All the Lives He Led-A Novel (35 page)

But he was not a person I could ask.

He studied me in silence for a moment. I didn’t say anything, either, but I was beginning to feel exhausted. I didn’t dare fall asleep, though. What if someone found a bed to put me in, and undressed me and, very naturally, checked my pockets? I suppose my weariness showed, because the professor stirred. “We’ll get you out of here pretty quick,” he said, standing up. “But there’s one thing I want to say to you.” He put his hand on the doorknob, looking a little—well, bewildered, I thought, as though unsure of what message he wanted to give me. And then he said, “Thanks,” and looked as though he had something more to say, but didn’t say it. Then he opened the door and was gone.

Getting me home took some doing. First they gave me a prisoner’s jacket to pull on over my own clothes. They put me in a police van, along with six or seven petty criminals shackled to their own seats. There were cars full of reporters circling around all the entrances to Security’s building. All the people in them looked us over with microscopic care and some took pictures. But the Security people had pasted a quite plausible-looking mustache under my nose and put bifocal glasses on top of it and none of the watchers looked any harder at me than at any other of the felons. And when we got to the transient jail there were half a dozen ways out, with Nola sitting waiting in a three-wheeler in one of them. Off came the mustache, on went a jail guard’s cap, and I drove us carefully home, avoiding temptations to speed or to rush a traffic light. When we got to the barracks for Indentureds like me I turned the three-wheeler over to Nola to park and for the first time in—had it really been not much more than one full day?—let myself in to my own dingy little room, with its own narrow and lumpy cot that I no longer had anyone to share with me. I pulled the covers into something like order and checked the wall screens to make sure they still worked. They did, of course, but I had no interest in hearing some hastily assembled experts tell their audience who Gerda and the Welsh Bastard had really been, so I turned it off again.

At least they didn’t mention me.

Nola tapped on the door about then, to tell me the three-wheeler was being driven away and if I wanted anything, anything at all—food, drink, whatever—I had but to name it and she would deliver it. “Thanks,” I told her, “but not right now. I’m going to try to get a little sleep.” When she was gone I kicked off my shoes, turned off all the lights except for one bright one near the head of the cot and, fully dressed, slid into bed. I looked up at the remaining bright light that I couldn’t quite reach and scowled in irritation. The irritation was theater, if anyone was bothering to perceive me just then, directed at myself for failing to turn the light off.

Then I petulantly pulled a quilt over my eyes. After a while I let my breathing get light and regular, changing position two or three times as though responding to the lumpiness of the cot. And then very slowly, timing each move to go with my breathing, I gradually slid out of my hip pocket the thing that Gerda, with almost her last breath, had asked me to hide.

All that was also theater, meant to make whoever was manning the spy cameras (if any) on my room lose interest in the sleeping me.

For a wonder—no, for what I was thinking of as practically a once-in-a-lifetime miracle—my planning was working out just as I wanted. I was quite sure that my room was bugged for Security, but I considered it very unlikely that they had stuck a camera in among my bedclothes. And when I held the blanket just so then plenty of light from that “forgotten” fixture leaked into where my clenched fist was holding the object Gerda had entrusted to me.

It was what I had thought it would be, a data coil. It was smaller than the ones I was used to. It wasn’t the usual colorless plastic, either. It was ruby red, and it had printing on it that wasn’t in English. The letters looked Russian to me, in the quick glance I gave it before carefully repeating the process in reverse to tuck it away again. That made me think Stans. And then I began to think about that very large question that lay before me.

First, what was the thing?

It could after all just be another data coil, but of some foreign manufacture. That was a quite likely answer to the specific question, but, like most easy answers, it just raised harder questions. All of them centered around the question of what kind of data did the data coil hold?

That was a biggie.

Suppose, just suppose, what Gerda had been carrying around with her had been nothing less than the secret way of curing Pompeii Flu. That was quite possible, was it not? And what medium would she carry it on, if not a coil? And she had recently been in the Stans where there was still a strong Russian influence left over from Cold War days, so a Cyrillic alphabet was quite possible.

