CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  “You were going to just sit here, let Lomax do what you knew he would.”

  “I never intended for this whole thing—”

  “Skip the theory. I’ve done the chillers, now Lomax does me. Logical.”

  “He isn’t really like this, you don’t know him. He’s shaded the law, sure, plenty of times. But this, it’s not like—”

  “Maybe Lomax is in further than he ever got before, further than he thought,” George said, tired of the softness in this man, “but he’ll follow his logic.”

  Reverend Montana leaded forward and buried his face in his hands. His voice was hollow, haunted. “How did I ever—”

  “Skip it, I said.” His analytical side had more in common with Lomax than with Reverend Montana. A clarity, a sharpness like the gleaming blade of a blue-steel knife. The soft side, the one that needed the Reverend, that part of him was only a small, hushed voice now.

  A long silence. George let it do some work for him. When Reverend Montana slowly looked up, there was a wary, gray cast to his sagging mouth. “What are you going to do with…”

  “With you?” George smiled again, enjoying this. “You’re going to get me away, far away. Where your brother can’t find me, and neither can anybody else.”

  “But I don’t know how—”

  “You’ll tell him you never saw me. I’ll just disappear.”

  “How can I—”

  “Your sermon about the mission work in Brazil, Colombia, places like that. Lord’s work—simple and good, you said.”

  The Reverend peered at George as if through a fog. He realized that this curiously shrunken man was seeing him true and hard for the first time, witnessing the analytical self who hid so well.

  It was pointless to tell the Reverend that George had taken the precaution of hiding some data files deep in distant computer banks. The files would point at Lomax if any legal types came snooping. But the files would lie dormant, sleeping like the noble dead—unless George roused them with a simple dialup command.

  Just the kind of precaution that Lomax, the smarter one, would respect. So George had left a tickler in Lomax’s computer inventories, too. It would tell Lomax the dangers of trying to strike at George, even if he could find the trail.

  Such clean logics eluded men like Montana. The Reverend only now saw before him the inner George, who knew how to cut through the softness of the world, how to act. All along, Montana had not understood what it truly meant to be a silent soldier of God. When swine like Cowell gave God the finger, only George could show God’s fist.

  A troubled fear worked itself across Montana’s face. He did not like or understand the true warrior who stood before him.

  George chuckled. Energy flooded through his bones.

  We meet at last.

  SEVEN

  THE COMING HOUR

  Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.

  —John 5:28–29

  1

  SUSAN

  A chilly pane of glass. Ice crystals speckled it.

  She blew on a spot. Hot breath.

  Blue-white crystals dissolved. A dark dot grew.

  She leaned closer. Through the spreading dot she saw beyond a black wintry night, immense and frigid and forever.

  Striations of pain.

  Flickering warmth.

  Blunt thumps. A hiss. Thin purrings.

  Splinters of light that converged. Blobs, moving. Yellow. White.

  Floating. Distant rubs.

  Time, time. A spike of hot. Then gone.

  The glows trembled, faded. Blackness again.

  A warm touch. Moving across her. Like licking, the thought came. She rummaged for it, but even the words dissolved.

  Sooooo. The whistling came from far away. A chilly wind blowing down from mountain canyons.

  Soooo. Closer. A soft sigh in the winter night.

  Sooo. Annn. So. And. So and so and so.

  Hiss. Click.

  Crisp. Sharp. She… felt motion? Rising? Falling?

  Sooosssaaann. Sooosan. Susan.

  A strumming heat. Susaaan. Dooo yooou heaaarrr niece?

  She felt a spurt of surprise. Susaaaan. It was a voice, the words coming fast enough to recognize. But no background sounds, except those hisses and clicks before, now gone.

  Ah, good. Do not try to talk.

  What could…? She had been on the sand. Salty air. Travis beside her. Waves crunching into the surf.

  It seemed somehow far away. Dwindled. Like photos in an album. Winking shards of broken glass.

  Some sort of accident?

  I can sense that you are there.

