CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  “More than a hand, lover,” he said with a warm grin that tilted her heart.

  “Ummm, and barnyard humor for dessert, too.”

  They approached the cathedral grounds. It seemed smaller and innocuous in morning light. A big digital display board bordering the street said

  FELLOWSHIP BREAKFAST. ALL WELCOME IN THE HOUSE OF THE LORD.

  The crisp morning air lent sharp detail to the cathedral’s sheer heights, its wooded grounds and vast parking lots. It was almost like a tiny, independent province, Kathryn thought, a pleasant glade of rest. The shrouded gloom of last night had evaporated.

  She had never felt the emotional tug of organized religion—indeed, the term seemed a contradiction, for her immediate sense of reverence extended to the whole natural world, and organizing it into boundaries and beliefs was as pointless as learning the names of all the flowers without taking the time to smell them. But this morning’s sunlit glow spread through her like a luxuriant fluid, and she was willing to accept the vast need others had for the company of like-minded folk in the face of the infinite. What she could not accept was their relentless campaign against those of other persuasions.

  “I wonder if this is really a good idea,” she said, her stomach tightening as they got nearer.

  “I couldn’t stay away,” Alex said. “Not now.”

  “You’re really sure the cockroaches will wake up?”

  “Tested it in the lab. It’s a natural defense mechanism. Cold weather comes, they slow down until it’s warm again.”

  “Like that girl who fell into the lake, ice skating?”

  Alex gestured amiably with his free hand. “Different—we can’t actually hibernate. Sometimes it’s not so great being human, but it’s always fun being a mammal.”

  “Ah, so that’s what you were trying to demonstrate in bed last night?”

  He laughed but would not be deflected. “That kid came back to full function after nearly an hour in the water, stone cold dead by any clinical definition.”

  “Dead by clinical definition,” Kathryn said.

  “Right. Which really only means they don’t know how to save the structure that makes up who the person is.”

  They turned off the sidewalk and ambled among a line of willows. Through the trees and brush they could see the long cinderblock church buildings. A breeze carried faint murmurs of many conversations and the cloying sweet scent of scrambled eggs and syrup. Kathryn’s stomach knotted. She felt conspicuous, sure someone would guess.

  “Should be about now.” Alex said, his eyes bright.

  She saw suddenly that he needed this. Although he could not speak of it, she had felt in the last two nights a fierce animal drive in him—the desire to prove to himself that he was alive, brimming and bursting and exuberantly alive. The accident had brushed him with black wings.

  And she had gone with him last night, into a world they made together—that fierce, demanding jungle where only a thin layer of skin separated two minds that suddenly desired to merge, blend, and fuse in a blaze of furious heat. They both carried an unspoken deep reservoir that had finally broken open, spilling years of tensions, draining them away.

  Alex said, “That’s how researchers keep those little guys inactive in the lab, y’know. Ice them down. They wake up good as new, and the first thing they want is breakfast.”

  The distant mutter of talk rose. Kathryn turned and impulsively embraced Alex, awkwardly putting her arms around him and his bound-up left arm.

  A window shattered in the dining hall. A can of tomatoes tumbled out onto the lawn.

  A woman’s high shriek. Then another. Quickly, a chorus of screams and shouts.

  A woman ran out the side door, hands in air, shouting incoherently. She ran five paces and tripped over a curb and crashed into the lawn, still babbling.

  From inside, bangs and clatters. A splintering crash of glass.

  The main doors flung open. Men and women bolted out, mouths agape, howling.

  A panicked babble arose from the building, and for a moment it seemed about to explode from the rising din. Torrents of people in their Sunday best fled like waters from a burst dam. Another window smashed.

  “Why, something seems to have occurred,” Alex said innocently.

  “It does indeed,” Kathryn said. “What’s that?”

  A gray, official-looking Ford sedan pulled into the parking lot.

  “That’ll be the inspector from the County Board of Health,” Alex said, glancing at his watch. “Right on time.”

