A King of Infinite Space Page 10

  “That’s why you’ve been playing at being John?” I cock my thumb over my shoulder at my old friend.

  “Indeed…although you’ve managed to exceed even his progress.” Mister Chicago speaks as if John isn’t there. “John was one of the first. For a time, he was one of our best successes. I’m still quite proud of him.”

  I glance over my shoulder at John. He’s still standing at the bar, patiently waiting to bring us another cappuccino or brandy. When I first woke up, he seemed so godlike; now he looks like a puppet waiting for his strings to be tugged. “I believe he once was a professor of biochemistry at some Ivy League university,” Mister Chicago says, “but now…well, he does make great cappuccino, doesn’t he?”

  A hundred years ago, John would have been able to explain all the technical stuff Mister Chicago just rattled off. Now he’s doing well if he can make coffee without screwing up. I can’t help but feel sorry for him.

  “So we’ve settled the most obvious questions.” Mister Chicago ticks them off on the tips of his fingers. “You now know who you are, and what you are, and when you are…that leaves only a couple, doesn’t it?”

  He stands up from his chair, gestures for me to follow him to the windows behind his desk. I stand up and walk behind the desk. “There’s a reason why I’ve sequestered you and your companions in the servants’ quarters after sundown. Can you guess what it may be?”

  “Umm…vampires?”

  For the first time, he laughs at one of my jokes. “Oh, very good! Vampires…I like that!” It wasn’t all that funny, but he seems to think so. “I’m really beginning to enjoy your company, Alec,” he adds, still chuckling to himself. “Now…lights off!”

  The ceiling lights go out. The solarium plunges into darkness.

  For a few seconds I can’t see anything, save for the castle windows and the faint glow of walkway lamps. Then my eyes gradually adjust to the gloom.

  Mister Chicago is a silhouette standing beside me. He raises a hand, points to the glass dome above us. “Now, look up there…what do you see?”

  Through the solarium windows, past the immense barrel ceiling of the artificial sky above that, are stars brighter and far more numerous than any I’ve ever seen before. Yet the stars aren’t fixed in place; they’re in constant motion, as if I’m looking at them through a slow-moving kaleidoscope. Some are brighter than others, some move faster than their neighbors, but the entire starscape is revolving, like…

  No. The stars aren’t moving. We are.

  When I was a little kid, another first-grader told me that if I looked up at the sky for a long time, I could feel the earth moving. I didn’t believe him, because when I stood in the playground and stared up at the sky, all I saw were clouds moving above me. But one autumn afternoon a few days later, I tried it again, this time in my backyard…but now, although I didn’t realize it at the time, with the chimney of my house as my fixed point of reference. And then, with the clouds scudding past the deep blue Missouri sky, I felt the awesome mass of the world as it ponderously rolled beneath the soles of my size-four Keds. It was my first taste of vertigo, and I had nightmares about it later that night.

  That moment is like this one.

  Everything around me—the solarium, the mansion, the landscape below, the walls of the sky above, all this great mass surrounding us—is in motion.

  Struggling for equilibrium, I stare at the center of the sky, that place where I had earlier noticed an opaque shape that blotted out the first stars of twilight. Now I see it clearly for the first time: an immense round object, off-gray and rocky, its rough surface deformed by craters and basins and tiny hills. A tiny moon, seen from only a few miles away.

  Near the top of the moon, there’s a huge spiderlike object: a man-made structure, round like a shield, constructed out of dull silver metal, several miles in diameter. Its legs are anchored to the moon’s gray soil, illuminated by both starlight and the multicolored spotlights.

  The spider rests in the center of a web. Long silver threads spread out in ninety-degree arcs from beneath the flat, bloated belly below the shield. The threads in the closest arc expand in size until they become thick cables attached to points on either side of the barrel ceiling above us. Tiny cabs move up and down a couple of these cables: elevators rising and descending from the web’s strands.

