“Yes. That’s why I got the Stileman Treatment in the first place.”
“When was the last time you ate?”
“I … tried to eat lunch but nothing would stay down.”
“Okay.” Eastwood wiped her hands on her napkin. “I think we’d just as well get started. You don’t have much of an appetite anyhow, do you?” Maria shook her head silently. “Tell Henry to hang on to my dinner. I’ll be back around midnight.”
I got out to let Maria out of the booth. She hugged and kissed me, trembling, then put a finger on my lips. “Don’t say anything. I’ll see you.”
I watched the doctor lead her out and slid back into the silence. “That’s wise,” Ulric said. “If she’s started to metastasize, it wouldn’t be worth putting her through the trouble. We’d chase cancers for a couple of weeks and lose her anyhow.”
I looked out through the window but couldn’t see her for the blur.
Selena Vaughn Shift Schedule
(problems, call Baird now)
Schedule will be updated after each major op. Try to keep your own schedule loose.
This is the big test.
11 yanvár
General oncology inspection, cleanup
Eastwood
Belyayev
Lewis
Swim
13 yanvár
(Predicated on above) blood switchout, dialysis
Zholobov
Shower
Hurd
—Beregovoy and McAtee on call for mesenteries until fevrál—
14 yanvár
Liver 1
Perkins
Titov
Taral
15 yanvár
Immune system 1
Ulric
Morvich
16 yanvár
Immune system 2
Ulric
Booker
18yanvár
Liver 2
Perkins
Taral
21 yanvár
Colon, large intestine
Arcaro
Prior
Shatalov
Winkfield
{21-22 yanvár
Liver 3 if necessary
Perkins etc.}
22 yanvár
Gallbladder
Bierman
Gorbatko
Stout
23 yanvár
Pancreas
Artyukhin
Borel
Knapp
24 {yanvár
Is. Lang. if indicated
Borel etc.}
25 yanvár
Small intestine
Prior
D. Wright
27 yanvár
Kidneys 1
Goodale
Koonze
28 yanvár
Kidneys 2
Goodale
McCreary
30 yanvár
Bladder
Hartack
Volkov
1 fevrál
Other urinary
Rukavnikov
York
2 fevrál
Adrenals
Kurtsinger
P. Ivanov
4 fevrál
Marrow team (adjust as needed)
Bierman
Sande
Feoktistov
Volynov
Kiley
Ben Ali
Hanford
8 fevrál
Lower circulatory
Lang
V. Wright
10 fevrál
Parathyroids
Cordeo
Titov
12 fevrál
Thyroid
Titov
Garner
13 fevrál
Corp. luteum (ovaries n/a)
Minder
14 fevrál
Duodenum
Sarafanov
Kurtsinger
Velasquez
15 fevrál
Other stomach
Klimuk
Legarova
17 fevrál
Pituitary body ant.
Alan
Dale
Dzhanibekov
Pituitary body post.
James
Z. Ivanov
20 fevrál
Esophagus
Yegorov
Rolfe
21 fevrál
Pharynx
Ussery
Adams
22 fevrál
Sinuses
Turcotte
Ryumin
23 fevrál
Cardiopulmonary team
Lazarev
Romanenko
Dodson
Franklin
Shoemaker
Rider
26 fevrál
Ears
Lyakhov
Boland
27 fevrál
Eyes
Dobrovolska
Notler
Booker
Rot2
28 fevrál
Mouth (teeth all implants)
McHargue
29 fevrál
Salivary glands
Barton
Schedule for mart (and apryél if necessary) will be posted mid-fevrál.
Dallas
I wasn’t able to see her for ten days. Then they’d call me every few days, whenever she had lucid periods relatively free from pain.
They gave her back her real appearance, removing the flesh tractors that had changed the shape of her face and body, which was comforting to both of us at first. Later it became disturbing, much more so for her than for me, the again familiar face daily becoming more haggard and old, not only from the constant pain and anxiety but also as a natural effect of the Stileman Treatment’s wearing off. Baird juggled the order of therapies so she could have facial plastic surgery as soon as it was practical.
The visits were more for my benefit than hers. Sometimes we could talk, but she had difficulty concentrating and often would lapse into confusion or fall asleep. She did a good job of being brave, though she seemed always on the verge of collapse. Once she did crack and began crying hysterically; a doctor gave her a shot and she relaxed into sleep. I wondered whether it would have been better to let her cry.
After a while I was on the verge of cracking myself, under the unrelenting pressure of helplessness. Baird offered me mood drugs, which I refused on principle for too long. Finally he said he wouldn’t let me see her if I didn’t take something; my gloominess was going to retard her progress.
By the end of February I had to stop seeing her anyhow; they had to put her into total biotic isolation for a couple of weeks, trying to control a runaway combination of infections that cropped up after the heart/lung team had finished with her. Baird said it was not any more dangerous than most of the planned therapies, but it did slow them down.