  5

  SUSAN

  Mrs. Yamada was in pain, but she gave Susan a joyful grin. “Welcome to the flower show.”

  “Ummm.” Susan sniffed at a gorgeous fountain of irises. “Does one of your sons own a florist shop?”

  “They’ll have paid for one by the time this is over.”

  There was a subtle difference between Mrs. Yamada’s laugh lines, earned in life’s battles, and the thin crinkles that now told of gnawing aches. She had chosen to endure rather than yield up a scrap of herself to drugs. The menu of chemical consolations was seductive, but this wry woman permitted nothing to blunt her world.

  Susan admired the scentful clouds of day lilies, roses, vibrant baby’s breath and moist orchids, then perched on Mrs. Yamada’s bed and chatted amiably for a few moments. When the right moment came by, she said softly, “I’m afraid that I won’t be practicing here any longer.”

  There; careful and neutral. This was Blevin’s patient, after all. But it didn’t get past the gleaming black eyes. “Blevin’s pushed you off my case?”

  “Out of the hospital, actually.”

  “He can do that?”

  “It’s not about you.”

  “Oh, yes it is. Cryonics, right?”

  “It’s over my research. Not about the student who spoke to you, Mr. Skinner.”

  “That started it, though.” Mrs. Yamada’s mouth twisted into a scornful line and she crossed her arms with absolute conviction. “I put him on the scent.”

  “You are not in any way responsible.” It would be reprehensible to load any of this onto a patient. Particularly one who would need every resource, and soon.

  “Well, I’m going to look into it anyway. And I’ll get somebody other than that Blevin.”

  “You are free to have any physician you like. Not me, though. I’m sorry.”

  “All right.” A sigh. Some of the starch went out of her. “Did you get a look at my latest tests?”

  It would be smart to say no. “Well, yes.”

  “It’s eating away at me, right?”

  “I’m afraid that seems to be the most probable implication of all the diagnostic results.”

  With an impish grin, this time momentarily free from pain, she said, “You don’t have to be like the rest of them. You could just say yes.”

  Susan laughed. “Uh, yes.”

  “Well, you play the cards you’re dealt.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, so Susan simply took Mrs. Yamada’s hand.

  “Are the rest of the doctors here like Blevin?”

  Susan knew she should not really even be here, but she let herself answer, “In what way?”

  “Stiff. By-the-book types.”

  “Not all.”

  “Are they all against freezing the patients they can’t save?”

  “Probably. We’ve never really discussed it.”

  “Shouldn’t you?”

  “This is a conservative institution.”

  “What’s more conservative,” Mrs. Yamada said sharply, “holding on to as much of the patient as you can, keeping them, hoping you might find a way to bring them back? Or burning them to a crisp?”

  “Your family favors cremation?”

  “Oh yes. People are dying to do it.” The mordant wit came without even a smile, as though a gesture toward gallows humor were a purely social obligation, something the dying did to get the living through an awkward moment.

 
; “I am ending my clinical practice here. I cannot properly give you detailed advice, but—” On impulse she reached out and firmly clasped both Mrs. Yamada’s hands. They were worn smooth by a lifetime of labor. “You have a terminal condition. Cryonics is a slim possibility. No one knows how slim, but it’s probably quite small. You should follow up the process if you feel it is compatible with your own personal philosophy. Think about it, Mrs. Yamada. I’m not pushing.”

  Mrs. Yamada squeezed back with surprising force. Tears welled up in the marble-hard eyes. Susan saw that the impassive stoicism was a veneer, perilously thin. “I’m going to. I promise.”

  “Good. Very good.” Susan blinked rapidly. Doctors did not run their mascara.

  “Good-bye.” Mrs. Yamada gave her a hug.

  Other physicians had always been better at knowing when to let go. It was part of the clinical attitude. Still, Susan left the room feeling oddly cleansed, at having put some small matter right, at least.

