The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Page 9

  That night, I returned to camp and found that only three other militiamen had made it back, out of eighteen. I climbed out of my mecha and we did a little of the weird yoga they’d taught us in basic to get our bodies back after being trapped immobile in a rubber, form-fitting suit for eight hours in the mecha. None of us spoke of the day. We knew what had happened to our comrades. Some of them had been my friends. One, a pretty Haitian girl named Monique, had been my lover. She’d been teaching me French. We knew we could find them by canvassing the nearby bars. They’d be spending the last of their money, drinking and crying until the money ran out. We’d next see them begging on a street, tears slipping down their cheeks.

  I didn’t tell them about being caught by the youth gang, nor about the unsuccessful mindrape. I certainly didn’t tell them about seeing myself in the faces of the youth gang.

  By the morning, there were only two of us left. Grad,

  a taciturn older man, had left his mecha but taken his pack. I wished him good luck.

  I looked into the eyes of the remaining militiaman. Technically, he was my superior, having the pip that made him into a nominal corporal. But Marcus wasn’t really non-com material, didn’t like making eye contact. Didn’t like conflict. He’d been promoted for valor in the field after losing it on a bunch of wumpuses and taking down like thirty in an afternoon, while they flailed at him. When we’d pried him, shaking, out of his mecha, his eyes were still lit up like glow-bugs, and he had a huge, throbbing boner.

  Marcus ticked a salute off his forehead at me, then grabbed his own pack and walked off. That left me alone. The sounds of the forest were loud around me. Mosquitoes bit at my neck and whined in my ears. I climbed into my mecha and clomped off, but not on my patrol route: I headed south, down to the Keys, making an executive decision to take an extended scouting trip into unknown territory. Without any particular plan to return.

  OK, so I stole the mecha. I also never got my last three pay-packets. Let’s call it even.

  Good thing I did, too. I found a grey hair in my eyebrow within a week. Within a month, the hair on my chest had gone white and the wrinkles had spread from the corners of my eyes to the tops of my arms. Six months later, I needed a cane. Within a year, it was two canes.

  It was the stuff in my marrow, of course. All those borrowed years, undone with a single injection. I tried to shut them down using the console, but they weren’t responding. I presumed that somewhere—Chennai, maybe—some colleague of Chandrasekhar would be fascinated to hear about this. Someone who’d love to know about the long-term outcomes in his experiment.

  Being the long-term outcome was less fun.

  I piloted my mecha up the walls of the treehouse on Sugarloaf Key. The bottom floors have something wrong with them, some mutant gene that caused their furnishings to extrude from the ceiling and walls. The upper floors were all right, though, and I have very simple needs.

  Climbing out of the mecha gets harder every day. Just looking at my body gets harder, to tell the truth. The wrinkles, the liver spots, the swollen joints. My physical age is impossible to guess, but I feel like I’m 120, a skeleton wrapped in papery skin. Every vein stands out, every bone, every joint.

  I inched down the limb of the treehouse and into my room. I had a little air-breathing radio-oven and a narrow bed padded with dried boughs from the tree. There was a comfortable sofa that I’d improved with a couple big pillows. It was more than I needed. By the time I got home from a day’s foraging, there wasn’t anything to do except choke down a little food and rest my bones until my bladder got me up, which it did, like clockwork, every two hours, all night long. There are lots of things I try not to dwell upon. The fact that this is all my fault is one of those things.

  It was later that night, the third or fourth time I stumbled to the oubliette for yet another piss, that some sound caught me and brought me to the door. I’m not sure what it was: nighttimes are a riot of ocean noises, animal sounds, insect sounds, wind soughing through the boughs. Something was different that night. I took up my canes and tottered to the door, leaning on the jamb.

  My mecha stood before me, cheap and nasty and lethal, a silhouette in the moonlight. I looked out into the woods, I looked down at the floor, and finally I looked up.