  Where? Was she trapped?

  Coasting blackness. A moment of awful silence, profound and frightening.

  Do not try to move. I will return muscular control later.

  Had she had a stroke? A sudden bursting of cerebral hemorrhage? Thrombosis? Embolism?

  Tumbling onto the sand, tongue lolling, helpless. Hemiplegia. Paralysis. Cortical sensory loss. Oh God, no, please.

  Deep coma could last days, months.

  Years.

  I want to check a few things. Can you hear this?

  She caught a whisper of sound. A tapping.

  Ah, I see you can.

  So she was getting some of her abilities back. What had he said about motor control?

  She heard the hiss again. Then a humming. Footsteps?

  Ummm. Looks good at higher levels, too.

  Looks good? She was blind, paralyzed. Disoriented. Terrified. She had seen innumerable stroke patients at UCI, and in many ways they were the most forlorn of all the ill. They were heartbreakingly close to functional, brains still working, missing only sections of the intricate web that directed actions. Yet that failure encased their spirits in their own rebelling bodies. Their haunted eyes peered out from a profound prison.

  A prison for which medicine had no sure key.

  Now will you please try to open your eyes.

  It took a conscious effort of will. How did she open her eyes?

  The unthinking reflex now took some hard thought, as though she had to search around for it among an old drawer of a forgotten cabinet, numb fingers feeling for the odd lumps there and trying to recognize what they had once been. How had she…? There was a certain flicker of movement, so natural, so obvious when you did not have to think about it—

  A blaze of hard white light.

  Too much, step it down.

  The brilliant eruption faded.

  Looks like she’s getting images, though.

  Infinite space. Small dots measured the expanses of it, black specks lined up neatly and marching away forever.

  Something moved across this space, and her perspective shifted and it was a head. A human head. Blue operating mask. Blue eyes glittering with excitement. It spoke. “Susan. I am Dr. Eusivio Fernandez. I wish you to go through some exercises for me, please.”

  She felt a leaden depression. A cerebrovascular failure, then, and a bad one. Hands, arms, legs—no sensation. She willed her arms to move. Nothing. No distant tugs, as though muscles moved but she could not feel them. Complete shutdown. A gray jail of the body.

  She fluttered her eyelids in agreement. It was the only way to answer.

  “Good. She’s registering, all right. Susan, if you understand, answer yes by blinking once.”

  She thought in despair, Oh God. Carefully she gave a slow blink.

  “Good. Try two blinks to say no, okay?”

  She blinked twice.

  “Excellent. Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine.”

  Sure, she thought bitterly. I’m just paralyzed, is all. I hope my bedside manner is better than this. Was better.

  “Now, Susan, I am going to return sensation to your upper chest.” The head turned, nodded to someon
e beyond her field of view. “Close your eyes and keep them closed if you feel pain.”

  What? Return sensation? What could— She blinked, startled at the abrupt, intense feeling of her lungs swelling, pushing, midway through expanding, her ribs rising. The elastic resistance, minute stresses, the satisfying savor of surging air. It felt wonderful. Whoosh, rest. Whoosh, rest.

  And no pain. She kept her eyes resolutely open, not even blinking.

  “Excellent. Remember, if at any time you feel pain, simply close your eyes. All right?” Behind his words she picked out a soft sigh and whir of machinery.

  She blinked once. The man’s head hung above her like an enormous moon, orbiting against the infinite white space.

  Uncertainly, groping, she tried to take a deeper breath. Nothing changed. Whoosh, rest; whoosh, rest. Her lungs were running on their own.

  A tremor of cold fear trickled through her. What was this? Nothing in medicine accounted for this treatment. The vast white space overhead was now clearly just an ordinary operating room ceiling, but this was no operation she knew. How did they do this, keep her lungs running, but no heart-lung machine astride her chest, slamming into her? No drug in the world could do that.

  “I am restarting your neck and facial perceptual net. Again, report any pain, please.”

  A fierce itching across her forehead.

