Dead Lines

by Greg Bear

  Even now, standing in the doorway of the small, freshly painted tract home in one of the least expensive neighborhoods in Marin County, Jessie was aging beautifully. But then she lightly waved her arm to invite him in; just that, and it did not matter how old she was. Teenage boys still posted her pictures on their bedroom walls. Charisma only improved with age.

  “How have you been?” she asked, swishing into the living room in a purple-and-orange caftan.

  Peter followed her at two paces. “Up to now, fine, but I think I’m going nuts,” he said.

  She eyed him cautiously. “You stink like you’ve been in a fight,” she said, not unkindly.

  “I need to borrow a shower,” he admitted.

  “Jesus, Peter. It’s nine A.M. Of all the showers in all the world, it has to be mine.” Jessie said. “Like some coffee?”

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, she watched him like a bored cat, as he sat down on her large, comfortable couch. Peter had washed his hair and now his head was chilly. He was wearing her long, thick velour robe. He kept his hands folded politely in his lap. She had taken his shirt and underwear at the bathroom door. Even now the damp clothes were rolling and ticking in the dryer.

  Jessie’s half-friendly demeanor was not providing much warmth. “Someone after you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been to a wake,” he said. “I’m going in for a job interview. I needed to clean up. Thank you, by the way.”

  “De Nader, as they say at General Motors. Who died? Anybody I know?”

  “Phil.”

  “Phil Richards?” Sympathy crossed her face, but the expression quickly lapsed into watchfulness.

  Peter nodded. “I spread his ashes at Point Reyes last night.” He fumbled into the story with eyes averted, not wanting to tell it and start crying. He explained about Lydia and his money but left out the sandblasted man and the three transparent kids. “It was rough.”

  “I remember Phil,” Jessie said. “Nice fellow. Hungry eyes. He didn’t know how to hit on women, but he wanted to. Oh, did he want to.”

  “He was my best friend,” Peter said with a flat simplicity that surprised both of them. He looked away.

  “Rough to lose friends. He was your age, wasn’t he?”

  “Two months younger.”

  Jessie was six years younger than Peter. “I’m going down to Oakland for a film festival later this morning,” she said. “But I’ll make you breakfast. Stoke you up for this interview. Then you have to go.” She sauntered down the hall. Peter leaned back. He would have paid good money to watch her walk; it was pure music.

  From the laundry room, she called out, “Is it show business?”

  “Not really,” Peter said. “Promotions, maybe more commercials. Telecom company. I’m going to prison.”

  “San Andreas? Don’t try that joke around the natives.” She returned and handed him his dry clothes, then gave him a look and thumbs-down. “All those telecom guys should go to prison for real. My retirement is shot.”

  She fixed him eggs and toast while he dressed in the bathroom. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror as he shaved his cheeks and neck with her electric razor and recombed his hair. Presentable enough. He was starting to feel human again, if not confident.

  Jessie sat on a stool at the pass-through kitchen bar and rested her chin on her hands and her elbows on the Formica. She still had the greenest eyes, and she watched him eat the way a sated cat watches a canary. “Why should I forgive you?” she asked. “What’s to forgive?”

  Peter pretended he could not talk with his mouth full. Finally, into her expectant and patient silence, he replied, “It just popped out.”

  “I left you, remember? Ran away with—”

  “I remember,” he said.

  “You were a guy who needed variety. I could see that.”

  “I didn’t, really.”

  “You’re not here to try to hook up again, are you?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “Because I have a guy. A pretty good guy, a few years younger than me. Met him at a film festival. He thinks I’m a goddess. Chubby lights his fire. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “It is,” Peter said.

  “Back then, I knew that for you, brains were everything, as long as they came with long legs and a nice pair of tits. Something told me I wouldn’t be growing old with you.” She waved her hands past her ample bosom and hips, Look at me now.

  “That’s not fair to either of us,” Peter said.

  “No, but I do forgive you.” Now she had a distance in her eye. The visit was wearing. He was not piggy enough. “Tell me about why you’re going nuts,” she said.

