Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

In a real sense I had become immortal.

  This was the point in time where I began to understand both the addictive qualities and health benefits of our Game. Using our Abilities, especially in the ultimate Using required by the Game, had made us younger. Just as patients’ lives were now being renewed by organ and tissue transplants, so were our lives renewed through the Use of other minds, the transplantation of energy, the borrowed use of RNA and neurons and all the other esoteric compounds to which modern science has reduced the mind.

  When I looked at Melanie Fuller through Justin’s clear eyes, I saw an old woman sleeping in a fetal position, intravenous solutions trickling into an emaciated arm, skin pale and pulled tight over bone, but I knew now that this was completely misleading— that I was younger now than ever before, absorbing the energy of those around me the way a sunflower stores light. Soon I would be ready to rise from my sickbed, resurrected by the renewal of radiant energy I could feel flowing into me, day by day, week by week.

  My eyes snapped open in the middle of the night. Dear God, perhaps this is how Nina has survived death.

  If my Ability could grow in strength and range and scope through the oxygen-death of one small part of my brain, what could Nina’s much greater Ability have managed in that microsecond after I shot her? What was the bullet I had fired into her brain from Charles’s Colt Peacemaker except a larger, more dramatic version of my own cerebrovascular accident?

  Nina’s control and consciousness could have leapt to a hundred subservient minds in the hours and days after our confrontation. I had read enough in recent years to know that people were now being kept alive by machines that replaced, stimulated, or simulated functions of heart, kidneys, and God knows what other organs. I saw no contradiction in the concept of Nina’s pure and forceful consciousness keeping its hold on life through others’ minds.

  Nina rotting in her coffin while her Ability allowed her mind to stalk the night like a formless, malevolent ghost.

  Nina’s blue eyes rising in their sockets on a tide of maggots while her ruined brain repaired itself even as it rotted away.

  The energy from all those she Used flowing back to her until Nina rose in the same radiant burst of youth I felt flowing into me— only Nina a corpse moving through the darkness.

  Would she come here?

  All my family stayed awake that night, some with me, some between me and the darkness, but still I did not sleep.

  Mrs. Hodges would not sell her house until Dr. Hartman offered— and paid— an outrageous sum. I could have interfered in the negotiations but after seeing Mrs. Hodges, I decided not to.

  It had been less than five months since George, her husband, had suffered his unfortunate accident, but the old woman had aged twenty years. She had always taken care to tint her hair a fake and obvious brown, but now it hung in limp, white strands. Her eyes were listless. She had always been unattractive, but now she took no pains to hide the wrinkles, warts, and wattles behind a mask of makeup.

  We paid her outrageous price. Money would soon be no problem, and, besides, as soon as I saw Mrs. Hodges again I thought of other uses she might serve in days or weeks to come.

  Spring came gracefully as it always does in my beloved South. Sometimes I allowed Culley to carry me to the sewing room and once— just once— outside to recline in the chaise longue while the Negro boy worked to prepare the garden. Culley, Howard, and Dr. Hartman had erected tall fences around the entire compound, ten-foot privacy fences in back, so peering eyes were not a problem. I just did not like being directly in the sunlight. It was far more enjoyable to me when I shared Justin’s perceptions as he sat in the grass or joined Miss Sewell as she sunbathed naked on the patio.

  The days grew longer and warmer. Soft air came through my open windows. Occasionally I thought I heard the squeals and laughter of Mrs. Hodges’s granddaughter and her friend coming from the courtyard, but then I realized it must be other children from down the block.

  The days smelled of new-mown grass and the nights of honeysuckle. I felt safe.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Beverly Hills Thursday,

  April 23, 1981

  Early on a Thursday afternoon, Tony Harod lay on a queen-size bed in the Beverly Hilton Hotel and thought about love. He had never had much interest in the topic. For Harod, love was the farce that had launched a thousand banalities; it was the excuse for all of the lies, self-deceits, and hypocrisies that made up relations between the sexes. Tony Harod took pride in the fact that he had screwed hundreds of women, perhaps thousands, and had never pretended to be in love with any of them, even though he had thought that in those final seconds of their submission, in his moment of orgasm, he had felt something approaching love.

