Buying Time

  “She’s in a safe place. She can’t hear you.”

  “She’s here. In this house.”

  “You don’t have to know.”

  “Your butler told me.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “Why don’t you take him out and kill him? That’s the way you do business. Isn’t it?”

  “Sir,” the man said from behind me, tension growing in his voice, “you didn’t say specifically—”

  “That will do, Mr. Porter. You may go now; I’ll call when I need you.” I heard the door open. “Wait. You may ask Mr. Lincoln to come in.”

  I stepped sideways and eased into the overstuffed chair, so that I could keep an eye on both Briskin and the door. Lincoln was evidently the black immortal who had brought me in from the spaceport. He slipped inside and closed the door noiselessly. He had traded the fake police uniform for a loose karate outfit with a black belt.

  Of course anyone can buy a belt of any color. I hoped not to find out whether he had earned it.

  “Let me get straight to the point. Things have not gone according to plan. I am going to need your help.”

  A number of replies came to mind, but all I could articulate was “Oh?”

  “I did manage to infiltrate Baird Ulric’s organization.” That was no surprise. “But it’s backfired. The man turned on me.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “A urologist, Dr. York. He’s been taken care of.” Briskin sat down heavily. “But now they’re doubly cautious. I need someone they wouldn’t suspect in a million years.”

  “Me?”

  “Exactly.”

  He looked perfectly serious. “You are out of your bloody mind.”

  “Mr. Lincoln.” He pointed at the image of Maria. “That woman has murdered two of my employees. If I asked you to kill her very slowly, would you do it?”

  “Oh yes.”

  He looked at me. “I could make you watch every minute of it. Keep waking you up so you didn’t miss anything.”

  “You were born in the wrong century, you bastard.”

  “No, Dallas, you were. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

  “What would you want me to do?”

  “Get to their records and destroy them. All of the old texts and journals they used to reconstruct the Stileman Process, they’re in Ulric’s library. A strong magnetic pulse and then a fire bomb.”

  “You don’t think there are duplicates.”

  “Not for everything. And we’ve made certain that none can be had from Earth.”

  Sure, you did. My first impulse was to tell him I’d go ahead with it. Each specialist must have had copies made of the material relevant to his or her own work. Or would they? Surgeons aren’t scientists. And copying is expensive in Ceres.

  Of course I could always arrange with Ulric to fake the disaster, too. I guessed I would go and do that, if there was no other way. But I didn’t want to give in too easily.

  “Why? Seems to me that Ulric’s group is doing the world a favor. All the worlds.”

  He settled back with a superior smile. “You haven’t given it enough thought. Furthermore, your judgment is distorted by having had your lover’s life saved.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “The demographic part of it is obvious. If immortality were inexpensive, the world would fill up with people in no time. My scientists say that starvation would be endemic within twelve to fifteen years.” His scientists, right.

  “Even before that, though, there would be general economic collapse. That would be true even if the Stileman Foundation retained the rights to the process, but wasn’t able to limit the period of rejuvenation. With wealthy people able to control their fortunes for a century or more, the foundation’s economic primacy would evaporate—and that primacy is essential to the economic stability of every major nation.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Eric said. His face appeared on the screen. I turned the reader around on the table so it faced Briskin.

  “Who are you?”

  “Eric Lundley. A computer image of him. One of the first people you killed in pursuit of this harebrained scheme.”

  “Dallas Barr killed you.”

  “Again, bullshit.”

  “It’s his testimony against mine.”

  “His and Marconi’s—and my own knowledge of him and of human nature. You, I know almost nothing about. Though I think I’ve met you in history books with tiresome frequency.”

  “Mr. Lincoln, take the data cube out of that reader and destroy it.”

  “Murdering the same person twice?” I said, picking up the reader and holding it close against me. “I wonder if that’s ever been done before.”

