One Million Tomorrows M

by Bob Shaw

  “You don’t have to,” she said, her eyes absorbing the fact that the case held two identical guns with their seals intact.

  “This is the time, Athene. The best time.”

  “You’re certain, Will?” She hesitated. “We have no children.”

  “We don’t need them.” He held the case out to her. “Besides, I took a pill last week and it might be months before I could be a father again—and I don’t want to wait months. This is the time. Right now.”

  She nodded sadly and began to undress. Sensing the rightness of it, Carewe set the case aside and took off his own clothes. He kissed Athene once, almost coldly, and offered her the case again. She picked the outermost gun, as he had known she would, and broke the seal. He held out his wrist. She pressed the gun to the blue deltas which glowed beneath his skin. There was a sharp hiss and tn waters,ny cloud of vapor passing into his tissues produced a fleeting sensation of coldness. He took the other gun and fired its charge into Athene’s wrist.

  She’s safe, he thought later as they lay entwined on the satin-cool divan. But how can I tell her I was cheating?

  IV

  In the dreams his body was made of glass and he was precipitated from one dangerous sequence of events to another: serving with Fauve teams in Africa or Southern Asia, sweating it out on the fourth Venus expedition, trawling for manganese nodules on the bed of the Pacific. Many kinds of destruction threatened his fragile limbs and torso—bullets, bombs, falls, the blind thrust of massive crankshafts which could grind him to sparkling dust …

  And Carewe would wake up feeling cold and lonely, unable to find reassurance in the nearness of his wife. He understood the significance of the dreams, but it made them no less- terrible. Before the development of biostats, a tutor had once told him, a population of human beings and a population of glass figurines had entirely different kinds of life expectancy .graphs. In the case of the figurines a fraction would get broken every year, until gradually none was left; with the humans, most of them would be around until their late fifties—and then the population would rapidly disappear. The advent of biostatic drugs meant that a human could look forward to an indefinitely prolonged life, but not to careless immortality. A being which had the potential for indefinitely prolonged life was “‘immortal”—but smash that being into a mountainside at thrice the speed of sound and he is dead. All we have done, the tutor concluded, is to join the ranks of the figurines.

  The magnitude of the responsibility for preserving his own life dismayed Carewe. To die at the age of forty in an airplane or high-speed automobile crash would be bad if it meant losing thirty years of life, but when a possible thousand years were involved, it was unthinkable. Standing looking out at the darkness of the lake, he achieved a little more insight into what the contemporary philosopher Osman called “the bitch society,” meaning a world population in which the historic male traits had effectively vanished. War had been abolished, if one discounted the limited operations of the Fauve teams, but more than two centuries after the first Moon landing Mars and Venus were virtually unexplored. The small number of funkies prepare to undertake such ventures received little backing from administrations of cools—and already Carewe could appreciate why, even though he had not been uncoupled from the biological flywheel of masculinity. The future weighs heavily, he thought. That’s all it is.

  And the problems of the immediate future were the most pressing. Dawn was overpainting the fainter stars, which meant that in a few hours they would be on their way back to Three Springs—and he had not been able to tell Athene the truth about his E.80 shot. The three days at Lake Orkney had been the best in ten years of marriage. He and Athene were matched opposing mirrors, and by his apparent act of faith in her he had created a lustrous image of himself which was blazing back and forth between them. (Love, Osman had said, is approval e other partner’s good taste.) Now he was faced with the prospect of turning Athene’s mirror aside, deflecting the precious fire into a cold void from which—by the laws of emotional thermodynamics—it could never be recovered.

  There was a purely physical aspect to his dilemma. Her belief that he had severed the sexual link seemed to have had a profound aphrodisiac effect on Athene. As if trying permanently to burn out her own desires she had, for three days, engaged him in an almost continual bout of sexual activity, refusing even to fall asleep unless he was in her as they nested, her buttocks to his groin, like spoons. But three days was about the maximum period for which Carewe should continue to display masculinity. The post-biostatic production of androgens was known to last that long in some cases, but within a matter of hours he would have to simulate loss of sexuality or tell Athene the whole story.

  To make matters worse, his own attitude kept fluctuating from minute to minute, depriving him of firm ground on which to make a stand. At times there appeared to be no problem at all—Athene would certainly be overjoyed to learn they were the first couple in the world to have been granted endless life and endless love—but at other times he accepted the facts of the enclosed universe which was his marriage. In that involute continuum getting something for nothing was not impossible, merely unforgivable. He had deliberately allowed Athene to believe in his faith in the essential, asexual component of their love, he had traded on the deception, used the emotional funds which had been forthcoming. Now it was time to confess—and he was afraid.

  Tired and depressed in the grainy light of dawn, he decided to take the only avenue of escape available to him. On returning to work he was scheduled to fly to Randal’s Creek for a medical check on the efficacy of E.80, and there was a faint possibility that the drug was a failure. He felt perfectly normal but—incredibly, the idea was almost attractive—perhaps he really had tied off, perhaps he had genuinely cooled it. With that possibility in mind, the logical thing to do was to remain silent until Farma’s physiologists made a definite pronouncement.