  Now Tony Harod was in love.

  He found himself thinking constantly of Maria Chen. His palm and fingers could recall the precise texture of her skin. He dreamed her sweet scent. Her dark hair, dark eyes, and soft smile hovered at the edge of his consciousness like an image at the periphery of vision— elusive, vanishing at the turn of a head. Even saying her name made him feel strange inside.

  Harod put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. The tangled sheets still held the seashore scent of sex. In the bathroom, the shower pounded on.

  Harod and Maria Chen carried out their daily lives as always. She brought the mail to him in the Jacuzzi each morning, handled phone calls, took dictation, then went with him to the studio to watch some of the shooting of The White Slaver and to review the previous day’s footage. The studio segments had been moved from Pinehurst to Paramount because of British union problems and Harod welcomed the chance to keep watch over the production without spending weeks away from home. The day before, Harod had been watching rushes of Janet Delacourte— the twenty-eight-year-old cow that had filled the role written for a nubile seventeen-year-old—and he suddenly imagined Maria Chen in the lead role, Maria Chen’s subtle expressions rather than Delacourte’s gross emotings, Maria Chen’s alluring and sensuous nudity rather than the pale, white starlet’s heavy nakedness.

  Harod and Maria Chen had made love only three times since Philadelphia— a restraint that Harod did not understand but which inflamed him with a desire for her that spread from the physical to the psychological; she was in his thoughts most of the day. The simple act of watching her walk across the room gave Tony Harod pleasure.

  The shower went off and Harod heard the muffled sounds of toweling and the roar of a hair dryer.

  Harod tried to imagine a life with Maria Chen. Between them, they had enough money that they could pick up and leave without being uncomfortable for two or three years. They could go anywhere. Harod had always wanted to chuck it all, find a small island in the Bahamas or somewhere and see if he could write anything besides formula slice-and-dice flicks. He imagined leaving a fuck-you note for Barent and Kepler and just getting the hell away from it all; Maria Chen coming back from the beach in her blue bathing suit, the two of them talking over croissants and fresh-ground coffee as the sun rose over the lagoon. Tony Harod enjoyed being in love.

  Janet Delacourte came naked out of the bathroom and shook her long blond hair out over his shoulders. “Tony, baby doll, do you have a cigarette?”

  “No.” Harod opened his eyes to look at her. Janet had a face of a hardened fifteen-year-old and breasts to fill a Russ Meyer wet dream. After three films her acting ability remained mercifully undiscovered. She had married a sixty-three-year-old Texas millionaire who had bought her her own thoroughbred, bought her the role of diva for an evening of opera that had been the laugh of Houston for months, and now was in the process of buying Hollywood for her. Schu Williams, the director of The White Slaver, had suggested to Harod over drinks the week before that Delacourte couldn’t emote falling if someone shoved her off a fucking cliff. Harod had reminded Williams where three mill of the nine-million-dollar bud get was coming from and suggested that they do a fifth rewrite to get rid of the scenes where Janet had to do something beyo
nd her range— such as talk— and add a couple of more bathtub and harem scenes.

  “That’s OK, I’ve got one here in my purse.” She rummaged through a canvas handbag larger than Harod’s usual carry-on luggage.

  “Don’t you have a second call today?” asked Harod. “Another try at that seraglio scene with Dirk?”

  “Uh-uh.” She was chewing gum as she smoked, somehow managing to do both things with her mouth open. “Schuey says that the take we did Tuesday’s about the best we’re going to get.” She sprawled across the bed on her stomach, elbow propped, huge breasts on top of Harod’s shins like pale casaba melons on a grocer’s discount shelf.

  Harod closed his eyes. “Tony, baby doll, is it true you’ve got the original of that tape?”

  “What tape?”

  “You know. The one where little old Shayla Barrington’s tugging some dude’s dork.”

  “Oh, that one.”

