Starship Coda (3 page)

I took a long swallow of beer and said, “I have no need to ‘redress the balance’, as you put it. I couldn’t give a damn about what people think of me, other than the few people close to me. And as to what everyone out there thinks…I’m not interested. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the truth of everything is corrupted, altered, mangled, the more it’s discussed, analysed, objectified. If we’re honest with ourselves, then each one of us knows in his or her heart what the truth is.”

I finished, sat back and took a breath.

“I find that very interesting, David. So…” he said, and smiled, “what is the truth as you perceive it? What happened all those years ago, on the beach when your friend Maddie Chamberlain was swept out to sea during the storm? The film glossed over the incident, the books made one or two inept stabs at getting at the truth…But, and I’m guessing here, but as I look at it, it seems to me that you achieved some kind of mental catharsis at the time, some turning point that allowed you to attain closure, to end one chapter of your life and move on.”

Hannah squeezed my hand and said, “You don’t have to relive all that, David.” She stared at Antrobus and went on, “I don’t know why you want to pry like this, Mr Antrobus, but…”

He held up both hands. “I’m sorry. I do apologise. I realise that I must seem rude, even crass. Forgive me. My…my natural interest in psychology…” He gave his disarming smile again, including me in its compass, and went on, “I’m afraid my curiosity got the better of me.”

I said, “Just where is Sally?”

He raised a manicured finger and said, “Please, one moment.” He stood, strode to the end of the deck, and raised a com to his lips. He spoke briefly, then returned to us. “Sally will be ready shortly.”

He refilled my beer and Hannah’s juice, and I took a drink and said, “You said that you’re Sally’s doctor.” I paused. “Just what is wrong with her?”

He nodded. He had the infuriating habit of accommodating himself to one’s expectations, almost as if he were a mind-reader who knew exactly how to react in order to win one over.

“Sally came to me several years ago, David, at a very low point in her life. She was…psychologically vulnerable, I might say on the very edge of insanity. We…we went through various procedures in order to peel back, as it were, the layers of accreted pain. Of course, at the core was what happened all those years ago when Carrie perished.”

“So you are a psychiatrist?” I said.

“No, David, I am not. Sally came to me because she wanted to undergo ART.”

I repeated the acronym as he had said it: ay-are-tee. “Okay, I give in. What is it?”

He sipped his cocktail, then said, “First, let me explain something. The motivating psychological factor driving Sally’s pain was…guilt. She felt guilt at allowing you to take Carrie out that day. If you recall, she didn’t want you to go. She wanted to take Carrie, but you insisted. Anyway, she felt the need to rid herself of that guilt in some way, and she came to me in order to achieve that.”

“By ART,” I said. “But would you mind explaining just what it is?”

“Your wife, your ex-wife, wanted to regress, David. She wanted to forget the pain, she wanted to return to a state where she would no longer be plagued by the demons that haunted her. I explained that my therapy didn’t work like that…that it was purely a physical process. I sent her away to think about it…and a few months later she returned and said she wanted to undergo the process anyway. She was a multi-millionaire, she told me, and could afford everything the procedure entailed…” He gestured, parting his hands. “I will state here, before you think that I am a mercenary, that while the money was an attraction, what actually motivated me in agreeing to her request was not the financial rewards but the challenge of curing your wife. I saw that my therapy might, after all, have certain psychological benefits.”

“What the hell,” I said, “did you do, Antrobus?”

He smiled. “Over the course of the past five years, David, I undertook to treat your ex-wife with a course of Age Reversal Therapy.”

* * *

Hannah was the first to respond. “Just what do you mean by that, Mr Antrobus?”

“The procedure is still in its experimental stages, and I am one of the few practitioners licensed to carry out the operation. It combines surgery and what we call telomere snipping. Put bluntly, we access the subject’s genome and terminate the aging process. Then, through chemical stimulus, we reverse the aging process. This, combined with corrective surgery, leads to the subject appearing to…grow younger.”

I stared at the little girl on the swing at the end of the garden, refusing to believe what my brain was telling me.

