CHILLER Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  ONE 1

  2

  3

  4

  TWO 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  THREE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  FOUR 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  FIVE 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  SIX 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  SEVEN 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  EIGHT 1

  2

  3

  4

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHILLER

  Gregory Benford

  To Dean and Gerda

  For laughter, wisdom, and warm companionship.

  PROLOGUE

  The bomb exploded three yards away.

  Alex’s father had often quoted an obscure philosopher’s saying, “God is in the details.” Alex had gathered that meant some abstruse point. Maybe that if you looked hard enough, God’s fingerprints showed up somehow.

  The bomb taught him another meaning.

  He was standing just around a corner of a steel kiosk, one of those little booths that sell chintzy last-minute gifts and cheap candy and utterly unmemorable memorabilia. Only this was Tokyo’s Narita airport and nothing was inexpensive. He had been annoyed to find that he had to cash his last travelers’ check to pay the airport tax, a stiff two-thousand-yen good-bye kiss from the Land of the Rising Sun. It was the last of his summer money. He decided that he might as well spend the leftover bills on a miniature samurai sword that he supposed would work either as a letter opener or as an assault weapon for midgets.

  He had handed the tired-looking Japanese woman the bills. She had been busy arranging some plum blossoms for sale and turned to him, distracted, crow’s-feet carved deeply in her face. She held a blossom in one hand.

  Later, trying to recall the moment, he seemed to see his hand moving with languid, slow-motion grace toward the woman’s worn, outstretched palm. In memory, something had alerted his subconscious, lending the events a sliding grace. The woman touched the bills, her hooded eyes dulled by fatigue, and then a wall of pressure struck her. Her face seemed to smear and dissolve an instant before he had the sensation of somebody hitting him in the head with a baseball bat wrapped in goose down. No sound, just massive impact. Then he was weightless, buoyant, the world beyond a blur of soundless velocities.

  No smack of landing. No sudden jar. But then he was lying in utter silence on a granite floor as cool as an angel’s kiss, staring up at the high, ribbed ceiling far, far away.

  He had turned his head. Legs flicked across the milky foreground of this curiously flat, dimensionless scene. The disembodied legs seemed in a tremendous hurry for no apparent cause. Certainly he felt no great urgency himself. He turned his head again, finding it a great effort, the vertebrae going rak-rak-rak like a rusty crank-driven machine.

  How had he gotten tired so fast? Steel sheeting lay curled next to him, its jagged edges glinting in the enamel-gray fluorescent light. The woman’s kiosk, still helpfully if redundantly sporting a large yellow KIOSK sign, was now a shredded box lying on its side.

  The Japanese built to last, and the rolled steel kiosk walls had lasted just long enough to blunt the explosion. He sat up, little chilly slivers running through his legs, ice in August. Bodies lay like rag dolls all around him.

  It was odd, he thought, how wounded people look like heaps of clothing, as if calamity were a confused fashion statement. They were tousled lumps—slick raincoat, wool suit, a polished brown shoe turned at the wrong angle—but somehow no longer people anymore, just collections of their wrappings that had failed to protect them from the shrapnel weather here.

  Pain started to seep into his elbows. His shirt was torn and bloody. Abstractly he noted the cuts and bruises where steel had peppered him. Metal was cold, so the icy threads he felt up and down his legs were steel. Logical.

  The ethereal fog around him began to retreat, letting in movement, damp air, faces wide-eyed, pale, their O mouths beginning to shape screams. Daytime television with the sound off, he thought numbly. Everything happened beyond the glass wall of silence.

  He got to his knees. A gliding, soundless world.

  He stood up shakily. Rubbery legs. The woman was there with him in the silence. He found her a few feet closer to the shattered kiosk. She had been cut nearly in two by the blast. Blue-black guts trailed from her like fat sausages. Gray bones poked through her skin where the shock wave had crushed her ribs.

  Yet her face was blank when he rolled her head up, her eyes open and still dull and tired and wanting to go home. In her hand she clutched a single plum blossom. Her body was already a cooling island in a spreading red-brown lake. He noted that her seeping blood smelled like freshly sheared brass, startling, pungent.

  He had stepped back, his shoes sticky with congealing blood, when he saw dumbly that he could do nothing for her. Her body was limp and relaxed but her pale, knotted fingers would not release the fragile, perfectly formed plum blossom.

  Don’t let go of that blossom.

  There is a moment that comes to everyone and changes them forever. No one ever forgets it.

  Usually the moment comes in the quickening years of adolescence. For him it had been that frozen instant in Japan when he retreated from the spreading stain. The darkening rust-red pool seemed to grow a brown crust, hardening before his eyes into the soil that would soon yawn moistly open to accept her body, to enclose the corpse in a grip that would never end. The earth would suck her down into it, make her a part of it, dissolve her with its licking tongues.