  “Once,” Eric said in a muffled tone. “In Milan, in 1998, a man was shot through the heart outside of a hospital. They were able to thaw out a transplant in time, and bring him back from clinical death, but while he was recovering from the operation the same assailant broke into his hospital room and decapitated him.” A bizarre reaction to life-threatening danger, supplying information, but the flesh-and-blood Eric might have done the same.

  “Give the machine to me.” Lincoln exuded relaxed confidence, hand out.

  “Do as he says,” Eric said. “It’s a meaningless gesture. I have copies of myself stashed all over the world.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Briskin said. It wasn’t, though. “Actually … let’s let him participate; he certainly has a different angle on everything.”

  I put the reader back so that Eric was facing Briskin. “So your computer brain sees flaws in my reasoning.”

  “Holes. Chasms. Ulric’s immortality process is not inexpensive. Never can be. It requires more than a hundred medical people, most of them specialist M.D.’s, doing almost a hundred separate procedures. If they had a constant flowthrough, they might be able to do three hundred people a year. Rich people. In a century, that’s thirty thousand new immortals, tops, who then have to recycle—if your doctors are willing to work day in, day out, no vacations. Thirty thousand people are immaterial to population pressure. Twice that many die of starvation every day.

  “And, to be realistic, the first twenty thousand people to go through the new process will be the existing Stileman immortals. They’re the people with the most money.”

  Briskin was trying to keep a smile on his face. It looked like a surgical scar.

  “Money is your other argument. Ruin the economy. Look around you. The economy is already in shambles, all over the world.

  “Stileman’s plan didn’t work. It did temporarily rid the Earth of the superrich—but in their place left a mandarin class of twenty thousand millionaires who control everything, absolutely everything, and stagnate every country’s economy because of their innate conservatism: whatever else happens, they dare not risk their basic million.

  “And now, with your Steering Committee and its supposed adroitness in accumulating billions, we have the superrich back again to compound the entrenched Stileman problems. If the committee does indeed exist.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just that it would be inconsistent with your generally paranoid pattern to, good-bye, Dallas—” The reader exploded and fell over faceup on the table. There was a small black hole just off the center of the screen, surrounded by a webwork of cracks. A wisp of smoke curled out of it. Briskin dropped the laser back into his pocket.

  “Tiresome,” he said. “Arguing economics with a machine.” I didn’t trust myself to say anything. He pushed a button on his desk. “Bring her down, Mr. Porter.” He pushed another button and the image of Maria disappeared.

  Eric and I had talked about the possibility that the Steering Committee didn’t exist, or was a good deal smaller than Briskin claimed. He had never revealed the name of any other member, and most of what had been done in the committee’s name, including the murders for hire that he tacitly admitted to, could have been done by one wealthy and determined person. Especially if that person was on the board of the
Stileman Foundation.

  The smell of ozone and burned plastic. My only companion for the last four weeks. Was he dead now, for good? Could I call up the TI bank and download him again, minus the last six months? Who would he be?

  Can turning off a machine be murder?

  Maria

  We landed on the roof of this outlandish snowbound mansion, and the pilot wheeled me into a bathroom on the top floor, where I politely declined his assistance. Then he pushed me into a small dark room and disappeared. I heard him lock the door behind me and didn’t bother investigating it.

  When my eyes got used to the dark, I realized that I and the wheelchair were slightly more visible than my surroundings, because of three extremely dim lights: overhead, to the front, and to the left. Holo camera setup. I supposed that they were operating in near-infrared, or used some sort of night-seeing image amplifier circuit. I remained completely motionless. Bore them into making the next move.

  Whatever this new quality was, this new sensibility, strength, or whatever, it included a palpable control over the passage of time. Once I had learned all I could from the dark room, I checked my watch and then “willed” time forward. In a few seconds the door opened again. More than an hour had passed, and I felt refreshed, as if I had slept.

  It was a different man, dressed like a British “gentleman’s gentleman.” I didn’t speak to him and he returned my silence.