“The girl…” I said, pointing. “That’s Sally, my ex-wife?”

“That is Sally,” Antrobus said, and went on, “The process costs in excess of five million dollars, which is why it’s not that widespread. And, as I said, it is still in its early stages.”

I watched the girl in the swing appear and disappear, kicking her legs. She looked, with her gawky frame and brilliant blonde hair, like the spitting image of my daughter.

Now I knew why Sally had elected not to show herself on the holo-cube she had sent from Earth, and on the com transmission that very morning.

I said, “I don’t see how this…how this procedure would help Sally, mentally.”

He gestured with his cocktail glass. “Neither did I, at first. I tried to dissuade her from undergoing the procedure. Then, as I came to get to know your ex-wife, I perceived that ART might in fact prove a benefit in her psychological recovery.”

Hannah leaned forward. “And how might that be?”

Antrobus pursed his lips, considering the question. “I think that

if I were to answer that I would be in breach of patient confidentiality.”

I sipped my drink, watching my ex-wife—in the guise of a little girl—swing back and forth, back and forth.

I said, “Why did she want to come here?”

“To see you, to talk about…what happened.”

“And she thought that this might help her?”

He inclined his head. “I think this was her reasoning, yes.”

“And if I’d refused to meet her?”

He shrugged. “Then that would be your choice, David. But I rather think that the meeting, and what might result from it, would be of benefit to you, too.”

I stared at him. I was about to protest that he was very wrong on that score when I became aware that the squeaking of the swing had abruptly ceased. I looked up the length of the garden. The girl—I still found it hard to think of her as Sally—had jumped from the swing and was standing at the top of the lawn, staring down at the house.

She lifted a hand and waved, and my heart almost stopped.

I recalled my daughter waving to me on a hundred occasions in the distant past…

“I think you should talk to her,” Antrobus murmured. “At least listen to what she has to say.”

I glanced at Hannah, who said, “Perhaps it would be best if you went alone, David.”

Like a man in a daze I stood up and moved from the deck. I descended the steps to the lawn, and then paused, staring up the emerald strip to the tiny, slim creature at the far end.

She waved again, and something caught in my throat.

I made the long walk up the garden and paused before her.

* * *

I stared at her, and made out the features of my ex-wife-to-be—or rather of the woman who had been my ex-wife—in the adolescent lines of her face. But more than that, I recognised my daughter, Carrie; it was as if she had come to life, returned from the dead, almost twenty-five years after drowning in the sea off the coast of British Columbia.

“Hello, David. You’re looking well.”

I laughed; I must have sounded almost hysterical. “I suppose I could say the same for you!”

“Well, aren’t you going to hug me, David?”

I was torn; the idea at once revolted and attracted me. I had an initial gut impulse to step forward and embrace the girl who looked so much like my daughter, while at the same time I reminded myself that this was my wife, that the mind behind the little girl’s eyes was that of a seventy year-old woman.

Numbly, I shook my head.

She smiled, reached out and took my hand. She walked back to the swing, taking me with her, and lodged herself on the timber seat. She kicked and swung back and forth, back and forth, watching me, smiling. A big silver dragon-fly hovered nearby; I batted it away and it retreated a couple of metres, bobbing up and down, as if it wanted to eavesdrop on what we had to say.

I said, “Why did you come here?” I leaned against the metal frame of the swing, watching her.

“To see you, David. We have so much to talk about, so much that we didn’t say to each other after…after what happened.”

That was not my memory of events. I recalled that we had gone over the same old ground again and again, arguing in that stultifying, futile fashion that couples perpetuate when they attempt to clarify their point of view. But, locked in intimacy and incrimination, we had succeeded only in sounding self-justifying and accusatory.

I said, “Like what?”

She smiled. “Don’t sound so angry and defensive, David. I haven’t come here to accuse you.”

I almost said, “Well, that’s what you did all those years ago,” but stopped myself. Instead I said, “Why…” I gestured at her. “Why

did you have this done? Weren’t you satisfied with the woman you were?”

