"Onopa-TheGreatfulDead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Onopa Robert)

ROBERT ONOPA

THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Let's talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs.
Shakespeare

WE WERE JUST SITTING THERE in the boardroom, Max and I, our black Italian
wingtips propped up at one end of the long slate table, our backs sunk into
charcoal velour. We were watching the Obituary Channel scroll by on the
wallscreen. That's really when it all began: during one of those moments of
stasis which originates a seminal, life-altering sequence of events, an
otherwise preternaturally calm patch of time in which the tiniest seed of chaos
fractalizes into a full-blown reordering of the cosmos. It goes without saying
that what happened from this quiet beginning unalterably changed my life. It
changed yours, too, I apologize to admit, as you will recognize once you fully
understand what I am revealing now, publicly, for the first time.

To the industry, watching the Obits scroll by is "trolling." Differentsized
vessels troll for different catches: the small firms troll for individual
clients, those recently deceased for whom the mauve icon in the encoded rainbow
of the color bar across the top of the screen indicates a still-open service
contract. On our level -- GD Inc. has six hundred franchised Homes nationwide
and operations in Canada, Mexico, and Korea -- we're more interested in
demographic shifts, tracking market share, the kinds of data indicated by the
shape of the color bar itself, its waves and fluctuations.

We started doing business even before "Elliott Anderson's Obituary Channel" was
first bounced down from a satellite. Our genesis lay in the demise of the 20th
Century "baby boomer" generation: as that population died off early in this
century, the demand for funerals increased so rapidly the deathcare industry
grew like bread rising under the action of yeast. We were the first chain to go
interstate, the first to use CDC statistics to locate new Homes, the first with
group plans {beginning with our benchmark contract with AARP}. We shaped the
franchise system of funeral homes you see today. So when Max minded the
boardroom wallscreen, he eyed it with a proprietary air, like an institutional
investor watching the big board dance before his or her eyes.

I confess I wasn't paying attention. I was staring past the wallscreen through
our eightieth floor window at the mustard-colored atmosphere of downtown L.A.,
wondering whether or not I was going to be able to sight Object 21/3847 -- a new
comet, just named Virgilius Maro -- as it finally hove into Earth's sight next
week. My hobby is imaging astronomical objects with VHD clarifying video. I was
concluding that the only way I was going to be able to see V. Maro for the full
fourteen seconds it would take for me to properly capture its image was by
leasing space on Mauna Kea. This gave new meaning to the phrase "visible to the
naked eye."

"Pass the fucking embalming fluid," Max growled, "They're killin' us."

"Mmmm. Us?"

He pointed at a new symbol, an ideograph, showing up in the color bar of the
Obit Channel screen. "Like who's this new outfit, Ancestors?"

"Asian specialists. In from Beijing," I said, stretching, sitting up. At least
I'd been keeping up with Post Mortem, our trade magazine. "They started out as
All Friends Mortuary Society. Special noodle feature on all banquet menus,
monk's food, saffron theme. Niche market. Specials include ancestors appear in
holocube .... "

"They're not the only ones."

"C'mon, Max. We're still doing close to three billion a year."

Max took a deep breath, rubbed his eyes, and spoke softly. "Not anymore.
Two-eight is what we billed last year. This year we thought twosix. Now look at
the way the market's turned on us. We'll be lucky to hurdle one-five.""

Really?"

"Your head's been in the clouds, Coop. Ever since Harriet took off last year."

"I am reading the trades." I blushed. My divorce aside, the truth is, the
business end of things had never seized me the way it had Max -- a business
which, I recalled with a pang of guilt, had treated me very well {ask Harriet,
whose settlement included a condo complex in Cabo). Lately I had been acting
like the numbers had little to do with me.

"We were the first with drive-through viewing," Max ruminated, "the first with
unit pricing, the first with mobile embalming centers .... "

My implanted pager hummed against my heart. I used the excuse to ease myself out
of my chair. "Cheer up," I tried. "We'll think of something."

"Well, you're the artist, Coop," Max teased with his crooked grin. "Right ?"

