Buying Time, Page 6

  the blue ring around the

  end. It protects you

  absolutely, by

  electrostatic repulsion.

  Airskin …

  (He drops it; camera

  FOLLOWS as it drifts down.)

  all you feel is safe.

  Low SCALE to follow

  Maria was looking forward to getting her hands on Dallas, too, but first they had to survive an “orientation discussion.” Nobody was allowed to visit adastra simply in exchange for paying the most expensive hotel bills in the history of the universe. You had to let yourself be educated, and you had to “become part of” the project, by donating a few symbolic hours of volunteer labor.

  The corridor abruptly widened into a large cylindrical room, which the leader identified as Hub One. There were six doors leading down, or up, to the various levels. One door was an empty yawning elevator shaft; the others had ladders. He pointed at one labeled “Spoke Five.”

  “They’re waiting for you at Level Four,” he said. “I’ll go transfer your luggage to your room. Leave your shoes here.” He floated between Dallas and Maria, grabbed a handhold, and flew back the way they had come.

  “Level Four, Spoke Five, Hub One,” Dallas said. “I think I prefer 248 Main Street.”

  “Don’t be silly. When people live here, they’ll just say four-five-one or something. Nobody could ever get lost.” She opened the door and started up the ladder.

  Dallas followed carefully. “Sometimes it’s fun to be lost.”

  It was about a hundred meters to Level Four, an effortless glide. It would be a good bit of exercise for fitness extremists, and people afraid of elevators, once the ship had gravity.

  The reception room at Level Four was designed to impress millionaires, the only people who would ever see it. The walls were a continuous abstract pattern of inlaid wood, from all the forests of Earth; the floor a tiled mosaic from Pompeii; the ceiling a Michelangelo fresco. The centerpiece was Rodin’s sculpture “Eternal Spring,” a young man and woman passionately entangled, pulling their humanity from a base of cold rock.

  There were three people in the room, a woman with a name tag and two other customers. Ignoring the museum-quality furniture all around the room, they were standing in the half-crouch posture that’s natural for zerogee.

  About a third of the floor, where they were standing, was covered with a Stiktite mat. The woman looked their way and held up two pairs of slippers. “Marconi and Barr?”

  “No,” Dallas said. “This plane is going to Cuba.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Old joke.” As he floated by the Rodin, he brushed the marble with his fingers. “I remember when you bought this. There was hell to pay.”

  She shrugged. “It’s the most appropriate piece of art in the world, for us to take. And they needed hard currency.”

  Maria and Dallas rotated slowly in the air, putting on the slippers, and then the three helped them down to the mat.

  The woman with the name tag was Melissa Abraham. The other two were Bill and Doris Baron.

  “Brother and sister, or married?” Maria asked.

  “Married.” Dallas and Maria nodded politely. There were lots of sibling immortals, since it was about the best way to spend a large inheritance, but married ones were rare. (Besides the obvious problems, there was the practical one that each person had to maintain a separate fortune; neither one could bail the other out if he or she didn’t make a million.) “Seventy-one years,” Doris said. “Two Stilemans apiece.”

  “The Barons arrived this morning,” Abraham said. “We asked that they wait a few hours so as to join you for this introduction.” The two exchanged a look that left no doubt as to what they had done during those hours.

  “So this is the sales pitch?” Dallas said.

  “Well … not really. The four of you have already contributed more than ten million dollars to the project. We assume you have some faith in it.”

  “Or at least money to throw away,” Dallas said. “Better you guys than the foundation.”

  “You’ve never thought of coming along?” she asked.

  1 Dallas looked around. “To tell the truth, I never took it that seriously before. It wasn’t this real.”

  “We’re going,” Doris said. Bill nodded.

  “I don’t know. Giving up a lot, everything for a blind gamble. Nobody can say whether it will even get you out of the solar system, let alone eighteen light-years.”

  “There’s no really new technology involved,” Abraham said. “It’s just bigger than existing structures and vehicles.”

