River of Blue Fire (25 page)

“We'll get to that.” Conrad Gardiner spoke a little sharply, as though he felt a need to establish his own place in the hierarchy. Fredericks had that effect on people, Ramsey had noticed. “But not here. That's part of why we wanted to see you in person. We'll go outside somewhere.”

“We'll go to a restaurant. We don't want to say anything about it here,” Vivien added.

“What on earth are you talking about?” Fredericks' thunderhead frown had returned. “You have lost me completely.”

Ramsey, who was practicing the silence that he generally found useful, was intrigued but also worried. The Gardiners had seemed quite level-headed in the few conversations he'd had with them, deadly serious in their desire to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Fredericks in person, but also secretive. He had trusted them on gut instinct. If they turned out to be conspiracy-mongers of some kind, UFO cultists or Social Harmonists, he would quickly begin to regret his own role in persuading his clients to fly out from Virginia.

“I know we sound mad,” said Vivien, and laughed. “We wouldn't blame you for thinking it. But just wait until we've all had a chance to talk, please. If you still think so, we'll pay for your trip here.”

Mr. Fredericks bristled. “Money is not the issue . . .”

“Jaleel, honey,” his wife said. “Don't be stuffy.”

“But first,” Vivien continued as though the tiny sitcom had not happened, “we'd like you to come see Orlando.”

“But . . .” Enrica Fredericks was taken aback. “But isn't he . . . in a coma?”

“If that's what it is.” Conrad's grin was bitter. “We've been . . .” He broke off to stare at something in the corner, where the coats had been piled in a heap on the one unused chair. The stare went on too long; the others turned, too. Ramsey couldn't see anything there. Gardiner rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Sorry, I just thought . . .” He let out a long breath. “It's a long story. I thought I saw a bug. A very particular bug. Don't ask—it will take too much time, and I'd rather explain later. It'll be easier if you just go on thinking we're crazy for now.”

Ramsey was amused. His clients exchanged a covert look between themselves, then Mrs. Fredericks stole a glance in Ramsey's direction. He gave a little head-shake, silently saying
don't worry about it
. In his not-inconsiderable experience with the deranged, the genuine loonies were not usually the ones who suggested that what they were doing must seem insane.

“You don't have to come with us when we go see Orlando,” said Vivien, rising. “But we'd like you to. We'll only stay a minute—I'm going to be spending the evening with him after we've all finished.”

As they moved out into the hospital corridor, the women fell in beside one another, the men paired up behind them, and Ramsey took up the rear, this shielded position enabling him to forget his dignity long enough to try a subtle skating motion on the paper hospital shoes.

He hadn't been getting out enough, there was no question about it. Ramsey knew that if he didn't make a point of doing a little less work, he would wind up at the least shocking some client by bursting into inappropriate laughter in a serious meeting, as he'd almost done a few times in the last weeks, or at worst pitching over dead at his desk some day, as his father had done. Another decade—less, now—and he'd be in his fifties. Men still died from heart attacks in their fifties, no matter how many modern medications and cellular retrainers and cardiotherapies there might be.

But that was the thing about work, wasn't it? It always seemed like something you could just put down, or trim the excess from, or ignore if things got bad enough. But when you got up close to it, things were different. It wasn't simply work, it was the tortuous mess of the DeClane Estate, which had become a dreadful gallows soap-opera that had paralyzed three generations. Or it was old Perlmutter trying to win back the company he had built and then lost in a boardroom mugging. Or Gentian Tsujimoto, a widow trying to win compensation for her husband's poorly-treated illness. Or, as in the case of the Frederickses, it was an attempt to make some kind of legal sense out of their daughter's stunningly mysterious illness, if only because
some
sense was better than no sense at all.

So, when he told himself he had to cut back on work, which people was he going to say “I'm sorry” to? Which trust for which he had labored to be worthy all his working life, which important connection or fascinating puzzle or heart-rending challenge, would he give up?