Right, I suppose. I started out as a videographer, got into deathcare by
scanning in sample make-up treatments on a part-time basis for Max when he was
still Sczyczypek Family Funeral Home. I stuck with Max when the business took
off. It was I who unified the company image with the Angel*" theme when we went
national, I who selected the Mozart Requiem[TM] as the signature for our
international line. It was I who designed our logo, the gilt letters G and D
surrounded by a gold, O-shaped frame, spelling in an oblique way a sacred
three-letter word to those of our customers who wanted reassurance that they'd
chosen the right provider in their time of need.

My only disagreement with Max had been over the name change, from Sczyczypek to
Grateful Dead. Not that I didn't think Sczyczypek couldn't be improved upon; but
how could the dead -- let me call your attention to the operative noun here --
be Grateful[TM]? Oh, I know the history of the term, its use by a 20th-century
rockgroup, its source as a descriptive term for a British ballad in which a
human helps a ghost find peace. But we're talking about corpses here, not
ghosts. Max pursued the fiction of their satisfaction as our trademark marketing
strategy. Another one of our signatures became the Mona Lisa[TM] smile on the
face of each of our clients. (True, I was the one who fabricated the mold for
the plastic insert -- who was I to argue with success?) But aside from giving
the franchise its name, Max mostly stuck to the books and left the rest to me.

Which meant that I was the one who was paged that morning. I had a warrantee
problem to deal with.

In the previous month the Westwood Grateful Dead had cremated the remains of a
prominent judge. His widow had called the Westwood facility to report that the
urn containing her husband's ashes had been stay with me here -- making noises.
I mean producing sounds: creaks, pops, strings of rapid ticks, little noises
like that. The Westwood unit had sent their man out, but he'd come back baffled.
They'd kicked the problem up to the franchise level, where it bounced over to
me.

You may already know me well enough to know that I prefer to work away from the
boardroom. Yet that day the relief I felt in walking away from Max's news was
balanced by a chill that ran down my spine when I identified the gray east I'd
been seeing over our flotilla of maglev Fleetwoods in the motor pool, limos
whose paint usually gleamed so black they shimmered in the light. They'd started
looking like funereal battleships.

I hadn't understood what was turning them that color: they were gathering dust.

It took me twenty minutes to drive to Westwood.

I found a pastel mansion at the address, all flat planes and glass walls; when I
activated the residential scanner the door was answered by a tall, leggy blonde
in a microskirt, hair all frizzed out, green lipstick. "I'm her niece," she
said, then promptly disappeared.

She left a rich cinnamon odor in the air.

Then Keiko MacPhee appeared in the foyer, dressed in black. She was younger than
I'd expected, thin but sturdy, with dark eyes and full lips. Her long hair was
pulled back in an austere way. I was struck by the way I could see her bones
beneath the spare flesh of her shoulders, her forearms, her long elegant
fingers, as if her mortality lay waiting just beneath her skin. Which of course
it did. I found her very attractive.

"I'm Cooper Boyd," I said. "From GD Inc."

"This way," she said, turning and pulling me in her wake into a living room with
a vaulted ceiling, faux rustic furniture, and a stark stone fireplace, a tribal
hearth in the Nomad style that's been so big for the past few years. I
recognized the pyramid set like a trophy in the center of the rough mantel as a
customized Model 986 Solid Titanium Urn, our finest unit -- a phoenix sculpted
in bas relief on its front.

The leggy blonde slipped through the room, now with a jacket over her shoulder,
pecking her aunt on the cheek. "Back about midnight," she said. Then she smiled
at me through her green lipstick. "My name's Unix. Nice suit."

"Italian," I assented, pleased. I watched her leave. "Mrs. MacPhee," I said,
turning my attention back to widow, "you don't look old enough to be her aunt.
And yet the Judge .... "

"...was a hundred and seventeen when he died. I'm...thirty-nine. The Judge spent
a lot of money on life extension. And the dear man, he insisted on spending some
on me."

We made small talk about adjusting to the loss of a loved one, about the house,
about the noise she'd been hearing. Judge MacPhee, I confirmed, was the elderly
gentleman in the nearby holopix. Big ears, a rapacious smile, the red and white
plaid pants only judges can wear with impunity. Mrs. MacPhee -- call me Keiko,
she insisted -- explained with quiet intelligence how the Judge, whom she'd met
clerking out of law school, had died during his third artificial heart
installation. She'd had him cremated on his instructions, against her own wishes
for cryogenic preservation in an elaborate home sarcophagus offered by one of
our competitors.

