Buying Time

  “I like the way you use those words ‘lunatic’ and ‘law.’ Living in a fantasyland palace with bogus policemen waving guns around for you, kidnapping.”

  “Killing, if necessary.”

  “Even in Alaska there must be a law about that.”

  “Yes. But as elsewhere, the law is a tool, a matrix to work within. Not a set of unbreakable rules. That’s a viewpoint you share with me, is it not?”

  “I think I draw the line at murder. And I can’t remember the last time I kidnapped somebody.”

  “You’ve killed.”

  “Only people you sent after me with guns.”

  “I mean before we met.”

  It took me a moment to understand. “In wartime. That was a hundred and thirteen years ago. I was just a kid.”

  “Ah yes. And they’d be dead anyhow by now, wouldn’t they?” He blew a smoke ring.

  “If you’re trying to establish some sort of commonality between us, I think another angle might work better.”

  Soft, artificial laugh. “In a way, the commonality is right there. You were drafted, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “In other words, something more powerful than you took control of your destiny; it put you in a perilous situation; it made you do things that you would normally find morally repulsive. All in the name of a greater good.”

  “Didn’t think so at the time. The war wasn’t all that popular at home.”

  That irked him. I was not going to be stunned by the brilliance of his analogy. “My research indicates that you were awarded the Silver Star, for bravery, and a Purple Heart with two clusters. To me that would indicate—”

  “Oh, do some more research. You get the Purple Heart for being in the same place as a moving bullet. I got the Silver Star for going berserk and charging a machine-gun position with just a couple of hand grenades. If I had it to do over, I’d charge the draft board with hand grenades.”

  He was actually turning red. I decided not to press him by observing that indeed there was an effective analogy there: I’d gone crazy and killed people. But in my case I hoped the insanity had been temporary.

  Not smart to anger him. He had Maria. He had me. “So what do you want of me?”

  “Hmm.” He sat up, clasped his hands together on the desk, and stared at them. Again: “Hmm. The game has changed. Radically changed. A few months ago, you were the piece I was after. Now you’re a pawn.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “No, it’s not that you are less important to me, to the Steering Committee. Just that this business with Ulric, with Marconi, well … changes everything.”

  We had assumed it was no coincidence that he’d stolen Ulric’s more-or-less secret stealthed ship. Too many people knew something about what was going on; he had gotten to one of them.

  “I can see how it would.”

  “They must not be allowed to continue in their work. Even you can see that.”

  “It saved the life of the woman I love. Maybe I’m not completely rational about it. How is it dangerous?”

  “One life is meaningless. No matter how much she means to you. Ulric has the power to undo all of the good that Stileman has accomplished.”

  “What have you done with her?”

  He looked at me for a long moment. “You don’t know.”

  “If you’ve hurt her I’ll kill you.”

  “How romantic. I don’t see how you could.” He extracted the pistol and dangled it in my direction. “I think I won’t tell you anything about her, yet.” He touched something under his desk and a buzzer sounded outside. “You should think about it for a while.”

  One of the servants came in, armed with a crowdpleaser. “Sir?”

  “Show Mr. Barr to his room. Obey him within reason.”

  “A room?” I said.

  “A cell, actually. But nicer than any of the four jails you’ve been in.”

  Maria

  When I surrendered control to Maui, I told them who I was and that I didn’t know the name of the ship or its description; that I had been kidnapped but managed to subdue my captor; that I wanted the police to be there when I popped the hull. Landing, I wondered whether that had been smart. If Briskin was expecting me to land at Maui, then the police on duty might belong to him. Which went back to the question of how powerful he actually was.

  He couldn’t own the control tower as well as the police. At least one of them must have phoned the newsnets, in hopes of a finder’s fee. The start of our publicity barrage.

  At any rate, with an obviously hostile ship coming right behind me—my ship said it was less than a thousand kilometers behind—I didn’t have much choice. The landing interval at Maui is five minutes, if there are no delays for outgoing craft. Not enough time to escape the island, but enough to make some noise.

