by Greg Bear
Stuart and Norton stepped back as she passed, as if they might catch something that would steal away their souls. She ignored them.
The caretaker walked around Rob and me, inspecting us with a patient, gray gaze, her head tilting left, then right. She smelled like wine left in a glass after a party.
“Rob Cousins,” she said in a youthful tenor voice that could have been either male or female. She reached out and pulled Rob’s hand close to her eyes. “You’ve made some mistakes, I see.”
Despite his resistance, she thrust out the hand for our inspection. Between the tendons on the back, the skin had folded and puckered into tight little furrows. I had noticed the marks before and thought they might be scars from an operation.
“Gross mistakes,” the caretaker said.
“What about you?” Rob said, his voice gravelly.
The caretaker held up her own hand: the same puckers, though smoothed over by the years. “How old do you think I am?” she asked Rob.
Rob snatched back his hand. “You’re suffering from progeria,” he said. “Premature aging. You’re forty, tops.”
The expression on her face hardened. “No reason to be petty.” She was not used to being judged. “Once I was the future, Dr. Cousins.”
She walked back toward the ramp, shoulders undulating slowly, wrists hanging. When we held back, she turned and blinked like a thin old monkey at Stuart and Norton. They urged us to follow with a couple of shoves. To Stuart, it was just part of the day. Norton enjoyed shoving.
The agents in wrinkled suits stayed by the door, foreheads damp. The kids vanished into the shadows.
For some time now I had been looking for a way to start a mad minute, to provoke some hasty action from our captors—without getting killed ourselves. Nothing. They were tight and observant.
The caretaker walked ahead of us down a dark, tomb-quiet hallway. The polished floor shone in the milky fluorescence of a far-off ceiling fixture. Rob caught up with our guide. “You said I did something wrong. How wrong? How do you know?”
She looked up. “Your chemistry runs like a spinning top first this way, then that. You cut too many channels between the Little Mothers. The puckers show me you will have the disease in a few months, perhaps sooner. Yes, you could live a long time. Maybe centuries. But you will spend years in rabid madness.”
Rob looked like a dog about to throw up. He hung back, and Norton gave him an encouraging tap on the ankle with the tip of his hard black shoe.
“We’re going to be killed,” Rob told me, as if this was news.
I looked back at Stuart and Norton. “You’re going to let this happen?”
Stuart shrugged.
I just wanted to see who was paying more attention. I knew how these guys thought, the exercises they went through at the end of a hard day to put away in drawers the things they had done and seen. Maybe this was all I deserved. Christ, I had gotten slow the last few years.
All the corners, the edges between walls and floor, walls and ceiling, were covered over with curved runnels of ceramic. The linoleum was not linoleum, I realized, as we walked a few steps, but long sheets of blue tile sealed with a vitreous sheen. The walls were also tile, fitted and treated to eliminate seams.
Not a breath of air in the hall. Age showed here and there in the star pattern of an impact fracture or cracks from building settling. Some of them had been repaired—glazed over with another vitreous layer.
The caretaker touched the wall with a finger. “Once a day, they used to go through the corridors outside the labs with steam hoses and sterilize, in the evenings. The whole building smelled like a Chinese laundry. It was a lovely smell.” She turned. “You keep looking at me, Mr. Bridger. You have obvious questions. I am Maxim’s wife.”
“Maxim Golokhov?” Rob asked.
“Yes,” the caretaker said, so softly we could barely hear. She turned to the left and Norton pushed us again.
“We’re going to ask you some questions,” he said.
I tried to match this wrinkled stick with the woman in the video, lean but handsome, smiling. I couldn’t.
Stuart took a position by the turn in the corridor and crossed his arms. One last pleading look didn’t faze him.