It was all very well to say it, and he certainly didn't want to follow his father into the first-class section of the Coronary Express, but how did you start throwing away the most important parts of your life, even to
save
that life? It would be different if he had anything much outside the office worth saving himself for . . .

Half of Decatur “please-call-me-'Catur-it's-what-my-mom-called-me” Ramsey was hoping that the Gardiners' portentous hints would lead to something as intriguing as the California couple had made it sound. A career case. The kind of thing that put you not just into the law books, but wove you into the fabric of popular culture like Kumelos or Darrow. But the part of him that had spent way too many nights staring at a wallscreen so cluttered with documents his eyes ached, dictating until he was hoarse while trying not to choke on the occasional hasty mouthful of take-out Burmese, could not help but hope that the Gardiners were in fact, and against his own estimation, complete and utter loons.

When they had donned the head-coverings and stepped through the sonic disinfectant, Mr. Fredericks had another attack of irritation. “If your son is suffering from the same thing that's affected Sam, why is all this necessary?”

“Jaleel, don't be difficult.” His wife was finding it hard to conceal her anxiousness. Ramsey had seen her at her daughter's bedside, and knew that underneath the smart clothes and composed features she was clinging to normality like a shipwreck victim to a spar.

“It's okay,” Vivien said. “I don't blame you for wondering. Your Salome is in a slightly different situation.”

“What does that mean?” asked Mrs. Fredericks.

“Sam, not Salome.” Her husband did not wait for her question to be answered. “I don't know why I ever let Enrica talk me into that name. She was a bad woman. In the Bible, I mean. What kind of thing, to name a child?”

“Oh, now, honey.” His wife smiled brightly and rolled her eyes. “The Gardiners want to see their boy.”

Fredericks allowed himself to be led through the air lock corridor and into the private room where Orlando Gardiner lay under a plastic oxygen tent like a long-dead pharaoh in a museum case.

Enrica Fredericks gasped. “Oh! Oh, my God. What's . . .” She put a hand to her mouth, eyes wide in horror. “Is that . . . going to happen to Sam?”

Conrad, who had moved to stand at the foot of Orlando's bed, shook his head, but said nothing.

“Orlando has a disease,” his mother said. “He had it long before any of this happened. That's why he's here in the aseptic wing. He's very susceptible to infection at the best of times.”

Jaleel Fredericks' frown now had a different character, that of someone watching a terrible wrong at one remove, a netfeed/news report of a famine or terrorist bombing. “An immune system problem?”

“In part.” Vivien reached her hand into the glove built into the tent and caressed Orlando's almost skeletally thin arm. His eyes were only white crescents between the lids. “He has progeria. It's an aging disease. Someone slipped up in the genetic testing—they must have. But we could never prove it. We knew it had been in my side of the family a few generations back, but the chances were so small it would be in Conrad's, too—well, when his tests came back negative, we never thought about it again.” Her eyes returned to her son. “If I had known, I would have had an abortion.” Her voice tightened. “And I love my son. I hope you understand that. But if I went back in time and had the choice again, I would have ended the pregnancy.”

A long silence was broken by Jaleel Fredericks, his deep voice softer now. “We're very sorry.”

Orlando's father actually laughed, short and harsh, a strangled sound that was clearly not meant to have come out. “Yeah, so are we?”.

“We know you've been suffering, too,” Vivien said. “And we know how hard it must have been for you to leave Sam, even for a day, to come out here.” She removed her hand from the glove and straightened up. “But we wanted you to see Orlando before we all talked.”

Mrs. Fredericks still had one hand over her mouth; her mascara, fashionably exaggerated, was beginning to run a little at the corner of her eyes. “Oh, the poor boy.”

“He's a
wonderful
kid.” Vivien was having trouble speaking. “I can't tell you how brave he's been. He's been . . . different all his life. Stared at when he goes out. And he's known since he was little that the chances of him living . . . even long enough to be a teenager . . .” She had to stop. Conrad looked at her from the foot of the bed, but did not move to comfort her. It was Enrica Fredericks who at last stepped forward and put a hand on her arm. Orlando's mother made a visible effort to gather herself. “He hasn't deserved any of this, and he's dealt with it so well that . . . that it would break your heart just to see it. It's all been so
unfair
. And now this! So I . . . so we wanted you to understand about Orlando, and about what a rotten deal he got. When we explain why we called you.”

