He tried more buttons. There, a clear sense of the rise and fall of his chest. He felt only the right side. Breathing, fast and shallow. Fear.
He fumbled and punched, fumbled and punched. Patches of his skin seemed to leap into being, flooding him with sensation. But still no vision, no sounds.
He spent a moment getting his leg to stop flopping around on the slab. The spasms eased into a steady trembling.
He made himself stop and think. The enormity of what he had now guessed would not bear inspection, so he pushed it aside and focused on a smaller problem.
There were no sounds over the intercom, but that meant little. His body lay here helpless. He could only rely on himself. So he had reached some switches that could turn on his neural networks as though they were parts of an electrical diagram. And of course that was exactly what they were, though he had never really thought of them that way, of himself as a huge wiring board.
Okay, accept that. He was fumbling with his right hand for switches that controlled his right side. It was a good bet then that the left side switches were on the left side of the table.
Think it through. What would happen if his right hand poked the button that turned off the hand itself? He would lie here helplessly. Waiting for…
Again, the foreboding dread. He did not know where he was. Or when, he thought, explicitly acknowledging for the first time his suspicion.
But even facing that huge possibility did not dispel his shadowy apprehension. Back to work. He had to get his left side going somehow, before he ran any more risks with his right.
He brought his right arm back to the slab. His motor control had to extend into his upper chest and shoulder to let him do that, but without any feeling from there he did not know how much he could make work.
Still nothing from his left side at all. Meanwhile his right side nagged him with tremors and fugitive itches. He felt jumpy and disoriented and for a moment almost wished he were dead again, feeling nothing.
He willed the right arm to reach over to his left. Fingers crawled over smooth metal and found a lip. They scampered down further, and there were buttons, two knobs, the same layout as on the right side. He started punching buttons. Pain leaped into his left side, each province shouting at him. Slabs of muscle shook violently, sending agony rippling up from his left leg and into his belly.
His breathing lurched. He concentrated on methodically marching his fingers over the buttons, punching each. More pain.
Then light poured in on him. Dazzling brilliance.
He had hit whatever controlled his optical nerve net. A gaudy red universe. He realized his eyes were still closed. He willed them open. Bleached white flooded in. Colors strobed. Pulsed. Steadied. He was staring at a mass of equipment. Digital readouts, oscilloscopes, chassis faces in duraplastic and buffed aluminum.
He got the crisp smell with the next button. Then more sounds: a thin mechanical clanking, distant buzzes. No voices.
He was lying on a white slab. When he had finished with all the lefthand side buttons, he rolled himself back over, pushing with his left arm. It was a lot easier and his balance seemed to be okay. The stings and aches were ebbing, too, probably some transient effect. He got his right side up and running pretty quickly. Then he just lay on his back, staring up into white fluorescents, and gave himself over to an orgy of scratching. The itches faded. He began to feel halfway decent.
But anxiety skated through him. His heart thumped, driven by unknown fears.
He felt a persistent itch at the back of his neck and reached for it. His hand went the other way.
He stopped his hand over his face. Something was wrong. He moved his fingers. His arm was coming from above his head, reaching down… but that was impossible. He brought up the other hand, the left. It came into his vision the same way, from above.
Something was very wrong with him. He closed his eyes to think. Nothing came. Immense questions ricocheted everywhere.
He opened his eyes and rolled over onto his right side. There was a blank yellow wall with a tan door in it. The door was upside down, reaching to a white tiled ceiling.
The whole world was upside down. That was it.
He remembered reading somewhere that when your eye took in light and cast it on the retina, ordinary optics inverted the image. But you didn’t see things upside-down because the brain set the image right side up again.
He looked at a sign at the foot of the door and managed to read its inverted letters. It said VI2 STEPCOM.
Something was wrong, some step in the process all screwed up. It had the feel of somebody getting a detail backward.
When he tried to sit up, a wave of awful dizziness hit him. His stomach reeled. Bile rushed into his mouth.