  I slowed time down as we rolled, in order to concentrate on detail. When the man leaned forward to push an elevator button, I noted that he was immortal, and he had a concealed weapon at belt level on his left side, which meant he would draw it across his body, since he had a pencil callus on his right forefinger. I felt I could have disarmed him at that time, grabbing his right hand as he reached across; he would reach for my wrist, reflexively, with his left hand, and I could go underneath and pluck out the weapon. Unless it was secured with some sort of snap or Stiktite band, which could prove embarrassing.

  I didn’t want to do anything dramatic until I knew where Charles Briskin was, anyhow.

  We descended to the ground floor and the man rolled me through a garishly overdecorated hall. From the dull way the chandelier refracted light, you could tell it was plastic. The carpet looked nice, but only because it was brand-new; you could still smell the adhesive they’d used to secure it, and the servant’s footsteps on it made an unpleasant crunchy sound, nylon. The fabric on the walls had been applied by machine; there was a perfectly consistent one-millimeter overlap at each seam. All of the furnishings had a fresh-from-the-catalog look, and I don’t mean the Harrod’s catalog. I supposed Briskin had had the place thrown together on the occasion of his ascension to the chairmanship. Foundation money, doubtless. Perhaps if we all donated an extra ten pounds next time, he could afford a decorator.

  We stopped at a door that was the first evidence of a scintilla of taste. It was a seventeenth-or eighteenth-century British antique, ebony hand-carved into a complex hunting scene frieze. Some artisan had spent a large fraction of his short life lovingly seeking out in that fine grain the horse, the stag, the hounds; the men bent forward in their saddles frozen alive now for dozens of lifetimes, could they have known? They were probably stable hands, servants, who posed; maybe indigents who would stand one way for hours in return for a bowl of food and a straw bed, with every aching bone hating the rich man who would have his doors turned into works of art because the walls were all filled, the servant’s hand inching toward the door handle, I may die on the other side of this door, and soon, but no point in delaying it any longer. I let him finish the act.

  Inside, a long conference table of matching ebony, Dallas halfway down one wall, slouching in an overstuffed chair, trying to look relaxed or vulnerable but actually taut like a coiled spring; Sir Charles behind an ebony desk butted up against the end of the table, looking irritated. He was wearing a ridiculous Oriental jacket. He stood up and I could see there was something large in its side pocket, probably a weapon. A man in a karate robe stood next to Dallas, guarding him impassively, arms folded.

  “Maria.” Dallas started to rise.

  “Stay where you are,” Briskin said. Dallas froze and the guard put a hand on his shoulder.

  I gave Dallas a look that tried to communicate the fact that I was bluffing, too; that if he wanted to try something physical, he had an ally. He seemed to nod slightly, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe another hundred years together; I raise an eyebrow this much and you know that I am impatient to go to Nebraska. Will we have even two more words together before this hateful man has his way? In his wide eyes, in the set of his jaw, the flush of his skin, the vein at his temple bulging, I read insanity and murder.

  “You killed my men,” Briskin said.

  “Man,” I corrected. “He came through the door aiming a gun at me.” The butler rolled me to where I was even with Dallas, the table between us.

  “The other one, the pilot. You killed him, too.”

  “He got the same drug I did, the zombi. He must have reacted to it badly.”

  “You did something to him.”

  “No. In fact, I had it twice, and survived. Maybe it doesn’t go with alcohol or other drugs. He was drinking a lot and punching something. Cream, I think.”

  Dallas tensed. “Did he—”

  “No.”

  “Shut up,” Briskin said, and his hand slid into the pocket. “The doctor says he could have died that way. You came out of the coma first, then gave him a punch of cream and manipulated him sexually. With the zombi, that would have killed him.”

  The man in the karate outfit leered and gave a low husky laugh. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dallas start to move and slowed things down.