  The hungry earth. Mold, rot, rust. Gray deep ponds reeking of rotten eggs. Decomposition. Dust.

  Among all the people in the milling airport he had been alone with a terrible fact he had now discovered—that the earth devours everything. That it swallows all life, finally, just as before his eyes a sticky emissary of the dank soil now oozed out of the torn woman and licked across the granite slab floor, searching for him, for anyone, for the fodder that could feed this organic mud-hunger but never satisfy it.

  Yet the woman’s rigid hand with its yellowing nails held vainly to the blossom. Somehow in his confusion he thought that if she held it, there might be some hope of hauling her back, even though the spreading brown pool had already claimed her.

  Hold on, he had thought. Hold on.

  Her body had taken some of the blast that would have ripped into him, shredded him, taken everything from him in one compressive instant. The kiosk and the tired woman had absorbed the worst of it. The fact that he was using up his last yen and that he stood at just a certain angle—that was a meaningless detail.
r />   God is in the details.

  An odd saying for his practical father, a white-haired man who didn’t believe in God. But the details of their momentary geometry had made him live, to stride the green fields, happy above the underlying slag layers steeped millennia-deep in bones and rot, while the small, worn woman died.

  She had given him time to heed the sign, the warning.

  His hearing took a day to come back. He read about the terrorist attack in The International Herald Tribune, propped up in a Tokyo hospital. By that time the frozen, eerie moments had already begun to seem unreal.

  As he lay on starched sheets for days afterward, he had plenty of time to think. He knew little Japanese so his mood was unbroken by casual chat. He had spent the summer as an American Field Service guest with a Japanese family, and they came to visit him, of course. That did not lessen his solitude. When they left after visiting hours there were still the long nights to get through. He had spent them staring at the white-tiled ceiling, thinking of the ribbed steel heights of the Narita vaulting, of the moment when he had seen what he now thought of as the Black One spreading out from the woman, searching for him.

  It was coming to get him. To get the clever and the stupid, the glossy rich and the starving poor. Everyone knew it. That simple truth lay behind every event of every day, yet no one mentioned it. The Black One was the best-kept nonsecret of all time.

  ONE

  REBIRTHDAY

  LONDON, APRIL 1773

  To Jacques Dubourg.

  Your observations on the causes of death, and the experiments which you propose for recalling to life those who appear to be killed by lightning demonstrate equally your sagacity and your humanity. It appears that the doctrine of life and death in general is yet but little understood…

  I wish it were possible… to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But… in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection…

  I am, etc.,

  B. Franklin.

  1

  ALEX

  Hold on, he thought. That’s all we can do, for now.

  Alex Cowell took a deep breath, sucking in the dry chaparral scent of the arroyo around him. A red squirrel scolded him from atop a gum tree. A palm farther up the slope clashed its fronds in the warm, shifting breeze.

  He had gone for a walk to clear his head. Usually it worked, sharpened him anew. But today he had slid into the past and snagged on that moment in Tokyo. It had haunted him for years. He saw now that he would never be rid of it. That slicing, brutal instant had led inevitably across more than a decade, to this quiet, yet exciting moment.

  He shook his head and turned back toward the boxy white two-story building. A warm wind came gusting down from the ridge, curling his black hair and plucking at his shirt sleeves with dry caresses, as though hurrying him along.

  He had come back here among the gangly pepper and eucalyptus trees hundreds of times before, taking a break from work, tossing worn tennis balls for Sparkle. The big, gangly Irish setter had fetched with glee, bounding into the mesquite and manzanita, ignoring the barbs that caught her coat and lashed her muzzle. She had never lost her enthusiasm for the bouncing yellow prey, had seemed convinced since she was a puppy that they were a rare, delicious game animal. Her look of quiet pride and accomplishment as she bounded back to him, tennis ball compressed in powerful jaws, had always struck him as both noble and comic. Out here, racing through the underbrush, her simple joy had picked up his lagging spirits many times, jollied him out of passing depressions. He had missed that simple rite this last month.

  He went back inside the building, threading his way through the chugging pumps near the rear door. He washed up carefully and pulled on his Angels baseball cap; maybe not medically orthodox but a comfortable way to keep his hair out of the surgical zone. Quietly he slipped into the operating room. Susan Hagerty nodded abstractly, busy adjusting the complex liquid crystal displays on the artificial kidney machine. The moment Alex stepped into the room he shed the memories of Tokyo, of Sparkle as a pup, and saw her as she was now.

  An old dog lying on her side. A tad comfortably overweight. But her russet coat was still sleek, her long muzzle giving a comic look of professorial intelligence. Her abdomen and chest had been shaved for her operation, and that area was swathed in white bandages. Her lungs labored under the artificial stimulus of a respirator.

  You’ll fetch those tennis balls again, Sparkle. Just hold on. Then he slipped into his professional persona.

