Knife Fight and Other Struggles (22 page)

Stephan’s Lynette, for instance. Dead. Cancer, started in her left breast. Undiagnosed. Spread all over. And so. Dead.

Stephan took it hard. The two had been together for decades when it came, and as Stephan told me: “There’s no one now, forever.” He was right, and I gave him a long hug—although silently, I thought (perhaps unkindly) he ought to have prepared himself, she being so much older than he. But I didn’t argue when he announced he wanted to turn the faux-Tudor mansion on Wellington Way into a mausoleum, for “the beloved departed”—Stephan’s code for those who died not from suicide or escape attempts, but simply in the course of things. So we worked to seal off some rooms in the basement as crypts. And into the first of those, we bore Lynette—her boney cadaver wrapped in 600-thread sheets from an upstairs linen closet—and by the light of a dozen candles, listened to Stephan as he sang her praises, and wept, and said a prayer. Then Luis, who’d volunteered, stayed downstairs with trowel and cement and bricked in the crypt.

Stephan could have expected to bury Lynette. Burying Scott, now. . . .

Yes. Scott Neeson. Heart attack. Too fat. Too drunk, maybe. So a massive coronary, while I snored beside him. And yes.

Dead.

I took it hard too. But who would have thought? I’m a fat old man. Fatter, older, and I never was a Marine, and I never was strong. Scott should have been burying me. But there he lay, eyes wide and wet and empty in the morning light. Soon to be the second resident of the crypts, the catacombs, beneath Wellington Way.

I could leave. I could stay. I could do the thing that I came to do.

I put on my parka, a pair of boots. I fished around in back of the china cabinet until I found the latch, and opened it, and from there pulled out the little Russian automatic pistol that Scott favoured, and a clip of ammunition. The kitchen, where I found an LED wind-up flashlight. Then I went upstairs one more time, to look at Scott, make sure I wasn’t tricking myself with ball-point perspective, then as fast as I could to the front door, and into the street.

It was tough going. A week ago there’d been a heavy snowfall, and then it had been cold since, so the road was rutted and icy. And uphill, around and around, in a gentle and exhausting slope. It took me until the noon-hour to reach Sandhurst Circle.

I nearly turned back. The whole street was choked with high drifts of snow, rising in places to the tops of first-storey windows. There was, simply, no path to or from #12. I couldn’t see how I could make it to the front doors, which were buried in snow up to the handles. But I thought: I could do the thing that I came to do. And: there’s no one now. Forever.

I pushed through the snow, nearly fell as I climbed over and through the drift to the door. Pulled aside the knocker, and spent some time recalling the access code before entering it. The doors swung inward, and the snow fell inside along with me.

There: the same vestibule. Dark, but for what light filtered in through snow-covered windows.

No one was vacuuming. The house was icy cold. But there was the sound of running water. A burst pipe? That’s what I thought too.

I might have stood there again, for hours, guessing at where the sound came from, losing myself in the rhythm of this place. I might have just fled. But finally, I was done with guessing, done with fleeing, just so far. My thumb found the switch on the flashlight, and soon the three blue LEDs cast a circle on the floor ahead of me. I thought only a minute about looking upstairs first—and thought about Marisse—and thought: No. And so I stepped through an archway, wallpaper peeling from it in wide strips. From there, I passed through a high living room, floorboards creaking underfoot. At one time, this room had been used for conferences; there was a long table in here, and at one end a projector with a bay for a laptop computer. Chairs everywhere.

“Mr. Nu,” I shouted. “What are you up to?”

The water—perhaps just a tap left on in one of the bathrooms? No. I passed into a wide, short hallway, made to look grander with art-deco wall sconces that would send light to the ceiling and back. Through the archway beyond, one might expect a kitchen, but over the decades I had become savvy to the architecture of the subdivision, and didn’t get my hopes up.

“You have associates,” I said, “isn’t that so? Tell me who they are, and we’ll give you back your clothes.”

I was right. The next room had a sunken floor, high shelves on every wall but one, and where the floor dropped, a big metal fireplace, open at every side. That fourth wall: tall windows of leaded glass. Mostly snow-covered now, so what light came in was a creamy grey. Some of the shelves had books on them.

“No one’s coming for you,” I said, in a threatening tone. “I’m your only hope. Now tell me: What are you up to, Mr. Nu?”

Not a tap, not a broken main. The water sounded nearer now, and more . . . elemental. It made me think of times long ago, sitting on rocks on a hot summer day, by rapids, mist making my breath cool.

“Our operative—never mind what her name was, you don’t need to know that—she shot herself in the eye. Dead. Why did you make her do that?”