He lay back down. His senses were telling him that he was on the ceiling of a room. Gingerly Alex felt around the base of his skull. There was a lump there. It bulged out about an inch, as wide as his neck. A cable came out of the crown. It led into the table itself.
He wasn’t going anywhere with this thing attached. It must be the lead-in, the avenue into his entire nervous system.
But his skating anxiety would not let him just lie there. His breath came fast and shallow and his whole body wanted to move. He lifted his head, feeling the cable tug at him, and tried to study the upside-down room. After a minute of nausea he began to sort out details. The exit, door, a lot of equipment he could not fathom, some work tables littered with instruments, and another door on an opposite wall.
He sat up further to see the whole room, and pop!—the cable came out of his neck. Instantly a hot, diffuse throbbing spread up into his skull. It felt like a massive toothache as big as his hand.
So he was free, by accident. A simple pressure release connector. Did that imply he was nearly ready to get up and move on his own? Well, so he would.
He sat up very carefully. Braced himself. Swung his legs over the side of the slab. Every move had to be calculated, because his eyes showed him his lap reversed. He was naked. Thin, pale, almost scrawny.
There was a work cart pulled up near his slab. He reached out to it for support, preparing to step down. His hand missed, swiping at air. His brain was directing his arm, always correcting in the wrong direction.
It took four tries before he could override his own reflexes. He got a good grip on the cart and lowered himself to the white tiles. Tingling pain shot through his legs. He had not been walking for a long time.
He took one unsteady step and had to stop, let the world quit pitching and swaying. Cold tile floor. A digital display on a nearby monitor gave upside-down numbers that seemed to be medical information: blood pressure, concentrations, heart rate. The display shifted, heart rate rising a little, as he watched. How did it keep monitoring him?
His next adventure, he decided, would be to reach the closest door. His first few steps taught him to keep his head tilted down toward his feet. He had to move his eyes the opposite way to shift his field of vision. He bumped into the cart and nearly fell. Each step brought twinges. A lancing pain in his left side made him suck in a sudden breath. He pushed the door slightly ajar.
Another room. The equipment was hard to recognize upside down. Chairs clung steadfastly to the ceiling. Somehow, confronting a new room, his head reeled. His eyes told his brain that he was standing on the ceiling. Deep in his brain, alarms struggled to be heard.
He held on to the doorjamb and made himself look at each object in the room beyond. First, no people. Good. An open chest of drawers, holding something like surgical instruments. A washup station with air hood yawning like a thin-lipped mouth. Electronics gear.
A prep room? He eased into this new frontier. He reached the surgical drawers. It was easier to open the drawers by moving slowly and closing his eyes, going by feel. Too bad he couldn’t walk that way. In the third drawer down he found a funny curved kind of scalpel. He palmed it.
Sounds from his left. He went right. He was getting the hang of things better now, could
walk without the stomach-fluttering sense that he was about to take a dive into the ceiling. He reached a corner and stepped around—
And stared straight into a surprised face. The man gasped. Alex figured out the inverted features as the man stepped back—older, deep suntan, sandy hair, mouth half open. Surprised?—or something else? Eyes big, showing a lot of white.
Do I know him? From where?
Before Alex could react, the man’s face whitened and he brought his hands up, palms out. “No. No no.”
The hard voice slapped him with a gush of memory. Cold stars. Sandstone.
“Lazarus! You don’t—can’t—”
Alex worked the scalpel forward in his hand. His voice was rusty. “Who are you? What—”
“You’re not—they said—you wouldn’t be awake!” The man’s lined and roughened face twisted. “But now—like Lazarus. But you’ve been there, you must know you belong in the valley of bones. I have to—”
The swarming confusion in the man’s face hardened. His fingers clenched and twitched.