  Shivering slightly, possibly with relief, Carewe got back into bed.

  Strictly speaking there had been no need for it, but in the morning he had adjusted the cutters on his magnetic razor and shaved off his five-millimeter bristles. Now, as he boarded the southbound vertijet flight, his chin and upper lip felt naked and exposed. The flight systems manager, who would once have been known as the pilot, was a symphony of honey and tan in her tailored uniform. Carewe smiled tentatively at her as he paused to hold his credisk against the scanner in the forward hatch. She gave him an impersonal smile in return, and already her eyes were on the passengers behind him.

  He sat down, stroking the skin of his face, and staring disconsolately through a window until the aircraft made its tiny run and take-off. It rose vertically for over a thousand meters until it had cleared the insubstantial walls of the noise abatement screenfield, then darted southwards parallel with the irregular white peaks of the Rockies. Far below, the evenly spaced townships of the western states glittered in their ganglia of roads and tubeways, giving Carewe a welme sense of reassurance and belonging.

  The world population was no smaller than at the end of the Twentieth Century, but it was no larger either, and there had been two centuries in which to shake down and find optimum solutions to the problems. Life in a society of glass figurines tended to be both dull and safe, but with the personal responsibility of immortality riding on one’s shoulders safety was the prime consideration. No sane person ever took a risk, knowingly. The aircraft in which Carewe was traveling to Randal’s Creek had three entirely independent means of staying aloft, but he was taut with apprehension.

  What would I do, he wondered, if there was even a slight crash and I had to look at a dead body?

  The Randal’s Creek laboratory was eighty kilometers south of Pueblo, discreetly tucked into the juncture of two mountain valleys. It was served by a fused-earth road which, although good enough for roadcars, was unsuitable for bullets because of their higher centers of gravity. Most of the staff of eighty lived in Pueblo and its environs, and traveled on the shuttle copter o
perated by Farma.

  Carewe reached the Pueblo field in mid-morning and found there were only three other men, all cools, sharing the copter’s large saloon with him. Remembering Barenboim’s injunction to keep up appearances of normalcy, be made a point of speaking to the others during the brief flight. By asking several questions about the location of the biopoiesis lab and admin block he managed to get across the information that he was an accountant on his way to Randal’s Creek to examine costing procedures. The other men had apparent ages in the early thirties, and something in their manner suggested to Carewe their real ages were not much greater. They lacked Barenboim’s glacial implacability. It occurred to Carewe that when the news about E.80 became public the old-style immortals, especially those who had newly tied off, were likely to feel resentment. On the other hand, some aspects of the cool philosophy might be vindicated as never before. Even in pre-historic ages a small percentage of men had sufficient time to tire of the basic reproductive procedures—what strange byways might such a person be exploring in his two hundredth year of undiminished potency? The disturbing idea that asexual immortality could have its advantages was stirring yet again in Carewe’s mind as the copter crossed the brow of a pine-clad hill and eased itself downwards to the silvery domes of the Farma laboratories.

  He hurried across to the main entrance, noting that the air was appreciably warmer in Colorado than further north in the Three Springs area, and stepped into one of a line of booths which spanned the reception area. There was a barely perceptible pause while the company computer, a thousand kilometers away, checked his identity, approved of his presence and used a microwave link to open the booth’s inner door, allowing him to enter the building’s main concourse.

  “Mr. Barenboim wishes you to join him in his office on Level D as soon as you have paid your compliments to Mr. Abercrombie, the divisional accountant,” the machine told him.

  “Understood,” he said, mildly surprised. Barenboim rarely visited Randal’s Creek, he knew, but then E.80 was the most important project that Farma or any other g manufacturer had ever undertaken. He found the divisional accountant’s office and spent almost an hour talking shop and pinning down the exact nature of the accounting difficulties he was required to straighten out. It soon became apparent that the problem was less one of procedure than of relationships between the department and Barenboim. Abercrombie, a plump cool with watchful, watery eyes, seemed well aware of the situation and he treated Carewe with reserve, as though he could be dealing with Barenboim’s axeman. The reaction amused Carewe, who found it the first foretaste of what it would be like to have top executive status and power, but at the same time it made him feel slightly apologetic. He got away from Abercrombie as quickly as possible and made his way to Level D.

  Barenboim’s suite was smaller and slightly less luxurious than the one at Farma’s headquarters. The inner door’s round black eye blinked its recognition of Carewe and the polished wood slid aside. He went through into the familiar aroma of coffee with which Barenboim was always surrounded when he was working.

  “Willy, Willy!” Barenboim, who had been seated at a free-form blue-and-red desk, crossed the office and shook Carewe’s hand. His eyes flashed from the depths of their bony grottoes. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Nice to see you again, Hy!”

  “This is marvelous,” Barenboim said as he returned to his seat, waving Carewe into another.