  “Jeez, I must’ve seen that ten-minute video at at least about sixty parties the last few months. You think people’d get tired of watching her. She’s hardly got any tits at all, has she?”

  “Mmmm,” said Harod.

  “I was at that benefit thing she was at. You know, the one for the spazzy kids with whatchamacallit? She was up at the table with Dreyfus and Clint and Meryl. I think Shayla’s so stuck up she thinks her doo-doo doesn’t smell, you know what I mean? It sort of serves her right, everybody laughing at her and looking at her funny and all.”

  “Were they doing that?”

  “Oh yeah. Don’s so funny. He’s giving this real funny talk, you know, sort of shooting down everybody at this front table like? And he gets to Shayla and he says something like ‘And we’re graced with the presence of one of the prettiest young mermaids since Esther Williams traded in her bathing cap’ or something like that, you know, only funnier. So do you have it?”

  “Have what?”

  “You know, the original tape?”

  “What does it matter who has the original if copies are all over town?”

  “Tony, baby doll, I’m just curious, is all. I mean, I think it’d be sort of a stitch if you’d made that tape after Shayla babe turned you down for the White Slobber and all.”

  “The White Slobber?”

  “Oh, that’s what Schuey calls the project. Sort of like Chris Plummer always calling The Sound of Music the Sound of Mucus, you know? We all call it that on the set.”

  “Cute,” said Harod. “Who said Barrington was ever offered the part?”

  “Oh, baby doll, everybody knows she was first pick. It would’ve got the twenty mill behind it if little Miss Sunshine had signed up, I guess.” Janet Delacourte stubbed out her cigarette and laughed. “Course now she can’t get anything. I hear the Disney people canceled that big musical thing they had planned for her and Donny and Marie booted her off that special they were doing in Hawaii. Her little Old Mormon Mama shit a couple of bricks and had a coronary or something. Too bad.” She played with Harod’s toes and wiggled her breasts back and forth over his legs.

  Tony Harod pulled his legs away and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m going to take a shower. You going to be here when I come out?”

  Janet Delacourte popped her gum, rolled on her back, and gave him an upside down smile. “You want me to be, baby doll?”

  “Not particularly,” said Harod.

  She rolled onto her stomach. “Well then fuck you,” she said with no animosity in her voice. “I’m going shopping.”

  Forty minutes later Harod came out under the Beverly Hilton awning and handed his keys to the boy in the red vest and white slacks.

  “Which one today, Mr. Harod?” asked the boy. “The Mercedes or the Ferrari?”

  “I’m in the gray kraut cart today, Johnny,” said Harod.

  “Yessir.”

  Harod squinted through his mirrored glasses at the palms and blue sky while he waited. He decided that Los Angeles probably had the most boring climate in the goddamned world. Except maybe the south side of Chicago where he had grown up.

  The Mercedes pulled up, Harod walked around, started to extend his hand with the five-dollar bill in it, and looked down into the smiling face of Joseph Kepler.

  “Get in, Tony,” said Kepler. “We’ve got some talking to do.”

  Kepler drove toward Coldwater Canyon. Harod stared at him through his mirrored glasses. “The Hilton’s security is really getting shitty,” said Harod. “They let all sorts of street flotsam into your car these days.”

  Kepler twitched his Charlton Heston grin. “Johnny knows me,” he said. “I told him it was a practical joke.”

  “Ha ha,” said Harod. “We have some talking to do, Tony.”

  “You said that already.”

  “You’re quite the wiseass, aren’t you, Tony?”

  “Cut the crap,” said Harod. “If you have something to tell me, tell me.”

  Kepler was driving the Mercedes too fast up the winding canyon drive. He drove arrogantly, with only his right arm involved, wrist propped on the top of the wheel. “Your friend Willi has made his next move,” he said.

  “Ground rule,” said Harod. “We’ll have our nice little talk here, but if you refer to him as ‘your friend Willi’ one more time I’ll be obliged to knock your capped teeth down your fucking throat. All right, Joseph old pal?”

  Kepler glanced at Harod. “Willi’s made his next move and there’s going to have to be some response.”