  He was sitting on one of the high, thin branches of my treehouse. He was wearing loose pantaloons that hung in folds around his legs, a tight zippered jacket, and a confusion of rings and necklaces. It was dark and he was all in shades of grey, except for his luminous white face, peering at me from his hood and his halo of elaborately braided hair.

  “Hello there,” he said. He seemed to be on the verge of laughing at some private joke, and somehow I knew that I wasn’t the butt of it. “Sorry to wake you. We have business to discuss. Can I come in?”

  I looked up at him, squinting. I thought about toggling the floodlights on my mecha but decided that whatever he wanted, I wasn’t in a position to deny it to him. Out of my mecha, I was helpless. He could knock me over with a pufff of air.

  I backed away from the door, leaning on my canes, and jerked my chin at the insides of my place. “Guess so,” I said.

  I struggled into a pair of shorts before hitting the lights. His pupils dilated with the telltale snap of night-vision enhancements, so the shorts were redundant. He’d already seen everything. What did I have to be modest about anyway?

  He was tall and thin, his hair a mad ash-blond dandelion clock around his face. He had a foxlike chin and nose, and a wide mouth that curled up at the corners in a profusion of dimples, making his smile look like a caricature.

  “Would you like tea?” I asked. It helped me sleep sometimes, so I was in the habit of making tea in the middle of the night.

  “You make it with those chanterelles you pick?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You know a lot about me.”

  “It’s not really tea at that point. More like consomme. But I’ll try some.”

  I put the dried mushrooms in my tea egg and dropped it into a jar of water from the treehouse’s condenser, then stuck it in the cooker, letting it figure out the timing and all.

  “You know a lot about me,” I said again.

  “I know a lot about you,” he agreed. He sat down on the edge of my bed. “I helped design you, if you want to know the truth. I knew your parents.”

  I looked more closely at him. He barely seemed a day over thirty. So he was telling me that he was an immortal, then. About time I met another one.

  “That’s an interesting story. On the other hand, you could be a thirty-year-old jerk who likes to snoop.”

  “You remember the time you came to Florida to get the Carousel of Progress? Your father slipped away one evening after dinner, told you to stay in your mecha, told you he had an appointment with someone?” He smiled and smiled, the corners of his mouth curling in on themselves. “We talked all night long. He was very happy with how you were working out, but there were some improvements we agreed we would make in the next generation.

  “He loved the Carousel of Progress. It was almost impossible to get him to talk about anything else.

  “Your mother—he said you didn’t remember her. I do. A great beauty. Smart, too. Acid tongue. She could flay the skin off you at a thousand miles’ distance over a mailing list.

  “I’ve followed your career very closely ever since. I felt I owed it to your father. Lost you for a while, but you turned up again in an Indian gentleman’s research notes, a gentleman from the IIT. Chandrasekhar.

  “He had certain novel theories about transcription. As this is my area of specialty, I paid close attention. Given what I knew of your design, I could tell that his ideas wouldn’t apply. On the other hand, I also knew something that you never suspected: Chandrasekhar’s little friends in your bloodstream were also gathering a copy of your genome for someone else’s use. Don’t know if old Race Car was in on it or not, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Dude’s always been jealous of my mad genomic skills.
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  “But it’s no coincidence that the Midwich plague came along within a few years of you taking the cure. Those little bastards are spreading around the world like a pandemic.”

  I forgot about the tea. The cooker shrilled at me a few times, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I was transfixed. This guy clearly knew things that I’d wondered about all my life, like my operating parameters, like my parents’ life histories, like what happened to Detroit, like who made the youth gangs. The cooker shut itself off.

  He laughed. His laugh was the oldest thing about him. It was positively ancient and there wasn’t a single nice thing about it. It snapped me back to myself.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why what?” The corners of his mouth curled another notch.

  “Why are you here now? Why have you been watching me? Why haven’t you come before? Just—why?”

