Pallas (46 page)

“Their children,” she added, “will make the place over into a par
a
dise—although they won’t think of it that way. People never do—they’re not built to. And then someday it’ll be another good place to be
from,
just like America and Pallas.”

“Perhaps,” the Senator replied, stretching his new understanding to the limit. “Perhaps they will at that, Rosalie. But you and I will never live to see it.”

No, he knew that he was condemned to live out whatever years were left to him—and if he was lucky there wouldn’t be too many of them—surrounded by the ruins of a lifetime of tragic mistakes.

It was probably just what he deserved.

As if she could read his thoughts of resignation to defeat and death, her voice sharpened suddenly. “What makes you so goddamned sure, Grandfather? How do you know that’s not the very thing Emerson and I asked you down here to discuss?”

“In that case,
Granddaughter
,”—he was feeling that cold prickling up and down his spine once again and he wasn’t getting used to that—“exactly where the hell
is
Emerson?”

She sighed, slumped a little,
then
made a visible effort to straighten her spine. “He had another heart attack, a bad one, shortly after you two fought tonight.”

“He’s dead?”

Don’t do patch-job repairs—do it right, or skip it...After all, the life you save may be your own.

—Jerry Kuhnhausen,
The
S&W Revolver, A Shop Manual

“F
or the time being.”

Altman’s head whirled. He was still far too preoccupied with the question he’d just asked to have registered the answer. He’d never re
a
lized until this moment just how great a part of his life had centered itself on his old adversary.

He blinked, and the next thing he was fully aware of was Rosalie, one slender arm spread wide to indicate the great, confusing mass of chemical and electronic equipment surrounding them, filling the dimly lit room with an ominous combination of bubblings, hisses, and hums, like
something out of an ancient horror film.

At the center of this mare’s nest of technology run riot was a row of low stainless steel vats or tubs set into the perforated metal floor they both stood on, just the proper size to contain a human body. Each was covered with a shallow dome of sweating sheet plastic and filled with a milky, opaque fluid of some kind.

On one of them, Emerson’s pistol belt and holstered Grizzly draped over a corner.

“...a multiple enzyme-based, computer-directed processing device,” she was saying, “with the potential to take a living organism apart, m
o
lecule by molecule, repair faulty and faltering biosystems from a digit
a
lized template, then flush out a lifetime of accumulated organic wastes and bad genetic information.”

“What?” Altman shook his head, struggling to get it clear. He wouldn’t have understood one word in three of what the woman had said at the best of times.

“In short,” Rosalie told him brightly, “it’s a rejuvenator.”

And odd, surprising sort of hope began swelling in Altman’s chest, the complement to his surprising sense of loss. “And at the moment, it’s r
e
juvenating Emerson?”

Looking satisfied and proprietary, she nodded. “So far it’s been tried out thoroughly on mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils, pigeons, dogs, cats, pigs, rhesus monkeys, everything we could get our hands on, with a ninety-percent success rate—”

“Only ninety percent?”
His feeling of hope suddenly mixed with f
o
reboding. His imagination filled his mind’s eye with horrifying pictures. “What...happened to the failures?”

Rosalie shrugged, unsuccessfully concealing her own fears in that regard. “The remaining ten percent...eventually died—gruesomely, I’m afraid. I saw a few of them. We hadn’t tried it out on living human beings before, not until tonight.”

The Senator exhaled, not having realized until now that he’d been holding his breath. It also hadn’t dawned on him before this moment that Rosalie was implying that she’d consigned her husband to these infernal
mechanisms, this infernal chemistry,
before
his heart attack had killed him altogether. It did now, and, recoiling from the shock of it—a part of his mind wondered whether Emerson had been conscious at the time—he sought security in old patterns.

“I don’t need to tell you,” he told her nevertheless, “that a process like this, involving such a risk factor, would be completely illegal, back on Earth.”

“
Which is precisely why,” Rosalie replied with a grin, “it had to be invented and developed here.
We Pallatians are tougher, smarter—and richer—than those pitiable culls
who
remain behind in the deadly safety of Earth, because we’re willing to take risks. We wouldn’t be here in the first place if we weren’t.”

