Marcus knew the place well. Long ago — two years ago by Marcus' counting, much longer in the real world — it had boasted a significant underground commerce. Anything could be had, if the price was right, and you knew which people to ask.
The people were long gone to dust, but as Marcus programmed his flyer for Sirius Nine, he knew that even if the old rat-holes had been paved over or cleaned up, new rat holes always appeared to replace them.
And Marcus was an expert at finding rat holes.
"You were looking for me?"
The Drazi who sat across from Marcus glared at him from deep set eyes set in a dark green face that betrayed his race's reptilian origins. They were a short-tempered people and far from the brightest. But Farn came highly recommended. For a Drazi, at any rate.
Marcus nodded. "I understand that you and some of your associates have achieved ... well, let's call it unauthorized access in most of the colony buildings."
"Hurm."
And he's such an astonishing conversationalist, Marcus thought.
"So, what can you tell me about the Neural Archives?"
The Drazi snorted. Unfortunately, when Drazi snorted, it came out their cheek flaps and sounded utterly disagreeable. "Nothing of value there.Old papers.Old voices.Noting to steal.Nothing to sell."
"And how's security in there?"
The Drazi's gaze didn't waver. "Nothing to steal," he repeated. "Nothing to sell."
"Is that Drazi for In my professional view they have very little security because the archives are of only technical and academic interest?"
"Hurm," the Drazi said.
"Good," Marcus said. "In that case, I have a business proposition for you."
The Neural archives used the very latest holographic crystal storage technology. Three hundred years ago, a standard sized data crystal could hold enough information to fill several libraries. Now, with pulse-burst enhancement and tachyon dual-layering it was possible to store the accumulated memories, thought patterns, neural data and synaptic pattern relays of a human being, from birth to the point of recording, on just seven crystals.
The problem was that there were several thousand such crystals arranged in neat, tidy rows in the room beyond the holographic display screen that pulsed softly in front of Marcus.
The Drazi had gotten him into the maintainance room through a service entrance whose night access codes had not been updated in some time. The next security patrol would come this way in less than twenty minutes.
All the data crystal groups had been numbered in sequence on the control panel in front of him.But without a key to connect the numbers with the names involved, it could take hours or even days to find the right seven crystals.
The Drazi who had accompanied him this far nodded at the rows of crystals. "Take and go," he said. Marcus had managed to convince Farn that there was some small value to the minerals that went into making the data crystals. The Drazi thought it was a great deal of effort for very little reward, but it was simpler than explaining what Marcus was actually after, and why.
After all, there were moments he didn't quite believe it himself.
How do I find her in all this? he wondered, desperately aware of how little time they had. There was no way he could do it going through them one at a time.
Then let's hear all of them, he decided.
He touched the master control, which activated all the data crystals in the archive. Instantly, the room was filled with the sound of a thousand voices, all talking at once.
I am Shadrala of Narn unless the equation calls for my political expertise was in have good no to sing achieved the ending of—
The Drazi covered his ears. "Insane!" he said. "They will hear and they will come!"
"Just give me a minute," Marcus pleaded. "Be quiet!"
He listened. He closed his eyes and focused everything he had learned as anla-shok, all the discipline, all the rigor, all the pain he had endured, into the task at hand: picking one voice out of one thousand.
Without opening his eyes, he passed a hand over the controls. Several hundred voices went away. He strained to hear.
"Guard coming soon," the Drazi said. "Go now."
"Not yet," Marcus said.
And listened.
— farther than under the rule of domestication of combat losses were my name is —
His heart suddenly pounded so loudly that he thought for a moment he might lose her. It was barely audible, but her voice cut through the rest because it was familiar, and because it was hers. He would recognize it even if it were drowned in a million voices.
My name is Susan Ivanova, daughter of Petrov and Sophie Ivanov —
There was just one set of seven data crystals still glowing in the room beyond where they stood, only one voice still remaining.
I am Death incarnate, and the last living thing you are ever going to see.
"We take? We go now?" the Drazi asked.
God sent me.
"Yes," Marcus said, softly. "We take, and we go now."
The Drazi didn't have a lead on where Marcus could find his next target, but he knew someone who knew someone who might know someone.
More money went into other hands. When enough of it had gone out, as Marcus had expected, someone who knew someone did know someone.
More credits were deposited into the account of the colony's head of security, who looked the other way as Marcus took off in his personal flyer, now programmed for a small research station in Brakiri space.
He checked his finances en route. He was reasonably sure that he had just enough left to finish the job, but he couldn't be absolutely sure, since none of the contemporary interstellar guide books indicated how much it cost these days to grow a human being on the black market.
Marcus looked at the figure handed him by the man in the white lab coat. He was a human, operating in Brakiri space because he had been drummed out of every human medical association on record. Some of those expulsions had come for negligence or malpractice, which concerned Marcus, and most of the rest had resulted from illegal and almost certainly immoral experimentation. Everything in his record said this was someone who liked challenges, someone who dared.
