CHILLER Read online

  “Well, this party will give you a whole new hunting ground.”

  “Ummm.” Sheila looked around. “I’ve got house pets better dressed than some of these guys.”

  “They’re techies. Not of our tribe.”

  “The Folk of the Freezer?”

  “Okay, so they’re not wearing spandex.”

  Sheila grinned. “Even better, they’re not insecure surburbanite guys in logger boots or navy pea jackets or army field gear or beat-up cowboy boots or A2 leather flight getups.”

  “There are more important things in the world than clothes.”

  “Name two. Without bringing sex into it, I mean.”

  “No deal. Anyway, clothes and sex are the same thing. Say, try these mushroom caps.” An appetizer tray drifting past perfumed the air with luscious advertisement.

  “No thanks,” Sheila said grimly.

  “Still on a diet?”

  “Sure. This one lets you have anything you want, but you have to eat meals only with naked fat people.”

  “You’re starting to look like a concentration camp victim.”

  “My goal is to not pay the IRS any taxes because I’ll be so thin they can’t see me.”

  “You always had a practical side.”

  “Hey, can I—?” Sheila waved an unlit cigarette. “I’ve gotta have one, even if these white-wine drinkers disembowel me for it.”

  “Come on outside. They might.”

  “Be worth it.”

  The smokers were outside and, in an added show of civility, on the downwind side of the rambling house. Cryonicists divided sharply between the health nuts and the technophiles. The nuts were veined by exercise, flensed of fat, encased in sleek ivory-white skin and scrupulously short hair, like monks. Some had abdominal walls ridged with sharp rows of muscle and wore running shoes, marathoners mentally ready even on a night out. They munched their raw broccoli appetizers and spilled their words out with bright, lively smiles.

  “On the other hand, these are the technos,” she said to Sheila, doing an imitation of a museum-guide voice. “They sport pot bellies and deep suntans and visibly enjoy their cigarettes.”

  “God’s people, except for the bellies.”

  “They figure they’ll get all their damage fixed up when they’re revived a century or two down the timestream.”

  “I notice I’m the only black here,” Sheila said. “Future going to be all white?”

  Kathryn smiled. “By the time science can repair the damage from freezing, girl, they’ll be able to change skin color.”

  “Wowee. I dreamed ‘bout that since I was just a little thing.”

  “About being white?”

  “No, blue. Gotta be a guy somewhere with a fetish for that.”

  “Yeah, but he’d probably want you to have twelve toes or something.”

  “Zat, mah dear, can be arranged.” A flutter of eyelashes. “Still, y’know, for such a wild idea as this freezing angle, I thought this would be a pretty swift crowd. Not exactly the Prep H set, but something.”

  When Kathryn didn’t get the reference Sheila looked aghast. “Where you been? Preparation H is the item most often shoplifted in drugstores. At first folks thought it was because people with the problem it was meant for, well, they were just too embarrassed to face a clerk and buy it. Turns out the nose candy crowd was liftin’ it.”

  When Kathryn still looked puzzled, Sheila said, “Cocaine addicts glom it, see? Stuff some up their noses. It soothes and shrinks all those membranes they been abusing.”

  Kathryn felt the familiar Out Of It sensation that Sheila often induced. Looking for Alex, they wandered into a room dominated by a huge flat screen prickly with random colors. She watched a thin, intense woman wearing a button saying CRYONICS IS COMING BACK flick through channels. The screen jumped among cable stations.

  “Digitized bread and circuses,” Sheila said with disgust. The screen showed a cathedral interior lit by splintering crystal light. A congregation swayed and sang. They formed concentric circles, and at the center was a lone man.

  “Hold there!” Kathryn called. “That’s Montana.”

  “Ah,” Sheila said, “guess I’ll never get to heaven. He’s not my type.”

  An organ pealed out long notes, and the congregation in the huge hall turned, feet slamming the floor. Slow, solemn, in lines, but not a snake dance. Spin. Stamp. Whirl. Sing.