  “A thousand times bigger,” Maria said.

  “That’s true. I know it’s like saying that because we can build a tree house, give us the money and we can build a skyscraper. We get that line from ’phems pretty often. I don’t think the project would ever have started, if we’d had to rely on ’phem money.”

  “Immortals are more optimistic,” Maria said.

  “We have time to be.” She obviously hadn’t heard the news. “Let me make us some coffee.”

  She walked over to the nearest wall, the rest of them following in a chorus of Stiktite rips.

  The coffee machine was a larger version of the one that graced Maria’s Bugatti, an eight-armed centrifuge of teak and gleaming brass. Abraham asked about cream and sugar and punched a sequence of buttons. The machine counted out the right number of beans and ground them with a startling shriek. Boiling water hissed and the aroma of coffee permeated the room, sudden and strong because of the low air pressure.

  The machine spun a few times and filled five bulbs of Waterford crystal. Dallas had to laugh when she handed one to him.

  “You folks sure know how to economize.”

  “It’s not just to impress people. We’re not coming back, after all. The things we take along should remind us of the best our past could offer.”

  The rest of the hour was not too excruciating—though, contrary to Abraham’s protestation, it was indeed a sales job. They especially wanted to get Dallas on their list, since he was one of the most public immortals.

  He was interested in an abstract way, but said it would be another few hundred years before he ran out of things to do in this solar system. Maybe he’d come join them later.

  Abraham showed them around the parts of the living area that were pressurized, as yet less than one percent of the total. Then they crowded into a repair tug and circumnavigated the skeleton of the ship.

  Most of the outside work was being done by robots, and Abraham seemed to think that that gave the project a high degree of predictability. She said adastra would be ready to go in fourteen years and three months. Dallas offered to bet her a million dollars on the spot that it would be late.

  Finally, they were released. Abraham called someone and found out their room was Suite B, Hub One, Spoke Four, Level Four. They may have set a speed record for nonresidents.

  Maria

  I’ve only had a few lovers, usually not immortals, and my memories of the last time with Dallas couldn’t be trusted. That was a long time ago and I was star-struck.

  He first made love 112 years ago. By now that woman’s grandchildren could be dead of old age.

  There’s not much he doesn’t know. His sophistication with my body might have been disconcerting if it hadn’t been offset by his own evident impatience. The Stileman Treatment does wonders for a man’s plumbing; it sets his clock back to about age twenty. Which might have been embarrassing if it hadn’t also been funny, in a grotesque way.

  It’s hard for a couple to “stay together” in zero gravity; the first minute or so requires certain adjustments, finding a proper rhythm. But we didn’t have a minute. I was obviously Dallas’s first woman since he’d left the clinic, and he had all the staying power of an excited rabbit. While we were still in the you-hold-still-while-I-move-a-little-this-way stage, his time was up. So instead of relaxing in a warm postcoital glow, we had to swim around the suite with tissue
s, chasing down threads of ejaculate, which quickly spun out to gossamer fineness. I got some in my hair.

  The shower was just big enough for two friendly people who like steam baths with a draft. It was a coffin-for-two cylinder with an air vent at the bottom, to substitute for gravity. (Of course it would be a regular drain once the ship was spinning. I wondered how much of our hundred thousand dollars per night paid for temporary amenities like that.) The shampoo was not remarkably effective, I suppose because the water had to be quickly recycled, but it did the minimum necessary.

  Of course, after the shower Dallas was up and ready again. He promised to be careful, and he was, and the only problem with the whole thing was trying to stay reasonably dignified during dinner afterward. Not running off before dessert.

  The food was unremarkable, but the company of Bill and Doris was interesting. Bill had made his first million in asteroid mining, during the confusing free-for-all period between the invention of the fusion drive and the rockniks’ November Revolution. He had the luck to stumble onto a silver variegate, an asteroid with a vein of pure silver.