Other than taking those occasional trips to the hospital, I stayed locked up in the villa. I had spent one day, right after they started on Maria, in frantic commerce: I sold most of our trade goods, paid off two months’ rent, and filled the pantry with food and drink.
I bought more weapons and spent a lot of time sitting in the darkness watching the street. Too many people knew who I was. Sooner or later someone would come to collect me. I had to have an off-duty doctor or nurse drop in every night to stand guard while I slept, or tried to sleep.
Sometimes people would come by during the day: Baird or Liz or, oddly, Big Dick Goodman, who was one of Baird’s fellow conspirators against the Stileman Foundation.
Goodman was over seven feet tall, slender as a blade of grass but with an oversized head. He had more motivation than most Stilemans to help Baird. The last time he’d gone to the clinic he’d almost died because of the stress of spending six weeks in Earth gravity. There wouldn’t be a next time. He gobbled calcium and protein and exercised daily, but he couldn’t seem to build up bone and muscle mass. Born on Ceres, it was as if his body had de
cided he was going to be an actual extraterrestrial. They had called him Lysenko in school.
On the tenth of March Dick showed up with Baird. I liked Baird, too, but never liked to see him during the day. I was always afraid he’d be bringing news.
It was good news this time. “It looks as if we have the infections beaten. They’re working on the inner and middle ears this afternoon. Maybe you could see her tonight, before we go on to the next phase.”
“Fine. Just going to pick up where the schedule left off, eyes next?”
“Yeah, that’s Winnie Dobrovolska’s team; pretty easy stuff, but she won’t be seeing much until next week.” We floated in toward the kitchen, Dick homing in on the refrigerator.
“You guys wanna beer?” I took one but Baird said coffee; he’d been up for twenty hours and still had to do ward rounds.
I squeezed out a cup of coffee and zapped it. “Good time for her not to be able to see,” Baird said, “and for you not to see her. Finish up all the facial surgery.”
“I always feel like it’s bad luck to ask how she’s doing.”
“So don’t ask, I’ll tell you.” He took a sip of coffee and let go of the cup while he concentrated on sitting down. “That’s why I came. It looks like coasting downhill from here. There’s some painful stuff left, but nothing particularly life-threatening.” He caught the cup and looked at his watch. “In eleven days, if there aren’t any complications, we should be able to remove the zipper and glue her up.” She had a plastic zipper from the base of her chin to her pubic bone. “After that we do the skin replacement, which has to hurt, but she’ll know then that she’s made it.”
“And then …”
“That’s why we’re here,” Dick said. “We gotta talk about ‘and then.’”
“How we’ll go about dropping our bombshell. How we’re going to use you and Maria.”
“My notoriety, okay; we talked about that. I’m willing to do anything so long as it doesn’t expose her to physical danger.”
They looked at each other and Baird let out a tired sigh. “There will be danger for all of us. There’s something we haven’t told you; something that not even all of the medical people know.”
“Foundation’s been fuckin’ with us,” Dick said. “They been murderin’ us.”
“The ten- to twelve-year cycle is artificially induced. There’s no reason the rejuvenation can’t last seventy, eighty years or more.”
That was more than interesting. “What do they do to us?”
“Something to do with the spleen; we’re not sure exactly what. It’s always atrophied when you do an autopsy of an ex-Stileman who’s died because of running out of money, but it seems normal for a Stileman who dies accidentally. Before the terminal degeneration has started.”
“You’d think that would be common knowledge,” I said.
“Would if you could get it published,” Dick said.
“What actually kills you is not the spleen specifically, but a generalized breakdown of the immune system. That’s my bailiwick; that’s how I got started on this project.”
“It’s pretty neat,” Dick said, “pretty cute. They go to old Stileman ’way back then and make the spleen booby trap part of the package. He’s this wet-handkerchief liberal who an’t ever recovered from bein’ born rich. They give him the magic wand: wave this an’ nobody’s ever gonna be super-rich again. Except they’re willin’ to die for it. More than die. Give up immortality.”
“You can see why the limitation was necessary for the economic scheme to work at all,” Baird said. “If the first millionaire clients had traded their fortunes for seventy or eighty years instead of ten, the Stileman Foundation could never have grown so powerful so fast. They’d all be millionaires again in a few years, and then have most of a century to extend and consolidate their fortunes. They could in actual truth rule all of the world—including, eventually, the Stileman Foundation itself.”
That was a lot to sort out. “So the foundation will be out to get you, not just because you can underbid them.”
“We can expose them. The basis of their financial power is murder and deceit. Even if they owned every legislature and judiciary in the world, and they don’t—that wouldn’t protect them from the wrath of their own clients. The ten thousand wealthiest people in the solar system.”
