Futureland. Part 24

Leon wasn't sure if it was the light or the music that had woken him. The room was empty except for a few long tables under cabinets that were shut and locked. Toward the back of the room there was a corner. It was from around this corner that the light and music came.

She was in a transparent coffin perfectly fit for a child her size. Tracie was definitely dead. Her cranberry dress was gone. She was totally nude; even her yellow hair had been shorn. In its place was a deep gash down the center of her skull, sewn back for a funeral that never took place. The music came from various-sized tuning sticks at the foot of the coffin. The green light came from underneath her in what seemed to be migrating waves of a mult.i.tude of microscopic life-forms.

Leon slid to the floor and wept until he pa.s.sed out.

7.

He awoke on the bench in Morningside Park. It was three forty-five by his watch and so he figured that it was still in December because the sun was already beginning to fade. Everything was as it had been. He was wearing his corduroy jacket and brown sneakers that looked like regular shoes. The air was a shade cooler. The cold gathered in his shoulders.

"Hi, mister," she said.

"h.e.l.lo, Tracie. How are you today?"

"You were sleepin'," she said mischievously. "I thought you were gonna fall down, but every time you almost did you sat up just in time."

"I did?"

"An' you were talkin' in your sleep, too," Tracie said while nodding her head.

"And what did I say?"

"Harmonica's cryin'." Tracie labored over the correct p.r.o.nunciation.

"Harmoni . . ." Leon said, and then he realized what the child had heard. "Harmonic cryonics?"

"That's it," Tracie agreed. "What does that mean?"

"It's a way to keep living cells in their original condition by duplicating and isolating the material vibrations of their internal environments."

"Huh?"

"To keep someone alive forever in sleep without freezing them."

"Like Sleeping Beauty?"

"Just like her."

"But why would somebody wanna do that?"

Leon looked closely at the girl. She wore the cranberry dress and there was a blue elastic holding her hair up on her head.

"Do you know where I was just now?"

Tracie shook her head slowly, keeping her eyes on the professor's face.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

"Take me swimmin'?"

"Okay," he said. "You lead the way."

Up the path they went, smallish black man and smaller still girl. The world, a New Age monk once told Leon, is a pious man dreaming of G.o.d. In the dream he sees G.o.d dreaming of him and in that dream the man dreams of G.o.d.

Smallish black man and blond child hand in hand ascended the long upward path. The park's forest deepened as they went. The sun became brighter and Leon Jones wondered if he had died recently, if his brain were going through a final Pulsedream.

Maybe it's just a last spasm, he thought.

But the smell of pine and the glare of the sun, the feeling of wind in the cuff of his jacket--they were all too pedestrian for Pulse. And it was warm. Leon had to take off his coat. His left knee ached as it always did when he attempted a steep climb.

Everything was real. More real even than the Pulse had been. More real than life itself had been, at least more real than he had felt for a very long time.

"It's right up there," Tracie shouted happily. She had thrown off the dress and ran in blue underpants up to the summit.

"Wait up," Leon cried, but Tracie couldn't hear him or couldn't stop.

At the top of the path there was a fallen-down wooden gate that led into a broad lawn bordering upon a lake. There were dozens of picnickers playing and eating and swimming in the lake.

"Hi, Mom," Tracie shouted.

Leon saw a woman turn and wave. It was a tall woman in a blue T-shirt and blue jeans. She was talking to a man but he was on the other side of her and obscured from Leon's view. The woman moved as if she were going down to the lake but the man put a hand on her shoulder and they continued their talk.

Leon was terrified but he didn't know why. He hurried toward the water. But before he got there Tracie's mother screamed exactly as she had done at the park days before. Leon knew this was a dream but at the same time it was also life and death. He hobbled down to the sh.o.r.e, where Tracie's body had just been dragged out of the water. People stood around her but no one was doing anything. Leon threw the child over his knee and pressed against her back.

Her mother was there and the man named Bill. Maybe William was Dr. Bel-Nan's original middle name. Tracie's mother was shouting, "She's dead! She's dead!" and trying to pull the child from Leon's knee. But he resisted her and kept going through the press-and-release exercise until the mother receded and the park faded. Tracie coughed and fell to the ground.

"Thanks," she said. "I knew you would save me."

"But why did I have to?"