Above the low hum of the house's climate control, I was startled to hear a pop
that definitely seemed to have come from the um; it was followed by a long, low
whistle, mournful and remote.

Keiko shivered. "It's...now he's started doing that."

When I looked at her in silence, she sighed.

"Oh, I understand," she said. "Those are only ashes and an urn."

"Cremation is very conclusive." I nodded slowly. She'd beaten me to where I had
come to try, for her own good, to take her. I admired her good sense. "So
there's probably a fairly .... "

"...pedestrian explanation," she completed my sentence. She took a deep breath.
"I'm trying to live with that. What I can't live with," she said, smiling wryly,
"is a noisy urn." She looked away. "I loved him dearly. It's like he's still
here somehow."

The urn made another pop. Keiko and I stood together in the ensuing silence and
exchanged raised eyebrows, then she looked away again. There was a sensuous
quality to the way she filled out her dress, to her scent, to the way she worked
her lower lip with her teeth.

I inspected the unit, which appeared to be capable of surviving its three
hundred year warrantee: terrific heft, perfect seams, that quality anodized
titanium finish. "I'll take it in," I suggested. "Do some scans, replace the
urn, see what happens." I pictured myself returning the unit personally.

"I'd be grateful," she said. "I'm sure you understand. How can I let go?" She
sighed, then bit her lower lip. "When you come back, come for dinner."

"I'll call you just as soon as I know something," I said, my heart flooding with
joy.

I STOPPED BY MAX'S spread in Santa Monica. I'd been avoiding my own home since
Harriet left. I set my Lotus on autopark and ducked in the kitchen door after
acknowledging the residential scanner. I was whistling as I walked into the den.

Max's son Lance -- a pudgy kid, pale as a mushroom -- was home on spring break
from Cal Tech. He was as smart as his dad was savvy, but to Max's dismay he was
utterly indifferent to the funeral business. Max had no other kids.

"Well, you're happy," Lance said, looking up from the green glow of a holocube
game he'd reconfigured. "Did you see your comet?"

"Something like that." I smiled, realizing that I'd forgotten my sighting
problems, forgotten the problems at work.

"Maybe you can cheer up Dad. He's really a case."

"Never fucking mind," Max said as he shuffled into the room. He was already
wearing his bathrobe, a bad sign.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Try we lost the regional contract for Triple A."

There goes all that holiday business, passed through my mind. There goes 500
mill. There goes 1-800-FATALITY. I cleared my throat, tried at least to speak
positively. "Max, you know, when we started, there were six billion people on
the planet. Now there are twelve. I don't care what contract we lose,
potentially .... "

"What do you want us to do, start bumping people off?" Max had migrated to his
bar, behind which hung my videograph of a slowly rotating Jupiter. He poured
himself a tumbler of the green Japanese melon liquor he favored. "We need a new
idea. Something big."

I was thinking about Keiko and her niece, about her late husband, about life
extension. "Immortality," I mused.

"What?" Lance said.

I paused. "Convince the market that you can provide clients some way to live
forever."

"We had a plan once," Max told Lance, his face crinkling with a memory from our
early days, and now I remembered too, to my embarrassment. "We planned to
holotape people," Max told his son, "You know, like a presentation thing about
them, THIS IS YOUR LIFE, they signed on when they were alive. Once they died,
we'd broadcast the tape on the anniversary of their deaths. The idea was, we'd
beam it down from a satellite on Fox, say, or Disney, or Fiat. Like during
halftimes, or even in commercial slots. It was perpetual care, see? Every year
you'd come back. We called it IMMORTALITY NOW!"

"Cool," Lance said. "Technology's a little dated, but still .... "

"`A holographic eternal flame; electrons and photons dancing to the virtual
reincarnation of your self,'" I quoted from the brochure we'd worked up.

"Very cool," Lance said. "There's your lost market share."

Max's eyes gleamed. "Market share? Did you hear this kid? Market share?"

"I like the technology, Dad." Lance blushed. "Why didn't you run the program,
Uncle Coop?"

