Space Is Just a Starry Night

by Tanith Lee

  But to return to Carla. She was, I believe, my great-great-great-great-great grandmother. Give or take a great. Absolute accuracy isn’t one of my talents, either. The relevant part is, however, that at thirty-three, Carla had developed the rare heart complaint valu — val — well, she’d developed it. She had a few months, or less, and so she opted, along with seventy other people that year, to undergo Cryogenic Suspension till a cure could be found. Cry Sus had been getting progressively more popular, ever since the 1980s. Remember? It’s the freezing method of holding a body in refrigerated stasis, indefinitely preserving, thereby, flesh, bones, organs, and the rest, perfect and pristine, in a frosty crystal box. (Just stick a tray of water in the freezer and see for yourself.) It may not strike you as cozy anymore, but that’s hardly surprising. In 1993, seventy-one persons, of whom four-or-five-or-six-great granny Carla was one, saw it as the only feasible alternative to death. In the following two hundred years, four thousand others copied their example. They froze their malignancies, their unreliable hearts, and their corroding tissues, and as the light faded from their snowed-over eyes, they must have dreamed of waking up in the fabulous future.

  Funny thing about the future. Each next second is the future. And now it’s the present. And now it’s the past.

  Those all-together four thousand and ninety-one who deposited their physiognomies in the cold-storage compartments of the world were looking forward to the future. And here it was. And we were it.

  And smack in the middle of this future, which I naively called Now, was I, Tacey Brice, a rotten little unskilled artist, painting gimcrack flying saucers for the spacines. There was a big flying saucer sighting boom that year of 2193. Either you recollect that, or you don’t. Nearly as big as the historic boom between the 1930s and ’90s. Psychologists had told us it was our human inadequacy, searching all over for a father-mother figure to replace God. Besides, we were getting desperate. We’d penetrated our solar system to a limited extent, but without meeting anybody on the way.

  That’s another weird thing. When you read the speculativia of the 1900s, you can see just how much they expected of us. It was going to be all or nothing. Either the world would become a miracle of rare device with plastisteel igloos balanced on the stratosphere and metal giblets, or we’d have gone out in a blast of radiation. Neither of which had happened. We’d had problems, of course. Over two hundred years, problems occur. There had been the Fission Tragedy, and the World Flood of ’14. There’d been the huge pollution clean-ups complete with the rationing that entailed, and one pretty nasty pandemic. They had set us back, that’s obvious. But not halted us. So we reached 2193 mostly unscathed, with a whizz-bang technology not quite as whizz, or bang, as prophesied. A place where doors opened when they saw who you were, and with a colony on Mars, but where they hadn’t solved the unemployment problem or the geriatric problem. Up in the ether there were about six hundred buzz-whuzzes headed out into nowhere, bleeping information about earth. But we hadn’t landed on Alpha Centauri yet. And if the waste-disposal jammed, brother, it jammed. What I’m trying to say (superfluously, because you’re ahead of me) is that their future, those four thousand and ninety-one, their future, which was our present, wasn’t as spectacular as they’d trusted or feared. Excepting the Salenic Vena-derivative drugs, which had rendered most of the diseases of the 1900s and the 2000s obsolete.

  And suddenly, one day, someone had a notion.

  “Hey, guys,” this someone suggested, “you recall all those sealed frosty boxes the medic centers have? You know, with the on-ice carcinomas and valu-diddums in ’em? Well, don’t you think it’d be grand to defrost the lot of them and pump ’em full of health?”

  “Crazy,” said everybody else, and wet themselves with enthusiasm.

  After that, they got the thing organized on a global scale. And first off, not wanting to chance any public mishaps, they intended to unfreeze a single frost box, in relative privacy. Perhaps they put all the names in a hat. Whatever, they picked Carla Brice, or Brr-Ice, if you liked that Newsies’ tablotape pun.

  And since Carla Brr-Ice might feel a touch extra chilly, coming back to life two hundred years after she’d cryonised out of it, they dredged up a bloodline descendant to hold her cold old thirty-three-year hand. And that was Tacey Brr-Ice. Me.

