CHILLER

by Gregory Benford

  “Now, the Reverend, he is not to know that some of his tithing, it goes for that.”

  “That?”

  “The Salon Maria.”

  “I never knew it did,” George said with feigned innocence.

  Genuine shock spread across the vexed face of Mr. Confuelos. “I could not take Church funds for it.”

  “Sí, sí. But aren’t you just taking it from the Reverend’s Church, instead?”

  “You must not think so!”

  He tired of toying with Confuelos. “Let me see my messages.”

  “You said I was to call you if—”

  “I didn’t say to read my mail.”

  George pushed past him, by a plywood door into the main kitchen. Past steel counters, old microwave ovens, and women in greasy aprons wearing beatific expressions. He strode into the mission office and slammed the door in Mr. Confuelos’s face.

  The gray computer screen held a WOrldNet news item, letters shimmering. George’s program had fished it out of the torrent of news, and it confirmed the worst of his fears: The Hagerty woman had made it through.

  His requests for a search/scan on the Reverend Montana had turned up news items buried in the Orange County Register, recent but routine. Confuelos had gone snooping, seen them, and spooked.

  He sat a long time at the fly-specked Formica table, staring at the remains of Confuelos’s lunch, a chipped blue plate with rice and beans and a gnawed crescent of green tortilla. George felt the old swirl of emotions, unleashed as though they had lain in waiting all this time. Incoherent, disconnected images propelled him down musty corridors of self. Words formed on his lips but evaporated before spoken.

  “Glory. Glory be to God,” George got out finally. His destiny and mission were once again sharp and sure.

  He banged open the office door and strode out onto the bare stone patio. The town lay beyond, a crowded shambles. Decades of work, and the problems just got worse.

  Work. That had been the best of it, a life dedicated to these mud-brown people steeped in eternal confusions. He had loved roaming around the province in the old Chevy truck, fixing water pumps for the cooperatives that dotted the steep mountainsides. But he had known his time here was drawing to a close. He had even helped it happen. He had helped install the fiber-optic link that brought WOrldNet into the village. “Making all the world WON,” the propaganda said. He looked up at the cobwebs bridging the transom of a speckled window. Webs everywhere now. He had used his phone hacker knowledge to keep up on computer stuff, getting free access to the international electronic fabric. That let him keep track of events in California, keep watch like a lonely, distant sentinel.

  But that same net would find him now.

  A Godly sign, yes. The Hagerty woman. WOrldNet closing in on him.

  Here he had a routine of solid work and healthy living. It kept him in what Mr. Confuelos called a native state of grace. He had a reputation as a fix-it man without parallel, willing to undertake any job, in fact liking the tough tasks best, the ones that gave him a workout with meaty arms and legs, that brought a shine of honest sweat.

  That contentment was over. His larger, ancient legacy called.

  3

  SUSAN

  They kept her in a milky fluid that seemed to insinuate itself into her skin like a cloudy memory. With her head propped up above the thick, cool liquid, she lay in her drowsy, slow-motion world. The fluid vibrated sometimes, tingled others. For a while she thought they had rolled her outside, for there were green hills in the distance. A river nearby had pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the slanting sun, and the water was leaping and swift near her but blue and deep further along. A wind murmured, stirring a cottonwood nearby. That blew white motes into the moist air, and some drifted down to the river and the spray claimed them.

  She slept and then watched the river with its fresh smells and slept again. Only after that did she see that the walls of the room came awake when she did. The next time they were a sea scene, big booming waves crashing on a black reef, plumes jetting into the crystalline, salty air, foam hissing onto a gritty beach.

  Dr. Fernandez was there several of these times, and she knew somehow who he was but paid him no attention—until abruptly he leaped into focus. She registered him sharp and clear, like a television picture that balloons into life. He was in the middle of an explanation of the milky fluid’s healing properties. Fernandez was precise and deliberate, already describing some neuron repair mechanism, but the chemistry of it eluded Susan, and she watched the big waves beyond Fernandez some more. Afterward she remembered that the milky stuff duplicated many of the body’s own cleansing mechanisms, only better. How she had learned this she could not recall. She watched the beach, waiting for nightfall, and as soon as the ruby sunset trickled away, she fell asleep.

  Then she came in on the middle of Fernandez talking again. She was sitting up in a soft bed that massaged her with patient skill. A man in a blue scrub suit was rubbing a mottled, stiff jelly into the back of her neck and upper spine, squeezing it from a giant orange toothpaste tube. Fernandez talked straight through this, and it was all very interesting, but she could never remember what he had been saying for very long.

  “When do I get these back?” She held up a hand, which had pink flesh where her fingernails should be.

  “Frappo, I told staff to paint those.” Annoyance momentarily roiled Fernandez’s calm surface.

  “What happened to my originals?”

  “The primitive perfusion technique didn’t get to them. Uh, sorry, I didn’t mean to derogate your achievements, Dr. Hagerty. I’ll have a nurse paint on some triot later.”

  “Triot?”

  “Oh, a salve that makes the underlying cells express the appropriate repair mechanisms.”

