2020 (4 page)

“Fuck the business,” I told him. “Go home to your wife and son. Nobody really knows about this, nobody knows for sure we’re safe until it’s deflected.” I was still shaken by the tic the President had developed half way through his speech.

“Coop, we’ve completely sold out
Paradiso
,” Max said with barely controlled excitement. “It’s damned amazing.
Purgatorio
’s half committed as of an hour ago—
Purgatorio
, where clients gotta shuffle around these circle things admitting they ate too much or slept too much or whatever turned them on. Fiat/Disney’s even working up an
Inferno
segment. We got couples buying adjoining units as gifts, we got groups who want to tape on the last day, like have a comet party and tape their segments.”

“Max,” I said, “all of us may only have a week to live. Don’t you understand? The comet could hit the planet. Even a near miss . . .”

Max blushed red. “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled. “I’m no rocket scientist, but hey, Coop, I figure, it turned, it’ll turn again, see?”

“How can you talk like that?”

Max pushed away from the table, got up, swung around and pulled his baggy suit coat off the back of the chair. He shoved his arm into a coat sleeve. “Gotta go. I got a presentation to give to FEMA. You wanna come? I know you’re not up to speed these days, Coop, but I always feel better if you’re there. Backup?”

“FEMA? Who’s FEMA?”

“Federal Emergency Management. You know. We’re cutting a deal on a pre-need thing. See, they got a mandated formula for disaster preparation. The front money on this one alone gets us back up over three bil. Ain’t that ironic? Just when we get
IMMORTALITY NOW!
workin’ better than expected? You dance for a drizzle, you get a hurricane. And look at you. Who am I to say you haven’t been up to speed? Who gave us the comet?”

“Max, what’s the fucking funeral business worth if the whole world ends? You may never have another night to bounce on your bed with Dorothy. You may never have another Monday afternoon to spend with Lance. Live a little, for Christ’s sake.”

As if on cue, Lance himself rushed in, his pale face flushed pink, waving a sheaf of figures that turned out to be estimates for the FEMA meetings. He told his father in clipped tones that they were going to be late if they didn’t get going. Max jammed papers into his briefcase, folded his battered old computer, and the two of them ran off as I stood there, still scolding.

Even as I ranted on, I could see the error of my ways. There Max had gone: busy with the company of his son, awash with business, fulfilled. Do you want to know how desperate
I
was? I tried to get in touch with Harriet. She has a new hyphenated name—no, not just a hyphenated last name, but a hyphenated first name as well. NuKiwi-Harriet Finney-Boyd. There’s no going back at all in life, is there.

* * *

At the request of Unix, I checked in on Keiko.

“How’s your aunt taking it?” I asked in the foyer when she answered the door.

“She’s doin’ great.
She
is, anyway. You know, Coop, Aunt Keiko always went for those short-man-syndrome, power-trip guys. The Napoleonic types? I mean, really, now the judge is as short as you can get, right?”

I looked at her with surprise.

“I don’t mean to disrespect Uncle,” she said. “He’s my father’s favorite uncle; I do love him, and I’m glad that he’s . . . back, sort of back. But he’s always been a real tyrant, little dictator bossing everybody around. Now he’s even worse than he was before.”

I laughed. “I don’t mean to disrespect him either,” I said, “but I could tell by the way he dressed.”

“Myself, I prefer taller guys like you. Fewer insecurities.”

I blushed. “Ah, Unix, I just wish I wasn’t too old for you.”

She giggled. “How old do you think I am?”

“Nineteen, at the outside,” I told her.

“Try twenty-nine. Uncle bought a bunch of that life extension stuff for me too, bless him.” She was wearing that tight green microskirt again, turned and walked away with a provocative wiggle. It is extraordinary how a bit of information can change your point of view.

The threat of the end of the world aside
, I remember thinking then,
we live in wonderful times.

* * *

A miniature life-support unit, consisting of racks of equipment sent over from GD Inc., and two exotic consoles from Switzerland, had been set up around a lab table in the living room, a nest of tubing and thin wires terminating in a light-enhancing stereo microscope. Keiko was there, apparently keeping a constant vigil. The judge had grown but he was still quite small, inhabiting a heated area on a textured slide.

