One Million Tomorrows M

by Bob Shaw

  Getting to the airport early had been a mistake, he realized. The liquor he had drunk the night before had withdrawn its transient benefits, leaving him feeling listless and a bit queasy despite the usual oxygen-ascorbic acid bomb he’d taken. There was too much time to think about the immediate future. There was a possibility he could see action with a Fauve team that very afternoon. The thought shocked him afresh every time it recurred, and he stared at the distant peaks of the Rockies with a mixture of nostalgia and resentment. I don’t want to go to Africa, he thought. And most of all I don’t want to come in contact with any Fauves. How did it happen? His anger against Athene suddenly returned.

  He walked towards a row of communication booths, swearing bitterly under his breath, then remembered he had nothing to say to her. On the practical, domestic level he might have informed her he was leaving the country, except for the fact that the Farma computer would automatically let her know when it was making the new credit arrangements occasioned by his move. On the emotional level he wanted to say: “See what you’ve done? You’ve driven me to Africa where I might get killed by a Fauve.” But even that childish catharsis was denied him, partly by his pride and partly by his knowledge that the person he wanted to address, the old Athene, no longer existed. There was nothing to be gained by talking to the hard-eyed stranger who now inhabited Athene’s body. It came to Carewe that he had been very proud of his old-fashioned, freakish one-to-one marriage—the union which had survived his supposed impotence by a matter of hours. Even the manner in which she had broken the news to him told its own story. She had shown no signs of regret, or of anything, but her contempt for the neuter object who had once been her husband. Within a matter of hours! A few stinking …

  Carewe became aware that people in the departure area were staring at him. He relaxed his grip on his traveling case and forced himself to smile at a pink-clad woman who was sitting nearby with a small baby on her lap. She gazed at him without responding until he turned away and went to a cofftea machine. He dialed a bulb of the hot liquid and sipped it abstractedly until his flight was called, then went and stood on the slideway with the other eastbound passengers. The first movement of the strip, reminder that his journey had begun, brought a new surge of panic. Carewe forced himself to relax and breathe steadily until aboard the aircraft, where concern about his own safety on the flight could occupy his mind.

  In his forty yeas, he had made perhaps a thousand trips on commercial aircraft; and he could not recall one in which he had failed to detect some minute but potentially lethal flaw in the machine or its equipment. It could be a faint smell of scorched insulation, a trace of wetness at the seams of a wing tank, or an unusual harmonic in an engine note—things a professional flier might be too blasé to notice, but which were only too obvious to the alert senses of an intelligent amateur. In this case he was not happy about the pressure bottle which in the event of a crash would cause a huge plastic balloon to spring from the back of the seat in front of Carewe and cushion him in pneumatic safety. The bottle looked slightly out of line with its nozzle, suggesting that the seal could be strained and its gas escaped.

  He was on the verge of asking the flight steward how often the pressure bottles were tested when a woman sat down beside him. She was dressed in pink and was unsuccessfully trying to disconnect the shoulder straps of a carrycrib which held a baby. Carewe recognized the woman who had been sitting near him in the departure area.

  “Permit me,” he said with deliberately historical courtesy. He worked the edge of one of the crib’s plastic snap-on covers free of the strap’s spring clip and it disengaged easily.

  “Thanks.” The woman lifted the silent infant out of the crib and settled it in her lap. Carewe collapsed the crib, slid it under the seat for her and leaned back, wondering if he should point out that the strap’s clip seemed dangerously weak. He decided against it—the woman appeared distrustful, if not actually hostile towards him—but his mind dwelt on the curious feel of the stainless steel fitting. The metal was almost paper-thin at one point, as if—a disquieting thought heaved in a lower level of his mind—as if it had been in use for a very long time. Modern steels could withstand many decades of wear before …