I took a deep breath. "Didn't cost out. You sell broadcast in perpetuity, how do
you support all that transponder time, Obit Channel fees, all that? Turns out
we'd need our own satellite, permits from the U.N. Space Agency, production
facilities, all that for starters, just to make a go of it. Your dad worked out
the figures."

Lance scrunched up his nose. "Maybe if you tweaked the hardware...?"

Max was beaming at him. But in the end, I knew he was going to have to admit to
his son that the idea didn't go anywhere. I thought I'd spare myself the
unpleasant part. "Busy morning tomorrow," I said. "I'm out of here."

Max wasn't at the office when I drove in the next morning, which I took to be a
good sign -- why take our reverses so seriously? We'd earned our dollar. So what
could we do? By giving up on everything else, I was able to concentrate on my
class.

I teach the franchisees what we in the business call "setting features." The
corpses that come to us often stare up from their gumeys, eyes wide and mouths
agape, cheeks slack from gravity. Our service is to make them look dead; not
actually dead, transfixed with the abyss or vacant-eyed as cooked lobsters, but
properly, conventionally dead. So we shave them, close their eyes, their mouths,
shut the openings that in life were ever active: we set the features. We fold
the hands, one over the other, over the umbilicus: a posture of repose, peace
with dignity at last. The final detail, here at GD, is insertion and adjustment
of the Mona LisaTM smile.

The fitting comes in seven sizes.

It's a serene time for me, passing from corpse to corpse among the Angels[TM] on
the walls, Mozart's Requiem[TM] in the air, murmuring with the students, seeing
peace drive out fright on the faces below my hands.

About eleven I got back to my office and was able to start on the urn. It looked
seamless, but a magnetic lock inside the Model 986 responds to a proprietary
magnetic key and the pyramid unfolds into four triangles.

The Judge's ashes were intact in a traditional ziplock bag: a generous cup of
fine white and tan powder, bone fragments and white chunks, a couple the size of
stream pebbles: although we burn at 4500 degrees, not every part of the body
vaporizes, and some of the body's bones -- the pelvis, for example t are so
large as to resist reduction. Still, the total mass only came to seven point
four ounces, a handful of dust. It is instructive how little even the rich and
powerful come to, in the end.

I spread the ashes on a lab table for inspection. One bone fragment reminded me
strongly of the new Matsushita turtle logo, but that was about it. I ran a
series of scans on the urn's inner sleeve, came up with nothing. I tried heating
and cooling the unit and listened for thermal flex noises. Nothing again. I
delaminated the phoenix, sent each strata through computer-aided tomography.
Nada. What the hell was going on?

I took my lunch up to the boardroom, brought an extra corned beef sandwich,
spread it out on the slate table -- but Max still wasn't around. His wife
Dorothy didn't know where he was either; I supposed he was worrying the bean
counters on the twenty-fourth floor.

Morosely I ate and watched the Obit Channel. Our GD logo continued to shrink as
our market share fell. When I looked away, out the window, the atmosphere was
socked in again, this time with a browner cast to it, like the mustard had gone
bad. You couldn't remotely see the heavens; you'd have trouble framegrabbing a
streetlight tonight.

Then late in the afternoon, using a stereo zoom technique from cosmic body
imaging, I finally discovered an anomaly in the ashes: a tiny green drop, shiny,
like a fused gemstone. Its hardness registered in the diamond range and its
translucent surface, like Chinese jade, offered no clue to its interior. I
thought I could make out a minuscule rectangle of shaded stripes, but it might
have been my imagination.

Then I heard the little bugger creak.

I called Keiko who toggled on video when she recognized my voice. She was
wearing navy blue today, which suggested an advance in her grieving process. I
told her what I'd found.

"Did the Judge have any gems on his person, any implants, anything like that?"

"No implants that weren't recycled. Do you think you've solved the problem ?"

"Once I figure out what this green thing is ...."

My efforts were interrupted by a message from Max asking me to cover a business
meeting. I still couldn't find Max himself-- but since he knew how I hated
taking meetings, I was hardly surprised.

Keesha, Max's secretary, gave me a wink of conspiratorial approval when she
ushered in the sales rep, an ancient gnome with the unlikely name of Slaughter.