  We had to come in “fat,” at a considerable angle, to lose enough velocity, so there was a lot of pitching, but otherwise the landing was uneventful. The control tower identified me as being a Rocketdyne named Oh Suzanna, registered to Baird Ulric, stolen last month from the Ceres Synchronous Orbit Repair Facility.

  Decelerating under the control tower’s guidance wasn’t bad, but after the engine shut down my body was still waiting for the relief of weightlessness. It wouldn’t come, of course.

  I undid the straps and tried to stand, but my knees buckled and I fell, hurting both knees and an elbow. I had to crawl over to the air lock to let the police in.

  The first one came in with his gun drawn, which I thought unnecessarily dramatic. I got a good look at his face and my hopes evaporated: he was immortal. Therefore he was a fake, Briskin’s: immortals do a lot of odd things for their million, but none ever tried to save up that much on a policeman’s salary.

  He glanced at me and checked the little man. “This guy dead?”

  “No, it’s a drug. Zombi.”

  He nodded and stepped to the air lock. “Need a wheelchair and a gurney.”

  “And a sandwich,” I said.

  He smiled, not in a friendly way. “Any particular kind? Your Highness.”

  “A big one. I haven’t eaten in forty years.” He didn’t react to the “forty years,” but he did tell someone to get an Italian sub out of the machine. A type of American sandwich, popular there since before I was born. A whole meal between two huge slabs of bread, grotesque. Real Italian sandwiches are small, subtle, teasing.

  The immortal quasi-policeman picked me up easily and installed me in a wheelchair. They ran a strap of webbing under my breasts to hold me upright without effort on my part. The buckle was behind the chair’s back, inaccessible. What mainly interested me, though, was the sandwich. With all the strength I could summon, I tore into it, exquisite if impossibly heavy, each bite a delicious leaden bolus of life.

  Halfway through, though, I couldn’t hold the sandwich up anymore. It wasn’t like the Coke, before. I lowered it to my lap and my lids lowered, too, as the man rolled me into a sort of freight elevator.

  I didn’t sleep, exactly. It was a humid lassitude that had something of the zombi patient timelessness. It felt as if my body was mobilizing its resources, rebuilding itself—whatever it was, it was real; sweat coursed down my back and ribs inside the loose tunic, it saturated my hair and beaded on my cheeks and brow; I sucked its salt taste from my upper lip. I glowed with heat but it wasn’t like a fever. It was like you feel after hard running or sex.

  “Are you doing all right?”

  I looked up and couldn’t quite focus on him. Pink blob on a blue blob. “I’m all right. Just tired.” I took another bite of the sandwich, less exquisite, and barely managed to swallow it before my chin hit my chest again.

  I was aware of motion, but it was not fast or slow. No direction or duration. Light periods and dark. Seconds or minutes or days went by while my body burned and built.

  The heat ebbed suddenly and my flesh turned cold and greasy in an outdoor breeze. I opened my eyes expecting blur, and was shock
ed by the razor clarity of the scene. I was being wheeled along a parking lot, in an aisle between rows of all kinds of floaters, mostly expensive European ones. The Maui sky was impossibly blue after months of black starblown space. The rows were broken up by formal plantings of brilliant flowering bushes, their frangipani scent too heavy to be pleasant. But interesting, mixed with the smells of sunbaked machinery. We turned and the sun was warm on my face. I closed my eyes against the glare and finished the sandwich, chewing mechanically now, detesting the pedestrian greasy obviousness of it, but knowing I might need it. In the lightness of its heft I discovered I had regained normal strength, which I would have thought not possible, except for that earlier experience.

  I grasped the metal arms of the chair and flexed, to test my strength. They seemed to bend slightly. I leaned forward against the chest band, and it started to protest with a quiet ripping sound, and I eased off. The belt’s resistance made my ribs ache and the edges of the fabric had cut into my skin. Even if I did have the strength to tear it, I’d pay with broken ribs, or worse.