  The room below was pink, but the cold pink of strawberry ice cream. There were forty doctors of every gender prowling about in it and round the crystal slab. It put me in mind of a pack of wolves with a carcass they couldn’t quite decide when to eat. But then, I was having a nervous attack, up on the spectator gallery where they’d sat me. The countdown had begun two days before, and I’d been ushered in at noon. For an hour now, the crystal had been clear. I could see a sort of blob in it, which gradually resolved into a naked woman. Straight off, even with her lying there stiff as a board and utterly defenseless, I could tell she was the sort of lady who scared me dizzy. She was large and well-shaped, with a mane of dark red hair. She was the type that goes outdoor swimming at all seasons, skis, shoots rapids in a canoe, becomes the coordinator of a moon colony. The type that bites. Valu-diddums had got her, but nothing else could have done. Not child, beast, nor man. Certainly not another woman. Oh my. And this was my multiple-great granny that I was about to offer the hand of reassurance.

  Another hour, and some dial and click mechanisms down in the strawberry ice room started to dicker. The wolves flew in for the kill. A dead lioness, that was Carla. Then the box rattled and there was a yell. I couldn’t see for scrabbling medics.

  “What happened?”

  The young medic detailed to sit on the spec gallery with me sighed.

  “I’d say she’s opened her eyes.”

  The young medic was black as space and beautiful as the stars therein. But he didn’t give a damn about me. You could see he was in love with Carla the lioness. I was simply a pain he had to put up with for two or three hours, while he stared at the goddess beneath.

  But now the medics had drawn off. I thought of the Sleeping Beauty story, and Snow White. Her eyes were open indeed. Coppery brown to tone with the mane. She didn’t appear dazed. She appeared contemptuous. Precisely as I’d anticipated. Then the crystal box lid began to rise.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Strange you should say that,” said the medic. His own wonderful eyes fixed on Carla, he’d waxed profound and enigmatic. “The manner in which we all still use these outdated religious expletives: God, Christ, Hell, long after we’ve ceased to credit their religious basis as such. The successful completion of this experiment in life-suspense and restoration has a bearing on the same matter,” he murmured, his inch-long lashes brushing the plastase pane. “You’ve read of the controversy regarding this process? It was seen at one era as an infringement of religious faith.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  I kept on staring at him. Infinitely preferable to Carla, with her open eyes, and the solitary bending medic with the supadermic.

  “The idea of the soul,” said the medic on the gallery. “The immortal part that survives death. But what befalls a soul trapped for years, centuries, in a living yet statically frozen body? In a physical limbo, a living death. You see the problem this would pose for the religious?”

  “I — uh —”

  “But, of course, today…” He spread his hands. “There is no such barrier to lucid thought. The life force, we now know, resides purely in the brain, and thereafter in the motor nerves, the spinal cord, and attendant reflexive centers. There is no soul.”

  Then he shut up and nearly swooned away, and I realized Carla had met his eye.

  I looked, and she was sitting, part reclined against some medic’s arm. The medic was telling her where she was and what year it was and how, by this evening, the valu-diddums would be no more than a bad dream, and then she could go out into the amazing new world with her loving descendant, whom she could observe up there on the gallery.

  She did spare a glance for me. It lasted about
.09 of a mini-instant. I tried to unglue my mouth and flash her a warming welcoming grin, but before I could manage it, she was back to studying the black medic.

  At that moment somebody came and whipped me away for celebratory alcohol, and two hours later, when I’d celebrated rather too much, they took me up a plushy corridor to meet Carla, skin to skin.

  Actually, she was dressed on this occasion. She’d had a shower and a couple of post-defrosting tests and some shots and the anti-valu-diddums stuff. Her hair was smoldering like a fire in a forest. She wore the shiny smock medical centers insisted that you wore, but on her it was like a design original. She’d even had a tan frozen in with her, or maybe it was my dazzled eyes that made her seem all bronzed and glowing. Nobody could look that good, that healthy, after two hundred years on ice. And if they did, they shouldn’t. Her room was crammed with flowers and bottles of scent and exotic light paintings, courtesy of the Institute. And then they trundled me in.