  He pushed his hair back from his forehead, using the movement to mask a sideways glance at the woman’s face. Her pale, regular features looked composed and normal, and he relaxed a little, almost ashamed of what he had been thinking When perfected biostats had become available two centuries earlier the government had been quick to pinpoint the one major possibility for their abuse. The penalties for illegally administering a biostat to a minor were so severe that the practice was virtually unknown, but in the early days there had been a rash of unpleasantly bizarre cases. The most prevalent and most difficult to stamp out had been biostat abuses carried out by parents on their own children. Doting mothers, often those who were ill-equipped for an indefinitely prolonged future, tried to bring time to a standstill by immortalizing their children at an early age. Once the invariant factor was introduced into its cell replication mechanism a child’s physical development was arrested. Mental growth was affected too because convolution of the brain, necessary for the increase in surface area of the cerebral cortex, could no longer occur. A child frozen forever at the age of three might become exceptionally bright, even learned, but denied access to the higher mental functions he remained essentially a child.

  Commercially motivated drug abuses had also occurred, one of the most famous being that of St. John Searle, the boy soprano whose parents had fixed him at the age of eleven for no reason other than that he was their sole source of income. That, and a number of child actors who remained suspiciously infantile, had ushered in tough legislation and tight control of biostat production and distribution. The only examples of the drug being lawfully administered to a minor were in the rare cases of incurable disease. With the invariancy factor introduced into his system a sick child was rescued from early death, but there was a moral problem in that his illness became a permanent, unchanging condition. Even where subsequent medical advances made a cure available to mortals, the ailing immortal child remained as he was because his body-image had been crystallized for all time.

  Another problem had been misappropriation of biostats. During the first feverish production race, when fortunes were made overnight in the attempt to pull all the world’s sick back from the brink of death, people had been found immortalizing household pets. Since then provision had been made for limited veterinary use of biostats, but horse racing and other activities in which an animal’s true age played an important part had undergone upheavals. Thanks to the state of abundant well-being induced by a biostat in any normally healthy organism there had been a fad for the meat of immortal cattle, sheep and pigs which had never entirely vanished, even in the late 22nd century. …

  Sensing he was being stared at, Carewe turned his head. The baby on the woman’s lap had pushed the folds of its wrap aside and brilliance from the aircraft’s ports illuminated the pink, doll-like face. Two ocean-blue eyes—wise, yet imprisoned in permanent psychosis by an infantile inability to distinguish between ego and the outside world—gazed humorously at Carewe. He shrank away instinctively as the baby reached towards him with a dimpled hand. Suddenly aware of his reaction, the woman pressed the baby to her breast. Her eyes fastened on Carewe’s, momentarily challenging, then slid away to contemplate the private horizons of a universe to which all men were strangers.

  Six months old, he thought in a kind of mindless panic. The child appeared six months old but in fact it could be the same age as himself. He listened to the burgeoning whine of the aircraft’s engines for a few seconds then stood up hastily and went aft looking for a vacant seat. The only one available was beside the flight steward’s station. Carewe dropped into it and sat tapping his front teeth with a fingernail.

  “Got to you, did she?” The steward spoke sympathetically.

  “Who?”

  The steward nodded for
ward. “Mrs. Denier—the Flying Dutchwoman. Sometimes I think we ought to charge her double fare.”

  “You know her?”

  “Everybody who works the Lisbon run knows Mrs. Denier.”

  “She’s a frequent traveler?” Carewe tried to sound only mildly interested.

  “Not frequent, but regular. Every spring. They say she and her husband and kid were in an accident on this route years ago—the husband got himself killed.”

  ̶Oh!” Carewe decided he did not want to learn any more. He took a deep breath of plastic-smelling air and stared out the window as the aircraft began to move.

  “She did ten years corrective for fixing the kid, and since then we get her every spring without fail.”

  “Quite a story.”

  “They say she’s trying to re-live the past or get herself killed the same way, but I don’t believe it. She’s probably got business on the other side. Women don’t grieve that long.”

  The aircraft reached the center of the tubefield and the engine note climbed. This was the phase Carewe detested most—when the ship was beginning its vertical climb and there was neither reaction time nor airspeed to save them if the engines failed. He tried to take his mind off flying. “Sony,” he said. “The engines.”

