I liked the illustrations, too.
Readers complained that they were paying novel prices for novellas; they weren’t getting enough words for their money. The experiment was terminated, the novella is still the ugly stepchild of the industry, and writers are still turning good novellas into bad novels because they need the money.
I still think I was right.
• • •
• • •
It was a relic of sorts: a granite block twenty-five or thirty feet long by the same distance wide by half that in height. Its corners and edges were unevenly rounded, as if it had weathered thousands of years of dust-laden winds.
There was writing on it. In it: Wes could see overhead light glinting through the lines. Something like a thread-thin laser had written script and diagrams all the way through the rock.
FOOTFALL, 1985
THE DEFENSELESS DEAD
The dead lay side by side beneath the glass. Long ago, in a roomier world, these older ones had been entombed each in his own double-walled casket. Now they lay shoulder to shoulder, more or less in chronological order, looking up, their features clear through thirty centimeters of liquid nitrogen sandwiched between two thick sheets of glass.
Elsewhere in the building some sleepers wore clothing, formal costumery of a dozen periods. In two long tanks on another floor the sleepers had been prettied up with low-temperature cosmetics, and sometimes with a kind of flesh-colored putty to fill and cover major wounds. A weird practice. It hadn’t lasted beyond the middle of the last century. After all, these sleepers planned to return to life someday. The damage should show at a glance.
With these, it did.
They were all from the tail end of the twentieth century. They looked like hell. Some were clearly beyond saving, accident cases whose wills had consigned them to the freezer banks regardless. Each sleeper was marked by a plaque describing everything that was wrong with his mind and body, in script so fine and so archaic as to be almost unreadable.
Battered or torn or wasted by disease, they all wore the same look of patient resignation. Their hair was disintegrating, very slowly. It had fallen in a thick gray crescent about each head.
“People used to call them corpsicles, frozen dead. Or Homo snapiens. You can imagine what would happen if you dropped one.” Mr. Restarick did not smile. These people were in his charge, and he took his task seriously. His eyes seemed to look through rather than at me, and his clothes were ten to fifty years out of style. He seemed to be gradually losing himself here in the past. He said, “We’ve over six thousand of them here. Do you think we’ll ever bring them back to life?” I was an ARM, I might know.
“Do you?”
“Sometimes I wonder.” He dropped his gaze. “Not Harrison Cohn. Look at him, torn open like that. And her, with half her face shot off; she’d be a vegetable if you brought her back. The later ones don’t look this bad. Up until 1989 the doctors couldn’t freeze anyone who wasn’t clinically dead.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why not?”
“They’d have been up for murder. When what they were doing was saving lives.” He shrugged angrily. “Sometimes they’d stop a patient’s heart and then restart it, to satisfy the legalities.”
Sure, that made a lot of sense. I didn’t dare laugh out loud. I pointed. “How about him?”
He was a rangy man of about forty-five, healthy-looking, with no visible marks of death, violent or otherwise. The long lean face still wore a look of command, though the deep-set eyes were almost closed. His lips were slightly parted, showing teeth straightened by braces in the ancient fashion.
Mr. Restarick glanced at the plaque. “Leviticus Hale, 1991. Oh, yes. Hale was a paranoid. He must have been the first they ever froze for that. They guessed right, too. If we brought him back now we could cure him.”
“If.”
“It’s been done.”
“Sure. We only lose one out of three. He’d probably take the chance himself. But then, he’s crazy.” I looked around at rows of long double-walled liquid nitrogen tanks. The place was huge and full of echoes, and this was only the top floor. The Vault of Eternity was ten stories deep in earthquake-free bedrock. “Six thousand, you said. But the Vault was built for ten thousand, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “We’re a third empty.”
“Get many customers these days?”
He laughed at me. “You’re joking. Nobody has himself frozen these days. He might wake up a piece at a time!”
“That’s what I wondered.”
“Ten years ago we were thinking of digging new vaults. All those crazy kids, perfectly healthy, getting themselves frozen so they could wake up in a brave new world. I had to watch while the ambulances came and carted them away for spare parts! We’re a good third empty now since the Freezer Law passed!”
That business with the kids had been odd, all right. A fad or a religion or a madness, except that it had gone on for much too long.
The Freezeout Kids. Most of them were textbook cases of anomie, kids in their late teens who felt trapped in an imperfect world. History taught them (those that listened) that earlier times had been much worse. Perhaps they thought that the world was moving toward perfection.
Some had gambled. Not many in any given year; but it had been going on ever since the first experimental freezer vault revivals, a generation before I was born. It was better than suicide. They were young, they were healthy, they stood a better chance of revival than any of the frozen, damaged dead. They were poorly adapted to their society. Why not risk it?
Two years ago they had been answered. The General Assembly and the world vote had passed the Freezer Bill into law.
There were those in frozen sleep who had not had the foresight to set up a trust fund, or who had selected the wrong trustee or invested in the wrong stocks. If medicine or a miracle had revived them now, they would have been on the dole, with no money and no trace of useful education and, in about half the cases, no evident ability to survive in any society.