  Pungent disinfectant smell. A prickly urge to sneeze.

  Warm breeze caressing her cheek.

  “That seems stabilized.” The head swung above her. “It’s going a bit better than I expected,” he said to someone beyond her view. “How’s the global?”

  Another man’s voice said, farther away, “Cardioculatory five point two liters per minute, steady. Left ventricle one twenty. Broncho-spirometric ratio fifty-three right, forty-eight left.”

  “Test those mid perifs again.”

  A faint woman’s voice said, “Still getting some current jitter.”

  “How large?”

  “Point one three microamp RMS.”

  “We can live with that. Should settle down.” The head looked down at her. Brown eyes, narrowed with concentration. “I’m going to turn on your upper sensory net. Close your eyes to signal pain, please.”

  A pause. She studied the ceiling, unable to think.

  A click somewhere.

  Itching across her chest.

  Rub of cloth at her waist.

  A suffusing warmth down her arms, into her hands.

  “Better watch the levels,” the head said. “Don’t want to go over the peak into saturation.”

  “Backing off a little,” the distant woman’s voice said.

  “Feedback stabilization within parameters?”

  “One point seven two.”

  “Great. Great.” The head studied her intently. “Susan, it’s going to take us a while to get the rest of you up and running. Your legs will take some work. But the boot-up is holding steady. Welcome back.”

  She blinked furiously.

  “What? Sorry, it will be at least a day until we can turn over function management to you. Your throat is a little raw anyway. We’ll paint it, get it smoothed out. Can’t let you talk until then. And there’s a long line of people who want to speak to you. Look, we’re excited here, this is a tremendous success. You’re going to walk this earth again, Susan, believe me.”

  She blinked energetically again. Someone murmured insistently.

  Frown lines above the brown eyes. “Oh, hell, I never remember the protocols. Sorry. Susan Hagerty, you have been cryonically suspended following a severe injury. You are now revived. We welcome you to a new life.”

  Later, she would wonder how she could have been so thick-headed. Probably it was the drugs, in part. Still, it came as a complete surprise, a massive freight train thundering out of blackness.

  2

  GEORGE

  The boy Manuel found him deep in the moist forest. The great heat of the day now ebbed, the air no longer brimming with infesting warmth, the first whispering breeze bringing a curious hush.

  George was fixing the solar panel drive on the peak that people here called the Fortress, because it reared like a lone, aggressive castle, a battlework of sharp granites towering above the jungle canopy. The panels needed to track the sun to store enough energy for the new microwave dish. The receiver and transfer net filled the knobby summit, a giant ear cupped to hear a satellite far out in chilly vacuum. That such a remote, desiccated and silvery craft in the empty sky could be locked in electromagnetic embrace with this place of leafy heaviness, transfixed by sweet rot and the stink of carrion, was to George a mute miracle, to which he humbly gave his tribute and aid.

  Manuel yelled at him in Spanish from a ledge below. “Mr. Confuelos says to come! Right away!”

  “I’m nearly through.”

  “Right away! He says it is about the Reverend.”

  The word spun George away into a morass of colliding sensations, memories, fretwork pains. He stared off into infinity. Toward him flew a rainbird, flapping with the mild breeze off the Atlantic, a murmuring wind that lifted the weight from the stinging day. The bird’s translucent shape flickered against big-bellied clouds, and George thought of memories ancient and wrinkled and yet still coming forth. Bruised shadows of a distant time, floating toward him now across the layered air.

  It was not over. It would never be over.

  He waved to Manuel. “Go on back. I’ll come soon.”

  He finished wiring the feedback, letting the cool and precise part of him do the job. He had to force down the welter of confusions that wanted to take him over. He struggled to insulate the calm, unsettled center of himself so that it could work on the final circuit, test it out.