  “What’d he do this time? Bugger the president’s wife or something?”

  “A little more dramatic and difficult than that.”

  “Are you playing twenty questions?”

  “It doesn’t matter what he did,” said Kepler, “and you won’t be reading about it in the paper, but it was something Barent can’t ignore. It means that your . . . that Willi is prepared to play for high stakes and we’ll have to respond in some way.”

  “So now we go to the scorched earth policy, huh?” said Harod. “Kill every German-American over fifty-five.”

  “No, Mr. Barent’s going to negotiate.”

  “How do you do that if you can’t even find the old bastard?” Harod looked out at the arid hillside flashing by. “Or do you guys still think I’m in touch with him?”

  “No,” said Kepler, “but I am.”

  Harod sat up. “With Willi?”

  “Who else are we talking about?”

  “Where . . . how did you find him?”

  “I didn’t find him,” said Kepler. “I wrote to him. He wrote back. We’re maintaining a very pleasant correspondence.”

  “Where did you write, for Chrissake?”

  “I sent a registered letter to his little house in the woods in Bavaria.”

  “Waldheim? The old estate near the Czech border? No one’s there. Barent’s had people watching it since I was there in December.”

  “True,” said Kepler, “but the family retainers still guard the place. German father and son named Meyer. My letter never came back and a few weeks later I heard from Willi. Postmarked in France. Second letter from New York.”

  “What does he say?” asked Harod. He was angered that his heart was pounding at twice its normal speed.

  “Willi says that all he wants is to join the Club and have a relaxing time on the island this summer.”

  “Huh!” said Harod. “I believe him,” said Kepler. “I think that the old gentleman was hurt that we did not think to invite him sooner.”

  “And he may be a trifle put out that you tried to blow him up in midair and set his old girlfriend Nina against him?”

  “That, too, perhaps,” said Kepler. “But I think he’s willing to let bygones be bygones.”

  “What does Barent say?”

  “Mr. Barent doesn’t know that I’ve been in touch with Willi.”

  “Jesus,” said Harod, “aren’t you taking one big fucking chance?”

  Kepler grinned. “He really worked you over with that conditioning session the other day, didn’t
he, Tony? No, it’s not too much of a chance. Barent isn’t going to do anything too brash even if he finds out. With Charles and Nieman gone, C. Arnold’s coalition is getting a bit shaky. I don’t think Barent wants to have his island sport all to himself.”

  “Are you going to tell him?”

  “Yes,” said Kepler. “After yesterday I think Barent will be grateful that I found a way to contact Willi. Barent’ll agree to the old man’s inclusion in the summer camp follies if he’s sure it will be safe.”

  “How could it be safe?” asked Harod. “Don’t you see what Willi can do? That old sonofabitch won’t stop at anything.”

  “Precisely,” said Kepler, “but I think that I’ve convinced our fearless leader that it’s safer having Willi with us, where we can keep an eye on him, than out in the shadows playing Spider King and picking us off one by one. Besides, Barent still has faith that anyone he comes into . . . ah . . . personal contact with will never be a threat again.”

  “Do you think he can neutralize Willi?”

  “Don’t you?” Kepler sounded sincerely curious. “I don’t know,” Harod said at last. “Barent’s Ability seems unique, but Willi . . . well, I’m not sure Willi is completely human.”

  “It really doesn’t matter, Tony.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it’s quite probable that the Island Club is overdue for a change of executive leadership.”

  “You mean dump Barent? How do we do that?”

  “We don’t have to, Tony. All we have to do is stay in contact with our pen pal Wilhelm and assure him that we’ll stay neutral in case of any . . . unpleasantness on the island.”

  “Willi’s coming in during Summer Camp?”

  “On the last night of the public segment,” said Kepler. “Then he’ll join us during the hunt through the next week.”

  “I can’t believe Willi would put himself in Barent’s power like that,” said Harod. “Barent must have . . . what . . . a hundred security people around?”

  “More like two hundred,” said Kepler. “Yeah, so Willi’s Ability isn’t worth shit against an army like that. Why would he do it?”