Keiko was a feverish specter. After I had politely put my eye to the microscope eyepiece for a moment she gave me her hand. An understanding had developed between us.

“How can he live like that?”

“He can’t,” she said. “His doctors tell us that he’ll survive for seven days maximum.”

“How tragic,” I said, searching my professional vocabulary for the right thing to say.

“What’s it matter?” a strange elderly voice said. I looked around me, startled. By the expressions on Keiko’s and Unix’s faces I realized we were listening to the judge; apparently his voice was picked up by sensors on the microscope stage and piped through the home quatro sound. His voice seemed to come from everywhere. The effect was eerie; my skin tingled and I felt myself tremble with momentary fright. The voice spoke again: “Those goddamned NASA bunglers, we’re all about to die anyway.”

They were behind schedule, it was true. But even given their failings, nothing could quite justify the acid criticism, the savage personal insult, the vitriol that filled the room for ten minutes as the judge described NASA’s response to the crisis. And the rest of the world’s. I spare you the details.

In the end, the judge told me, his one regret was that he’d wanted to go out big.

Unix rolled her eyes.

I had to bite my tongue.

“Put me back now, goddamnit,” the judge said.

“What does he mean?” I asked.

“He goes with Aunt Keiko,” Unix said. “Has to do with body temperature.”

“We’ll rest now,” Keiko said. “Thank you, Cooper, for coming by.”

I held out my hand forlornly, and Keiko touched it briefly before turning to be alone with her husband. The look in her eyes confirmed that I had lost her, absolutely, to a 117-year-old man the size of a tomato seed. And a mean-spirited bastard besides. Perhaps that’s what it took to cling so tenaciously to life.

Keiko opened the top of her hospital gown and slipped him down into her bosom. Out of respect I tried not to stare.

Unix looked at me with raised eyebrows. “For him, it’s the adventure of a lifetime.” Then she swallowed and looked alarmed at having let slip an off-color remark.

Embarrassed for her, I blurted out, “Finally conclusive proof that size isn’t everything.” It was really a stupid joke, but Unix looked at me gratefully while Keiko pretended not to hear, turned with dignity to leave the room.

Unix put her hand on my back. “Say, Coop,” she said.

* * *

It must have been the comet.

Unix walked me out to my Lotus with a shy batting of her green-lined eyes and thanked me for the way I’d helped her aunt.

“If you only actually knew,” I said.

“I know. Look, what counts is, you did the right thing in the end. My aunt’s happy; little Caesar is back on his throne. Frankly, I think she’s missing a bet. I’ve thought so from the beginning. Especially now, with your comet in the sky.”

Then Unix kissed me, really kissed me.

I kissed back.

She slipped her tongue between my teeth and wiggled it around.

We fell against the car, shamelessly groping at one another, sliding down the hood and along the fender and over the headlight, pulling at one another’s clothes, half naked by the time we rolled onto the soft lawn.

What can I say of that first encounter that could do justice to our passion, to the bliss that mixed with relief down through my bones? No words can quite describe the sensation—but oh, the touch of her flesh, the warmth of her breath, that moment of slippery joy.

* * *

We went everywhere together for twelve hours, having sex. Like a lot of people. We wound up in the boardroom on the eightieth floor of the GD Tower. I felt wonderful, lying there on the slate table, my black Italian wingtips unlaced on the floor, a cashmere sweater rolled into a pillow beneath my head, Unix’s thigh inches from my teeth.

On the wallscreen new infomercials for our
Purgatorio
offering produced by Fiat/Disney were running. I hadn’t quite understood the attraction of appearing periodically throughout eternity suffering one of the punishments of Purgatory, but when I saw the actress Candy Candiotti jogging around the Fourth
Cornice
to show her victory over Sloth, I realized that
Purgatorio
would sell out completely, too.

Later that morning I showed Unix around corporate headquarters; for all the volume Max said we were doing, you’d have thought GD Inc. was shutting down. The business floors were almost deserted, the Angel® Imaging Center on skeleton crew, all but one of Resurrection Chapel’s Dial-a-Faith windows dark. The usual staff was working in Preparation, but the Motor Pool was quiet, and there were only two girls down in Floral. I’d called off my franchisee classes. I took Unix through the Professional Education wing, looked into the great room. When I saw the clock on the wall at eleven, I felt a pang of guilt, felt I ought to be working.