  So they both were able to stay immortal without too much effort, so long as no one else found their asteroid. Once each decade, as soon as they get out of the clinic, they go to Novysibirsk, find their private asteroid, and carve out a couple of million pounds’ worth of silver. Their craft is completely stealthed; no one can track them to the rock by radar.

  It’s a clever way around the Stileman rules. It’s not like saving assets illegally, because they don’t own the asteroid. All they own is the knowledge of its orbital elements. They were on their way out there now.

  After dinner we went back to our suite, to play with a bottle of wine and each other. You shake globs of wine out of the bottle and chase them around with straws. You don’t do it with clothes on.

  Oral sex can be exotic in zerogee, floating in the middle of the room with the lights off, your lover a disembodied presence who contacts you only with his kiss. Ghost lover, succubus.

  We also had time to talk, actually the first time since Claudia’s party that we’ve been together and not busy getting this or that done. I asked him why he seemed so unconcerned about the new brain death revelation, and after a long pause, he told me about the Steering Committee and the “inside” information he had from Charles Briskin.

  I almost wished he hadn’t told me. I’m one-fourth Sicilian, and I take the business of secrets very seriously. True, Briskin hadn’t said, “Keep this to yourself, or else”—but he probably hadn’t thought he had to say it.

  Dallas laughed at himself for having felt a twinge of paranoia over the Russian’s death. I didn’t think it was paranoiac at all, or funny.

  “The timing is too neat,” I said. “The way of dying is too suspicious. Don’t you think they’re capable of getting rid of someone who is retarding their progress?”

  “Come on, Maria. It’s just an old-boy network.” He explained that Americanism to me. “They don’t have to kill a member to get rid of him.”

  “It’s the only sure way to keep the secret safe.”

  “You’re making too much of it.”

  “If I am, then you’re brewing a paradox. They’re not powerful enough to engineer a murder, but they are powerful enough to know the real story behind Lorne-Smythe’s death.”

  “They could be powerful in knowledge, in connections, without being desperadoes.”

  “Ostia! Which one of us comes from a convent?”

  “Mafia maid.” I let the matter drop. Perhaps I should have been more insistent.

  The next day we did our symbolic token of labor aboard adastra. They assumed we didn’t have any useful construction skills (which was more or less true in my case, but Dallas had built two houses himself), so they put us where we couldn’t do much damage, painting a bulkhead and each other.

  There was no excuse for not doing a perfect job, except that it was zero gravity and neither of us had ever seen a pressure-roller before. If you set the pressure too low, or roll too fast, you get a streaky mess that has to be gone over again. But if you set the pressure too high, you make little solar systems of paint planets that go spinning away. That’s why one person rolls while the other stands by with two sponges.

  (Dallas thought a vacuum cleaner arrangement would work better. Vacuum is one thing they have in abundance.)

  When we weren’t taking advantage of weightlessness and privacy, we spent a lot of time talking, usually in the observation room at the end of the axial corridor, half the time watching Earth race by a couple of hundred kilometers below us, half the time staring into the depths of the sky. The ship was pointed at Cassiopeia, and there was a little telescope you could use to look at Eta Cass, the star they were going to. It was a double star, very pretty; purple and gold. (Dallas said there are no purple stars, but I know purple when I see it.) The sky was beautiful in that direction, the Milky Way billowing as you can never see it on Earth. There was a lovely twin star cluster near Eta Cass.

  By now Dallas knew me well enough not to try to argue me into going back to the clinic, but he wasn’t above trying to ply me with numinism. Dying meant leaving all this beauty behind; it could be mine for another thousand years or more.

  Of course no one knows what beauty might be on the other side, but I knew him well enough not to pursue that. He was surprised when I quoted the King James Bible at him: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” That’s how I learned English, reading that old translation of the Bible: my father had learned that way, and he wanted to share it with me. When he died, I continued.

