County were Waukegan and De Smet. There must have been a literary type on the naming committee. Well, it probably looked good on paper. Being the only one around who had seen both Disneyland and the original De Smet, my observations were more authentic than the molecular-engineered PerfectWood out of which much of these towns were constructed. I’d had a lot of life between 1965 and 2283. Too much life, I sometimes thought.

People pointed. The sky hung low and threatening, pregnant with storm. The wind picked up. Everyone appeared uneasy. I wanted to pull a Jimmy Stewart, quell the citizenry’s incipient panic. But I didn’t have it in me. Perhaps I needed somebody to quell
my
incipient panic first.