The Curiosity (20 page)

“You, too,” Dr. Philo said, strolling away.

“Have a nice day,” I echoed, lingering for another look. She turned forward, bored as ever, and began tallying the next customer.

It was all I could do to restrain myself until we were outside. Again the doors swept open ahead of us, but I was too preoccupied to recoil. As soon as they had closed I blurted, “What nation was that woman from?”

Dr. Philo scanned the roadway for another car to hail. “What do you mean?”

“She had more piercings than a pirate.”

Again she gave that melodic laugh, bright teeth and not an ounce of scorn. “That's just a thing that kids do now. You'll see them with tattoos, too.”

“Has America become a tribal place?”

“Now, there's a question.” She tucked the grocery bag under one arm, waved the other, and a car across the boulevard honked, weaving through other motor carriages toward us. “It's complicated, Judge Rice. If we are, it's not in the way that you mean.”

She opened the door and motioned for me to precede her. I shook my head no, bowing, not this time, and she clambered ahead. Once we settled in and she gave the driver the address of the lab, I gripped the handles fiercely. Gradually I realized that this driver would not be tossing us hither and yon. As I released my grip, Dr. Philo smiled. “We must seem incredibly strange to you.”

“Not strange, especially. Wealthy.”

She turned in her seat. “Do you think so? That market was nothing fancy.”

“Seven kinds of apples.”

“True.” She nodded. “I am going to have to figure out how to explain all of this for you. So much has changed.”

I contemplated that idea as we sped through town. Everything was new, of course, but everything old remained immediate in my memory, too. I would have loved to show Joan that market. The apple trees in our side yard in Lynn had produced such modest yields, she would have found the fruit of here and now to be miraculous.

Out the car window, buildings blurred by. Lights flashed, people hurried along the sidewalks with phones to their heads. As we turned a corner a woman tugged her dog's leash, and the animal sat obediently at her heel. It was the smallest dog I had ever seen. Something about that image, about seeing the pitiful creature held on a tether, gave me a moment's courage. “Could you possibly accomplish something else for me first, Dr. Philo? At the lab?”

“I can certainly try. What is it?”

“I hesitate to ask. Frankly I flinch from making any request, given what your project has already done for me. But I am a grown man, thirty-eight years old if you don't count the decades I was gone.”

“What is it you need, Judge Rice?”

“Hm. A proper bed. In a proper room, with a bit of privacy. Hm. I don't expect anything approaching the home I once had. But perhaps a window? A chair, a lamp? Possibly some books? Just a few: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens perhaps. I have no friends left on this earth, but still I might enjoy some modest comforts. ”

She did not reply. Had I erred? Did I overstep entirely? Dr. Philo only kept her gaze steadfast out the window. I could see the muscles in her jaw working, but still she did not speak.

“Never mind,” I said at last. “Forgive me, excuse my mistake. Please. It's just that in this new world, I do not properly know my place.”

She turned then, and shocked me: her eyes brimmed with tears. “Not the littlest bit did you make a mistake. It just shows . . .”

I waited. She wiped a knuckle across her cheekbone but did not speak.

“It shows . . .” I prompted.

“It shows that goddamn Carthage has no idea what you are living through. It shows that this project has its head completely up its ass.”

She had never spoken to me with such heat before. “I beg your—”

“It also shows what a wimp I have been about getting you taken care of. But the answer isn't Carthage. That guy won't let go of a nickel till he's squeezed six cents out of it. The answer is the world.” She nodded to herself. “Oh yes, everybody wants to be Judge Rice's friend.”

“I'm not certain I understand.”

“You want a few creature comforts? They're on their way. You want some friends? I will get you thousands.”

When we returned to the project, the protesters were ready. They had shaped themselves into a triangle, their captain at the apex. Like a preacher, he would call and they responded in kind. To my ears the sounds collided chaotically, but Dr. Philo made sense of them.

“Crazier every day,” she said. “This way, Judge Rice.”

She led me unnoticed along the building's flank, to the rear. There the feeling was less of laboratory or office and more of industry, with a place for unloading and storing goods, parking for cars, and no crowds. Dr. Philo swept a card through a device on the wall and I could hear the doors unlock.

We had barely stepped inside when a wave of exhaustion swept over me. I slumped against the wall but Dr. Philo supported me instantly. She straightened under my arm till I stood upright, then guided me forward. Despite the grocery bag in her free hand, I felt her strength firmly against me. She whispered reassurances, to keep walking, we were almost there, and the like. I barely heard her words, instead discerning the more important element, the tone of concern and affection. As we hobbled past the guard, it dawned upon me that this was a person I could genuinely trust. And so my hand, which had hung in the air past her arm, came down to rest upon her shoulder, and drew her near.

Dr. Philo's only reaction was to stop speaking. The silence was not awkward, however. The rather, as we waited for the elevator, it felt as comfortable as the manner in which we held each other.

The doors opened and there stood Dr. Gerber. His face lit at the sight of us, though Dr. Philo pulled away from me. I steadied my legs as though at sea.

“Oh-ho. Welcome back, intrepid travelers,” he cried. “But I must give you a warning. Carthage is on the warpath. Something Billings did or didn't do, and the boss was peacocking around shouting about it while I was trying to work. Anyway that was my cue to go for an evening stroll, and I encourage you two to keep a low profile, too.”

“Thanks.”

We moved past him, Dr. Philo pressing the button to send us upward. Before the doors touched, Dr. Gerber caught one with his hand. “Remember, kids: don't do anything I wouldn't do.”

“Give it a rest, Gerber,” Dr. Philo said. Then the doors came together.

“I don't understand,” I said.

“He's teasing me,” she replied. “It's complicated.”

