2020 Read online

  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.”

  I’d seen for myself, watched a famous criminal, the Organ Bandit, writhing happily in flames in the Circle of Thieves. The punishment was only staged, but his eternal celebrity promised to be real.

  “One more thing,” Max said. “We’ve made our greatest placement ever. Lance found out they had room for half a kilo more payload on that last emergency attempt to blow the comet off course. So we bought the spot in the nose cone.”

  “And what in the name of God are we going to do with that?”

  “We’ll be sending up a cremate. It’s like burial at sea, but much grander.”

  “Who could have the vanity . . . ?”

  “That judge,” Max told me, “what’s his name? MacPhee.”

  * * *

  I recall it was Thursday night of that week when society started becoming really unglued—lawlessness swept the beaches, looting raged on Rodeo Drive, anarchy on the freeways. Public safety followed public transport into frightened hibernation. But the weather turned gorgeous—the air crystal clear and the stars shining brightly that night when the whole power grid went down, the stars of the Milky Way lighting the bowl of the sky with celestial jewelry.

  I braved the streets to Westwood on Friday.

  Keiko was fortified at the mansion, spending her last days with the judge. Max had arranged for a cortege of armored hearses to transport the judge up the coast to Vandenberg Air Force Base for the launch when the time came.

  When I looped back through downtown I found Max and Lance camped out up in accounting. Business was still streaming in; Max had Lance shunting in overload invoice servers into the corporate mainframe. Max was filled with enthusiasm for the judge’s journey as payload on the third rocket, but guarded about the details, as if he didn’t trust me with them. A marketing vision of cosmic proportions danced in his eyes: GD’s greatest triumph, he told me, the beginning of a whole new range of franchise-level services, symbolic of his joining with Lance.

  Then fires began to smoke the atmosphere. From the eightieth floor window I watched a sooty cloud rise from South Central, then a fireline start further south, by Long Beach Harbor, where Nomads lived on boats. The winds were pulling the smoke across the whole basin. Even as I watched, a string of brush fires ignited above Malibu.

  That’s when we flew to Mauna Kea, Unix and I.

  * * *

  Since the late 20th Century, Mauna Kea has been the premier optical and infrared red imaging site on the globe. Fourteen thousand feet high, isolated by thousands and thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean from the nearest landmass, Mauna Kea is impacted only by air pollution downstream from China, a high mustard haze which that week had slowly dissolved into nothingness.

  It is a rugged site, rust-red and black with lava ash and boulders, the fixed observatories on their little knolls, a gravel road winding up from the astronomer’s quarters a few thousand feet below. I found out I could image from the summit itself, a cinder cone just east of the large instruments. Unix and I staked out a spot and I deployed my small imaging package on the night we arrived. By midnight I’d set celestial coordinates, and we settled in.

  We had a little self-erecting tent and good down bags, picnic hampers of food, our own satlink to watch the madness back on the mainland. But mostly we watched the sky, rich with stars, the great
silver swipe of Virgilius Maro wide across the heavens, Mars and Venus bumping one another on the horizon, as if jostling to get out of the way. The firmament seemed a vast deep blue bowl; up there, with the sky so clear and nothing around you, you feel yourself suspended in space, a cosmic traveler.

  We thought we could make out the launch of the Vandenberg rocket, its passage through the ionosphere. “Uncle’s up there,” I heard Unix whisper in wonder.

  Unix and I grew very close. Our zipped-together bags made a womb from which we emerged only late on the final day.

  As you know the nuke merely turned Virgilius Maro off course. It wasn’t the way it might have been in an old SF movie, blowing up. No, that would have sent fragments in the direction of Earth. Rather, it was a flash, albeit a diamond bright human flash, and then the turning, the quickening across the sky.

  I don’t mean to diminish it. What a night that was: the thrill of the comet turning, the colors spreading across the heavens, refracted light in bands of red and orange and water blue, Unix against my side, my equipment whirring. . . . It was lovelier, and more dangerous, than any other moment I have experienced.