Were they in frozen sleep or frozen death? In law there had always been that point of indecision. The Freezer Law cleared it up to some extent. It declared any person in frozen sleep, who could not support himself should society choose to reawaken him, to be dead in law.
And a third of the world’s frozen dead, twelve hundred thousand of them, had gone into the organ banks.
“You were in charge then?”
The old man nodded. “I’ve been on the day shift at the Vault for almost forty years. I watched the ambulances fly away with three thousand of my people. I think of them as my people,” he said a bit defensively.
“The law can’t seem to decide if they’re alive or dead. Think of them any way you like.”
“People who trusted me. What did those Freezeout Kids do that was worth killing them for?”
I thought: they wanted to sleep it out while others broke their backs turning the world into Paradise. But it’s no capital crime.
“They had nobody to defend them. Nobody but me.” He trailed off. After a bit, and with visible effort, he pulled himself back to the present. “Well, never mind. What can I do for the United Nations police, Mr. Hamilton?”
“Oh, I’m not here as an ARM agent. I’m just here to, to—” Hell, I didn’t know myself. It was a news broadcast that had jarred me into coming here. I said, “They’re planning to introduce another Freezer Bill.”
“What?”
“A second Freezer Bill. Naming a different group. The communal organ banks must be empty again,” I said bitterly.
Mr. Restarick started to shake. “Oh, no. No. They can’t do that again. They, they can’t.”
I gripped his arm, to reassure him or to hold him up. He looked about to faint. “Maybe they can’t. The first Freezer Law was supposed to stop organlegging, but it didn’t. Maybe the citizens will vote this one down.”
I left as soon as I could.
The second Freezer Bill made slow, steady progress
, without much opposition. I caught some of it in the boob cube. A perturbingly large number of citizens were petitioning the Security Council for confiscation of what they described as “the frozen corpses of a large number of people who were insane when they died. Parts of these corpses could possibly be recovered for badly needed organ replacements…”
They never mentioned that said corpses might someday be recovered whole and living. They often mentioned that said corpses could not be safely recovered now; and they could prove it with experts; and they had a thousand experts waiting their turns to testify.
They never mentioned biochemical cures for insanity. They spoke of the lack of a worldwide need for mental patients and for insanity-carrying genes.
They hammered constantly on the need for organ transplant material.
I just about gave up watching news broadcasts. I was an ARM, a member of the United Nations police force, and I wasn’t supposed to get involved in politics. It was none of my business.
It didn’t become my business until I ran across a familiar name, eleven months later.
Taffy was peoplewatching. That demure look didn’t fool me. A secretive glee looked out of her soft brown eyes, and they shifted left every time she raised her dessert spoon.
I didn’t try to follow her eyes for fear of blowing her cover. Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I don’t care who’s eating at the next table in a public restaurant. Instead I lit a cigarette, shifted it to my imaginary hand (the weight tugging gently at my mind) and settled back to enjoy my surroundings.
High Cliffs is an enormous pyramidal city-in-a-building in northern California. Midgard is on the first shopping level, way back near the service core. There’s no view, but the restaurant makes up for it with a spectacular set of environment walls.
From inside, Midgard seems to be halfway up the trunk of an enormous tree, big enough to stretch from Hell to Heaven. Perpetual war is waged in the vasty distances, on various limbs of the tree, between warriors of oddly distorted size and shape. World-sized beasts show occasionally: a wolf attacks the moon, a sleeping serpent coils round the restaurant itself, the eye of a curious brown squirrel suddenly blocks one row of windows…
“Isn’t that Holden Chambers?”
“Who?” The name sounded vaguely familiar.
“Four tables over, sitting alone.”
I looked. He was tall and skinny, and much younger than most of Midgard’s clientele. Long blond hair, weak chin—he was really the type who ought to grow a beard. I was sure I’d never seen him before.
Taffy frowned. “I wonder why he’s eating alone. Do you suppose someone broke a date?”
The name clicked. “Holden Chambers. Kidnapping case. Someone kidnapped him and his sister, years ago. One of Bera’s cases.”
Taffy put down her dessert spoon and looked at me curiously. “I didn’t know the ARM took kidnapping cases.”
“We don’t. Kidnapping would be a regional problem. Bera thought—” I stopped, because Chambers looked around suddenly, right at me. He seemed surprised and annoyed.
I hadn’t realized how rudely I was staring. I looked away, embarrassed. “Bera thought an organlegging gang might be involved. Some of the gangs turned to kidnapping about that time, after the Freezer Law slid their markets out from under them. Is Chambers still looking at me?” I felt his eyes on the back of my neck.
“Yah.”
“I wonder why.”
“Do you indeed.” Taffy knew, the way she was grinning. She gave me another two seconds of suspense, then said, “You’re doing the cigarette trick.”
“Oh. Right.” I transferred the cigarette to a hand of flesh and blood. It’s silly to forget how startling that can be: a cigarette or a pencil or a jigger of bourbon floating in mid-air. I’ve used it myself for shock effect.
Taffy said, “He’s been in the boob cube a lot lately. He’s the number eight corpsicle heir, worldwide. Didn’t you know?”
“Corpsicle heir?”