  Just like that, she thought fuzzily. Dab on miracle goo, goose the body’s innate fix-up squads. Let Mother Nature do the grunt work. She was trying to imagine how it worked, and the immense changes Dr. Fernandez’s casual comment implied, when she dozed off.

  She awoke again into a dark room, and the walls and ceiling gradually eased into a night sky, its horizon rimmed in stately spires that after a while she saw were trees. Then she was awake again and Fernandez was talking, but this time she could follow it very well and he introduced a Dr. Blyer. This was a short man with intense brown eyes who kept glancing down at a square pad on his knee. When she turned her head, she saw a thin cable leading from the pad and around, out of her field of view. She turned further and felt a tug at the base of her spine. They explained that the cable was socketed into her so they could check on some diagnostics, and when she asked what kind, the description quickly got away from her, and by the time she started registering things again, Blyer and Fernandez were discussing the spinal membrane, the meninges, as though she had asked an intelligent question about it.

  “But do go on with your story,” Dr. Blyer said, falsely casual.

  “Story?”

  “You were telling us your life story,” Fernandez prompted.

  She was in a large square room packed with odd equipment. A canned hospital astringency flavored the air, and the walls had a peculiar shine to them. How she had gotten here did not seem terribly important beneath the glossy, calming glow of the fluorescents.

  “Oh… yes. After finishing at Harvard and Mass Gen I did a turn at Rockefeller. By accident I got interested in the problem of cryoprecipitates in long-term preservation of blood samples. The high factor eight content seemed to me to imply a three-step process, taking place at four degrees centigrade, that you could intervene with. I worked out the steps and then saw that perhaps I could extend the range of operation down, to below freezing, where intervention would be harder and slower, but could affect other reaction rates, too.”

  Fernandez nodded. “Your early ideas, yes. That led to the transglycerols?”

  “Well, I didn’t get into those effects until I—until I—met—”

  “You can skip over that,” Dr. Blye
r said gently.

  “I met—where?—met—where is—?” Her lungs lurched, breath rasping in her throat.

  “We’ll come back to that later,” Blyer said smoothly. He looked down at the pad on his knee. With two fingers he tapped on the pad, as though he were entering something on a keyboard.

  Susan felt a subtle change in herself. Now her breath came smoothly, her mind cleared. Something had bothered her just a moment before. What was it? An idea, a memory, like a massive fish in the gloomy shallows of her mind, slippery. Darting. Gone.

  The vexing thoughts dwindled. She gazed at the wall screens and felt a soothing quiet descend into her mind.

  Dr. Blyer leaned forward and held her gaze. “I hope none of this procedure disturbs you, Dr. Hagerty. Of course no such methods existed in your era, but I assure you they are no more intrusive than absolute necessity demands. They leave no detectable trauma.”

  “I don’t quite understand what you’re doing.”

  Dr. Blyer put his pad aside and leaned forward earnestly, clasping both hands together. Both men wore standard white lab coats, which Susan found reassuring amid all the curious elements of her room. Half the equipment surrounding her was completely unfamiliar. “This work is exploratory, really. Research with laboratory animals came before, of course, extensive tests, but humans have so many complex higher functions, such marvelous overlapping nets in the cerebral cortex, that we must proceed with a set of checks, of safeguards.”

  “Against what?” she asked.

  “Against psychological strains that precipitate physiological ones.”

  Dr. Fernandez put in, “Remember the old divisions of computer functions of your time? Software, that is programs, ran on hardware. Well, that applies to our minds in a crude way. We are trying to see if you have sustained any hardware damage that has software implications.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

  “See, that phrase, ‘you’ve lost me.’ It’s actually a rather involved metaphor for confusion,” Dr. Blyer said. “That’s a talent for replacing one kind of thought with another. So we say that time runs out like a fluid, or logic is like a path you can get left behind on. Your language centers fetched up that metaphor right away. I’m glad to see you doing it, because that implies that you have suffered no significant loss in several different areas of the brain.”

  Susan sighed. “I seem to go asleep at the switch a lot, though.”

  Dr. Blyer smiled. “Another metaphor. Dr. Hagerty, minds are simply what brains do. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. That’s what memories are, of course—they change the way we later think. But to revive you completely, we have to be sure your brain is truly reintegrating your memories.”

  “I thought you were checking to see how much I can remember.”

  Dr. Blyer nodded. “But the effect of that is to make your mind sort out problem areas. Let me put it in computer lingo. See, the you who is listening to me say these words is like a software program.”

  “I’m software?” She hoped she ran better than the word processor in her office. She could never get the spell-checker to work right.

  Blyer shrugged good-naturedly. “It’s an analogy. When that software program needs to recall something, it hands off to a memory program, something like a tiny librarian. The librarian goes and fetches the information. The mind maintains that sense of you, that self-awareness that we’ve pulled up out of the liquid nitrogen after thirty-eight years, and—”

  “What? Thirty-eight?”

  Dr. Blyer blinked. “Well, yes. I thought Dr. Fernandez took you through the protocols.”

  “I did,” Fernandez said. “But it might not have registered. She was still reintegrating.”

  Blyer was startled and irritated. “She’s still having gaps?”