  She could not reasonably involve herself in the paperwork pyramid Mrs. Yamada would have to climb, while fighting her illness, to arrange for cryosuspension. Courts frequently found terminal patients to be mentally incapable of executing legal matters properly, especially if relatives claimed any “duress.” Susan would be a prime target of any such litigation, and she could not give such potent ammunition to any of Mrs. Yamada’s sons. They looked like dutiful, unassuming men, but inheritance law makes ogres of the meek.

  She made her way to her hospital office and resumed the stale task of boxing up her books and notes. She would haul them over to her medical school office, but didn’t plan to unpack them. In her bones she felt that her clinical days were over. Her UCI time might be quite short, too, if the Academic Senate acted swiftly.

  She tried to focus on the many issues she would have to deal with, but her heart was not in it. There had to be a way to leave a dying patient’s bedside and cleanly go home to your own troubles, but she had never mastered it. And there had to be some professional method to take Mrs. Yamada’s impending fate with the right level of seriousness, and yet still have some intensity for her own predicament, for her friends’ passing troubles, for the daily parade of discords that were, in the end, life.

  She resolved to by God be ready for anything. But she was not prepared for a visit by Dr. Marilyn Jacobs, who swept into Susan’s office in a severely tailored gray suit.

  “I wanted to have a private moment with you,” Jacobs said. “I feel I owe you an explanation.”

  Susan cleared some files from a chair, and the white-haired woman went on briskly, as though this speech had been prepared. “I voted against you in the committee because I thought Dr. Blevin’s charges had some foundation. And I feel we must watch very carefully for animal abuses, or the rights activists will crucify us in the media.”

  This didn’t seem to require any answer. Susan gave none. She reflected that it was interesting how, with nothing left to lose, she could simply watch events unfurl like a spectator at a play, safely sitting in the darkened audience.

  “But I have since come to feel that Blevin is continuing to conduct a personal campaign against you. As a colleague and as a woman, I had to tell you.” Marilyn Jacobs looked down at her hands, which were knotted together in her lap.

  “This is not exactly news,” Susan said dryly.

  “I did not understand the depth of Blevin’s feelings.”

  “Weren’t they pretty obvious?”

  “I took them to be in the heat of the moment. But now he is spending a great deal of time gathering support against you in the Academic Senate.”

  “I expected that.”

  “He wants a quick judgment and your formal ejection from the faculty.”

  Am I being cynical? Susan inspected her feelings. This sounds like just another way to hustle me into resigning.

  But Marilyn Jacobs seemed genuinely vexed, her face lined and pale. In contrast with the neatness of her freshly pressed formal suit, her makeup clung to the crow’s-feet spreading from her eyes and there was a haggard roughness to the skin that creams could not banish.

  “I’ll have to move fast.”

  “Do.” The thin woman’s voice was tight and earnest. “We’ve hushed up problems in the med school before, but in this case the dean is playing his cards, shall we say, under the table.”

  “By reprimanding Blevin but letting the charges against me go to the Senate.”

  “He’s cut Blevin’s clinical income, too—but not by much. That way he looks even-handed. And he can divorce himself from Blevin’s private accusations.”

  Susan had figured out most of this, but she no longer heard any corridor gossip, of course. “Accusations?”

  “That you were using UCI’s reputation to make money, dirty money, and to do illegal experiments.”

  Susan had been cultivating a bemused detachment, but this rankled her. “That’s obscene.”

  “You have this, uh, entanglement with Immortality Incorporated. And you haven’t reported that experiment with the dog yet.”

  “Because I’m not through analyzing it.”

  “It would be smart to get something out. Call a press conference, announce your results.”

  Susan shook her head. “That’s not my style. I need to run some more tests on my lab mice population, and then—”

  “There isn’t time!” Jacobs was flushed, becoming more animated. “While you’re refining your results, going through the scientific journals, Blevin will crucify you.”