  At the endpoints of the strands furthest away: three enormous cylinders, miles in length, spaced equidistantly from the spider and the tiny moon upon which it crouches. Light glows faintly from within long windows in the tops of these cylinders; through them, I can just make out landscapes that resemble miniature versions of…

  Of the little world that I’m within.

  “Oh, my God…”

  The muscles in my legs weaken. I blindly fumble behind me, seeking something to support me. Finding nothing, my knees collapse beneath me. I fall down on my haunches, the rug burning the skin on my knees.

  All this time, I’ve assumed that I’m on Earth. Maybe in a secret underground fortress, like something from a science fiction movie, or inside a biosphere out in the desert somewhere in Utah. It never occurred to me that I’m in space…

  Way out in space.

  “The asteroid is 1985 RBI.” Mister Chicago is a dark presence behind me. “Renamed 4442 Garcia in 1995, in memory of an American musician who died about the same time you did, if historical records are complete.”

  Deadheads. Garcia. If that’s supposed to be a joke, I’m not laughing. “How…how…?” I can’t get the words out of my mouth.

  “How what, Alec? How far from Earth? How big is it? Composition, perihelion, inclination, orbital node?” Soft laughter, like a knife sliding out of a black velvet sheath; contempt for dead souls. “Even if you downloaded this date from your MINN, I rather doubt you’d understand it. You could barely converse with me about the details of your own neurosuspension, so there isn’t much reason to believe that you would comprehend astronomical terminology.”

  He’s right. I probably wouldn’t. I only know that, if 1985 RBI…or 4442 Garcia, or whatever the hell he called it…is an asteroid, then it’s most likely located somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.

  Never mind the math. I’m a long, long way from Earth.

  That leaves only one question unanswered…

  No. There’s hundreds of questions. Thousands. But right now, I can think of only one. I pull my eyes away from the sky, seeking Mister Chicago’s face among the shadows.

  “Why?”

  I can’t see him, only the man-shaped hole he makes against the cosmos. If he’s smiling, or scowling, or wearing John’s implacable face once more, I can’t tell. There’s a long silence, as empty as the void above me and just as cold, before he deigns to speak to me.

  “I have my reasons,” he says, “and they’re not your concern.”

  More silence, then even his shadow begins to disappear. “Get up now,” he says from the darkness. “You’re beginning to bore me. It’s time for you to leave.”

  As I struggle to my feet, I hear the soles of his boots whisking softly across the carpet, heading for the door.

  “And, by the way…when you change the sheets tomorrow? No wrinkles on the pillowcases. I hate it when you do that.”

  The door opens and shuts. A moment later, the lights come up again.

  I’m alone with John. He silently beckons toward the door. My audience with the master has come to an end; it’s time for me to leave.

  My name is Alec Tucker. I was dead for one hundred and four years. Now I’m alive again, and living on an asteroid millions of miles from home. I was brought back to life by someone named Mister Chicago. I’ve got a computer in my head and a body that looks like mine, but isn’t the one I was born with. I’m here to change sheets and make sure that there aren’t any wrinkles in the pillowcases…

  And every time one mystery is settled, there’re two more to take its place.

  I take one more glance at the solarium windows, then I let John lea
d me to the elevator and back down to the servants’ quarters, beneath the castle of Mister Chicago.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  * * *

  COME AS YOU ARE

  “What a wasteful thing it is to lose one’s mind.”

  —Vice-President Dan Quayle

  And so I went back to what I had been doing before my memory returned, one hundred and four years older and not much wiser.

  I wasn’t the only one. Soon other deadheads were having their long-term memories coming back to them. Mister Chicago kept his word; our food wasn’t being dosed anymore, and for about a week or so everyone shambled about in apparent slow motion, triple-blinking and mumbling to themselves as suppressed recollections of their former lives began seeping back into their consciousness. Walking through the castle, you could see robed figures staring into empty space while they performed their chores like short-circuited robots, and when the day was done and the lights went out in the servants’ quarters, you could hear voices from behind closed doors: laughing, murmuring, occasionally weeping.