  I got out of the chair and started my molasses dash toward Briskin. I watched Dallas in slow motion as I went step … step … step. He reached up and crushed the man’s testicles with one hand; as he folded up in eye-bulging agony, Dallas half rose, swinging his elbow up in a sort of backhand. It caught the man in the throat and his head slammed against the wall with a faint deep boom. I assumed that was sufficient for him. I turned all my attention to running without tripping. Sir Charles was not looking at me. With a fixed smile, full of perfect teeth, he was withdrawing a laser from the pocket of his ridiculous jacket. I could not will myself faster, nor slow the world down more than I already had. Jump over the desk or go around? Better jump.

  Dallas told me an interesting fact during that long loving weightless time when we talked about everything. We had watched a century-old detective movie in which the private eye was knocked unconscious by a woman (who turned out to be otherwise innocent) smashing a lamp over his bare head. The private eye woke up a convenient time later, convenient for the story’s plot, and proceeded to solve the crime.

  Dallas said that it didn’t happen that way. If you hit somebody over the top of the head hard enough to knock him out, you would probably fracture his skull and kill him. What causes unconsciousness is the quick displacement of the brainstem, preferably a horizontal displacement, which is why the boxers we saw in Australia jabbed at the chin and street criminals “rabbit punch” (what a misnomer) to the back of the neck. I cleared the desk. He began to react to me.

  Maybe a rabbit punch is the way they kill rabbits. Have to ask Eric.

  I landed next to him. He was turning toward me, raising the weapon.

  Plenty of time. With my left hand I grabbed the laser as it swung around, then balled my right fist and swung it as hard as I could, right at the aristocratic point of Briskin’s chin.

  My arm moved as if through thick honey, and at the last moment I wondered whether it would have any more impact on the man than a baby’s pat. I shouldn’t have worried. The force of the blow actually picked Briskin off the ground, and in midair his eyes rolled up to show all whites, and his face went slack, and the pain in my suddenly broken knuckles was remarkable. I visualized a bracelet around my right wrist that would not allow the passage of any sensory data,
and the arm fell limp. The servant was drawing his gun. I brought the laser up with my left hand, and resumed normal time in order to speak.

  “Don’t do that!” I shouted. He paused. “I’ll have to kill you!”

  “It’s a crowdpleaser,” Dallas said tightly. “You’re out of his range.”

  But Dallas wasn’t. The man pivoted—

  I slowed things down and took careful aim. Enough killing. The man was swinging the weapon in a flat arc toward Dallas. Hard to aim with the left hand, steady. Red aiming spot right on the crowdpleaser itself, squeeze the trigger slowly.

  Of course his gun exploded. It was almost like Ceres, the terrible slow mushroom of flesh and blood and bone.

  Real time. Half his arm was gone, the shredded stump spouting blood. He looked at me and said one syllable and fainted. Dallas looked as if he were going to faint, too. I didn’t feel too well, myself.

  “Where did you learn how to do that?” Dallas whispered. Blood welled from two cuts on his forehead and cheek, from fragments.

  “It’s a long story.” The door swung open and I brought the laser up, with a reflex command from a half century of movies in English: “Hands up!” It was the pilot; he complied, looking around. “Come inside and shut the door.”

  “Don’t do anything dumb,” he said.

  “Don’t you do anything dumb,” I said. “Is there another way out of this place? Other than through that door?”

  “Huh-uh.” Dallas searched him and came up with a laser like Briskin’s.

  “He’s the pilot who brought me here,” I said. “Floater on the roof.”

  “Let’s do it.” He gestured with the laser. “You pick up Briskin. We’re gonna go through that door real slow. I’ve got a gun at your head and Maria’s got one at Briskin’s. Take us to the floater and get us outa here, you’re home free.”

  “Okay, okay. Just don’t do—”

  “Move it move it!” He stepped over the black man and the bleeding one and heaved Briskin up on one shoulder, sagging. Dallas picked up Eric’s reader—there was a hole burned in the screen, but maybe he was all right; the TI cube was down in the other corner—and put the laser’s muzzle to the pilot’s temple. I aimed at Briskin’s head and we shuffled out, a clumsy and dangerous six-legged creature.