  Not astoundingly, she gazed at me with bored amusement. Like she’d come to the dregs at the bottom of the wine.

  “This is Tacey,” somebody said, making free with my forename. Carla spoke, in a voice of maroon velvet.

  “Hallo, er, Tacey.” Patently, my cognomen was a big mistake. Never mind, she’d overlook it for now. “I gather we are related.”

  I was drunk, but it wasn’t helping.

  “I’m your gr — yes, we are, but —” I intelligently blurted. The “but” was going to be a prologue to some nauseating, placatory, crawler’s drivel about her gorgeousness and youth. It wasn’t necessary, not even to let her know how scared I was. She could tell that easily, plus how I’d shrunk to a shadow in her high-voltage glare. Before I could complete my hiccupping sycophancy, anyway, the medic in charge said: “Tacey is your link, Mz Brice, with civilization as it currently is.”

  Carla couldn’t resist it. She raised one manicured eyebrow, frozen exquisite for two centuries. If Tacey was the link, civilization could take a walk.

  “My apartment,” I went on blurting, “it’s medium, but —”

  What was I going to say now? About how all my grant from the Institute I would willingly spend on gowns and perfumes and skis and automatic rifles, or whatever Carla wanted. How I’d move out and she could have the apartment to herself. (She wouldn’t like the spacine murals on the walls.)

  “It’s just a bri — a bridge,” I managed. “Till you get acclimatozed — atized.”

  She watched me as I made a fool of myself, or rather, displayed my true foolishness. Finally I comprehended the message in her copper eyes: Don’t bother. That was all: Don’t bother. You’re a failure, Carla’s copper irises informed me, as if I didn’t know. Don’t make excuses. You can alter nothing. I expect nothing from you. I will stay while I must in your ineffectual vicinity, and you may fly round me and scorch your wings if you like. When I am ready, I shall leave immediately, soaring over your sky like a meteor. You can offer no aid, no interest, no gain I cannot garner for myself.

  “How kind of Tacey,” Carla’s voice said. “Come, darling, and let me kiss you.”

  Somehow, I’d imagined her still as very cold from the frosty box, but she was blood heat. Ashamed, I let her brush my cheek with her meteoric lips. Perhaps I’d burn.

  “I’d say this calls for a toast,” said the medic in charge. “But just rose-juice for Mz Brice, I’m afraid, at present.”

  Carla smiled at him, and I hallucinated a rosebush, thorns too, eviscerated by her teeth. Lions drink blood, not roses.

  I got home paralyzed and floundered about trying to change things. In the middle of attempting to re-spray-paint a wall, I sank onto a pillow and slept. Next day I was angry, the way you can only be angry over something against which you are powerless. So damn it. Let her arrive and see space shuttles, mother ships, and whirly bug-eyed monsters all across the plastase. And don’t pull the ready-cook out of the alcove to clean the feed-pipes behind it that I hadn’t seen for three years. Or dig the plant out of the cooled-water dispenser. Or buy any new garments, blinds, rugs, sheets. And don’t conceal the Wage-Increment checks when they skitter down the chute. Or prop up the better spacines I’d illustrated on the table where she won’t miss them.

  I visited her one more time during the month she stayed at the Institute. I didn’t have the courage not to take her anything, although I knew that whatever I offered would be wrong. Actually, I had an impulse to blow my first grant check and my W-I together and buy her a little antique stiletto of Toledo steel. It was blatantly meant to commit murder with, and as I handed it to her I’d bow and say, “For you, Carla. I just know you can find a use for it.” But naturally I didn’t have the bravura. I bought her a flagon of expensive scent she didn’t need and was rewarded by seeing her put it on a shelf with three other identically packaged flagons, each twice the size of mine. She was wearing a reclinerobe of amber silk, and I almost reached for sunglasses. We didn’t say much. I tottered from her room, sunburned and peeling. And that night I painted another flying saucer on the wall.

  The day she left the Institute, they sent a mobile for me. I was supposed to collect and ride to the apartment with Carla, to make her feel homey. I felt sick.