  “How about that tea?” He stood up and helped himself. He took a sip. “Delicious. More like consomme than tea, though.” He took another sip, looked out into the night. “I was pretty bummed when you took the cure. I could see where it was going to go. You were our little group’s proudest moment, you know, the pinnacle of our achievement. I could tell from looking at Chandrasekhar’s publications that it wasn’t going to work out. I could also read the writing on the wall: someone was going to get hold of our work and set to work improving it.

  “You’re the only one, you know. As you might imagine, experimental verification of immortality is a long-term process, not the kind of thing you can do in a hurry. The plan was to let you run for a half century or so before the rest of us had our own kids.” He laughed again, that old laugh. “Pretty silly to think that there’d be anything recognizable left after fifty years. It’s easy to believe you understand the future just because you’ve got a reasonable handle on the present, I guess.

  “The raid on Detroit was about getting you, you know—your genome, anyway. Originally the plan had been to seduce you, but that wouldn’t have gotten your whole genome, just the zygotic half you left behind. Anyway, it was irrelevant because the Treehuggers weren’t about to let their daughter be deflowered by an inhuman monster. So instead,

  they raided you. Your father died to keep you safe. Then what do you do with that legacy? Piss it away because you don’t like your protracted adolescence. You would have aged eventually, you know. If all had gone according to plan. You were impatient, and now, well, look at you. You’re certainly paying the price for it, aren’t you?”

  “Leave.” I hadn’t known that that was what I was going to say until I said it. Once I said it, I said it again. “Leave. Now.” I was seeing red. How dare he blame me for what happened to me?

  He laughed and that didn’t endear him to me at all. “Oh, Jimmy. You’re letting your ego get ahead of your good sense again. You needn’t be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past, you know. You can choose otherwise.

  “I haven’t answered one of your questions yet. Why now? Because I can reverse it. I can undo what Chandrasekhar did. It’s my area of specialty, after all. I can make you young again.”

  “Leave,” I said. I didn’t believe him for a moment. He laughed. “I’ll come back later, once you’ve had a chance to think it over.”

  The next day, climbing into my mecha hurt more than usual. The heat arrived early that day, so I woke up in a sweat. The tree’s sap-tap yielded sweet water that was already sickly warm, but I drank cup after cup of it before suiting up. It could keep me going all day. I barely looked at my room as I left it, not wanting to see the two cups by the sink, the evidence that I hadn’t dreamt my visitor in the night.

  The mecha’s cargo pouch bulged with my week’s foraging: irregular lumps of concrete that still betrayed a few human-made, razor-sharp edges, angles you just couldn’t find anymore in a post-wumpus world; half a steel-belted radial that had rested under a rock where the wumpuses had missed it; and the great prize, a whole bag of tampon applicators,

  what the locals called “beach whistles,” discovered in a dried-out septic tank up on Little Duck Island.

  This was my living: collecting the junk of our erased civilization. I knew an assemblage sculptor who’d pay handsomely for it in processed cereals, refined sugars, and the other old evils that were nearly impossible to derive from the utopian plants that sprouted all around us. There were sweet edible flowers you could put in your tea, there were mushroom loaves that tasted like whole-grain bread, but there weren’t any Twinkie bushes or cigarette trees.

  The thing about the main road is that you can see down it for a long, long way, so theoretically it should be hard for the youth gangs to stage an ambush. And the old roadbed was kept smooth by the passage of feet, yielding a less bumpy ride in the mecha, which was a comfort to my old bones.

  I stayed away from the road from a little before dusk to a little after dawn. The youth gangs grew more fearless then—or so it seemed to me—and they owned all the high-traffic routes after dark.

  But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. That day, they surrounded me on the road, moving like they were on casters, that same eerie precision. It had been five years since I last met a youth gang in the woods at the eve of the militia’s dissolution, but I still recognized these kids. They were the same kids—not just similar looking, the same kids, I’d never forget their faces.