Alex felt weakness flooding through him. He had only seconds. He held up his left hand to draw the man’s attention. An instant later he stepped forward and swung the knife up. It struck the man’s left arm, going in only an inch. The man flinched away, face white, grunting in amazement.
Alex drew back to strike again.
“Lazarus! Am I wrong? What did you see?” The man’s mouth worked with unspoken emotions. Tears welled in his eyes. Abruptly he turned and lunged away, his lab coat flapping behind him.
Alex gaped, stunned. Shards of recollection winked in his memory, like broken glass seen glinting when he turned the flashlight of his attention on them. Then they faded, just as quickly.
The fear, the anger… they ebbed in him. Was he really sure of anything? He wobbled. The scalpel clattered on the floor.
So tired… a wall caught his woozy descent.
He was trying to sort out memories when he noticed that he had slid down the wall and was sitting, bare skin on cold tile.
Fast footsteps. People in lab coats. It was funny, in a way, watching them run along on the ceiling, jabbering and pointing. They seemed very excited about something, but in the silky light he wasn’t in a mood to listen just then.
11
SUSAN
She had not expected to enjoy her bathroom so much. Dr. Blyer had encouraged her to indulge herself, to focus on the present. Good therapeutic advice, and also fun. Bathrooms had grown up.
The shower had a dozen settings, from MASSAGE to STIMULATE to CLEANSE, STIMULATE released blue gouts of ions that perked her up. MASSAGE made her so slack-jawed, she needed a nurse to get back to bed. The shower had no door, nothing to crash through if she fell. Its padded walls spiraled in on a tight curve, so that no water sprayed out. Even the toilet had attachments, converting into a bidet with one turn of a knob. When you flushed, it first offered an arcing stream from the water tank, to wash your hands, then recycled that water to do the flushing. Susan liked standing over the whole-body blow-dry, which Dr. Fernandez had been very strict about; her skin was too delicate to rub with towels. This felt better, anyway, like a desert wind that knew how to kiss. She lingered in its warm and decidedly erotic caresses and watched the real wonder of the bathroom—something beyond these pleasant gadgets, profound yet subtle.
The bath mat was cleaning the room. At least it looked like a bath mat. Its thin cilialike fibers reached out like sluggish fingers, inching along, sopping up droplets, tissue shreds, the debris of grooming. The nurse had said it lived off “human dander,” sloughed-off skin and hair. Susan was watching it crawl partway up the shower wall to engulf a spatter of soap—she had gotten a bit playful under STIMULATE—when a chime announced a visitor. She slipped on a royal blue terrycloth robe and sat in a recliner chair before thumbing the room control unit in the chair arm. She wasn’t prepared to see Dr. Fernandez and Dr. Blyer push into the room a wheelchair carrying Alex Cowell.
“Alex—they said you were—my God, you look wonderful!”
“Not half as good as you do.” His expression of joy turned to awe as he reached out, touched her face.
“It’s just old me,” she said.
“You look younger.”
“So do you.”
“And… happier.”
“So do you.”
“But we’ve both been…”
She could see that despite his proper cryonicist training, now so long ago, Alex had almost said “dead.” She provided, “Suspended.”
“Right. Stored.”
The ice broken, they fell into eager conversation. But even as she enjoyed it, Susan felt herself at a slight remove, for reasons she could not quite understand.
She knew intellectually that this man had seen her through what was called death at that time, so for him this was in a way a more convincing, immediate miracle than his own resurrection. It was damnably difficult to truly believe you had died, had been still and stiff and cold, when you could still scratch your nose.
Dr. Blyer had spoken to her about this meeting several times, and she had even rehearsed what she would say. This was a new area of therapy, of course, largely uncharted. Surprisingly, Blyer had said that Alex would have a harder time with this first encounter than she would—because he had seen her die, while Susan remembered Alex as hale and hearty. Mourning someone, then seeing them newly reborn—chattering away, embracing life’s minute-to-minute delights—was a profound shock. They had prepared Alex for it by letting him see Ray Constantine. Meeting an old friend at an advanced age was less troubling than witnessing the “dead” walk.