All of which made him just the right person for what Marcus had in mind, and the facilities he'd been able to construct out here with Brakiri funding were more than sufficient to the cause at hand. But the figure in Marcus' hand was still a shock. He could only hope that there would be enough at the end of the day to finish the job.
"Let me see it."
Marcus produced a strand of hair from a plasticine pouch, a long hair that he had found on his uniform the day he had been revived. It was long and it was black and it was unquestionably hers. He'd found it on his shoulder, shortly after being revived, just where he had rested her head against his during the energy transfer. With the one-time-only exception of Delenn, the bone-crested Minbari didn't have hair like that. "Can you extract the DNA you need from this?"
The doctor — he had introduced himself only as Quijana — took the strand of hair and considered it. "That's all?Just the one strand?"
"That's it."
Quijana hmmm'd for a moment. "Maybe.I won't know for sure until I get inside. If there's been any kind of deterioration, I may need to fill out some missing sequences. Nothing major, she might have a freckle or two she didn't have before, but it probably won't be anything significant."
"Probably? For the money you're charging I expect better than probably."
"I'm limited by the math and the available sequences and what I can guess concerning what's missing, if anything. And that fee is for delivering a fully grown human being. You don't just pop those things out overnight, the body takes the time it takes to grow and mature. We still don't have any way to overcome that. And thirty two years is a long, long time. You're talking long-term maintenance along with the actual cloning process. That means nutrients, electro-stimulation for muscl
e and nerve development, round the clock monitoring, it adds up. Now, if you just wanted an infant, or better yet a fetus, you could save considerably on the overall cost."
"I don't think that would exactly serve my intent," Marcus said.
"Suit yourself. What else?"
Marcus handed over the seven holocrystals. "These are the neural maps I mentioned earlier," he said. "You're sure you can link them into the system?"
"It's risky, but it can be done. We'll have to set up a trickle-flow, so that the memories and thought patterns are transferred in as close to a chronological fashion as we can handle. Now, you have to understand that there may be some lapses, a few points where she won't be able to remember something from her early life, and may remember a shadow of something from her later life. She'll probably write it off to a faulty memory in the case of the former, and the memory of a bad dream in the case of the latter."
"I suppose it'll have to do," Marcus said. "I've arranged to have the funds transferred into your account every six months. The transfer will be key-coded to her DNA sequence and brainwave signature once she gets to that point. If either one of them stops, or shows any sign of damage ... the payments stop."
"Understood," Quijana said. He folded the plasticine bag and placing it in his jacket pocket, then studied Marcus for a moment. "You do realize that what you are asking me to do is patently illegal. To clone a new person with all the memories of the original person."
Marcus smiled. "Spoken like a man who has heard that same warning himself, from time to time. Just remember, I don't want her to have all the memories. Just the memories up to and including a particular year, month and day. No more than that."
"That kind of precision is impossible," Quijana said. "I can give you an approximation of that, but it may be off by a bit. How far, I don't know, but I'll do the best I can,"
The doctor stood, and extended his hand. "Just to make sure my work doesn't fall into the wrong hands, who will be taking custody of the body in thirty two years?"
Marcus smiled.
"That'll be one thousand four hundred and twenty credits."
Marcus inserted his credit-chit into the scanner, and watched as most of his remaining funds were extracted. A lifetime of funds, times several hundred people, gone in just a few months, he thought. I must remember to get on a budget sometime soon.
But with any luck, the small amount remaining would gather a fair amount of interest in the coming thirty two years and four months.
"Here you go," the technician said. "Right this way."
Marcus followed the technician down the long white corridor that led down the center of EverDream Enterprises, a cryosuspension service located in Syria Planum on Mars.
"We get all kinds here," the technician said. That way over there is where we keep the near-death cases. You ever been cryo'd before?"
"Once," Marcus said.
"Well, the process ain't changed much. You go in, you close your eyes, and you open 'em again and poof, you're in the future. We get a lot of folks like that. We have to make sure we don't get fugitives from the law, of course, trying to escape the statute of limitations, though that's a lot harder now that they passed the Chrono Fugitive Laws back home. Most folks just want to see the future. We got whole families in here who want to see the future. They think it's gonna be different somehow, maybe better. What they don't understand is, the future's always just like the present, just moreso."
"I'm rather hoping that's true," Marcus said.
"Well, either way, don't you worry about a thing. We've been in business for nearly a hundred years, and we'll be in business for a long time to come. Not like SleepWorld, back on Earth. You heard about that, right? They went bankrupt, and on the sly sold off the bodies of all the sleepers anybody'd want to buy, then dumped the rest. It was a huge scandal. That'd never happen here."
"I'm sure that's true," Marcus said, and glanced at his name tag. It read D. GARIBALDI.
"Garibaldi?" Marcus said aloud.
"Yeah?"
"Any relation to Michael Garibaldi?"