  The camera played across the upturned, rapt faces. Sweaty, glistening, eyes unfocused, singing.

  Running Lord, leaping, soaring,

  Brimming, loving, flying, joying,

  Yes Lord now and yes forever

  Joyful singing love together.

  “Yes, but can you dance to it?” Alex said behind her.

  “Want to try?”

  “For folksy, I prefer the Virginia reel.”

  Kathryn introduced Sheila, who gave Alex a frankly appraising eye. “Yum. I approve.”

  Alex grinned. “Suggestions for improvements in our service are always gratefully received.”

  “I was looking for something in blue.”

  Alex didn’t understand why Kathryn chuckled, but before she could explain, Reverend Montana started his sermon. Alex said seriously, “This Montana guy has got some of the old-line Protestants on the run around here. They’ve got something for everybody. Redemption of your ancestors, like the Mormons. Evangelism with spin.”

  “And weird dancing,” Sheila added. “But if you look on Channel Sixty-two you’ll find Brother Jim preaching against Montana. Same as Sister Elaine on Channel Eighty-five.”

  Kathryn blinked. “You’re up on this?”

  “Just ‘cause I’m a hip black girl with an attitude don’t mean I don’t believe.”

  “Uh, I see,” Kathryn said. She had a faith in the sense that the church she did not attend was Catholic.

  “The All Evangelical Conference condemned Montana’s group last year, y’know. He’s a fringe type. He surely doesn’t speak for folks like me. I’m a Baptist.”

  Alex seemed as surprised as Kathryn. “Well, what do people of your faith think about us?”

  Sheila sat back in a web chair. Her words came more slowly, and Kathryn sensed a quick intelligence that usually masked itself with fast patter. “You got to be middle-class white to even consider it, seems to me. You guys aren’t worried about using up money that could be helping other people, or taking up room from the next generation. The old ought to get outa the way of the young, I’d say.”

  Kathryn nodded. “It is their money they’re spending, though. If they used it to build big mausoleums, nobody would gripe.”

  “God might. You’re getting in the way of natural processes.”

  “So does a heart transplant,” Alex said, a stock answer.

  “And a lot of folks like me think we shouldn’t be spending big bucks on those transplants when children go hungry.”

  “Nobody asks society to pay for cryonics,” Kathryn persisted.

  “Oh yeah?” Sheila smiled sardonically. “You never talk about who’s gonna pay to defrost you, do you? Suppose you chillers stack up like cordwood. There’s plenty of you. Hundred years from now, who pays to do the Lazarus number?”

  Alex pursed his lips and said nothing. Kathryn said uncertainly, “The economics of the present are taken care of. The future—well, they’ll have to decide.”

  “You don’t sound so sure about that,” Sheila said.

  “Well, I’m not really a cryonicist,” Kathryn reminded her. Why do I feel this impulse to defend them, then? Or am I defending Alex?

  Sheila said, “They’ll need some reason to foot the bill. Think they’ll warm you guys up just ‘cause you got wonderful personalities?”

  “Who can guess?” Alex said. “Wouldn’t you like to talk to somebody from the past?”

  “Abraham Lincoln, sure. Joe Frump, nope.” Sheila grinned. “Maybe Malcolm X, yeah.”

  “Maybe they’ll need me for fashion tips up there in the future,” Ka
thryn said.

  “Right on—a future with everybody wearing plaids and stripes together. They rush over, pop you guys out, put you in charge of the Good Taste Police.”

  “Well,” Alex said seriously, “I think you have to have—”

  “Faith,” Sheila supplied. “That’s why you guys and us Baptists, we’re alike.”

  “You’re not serious!” Alex protested.

  “You have to believe somebody’s going to develop the technology to defrost you—and then will pay the bills! Hey, at least my faith depends on somebody more reliable than people—good ol’ God.”

  Kathryn laughed. “She’s got you there.”

  Alex seemed stunned. “I never thought of cryonics as a matter of faith.”

  “Now, I don’t mean it’s that kind of faith.” Sheila pointed at the big screen.