  The transition wasn’t easy for anyone, but it was worse for some than others. Just as Mister Chicago predicted, a handful of deadheads came out of their fugue with their minds severely impaired, their personalities little changed from the way they had been before they were taken off the drugs. There wasn’t much that could be done for them; the osmotic damage to their brains was too extensive for nanotech repair, and their new lives were doomed to a state of arrested adolescence. Others had memories that were only partly intact; they might recall their spouses, for instance, but not the dates of their marriages; a child’s college graduation ceremony might be vividly remembered, but not the school he attended, or even his or her name. In some ways, the latter were worse off than the former; the ones with blind spots were often frustrated, miserable with their inability to recall what should have been obvious, while the others were as content as children.

  And there were a few who became deeply depressed, even psychotic. Winston was disturbed when he discovered that he couldn’t remember many details of his old life: the position he had once held at IBM, his wife’s maiden name, the street address of his home in Los Angeles. A lot of little gaps, none important individually, but collectively adding up to an enormous gulf that he couldn’t bridge; he came to believe that he wasn’t the man he had once been. One evening, he sat silently by himself at dinner, barely nibbling at his food and saying little to anyone around him; when the meal was over he made a point of saying good night to all his friends. The next morning, we found that he had hanged himself in his room during the night.

  The suicide itself was simple; Winston had coiled a bedsheet into a rope, slung it over his closet door before shutting it, tied the outside end into a noose, stood up on a chair and pushed his neck through the loop, then kicked the chair away. What puzzled us was why he had blindfolded himself by wrapping a ripped towel around his eyes, until Russell deduced that this was the only way he could have killed himself without his associate stopping him. If his associate couldn’t see what he was doing, then there was no way it could stop him. He must have meticulously planned it all in advance, rehearsed it in his mind, then performed the act by touch alone, without seeing what he was doing. Only a very intelligent person could have carried out such a grim act with such methodical determination. But it was a shame nonetheless.

  This wasn’t nearly as bad as what happened a couple of weeks later, when Veronica tried to murder Hugh. She had been pretty twitchy for a while now—of all the deadheads who had started talking to themselves, she was the one whose monologues had become reminiscent of bag-lady rants—but when she stopped showering or bothering to put her soiled robes in the laundry cart, it became apparent that she was pretty close to the edge. Everyone went out of their way to avoid her, but one afternoon poor Hugh—one of our slower companions, happy to do anything that his associate told him to do, no questions asked—was unfortunate enough to be assigned to kitchen detail with her.

  I didn’t see what happened, but I heard all about it over the dinner table that evening. Hugh had been taking some pots down from a hanging rack when he dropped one of them next to Veronica, who was scrubbing the counter underneath. Veronica screamed when the pot hit the counter, then she snatched an eight-inch knife out of a butcher block and tried to bury it in Hugh’s heart.

  We already knew that our MINNs were capable of inflicting extreme pain in our frontal lobes as punishment for disobedience or bad behavior, or even a fatal cerebral aneurysm, such as when George attacked Kate in the showers during a similar psychotic snap. Veronica suffered the latter, but not before she managed to slash Hugh across the chest, arms, and hands several times before she dropped dead, the knife still clutched in her fist. Hugh was rushed to the infirmary by a couple of deadheads, and John brought him back to the servants’ quarters the following day. He didn’t have physical scars, but the emotional wounds never healed; after that, he refused to be alone with any of us ever again. He sat far away from everyone at the dinner table and wouldn’t even raise his eyes when someone spoke to him. Poor guy.

  For those who didn’t come out scatterbrained, depressed, or homicidal, though, it was a time of rebirth. Lazarus steps forth from the crypt, blinks a few times, and says, “Whoa, baby…is this the afterlife or what?”