  The comet streaked across the sky, some cosmic fulfillment, an instrument, a sign of change for myself, for the world I lived in. As the rocket had slivered into the comet’s albedo, as the nuke had blossomed, as the shifting colors had climaxed, I’d tracked the nearby click of servos and the squeaks of optical drives to confirm my hopes: my equipment had grabbed just the right fourteen seconds.

  In the ensuing silence we stood there, Unix and I, our breaths vaporizing before us, the cold rock hard beneath our feet, our hearts beating together. I cannot tell you how happy I felt at that moment, how fulfilled.

  My pager hummed against my heart.

  I took the call through the backup monitor on my imaging equipment, my chilly fingers fumbling with the thin lead. Keesha was on the tiny screen. She looked stricken.

  She was calling to tell me that Max Sczyczypek was dead, of massive cardiac arrest.

  * * *

  You of course know all about the near miss’s unexpected effects—that tidal thing, the way the ozone layer was restored to pre-1900 levels, the way the lower atmosphere cleared. I remember the day after we returned to California, waking up and gazing through the clear, crisp air that had been with us since the comet passed. The rapid ionization of the atmosphere had picked up the particulates and plopped them on the ground, where they were washed by heavy rains; the world seemed fresh and new. It changed all our lives, that near-death experience.

  Max, as I’ve mentioned, got a little nearer than most.

  His funeral was one of the most spectacular and professionally accomplished in the modern history of deathcare management. It was understood that I would handle the basic interment, though I left the stainless steel instruments, the needles, the gloves and the fluids to Preparation. I dressed Max in his best black suit, picked out a casket, and laid him out, setting his features with a number six Mona Lisa® smile. Dorothy helped me with his obituary; the Sierra Club managed the flowers and the stands of virgin Redwood offered in his name, Espagio’s did the catering, Fiat/Disney produced the wake and the procession. The High Mass was held at St. Christopher’s, with a little virtual hookup to all GD Homes. Burial was at St. Mary’s: Digger O’Donald was there, an orchestra, celebrities by the hundreds, with a special presentation by the union of professional mourners Max himself had helped found.

  That was when I first spotted the chemistry between Unix and Lance. I was surprised but then it seemed to me a good thing. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with her, and she needed someone who looked further ahead than I do these days.

  Lance and I run the company now. Max left us very well off. We have all that front money from FEMA in the bank, all those fees from IMMORTALITY NOW! without the liability to produce it as advertised. Since the comet had been redirected by the Government under an action classified by the courts as an Act of God or War, our warrantee must exclude any mention of “comet.” No comet, no signal. The broadband noise that had been converted into holounits from The Divine Comedy would continue to be broadcast by the redirected Virgilius Maro, but only in the path of the M31 Galaxy for the next four hundred million years.

  We own the Obit Channel now—under a dummy corporation, however those things are done. All of the Angels® have been dusted, the Fleetwoods shine, and our new South American division is expanding at the rate of two new Homes per week.

  I still feel deep satisfaction with the image I’d grabbed of Virgilius Maro up on Mauna Kea. During the final edit I doubled the length of the hololoop. The finished piece hangs in the boardroom these days, replacing an image of Mars. The now half-minute loop, bright silver with a banded spectrum in slo-mo, opens and turns like a timelapse flower bathing in quasar light against a backdrop of deep space.

  I see Keiko a lot. It’s a bit unreal. Lance and Unix are a couple. We’re all into life extension. Lance is working with those Swiss engineers you’ve been hearing about on the news. I mean, why not stick with a good thing?

  * * *

  One more thing I need to tell you about.

  After all the dust had settled, Keiko and Unix and Lance and I took what remained of the judge’s ashes and placed them into a crypt. He had refused to take his ashes up with him to Vandenberg; he’d called it a morbid idea. The left-behind ashes had been moved to GD Tower, but Keiko understandably wanted closure. Burial was my advice, a small traditional service; I was glad to see my thinking confirmed by Keiko’s therapist and the MacPhee family counselor. The obsequies were set for a Friday afternoon.