The salesman represented a line of containers suitable for the cremates of
family pets. They looked like stuffed animals, fluffy birds and cats and fish
with big eyes, had microprocessors inside and made lifelike twitches for months
on a tiny rechargeable. "Max said you needed to work on your numbers," Mr.
Slaughter said with a wet smile.

Has it come to this? I asked myself. True, when my black Lab Balthazar died, on
the way back from the crematorium I'd wound up shoving his ashes into the
glovebox of my Lotus, where they'd stayed for want of a proper spot. Maybe a
full service franchise should have something for everybody passed through my
mind. But this was going too far.

I ran Mr. Slaughter out. Keesha gave me the evil eye. "It's not like we don't
have a problem," she hissed.

AS FOR the little green thing, I kept thinking chip, though I'd never seen
anything quite like it. At noon the next day, I finally found Max.
Inadvertently. I was tracking down Lance to help me identify the green blob. I
found my call forwarded from Lance's holocube game to a lab at CalTech in
Pasadena.

"It may be the remains of one of those new biochips," Lance said after a
moment's study on the vidphone. "Looks fried. You can still read the barcode,
though .... Huh. Lemme scan this .... "

The vidphone screen was suddenly taken up by Max's face, bushy eyebrows wagging.
He looked manic. "We're back in business," he shouted.

"What are you talking about?"

Max pushed Lance back in front of the camera sensor. Lance was blushing. "You're
the one who gave us the idea, Uncle Coop," Lance said. "It started with your
comet."

"What about my comet? What idea?"

"We're using Virgilius Maro to produce the signal we need for IMMORTALITY NOW!
I've been taking courses in radio astronomy this semester. Did you know comets
and their tails move through the solar system like huge generators?" He waved
his hands around. "They come slicing through the system with a bigtime surge of
radio frequency signals we get as broadband noise. I mean, comets produce it,
generate radio frequency signals, in a major way. It's, like, the snow between
channels?"

"Yes," I said, vaguely familiar through radio imaging. "And?"

"All we need to do is organize that RF noise and transform it into something
useful -- our image carrier, say. Digitize it, modulate it with the holounits
you want broadcast .... Then you send back to the comet a one-time countersignal
to reshape the original RF noise into the signal you want broadcast. Bingo ....
"

"Bingo?"

"Bingo. You've got a customized signal that'll be transmitted through the solar
system on every pass of the comet until, uh .... ten to the seventh over pi ....
for about, uh, four hundred million years ?"

"You're not seriously .... Max?"

There was his face again, shiny with perspiration, beatific with a kind of
madness.

"Look, Max," I said, "It's nice to have Lance in the loop here, but aren't we
reaching a bit? Selling radio noise from a comet? Isn't that a little out of our
range?"

Max's grin might have been shaped by a Mona Lisa[TM] insert. "Not like we have a
choice, Coop."

"It's O'Donald's, Uncle Coop," Lance said off-camera.

I saw Max wince. He was particularly touchy about the mortuary arm of McDonald's
Corp., the O'Donald's chain. "Those cheap maggots," Max said grimly, "with their
fake Irish Wakes and that stupid fucking clown, Digger O'Donald."

"What did they do?"

"They underbid us for the AARP contract."

Now it was my turn to wince. Perhaps we were finished after all. No business can
downsize by half overnight and not experience disaster. I looked up. The
Angels[TM] on the wall seemed surprised too. I noticed a film of dust on their
wings; were we already laying off maintenance staff up here in the suites as
well?

The monitor framed the faces of both Max and his son: the Earth and the Moon,
Jupiter and Io. I imagined retiring into another life with a woman like Keiko,
working through the night somewhere, framegrabbing shooting stars. How nice it
would be to have that kind of human satisfaction when the business was coming
down -- a son you loved, a loyal wife. "You guys do what you want," I said.
"We're due for some luck." I was certain, of course, that our luck had run out.

"Send me the chip!" Lance blurted out under a squeeze from his dad.

Part II

"A memory chip?" Keiko said.