  The big solar panels caught more power if they tracked the sun, so George had dug into the specs and figured a way to build a feedback mechanism. It used an old motor from a refrigerator and some breadboarded microchips salvaged from a broken-down Ford truck. He switched on the rig and watched it swing back and forth, seeking the maximum sunlight, and then lock on. To test it he held a palm fan over the panels, and the circuitry responded sluggishly, tracking around to seek the sun like an ungainly, flat flower. Slow, sure, but it worked.

  Coming back down through kilometers of jungle took him through terrain that reflected his inner turmoil. Rotting logs shone with a vile, vivid emerald. Swirls of phosphorescent lichen engulfed thick-barked trees. Nothing held sway for long. Hand-size spiders scuttled like black motes across the intricate green radiance. Through the decades George had come to know this exotic vitality and how to slip through its myriad threats, spot its traps and viper seductions. He sidestepped a blood vine’s barbs, wisely gave a column of lime ants their way. Rustlings escorted him through dappled shadows that he knew held a million minute violences. Carrion moths fluttered on charcoal wings in search of the fallen. Tall grass blades cut the shifting sunlight, like swords upon which jungle giants could impale themselves with a stumble.

  He came into the mission church, tired from the day’s work, but contented with the roll of muscle in his shoulders and gut. The straps of his pack tugged him with a reminder of another fine day’s work done. He was graying now, but still had a flat belly and sinewy legs. He had seen a lot pass here, the press of overpopulation on the lush land. He disliked how the town of Santa Isabella sprawled like a tan fungus and now nearly enveloped the church camp. When he had first come the concrete-block building that became his home had stood in pastel-painted loneliness among the jungle’s riot of emerald invention. Now a dirt road wound by it, puddles from the morning rain mirroring the iron cross over the entrance gate. Ramshackle houses and one-room factories lay toward town, soiling the air with greasy diesel smoke. Clattering generators labored, coconut shards and crushed aluminum beer cans littered the walk, and the usual crowd of worn men waited for the church supper to start. They slouched against a stained yellow wall, scrawny and raw-boned and faces slack with fatigue. They were sour twists of men,
maraneros from the jungle, a machete their single tool, sporting once-jaunty tattoos of wide-winged eagles and bulls and grinning skulls. Tough looking, but George had done in quite a few of them in the Lord’s cause, stamping out the drug runners and thieves.

  “George! A moment,” came a stealthy voice. Señor Confuelos tugged him aside, into a side room of the cafeteria building. The gaunt, swarthy man beseeched, “I’ve been treating you all right, have I not? I make sure you get your injections and good work and even the nights in town, remember? I allow you those nights.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  “Now you’re not to tell anyone, this Reverend person, about the nights, understand?”

  George’s mind struggled, his analytical side rusty and resistant. “You just be sure that anybody comes by, you don’t know where I am.”

  “He has sent us the support money for so long now, it would be a tragedy, George, if you communicated to him—by surprise, I wish you had warned me!—if he learned, well, things not to the liking of a high-minded man like him.” This came out in a whispered rush as Mr. Confuelos mopped George’s brow with a kitchen towel.

  “I’ll keep quiet.” George was sharpening himself inside, but he still felt amusement at this man’s anxieties. He frowned and said, deadpan, “He won’t like Angelina?”

  “No, no, do not mention her.”

  The sweetness of her seemed to swarm up into his nostrils then, blotting out the disinfectant smell from the cracked linoleum. He could see his thrice-weekly walk down to the Salon Maria, a pastel-pink clapboard box three stories tall, where Angelina was always waiting. She was younger than he but not by much and was short and sturdy in the durable manner of the coastal women. Her electric black hair tumbled like roiling smoke about her shoulders, spilling onto her full breasts in the wan candlelight. After a tough day he would lift her onto him, setting her astride his muscular arch. The hair wreathed them both, making a humid space that was theirs only, musk-rich and silent. She bounced and stroked and coaxed from him the tensions of time and later would fetch him dark rum laced with lime. Her eyes widened with comic rapt amazement as he told her about his work, always the work, her deep womanly eyes reflecting the orange serenity of the languid candle flame.