The New World: A Novel (9 page)

 

Jane was afraid Brian would meet her at the airport. She didn’t feel ready to see him. But it was a fizzy young lady who met her, holding up a blue Polaris sign with Jane’s name on it. When Jane approached, the girl bowed to her with her fists pressed over her heart. Jane clasped her hands over her stomach and bowed back, not sure of what else to do.
Oh
,
Jim
, she thought to herself.
How could you not tell me you were joining a cult?
“Greetings and salutations!” the girl said. “I’m Poppy.”

“What a lovely name,” Jane said, pretending to be a nicer version of herself. “I knew a girl named Peony once in grade school. All the boys called her Pee-on-Me, but she didn’t care. I never knew how she could be so gracious and strong but very much later I started to think she was somehow protected by the beauty of her name.”

“I wasn’t born with it,” Poppy said, very brightly of course, as they waited for Jane’s bag to come out on the carousel. Jane hadn’t dared carry it on with the Kiss inside—Hecuba couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t set off alarms at security—and now Jane was anxious that the bag was lost, or being tampered with. “It’s my
Polaris
name. It’s what I want them to call me in the future. What’s yours?”

“I haven’t selected it yet,” Jane said. “And anyway, that might be premature. I’ve got one more interview left.”

“Oh, the last one’s easy! Alice asks you everything that matters. This is just a formality, really.” She gave Jane a sly smile. “But it’s the most
wonderful formality ever.
Once I saw campus, I never wanted to leave again. I wanted to
go
right away, you know. But of course that was impossible.”

“Of course,” Jane said, trying to sound sad.

“So I did the next best thing,” Poppy said. “I moved in!”

“I’m really looking forward to seeing the campus,” Jane said, which was true in its way. She had felt a tremendous pressure of anxiety behind her, building since Alice had congratulated her on becoming a Polaris Novitiate and clearing the way for her to take her final interview and become a member. Within a few days Jane had booked her flight, and Hecuba had sent her to an address deep in Crown Heights. Jane rang the bell of an ordinary-looking brownstone and was handed the envelope through the mail slot by a well-manicured lady’s hand. She never saw a face.

By her last night at home, the pressure was nearly pushing her out of the house. She said good night to her mother and lay awake with a flavor of insomnia different from the one to which she had grown accustomed in the weeks since Jim had died. She rose every now and then to sniff at the envelope a few times—Hecuba said it was totally harmless to unfrozen, full-bodied human beings. It smelled very strongly of cinnamon and paprika. She spent most of the night quietly dressing in the dark, and gave herself a whole half hour just to sneak down the stairs and out the door. Still, Millicent came down before she’d shut the door, standing like a mad shadow in the dark. Jane put a finger to her lips. Millicent put a finger on the side of her nose. Jane met a cab around the corner with sunrise still two hours away.

“Oviedo is lovely,” Jane said in the car, which prompted a snort from Poppy.

“It’s a dump,” she said. “That’s what makes the campus so amazing—you’ll be able to see the pyramid in just a minute.” And soon enough, as they rose up a highway ramp, Jane saw it glinting above the strip malls. “
Look
at it! We’re still three miles away!” Poppy shouted, rolling down the windows, as if to start savoring the air.

“It’s quite large!” Jane shouted above the wind.

“Exactly as big as Cheops!” Poppy said, something Jane knew already from the brochure, but it really was something to see it in person, glassy and enormous amid the Oviedo sprawl. After they parked, Poppy led her to a sunny terrace where two other applicants were waiting on a stainless-steel bench, a married couple named Sally and Bill. “Greeting and salutations!” Poppy said to the pair. Sally and Bill did the Polaris bow, but Jane could only wave feebly. Her other hand was in her pocket, to make sure of the envelope. She took her hand away only to dry it when she was worried her sweaty palms would compromise the fine particulate nature of the Kiss. “Are you ready to spend a few hours in the future?” Poppy asked them all when she’d brought them around to the main entrance. Bill said he was born ready. Sally said she was so excited she was going to
explode
. Jane said she might explode too. The giant glass doors slid open.

She supposed it was amazing in there. She still felt the pressure behind her, blowing her toward the dewars, which made it hard to consider very deeply anything that Poppy was saying. Poppy loaded them onto an electric cart and toured the interior of the daylit portion of the pyramid, which receded upward into balconies and catwalks. Poppy was talking about membership services and the R&D section and the Foundation initiatives. The upper pyramid was all about bringing the future into the present, she said, while the inverted lower pyramid (the whole building extended as far under the ground as it did up into the sky) was all about sending the present into the future.

“But when will we see the dewars?” Jane asked, when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Those
amazing
dewars,” she added, when Poppy looked at her strangely and didn’t answer.