  Russell was one of the first to regain his bearings. Russell Weatheral had been a Cal Tech research physicist who, at age 67, keeled over from a heart attack in 1996, a couple of months after he had helped confirm the formation of antihydrogen atoms in the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva. He told me that, shortly after he had signed up with the Immortality Partnership, he had made a wager with several of his colleagues: one thousand dollars, which had been deposited in an escrow account in Zurich only about a week before he died, would be awarded to him if an antimatter space drive was developed by the time he was resurrected.

  Russell sighs as he idly stirs his vegetable stew in the dining room. “I’ve checked it out with Hal,” he says, referring to his own associate. “Applied antimatter research reached a dead end about twenty years ago. It’s a scientific curiosity with no practical application.”

  “No starships, huh?” I ask, and he shakes his head sadly. “Guess you lost the bet, then.”

  “Yep.” Then he smiles. “But look at the bright side…I had a side-bet going with Stephen Hawking that I’d go before he did. I even entered it in my will…he’d get a five-year subscription to Omni if I lost. Sort of a reverse on a similar bet he lost to Kip Thorne on the existence of black holes.” He chuckles. “Hawking won, but Omni folded not long after I kicked the bucket.”

  Kate was Katherine Van Der Horst, the publisher of an influential New York fashion magazine. Her third husband had given her a membership in the Immortality Partnership as a wedding present. Although she came out of neurosuspension with her memory intact, she took revival quite hard. A second chance at life wasn’t something that she particularly wanted, even though she had returned with the same svelte body that had earned her fame and fortune on the fashion runways in the 1950s, minus the lung cancer that had finally killed her in 1989. Her magazine hadn’t lasted past 2002, and no one remembered the names of all the protégé models and designers she had fostered during her career. But she soon got over it, especially after her associate, Coco, informed her that she could instruct her MINN to activate a new gland in her body that would produce spermicidal hormones at will: birth control without pills, sponges, or rubbers. She hadn’t forgotten the fact that Russell saved her when George tried to rape her, and it wasn’t long before she repaid the favor. Russ was grinning for days.

  Sam MacAvoy had been a poet and novelist. His books had won several major literary prizes, his stories and his poems frequently anthologized. He had been one of the Beats, and his more notable friends had included the best and brightest voices of his generation; Lawrence Ferlinghetti had once put him up on his couch for several weeks, Alan Ginsberg had b
een a pool hall buddy, and he told me where Thomas Pynchon had been hiding out all those years—he knew, because he had gone out there to smoke grass with him a couple of times. From 1988, the last time Sam had published anything, until 1994, when he died of AIDS, he had been writer-in-residence at a succession of liberal arts colleges while struggling with writer’s block.

  A second life wasn’t something Sam had asked for, either; in fact, he considered it a curse. Just before he died, some anonymous admirer had gifted him with an Immortality Partnership membership. One of his deathbed memories was having that silver ID medallion placed in his hands by a nurse at the California hospice where he spent his final months. A last gift from a wealthy but shortsighted fan.

  “I don’t know who did this to me,” he says to me, one afternoon while we’re mopping the terrace, “but if I ever catch up with him, I’ll rip out his heart. Provided he underwent the same treatment, of course.”

  “How come?”

  “I checked the computer. Virtually everything I wrote…all my stories, my poems, my novels…have fallen out of print. The only thing that remains is a poem I scribbled on a napkin in Max’s Kansas City back in ’74, and even that’s lapsed into public domain.” He shakes his head as he plunges his mop into the bucket. “A writer’s words are supposed to outlive him, not vice versa…and, fuck it, I’m still blocked.”

  Which, of course, led to yet another question: Where was all the money these guys socked away? Sam died poor, but Russell had established a small trust fund for himself in the same Zurich account where he had placed his final wager with Stephen Hawking. Kate’s publishing empire was worth several hundred million dollars when she died, and her third husband and her lawyers had made sure that she wouldn’t come back from the netherworld as a pauper. My dad was rich, and so was Shemp’s. In fact, virtually everyone here came from upper-class backgrounds; most of them had established escrow accounts at various banks that were supposed to tide them over in the afterlife.