  Peter took off his glasses and wiped them with the clean paper napkin. “No,” he said.

  “Ingrate,” Jessie said, but blew him a kiss across the counter. “Now get out. Gerry doesn’t like me to consort with known photographers.”

  “I’ve been seeing things,” he said. Again, the desperation; he did not want to be alone, anywhere. That frightened him almost as much as the old man and children.

  “Oh?” The piggy gleam brightened in Jessie’s eyes.

  He told her about seeing the simulacrum of Lydia in the Tiburon house, and then, more reluctantly, he talked about the morning visitors at Point Reyes.

  Jessie was very into it by the time he finished. Peter was becoming a diversion, a story she could tell her friends. She stared at him intently, green cat eyes searching. “That’s wonderful,” she said matter-of-factly as she took his plate to the sink. “Phantasms of the living. Doppelgangers. I made a film about that once.”

  “Am I crazy?” Peter asked.

  “Beyond a doubt,” Jessie said, then screwed up her face in disdain. “Peter! Come off it. You’re not crazy.”

  “Then what am I?”

  “People see things all the time.”

  “I never have,” Peter said.

  She shrugged that off. “Ghosts of the living are called wraiths. Ghosts of the dead are specters. I wish I could see something. Life is a bore around here. Maybe you can take Gerry and me out to Tiburon. We could hold a séance. On second thought, never mind. Séances are a real bore, and Gerry’s an atheist.”

  She walked around the counter and gave Peter a quick hug. “Now really. Time for you to go.” He appraised her bulk through the caftan and wondered about Gerry, trying to picture him.

  As they walked to the door, Peter peeked down the narrow hallway, looking for he knew not what. Residues of bad times, perhaps. Wraiths of Gerry crying out for sympathy. Peter had forgotten how hard it had been, stirring more than just good humor out of Jessie.

  Nothing. The rooms looked clean and good. A quiet, calm life.

  Back at the Porsche, Peter opened the door and climbed behind the wheel.

  Jessie smiled and waved good-bye from the door.

  The Trans pressed against his hip as he buckled himself in.

  CHAPTER 15

  YOU COULDN’T SEE most of the old prison from the main approach road. Construction on San Andreas had begun in 1854. The complex had been emptied and decommissioned just two years ago, the stretch of magnificent Bay Area beachfront having long since become worth more to the state as raw land.

  Now, tall, mobile demolition units were pulling or knocking down most of the fortresslike walls, swinging aside huge chunks of concrete and tangles of chain link and barbed wire. To the east, toppled concrete guard towers lay stacked in trios like old cheese logs, cracked and gray, facades of bricks clinging like red mold. Piles of brick and stone and concrete rubble rose in hundred-foot mounds behind construction fencing. Muddy truck-rutted gravel roads crisscrossed a wide stretch of no-man’s-land still colored by jagged pentangles of lawn.

  There remained intact the famous North Gate, hallowed in film and TV, with its huge brick arch. Several slogans had glamorized that dreadful span over the years, including the infamous “Pain Is Your Last Constitutional Right. Welcome to San Andreas.” There had also been, “Don’t Give Up Hope
. Just Give Up.” All the old admonitions had been replaced by a rippling, shiny plastic banner reading HAMPTON’S SAN ANDREAS PARK BUSINESS LEASES AVAILABLE.

  The new glassed-in security booth was manned by corporate guards wearing plain black uniforms. They checked his name against the appointment book. “You’re going to see the Trans boys,” the portly, pleasant-faced chief of security mused as he hefted an e-pad. “They’ve had folks in and out all day. Busy, busy. Photo ID?”

  Peter produced his driver’s license and the guard used his pad to scan it from the wallet. He then returned the wallet and vanished back into the booth.

  Peter had nearly gone to prison once. An obscenity trial in Los Angeles in 1973 had ended in a hung jury. Even had he been convicted, Peter would not have ended up in San Andreas. This was the box that had held the twisted hard candies of crime. “Scum de la scum,” Peter murmured nervously just as the guard emerged from the booth.

  “Pardon me?” the guard asked.

  “Did you work here before?” Peter asked.