“I believe those are last on the tour,” Sally said, holding up the itinerary. Jane had wadded her copy in a sweaty fist.

“Don’t worry. They’re not going anywhere . . . except into the future!” Poppy said. “And I should tell you,” she said, lowering her voice, “that Brian likes to quiz folks a little on the Foundation activities. So pay attention to all the details!” Jane felt a little thrill of nausea at Brian’s name, and the thought of his actual presence in the building.

“Pay attention?” Bill said. “Poppy, my dear, I’ve been waiting all my life to hear about this!”

“Can you believe we’re going to meet
Brian
?” Sally asked, squeezing Jane’s arm.

“It’s like a dream come true,” Jane replied.

They went toodling along the glass-and-steel runways and catwalks and balconies and causeways, Jane feeling more and more like she was on some combination of very slow roller coaster and living diorama of the future. Futuristically styled, artificial-looking people waved at them from their workstations or work-sponsored recreations, having indoor picnics or doing yoga or playing badminton without a net or racquets. In the future, Poppy told them, Polaris would make Florida the center of the world. Jane, wishing she could say it to Jim, thought very sadly that crazy, ridiculous Florida was already the center of the world.

At last they had gone all the way up, so then they went all the way down, into the basements and subbasements and sub-subbasements, lit at first with skylights and then with snaking optic cables that carried actual sunlight from tens of thousands of collecting nodes (Poppy said ecstatically) in the glass walls of the pyramid. The basement was full of research; Poppy told them about a vigorous twenty-five-year-old mouse named Methuselah, which she’d fed from her own hand
.

“I think my ears are popping!” said Sally, just as they came to the first of the three dewar chambers.

“Are you ready?” Poppy whispered reverently, as she keyed a code in the tiny door. “Are you really, really ready for this?” They all nodded hard, even Jane, who, despite the pressure behind her back that she thought might push her right through the steel door before Poppy could open it, suddenly didn’t feel ready at all. “Then . . . let’s go!” Poppy said, and swept them inside.

 

Days or weeks or months later, Jim was ready. He lost track of the hours, and lost track of the others in the house, even his Alice, taking his meals alone and spending the little time when he wasn’t working asleep, or walking through the orchard and beyond. The morning he finished his book, he put his head down to rest and was woken again by the noise of the bus in the yard. He went to the window to see who was going to leave today, and stood a long while before Alice knocked on his door and he understood that the bus was waiting for him.

Alice held his hand the whole way to the city. Except for his book, he brought no luggage. Though the bus had no driver, it seemed to know just where it was going, rolling confidently over the hills on its big moon-buggy tires. Neither he nor Alice said anything for the first hour of the trip. Jim stared out the window at the lovely landscape, pretty streams and tidy woods and stark blue lakes that looked like they belonged high in the mountains somewhere.

“Do you feel ready for your Debut?” Alice asked at last, squeezing his hand.

“I think so,” Jim said. “I feel ready for
something
. I’m not having stage fright, if that’s what you mean. It doesn’t sound too hard, anyway. I just burn the book, right? As a pledge. And then I say I’m ready to become a citizen if everybody will have me. I make my testimony, and cross my fingers that they’ll all say yes.”

“No need to cross your fingers,” she said. “You’ve already done the hard part. I have every expectation that you’ll succeed today. You’ve made this last part just a formality. I’m very proud of you.” She pointed out the bus’s curved window. “Look, we’re nearly there now.”

Jim turned his head and saw a slender metal spire rising from one of those displaced tarns. Mercury-silver, the tower looked almost liquid itself. A door opened in the lake and the bus drove in. Shortly, they came to a brightly lit underground garage.

Alice led him out of the bus to a smooth elevator, which seemed to move in a variety of directions. They stepped into an immaculate hallway, so white it was hard to tell the bright lamps in the wall from the wall itself, but carpeted in neatly clipped green grass. He laughed when she brought him into the greenroom, which was green all over, not just the floor carpeted in grass but the walls and even the furniture upholstered with it as well. “It’s the greenest greenroom I’ve ever seen,” Jim said. “Now what?”

“Now you can rest, and prepare. You won’t see anyone else until you see
everyone
else. But look, a friend has sent you some flowers.” They were on the table, a giant bouquet of sunflowers and posies and daisies, all of them shivering, vastly more alive than any flower Jim had ever seen before. There was a card stuck in them, from Franklin.
Break a leg!
it said. Jim smiled, then winced and held his belly where he had a sudden pain.

“Lie down,” Alice said when she saw his face, leading him to the verdant couch. “You’re pale. It’s all right to be nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” he said. “It’s just a little stomachache. I’m fine, really.” He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, Alice was fixing something to his hair.