It passed.
Let the dead attend to themselves a bit
, I remember thinking. Unix and I went up two floors and wandered into the Casket Selection Suite. We wound up unraveling a dozen bolts of satin and tunneling into a love nest of pillows. The funeral business, more so than other work, gives you an enhanced appreciation for life.

In the late afternoon we were back up on the slate table again. The Obit Channel was still running on the far wallscreen.

“Coop,” Unix said. “What’s that?”

A news flash was crawling across the bottom of the screen, text shot through with a red comet icon:

 . . . authorities are investigating reports that changes to comet
Virgilius Maro
’s trajectory may be linked to a bizarre “lights out” phenomenon in Puerto Rico on Sunday. Near Arecibo, an unknown hacker diverted the entire electrical supply of the island to the site of the SETI transmitter for more than thirty minutes. . . .

* * *

“Lance’ll fix it. He’s very sorry, but he and that friend of his down there . . .”

“
Lance
. What happened?”

“It’s called a steering pulse, Uncle Coop, a microwave thing? Beam it up there. We heat up one side of the comet, see, fiddle with its spin. We needed to move the orbit just a tad closer to earth to get the resolution we needed? The one we contracted for with Fiat/Disney?”

“So they miscalculated a bit,” Max said. “They’re just students. They’ll fix it, don’t get too upset. Hell, it’s unbelievably great for us. You see the Obit Channel numbers? We’re kickin’ butt.”

By then society had ceased normal functioning; people stayed home from their jobs, construction projects went on hold, kids skipped school. But the cities were surprisingly peaceful. (Of course, it was still early in that historic week.) Those were the days when traffic thinned and industries all but shut down around the world and the air cleared. We all awaited the delayed launch from the Cape. A back-up was in position as well. We tried not to worry.

* * *

The business, you will appreciate, was entirely out of my hands. Cash and electronic transfer money flowed into GD Inc.’s accounts like water from a dozen fire hoses. On Wednesday I logged into the firm’s proprietary accounting program to see what Max had been up to with FEMA. In the face of disaster, he’d been playing the market both ends against the middle. He’d contracted with FEMA to service millions of potential fatalities, but he’d so far underbid the competition that our losses would be greater than our net worth if we had to deliver from even a glancing blow of the comet. Meanwhile the virtual studios were holotaping
IMMORTALITY NOW!
segments on double shifts throughout the country.

The actual work continued to stall. The dead continued to go unburied in coolers. The great room, the walks with my students, the lectures on setting features, the insertions of the Mona Lisa® smiles, these were out of my life now. Some heroic funerals were being conducted: we did our part, sending our maglev Fleetwoods out undermanned, deploying mobile embalming centers, express shipping corpses around the country on chartered flights if it was too difficult for surviving family to travel.

You don’t need me to tell you that the story of those times was an epic adventure which all of us helped write. I’ll confine myself to finishing the inside story of the comet, since that was what changed your life too.

As you’ve probably surmised, Lance was counting on a fix of the comet’s path but not getting results. And, as you remember from that week, on the morning of the great launch, the unmanned shuttle carrying the Ukrainian warheads to the “factory in space” blew up all but a dozen of the backup nukes on the pad. Then there was the problem with the guidance system on the back-up shuttle, which knocked the “factory-in-space” out of orbit and eventually back down to earth. Thankfully no one was hurt. The Chinese still say that problem with the guidance system was caused by broad band radio noise pulsing somewhere out of the Caribbean. Lance denies it.

I remember hearing about the collision between the backup shuttle and the Chinese “factory-in-space” at Espagio’s—one of the few restaurants left open—where I’d gone for lunch with Unix. I took a call from Max immediately afterwards.

Max said, “Do you want the good news or bad news first?”

“The bad news I just heard for myself. According to NASA we’ve got just one more chance, with just one more nuke and that old launch vehicle from Vandenberg. They’re cutting it close—going straight for the comet. I’m worried.”

“Then let me cheer you up.
Inferno
sales are through the roof. We’ve got clients wallowing around in frozen garbage in the circle of the gluttons, women biting one another, employees getting their bosses sunk in shit. What a good idea.”