Upstairs I found the energy to reach the chamber on my own powers. On the way in I noticed a counter of some kind, numbers in bright red: 21:07:41. There was one by the chamber, one in the control room, and now that I recollected, one in the glass foyer downstairs.

“What is that device counting?”

“That's the number of days since you were reanimated,” she said.

“Is it significant in some way?”

Dr. Philo pressed a combination of buttons to open the chamber door. “Not that anyone has told me.”

I went straight to the bed, but remembered my manners and leaned on it rather than lying prone immediately, as I was inclined to do. First I thanked Dr. Philo for the supermarket trip, which I said felt like a trial expedition to the here and now. “Also I am grateful for your speed at catching me each time that my energy collapses. I appreciate the trusting manner in which we walk together.”

She pursed her lips at that, not speaking, and again I wondered if I had erred in some way. Dr. Philo shook her head as though a fly were buzzing nearby, then dug into the grocery bag and placed my orange on the table.

“I'll check back after Hurricane Carthage has passed,” she said, punching the security numbers again. “Have a good rest.”

And she was gone. The room immediately felt mechanical and gray. There was naught else for me to do but hoist my weary bones upright, cross the room, and pick up that singular orange. It was brighter colored than any I'd seen in my prior time. The smell was wonderfully familiar, calling forth associations that ranged from that childhood Christmas gift to Joan's recipe for fruited ham. The peel was thicker, so my thumb could dig it open and away easily. The meat within was unmarred. I spread the wedges—and mystery of mysteries, there were no seeds. How could that be possible? How could a fruit persist in this world without means of reproduction?

I pulled one section free. My mouth watered at the prospect; this was a perfect orange, the Platonic ideal. I paused, aware of how desire can be its own reward, and recalled what eating one felt like, how refreshing, quenching, and tart. I brought that wedge up to my nose. The scent was fine, milder than I recalled but my desire not one whit reduced.

Oh, I felt foolish for succumbing to such sensuality about a fruit, however fine a specimen, and bit the wedge neatly in half.

There was almost no flavor. It was watery, yes, and there was a slight tang. But the rich wash of sensation I remembered was somehow missing. I took another bite, and the taste was the same. Bland, to be honest. Dull. I ate more, each section thumbing away effortlessly as one would hope, but the flesh tasted far less, well, less orange.

Half of the way through, I stopped. Were my memories that much stronger than the truth? Or did oranges in the here and now somehow contain less flavor than their visually imperfect ancestors? I found that notion hard to fathom. The farming expertise that cultivated this fruit to its ideal appearance could not have neglected the most important element, could it? Not possible, not in a race so competent and advanced. The explanation I settled on was far simpler: somehow in its century of being inanimate, my tongue had lost sensitivity.

Yes, that must be the reason. I set the fruit aside, concluding that the fault lay not in the orange but in myself. It must have been me.

CHAPTER 19

Lovely Evening

(Daniel Dixon)

T
he deadline is my friend. Sure, there's pressure, and compromises when you're running out of time. But take it from yours truly, if it wasn't for deadlines, nothing important would ever get done.

That particular night my editor had been bearing down like a bull on the loose in Pamplona, pressing me to write an update for
Intrepid
's Web site. I'd stalled him as long as I could. Normally I can bang out a piece like that half asleep: anecdotal lead, hooking quote, news peg by sentence four, stakes in the fifth paragraph, three sources, inverted pyramid structure, and a nice kicker, easy as drinking a beer.

But with all the back-and-forth with Carthage, including his tantrum about Billings that day, I'd been as distracted as a teenage water boy at cheerleading practice. Not to mention tracking down all those people who'd claimed to be the good judge's descendants, a first-rate goose chase that scored a colossal zilch. What kind of desperate dingbat pretends to be related to someone just for the possible fame? Plus I'd been interviewing bigwigs for my book: pray tell, sir and ma'am, what the Lazarus Project means to our disintegrating society and all that hot air. Hate to say it, but the day job was coming in at something like fourth place. Honestly, though, what magazine would fire a reporter hooked into an exclusive as rich and rare as this one?

There were also the cosmic questions, that's what I called them. Such as what is life, now that it persists outside of the rules we've understood for all human time? Nothing would ever bring my parents back, of course. But if Carthage had outsmarted freezing to death, what other tricks might he accomplish in the years ahead? If he beat ice, could he someday beat fire?

By habit I checked the digital counter of old Frank's reawakened days. Fourteen hours and forty-one minutes into day twenty-one. Ho-hum. The guy snored in his glass cabin like a millionaire on vacation. The real squeeze was 9
A.M.
, when my story had to be filed.

On the plus side, the regular clock read 1:15
A.M.
, which meant the imminent arrival of the delectable Dr. Kate. Life was about to improve. Hey, and maybe she could be the lead. I'd interviewed her earlier that day, forty-five minutes in her company as pleasant as a morning in June, about introducing the judge to the modern world. She described their trip to a supermarket, how our contemporary life can be overwhelming compared with a century ago.

I dug in my satchel for that notebook, flipped to her comments, and bent back to slapping those keys. But new distractions always arrive just in time, and right then Gerber came bopping in, looking as airy as a beach ball.

“The mad scientist returns,” I called. “What misdeeds have you been up to now?”

Gerber barely registered my presence. “I've been strolling in the lovely evening,” he said, almost singsong, then beelined for his desk. He sat, sniffed around for a moment, picked up his headphones. “Lovely evening, lovely evening.”

I was sitting halfway across the bullpen but I swear the man smelled of smoke. This place . . . oh, brother. What a menagerie.

“Strolling in the lovely evening.” Gerber clapped the headphones into place and nudged the mouse on his desk. His computer screen refreshed instantly, to a page filled with Chinese characters.