"Because you had to," she said. "You had to come up here so you could see my world and save me. And now I can see your world and then . . ."

At that moment Leon felt his heart catch and he knew the patchwork memories of Tracie Rogers, daughter of Bill and Mom, from somewhere in California, at last count five years old--these memories were his own. She kept his heart beating and his lungs breathing; she watched for old dangers like a lion's roar. Her memories laced themselves around his deeper brain functions. She had become him and he had become her.

8.

He was still on the floor near the coffin but no longer crying. The woman with yellow eyes, Bill, and a few others were checking the machinery that kept the harmonics on key.

"So you're awake, Leon," Bel-Nan said.

"Sure am, Bill. More awake than I ever been."

"I take it that you and my daughter have met?"

"What the f.u.c.k am I doin' here, man?"

Bel-Nan offered his hand. Leon took it and got to his feet. Again he felt strong and vital.

"Life everlasting," Bel-Nan answered. "From manhood to G.o.dhood."

"You sure it isn't just guilt that you let your daughter die?"

"She was the love of my life."

"Then why didn't you splice her into your head instead'a mine?"

"I'm the only one who could do the operation. And what if I died?"

"Sounds good to me," Leon said. "So what now?"

"I would expect you to know, Professor."

"Let's see," Leon mused. "You got a clone of the child somewhere. Maybe nine months or so. You take her personality from outta me and put it into the clone."

"The clone is twelve months, has the name of Tracie, and knows me as her father. Later on we will test the process on younger subjects."

"Man, you got a little girl. Why don't you just love her?"

"Tracie, or any living, sentient being, is unique. Her mother broke down after the accident. The only way to rouse her, to remake our family, is this operation."

"Why did you need me at all?" Leon asked. "Why not just go right from the original to the clone?"

"Money, Professor. The equipment I needed to follow up the examination was too great. And also I needed to replicate the cortical functions of the brain so that I wouldn't need to have her under treatment for so long restructuring lower brain functions."

"And what happens to me, Dr. Bel-Nan? What happens when you rip out the center of my brain?"

The yellow-eyed woman looked down when she heard this question.

"You were dead when they brought you to me," Bel-Nan said. "Confined to a gravity chair, having to undergo shock treatments eighteen hours a day. Hardly able to speak more than a sentence before you went into spasm. There was no cure. There was no hope but me. I gave you life. And now I'm asking for repayment. Your few months of grace for the life of my daughter."

"What if I don't want to give up my life just yet?"

"We cannot wait. As time pa.s.ses, Tracie's personality will become a part of you. We must move her while she is still distinct. And anyway, you want her to survive. You love her as much as I do."

Leon thought about these last words. He did love the girl. He wanted her to be alive and happy. He wondered if there was a compromise that could be reached.

But while he thought a hand grabbed his shoulder. He felt a familiar tingling at his elbow and fell again.

"Wake up, Leon," a girl's voice said.

It was Tracie. But she had aged at least six months, taller now and wearing the same blue jeans that her mother had worn. Her face was just that much longer, and the happiness in her eyes was leavened with the awareness of Leon's fear.

"Where am I?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I can't see what you see right away."

"Are they operating?"

"No."

"How can you be sure?"

"I heard something," she said. "They arrested my daddy for taking you away."

"When?"

"I don't know. I don't hear things right away, either. And you've been sleeping so it takes even longer."

"Daddy?"

Leon opened his eyes to see Fera standing above his bed. He was in a hospital. The ocean roared outside the window.

"Honey?"

"Yes, Daddy," the congresswoman from the Bronx replied. "How are you?"

"What happened?"

"Pell got your letter and he got the international corporate corps to free you."

"But how did you find me?"

"We put a tracer on you, Daddy. Don't get mad. It's just that when you first got out of the hospital you were so foggy. I worried that you might forget to carry your chip, so Pell had your dentist do it at your last checkup. And it's lucky he did."

"I'm not mad. Nothing belongs to me anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"Not my body or my mind, not my history or even what I know. But it ain't bad. Naw. It ain't bad at all. 'Cause I'm still feelin' and thinkin' somethin'."

"They want you to go to a government laboratory for some tests, Daddy," Fera said. "It's in a nice place."

"What happened to Bel-Nan?"

"He was sent back to the polar prison. MacroCode paid off on his policy. They took the whole installation back for study and critique."