  (A psychiatrist once theorized at me that this was the root of my religious feeling; that it was a way of coping with my father’s dying and deserting me. It doesn’t seem likely, but even if it were true, you could argue right back that my father was taken from me under such circumstances in order to crystallize my nascent faith.)

  Sleeping is wonderful in zero gravity. In a ship you have to slip into constraints, since you don’t want to drift into any buttons or switches, but aboard adastra we could just float there. Dallas is a heavier sleeper than I am, and he sleeps longer, so I was able to watch him for hours. I would have guessed that people would contract toward a fetal position, but they don’t, or at least Dallas doesn’t. He floats with arms flung out, as if in supplication, his legs bowed like a jockey’s. Once he appeared to be having an interesting dream; I quietly joined it as incubus.

  I find myself being the devil’s advocate in this enterprise, defending adastra against Dallas’s cynicism and rationalism. Ignore the hardware; ignore the species-imperialism and dominance aspects. Adastra is a testament to faith, which Dallas mistrusts, his own more than anyone else’s.

  The central personnel problem, for instance, in keeping everyone alive for a few centuries: the Stileman Foundation has to agree to train a hundred or so doctors to send along to administer the treatment. So far it hasn’t agreed to supply the people, and Dallas says it never will: it has nothing to gain and a thousand customers to lose.

  I think they just haven’t come up with the right price yet. It won’t be money.

  (The woman Abraham thinks that these artificial-intelligence TI, touring image or whatever, computer things, might be the answer to that. They could make carbon copies of all hundred doctors and take them along as cybernetic consultants.)

  It seems to me that a more daunting problem would be what in the world those thousand or so people are going to do when they get to Eta Cass. They all will have plenty of talent in making fortunes, but what else? The supposition is that they’ll have centuries to study farming, construction engineering, and so forth. But I don’t know. There’s a lot more to growing things, for instance, than just knowing what to do—the fruit trees I was in charge of at the convent nearly perished before Sister Petra took over. Petra was mentally retarded but things grew for her.

  I’m told that engineering is the same, in that you must ha
ve a “feel” for it. Out of a thousand financiers and children of rich people, how many do you suppose will be able to make a machine behave? Enough to build a world from scratch?

  I suppose they could go at it gradually, living in orbit for generations, tended by the machines that took care of them en route, while chosen pioneers down below learned how to cope with the planet. When I was a little girl, people talked about doing that here—building permanent cities in orbit, a hundred times the size of adastra. The rockniks might have that many people now, nearly a hundred thousand, living permanently in space—but it’s a sprawling slum, nothing like the gorgeous postmodernist architectural fantasies I studied for that school report when I was ten. Maybe they would have been built if America hadn’t had all that trouble in the nineties. Dallas said it wasn’t likely, since the cities were supposed to have paid for themselves by selling solar energy, which couldn’t compete with cheap fusion. I don’t know. Money makes money.

  Even if it would work here, though, it would still be a chancy way to live eighteen light-years away. A long wait for spare parts, if something breaks down.

  Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dallas were to go in spite of his protestations. I would almost go too if I were still here. New worlds to conquer, as they say.

  We had to leave a day earlier than planned; the committee wanted Dallas (and everyone in their group who’d had more than seven Stileman treatments) to undergo a battery of tests before the Dubrovnik meeting.

  He’s been thinking about it, and is more worried than he wants me to know. It shows on his face when he doesn’t know I’m looking.

  I pray for him not to die before he’s ready. Prayer is not one of his own tools, I suspect. We haven’t talked much about religion, beyond his curiosity about my years in the convent, and perhaps that’s best. It’s not as if we were going to marry and raise a family.

  The London hospital visit took less than an hour, just a few measurements and samples. Some of the samples, though, were no fun for him to give—kidney and liver cells and a little scrape from the prostate—so Dallas stayed in London for a day or so of bed rest, while Maria went to Italy for two board meetings, and up to Switzerland to talk to the people who were turning her real estate into cash.