  “Not me,” the guard said. “Knew some guys who did. Scary. Me, I’m a Libertarian.” He gave Peter a small wireless card. “You’re cleared, Mr. Russell. This is your electronic pass. If you go outside your zone, the card beeps and you show up on our screen here. Then we have to come looking for you. If you lose the pass, you cause all sorts of bother. You’re going to the old DP building.” He handed Peter a crisp paper map and drew him the way with a marker. “Right to the heart of San Andreas. Very exclusive.” The guard smiled, showing beautifully even false teeth.

  The gate, an ordinary wooden beam, lifted. Peter entered with just the slightest grind of gears.

  CHAPTER 16

  “YOU LOOK SO serious,” Weinstein said as he and Peter walked down the long polished concrete floor between the tiers, three stories on each side. Peter was frowning up at the cells. The bars had been removed and workers were now bustling along the walkways, carrying desks and chairs or stringing cables.

  “It’s a serious-looking place,” Peter explained. He did not much like the decor, but Weinstein seemed pleased. Exhausted, but pleased; even a little manic.

  Weinstein stared back at Peter through red-rimmed eyes. “We only have a few cubicles in this block, for overflow, you know,” he said. “We took the pit right out of the peach. Got into this deal early and scored the DP block.”

  “DP?” Peter asked.

  “Death Penalty. Dead man walking. The complex right around the gas chamber.”

  “Whoa,” Peter said.

  “Out of death comes life, and out of incarceration comes real estate. Both lead to profit. And the ladies adore it. I cannot tell you how many times in the last month . . .” He waggled his hand from his wrist.

  “Why would you rather be here than, say, Sausalito?”

  “Therein lies a story,” Weinstein said. “My office is right ahead. It’s pretty close to the old chamber. We have all rights to the chamber, you know.”

  Peter did not like the way the walls seemed to close in. Trick of perspective, he decided—or deliberate design. Prisons had been made to punish after all.

  Weinstein went on breathlessly. “The chamber has a table in it with straps and tubes, not a chair. Lethal injection. They stopped using gas a long time ago.”

  They walked through an open gate of thick bars painted a nasty shade of lime green. “This way.” Weinstein pointed left, down another, shorter block, where work had progressed to the point that the cells now had glass inserts and Dutch doors. He waved his ID card over a security plate and a latch clicked. He pulled the door open. “Welcome to the office of the champion funding guru. That would be me. Thanks of course to you and to Mr. Benoliel.”

  The cell was equipped with a desk, a file cabinet, a PC, and a small refrigerator. The walls had been painted a fashionable but neutral gray and sported a white board and a small corkboard covered with file and business cards. Retrofit ducts and cable conduits snaked around the ceiling and floor.

  “Telecoms melted down a few years ago. Remember?” Weinstein asked with a twitching wink. He opened the refrigerator and offered Peter a Pepsi. Peter popped the top and sat in the chair before the desk, which filled half the cell. The office. “WorldCom and some offshoots of Enron and a couple of other biggies were going to transform San Andreas into a huge business park, with condominiums and shops lining the waterfront. Five hundred acres of prime waterfront, can you believe it? Best views in Marin. Anyway, they were in the deal to the tune of five billion dollars when it became obvious that the old prison better suited their CEO needs.” Weinstein grinned ferociously and leaned back in the office chair. “The feds shut down the whole development. But the prison was theirs to dispose of, and it came with a sweetheart tax offer from Marin, so someone made a quick decision. What’s the difference between Dilbert cubicles and sad harmonicas in the Big House?”

  “Not much,” Peter said.

  Weinstein nodded decisively. “A few surviving startups bid for space. Google wanted it, but we got in first.” He lifted his Pepsi and toasted Peter. “My apologies. It took me far too long to realize that you’re the director of Rising Shiner and The Private Lives of Helen and Troy.”

  Peter smiled. “Old history.”

  “I love those films. John Waters, eat your heart out. I go to psychotronic festivals whenever I can, which isn’t often, lately. What I’m saying is, to the younger generation, you’re a legend.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Peter said. Nor did he believe it.