  “I said women don’t mope around that long.”

  “How long?”

  “Lowest estimate I ever heard was thirty years. Could you believe it?”

  Carewe shook his head, thinking of the worn clip on the child’s carrycrib. The fastening could not have pared down so far in thirty years. As the aircraft lurched unevenly into the air he gripped the arms of his seat and wondered if this was going to be the year in which Mrs. Denier got her wish.

  VII

  It was late afternoon when the Unations shuttle from Kinshasa, whistling northeastwards in near-ballistic flight, overflew the scattered township of Nouvelle Anvers and curved towards a forest clearing.

  On the commercial flight down from Lisbon earlier in the day, Carewe had kept a hopeful eye on the scattered trees and shrubs which gave the northern savannah its pastoral appearance. He had only the vaguest notion as to where the Fauve team, for which Farma held the supply contract, was based—and had it been somewhere in the park-like savannah the next few months could be reasonable, almost pleasant. But the character of the landscape had gradually changed; and now the shuttle was hurtling over an evergreen forest which looked as though it could swallow humanity in general, and Carewe in particular, without a trace. His mood of despair and self-recrimination deepened. The whole crazy, melodramatic idea of joining a Fauve team should have been discarded that first gray morning after he had broken with Athene. Fauve service was carried out on a purely voluntary basis, and his backing out would have affected Athene even less than his original decision to go. It was typical of his character that he should be compliant in situations which demanded resolution, and illogically rigid when commonsense told him to bend with the wind.

  As the shuttle banked through the slumbrous yellow air he glimpsed a curiously localized rainstorm a few miles to the north just enough time to search the upper sky and detect the insubstantial tautness of weather control fields before the tree-line surged upwards and blocked his view. The shuttle landed in the clearing’s confines and its engines burbled into silence. He unbuckled his safety harness, stood up and followed the shuttle’s four other passengers, all bearded and uncommunative funkies, to the exit. They stepped down onto the flattened grass and were driven away in a waiting bushcar towards a break in the trees, leaving Carewe feeling utterly lost. He was peering uncertainly through the hatch, tasting the humid alien air, when the pilot emerged from the nose compartment. She was a sturdy blonde in a blue Unations field uniform, who eyed Carewe with a wry sympathy for which he was profoundly grateful.

  He jerked his head at the palisade of trees. “Can you direct me to the nearest civilization?”

  “What outfit are you? Farma?” She sounded Australian or English.

  “Farma,” he confirmed, reassured at hearing the name of the company in the unfamiliar environment.

  “Don’t worry, they’ll be along presently; I brought them some supplies. You might as well relax till the truck gets here. The humidity around here wrings you out in no time.” She glanced at Carewe’s hairless chin, then pulled off her shirt to reveal a faintly muscular but very feminine torso. “I’ll be back in Lapland next week, so I’m going to take the free vitamin D while I can.” She threw the shirt across a seat and sat down on the shuttle’s steps, breathing deeply as if to give her breasts maximum exposure to the sun.

  Carewe’s heart thudded steadily—he had not foreseen all the side-effects of masquerading as a cool. World fashion was in one of its cyclic swings away from female nudity, but to a large extent women disregarded the old sexual conventions when in the company of non-functional males.

  “I’ll stay back here,” he said. “I blister easily.” He sat down again, astonished at the persuasiveness of the feelings aroused in him by a not particularly attractive girl. The interior of the shuttle grew warmer and he closed his eyes. He could feel a sense of guilt about having deceived the girl—and that must have been the catalyst….

  The sound of the truck’s door slamming awoke him an indeterminate time later. He went to the hatch and stepped down onto flattened grass where the pilot was fully clothed again and talking quietly to a small man who had the thick sloping shoulders of a weightlifter. The new arrival carried a paunch which strained the thin material of his Unation field uniform and his graying hair was sparse, but a corona of silver bristles on his jowls proclaimed he was still functional.