  They hadn’t aged a day.

  Again, I rotated my mecha at the waist, looking at each in turn. They met my gaze calmly.

  They were filthy now, so grimed that they were all the same mottled brown and green. One appeared to have fungus growing on his shirt. Two were barefoot. They looked like they needed a parent to sit them down and bathe them and put them in a new suit of clothes. And administer a spanking.

  I found the one I’d chased to his hidey hole, the one who’d moved with so much preternatural grace and agility. I gave the mecha his scent, told it to track him, only him, to grab him, no matter what. Then I spun a little around, looking a different one in the eyes, hoping to trick them all about the focus of my attention.

  They each raised an arm in unison and tried to min-drape me. The headache returned, the same headache, book-marked and reloaded five years later, and I slapped at the activator control as it descended. Fetch, mecha, fetch!

  The mecha lurched and spun and grabbed, in a series of clicks and thuds. I’d told it to put itself into relentless pursuit mode, without any consideration for me. I heard one of my ribs snap and gasped. That old rib was the same one that had snapped all those years ago.

  The headache disappeared, swallowed by the pain in my chest. I heard and felt the rib-ends grating, had a momentary vision of the sharp rib-end punching through my lung. The mecha would be my grave. It would chase the boy and catch him or not, and I would bubble out my last bloody breaths, immortal no longer.

  But we were lurching too hard for me to spend time on these visions. The boy was running and dodging through the jungle, again choosing his route based on the mecha’s limitations, the places it couldn’t leap or smash through. I took over the controls and added my smarts to the mecha, trying to model the boy’s behavior and guess where he would go next.

  There, he was going to jump into that swampy patch and pull himself out along that old rotting log. So, coil the legs and spring, aiming for the log, doubling over in the air and grabbing for him. Little fucker wasn’t going to generation gap me again.

  I did it, roared into the air and roared at the pain in my ribs. Caught him on the first bounce. Wrapped my hands around his skinny chest, turned him right side up, and held him in front of my faceplate.

  He was eerily calm. I could feel him trying to work his way into my head, his SQUID battering my mind. I flipped on my PA.

  “Cut it out,” I said. I was breathing hard, each inhale agony from my ribs. “Why can’t you little creeps just leave me alone?”

  “Jimmy,” he said. “What have you done to yourself?”

  He spoke in my father’s voice.

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sp; I think I blacked out for a while. I don’t know how long I was out, but then I was back and he was just disappearing into another hidey hole, his scrap of a shirt still caught in my mecha’s fist. I grabbed for him, but the pain in my ribs nearly made me black out again.

  I switched on the mecha’s medical stuff and let the needles and probes sink into me while I set the inertial tracker to backtrack—gently—to home. I could see my artist friend some other time and do my trade.

  The man with the rings and necklaces and the dandelion clock of hair was waiting for me when I got back.

  “That was some chase-scene,” he said, as I pried myself out of my tin can.

  “Hand me my canes,” I gasped, stepping onto the wide limb that led into my treehouse.

  He shook his head as he did so. “You don’t look so good.”

  “You want to tape up my ribs?”

  “Not especially,” he said. He rummaged in his pack and then tossed me something. “Compression shirt. Just put it on and let it do its thing.”

  In the end, he had to help me into the t-shirt, which was snug and electric blue. It gradually tightened itself around me, like a full-body hug. He showed me how to get it to loosen up for later when I wanted to take it off. I slumped onto my bed.

  “What have you done to yourself?” he said. “You’re the second person to ask me that today.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  “You’ve been following me, huh?”

  He pointed to the sky. “Midges,” he said. “My familiars. I have millions of them, all around these parts. They keep me filled in on all the doings on my territory.”

  “Your territory.”

  “I’m the shaman of the southland, son. You should be honored. Most people don’t even know I exist. I’ve come to you twice.”

  “You said you could reverse this,” I said, gesturing with my skeletal, liver-spotted arm.