Blyer had mentioned obliquely that the emotional disturbance was even greater for those who had mourned a loved one, and then gotten over it, going on to take up a new life. Meeting a long-lost love reopened old wounds. Feelings buried and forgotten burst anew into consciousness, erupting through the mind’s emotional equilibrium. The entire discussion with Blyer had unsettled her, sending her mind reeling into strange, murky turbulence. She had understood the ideas well enough, but thinking about them had made her heart race, and vagrant impulses flitted in her mind. She would catch glimpses of faces, hear fragments of remembered conversations—then they would flit away, sucked into a blank abyss. They were shards of her past, but she could not seize upon them long enough to assemble a coherent picture, to even see what they were about.
The effects seemed to disperse throughout her waking moments, like ripples in some interior pond. Once, standing over the whole-body blow-dry, she had experienced in quick succession a tingling erotic wave, then a jolt of guilt, and finally an inexpressible, sad longing. Yet she could put no name to her feelings, could not tie them to any memory. It had been like groping through chilly, dank fog, searching for a reassuring glow, for homefires in the night.
Even the recollection of her confusion took her out of the present, mired her in vague, troubling sorrows. She shook herself free of the thoughts and concentrated on Alex. He was showing off his skin, which was, as he put it, “as smooth as a baby’s ass”—one of the benefits of the revival tanks.
“I never thought it would be like this,” Alex said.
Susan laughed. “Who could?”
“We made it.”
She knew what he meant. “Thirty-eight years, gone in the blink of an eye.”
“But there are things I can’t remember.”
“That will clear up with time,” Dr. Fernandez put in.
“We can sift over the past later,” Susan said. Best to get Alex off the subject; his mouth had turned down in the moody way she recalled. She glanced at Blyer and said brightly, “I have no idea of what it’s like outside, but just staying in this room has made me love this place. I won’t ever have to shave my legs again—there’s a simple smear-on for that. No more sniffles, either. Anybody who can repair the damage freezing did to us, can cure a cold. Dishes here keep your food at the temperature it had when it was served, even if you have a cold sal
ad and sizzling steak on the same plate. Bathroom mirrors don’t steam up, even hospital clothes don’t wrinkle—”
She stopped, realizing that she was babbling. Dr. Blyer smiled and nodded. “That’s fine. Go on.”
“My God, I sound like a complete airhead.”
“You sound like a woman who is recovering excellently.”
She knew as well as Blyer that she didn’t know how to act with Alex, but she banished her uncertainty and plunged in. “Tell me what happened,” she said. “To me, I mean.”
This broke through the last shell of awkwardness between her and Alex. The surest way to get anyone to talk was to let them tell a story, the deeply human way of framing experience. He had been somber and distracted, but now he blossomed. As he talked, in her mind’s eye she could see him and Kathryn battling the coroner and police, sneaking her body away, fending off the media. It felt peculiar to hear a yarn with yourself as the pivotal piece, the McGuffin in a Hitchcock thriller.
Then it sank in that Alex had risked prison for her, withstood the police, damaged the credibility of I2 itself—all out of his intense faith that they had to hang on to the slender promise of pulling Susan back from the dark gulf. She felt a burst of deep affection for this man. She had been led into cryonics by her research, but he had pursued it for deeply human reasons—compassion for the afflicted, black rage at death’s brutality, a deep longing to bridge the abyss between souls.
A vagrant thought skittered like heat lightning through her mind. More than the serene curiosity of research had led her. Something else—
A wedge blocked the thought, a black barrier rearing up like thick granite walls erupting from the shrouded earth.
“So then I died,” Alex ended suddenly. “Don’t know how.”
“It was very much like Susan’s death,” Fernandez said. “A fall from a height. Quite similar traumas.”
“How did you fix it up?” Alex asked.
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