"Apparently it survived the cremation, so it's clearly some hardened circuit.
Maybe part of a life extension implant that didn't melt down, maybe something
else .... "

She was sitting across from me at Espagio's. Its aquarium wall bubbled behind
her in an algae-laden homage to Venice, the Italian city which had sunk just the
year before to rising sea-levels. Keiko's niece Unix had suggested the place,
winking at me in a way which, I felt, boosted my stock. I'd needed the boost;
the news about her husband's remains had changed Keiko. She'd put more holopix
of the Judge around the house and she was wearing black again. She seemed drawn
into herself.

"Is the chip readable?"

I recited again the printout of the message text Lance had sent me that morning.
"Bubble memory nanochip exchanging gasses through a quantum field. Proprietary
barcode, unlisted, bio range."

"Bio range. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that."

I folded the mostly blank paper down to a sixth its size, the proportions of a
coffin. "All of us wait for signals from the dead," I told her. "We watch for
signs that they're still there, listen for voices to tell us that they still
care. People are even happy when we hear that some deceased soul has done some
outrageous thing, like disappeared from a grave or sat up in a coffin or made
noise from an urn. As if any of that proves they're much like the living and
that we're still on their minds. You have to be realistic, Keiko."

"Do you know I'm really fifty-nine?" she said quietly. "He was a bastard to a
lot of people. But not to me."

I'd guessed fifty; not bad. "Mrs. MacPhee. Keiko ...."

"First the noises, now this chip. It would be like him to leave something. Maybe
he's just saying hello. Maybe ...." She sighed, looking away with dark eyes that
mixed sadness and hope.

Well, the surprise was on me. Life always turns out to be more complex than
you'd planned for it to be. I'd only just figured out what I really wanted in
life -- the love of a woman like Keiko, a life together to complete my own
approaching sixties -- and now here I was, the rival of a bag of ashes. And
losing. I put my two hands over hers on the center of the table, nudging aside
my plate, felt a tremor in my palm. "Maybe you ought to get out more," I said,
deciding to go for it. "Unix told me that you've been alone in your house since
.... Go for a walk. Anywhere, to a park. Dig around in your garden." I blushed
and muttered, "Have um, a fling."

She smiled.

"Well, it would be a mistake to give you hope about the Judge."

"I suppose you must be right. But until I really know about this chip .... "

"Give me a couple more days. Just don't expect a miracle. The only real miracle
is .... "I said, waving my arms, "all round you." I'd intended to wave at life
itself, but I found myself waving at replica Espagio's, at the movie people at
the tables, at Unix, coming in the bluegreen glass door, a head-turner in her
short reflective dress.

Still, my strategy with Keiko seemed to be working. As I helped her into Unix's
van at the curb she let her hand linger in mine and smiled. "My niece was right
about you," she said. "You're a lot of fun."

At breakfast the next morning I found myself watching an infomercial on the Obit
Channel whose strangely familiar elements took a long time for me to fully
recognize.

The screen had gone European with archaic reds and blues and golds, morphed into
an ersatz ancient tapestry whose vague robed figures came to life holding hands
and ascending through some sort of stagy empyrean busy with GD Angels[TM]. A
smooth, deep voice intoned: "Star with saints and heroes in a dazzling
holographic celebration your descendants will cherish forever. Travel through
eternity clothed in the authentic finery of medieval Florence ..."

I recognized the voice from an ad for our International Line. Medieval Florence?
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. What I was looking at was an
infomercial for IMMORTALITY NOW!

I was even partly responsible for it. When we'd kicked around the idea years ago
I'd suggested holotaping the clients Ior, failing their actual presence, their
computer generated images) in scenes set in the ascending circles of Paradise as
imagined by Dante Alighieri. I mean, it had been just an idea. Now apparently
Max had gotten someone to develop it.

I paged the rest of the executive floor for Max, got forwarded to Pasadena.

"We're getting great results," Lance told me enthusiastically from the CalTech
lab. Max, who appeared disheveled, was behind him, teleconferencing with a bank
of monitors; I recognized the rainbow colors of the GD Regional Franchisee Net.
"Fantastic results," Lance went on. "A friend of mine from the radio astronomy
club has an internship at the SETI transmitter in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. We're
working with him. Dad leased the site for the duration."

"Arecibo? The whole site?"