  I probably wasn’t much stronger than normal. I just had more subtlety in seeing and hearing the results of my strength. So I shouldn’t try to rip myself free and beat this man into submission with the wheelchair.

  Besides. Maybe I didn’t want to escape. The man was probably going to take me to Briskin. Best that I face him now, while he thinks I’m helpless.

  Or maybe we were going to Dallas. With the overshoot, he should have beaten me here. This immortal hadn’t done anything to hurt me; maybe Dallas had sent him to intercede.

  We wheeled up to a black van floater with the sigil of the Unaffiliated Commonwealth of Alaska. Good. That’s where we were going to start the media offense. “Are we going to Dallas?”

  He gave me an odd look. “No, Anchorage.”

  I slept over most of the ocean, almost two hours, and woke up feeling cramped and cranky. The man jumped when I spoke. “Is there a toilet on this thing?”

  “No. You’ll have to wait.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” I was still in the wheelchair, which was secured to the floor of the cargo area. “Could I at least get out of this damned thing?”

  He looked back at me and considered it. “You can walk?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m not supposed to.” He looked away and tugged on an ear. “You don’t seem all that dangerous. Just get back in it before we land.”

  “Sure.”

  “And not tell anyone that I …”

  “Definitely.” He came back and undid the chest band, then helped me forward, palm under my elbow, both of us bent over, walking like odd birds. Practicing an exaggeration of clumsiness, weakness. He eased me into the bucket seat and helped me strap in. I surreptitiously pinched the metal frame of the seat, and felt it bend.

  “Sorry we don’t have a pisser. Maybe there’s an empty can or something back there.”

  “I’ll be okay for a while. How long is it to Alaska?”

  “Maybe forty, fifty minutes more.”

  “I’ll be okay.” The calm sea, purple in the dying light, was rolling by fast, less than a hundred meters below us. Seeing all that water did not affect my bladder at all. Not at all. “You’re taking me to Charles Briskin?”

  “That’s right. He’s not going to harm you.”

  I almost laughed. “On the contrary. He wants to kill me.”

  “That’s not possible. He’s a great man. He’s gentle, and generous—”

  “Hold it. Just … hold it. You sound like the lowlife who kidnapped me on Ceres. If he’s such a nice man, why is he hiring you to commit a federal crime?”

  “You have to take a larger perspective—”

  “Perspective! He’s a megalomaniac who kills anyone who gets in his way. Are you as crazy as he is?”

  “Sir Charles has never killed anyone.”

  “Eric Lundley. Lamont Randolph. Dmitri Popov. God knows who else.”

  “I don’t know about any of those people.” He stared at me with truly burning intensity. “Sir Charles doesn’t take life. He gives life!”

  “Ostia.” But I understood. “He gave you life, is what you mean.”

  “He did. A few months ago, I was an old man.”

  “As I thought. An old man without a million pounds.” He smiled, superior. “Who will never need a million pounds.”

  Agreement

  Summation

  1.This document details the entire relationship between the Stileman Foundation (henceforth “the Foundation”) and the undersigned, superseding any previous agreement. [ref. ¶s la-d, 23e, 56c-f.]

  2.In return for a series of life-extending procedures (henceforth “the Process”), the undersigned deeds his entire estate to the Foundation, the estate including, but not limited to, all monies, investment properties, real estate, present and future royalties, collection rights on debts outstanding; the total value of this estate to be greater than £N 1.000.0002010· Adjusted for inflation, this sum on the date of signing is £N1.105.677. [Ref. ¶s 5a–d, 6, 8a–c, 12, 20–23, 41.]

  3.The undersigned testifies that he or she has no debts outstanding, that no single person or corporate entity owes the undersigned an amount greater than £N10.0002010>, and that during the past twelve calendar years the undersigned has given to no single person or corporate entity any gift valued in excess of £N10.00020l0. [Ref. ¶s 4, 5e, 7, 30.]