Norton pointed to an open doorway. Inside a small office was a bare wooden desk and an old, scarred filing cabinet with labels in Cyrillic. Photos lined the walls. Norton pushed two chairs up to the desk. Rob and I sat. The caretaker stood by the wall of photos. I swept my eyes over the ranks of small black frames and their black-and-white contents. I recognized none of the people in the photos on sight, except for one—in the lower left-hand corner, Joseph Stalin, standing beside another, younger man, both in military dress, both smiling. Stalin looked to be in his sixties. A war photo.
“Let’s get going,” Norton said. “We don’t want to be here too long.”
The caretaker gave him a pinched look. “Dr. Cousins,” she said, “your research is interesting, what you allowed to be published.”
Norton kept his eye on us with as much intellectual engagement as a guard dog.
“My question for you is, will you stop your research?”
Rob looked up. “Would that do me any good? I’m a dead man already.”
“We are at that crossroads, yes. But there is a way. We bring stability, not greed. Tell us what you have done that blocks our controls.”
Norton nodded. The conversation was following the proper form now.
“I’d like to know what my mistakes were,” Rob said.
The caretaker moved closer. Her eyes inspected him with a surprising heat and her voice rose almost an octave.
“When you seek to live forever, you cut yourself away from the Little Mothers and their ministrations. That can make it difficult for others to control you, yes. But not impossible. It just takes more, much more, over time, as a wife or lover might deliver, or all at once, a mix of product and maker, the pure form, then you can be run for several hours, even days, sometimes weeks.”
“Why do I have wrinkles on the backs of my hands?” Rob asked.
I watched Norton—Melon—carefully. Stupid men always leave themselves open, but I was not at all sure Melon was stupid. He just knew what to pay attention to and what to ignore. And he seemed less ill at ease than Stuart.
He knew the place. It was Melon’s assignment.
“You have cut off signaling paths used by both the body and the Little Mothers.”
That phrase kept popping up and it was bugging the hell out of me. “What are these Little Mothers?” I asked.
“She means bacteria,” Rob said, his eyes on the caretaker, as if they were playing a game of chess and he wanted to psych her out. Another bad move. Don’t stare at the beast.
“The body feels lonely without guidance,” the caretaker said. “It turns in on itself. You lose your connections to other humans. What you hate and fear becomes magnified.”
She looked at Melon again. I could not read her expression, and clearly Melon did not want to try. Who was in charge here? Who was running whom?
“Dr. Golokhov—treated you first?” Rob asked.
“Skip it,” Melon said.
“I was the first. I volunteered,” she said. She wanted to talk. Rob was providing a sympathetic ear. A fellow traveler. I was back in Kafkaville with a vengeance.
“And it didn’t work?”
“I am still here. I will be here a hundred years from now, barring accidents . . . or losing control.”
“But you said you went insane.”
“You pass through the most horrible gates to escape death.” The caretaker sighed like a little girl. “I remember the days we worked together, how he tended to me during my transition, and learned from my example to change his treatments, to avoid the most obvious side effects. He was wrong to leave me here. I could have helped him listen to the Little Mothers. That’s the important thing, isn’t it?”
“Listen to them—where?”
“Downstairs.
In the tanks. Everything else we did was wrong. He drove me to this. Maxim was wrong.”
Melon’s eyebrow twitched. “Time’s a-wasting,” he said.
“Tell me about my errors,” Rob insisted, his face as intensely focused as a cat’s over a bowl of cream. “He must have done more work, more research. How can we avoid making his early mistakes?”
The caretaker looked up at Melon.
“Fuck this,” Melon said. He pushed his gun against Rob’s neck. “How do you block the tagging?”
Rob blinked. We were on a knife edge and he was discovering courage.
“How?” Melon insisted.
The caretaker held up her hand. However small, this gesture made Melon back down—but only for a moment. “Will you work with us?” she asked. “It is obvious we have so much information to share.”
Rob looked pained and shook his head adamantly. “Never,” he said.
“Give them what they want!” I shouted.
“They don’t need me,” Rob said. “This is a charade.”
“We had to try,” the caretaker said. “We are not monsters, you know.” She faced the wall of pictures, head tilted to the right, then the left. She seemed to have tuned us all out.