  Before I met her, though, the medic in charge wafted me into his office.

  “We’re lucky,” he said. “Mz Brice is a most independent lady. Her readjustment has been, in fact, remarkable. None of the traumas or rebuttals we’ve been anxious about. I doubt if most of the other subjects to be revived from Cryogenesis will demonstrate the equivalent rate of success.”

  “They’re really reviving them, then?” I inquired lamely. I was glad to be in here, putting off my fourth congress with inadequacy.

  “A month from today. Dependent on the ultimately positive results of our post-resuscitation analysis of Mz Brice. But, as I intimated, I hardly predict any hitch there.”

  “And how long —” I swallowed — “how long do you think Carla will want to stay with me?”

  “Well, she seems to have formed quite an attachment to you, Tacey. It’s a great compliment, you know, from a woman like that. A proud, volatile spirit. But she needs an anchor for a while. We all need our anchors. Probably, her proximity will benefit you, in return. Don’t you agree?”

  I didn’t answer, and he concluded I was overwhelmed. He started to describe to me that glorious scheduled event, the global link-up, when every single cryogone was to be revived, as simultaneously with each other as they could arrange it. The process would be going out on five channels of the Spatials, visible to us all. Technology triumphant yet again, bringing us a minute or two of transcendental catharsis. I thought about the beautiful black medic and his words on religion. And this is how we replaced it, presumably (when we weren’t saucer-sighting), shedding tears sentimentally over four thousand and ninety idiots fumbling out of the deep-freeze.

  “One last, small warning,” the medic in charge added. “You may notice — or you may not, I can’t be positive — the occasional lapse in the behavioral patterns of Mz Brice.”

  There was a fantasy for me. Carla, lapsed.

  “In what way?” I asked, miserably enjoying the unlikelihood.

  “Mere items. A mood, an aberration — a brief disorientation even. These are to be expected in a woman reclaimed by life after two hundred years, and in a world she is no longer familiar with. As I explained, I looked for much worse and far greater quantity. The odd personality slip is inevitable. You mustn’t be alarmed. At such moments the most steadying influence on Mz Brice will be a non-Institutional normalcy of surroundings. And the presence of yourself.”

  I nearly laughed.

  I would have, if the door hadn’t opened, and if Carla, in mock red-lynx fur, hadn’t stalked into the room.

  I didn’t even try to create chatter. Alone in the mobile, with the auto driving us along the cool concrete highways, there wasn’t any requirement to pretend for the benefit of others. Carla reckoned I was a schmoil, and I duly schmoiled. M
ind you, now and again, she put out a silken paw and gave me a playful tap. Like when she asked me where I got my hair done. But I just told her about the ready-set parlors, and she quit. Then again, she asked a couple of less abstract questions. Did libraries still exist, that was one. The second one was if I slept well.

  I went along with everything in a dank stupor. I think I was half kidding myself it was going to be over soon. Then the mobile drove into the auto-lift of my apartment block, the gates gaped, and we got out. As my door recognized me and split wide, it abruptly hit me that Carla and I were going to be hand in glove for some while. A month at least, while the Institute computed its final tests. Maybe more, if Carla had my lazy streak somewhere in her bronze and permasteel frame.

  She strode into my apartment and stood flaming among the flying saucers and the wine-ringed furniture. The fake-fur looked as if she’d shot it herself. She was a head taller than I was ever going to be. And then she startled me, about the only way she could right then.

  “I’m tired, Tacey,” said Carla.

  No wisecracks, no vitriol, no stare from Olympus.

  She glided to the bedroom. OK. I’d allocated the bed as hers, the couch as mine. She paused, gold digit on the panel that I’d preset to respond to her finger.

  “Will you forgive me?” she wondered aloud.

  Her voice was soporific. I yawned.

  “Sure, Carla.”

  She stayed behind the closed panels for hours. The day reddened over the city, colors as usual heightened by the weather control that operates a quarter of a mile up. I slumped here and there, unable to eat or rest or read or doodle. I was finding out what it was going to be like, having an apartment and knowing it wasn’t mine anymore. Even through a door, Carla dominated.