2020 (3 page)

“Arecibo? The whole site?”

“We’re going for a burst transmission on the 31st,” Lance gushed.

Max had migrated to the vidphone and joked about buying down the national debt with the deal for Arecibo.

“Cripes,” Lance said, “are we getting bandwidth! We’ll be able to encode enough information to broadcast tactile holography in a window of about eight hours real time. Then with compression . . . We’re trying to squeeze in a full twenty-four-hour day.”

“I still don’t get it,” I said, trying to stay calm. “How does this signal override all the other signals people get?”

“The way sunspots affect even hardened satellites; you fiddle with the magnetosphere a bit.
Virgilius Maro
’s that big, and we punch him up besides. Terrific lot of RF noise. Now if Virgil was just a little closer to earth, ha ha.”

There was Max over his shoulder, munching popcorn. “Isn’t it great how Lance’s finally taken an interest in the business?” Max said. “It’s been a dream, to pass it on to the kid: Sczyczypek forever. Wait till you see the spots we’ve got running on the Obit Channel.”

“Max, that’s what I called you about.”

“Virgil, everybody’s calling the comet Virgil, don’t you love it? How could we pass the Dante angle up? I know you usually handle the art director end of things, but how you’ve been lately. . . . I thought I’d turn it over to Fiat/Disney.”

“Max . . .”

“It’s a business decision, Coop.” The way Max tensed his jaw when he spoke, that distant look in his eyes, reminded me that it was, after all, his business. I held my tongue. Anyway, I thought, who wants to paint the hull of a sinking ship?

“We’re already selling units,” he went on. “From six this morning we’ve had a lease on reference studio space in the Valley. We’ll have virtual setups in every franchise city by week’s end. Overnight we’ve sold sixty thousand slots of that
Paradiso
so far—hey, you think that’s too Italian? ParadiseLand maybe?”

Max downloaded other segments of the advertising program into a window on my wallscreen and I saw more of Fiat/Disney’s work, even one of the holounits themselves. Now I knew what those high production levels, those make-up jobs reminded me of: soap opera. Set in Thirteenth-Century Florence, laced with special effects, but soap opera all the same. It was painful to watch. I felt the way any writer feels when a story of his or hers is worked over, distorted. I felt surrounded by disaster.

It had been a good run, with the company, I found myself thinking.

“Don’t look so glum, Uncle Coop.” Lance seemed a little embarrassed himself. “I got something else on the chip. Set of chips, I guess we should say. Apparently the, uh, cooking it went through? Thermal conversion auto-booted a runnable file to access mass storage? Or at least so say the probes. Amazing how the lines hold up. I think I got the power leads identified to the CPU and the bubble memory. Who knows, I might even be able to run that sucker. Or ruin it for good. I mean, it’s really a longshot.”

“Do what you can,” I smiled automatically, but the room really began to swim around me now. Destroy it! I wanted to shout. Give it to me!
I’ll
ruin it. I had just been comforting myself with a vision of retirement with Keiko and my rival’s dust refused to settle, if you know what I mean.

After I hung up different schemes passed through my mind. Get it back from Lance, send it down the trash chute, flush it down the john. But gradually, after twenty minutes of controlled breathing, I settled down.

I did have qualms of conscience about destroying it, after all. And I was curious about what would happen if Lance tried to run the program (
“ruin it for good,”
ran through my mind). Still, I resolved to withhold this latest development from Keiko. I would tell her that we hadn’t made any progress, that it looked like there was nothing to the chip after all.

As the comet approached, I could lose myself in setting up the imaging equipment, dirty though the atmosphere continued to be. I’d planned to invite Keiko to drive down to Baja with me, but word was even Baja was socked in. So I would have to console myself with beta-testing new Zeiss filters; they were ingenious: including power supply the whole set fit into palm of my hand.

My specialty is the suitcase-sized observatory. There is a special pleasure in handling such fine equipment, calibrating the sensors, cleaning the lenses, inputting the current project’s program, coordinating frame-action with celestial coordinates, running through simulations whose successes and failures both leave you hanging, peacefully and without messy human contact, somewhere among the stars.