  “I’m Felix Parma, transport manager,” he boomed up at Carewe in a Scots accent. “Sorry I’m late. The computer said you’d be here, but I guess I overslept. Rough night, last night.”

  “It’s all right.” Carewe stepped down and shook the proffered hand, acutely aware of Parma’s quizzical blue eyes scanning his face. The older man exuded a sw soupy odor of perspiration, but—Carewe felt a flicker of resentment—it was because of him the girl had put her shirt on again. “Were you working late last night?”

  “I’ll say.” Parma did a speeded-up mime to show he had been drinking, and grinned. Carewe noticed the veining on his button nose. “D’you take a drop yourself?”

  “It’s been known to happen. On rare occasions.” Carewe felt the beginnings of affection for the physically decrepit funkie who had driven out of the unknown and spoken to him in the kind of language he understood. He was baffled as to why Parma should have let himself go so far without tying off, but in all important respects he could visualize the man as a friend.

  “Ever been to Africa before?”

  “No.”

  “Then this is a rare occasion, William. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Rare as they come.” Why did Athene do it? he wondered.

  “We’ll have a drink,” Parma announced with the air of a man resolving weighty deliberations. “Give me a hand with these boxes.”

  Carewe helped him carry several alloy-clad containers from the shuttle’s cargo hatch to the truck, while the pilot sat on the passenger steps and combed her hair. He wondered if that could be for Parma’s benefit too—in a world in which nubile females so greatly outnumbered functional males he had seen more unlikely matches. When the boxes were all transferred Parma waved a casual goodbye to the girl and leaped into the driver’s seat.

  “Let’s go, William,” he muttered. “That’s a handsome lass, but we’re wasting good drinking time.” He threw the truck into drive and they went dipping and swaying across the clearing. Looking back for a last glimpse of the pilot, Carewe again noticed the strangely restricted rainstorm several miles off, a cloud column of dusty grays and ominous purples standing against the settling sun like the aftermath of a hell-bomb.

  He touched Parma’s arm and pointed. “What’s going on over there?”

  “That’s the operation, William.” The truck lurched in
to an already-shadowy lane cut through impassive trees. “That’s where we’re working.”

  “I don’t get it. I saw weather control fields as I was coming in, but … It must cost a fortune to siphon that stuff in from the Atlantic.”

  “It’s worth it, William. That rainstorm’s centered right on the Fauve village. Been there three weeks. Officially it’s part of the humidity reduction program for this part of Africa, but that’s not the real reason it’s there.”

  “Tweeks constantly?” Carewe felt a vague dismay. “What’s it doing to the people underneath?”

  “Making them good and wet.” Parma laughed and spat through the side window.

  “And sick.”

  “And sick,” Parma agreed readily. “If you’d ever done this kind of work before you’d have a strong preference for rounding up sick Fauves instead of healthy ones. That’s the whole point.”

  “There ought to be a better way.”

  “There is—gas. Or dust. Either would be neater and quicker and cheaper, but we’re all snarled up by the Helsinki Convention. You know, William, you can get killed by a Fauve and nobody will say a word; but if you even graze one of them with a flechette you’re in trouble.” Parma switched on the headlights to counteract the swiftly gathering darkness ahead, and the surrounding trees seemed to close up their ranks. “Have you ever seen a dead man?”

  “Of course not,” Carewe said quickly. “The rain demoralizes these people, I guess.”

  “That’s it. A bunch of, them decide to break away from the tribe and go Fauve. They build their own village and do a bit of old-fashioned marauding. Everything goes well for a while, then the normal sensible immortals in the area get sick of it and complain to us—but we don’t charge straight in and wrestle with them. Not any more. The first thing our hairy-chested Fauves notice is that it has got hellish wet all of a sudden—and a few weeks of solid rain in the middle of the season starts them thinking they’ve offended somebody upstairs. After that it’s usually fairly easy to persuade them to come in and join the bitch society.”