And there was a suspicion that was taking up more and more room in my more and more worried brain. If it was right, then I was carrying a heavier load of responsibility on my quite self-centered shoulders than I had ever supposed possible.

I didn’t know how to answer those questions. But then, fortunately, I was spared the pain of that particular attack of indecision, because pretending to be asleep carried its own consequences, and next thing I knew—or didn’t know—I actually was.

28

ANOTHER UNDESERVED REPRIEVE

Sometimes fate is a lot kinder to me than I deserve.

What woke me up was riotous noise in the hallways. People were tramping up and down, talking loudly, once or twice actually singing. When I got out of bed and began turning lights on it was only moments before Shao-pin was tapping at my door. She was wearing a party hat and carrying a party glass of what I thought was champagne, which she carefully set down before throwing her arms around me. “Oh, Brad!” she cried, pausing only to kiss me again. “She had it! They found it! The cure!”

And it was true. When Security did their professionally methodical search of my beloved’s French-fried and julienned body they found that special coil, the coil of a recording with all the specs for the cure that saved the human race, or at least way the most part of it. They found the coil in a little pouch around her neck that looked like leather but wasn’t. It had kept the fire out and the coil was unharmed. Maury hadn’t been wrong about it. He had just lost out to my very dear Gerda.

So the world was now safe?

Well, that was going a step too far. A lot of things had to happen before the dying stopped. Knowing what the solution to a problem is isn’t quite the same as having actually solved it. When there’s a deadly disease threatening your dearest you may have all the complete printed directions for making a serum in your hand, but you can’t inject printed directions into a dying four-year-old. You have to manufacture the stuff the directions are all about before it can do her any good, and by the time you finish doing that the four-year-old is probably dead.

We were luckier. With the data on the coil it took only three weeks and two days (I counted) for laboratories all over the world, all the millions of them, to start churning out the magic little pale yellow capsules that stopped the disease in its tracks. No one not already infected would get it. And even some of those already rotting away did not get worse … Well, they didn’t get better either. The tissues that were gone stayed gone.

I was not surprised that some of them preferred not to keep on living in their present fragmentary state.

But I am getting ahead of myself. For those twenty-three days people were still getting infected and things were happening. Most of my personally interesting news came from Nola and Shao-pin. When I was ordered to the labs for another round of testing it was Nola who shepherded me from examining room to examining room, each one a little different, with their doctors or sometimes nurses who poked me and listened to my heart, my breathing, and the faint rumblings from my belly. And it was Lieutenant Nola who told the testers, most of whom were at least captains and majors, how much trouble they would be in if they overtired me and what the colonel would say when she reported to him.

People were being nice to me, too. Especially female people like Nola and Shao-pin.

Probably that was orders from the colonel, I thought, although I don’t believe his orders included hinting to me that sex wasn’t out of the question. The way Nola put it was that she would undress me and give me a nice hot bath before tucking me in. That didn’t sound bad, but I didn’t want her going through my pockets before I found a good hiding place for the stolen coil. Elfreda Barcowicz didn’t hint about what she offered. She invited me to check out her lavish new suite—with, she said, “a really comfy double bed.” And then when I told her I couldn’t because I was still in love with Gerda Fleming, she got all misty-eyed and a day or two later she called me into her new office—the place that used to be the Welsh Bastard’s dispatch room—and gave me back my job as a purveyor of fine, or not so fine, wines. The Bastard wouldn’t be using that room anymore. He had been the one in the window with the rocket launcher, and Elfreda inherited his job—and the pay and the deluxe housing that went with it. I supposed that Security wanted somebody they could trust supervising personnel, and who better than one of their own snakes?