* * *

The comet was a big event in the news: icy infalling interstellar material from the Kuyper Belt, a remnant of the formation of the solar system. The best estimate of its mass was a bit over a hundred kilotons, the size of a small mountain, a fairly rare event. A comet that big, impacting the Earth, would cause an untold catastrophe, its energy yield on the order of 20,000 megatons, equivalent to all the nuclear weapons produced in the previous century. But though
V. Maro’s
272 year orbit would be close in cosmic terms, no measurable effect to earth was expected beyond an interruption in communications, and an incredible show.

The latest data on
Virgilius Maro
—which everyone was calling Virgil now—was everywhere. It was on CNN, VNN, running as an occasional window on the Obit Channel.

A comet-related story was running on the wallscreen at Keiko’s house the next evening when I arrived for my promised dinner, the titanium urn and what remained of the judge’s ashes in my hands. Yes, I’d told Keiko that the chip inquiry had come to a dead end.

I was feverish with guilt and lust.

Unix, wearing a silver microdress decorated with signs of the Zodiac, met me at the door and took the urn from my hands. She set it on the foyer table. “Aunt Keiko’s instructions,” she said. “She’s taking your advice about burying the ashes and the urn in a regular grave. Burying what’s left of Uncle—my
dad
’s uncle, actually. Still, she’s been like an aunt to me.”

“I’m just trying to make her happy,” I said.

“I can tell.” she smiled. “She’s out back. . . .”

I found Keiko outside in the neglected kitchen garden, hands dirty but cheerful. She was filling pots with soil.

“Not much bigger than this,” she said, holding up a parsley seed. I realized she was talking about the chip. “Nothing to it, then?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing at all. My technician still has the chip, but your husband’s ashes are otherwise intact. I wasn’t sure you wanted the, uh, since . . . No noises anymore.”

She shrugged. “Something from an implant then, after all,” she said, shaking her head. She drained her glass of vodka. “Now let’s have dinner. I’ve got a fifty-year-old bottle of wine.”

Afterwards, we sat by a fire in the living room, drank port and watched a bit of the comet special on VNN. Unix settled in with us. She’d had a falling out with her boyfriend.

The special was interrupted, to my dismay, by a commercial for
IMMORTALITY NOW!
from Grateful Dead. Elderly men and women romped around a fountain in a cobbled square—Max had turned creative control entirely over to Fiat/Disney. The little cartoon animals splashing in the water of the fountain, the voiceover sales pitch, the promise of a
Purgatorio
sequel, made me burn with shame.

The tacky part, though, cheered up Unix, and she cheered me up, and we started to chat, sunk so happily in the sofa by the Nomad firehearth that I didn’t at first realize that Keiko had been out of the room for some time.

Unix blushed a little, smiled, and disappeared.

It was getting late, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then the lights dimmed, and I thought I saw someone in the hallway to the master suite at the rear of the house, hand raised at about the level of a console for a house computer. A moment later subdued harp music floated through the air. Then Keiko walked slowly into the room wearing a black silk robe.

She stopped at the hearth, her hands resting on the slate platform, fingers splayed, her hair down around her shoulders, the fire reflected on her face. She had continued drinking—I could see it in her eyes, in her breathing, in the way she swayed, ever so slightly. I calculated the time since the judge had been cremated: a month, exactly. The grieving process takes different forms for different people; I had used my professional experience to read her precisely.

“The kind of man he was, my late husband,” she said. “He would have wanted me to jump back in. You’re that kind of man too.”

I cleared my throat. Would you believe me if I told you that I realized then that what I had encouraged in her was wrong, that things between us had moved too fast, that for her own good I was going to turn her down, hug her gently and lead her back to her bed and tuck her in and tell her to go to sleep? I’m not sure I believe myself either. Oh, I realized I’d been wrong, certainly, but the way she’d said
jump back in
I’d fallen completely, victim to my desires, victim to the silky curve at her waist, to the huskiness in her voice.

Keiko and Unix, forgive me.

As it was, I was saved by my pager, which hummed against my heart insistently.

The message was from Lance, He was paging me from the mortuary lab in the basement of the GD tower. The message read: Highest Urgency.

* * *

When I found him, Lance was crouched over a jury-rigged assembly surrounded by a bank of instruments. I recognized a light-enhancing stereo microscope.