  “Ah … yes.” It isn’t all that marvelous, Carewe thought; I’ve only been away a few days. It occurred to him, for the first time, that Barenboim was making a real effort to behave like a funkie or, at least, to act un-cool; and he was reminded that their relationship was entirely artificial, based on nothing more than circumstances and expediency.

  “Well, how did it go? Good trip?”

  “Very pleasant—Lake Orkney is beautiful this time of the year.”

  Barenboim’s face was momentarily impatient. “I wasn’t inquiring about the scenery. How’s your libido? Still got it?”

  “You bet.” Carewe laughed. “And then some.”

  “That’s fine. I see you’ve shaved.”

  “I thought it would be best.”

  “Probably, but you’d better use a depilatory instead. Your chin has a distinct blue tinge which makes you look less cool than ever.”

  Carewe felt a pang of pleasure, but was careful not to conceal it. That bitch who flies the plane, he thought. She must have been blind. “I’ll pick up one today,” he said.

  “No you don’t, young Willy. There must be no hint anybody anywhere that you have used anything but an absolutely standard biostat. How would it look if a supposed cool was seen buying a depilatory?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Willy—but this is the kind of thing we have to watch out for. I’ll give you something before you leave.” Barenboim inspected the puffy, floury skin of his hands. “Now take your clothes off.”

  “Huh?”

  Barenboim smoothed each of his eyebrows delicately with a single fingertip. “We need tissue samples from various sites on your body for checks on the all replication functions and, of course, it will be necessary to carry out a sperm count.”

  “I see—but I thought the checks would be done by one of your biochemists.”

  “Making the results available to the entire laboratory staff? No thanks. Manny Pleeth is a better practical biochemist than I, but he’s busy up north, so I’ll check you out myself. Don’t worry about it, Willy—the door’s locked and I do have some years of experience.”

  “Of course, Hy. I wasn’t thinking.” Carewe stood up and, with an uneasy suspicion that something was beginning to go terribly wrong, removed his clothes.

  He had been waiting at the Three Springs airport for over thirty minutes before it occurred to him that Athene might not be coming to pick him up. It was mid-afternoon and the passenger building was almost deserted. Carewe went into a communication booth, stated his home number and stared impatiently at the screen, waiting for Athene to answer. It was the first time in ten years of marriage that she had failed to meet him on his return from a trip. But, he reassured himself, it was pure coincidence that it was also the first time that, as far as Athene knew, he was returning as a cool. The screen selected colors from its electronic palette and assembled them into a two-dimensional picture of his wife’s face.

  “Hello, Athene.” He waited for her reaction to seeing him.

  “Will,” she said listlessly.

  “I’ve been waiting at the airport for over half an hour—I thought you were picking me up.”

  “I forgot.”

  “Oh.” It may have been an effect of the two-dimensional image, but for a moment Athene’s face seemed to be that of a hostile stranger. “Well, I’m here now reminding you. Are you coming for me or not?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever you like.”

  “If it’s too much trouble for you,” Carewe said distantly, “I’ll rent a bullet here at the airport.”

  “All right. See you.” The image dissolved, became a swarm of colored fireflies which fled into gray infinities. Carewe touched the smoothness of his chin and a great surge of emotion boiled up through him. It was a few seconds before he was able to identify it as … sadness. Athene was perhaps the only person he knew who was completely honest in all her dealings with people, who without embarrassment or compunction would reverse a statement she had made perhaps minutes earlier provided the words reflected a change in her inner being. He had known her to buy an expensive vase and smash it the same day; she would persuade him to vacation in a resort of her choice and on the minute of arriving, if it turned out not what she expected, would refuse to stay. And on another level, would she work on Carewe’s feeling for years, swearing that her love for him would be unchanged by his going cool—and then, within a week, treat him with open contempt?

  The answer, he knew, was yes.

  If Athene discovered that Carewe minus sex equaled nothing th
ere would be no dissimulation on her part. Instantly, with an appearance of cruel ease, she would come right out with it, and begin making other arrangements. In all his thoughts about going cool he had used the figure of one year as a likely upper limit for the continuance of the marriage, but he had always known that the term might be a month or a week. I’ve got to tell her, he screamed inwardly. I’ve got to get back there right now and tell my wife the truth about E.80.

  Carew shouldered his way out of the booth and ran towards the vehicle pool. All the way home, as tons of air pressure hurled him along the tube, he rehearsed what he was going to say. Barenboim’s tests had confirmed that E.80 was successful, that he was both immortal and male. So his marriage with Athene was going to have a fresh start and no foreseeable end. So he was going to tell her the truth, demonstrate the truth with all the forces of his loins. We’re going to have children. The thought stilled the trembling of his fingers. As soon as the effect of my last pill wears off, we’re going to have children …

  The dhome’s windows were opaqued black as Carewe parked his rented bullet on the surrounding apron. He let himself in through the main door and found the interior was in near-darkness, the only light coming from star shapes projected on the roof. The partitions had all been retracted and at first he thought Athene had gone out, then he saw her lying on a couch staring upwards at the wheeling constellations. He crossed to the environment console and cleared the windows, filling the dhome with sunlight.