Next to this room was the kitchen. A fine kitchen, but not the finest in the subdivision. Wellington Way’s was nicer, for one. But still. The countertops gleamed. The appliances—huge; the cabinetry, fine dark cherry wood, stretching high and for miles. I reached into my parka’s pocket, and pulled out Scott’s gun. I stood there I don’t know how long. Then I lifted it high, flipped the safety off and shot the refrigerator.

“You think I put that bullet in my eye? You are wrong, Mr. Nu. That was your friend. He wouldn’t talk to us. Now he’s dead too.”

Beside the refrigerator—a doorway. Not as grand as the others, but why should it be? It only led down to the basement. Basement doors should not be grand. I put Scott’s gun down a moment on the butcher block, gave the flashlight another cranking and picked it up again, and opened the door.

“Why do I want to go upstairs right now, Mr. Nu, not down? Is it you?” I asked, as I shone the light down the long flight of metal stairs. The light caught rust like moss growing on the edges where the paint had scraped away, a rime of frost that coated the bannister. The beam hung ahead of me in thick, icy mist. The sound of running water turned into a racket; it was close by now. It sounded like a river.

The stairway was long—so long it switched back on itself once and then bent out at ninety degrees for the last five steps. Slow going too; the mist and the frost made the metal treacherous for a young man. Fat old men carrying guns and flashlights had to take particular care. I passed the time asking more questions. Some were questions I’d come to ask: more about Marisse and her team, and as it followed the things that might have happened to the transport team, and to the firm’s government liaison. And more that had occurred to me in the months and years that followed: What of Scott? Of me? Of the world? What have you done, Mr. Nu, Mr. Nothing, Mr. Null—to cause us all to so badly recede? Is it you, now, you and your
associates,
that walk the world you persuaded us all to so easily abandon?

Why us? Why not Larchmount?

Questions along those lines.

I stood alone, finally, in the basement of 12 Sandhurst, playing the flashlight beam across the wet, icy stone—looking for some sign of the interrogation room; the three-piece bath, with the Italian tile that had so pleased Stephan. Were there any remains of the seven cells in this cavern? Would Mr. Nu somehow still be in one of them? Alive? After so long?

There was nothing that I could see. The place was all ice and rock, flickering in dim reflected light.

I took care as I moved along, but it was no good. I slipped, and pinwheeled, and landed hard on my behind. Nothing was broken, but in the fuss of it all, I let go of the light and the gun. I listened to them both, skittering down rocks as might lead to a fast-moving stream on a summer’s afternoon. There was a splash, and then another.

A stream. Was that what had happened here? An underground stream, an aquifer, broken through the thin layer of concrete that the bankrupt builder had spread over the ground, and flooded the basement, over years perhaps corroded the foundations; swept away the neat, levelled chamber here, the seven cells and the interrogation room and the three-piece bath . . . leaving . . . only this cavern?

This cavern . . . where a man might sit, under a single lightbulb, on a canvas lawn chair, in a brown T-shirt, pale green underpants and socks of a material that drew moisture away from flesh. Looking with a hollow, knowing eye at another: this one an old man, fat, blind, freezing cold, looking for purchase on the slippery stone. . . .

. . . finding some, finally, on a ledge of concrete, just inches above the icy, flowing earth-water. I might have stood; there seemed enough space. But I tucked my feet close under my knees instead, stayed low, because I knew if I stood up, I would turn, and try and scramble away, flailing in the dark until I found the base of the stairs. Then, I would haul myself up those stairs, fast as I could, and run. Flee.

I wrapped my arms around my knees, and looked, and checked against the data from his file, some of which (not all, not all) I had committed to memory. Might he have lost weight, over time? It didn’t seem so. He was, if anything, a little chubby. His dark hair seemed long for the style he’d cut it in, but it was hard to say whether that was a result of inattentive incarceration. His clothing seemed fresh though. And he was clean-shaven.

He leaned forward in his chair—looking straight at me, frowning, as if deciding whether to say anything; whether after all these years, this time, he had any answers for me. Whether he’d thought of any questions, for that matter.

Then, both hands on his knees, he stood. His head came near the 200-watt bulb that dangled over his chair, and he shifted from the hot brilliance, of a kind that had not come to light the night at Sandhurst in decades.

And he looked down—down at me—and yanked his briefs from the crack in his behind, adjusted the waistband so it cradled his gut. Fattened on stillness.

Head still bent under the low beams of Larchmount, he eyed me once more.

No. No questions worth asking of one such as I.

And with that, Mr. Nu made his way to the narrow wooden stairway and climbed, to the kitchen at Larchmount. To the world, which he now inhabited; which he had, in his agreeable solitude there, spared. Which I had abandoned.

Mr. Nu reached the top. He stopped there an instant, as though considering one more time, then flipped a switch, and so. The bright yellow light vanished. Larchmount, forever gone.

In its place, nothing.

Suki Shannahan felt like she was the luckiest girl in a million light years.