Altman nodded slowly. “I’m beginning to understand that, after all these years.” He looked down at his hand, clutching the pistol in his jacket pocket, as if he’d never seen it before, and shuddered with
embarrassed
self-loathing. Suddenly, and for the first time, he noticed he was still wearing his bedroom slippers.

Rosalie smiled, warming him even in these surroundings. “I believe you are at that, Senator. Emerson and I considered long ago all the co
n
tingencies we could with regard to his failing health, even his long-running feud with you. It was according to that plan that I brought him here tonight, after his attack, to perform the final experiment, a complex, intermittent process requiring sixty days for each of us, so we’ll be on time to catch the
Fifth Force
out to the Halo.”

“‘Each’?” Altman echoed in paralyzed revulsion. “You’re going through the process, too?” She still looked like a young girl to him until he realized that he was seeing her, especially in this light, as much with his memory as with his eyes. But the years had flown by without notice, as the years will do, and she must be at least...sixty-three.

She nodded, and this time there wasn’t a hint of trepidation discernible in her voice or attitude. “Two of these units over here already hold the bodies of Mirelle Stein and R.L. Drake-Tealy, quick-frozen many years ago at the very moment he died. Miri decided to die
with
Di
g
ger—something else that would have been forbidden back on Earth—but
now, with any luck at all, they’ll both live again, to join us three months from now aboard the
Fifth Force
.”

Mirelle Stein and R.L. Drake-Tealy, alive again.
Suddenly Altman was suspicious. A chill crept up his spine.
“Rosalie, why the hell are you telling me all this?”

“Well—” his granddaughter shrugged as if it
were
of no particular importance “—we thought we’d invite our old enemy along, if he was interested and willing.”

Shock: “I don’t understand.”

All the same, the weight of the pistol in his pocket was suddenly very comforting. He glanced from one of the evil-looking vats to another, imagining what the first breath of vile liquid would be like, how it would feel to be taken apart, molecule by molecule, and reassembled according to a computer program.

“I think you do,” she continued as if unaware of Altman’s misgivings, which she probably wasn’t. “Right to the end, Emerson insisted things just wouldn’t be the same without you. He told me more than once, sp
e
cifically: ‘Even if I wind up killing him—
or he kills me.’
I think he e
n
joyed the idea of your having to live in a future he’d created. If this process works the way it has time after time with animals, we’ll all be twenty years old again, biologically—but with the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime, and a whole new life ahead of us.”

Altman, having recently learned something important about life himself, thanks to the
Ngu
Departure pistol, was intrigued by Rosalie’s words, but terrified of them at the same time. At one level, he suspected that this might be no more than an elaborate trick, a wife’s revenge for her husband’s death.

At quite another level, he was desperately afraid that the whole thing might be true.

He hesitated.

Abruptly, there was a ripple across the surface of one of the tu
b
ing-festooned vats beside which Rosalie was standing. An obscene gu
r
gling came to his ears. He shrank back in mindless dread as a wet, shiny hand emerged from the cloudy liquid, followed by a dripping arm. He
looked away as someone—or something—coughed, vomited some w
a
tery substance, coughed again, and began to speak, a familiar-sounding voice distorted by the plastic bubble that contained it.

“Come on, you geriatric son of a bitch,”
Emerson demanded, his fluid-slicked hair and naked shoulders rising briefly from the vat. For the first time, Altman saw into his naked, empty eye socket.
“You’re holding up progress, as usual! What the hell are you waiting for, a goddamned engraved invitation?”
Exhausted by the effort, the eerie figure slid back into the solution and was silent.

Rosalie reached out and took Altman by the hand. “C’mon, Grandf
a
ther—
‘For the opportunity of a lifetime and a lifetime of opportun
i
ty’
—you wanna live forever?”

Nodding uncertainly, the Senator stepped forward, toward her, into an unknown future.

For an
updated list of available L. Neil Smith books
a
vail
a
ble from Phoenix Pick:

www.PhoenixPick.com