“Tell them,” I said to Rob. “Give them something!”
Melon waved his little gun. “Let’s do it,” he said. The caretaker swung around on her tiny feet and glided out of the small office.
We got up from our chairs and returned to the main corridor, where Stuart was waiting.
“Ready?” he asked me.
We all came to a wide doorway and stopped. Beyond lay a room that might have been an abandoned Turkish bath, slick gray surfaces rising into long benches against the walls. Seven blue-gray tile basins, as big as double-wide bathtubs, held the center in two rows of three, and one in the middle, forming an H. Dark, pudding-thick liquid spiraled in the tubs, stirred by hidden paddles. Long hoses connected to aerators hung off the far sides of each tub. I could hear small bubbling sounds. The room was mostly in shadow.
“Take off your clothes,” the caretaker said.
The air smelled faintly of jungle. Seawater in an old tide pool. Fresh sweat on Janie’s arms on a sunny day. I could not identify all the odors rising from the tubs, but they scared me more than the mephitis of rotting corpses or the gravy-tang of spilled blood.
I watched for a lapse of attention and put on an act—not much acting needed, really—that would suggest a mark about to lose his cool. A mark is someone who is all too aware he will soon be meat. Lieutenant JG Mark Wasserman changed his name as we flew into Laos because that was how we used to designate those who would soon be dead. “Look at all those marks.”
“How old are you?” Rob asked the caretaker. “Why am I like you? Which receptors did I screw up?” Curious to the end. Like a young steer in the chute.
Stuart and Norton took their positions. I started taking off my clothes, but slowly. Prolong the inevitable.
The caretaker walked to one of the aerators and picked up a black wand with a brass nozzle. Two hoses hung from the wand, I saw, one going into the tub, the other snaking around to a row of brass nipples mounted in the back wall.
She inspected the nozzle. It resembled a showerhead and seemed to meet her approval. She turned the valve and a small dollop of goop smeared her palm. She approached Rob. Melon held his arms. Even with the difference in ages, it was no contest.
Rob drew his head back. Delicately, like a cosmetologist applying makeup, the caretaker dabbed her finger in the goop, then painted it beneath and around his eyes, under his lips. He jerked his head aside and Melon tugged at his elbows until he gasped. She applied greenish streaks to his gums, his cheeks, his temple, under his chin, with swiping jabs, her arms quick as wasp wings.
“Greed and stupidity,” she said. “It is old history.”
Melon let Rob go, leaving him to scrub at his face vigorously.
I had taken off my shirt.
The caretaker aimed the brass nozzle in my direction. “That is enough,” she said. She turned the valve all the way. The stuff stung as it hit, like paint out of a spray gun. I felt the tingle over my skin, involuntarily sucked some of it into my nose and mouth, choked and heaved, tried to spit it out. I fell on my back and wiped my eyes, flung strands of the slime against the floor, the side of a tub.
“I was Maxim Golokhov’s student and assistant in 1924. I became his wife in 1936. Beria and Stalin were at our wedding. We spent long years in Irkutsk and in Moscow, learning, always learning.”
Through the haze, watching for her next move, I saw that she could still cry. “I helped him build this facility after we were finished in Russia, after we fled. The Politburo wanted nothing to do with us, even though we had saved them. Maxim, he was the brave man, but he had other concerns than our marriage. He went to the islands in 1965 and left me here, and I became a caretaker. I earned my keep.”
The stinging subsided. I started to enjoy the sound of her voice. She checked my eyes and nose and lips, like a vet looking over a dog. “Your friend has treated you with something, an antidote maybe?” she said confidentially.
I nodded. The slime dripped off my chin.
“But not expertly. Do you like me?”
I did, actually.
“Rob Cousins is a dead man. Do you see this? Do you see and feel why?”
Her voice was really something. I felt like a tree about to topple from its stump, but somehow stayed on my feet.