“You’ll never know what ecstasy you interrupted,” I said dryly. “What is it?”

“Uncle Coop,” Lance said, pointing to an eyepiece. “Look at this.”

I put the bridge of my nose between the soft cups of rubber. At first I didn’t see anything but a mottled background, then discerned what seemed an aberration, a comic little figure, a smaller grid of red and white.

“You may not believe me at first,” Lance said, his voice tight with excitement, “but I think that’s the Judge. Or some manifestation of him, like a homunculus. It was created by the chipset when I powered it up. . . . See, first thing it did was output a nutrient program, carbon high. I used my Pepsi. Next thing I knew . . . See, it was a sequence, started with the sound chip, to call attention to itself. . . .”

“Christ!” I said. “It’s a little person. Those are plaid pants.”

I continued to watch the figure in wonder as Lance brought me up to speed. The judge had bought into a duplication technology, he told me. “There’s a DNA info base in nanomemory, quark based, really something. Then a generator that kicks in when that program runs, comes out of a lot of compression. Well, he reproduces himself, see? This guy actually figured out a way to live forever.”

“Guy? What do you mean, guy? This is some kind of bacteria.”

“Yeah, that’s true, right,” Lance said. “There’s a bug in the scalar routine?”

“Scalar routine?”

“Formally it’s the function of two vectors, equal to the product of their magnitudes and the cosine of the angle between them? Anyway, if you get the dot point wrong . . .”

“Lance, what are you talking about?”

“What went wrong. It’s in the sequence for the scalar routine, what makes him this size. See, the chipset reproduced him all right, but the dot point got shifted. Got his scale wrong by a factor of one thousand. Poor sucker. I did the calculations. He’s one one-thousandth the size of an actual man.”

So there he was, my rival, who less than an hour ago, in the strange complicated way of human affairs, had interposed himself between me and the consummation of my dreams. Who, I asked myself, stood between me and my dreams now?

I started to laugh, but I swear I saw a tiny fist raised, shaking, directly at me.

I sucked in a deep breath. “I’d better contact Mrs. MacPhee immediately,” I said, reaching for the vidphone.

III.

That was the beginning of the week you all remember, the week that changed all our lives.

Later that Monday morning astronomers announced that
Virgilius Maro
’s course had unaccountably shifted. The large comet was now headed directly toward the planet Earth.

Impact was expected in seven days, fourteen hours, and six minutes.

I see I’ve barely touched upon the catastrophic possibilities impact presented, but I’m sure you remember some of them: how a comet
V. Maro
’s size had crashed into the Yucatan at the end of the Cetacean Era and ended the reign of the dinosaurs, how the current human casualty estimate ran into the billions. Alone in the glow of wallscreens and in groups from school auditoriums to cathedrals we contemplated the possibility of a conflagration that would produce rampant volcanism, sulfur clouds, an extended period of darkness, soaring temperatures followed by a new ice age, the extinction of species after species and eliminate most of the world’s biomass. Scientists were scrambling to turn the comet off its course with a thermonuclear explosion in space. NASA ran twenty-four hour shifts, and the Chinese mobilized their “factory-in-space” program to produce a delivery vehicle loaded and launched from the UN Station. Nukes were being readied and shuttled up, but as there were only a few hundred left on the planet, NASA was having logistics problems, and the decision to go with the Ukrainian multiple warheads (the infamous “cabbage bombs”) made everyone nervous. As well, as we all now know, we should have been.

As for Grateful Dead, Inc., the effect on the firm was paradoxical. With so much potential death on the way, suddenly lots of people wanted to make arrangements. They reasoned, and rightly so, that in the event of impact there would be a run on deathcare services, and that the average consumer would be best accommodated by the world-wide facilities of a full-service chain such as ours.

Just after the President’s announcement, I finally found Max. He was up in the boardroom, sprawled in his captain’s chair at the end of the long slate table, transfixed on the Obit Channel running full wallscreen on the other side of the room. His little fax dish had pulled in a library of invoices, printed out balance sheets and ledger pages, all heaped around him. On his laptop was loaded a draft page from the upcoming annual report to shareholders.