  “Executions always draw a big crowd, don’t they? If only I could find a way to get through to my own colleagues here…” Susan gazed out her sole office window, toward a tawny hillside.

  “A lot of people think what you’re doing is, well, immoral.”

  Susan laughed. “I see—Immorality Incorporated?”

  Jacobs looked uncomfortable, as though struggling with her own inner arguments. “I’ve heard some faculty say it is simply unprincipled, to spend money on people who are already dead.”

  “It’s their money. How does paying to suspend yourself differ from setting up, say, a nonprofit foundation to spend your estate?”

  “Because it’s for yourself, not others.”

  “Sounds like forced charity to me.”

  “There’s more to it than that. If the older generation hangs around, even just in liquid nitrogen, it’s not getting out of the way of the young. Every generation deserves a fresh start, don’t you think?”

  “Descendants inherit the gains of the past, all the knowledge and creativity. That doesn’t mean each generation gets to dispose of the past as it likes.”

  Jacobs looked genuinely concerned, as if she had been struggling with these issues herself. Probably she had been defending Susan in coffee-break gossip circles, and these ideas troubled her. “What about the ethics of overpopulating? What if everybody does this and it works?”

  “I don’t think there’s danger of people jumping on the cryonics bandwagon. Just the opposite,” Susan said wryly. “And even if they did, so what? The industrial countries are the only ones which could afford to, and they’re not the breeders of the planet. The increase comes from Asia, Africa, South America. That’s where we have to fight the battle.”

  Jacobs looked at her hands, still vexed. “Ron Miller, the bioethics fellow, said something about that. But he questioned the emotional elements of refusing to accept death.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if talk about the wisdom of acceptance and so forth isn’t just making a virtue of necessity.”

  Jacobs gave a weak, worried chuckle. Susan tried to read the concern that knitted her brow. Physicians tried to be superrational, but constant exposure to death kindled deep emotions. Many people entertained the consoling fantasy of themselves peacefully sleeping in their fancy sealed coffins, unchanged through the ages. And even Joe Sixpack could envision the “discomfort” of spending a century as a frozen, naked statue in a giant Thermos bottle.

  Susan said soft
ly, “Something else bothers you, though.”

  “Well, yes.” Jacobs bit her upper lip. “I think you’re being treated shabbily, but still—this feels wrong. If I did it, I might reawaken in some strange place, without any of my family, my friends, no job.”

  Susan nodded sympathetically. “Women feel that way, more than men. I call it the neighborhood argument—you’re really saying ‘I am my neighborhood.’ That you can’t live outside your present context.”

  Jacobs nodded jerkily. “It’s a horrible idea to me.”

  “Me, too. Until I realized that I came into this world pretty much that way. I had family, true—but there’ll be your descendants in the future, remember. When you and I started out as babies, we knew nothing, nobody.”

  “But now we have friends, family we’ve known so long. I would hate to lose them.”

  “If they elect to be suspended, they can go, too.”

  Jacobs blinked, as though she had not considered this. “Oh, I don’t think they would.”

  “Maybe they won’t. It’s the most deeply personal choice anyone can ever make.”

  “But I’m used to this time. Who knows what the future will be like?”

  Susan shrugged. “Nobody. And no matter how much you love this time, you can’t hold on to it. The world changes. Sometimes for the better.”

  Jacobs brushed at her cheek, and Susan saw a tear. She had been involved with cryonics so long, at times she forgot the deep emotions this kind of discussion called up. “Look, it’s perfectly natural to react this way,” she said. “We women are more communal, we relate to others. These ideas, the first time we hear of them, it pulls the rug from under us, emotionally.”

  Jacobs took out a tissue and dabbed at her eyes. “Men don’t seem to.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” Susan said, trying to be a bit upbeat. “They’re more loners than we are. They like long hikes, getting away, exploring. Most of the great male myths are about that, like The Odyssey. Cryonics has that same feel for them, a big journey to a strange place. Deep down it’s okay for them. Us, it frightens some.”