  A Stileman Clinic client must swear to a condition of total bankruptcy after payment. It is expressly disallowed for him or her to save significant resources through elaborate loan mechanisms. Anyone who violates the letter or spirit of this provision will be denied subsequent treatment, at the sole discretion of the Stileman Foundation Board of Governors.

  I warrant that I have read and understood this summary agreement and the detailed document attached.

  Client:

  For the Stileman Foundation:

  Dallas Barr

  Richard Dover Knox

  Sydney, Australia

  2 October 2080

  Dallas

  Interesting “cell” they put me in. A plush suite with a well-stocked kitchenette and bar. There were caviar and pâté and such, for the refined palate, but after four weeks on freeze-dried travel food, what I really wanted was something actually cooked before my eyes. I fried up some eggs and onions and wolfed them down with fresh black bread. The wine assortment was impeccable, and there was icy beer, and a shelf of tempting liquors, but under the circumstances I left them all alone. I didn’t know when Napoleon would call me again, and I wanted to be sharp.

  Presumably I was being watched. I didn’t say anything to Eric, because his sudden appearance was one of the few things I might use as a weapon against Briskin. Of course he might have been randomized by the scanner, earlier.

  I stripped and bathed, which was good but would have been more enjoyable without the unseen audience, and afterward had a slight shock when I opened the clothes closet. They were my own clothes, the London wardrobe selection I had left behind in Dubrovnik. Whatever else Briskin was, he was thorough.

  There were women’s clothes on the other side; I recognized the green suit Maria had worn to Claudia’s. Maybe that meant she hadn’t yet been delivered. Or she had escaped. Or she was dead.

  In any case, all I could do was wait.

  I felt stupid for having walked into this, but in reviewing my actions couldn’t come up with much in the way of alternatives. I could have resisted the “police,” but that would have been outlandish, suicide. I could have risked landing the thing ad lib, out in the tundra someplace, but almost certainly would have been caught before I could walk my way to a city and anonymity. A guy wandering in out of the woods in a space suit might attract some notice, too.

  I could have landed at another spaceport, but he probably did have them all covered. I could have stayed in Novysibirsk, waiting for him to make a move, but that would have increased the danger for Maria, and put him even more in contr
ol.

  The only thing to read in the whole place was a copy of my last Stileman contract. I practically knew the blasted thing by heart, all fifty pages of it, but I lay down on the bed and flipped through it anyhow. I got halfway through “Approved Modalities of Pre-Treatment Dispensation” before falling asleep.

  The dream was disturbing. I was walking down a pitch-dark road with my hand on the shoulder of the man in front of me. There was a hand on my shoulder, too. I would lose my man and grope blindly, shouting, and in the process would become separated from the man behind me, who would also panic. We would come back together in confusion, and then start walking again.

  “Mr. Barr. Wake up, Mr. Barr.” It was the incongruously armed Jeeves who’d escorted me earlier. “Sir Charles would like to speak with you.”

  If life were a movie I would snatch the gun from his hand and render him unconscious with a fairly humane blow, and then stalk the darkened corridors for Charlie. Instead, I peered at him through sleep-slitted eyes. “Go away.”

  “Sir. I have to insist.”

  I raised myself slowly and remained sitting for a minute, gathering strength. Six months ago, I possibly could have done it, plucked the gun away before he could fire. Nasty weapon, though. You could use up a lot of fingers and hands practicing the move.

  It was only eight; I’d slept less than an hour. “He couldn’t wait until tomorrow.”

  “No, sir.” Unexpectedly, he elaborated. “A woman was brought in, sir. He wanted to speak to the two of you together.”

  “Let’s go.” I picked up Eric, got halfway to the door before I remembered how weak I was, and stumbled. He helped me up and I shuffled along with him back to the library.

  Briskin was standing at the end of the conference table as before, but I hardly noticed him. Maria was there too, in a wheelchair—she seemed inhumanly pale at first, but then I saw that it was her image in a hologram.

  “Where is she? Where are you, Maria?”