When the professor did finally show up at my winebar in full uniform, the onlookers were the first things he noticed. “Who are all these people?” he demanded. When I told him that I didn’t know but just wished they would go away, he scowled. “Somebody has outed you, Bradley. I don’t know where the leak came from. Not from anyone in Security, of course, but there were all those witnesses on the autostrada.” He shook his head, then looked around at the gapers and settled on Cedric, gazing unhappily out of the door of his establishment. “You!” the professor called. “We need your premises for a bit. You can relieve Bradley at his shop.”

That was a man wearing the uniform of a Security colonel who spoke. Cedric jumped to obey. (Of course he also instantly realized what being left in charge of the wineshop implied.) He put the “
Chiuso
” sign on the bordello door for us and scampered back across the street.

Inside the building, the professor gave our surroundings a dismissive glance. I didn’t think they were that easy to dismiss. Over every door was a mural displaying what specialties were on offer inside, and inside the tiny rooms virt teams were doing them. I couldn’t take my eyes off them—not because I liked looking at dirty pictures so much as that sometimes they made me think of something Gerda and I had done, and never would do again.

The professor poked at things in the control panel by the door until all the virts fizzled and disappeared at once, then looked around for a place for us to sit. Since the brothel had had little use for chairs, the professor settled for patting one end of a stone slab—in the old days no doubt the workstation for one of the whores—and sat himself on the other.

“Bradley,” he said, “I’m worried about you.”

I thought I was for once ahead of him. “Because your tests showed you what was wrong with me?” I guessed.

He was shaking his head. “No, Bradley,” he said. “They didn’t. We don’t have a lot of experience with people who have gone through a deep penetration, and we’re even scantier on people who were given a Stans love shot. We do have some theoretical projections on what should be happening with you now.” He turned to look at me more closely. “Worst case,” he said, “you should have killed yourself by now. You haven’t. You haven’t even tried.”

“You don’t know that,” I told him.

“Oh, hell, Bradley, of course we do. Do you think I haven’t had you watched? I could tell you what the projections show, but it gets pretty technical,” he said.

“Go ahead,” I said, and it did. It wasn’t just full of high-tech psychobabble; it was simply all wrong. The important thing was not at all descriptive of the heartfelt, the almost holy love that I felt for my permanently beloved, if absent, sweetheart.

Well, I listened to all of it, or at least pretended to. I don’t think I fooled the professor. When he had finished he looked at me in silence for a moment, curled around on that unforgiving stone slab, and then he sighed.

I thought it was my turn to speak, so I said, “I understand what you’re telling me. So what do I do now? More tests?”

He made a face. “Of course you’re going to do more tests, but for our sake, not yours. All your test results’ll be in the literature for a hundred years. For you, all you have to do is go on living your life, avoiding stress as much as you can.”

I had been observing the lines of worry and weariness on his face. “You ought to do that yourself,” I told him. “You look like hell.”

That almost made him laugh, or at least produce a kind of raspy chuckle. “I’m a little tired,” he admitted. “Shao-pin’s been after me to take naps and that’s probably a good idea. Have you got any questions?”

At that point I swallowed hard. It was the first good chance I had had to unload a second question that was keeping me awake at night. “Actually I do,” I said. “It’s about Gerda. Why do you think she did it?”

The professor had been standing up to go, but now he sat back down again, looking at me with something like resentment. “I said questions,” he remarked. “I didn’t say hard ones. How do I answer that? When she was Brian Bossert she killed innocent bystanders and that didn’t seem to bother her. You could even say she was sanctimonious about it.”

“Not millions and millions,” I said.

He sighed. “Point taken. That does make a difference, doesn’t it?” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I wasn’t going to tell you, at least not just yet, but one of the things we found in the farmhouse was stuff Gerda was working on. What she was doing seems to have been giving a lot of thought to that exact question. We found a lot of—I guess you’d call it research—on the subject. Of course,” he added, “it’s all classified. Security would classify the used paper in the toilets if they could figure a way to get it out of the bowl.”