“You know what corpsicle means? When the freezer vaults first opened—”
“I know. I didn’t know they’d started using the word again.”
“Well, never mind that. The point is that if the second Freezer Bill passes, about three hundred thousand corpsicles will be declared formally dead. Some of those frozen dead men have money. The money will go to their next of kin.”
“Oh. And Chambers has an ancestor in a vault somewhere, does he?”
“Somewhere in Michigan. He’s got an odd, Biblical name.”
“Not Leviticus Hale?”
She stared. “Now, just how the bleep did you know that?”
“Just a stab in the dark.” I didn’t know what had made me say it. Leviticus Hale, dead, had a memorable face and a memorable name.
Strange, though, that I’d never thought of money as a motive for the second Freezer Bill. The first Freezer Law had applied only to the destitute, the Freezeout Kids.
Here are people who could not possibly adjust to any time in which they might be revived. They couldn’t even adjust to their own times. Most of them weren’t even sick, they didn’t have that much excuse for foisting themselves on a nebulous future. Often they paid each other’s way into the Freezer Vaults. If revived they would be paupers, unemployable, uneducated by any possible present or future standards; permanent malcontents.
Young, healthy, useless to themselves and society. And the organ banks are always empty…
The arguments for the second Freezer Bill were not much different. The corpsicles named in group two had money, but they were insane. Today there were chemical cures for most forms of insanity. But the memory of having been insane, the habitual thought patterns formed by paranoia or schizophrenia, these would remain, these would require psychotherapy. And how to cure them, in men and women whose patterns of experience were up to a hundred and forty years out of date to start with?
And the organ banks are always empty…Sure, I could see it. The citizens wanted to live forever. One day they’d work their way down to me, Gil Hamilton.
“You can’t win,” I said.
Taffy said, “How so?”
“If you’re destitute they won’t revive you because you can’t support yourself. If you’re rich your heirs want the money. It’s hard to defend yourself when you’re dead.”
“Everyone who loved them is dead too.” She looked too seriously into her coffee cup. “I didn’t really pay much attention when they passed the Freezer Law. At the hospital we don’t even know where the spare parts come from: criminals, corpsicles, captured organleggers’ stocks, it all looks the same. Lately I find myself wondering.”
Taffy had once finished a lung transplant with hands and sterile steel, after the hospital machines had quit at an embarrassing moment. A squeamish woman couldn’t have done that. But the transplants themselves had started to bother her lately. Since she met me. A surgeon and an organlegger-hunting ARM, we made a strange pairing.
When I looked again, Holden Chambers was gone. We split the tab, paid and left.
The first shopping level had an odd outdoor-indoor feel to it. We came out into a broad walk lined with shops and trees and theaters and sidewalk cafés, under a flat concrete sky forty feet up and glowing with light. Far away, an undulating black horizon showed in a narrow band between concrete sky and firmament.
The crowds had gone, but in some of the sidewalk cafés a few citizens still watched the world go by. We walked toward the black band of horizon, holding hands, taking our time. There was no way to hurry Taffy when she was passing shop windows. All I could do was stop when she did, wearing or not wearing an indulgent smile. Jewelry, clothing, all glowing behind plate glass—
She tugged my arm, turning sharply to look into a furniture store. I don’t know what it was she saw. I saw a dazzling pulse of green light on the glass, and a puff of green flame spurting from a coffee table.
Very strange. Surrealistic, I thought. Then the impressions sorted out, and I pushed Taff
y hard in the small of the back and flung myself rolling in the opposite direction. Green light flashed briefly, very near. I stopped rolling. There was a weapon in my sporran the size of a double barreled Derringer, two compressed air cartridges firing clusters of anesthetic crystal slivers.
A few puzzled citizens had stopped to watch what I was doing.
I ripped my sporran apart with both hands. Everything spilled out, rolling coins and credit cards and ARM ident and cigarettes and—I snatched up the ARM weapon. The window reflection had been a break. Usually you can’t tell where the pulse from a hunting laser might have come from.
Green light flashed near my elbow. The pavement cracked loudly and peppered me with particles. I fought an urge to fling myself backward. The afterimage was on my retina, a green line thin as a razor’s edge, pointing right at him.
He was in a cross street, posed kneeling, waiting for his gun to pulse again. I sent a cloud of mercy needles toward him. He slapped at his face, turned to run, and fell skidding.
I stayed where I was.
Taffy was curled in the pavement with her head buried in her arms. There was no blood around her. When I saw her legs shift I knew she wasn’t dead. I still didn’t know if she’d been hit.
Nobody else tried to shoot at us.
The man with the gun lay where he was for almost a minute. Then he started twitching.
He was in convulsions when I got to him. Mercy needles aren’t supposed to do that. I got his tongue out of his throat so he couldn’t choke, but I wasn’t carrying medicines that could help. When the High Cliffs police arrived, he was dead.
Inspector Swan was a picture-poster cop, tri-racial and handsome as hell in an orange uniform that seemed tailored to him, so well did he fit it. He had the gun open in front of him and was probing at the electronic guts of it with a pair of tweezers. He said, “You don’t have any idea why he was shooting at you?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re an ARM. What do you work on these days?”