  Montana’s face beamed forth, ten times natural size. He began to speak about hellfire.

  “—and the opposite sin, the greater. Coldfire, I say unto you. Coldfire. The unholy clinging to the body—to the worn-out carcass—when we should be rising to the Lord. Hellfire, my friends, for the sinner. Coldfire, my friends, for the special sin of arrogance.”

  “Y’know, he’d be funny if he weren’t so scary,” Kathryn said.

  “Man looks like he could use a little shakin’ up,” Sheila said.

  “He’s been attacking I2 daily on this show of his,” Kathryn said. “He really believes that stuff.”

  Sheila said, “That man needs a good laugh.”

  Alex scrutinized the screen. “Good idea. I’ll work on it.”

  Kathryn punched off the sound. “I can’t understand how anyone can keep telling deliberate lies—”

  “Malt does more than Milton can,” Alex saluted the screen with his wineglass, “to justify God’s ways to man.”

  “Malt? You should be drinking beer to say that,” Kathryn said. “And who did say that, originally?”

  “A dead English poet with a long nose,” Alex said grandly, and she realized he was getting tipsy.

  “Uh, maybe you should sit—” but by then he had walked away.

  Sheila whispered, “Good guy. Have you ravished him yet?”

  “Have mercy. He’s been recovering.”

  “Best medicine in the world is yours to provide.”

  “I’m a little cautious.”

  “He’s not the diseased madman type, trust me. I should know.”

  “I like to get to know a guy.”

  “Who doesn’t? Me, I hold out for the last name and his address.”

  Kathryn laughed. “Wow, an old-fashioned girl.”

  “How long you two been going out together?”

  “Um, a few weeks.”

  “My Lord! Even the Pope doesn’t play that hard to get.”

  Kathryn grinned and followed Alex into the next room. He had sat down at a grand piano that looted out upon the city lights. With his right hand he suddenly began playing a familiar classical piece, fifteen seconds of one-handed magnificence. The entire room stopped chatting and turned, enthralled. Just as abruptly, he stopped.

  “Go on!” several called.

  “That was great, Alex.”

  “Play the rest.”

  He turned with mock solemnity. “I can’t. That’s all I know.”

  “No! Play it,” Kathryn said.

  Alex held up his right hand. “That is all this hand has in it.” Then he got up and walked back into the screen room.

  “What was that?” she asked when she caught up with him.

  He sagged into one of the net-loungers. Montana mouthed oracular points soundlessly on the screen—like a weird street mime, she thought.

  “I once was terminally shy,” Alex said with boozy earnestness. “I tried to find some way to stand out at parties, y’know? So I learned to play the opening of that Chopin piece. Practiced it for months. It sure worked. Got everybody’s attention.”

  “And you can’t play anything more?” Kathryn asked, somehow shocked.

  “Nope.” He grinned impishly. “Not a note.”

  There was something oddly confessional about this, a way for him to open up to her this odd side of him, that warmed her. “Well, I liked it.” She leaned close to him and delivered a long, passionate kiss. Sheila would have approved, but she had wandered off somewhere.

  This made him actually swoon for a second, something she had only read about. He eased back into the netting and she sensed his vulnerability in the soft shadows, his shirt bunched where he had lost weight in the hospital, eyes strangely brooding, as if asking her to understand him. The brush with death had shaken him but he could not easily talk of it. He was like so many men in their yearning to reach out, to penetrate their own reluctance to show weakness.

  He exhaled deeply, peering ahead of him as though he half-expected his alcohol-laden breath to hang like a separate, substantia] cloud, unmixed with the usual air. Then he hiccuped and wearily lifted his glass toward Montana’s enormous head, which had sweat gleaming on the high forehead. “Make a joyful noise unto the horde.”

  “Ummm, good pun. Maybe we’d better get you home,” she said.

  “Sheila’s right, y’know. Need to loosen up the good Rev.”

  “Think about it tomorrow.”

  “I have a plan, too. Loosen him up.”