  “Well, we can play it that way in the trades. Out of the onetime slammer comes a promo campaign headed by Peter Russell, the edgiest sexploitation director ever.” Weinstein’s face grew serious. “And, to be honest, Russ Meyer turned us down. But then he suggested you, one Russell to another.”

  “Nice of Russ to give me a plug,” Peter said. He glanced over his shoulder at the door. The office was remarkably small.

  “It was fate.” Weinstein’s eyes shifted. “Cells for the condemned,” he said with a barely perceptible shudder. “I try to get out whenever I can. A different route, each time, just in case.” Weinstein pushed back from the desk. His chair bumped the concrete wall. “Needs a few canaries, don’t you think?”

  Peter chuckled, but there was little real humor in the air.

  “Let’s go meet our Nicola Tesla,” Weinstein said. “If you two hit it off, we’re in clover. By the way, do you have your Trans?”

  Peter removed the unit from his coat pocket.

  Weinstein put it in a desk drawer. “We don’t take them any closer to the transponder than this. Sparks, sort of. Not just energy, either. Information.” Weinstein pushed forward another grin, this time excessively wry. “Fascinating effects.”

  PETER DREW INTO himself as he automatically followed his host down the relentless corridors. Talk of Russ Meyer had taken him back.

  Weinstein led him into a circular cell block, older, fashioned of large ocher bricks. The cells here were larger. They passed row after row of offices occupied by eager young men and women staring at monitors.

  Peter pulled up from his reverie in time to walk through a steel door, into the largest cell he had seen so far: at least nine feet by ten, concrete walls painted pale green and blue, a stylish curved desk covered with printouts and a laptop. No posters or pictures. The abode of a high-tech monk.

  Weinstein introduced him to a large, bearlike man in a golf shirt and black jeans, rising from behind the desk. “Peter Russell, meet Arpad Kreisler.”

  The bear held out his hand and squeezed hard enough to hurt, but his face was childlike in its eager friendliness. “Pleasure to meet you,” Kreisler said with a trace of some Middle European accent. He stood over six feet tall, with large, square features, and broad, stooped shoulders. Stringy black hair hung into deep-set black eyes. The way he stood revealed a casual but awkward strength, and a strangely coltish grace for a man of his imposing size. “Stanley tells me you saved our butts.”

&
nbsp; Peter looked pleasant and decided he would say as little as possible. He had no idea where he stood here. Seconds passed before he realized they expected a response. “Thanks, but I didn’t do much, actually. Mrs. Benoliel did the persuading. Sorry to zone out,” he added as an afterthought. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “None of us has been getting much sleep,” Kreisler said, his eyes momentarily losing focus. “Too much work. But we get the hang. We are adjusting.”

  Peter sensed tension, but could not determine what sort: startup tension, brilliance pushed to the limit, or just working too hard and needing a year off. Nothing amiss, he tried to convince himself, ignoring the other voice that insisted he should leave, and sooner rather than later.

  “Wonderful opportunity, working with such as you,” Kreisler said. “Has Stanley told you what we are doing? What Trans does for the communication of the world?”

  “I left most of that for you, Arpad,” Weinstein said. “You’re the heart and the brains.”

  “Also kidney and spleen,” Kreisler said, deadpan. “I used to work for Xerox, they hire me right out of Ukraine, then for Microsoft Research, you know? I am the best.” He screwed his finger into his head and winced. “But a little cracked.”

  Weinstein chuckled. “Definitely.”

  “So I do not handle money or go out in public,” Kreisler said, raising his eyebrows to read Peter’s reaction.

  Peter managed a smile. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me too much,” he warned. “I haven’t signed a, what is it, an NDA or anything.”

  Kreisler’s grin was wicked. “Not a problem,” he said. “We are a hundred years ahead. We could show you everything and do the math right in front of you, and still you would have nothing.”

  “Brave New World,” Weinstein said.

  “We have yet to tell the world how brave it is,” Kreisler said. “Perhaps you do that for us.”

  Peter pulled himself up. “Look, Stanley, Arpad—it is Arpad, isn’t it?”