“A microphone,” she said. “The hall is very large. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And how is your stomach?”

“I think it was actually my heart,” he said. “But it’s all better now.”

“Excellent,” she said, with a beautiful smile. She stood him up and offered him her arm. “Then James Arthur Cotton, Polaris Member 10.77.89.1, let us proceed to your Debut!”

In no time at all they had passed down a hall, through a door, and up some stairs, into darkness and a noise he recognized as the susurration of an enormous crowd. She took him onto the stage and stood with him behind the curtain. There was a little brazier set up a few feet upstage, and next to that, on a little stand, a large tin of lighter fluid and a box of wooden matches. “I’ll be just over there,” Alice said, handing him his book just when he realized he had forgotten it in the greenroom. “Good luck, my dear, dear client. Remember, I’m proud of you! How do you feel?”

“Good,” Jim said. “I feel good. I feel
ready
.” Alice gave him a long, hard hug, and then withdrew. The curtain rose. A spotlight picked him out.

Peering into the audience, all Jim could see was the light on him, but he could hear a great variety of bodies, shuffling and breathing.
People are very patient in the future
, he said to himself as the empty minutes went by without a single catcall.
Maybe because they have so much time
, he thought, and then he began to speak.

“Thank you for having me today,” he said. “I’m so glad to be here. I mean, I’m so
grateful
. I really am. It’s been really charitable of you all, to take care of me like you have. I thought I should say that, before I get started.” He stood up straighter and cleared his throat, and held the book behind his hips with both hands. “My name is James Arthur Cotton. I am Polaris Cryonics Member 10.77.89.1. I am here to formally declare my readiness to enter your world, the world of the future, a world I have diligently prepared myself to understand. I have severed every lingering attachment to my old world, the old life, liberating myself to enter a new one.” He held the book up for them all to see, and then he held it tight against his chest.

“By these flames,” he said. “I ask you to
let me in
.” He put the book in the brazier and gave it a good soaking with the lighter fluid. His hands were shaking, so he got as much on the floor as on the book. Jim giggled nervously. “I make a mess when I pee, too,” he said to his audience. “So I always have to sit down.” Nobody laughed, but of course the toilets in the future caught the urine no matter how freely you peed. These people couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about. “Somebody used to get angry at me,” he added softly. He stood there a moment, until Alice whispered from stage left, “You should light the fire now!”

“Of course!” he said, and he lit a match, but not the fire. “A Viking funeral always was the best kind of funeral,” he said, staring at the little flame. “I think I should just say a few words, if that’s all right?” He was asking the audience, which remained silent, but Alice was shaking her head vigorously. “Funny to preside at a funeral for somebody you don’t know, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t even know what’s in there anymore.” The motion of pointing at the book extinguished the match, so he lit another one. “I forgot everything else, but I still remember what to do at a funeral. You just put your head down and try to bear as humbly as you can your good luck at still being one of the living.”

“It’s time now to light the fire,” Alice said next to him. She had come onstage while he was talking. He blushed. “You can’t stop now,” she said urgently. “In the middle of things.” She lowered her voice. “It’s dangerous. People have
exploded
that way.”

“I will,” Jim said. “In a minute. Just give me a second to say goodbye. This is what I
do.
” He stepped forward and began confidently. “My dear friends,” he said. “We are here together to celebrate a life. This man . . .” Alice was gripping his wrist so hard she was hurting him, but he pointed with his free hand at the book. “I mean, this
woman
.” But of course that was wrong too. So he said, “Always together. Never apart.”

“Listen to me!” Alice said. “I’m your
s
ocial
w
orker
!” She lit a match and stepped toward the brazier.

“You listen to me,” he said. “She was my
wife
!” He tried to step in front of Alice, but she bumped him, and the brazier and book tumbled to the floor. Alice dropped her match into the puddle of lighter fluid, and the stage caught fire like it had been waiting forever to burn.

Through the flames, Jim could see the pages of the book unfurling and glowing, the covers spread wide. The ashes rose with the smoke, the plumes twisting into the words and stories and faces. There was something so attractive about the smell. He couldn’t help himself; he took a big heaving lungful of the smoke, and it was like sucking all the memories into his lungs. Or maybe they were just unfolding in him, never having been forgotten, only made incredibly small. In any case, he felt very full. And he felt, deep in his burning chest, that he had somehow found a way for both of them to live forever, a way for him to carry her forward with him and forget her at the same time. He opened his mouth to try to explain this good news to Alice as she ushered him away from the flames, but a hideous belch came out of his mouth instead.

“Oh, Jim,” she said. “You are
definitely
going to explode.” She was weeping now, and didn’t seem angry with him anymore.

“Would you stop saying that?” he shouted.
“I am not going to explode!”

But then he did.