  “Alex, am I going to have to carry you to the car?”

  “Bugs. The secret is bugs.”

  “Why do I always get the guys who are buggy?”

  “Woman, you seek to take from me my secret,” he said in a surprisingly good Boris Karloff imitation. Drink did open the man. “I have the knowledge of eternal life. But first”—a comic, leering roll of his eyes—“I must have… your bod-ee…”

  She laughed. “Okay, it’s a deal.”

  “And don’t let me forget the bugs. We’ll have a little fun with this Montana. You game?”

  “Uh—sure.”

  “Good. Now—your bod-eee.”

  Which was the way it worked out.

  3

  GEORGE

  He got out of his new Chevy and strolled casually over to the viewpoint above Ortega Highway. Smog lay like greasy gravy over the midsection of the county.

  A hawk slid down the warming wind. It cruised along the dry wash of a broad creekbed and then dove suddenly into a stand of tan pampas grass. George imagined a fleeing mouse down there, scampering among the dry stalks and their comforting shadows, not knowing what veered on the air above. Then a flicker in the sky, and the mouse would run, dodging, bright fear snapping in its veins. It knew only the two-dimensional geometries that had let it elude the snakes and ground predators. The swoop and plunge of three dimensions brought a sudden shadow, a tiny squeal of blind panic, and then the sharp hard pain that prey had always known was coming for them.

  He made himself close his eyes and breathe deeply three times. The sweat on his skin cooled.

  Something had called up the dream from this morning. The same dream, every night. He had floated up from some blood-shrouded place, into blaring hard light. Twisted faces peering down at him, judging him.

  Working on him. Their sharp tools flashing with cruel reflections.

  He made himself think about the dream. They were the Master’s Messages, just like that reverend had said, and suddenly he knew what the dream meant.

  Chillers. The Master was showing him what it would be like to return to the world of the living as a chiller, still sunken in the corruption that flesh is heir to. Returning to horror and raw chaos. Not immaculate, white, like the cleansed bones of the decently dead.

  That atrocity had to be avoided. George felt long, slow waves of absolute malevolence welling up from far within himself. He would heed the Master’s Message. This work today, it would contribute to his Calling.

  Then he shook himself, emerging back into the rasp of the real. He needed his carapace self now. The quick, analytic self.

  He shook a Camel from its pack and lit up.

>   “Mr. Goff,” a man’s voice said behind him.

  George turned and made his usual smile. “Mr. Miller.” The real estate agent wore jeans and a T-shirt, just as George did. No need to attract attention in this remote spot by sporting a business suit. He had made sure the man understood the importance of even small details.

  “I’ve got the last bunch of paperwork,” Miller said, showing a brown valise.

  “And?”

  “Well, the cash, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You come well recommended by your friend in Arizona.”

  “He spoke well of you, too.” George used his flat, standard American accent for business. It took some effort. A southwestern twang came into his words when he wasn’t minding it.

  “These deals are a little bit delicate…”

  “Sure are.”

  For some reason Miller wanted to start off with an edgy civility, and that was all right with George. He had followed some earlier contacts from his Arizona work, and it had taken only a couple of weeks to set up this little number. All done by telephone and fax and modem, but there was no clean and untraceable way to move the money. People don’t like to work with ghosts, either, so at least one meeting was essential. George knew all that, but he didn’t have to like it.

  He followed Miller to a big blue Cad, and they sat in the front seat. Miller had left the motor running for the air conditioning even though the day had not gotten warm yet. They went over the papers, and George took the time to read the main parts. He had used his Bruce Prior identity on this deal, and he wanted to be sure no minor screwup endangered it. The banks had wanted a thorough background, and Bruce Prior was the only paper persona that could stand up to that.

  George was building up the Charles Goff persona, the one he used with Miller. It was about time to get a cheap apartment for Goff, some reality behind the paper identity. It could be useful in his holy work, too.

  Miller consulted his spreadsheet printout and poked a finger at some lines. “Chase Manhattan okayed you, just like you said they would.”