I wondered if her undergoing Age Reversal Therapy was a natural consequence of the person she had been: I recall the money she had spent on cosmetic surgery, on miracle creams and toning procedures in a bid to make her look younger. It was as if even back then she had had a pathological fear of growing old.

But a little voice in my head wondered, then, if she might have undergone the procedure so that she could confront me with this simulacrum of my dead daughter, and so in some twisted psychological way exact her belated revenge.

The little girl on the swing said, “I was never satisfied with the person I was, David. I did nothing but look ahead, and I didn’t like what I saw…Death, disease, entropy.” She smiled brightly, and the words coming from someone seemingly so young were terribly incongruous. “That’s why I found such solace in Carrie. I lived
through
her. I cherished her youth, her innocence. And then…”

Her face twisted, and the manifestation of grief on so young a face was painful to behold.

I hung my head. “I’m sorry.”

She swung back and forth in silence.

A little later I said, gesturing to her body, “Antrobus didn’t say much about the procedure. I’m curious. When does it stop?”

She interrupted, “You mean, does it continue, sweeping me back through infancy, to my baby years…” She trilled a little girl’s laugh. “Of course not, David! This is where it stops, right here, at the somatic age of thirteen.”

“A coincidence that it should stop at that age, isn’t it?” I asked, avoiding her piercing blue eyes.

“Maybe, but that suited me very well.” She kicked her feet into the scuffed earth beneath the seat and juddered to a halt, staring at me. “I wanted to see the world through the eyes of the child my daughter had been, David—though of course that is impossible.”

I was heartened that she had sense enough to realise that.

She stood up from the seat and smiled at me. “One drawback of the procedure is that I’m left immensely tired. The treatment is ongoing, and by late afternoon and evening I’m shattered.”

I felt a sudden relief that she was bringing the meeting to a close; I had, all things considered, got off lightly.

She went on, however, “I wonder if I might come to your ship tomorrow morning? We’re leaving for Earth the day after tomorrow, and I would like to see you again.”

I nodded, despite my reservations. I didn’t want to give her the impression that I had anything to fear. “Yes,” I said. “Very well.”

I wondered if this had been no more than a warm up, a
faux
amicable session to tenderise me: the grilling would commence in earnest tomorrow.

She gave me a dazzling smile. “Wonderful, David. I’ll see you around eleven.”

We walked back to the house and climbed the steps. Sally trotted across the deck and paused before Hannah. She held out a small hand and said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Ms Conway.”

Unsure, Hannah took the hand and murmured something.

Sally said, “Antrobus, I’m tired. Show David and Hannah out, and then I’ll have my afternoon treatment.”

Five minutes later we were driving away from the Laurels. Hannah glanced at me and said, “Well…how did it go?”

I shook my head. “I’m not at all sure. She’s coming over tomorrow.” I described our brief meeting, and finished, “and I’m sure she’ll be sharpening her claws for the next encounter.”

* * *

Hannah invited our friends over that evening—in a bid to take my mind off things, I think—and we ate a meal in the
Mantis
and then sat on the veranda and watched Delta Pavonis sink into the sea.

At one point Hawk said, “Hannah told me about ART earlier, David, so I thought I’d do a little research.”

“And?”

We sat around the table with our drinks, watching the big spacer as he leaned forward and said, “And I found out that the process is actually illegal. It was banned on Earth three years ago. I tried to dig something up about Gideon Antrobus, but drew a blank. It’s my guess that he’s using a pseudonym, which would make sense if he’s taking scads of money from millionaires and performing illegal ART on them.”

Maddie asked, “Why did the authorities make it illegal?”

“Because the procedure’s damned dangerous. A lot can go wrong and fatalities are high. In the early days, seven out of ten patients survived only a year into the treatment and succumbed to massive psychological and physical trauma, as well as side effects like cancers and coronary complications.” He shrugged. “Not many subjects have lasted more than five years.”

Maddie sat back and exclaimed, “Imagine being so insecure as to take the risk!”

Kee said, “David, how long has Sally been having the treatment?”