The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller (21 page)

Autumn puts down her tea. “Pace yourself, Mr. Durbin. You’ve got a long way to go. There’s really no hurry.” She pushes back her chair and stands. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to excuse me now. I always take a walk this time of day.”

“Alone?”

“Alone. Can I call you a shuttle?”

“No, I’ll take care of it,” Lane says as he rises. “Could we continue this conversation another time?”

“Not this one,” she says. “But maybe another.” She holds out her hand. “Goodbye now.”

As Lane takes her hand, it feels almost unnaturally cool. “Thanks. I’ll show myself out. Have a nice walk.”

Lane can feel her presence fade as he walks back through the house to the front door and out onto the front porch. He stops and looks back through the screen door, which lets him see all the way through the French doors into the garden and out into the woods.

He continues to watch for several minutes, standing in the resurgent warmth and buzz of insects. She’s gone. He can almost hear the hoarse whisper of the dry grass as it gives way beneath her sandals. A carnal moment flashes its beacon and he desperately wants to follow, to stalk her through the forest and then fall with her to the soft earth.

The beacon fades. Lane is left with the porch, the warm afternoon, the insects. He steps forward and tries the screen. Still open.

Once inside, he moves slowly and carefully, and has the odd sensation that he’s actually floating a hair above the floor. To be on the safe side, he walks through the house and garden, and checks the path to the woods. Nothing but chirps, buzzes, and floating seedlings. She’s really gone.

He goes inside and roams through the place with a practiced eye, finding next to nothing. No computer. No personal effects or paperwork. No mementos of times gone by. No messages or outgoing numbers on the phone system. It’s as if Autumn West doesn’t really live here, yet obviously she does, with dishes in the sink, unmade bedding, and clothes in the hamper. He’s never seen anything quite like it.

Only one item floats above this sea of anonymity. A framed picture on her nightstand, a color photograph of dubious quality. She smiles at the lens, and appears just a few years younger than now. She wears a thick coat, and a wool cap, and the background reveals a series of storefronts in the classic style of small-town America.

Lane gets out his handheld, sets the camera at max resolution, and captures a picture of the picture. He wants to know more, but not as much as he wants to find his brother. Autumn West is a detour Lane simply can’t afford to take.

He goes out the door to the porch, where he scans the landscaping and finds a decent spot. He pulls a video nanobug from his pocket and pushes it into a convenient stone crevice.

He promises himself that she’ll remain a diversion, an entertainment, a distraction. Nothing more.

A little squadron of spent leaves flutters by the kitchen window, twisting in the morning sun. Lane tracks their path as he waits for the coffeemaker to finish. The device is superautomated, with several “gourmet” settings that are lost on him. A polite beep signals the end of the process, and he pours a cup and sits at the kitchen table with its roughly polished hardwood top. Upscale rental furniture sprawls out around him, all cleaving to some consistent sensibility in the mind of some interior designer, the ghost of good taste.

The silence and cruel façade envelop him as he sips. The pseudo-home of Allen Durbin, the pseudo-home of Lane’s family that never was nor will ever be. He shakes it off and opens a connection between his laptop and his handheld. He’s sure it can be plucked out of the home’s wireless cloud and delivered afar, but he’s willing to risk it. While the connection initializes, he plays with the pieces in his head. Johnny, Ms. Crampton, the Institute, Mount Tabor, the plane crash. They slither about like drops of oil on hot metal, skittering, colliding, bouncing, but they never settle into a coherency.

He lets the puzzle go and retreats to something more entertaining: Autumn West. He brings up the picture he took of the photo in her bedroom, the solitary artifact of her past. He does a modest zoom and pans to the left of her face. A sidewalk lined with one-story businesses stretches down the main street of a thousand towns across the Midwest. She said she was from rural Nebraska and the picture seems to confirm it.

He pans a little more to the left, almost into the foreground, and comes across the front of an old movie theater from the golden age of cinema. Vertical green neon descends to spell
AVALON
. Underneath it, an elevated wedge of marquee juts out over the sidewalk. Hand-placed capital letters in lurid red spell out the title of this week’s feature, some movie Lane’s never heard of.