  I set out driving alone in my Lotus from downtown to meet the rest of the funeral party at Forest Lawn. I’d picked up the ashes from GD Tower and was carrying them on the passenger’s seat. They were resting in a beautiful onyx urn. I rounded a corner, my suspension let out a squeak, a groan, and I found myself remembering my first encounter with the judge’s ashes in the Model 986 Urn. I started seeing him as a rival again. Instinctively, I reached for the glove box, pulled out the plastic bag containing the ashes of Balthazar, my old Lab, and exchanged them for the ashes of the judge. The idea that the urn containing the judge’s ashes would make a noise during interment spooked me more than I can explain. I know what I did was unethical; I couldn’t help myself.

  Anyway, the modest ceremony went well. Unix had arranged for Scottish Pipers, and a representative from NASA stood in uniform and saluted. Keiko achieved her closure.

  The thing is, after the dinner at Espagio’s, when I was driving back to Westwood with Keiko, swinging up Santa Monica Boulevard?

  I swear I heard something from the glovebox: a creak, a pop, a long high note that sang eerily into the gathering night.

  Keiko looked at me.

  “Balthazar,” I said. “Hush.”

  The Swan

  THE COLUMN OF BLACK SMOKE WAS VISIBLE from ten clicks away, dense and billowy, shifting in the wind like a dye marker in ocean currents.

  Photochemical colors in the twilight sky: mauve and filthy pink. The old Army turbocopter rattled through the airspace above coastal L.A., descending gradually toward the source of the smoke in Long Beach Harbor.

  Standing in the open door of the copter’s cargo area, one hand on a safety strap, Voorst squinted south through the haze at the continuous string of makeshift harbors where houseboats seemed every year to multiply like algae in a pond. He guessed densities of five or six thousand per square kilometer, half the rigs illegals, population out of hand.

  The way the picture was never seen on CBS or VNN ate away at him like an ulcer. As they swung upwind of the column of smoke—it hung below them now three thousand feet like some fantastic butte in Monument Valley—he pulled himself across the cabin, took a deep breath, then leaned out the opposite cargo door, trying to make out what was going on near the source. The pattern of debris and smudge spread clearly from a large ship, one he maybe recognized: rusty white decks, an out-of-se
rvice pool, a blue hull—a passenger liner auctioned off years ago and anchored in the harbor as one of the transient hotels, the QE III.

  The copter weaved down alongside the column and his stomach tightened, the sensation like floating down a precipice untethered. Now he could make out the big Virtual News Net uplink out on the breakwater. The shoreside traffic was gridlocked, the sealanes so crowded even a SoCal Harbor Inspector like himself (but what did Harbor Inspectors matter anymore?) had to hitch a ride through the air.

  This was the third harbor fire in a week. One up in L.A. proper, the other down in Balboa.

  A soft wall of black came rushing up and they wafted into the smoke. In the darkness the copter’s interior screens brightened and he checked the image going out over VNN—he was used to the way they altered a landscape, accustomed to seeing some of the live-aboard scows bled out of harbor shots, but now it looked like they’d moved the source of the fire too. On the VNN screen the smoke rose from a Brazilian bulk carrier anchored in the industrial harbor northwest. Voorst ground his teeth. The acrid edge to the air belonged to burning petrochemicals, not the cargo of Amazon mahogany whose loss the smooth-voiced anchorman was describing. Still, even the VNN summary screen showed the crowd—people with bundles, transients being driven off—fighting with Army cops. “Hey, Stringer,” Voorst shouted against the whine of the turborotor “Stringer. Your men gonna have the area secured by nightfall?”

  The fiftyish sergeant, his name in block letters above the left pocket of his fatigues, seemed not to hear, didn’t even open his eyes. He leaned against the bulkhead, the bank of internal screens glowing yellow behind him, and continued the story he’d started before Voorst had leaned out the door. “So I tell the lunchmeat I’m a friendly, right? I get her inside the troop carrier. There’s nobody around. I get her on the floor in the back. . . .”