The starship
Gwendolyn
had a staff of more than fifteen cryosurgeons, a payload of three thousand, two hundred and twenty-four crew and colonists, and a nursing staff of thirty-four. The first person she saw when she revived could have been
anyone
.

It could have been that hateful Chief of Nursing Staff, Helen Rockholme, who had broken Suki’s heart back on Luna when she signed Suki on as a Candy Striper Second Class, even though Suki’d passed the exams at the top of her class and everybody
knew
she was more qualified for the rN-5 position than that horrible
pill
of a former best friend, Betty-Anne Tilley.

For that matter, it could have been Betty-Anne Tilley that Suki’d seen first—she’d studied all the procedural manuals until it seemed like her brain was ready to burst, and Suki knew that registered nurses often monitored the routine revivifications without any supervision at all. It was part of the job.

Betty-Anne Tilley at the console of
my
cryo-unit
. The very thought was enough to make Suki’s still-frosty cheeks flush hot with anger.

But as she lay back in the recovery room on the outside rim of Torus 3, Suki couldn’t stay mad long. Because when her eyelids peeled open like the paper off a Popsicle, the first thing she saw wasn’t the stern glare of Nursing Chief Rockholme, and it certainly wasn’t the smug little face of Nurse—
Nurse!
—Betty-Anne Tilley.

It was Doctor Neil Webley. And after seventeen years of waiting in the residential arcology of Torus 2, seventeen long years spent in the dark spaces between Earth and this star that shone outside the viewport now like a glowing red beacon of their love, Doctor Webley—Neil Webley,
her
Neil—was every bit as gorgeous as the day they’d first kissed.

When they’d first met on the shuttle up from Luna, Neil had only been five years older than Suki, and had just completed his residency on both legs of the Earth-Mars comet run. The old Russian-built ship that ran the loop between the two worlds had been constructed without a torus, so Neil had spent the entire year and a half in zero gravity. Which, he’d told her, was one of the reasons he’d signed on to the
Gwendolyn
. He’d been engaged to a girl in the Free Principality of Greater Seattle, but the eighteen months he’d spent in freefall had done such damage to the calcium in his bones that he’d never be able to return to a full-gravity environment.

“She broke off the engagement the moment I told her,” Neil had explained as they sat together watching the
Gwendolyn
grow from just another star in the forward porthole to the two-mile long chain of rings and cylinders and star drives that was to become their new home. “Judith always hated space travel—I suppose I should have known.”

“That’s no excuse,” Suki answered, without even thinking. “I know that I’d follow the man that I was going to marry to the bottom of the ocean if that’s where he wanted to go. Love is supposed to mean forever, Neil.”

There had been an uneasy silence then, and Suki was sure that she’d put her foot in it.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I didn’t mean to suggest—”

But Neil had put her at ease with one of his patented grins, and patted her arm with his still-strong surgeon’s hand. “What? That Judith didn’t truly love me? There’s no need to apologize for being perceptive, Suki.”

Neil’s hand lingered for a moment on the bare skin of her arm, and Suki felt gooseflesh rising. From across the lounge, she was sure she felt Betty-Anne’s envious glare boring into the backs of their seats. At another time, she might have taken a little guilty pleasure in it—but Neil Webley consumed her attention like a flame.

“It’s possible to marry for other things than love,” Neil had continued. “On Earth it is, anyway. You can marry for status, for wealth . . . for trophies like lawyers or engineers. . . . Or, I suppose, for doctors.” His grin turned wry, for just an instant. “In space, though—”

And then his impossibly blue eyes had met hers—their eyes had truly
met
—for the very first time.

“—in space, the trophies are different. And when we marry, true love may be the only thing we have that can keep us together.”

And finally, as much to his amazement as hers—or so he later claimed—Doctor Neil Webley had leaned in closer, and the gooseflesh vanished in the tide of Suki’s quickening pulse, and the two had kissed. It had been their first kiss—and in many ways, Suki later decided that it had been
her
first kiss. The first kiss that had mattered, in all her eighteen years.

True love,
thought Suki as she lay alone in the immense recovery ward of Torus 3, waiting for the pins and needles in her arms and legs that were the last stage of revivification to subside.
It really
is
forever
.

“How’s my Suki?”

Wonderful
, she mouthed—it was still too soon for her to talk, even twelve hours after they’d pulled the tube from her throat. But Neil understood. He leaned over her bed and delicately brushed away a strand of hair that had fallen across her eyes.

This was only the second time she’d seen him since revivification. The first time she had been unable to even breathe unassisted, let alone speak. There had been his face, that strong, even jawline, that wide, sensuous mouth that always seemed about to smile. The only sign of the intervening seventeen years had been a slight thinning in his luxuriant mane of brown hair, and the appearance of thin laugh-lines around those wonderful blue eyes. And then the face was gone, and she had slipped back into sleep, while her beautiful doctor went back to work.