“You are covered with Little Mothers making a palette of persuasive chemicals, all over your outside, soon inside, too. Insinuating. It’s not unpleasant, is it?”
It wasn’t. I was feeling pretty good now. Confident.
“Listen to me, Mr. Bridger. I tell you the truth, then I tell you what to do.”
“Let’s hurry it up,” Stuart said. “How do you know they’re under? Silk couldn’t work them.”
“I could teach my husband a few things,” the caretaker said. “But I don’t think Maxim’s heart is in it anymore. Maybe he’s learned all he wants to know.” I could have sworn that pruned, wrinkled face was sneering. She looked at me. “You are not a rich man, are you?”
I shook my head. “Far from it.”
“Rob Cousins asks the rich and powerful for money. He would make them immortal. But would you trust these plutocrats with your most precious things? Would you leave your children and grandchildren, for ten, a hundred generations, with them? Would you make that mistake again? These rich and greedy and ignorant people, tyrants, robbers of all the resources, all the money, for all time? Do you trust them with that power, for all time?”
As if for good measure, she sprayed Rob full in the face with the wand. He fell over on his hands, choking and gasping. She lifted the wand and turned. She stared at Stuart and Melon—Norton, I corrected myself. Best to be respectful.
They dropped back. They were distracted, their guard was down. But it was far too late to make my move. I was on the deck myself, writhing, feeling little orgasms work up my spine. The skin on my back sucked along the slick floor.
I wondered how Rob was doing. The caretaker leaned over him and showed him the back of her right hand, as if she might slap him.
“Do you know how old I am?” she asked in a shrill tenor. “I am 107. I will not age. I will be ugly forever and ever. Do you know how many years I was mad?”
I rolled over to see Rob’s reaction. I was starting to feel pissed off at him for causing all this trouble, and for going to all those rich people.
“Ten years. Maxim watched over me,” she said. “I was kept in a cage. He took notes and made improvements on the treatment. He wanted to live a long time so he could decipher the voice of all the Little Mothers, from the deeps and the salt seas, but Beria and Stalin were more practical. They insisted they be treated next or we would all be executed. They had killed so many and yet they were such cowards. They did not go quite so mad.” Another dead smile.
“Just shoot us
!” I shouted at Stuart, with the last of my will to resist.
Stuart actually leveled his gun at me. There was a scrap of decency still in him.
“What can she learn from that?” Melon asked him. Stuart lowered the gun.
The caretaker turned one last time to Rob. “There is always your brother.”
Rob tried to grab her. Melon batted his arm down and kicked him in the stomach. He curled up, retching.
The caretaker leaned over me and pouched out her lips like a wizened little gibbon. “Here are some numbers,” she said, and pulled a small sheet of paper from the pocket of her overalls. “Tell me what they mean to you.”
PART FIVE
HAL COUSINS
33
AUGUST 13 • ARIZONA
We were still driving east in the blood-red Mercedes, through desert caught up by morning. Bridger and I had been talking for hours, telling our stories. Banning spoke only rarely and kept checking his maps.
Bridger’s story was coming to the conclusion I did not want to hear.
“The kids sprayed us down with water to get the slime off,” Ben said. “We were both pretty limp by then. I was having visions. I was able to fly, I thought. I was in touch with powerful people all over the world. I could hear my intestines talking to me—as if they were stuffed with angels.
“They took us out to the loading dock and pushed us into that goddamned Crown Victoria. We got the seats wet, I remember. Rob was talking a mile a minute about cells and channels and receptors, about how he could feel the pathways opening up inside him. He said he could identify the ones he’d missed, the ones he’d got wrong. He seemed happy as a clam, eager to get back to work. ‘They’re letting us go!’ he said. ‘We’re getting off easy!’”
“Did he tell you what the receptors were?” I asked Ben.
Ben gave me a look, as if I were some kind of curious and disgusting insect. He faced front, squinting at the long two-lane highway. “No, fuck it, I’m sorry, Hal, he didn’t. Not in so many words, and how in hell would I know, anyway?”