"Yeah, back about five, six generations. Course, in a tight knit community like you get here in Marsdome, hell, everybody's related to just about everybody else after a while. You a history buff or something?"
"Something," Marcus said. He wasn't quite sure why, but he found the synchronicity both reassuring and vaguely amusing. "I should've realized. You sound just like him."
He shrugged. "I ain't got much time for history vids," he said. "Life's too short, you know?"
"I'm surprised you would say that, given your line of work."
"We just extend the range of years you cover," Garibaldi said. "But a human lifespan is still a human lifespan. It's almost a hundred and seventy years now, but if you ask me, it's still too short."
They stopped in front of a small glass door. Inside, Marcus could see the front panels of several dozen small tubes. One of them was open.Waiting.
"You ready?" Garibaldi said.
"I suppose so," Marcus said.
Here we go again, he thought, and opened the door to the cryo unit.
He closed his eyes.
He opened his eyes.
"How you feeling?"
Marcus sat up, supported by the hands that reached out to help him.The room was impossibly cold.
"You got a bit of epidermal burn," someone said. "Slight accident with the freeze units about ten years ago. It'll pass."
Marcus looked up. It was Garibaldi, plus thirty two years. He caught Marcus' look. "You got lucky. I retire next week. I'm vice president of Mars operations now. I don't usually do the hands-on stuff anymore, but I remembered you, so I thought, what the hell. Might be nice to see a familiar face when you wake up."
"Seeing a familiar face ... is exactly what I have in mind," Marcus said. "Where are my clothes?"
She floated in the nutro tank, eyes closed, her long black hair floating like a veil around her face. She was also naked. Marcus hadn't considered that part of it, and found himself turning away to protect her modesty. When it happens, it will happen because she chooses to, not like this.
"Something wrong?" The speaker was Quijana's son, William. "Does she look okay?"
"Yes ... yes, she looks ... magnificent."
"Good. Took a lot of work, you know. I think we got her memory to right where you wanted." He produced a release form. "Sign here."
Marcus signed where indicated.
"Bring your ship around back, we'll pop her and load her up for you."
"I'd like her dressed first," Marcus said. "I've brought some clothes."
Quijana Junior shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said, and went off to comply. Marcus waited until he was gone, then looked again at her face. God, how he loved her.
Hello, Susan, he thought.
It's been a long time.
Marcus finished unloading the last of their supplies, hesitated briefly, then pushed the button that detonated the explosives he'd placed strategically in and around the small flyer. It pained him to see the old ship go, knowing it had waited patiently in storage for his return, but it was necessary. It had to look as if they had been shot down.
As the smoke rose into the clear blue sky, Marcus surveyed the area around him. He had stumbled across Chryn III while he and his brother had been on a survey job, years — he corrected himself — centuries ago. It was unpopulated, well off the trade routes, and offered little in the way of precious minerals, certainly nothing worth the time and effort to dig it out.
But it was the most lovely world he had ever visited. In the temperate zone, lush fruit trees bent low under the weight of delicacies that contained a thousand different tastes. The air was generally close to skin temperature in this region, and the water was untainted by chemicals. The nearest Earth comparison would be Maui.
Space contained any number of such planetary gemstones, places where sen
tient life had not evolved, but which did not offer sufficient incentive for corporations or tourists to exploit it.
He breathed in the sweet air, and remembered again a late night conversation they'd had, just after the end of the Shadow war. He'd been celebrating, along with Sheridan and Garibaldi and Ivanova and Franklin, and they had come to a quiet moment, as conversations sometimes did. It was Franklin who had said, "Did you ever think about what you'd like to do after the war?"
Ivanova had hesitated, then said, "I've always had this dream of retiring to a beach somewhere. Someplace where no one could find me. Not the bureaucrats, not the sales guys, not anybody. I think I could plant myself by a river, or a beach, and look out over the water, and never, ever want to leave." Then she had looked up, and found Marcus watching her. She smiled almost sheepishly. "Well, anyway, it's just a dream I have. Truth is there's always too much to do, and in the end, how many of our dreams come true, right?"
How many indeed, he wondered.
He looked over to where she stirred. She wore a uniform identical to the black resistance uniform she had worn during the Earth civil war.
"Marcus?"
He had waited three hundred and thirty two years to hear that voice say that name. But he could never tell her that. Not ever.
"Yes?"
"What ... what happened?"
"What do you remember?"
"I'm not sure," she said, standing slowly. "I was on the White Star, and we were hit. I was wounded pretty badly ... "
"That was weeks ago, Susan," Marcus said. "That must've been a bigger bump to the head than I thought. I mean, you're alive, and well, and fine."
"Yes, I suppose so." She looked around. "What happened?Where are we?"
"Well, we were en route to Babylon 5 to celebrate the end of the war — you do remember that bit, don't you, the war ending, Sheridan being made President and all that?"
Babylon5: The Short Stories Page 8