Now, in the recovery ward, she was able to give him a more appraising look. And Suki had to admit that she liked what she saw. In spite of his weakened bones, Doctor Neil Webley had kept himself in top form. It had been seventeen years, after all—
goodness, that meant he’d be nearly forty!
Suki realized. And if anything, his shoulders were broader, his stomach flatter, his demeanour more assured than the young man that Suki had left when she went into the cold sleep vaults with the other colonists.

Neil patted her shoulder and blinked up Suki’s charts. The projection hung between them, reversed to Suki’s eyes so that the strings of numbers and charts were all but unreadable. But she could tell by the reassuring green of the status bars and the steady jags across the EKG window that there wasn’t anything serious to worry about. As if to reassure her even further, Neil called up quick views from the nanocameras in her aorta, at the base of her cerebellum, in the cilia of her lungs. All showed healthy tissue, every sign of business as usual for a by-the-books cryogenic revivification. Neil blinked, and the air between them was clear once more.

“You’re doing great, Suki. Everything’s proceeding on schedule; we should have you up and around by tomorrow, Thursday at the latest.”

Suki opened her mouth to try and speak. He shushed her with a finger on her lips.

“No talk. We’ll have plenty of time for that later. Right now, I want you to collect your strength. We have a lot of work to do in the next few weeks.”

Suki found that she could nod her head, ever so slightly, so she contented herself with that. Neil nodded back, leaned forward, and Suki lifted her chin, waiting for the life-giving warmth of his kiss.

It didn’t come.

“I have to go,” he whispered, his eyes strangely avoiding hers in their new proximity. “I can’t spend too much time here. I’ll—” Neil only pulled back a few inches, but it seemed to Suki like a gulf of a million miles had arisen between them “—I’ll talk to you about it later.”

If Suki hadn’t known better, she would have thought that the temperature in the torus dropped by ten degrees then. Neil’s knees cracked as he stood up from the bedside.

“Try and get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll be back to see how you’re doing in a few hours.”

And then, with a thin smile that was a shadow of the smile that Suki knew, he was off. As Suki watched him climb the gentle slope of the torus floor, she felt her eyes brimming with slushy tears.

What had just happened here? Where was the Neil Webley that Suki Shannahan had known and loved? Wasn’t love supposed to mean forever? Suki didn’t know how long forever was, but she had always assumed the word meant a time span longer than seventeen years!

Suki felt a sob, the first sound she had uttered in those seventeen years, rise up in her throat. It came out as a horrible croak, the sound a frog might make—if that frog’s heart had just been sliced in two, on the cold steel dissection table of thwarted romance.

By degree over the next six hours, the recovery rooms of Torus 3 filled up. From the manuals that Suki had committed to memory those seventeen years ago, she knew that these ghost-white forms who nested in complicated tangles of thick tubes and wires would count few if any colonists among their number. Phase One of the revivification would include only the crew, scientific teams and medical technicians absolutely essential to the task of preparing for the colonization drops. It would only be after the
Gwendolyn
was installed in orbit; the planet below thoroughly explored and charted; the livestock embryos grown and modified for survival in the new ecosystem; and the landers assembled, fuelled and tethered into their drop positions; only then that Phase Two, the truly monumental task of reviving more than three thousand colonists, would begin.

In a way, Suki envied those colonists, sleeping in the long tunnel of freezers along the
Gwendolyn
’s core. They would wake up to a new world, made up like a brand new subdivision complete with high schools and strip malls and cineplexes, there waiting for them to begin their new lives. And in the meantime, they slept insulated from the hardships of construction, of exploration. From the simple heartbreak of waking. . . .

“Well, well, well,” said a voice that was at once familiar and strangely unknowable. “Look who’s rejoined the living.”

Suki looked up from the novel she’d been trying to start for the past hour, and almost instantly found she had to supress the urge to gloat.

“Betty-Anne Tilley,” she said, as sweetly as she could manage. “Look at you.”

After seventeen years, there was little left of the petite, strawberry blonde beauty that had taken Suki’s job away and thereby sentenced her to the freezers and the lowly status of a candy striper. Years in low gravity had lengthened Betty-Anne’s bones and drawn lines across her face that gave her a hard, spinsterish look. Although she was, like Suki, fully five years younger than Neil, this day standing beside Suki’s bed with her pharmaceutical pallet tucked under her arm, she seemed almost elderly. Betty-Anne smiled, and Suki was struck by how similar that smile was to the one Neil had given her before he had left her bedside—cool, professional, and more than a little heartless.

“It’s been longer for me than it has for you,” said Betty-Anne, as though she were reading Suki’s mind. “You haven’t changed a bit—I guess the freezers really are the ultimate beauty sleep.”