  “Apparently.”

  Gaps. While Blyer shot quick, technical questions at Fernandez, Susan thought about the gap of thirty-eight lost years, friends gone, the press of incessant change while she slept. She felt as though an abyss had opened in her tenuous reality.

  Rather than struggle with it, something made her simply watch Blyer get it under control and go back to his bedside manner, his mouth losing its irked twist. He was good. “I see. Dr. Hagerty, I must apologize. You may be experiencing disconnections in your awareness, in your memories. Please bear with us.”

  Susan smiled. As if I had any choice. I can’t go back, can I?

  Blyer said, “All our memories are processes that make the various agencies inside our minds act in much the same ways that they did at some time in the past. In your case, that past is—”

  “It’s been thirty-eight years? That’s all? I thought cryonics would take a century, maybe more, to get this far, to revive people.”

  “Perhaps it would have, but for your research. And of course, your case.”

  “My case?”

  “You are a famous woman, Dr. Hagerty. But we don’t want to rush ahead into that.”

  “But what’s happened? I need—”

  “We’re helping you to understand that,” Dr. Blyer said soothingly.

  She recognized the bland, reassuring manner and resented it. But she could do nothing about it, she soon learned. Blyer and Fernandez adroitly eluded her questions. She was slipping into a soothing fatigue. The two men slipped away from her questions. Usually she had found it fairly easy to tug information out of men by supplying a receptive audience. Physicians particularly liked to go into their lecture mode. Something to do with the kind of people who went into medicine in the first place, she thought vaguely. That fact hadn’t changed in thirty-eight years.

  But she felt an ominous foreboding. Something was wrong, somewhere at the shadowy edges of her mind.

  4

  GEORGE

  The creamy Buick Riviera George rented at LAX was his first surprise. Small, electric, it buzzed easily through the surprisingly thin traffic easily, its motor sounding like a hornet. He went down the 405 to the Garden Grove Freeway without a single jam or even a slowdown. Off on Euclid, just like the old days. The route had more trees than George remembered. There were no hookers on Harbor Boulevard, no illegals loitering sullenly around the 7-11s.

  He pulled over near the Marble Cathedral grounds. At first he thought he had taken a wrong turn because a large yellow sign said THOMSON DAY CARE. Most of the grounds were filled with new buildings. Bright yellow seesaws, slides, and jungle gyms dominated what had once been expansive lawns.

  But the majesty of the marble slabs was as powerful as ever, rising straight from the ground like soaring spirits. Buttresses and arches suggested the slumbering strength of the faith within. The stained-glass windows still shone with their immense biblical scenes, alive with jewellike refractions, though the inner lights seemed dimmer, casting little of their radiance through the early evening gloom and into the surrounding oaks.

  No one on the grounds. Usually there would be a fellowship meeting or choir or something going on every night of the week. The outer buildings and the Reverend’s residence seemed unchanged, though in need of a paint job. He slipped through the shadows that had always been his ally. The lock on the side door was new, but he picked it and went through. No chain lock this time, either. The hushed, sprawling rooms smelled musty in the pressing darkness.

  Down the carpeted corridor. A spill of light from the Reverend’s study, the massive door slightly ajar. No voices from inside. George stepped in, and the Reverend was sitting at his desk, talking on the telephone. Reverend Montana’s eyes widened.

  “Hang up.”

  The Reverend froze.

  George strode quickly forward, snatched the telephone away, and slammed it down.

  “You… My God…” The Reverend sank back in his chair.

  “I know about the Hagerty woman.”

  “I thought it was over. So long…”

  The Reverend stood suddenly and came around the desk. He walked with a hunched-over gait, head down, his pla
in brown suit flapping about him. George caught him by the shoulder and spun him into a worn leather chair. Touching him made George realize how much good the decades of solid work had done him. His traveling suit, bought on the way to the airport, fit a bit snugly over his broad back and tightly clasped his thighs. Montana was shrunken and thin beneath his clothes.

  “I came a long way, I expect some hospitality.”

  Montana went ashen. His mouth gaped, twisted, closed. “All—all right.”

  “Anybody else in the building?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Sister Angel?”

  The Reverend overcame his alarm and replied automatically. “Oh, her. She was not the woman I thought, my friend. Not at all.”

  “I remember you being real close,” George said deadpan.

  “Oh yes. So long ago.” Montana’s eyes narrowed with remembered pain. Then he snapped back into a stern, officious pose. The seasoned performer. “That moment when you discovered us, it was an aberration for me. A thing of the moment. For her, I later learned, it was but one in a long series. Very long.”

  The shadowed stillness of the large study held the same rich scent of leather and polished wood, though. George sucked it in, letting the memories come in like old friends, while the Reverend recovered, blinking. The soft warm glow of the brass fixture cast long shadows upward into the bookshelves that stretched to the black skylight. A passing car cast a sheen of blues and yellows among the leather-bound volumes there as headlights passed across the stained-glass rear windows.

  “Why have you changed the cathedral?” George asked conversationally, to give Montana time to recover.

  “What? Oh, we had to bring in the Thomson Day Care people to help out a little.”