Catur Ramsey took it upon himself to break this silence.

“Sounds like it's time for us all to go somewhere and talk.”

“So,” Enrica Fredericks said, “this menu looks lovely.” Her good cheer was as brittle as old glass. “What do you recommend, Vivien?”

“We've never been here before. We picked it at random out of a directory. I hope it's okay.”

In the silence, the snapping of the awning overhead was quite loud. Ramsey used his wineglass to pin down his napkin, which was threatening to blow away, and cleared his throat. “Perhaps we should jump right in, so to speak.”

“That's why we're sitting outside, too,” Conrad said suddenly.

“You've lost me again,” Fredericks replied. He squinted at the menu. “I think I'm going to have the sea bass.” He called the skulking waiter over from where he was huddling out of the wind. “Are you sure this is Pacific sea bass?”

When they had ordered, and the waiter had hurried back to the warmth of the indoor portion of the restaurant, Vivien began to speak.

“The problem,” she said, tracing a near-transparent circle of white wine on the tabletop, “is that kids today don't write anything down. They talk—God knows, they talk—and they go places together on the net, but they don't write anything down.”

“Yes?” said Fredericks.

“We've had a really hard time figuring out what Orlando's been up to,” Conrad Gardiner said. “On the net. But we think that's what's wrong with them both.”

“That's not possible.” Enrica Fredericks' voice was flat. “It doesn't work that way. Our doctor told us. Unless someone . . . someone ran some charge on them.” Her face was pinched and angry. “That's what they say, isn't it? ‘Ran some charge'?”

“That may be it,” Vivien said. “But if so, it's some kind of charge the doctors haven't heard of. Anyway, you'd have to abuse it seriously for years to have that effect—no, even then it wouldn't be the same. Look, you said it yourself—you can't unplug Sam. She screams, she fights, you have to plug her back in. The same thing's true with Orlando, except that he's been so sick we can only tell the reaction by what happens to his vital signs. We've checked with neurologists, neuropsychologists, charge-addiction treatment centers, everything. No one's ever heard of anything like this. That's why we contacted you.”

The salads and hors-d'oeuvres arrived. Ramsey frowned at his bruschetta. Maybe it was time to start taking this health stuff seriously. There was a list a mile long for heart transplants, even with the new generation of clonal replacements. He would have been better off ordering a green salad.

He pushed away the bruschetta.

“Forgive me for being impatient,” said Jaleel Fredericks, “but it seems to be my role in this particular gathering. What is the point? We know all this, although not the details.”

“Because we all know that something has happened to your Sam and our Orlando, but we don't think it's an accident.”

Fredericks raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“We've done our best to open up all Orlando's files on his system. That's why it's so frustrating that kids don't even use mail any more, like we did. There are pathways, but no records to speak of. And to make things more difficult, his agent has been removing files. In fact, that's one of the things we're worried about.”

Ramsey sat forward, intrigued. “Why is that?”

“Because it's not supposed to happen,” Conrad said. He was drinking only water, and he stopped to take a long swallow. “We froze the house system when this happened—well, all of Orlando's part of it, anyway. The only way his agent could be moving files against our wishes is with Orlando's permission, and . . . well, you saw him. So why is it that the thing is still removing files and destroying others? It's even hidden itself, so we can't turn it off without killing the whole system and losing any evidence we've got of what happened to Orlando. In fact, the thing's gone AWOL entirely. The robot body it uses around the house is gone, too. That's what I thought I saw in the hospital.” He shook his head. “The whole thing is creepy.”

“But I don't understand,” Enrica said plaintively. “Why would any of this happen? If someone's hiding files, or destroying them, or whatever, what reason could there be?”