  He automatically checked the kidney procedure the old-fashioned way, by judging the color of the cylinder that carried out the heart of the job: exchanging Sparkle’s blood with the dialyzing fluid. The thick tube was a deep, rich red—good. Still, he set to work running a careful check on a humming ultracentrifuge.

  A Dixieland number came on their six-disc CD player, rattling drum riffs through the austere operating room. Jelly Roll Morton from 1927, the spotty old plastic recordings digitized and precision-tuned so that the full-bodied bass and piercing trumpet sliced through the decades, sounding more pounding, alive, and vibrant than ever, the past recaptured. The bouncy beat put a touch of zest into their labors. Susan would have preferred a Mozart symphony and Alex favored sixties classic rock, maybe Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, so they had compromised on a hefty stack of Bix Beiderbecke, King Oliver, Preservation Hall, the sassy Barrelhouse Boogie Band, and Louis Armstrong.

  Dr. Susan Hagerty hovered over Sparkle. She was a solidly built woman, good-looking in a homespun way, with a level-headed, calm expression that Alex found particularly reassuring now. She was the first woman he had ever had a true, professional relationship with, the joys of involving labor without any sexual nuances. That aspect was particularly welcome; he was still recovering from his divorce and needed to see women in a different light.

  Susan ran on the beach regularly and had a quiet physical energy about her, the focused gaze of a woman who had made her way in life through concentration. As he watched she changed one of the IV bottles that trickled fluids into Sparkle and said crisply. “No sign of pulmonary edema.”

  “Great. Let’s hope…” His voice trailed away. The unexpected plaintive note in it embarrassed him.

  Hope seemed of little use here. His old friend seemed to be a small, fragile splash of color encircled by banks of shiny medical equipment. Hope was a soft, vague thing compared with the hard metallic grays and greens of the OR.

  Pulmonary edema was, as usual for medical terminology, a long term for a simple problem. Sparkle’s lungs could accumulate fluids as Susan gradually brought her body temperature higher. Too much, and she would drown.

  “I had some danger signals in the latest blood chem readings, though,” Susan said in a flat, almost matter-of-fact voice.

  Alex looked at the digital readouts on the bank of screens and knobs opposite Susan. The welter of information was confusing, and he was still trying to unravel the numbers when Susan said, “Traces of damage in the pancreas. Blood glucose was jumping around. Electrolytes were acting funny, too.”

  “So you—”

  “Straightened out the electrolytes right away. Glucose is coming back, too. The pancreas has me worried.” Susan worked steadily as she talked, calm and steady after many hours here. It had been a long, tough operation, and it wasn’t over. They had started the day before, bringing Sparkle’s stiff body in from the freezer where she had lain for days.

  It had begun weeks earlier, when Sparkle began dragging her hind legs. The cause turned up when Susan, who worked on research at Immortality Incorporate
d, had done a routine angiogram, injecting contrast dyes and taking X-rays. Sparkle had a blood vessel tumor pressing on her spinal cord. It was a mass of small vessels buried deep, a fibrous tracery that pinched nerves and brought lancing pains. Not cancerous but growing, it had spread all through her before Alex had noticed that she wasn’t eating very much, didn’t go outside anymore, even to play ball, and slept more and more.

  Susan had shaken her head in despair when she looked over the X-rays. She had worked with dogs as experimental animals and knew the dimensions of their problems. An operation to remove all the fine filaments would have been too much of a strain on the animal. A veterinarian whom they called in to consult had shaken his head and offered with a sad, kindly smile to put Sparkle down immediately.

  It had hit Alex hard. No more would his big friend come bounding up to him after a tough day at work, slathering him with tongue-kisses, woofing greetings and complaints, eagerly snatching up a ragged ball for fetching, yelping out her transparent joy. No more.

  So Alex had decided to try a long shot. As general manager and technician at Immortality Incorporated, he had access to methods and equipment denied to most people. And he knew Susan Hagerty, whose research in low-temperature preservation at I2 was slowly bearing fruit.

  He had to spare Sparkle the slow agony of the tumor. She was more than a pet, somehow. She had gotten him through his strident divorce, through his mother’s dying, through innumerable evenings of wine-deepened depression, sitting alone and dateless in his apartment. But he could not accept her “merciful” murder.

  They had cooled Sparkle down to twenty degrees below freezing, carefully adjusting her internal chemistry, injecting noncellular blood substitutes that acted like antifreeze. Her firm old head had trembled at first as Alex held her and murmured softly, almost like singing a lullabye, stroking her belly the way she always liked, avoiding the shaved and swathed patch where the cannulas connected into her. She had peered up at him with luminous deep amber eyes that held an eternity of loving patience, utterly trusting that this spreading chill in her was going to be all right somehow. With her last remaining energies she had licked his hand. She had gone without a whimper.