He opens another window and does a Meternet search of Diebenkorn paintings. A few pages later, he lands on the one that hangs on her wall. One more page and he receives an estimate of its value: twenty-five million dollars.

He goes back to the painting and stares at it. Twenty-five million dollars. It’s one thing to live in Pinecrest and quite another to be here in your mid-twenties with a major museum piece hanging on your cottage wall.

An alert issues from the laptop’s audio transducer. The neural circuits in the video bug at Autumn’s are busy bearing witness to something they judge to be significant. A window automatically opens on his display, and he sees her walking down the path. She’s dressed in a stylish pantsuit, not the kind of thing you wear to photograph birds or for a casual trip to the store. The bug’s micromotors pan the lens to the street, where an air hop shuttle pulls up.

She’s going downtown. But where? He looks over at the stupendously valuable painting and then back to her boarding the shuttle to the air hop terminal.

He folds the laptop shut and resolves to follow, at least for now.

***

An air hop shuttle drops Lane at the terminal, which sits on flat terrain on the far side of the pond. Two choppers rest on the tarmac in front of a two-story building with a front of tinted glass. Covered walkways extend out to the periphery of the aircraft, with their drooping rotors at rest. The upper story offers a mezzanine view of the lobby below and the tarmac beyond, and Lane has stationed himself here.

Each craft has a separate exit with a display mounted above. The left exit announces a boarding time in one minute, and to confirm it, a soft whine floats in as the aircraft’s engine fires up. The other exit’s display is dark, and its machine idle.

From up on the mezzanine, Lane can see down to where Autumn sits in the lobby, along with several other passengers. She gazes serenely at the scene outside. A perfect body at perfect rest. A woman’s voice announces that the flight to downtown will now board, and the display confirms it.

The passengers rise to board, all except Autumn. She remains unaffected and stationary. The exit door slides open and the passengers file through the lobe field and down the walkway. All except Autumn.

A few minutes later, the air hop lifts and rotates in the direction of the Trade Ring as it thrusts forward. In the meantime, Autumn sits alone in the lobby.

Lane watches the aircraft disappear into the distance and looks down at her solitary state of repose. What now? He checks his watch. How much time does he want to put into this highly speculative venture?

Once again, the soft whine of an engine. The exit display to the right lights up with a single declaration:
CHARTER ONLY
. Autumn rises. The woman’s voice comes back on and announces the destination: “Mount Tabor charter now boarding.”

Autumn walks slowly, almost hesitantly, through the lobe scan and down the walkway.

Lane feels a surge of interest flow through him. He’s uncovered another connection between Pinecrest and Mount Tabor, a completely unexpected one. He finds that the terminal has a business center, with several complimentary office cubicles. He grabs one for privacy and opens his laptop. He considers trying to trace the ownership of the Diebenkorn, but decides it’s hopeless. The inner workings of the art world have long since disappeared from public view, for both political and security reasons.

That leaves him with Autumn’s bedside photo. He opens it and stares. It has a certain quality found only in pictures from the predigital age, a product of chemicals, dyes, and paper, not photons striking pixels composed of semiconductor materials.

He focuses on the movie marquee in the background. He pans and zooms and reads the title of the movie spelled out in big, block letters:
ROAD TO RIO
. He opens a second window and does a search of movies based on the title, and there it is, release date and all. He does some simple arithmetic to derive her age. He subtracts the current year from the release year, and adds twenty-five years to approximate her age in the photo.

Autumn is at least one hundred years old.

Astounding. He’s seen her up close. She’s not a product of preservation technology, like most of her neighbors. What’s going on? He needs another data point to corroborate his calculation and returns to the detail in the picture. The storefronts stretching down the sidewalk all have display windows, and each contains a faint reflection of the street at curbside. Several of these reflections contain the images of parked cars. He cuts out one and puts it in its own
window, where he runs a series of image-enhancement filters. And there it is, a Chevrolet pickup truck with a rounded hood and a grill of four parallel chrome bars. He does an image search and comes up with the year it was made, which is consistent with his calculations.