“Slow down now,” I said. “We don’t know that all of the foundation is in on it. You say some of your own doctors don’t know. What would be the minimum number who are in the know on Earth—just the spleen doctors and the immunologists?”
“And the overall coordinator, whoever my counterpart is there. Of course, like me, he could be one of the immunologists.”
“But nobody on the board is necessarily part of it. They go in the clinic every ten years like everybody else.”
“Go in an’ play cards for six weeks,” Dick said.
“Presumably everyone who was in on the original proposal knew about the artificial limitation. Most of them must still be alive, some of them either on the board or serving as silent partners. I would be very surprised if everybody on the board did not know all about it. Probably everyone high up in Briskin’s Steering Committee, too.”
“I wonder. He never dangled that in front of me, the possibility of a longer time between rejuvenations. But he did say there were things he wasn’t allowed to tell me.”
“So who knows?” Baird said. “Literally, who? We ought to play it safe and assume everybody knows.”
Dick shook his head. “Careful. We could maybe pick up some allies, you know? Half the board might be holdin’ out on the other half.”
“Good point. We’ll keep that in mind.” He sipped the coffee and blew on it. “So we’ve got four things: The truth about the murders you’re accused of. Existence of the Steering Committee. The foundation’s cynical manipulation of the Stileman Process. Our duplication of it. They’re all strongly or weakly linked. But it seems to me we ought to feed them to the media one piece at a time. We don’t want to drop all the information at once.”
“People’s lips only move so fast,” Dick said. “Average person’s attention span couldn’t handle it all.”
We thought together for a minute. Dick belched by way of preamble. “You got the order right. We show ’em Dal an’ Maria to get their attention. And Eric’s TI. Maria’s old bodyguard, if they haven’t got to her.
“This gets the ’phems interested. Here’s two of Dal’s victims, one alive and one not, sayin’ he’s innocent and not crazy. They point the collective finger at Briskin and also accuse him of murderin’ the Russian and the Strine.
“How come he murdered ’em? Hold on to your hats. Conspiracy time, Steering Committee. That gets the Stilemans interested.”
“Hold it,” I said. “Do we have anything on the Steering Committee other than my word against theirs? Against Briskin’s?”
“Corroborative testimony,” Baird said. “You can’t be the only one they approached who had second thoughts.”
“Yeah,” Dick said, “and even if nobody comes for’d right away, they will after we drop our little bomb. Foundation got you by the spleen! Here’s chapter an’ verse.”
“I don’t know about that one,” I said, devil’s advocate as usual in these discussions. “That’s going to be pretty technical stuff. They’ll have scientists lined up twice around the block to prove you’re lying.”
“That’s when we produce Maria’s records and show that we can duplicate the process, without the ten- to twelve-year limitation.”
“Which won’t be proven for thirteen years. By which time I will have died in jail.”
“You an’t gonna chicken out.”
“Who said anything about that? I just don’t want you guys to think that Maria and I are only going to walk out on a stage, take a bow, and then go on with our business. Just going back to Earth, even if we didn’t an
nounce who we were, will be like playing catch with hand grenades.”
“The public announcement should make you safe, at least from assassination.”
“If the camera’s plugged in.”
We had discussed this part of it before. Maria and I did have to go back to Earth. The foundation had an octopus grip on the news media. If Baird were to broadcast from here, his story would be released as NUTSO ROCKNIK CLAIMS STTLEMAN HOAX, appearing in all the finest tabloids, and nowhere else. And not even the tabloids would report the subsequent bloodbath on Ceres.
The plan was for Fireball to return to Earth with somebody else piloting. Maria and I would go back as unregistered hitchhikers a couple of days before, on a stealthed vessel that might be able to slip into White Sands as if it were returning from the Moon.
If we were caught, the pilot could claim he was returning me for the reward, and we might get uncensored air time anyhow. If things went as planned, though, we’d set up a controlled press release situation, with enough money spread around to guarantee us at least a few minutes of uninterrupted multichannel broadcasting. The foundation couldn’t edit us out of existence after we’d gone out live on a dozen local stations all over the country.
“So what’s our timetable look like now?”
Baird shrugged. “Depends on how long it takes until Maria’s surgically clean enough for a few gees’ acceleration. Maybe four weeks after she’s released, maybe three, depends. Mental recuperation might take longer than physical; nobody’s ever gone through this before. It’s still up in the air.”
Dick cleared his throat. “Doc, you said we was gonna—”
“That’s right. Look, Dallas. Suppose, uh, in the eventuality that …”
“We an’t talked about what would happen if she dies. Would you still be with us?”
I had thought about it. “Yes. I wouldn’t have so much news value, assuming you’d have to wait until you had a successful patient. The patient wouldn’t have as much news value as Maria, either. But we’d have plenty of time to work out—”