He repeats the process for several other display windows. All the vehicles fall into the same age range. He’s looking at a little town, probably in Nebraska, as it appeared over seventy-five years ago.

He doesn’t want to believe it. He wants her to be twenty-five. For real. Maybe someone pasted her into the scene. But if so, they did a terrific job matching the lighting, especially with an old film-generated photograph.

Lane leans back from the laptop and turns to stare out at the empty tarmac. Fantastic as it seems, it would help explain Autumn’s detached, dreamy air, with the touch of melancholy, like an aging immigrant clinging to the Old World. Maybe she doesn’t really live here, at least in her mind. Maybe she lives not only in another place, but another time.

***

Autumn gazes out at the fractured grid of the city below from her window in the air hop. Except for the vague rush of the rotors, the cabin is deserted, the seats empty. She knows the route by heart. They are about ten minutes south of the landing pad at Mount Tabor, where Mr. Arjun Khan will greet her, and they will drive up the hill to the sprawling residence at the top. Arjun will explain to her that Mr. Zed is once again in imminent danger of dying. His heart, it’s always something about his heart.

She can’t deny him her presence. He’s given her the most unique epilog imaginable, even though the ultimate truth of it seems lost on him. He attended her resurrection and it only seems right that Autumn should attend his death, whenever that might be. There was a time when his demise might have caused her sorrow, but that time is past. Because back then, she adored him, Thomas Zed, her savior, provider, benefactor, and worker of miracles.

He never seemed old to her, and why would he? After all, she herself was one hundred and one years of age. She can still picture the joy radiating through all his creases and wrinkles when he first looked down on her intubated and supine form. It calmed her and gave her a course to follow through the days of confusion that followed.

Where am I?

You’re not in the hospital anymore. You’re at a specialized facility. We pulled you back from the brink. You’re doing very well, even better than we expected
.

But why? I was ready to go. What’s left for me?

Let me show you
.

Zed brought the mirror up to her flawless face.

The Bird, thought Arjun. It has to be the Bird. The dark hair, so carefully sculpted. The skin of copper. The leather overcoat. The silk tie knotted in perfect symmetry.

Of course. Who else would Harlan Green charge with security for a meeting of this magnitude?

Arjun Khan and the Bird stand by the stairwell on the fifth level of a ten-story parking structure where the Trade Ring fronts the river. The cool air of late night pervades the space. All is monochrome like the concrete, save for the Bird, who turns to Arjun and says, “Your people swept the place, my people swept the place. Have we got a deal?” he asks.

“Not quite,” Arjun replies. “We still need a personal cam scan on both parties. It’s all set up. All they have to do is walk through.”

The Bird looks down the row of deserted parking stalls to where the scanner is set up, with its portal of gray plastic. “Okay, but first I want it tested.”

“Agreed,” Arjun says. No one on Arjun’s side wants a record of this particular encounter. The same is probably true on the Bird’s side, but you can never be too cautious. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a little case containing a nanocam. “I think this will do.”

He hands the case to the Bird, who opens it and looks at a capsule only a few millimeters in diameter. “It’s active?” he asks.

“It’s active.”

The Bird closes the case and walks out into the parking structure. His footsteps bounce in a hard echo off the walls and floor. He passes through the scanner. The alarm promptly sounds. He hits a switch and it stops. He hits another switch and an arming light comes on once more.

“Okay, we’re done,” the Bird declares as he walks back. He elevates his arm to raise his coat sleeve and check his watch, a Ming from Chen Ho. “Ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes,” Arjun confirms.

The two men enter the stairwell. Arjun walks up, the Bird down.

Arjun opens the metal door to the parking structure’s roof, where the chopper rests on the helipad. The craft is dark, the engine silent, the pilot absent. Arjun scans the skyline as he walks to the machine. No buildings have an easy line of sight. No telephoto lenses are likely to be peering their way.