"We're going for a burst transmission on the 31st," Lance gushed.

Max had migrated to the vidphone and joked about buying down the national debt
with the deal for Arecibo.

"Cripes," Lance said, "are we getting bandwidth! We'll be able to encode enough
information to broadcast tactile holography in a window of about eight hours
real time. Then with compression .... We're trying to squeeze in a full
twenty-four hour day."

"I still don't get it," I said, trying to stay calm. "How does this signal
override all the other signals people get?"

"The way sunspots affect even hardened satellites; you fiddle with the
magnetosphere a bit. Virgilius Maro's that big, and we punch him up besides.
Terrific lot of RF noise. Now if Virgil was just a little closer to Earth, ha
ha."

There was Max over his shoulder, munching popcorn. "Isn't it great how Lance's
finally taken an interest in the business?" Max said. "It's been a dream, to
pass it on to the kid: Sczyczypek forever. Wait till you see the spots we've got
running on the Obit Channel."

"Max, that's what I called you about."

"Virgil, everybody's calling the comet Virgil, don't you love it? How could we
pass the Dante angle up? I know you usually handle the art director end of
things, but how you've been lately ... I thought I'd turn it over to
Fiat/Disney."

"Max ...."

"It's a business decision, Coop." The way Max tensed his jaw when he spoke, that
distant look in his eyes, reminded me that it was, after all, his business. I
held my tongue. Anyway, I thought, who wants to paint the hull of a sinking
ship?

"We're already selling units," he went on. "From six this morning we've had a
lease on reference studio space in the Valley. We'll have virtual setups in
every franchise city by week's end. Overnight we've sold sixty thousand slots of
that Paradiso so far -- hey, you think that's too Italian? ParadiseLand maybe?"

Max downloaded other segments of the advertising program into a window on my
wallscreen and I saw more of Fiat/Disney's work, even one of the holounits
themselves. Now I knew what those high production levels, those make-up jobs
reminded me of: soap opera. Set in thirteenthcentury Florence, laced with
special effects, but soap opera all the same. It was painful to watch. I felt
the way any writer feels when a story of his or hers is worked over, distorted.
I felt surrounded by disaster.

It had been a good run with the company, I found myself thinking.

"Don't look so glum, Uncle Coop." Lance seemed a little embarrassed himself. "I
got something else on the chip. Set of chips, I guess we should say. Apparently
the, uh, cooking it went through? Thermal conversion auto-booted a runnable file
to access mass storage? Or at least so say the probes. Amazing how the lines
hold up. I think I got the power leads identified to the CPU and the bubble
memory. Who knows, I might even be able to mn that sucker. Or ruin it for good.
I mean, it's really a long shot."

"Do what you can," I smiled automatically, but the room really began to swim
around me now. Destroy it! I wanted to shout. Give it to me! I'll ruin it. I had
just been comforting myself with a vision of retirement with Keiko and my
rival's dust refused to settle, if you know what I mean.

After I hung up, different schemes passed through my mind. Get it back from
Lance, send it down the trash chute, flush it down the john. But gradually,
after twenty minutes of controlled breathing, I settled down.

I did have qualms of conscience about destroying it, after all. And I was
curious about what would happen if Lance tried to run the program ("ruin it for
good" ran through my mind). Still, I resolved to withhold this latest
development from Keiko. I would tell her that we hadn't made any progress, that
it looked like there was nothing to the chip after all.

As the comet approached, I could lose myself in setting up the imaging
equipment, dirty though the atmosphere continued to be. I'd planned to invite
Keiko to drive down to Baja with me, but word was even Baja was socked in. So I
would have to console myself with beta-testing new Zeiss filters; they were
ingenious: including power supply the whole set fit into the palm of my hand.

My specialty is the suitcase-sized observatory. There is a special pleasure in
handling such fine equipment, calibrating the sensors, cleaning the lenses,
inputting the current project's program, coordinating frame-action with
celestial coordinates, running through simulations whose successes and failures
both leave you hanging, peacefully and without messy human contact, somewhere
among the stars.

THE COMET WAS a big event in the news: icy infalling interstellar material from
the Kuiper Belt, a remnant of the formation of the solar system. The best
estimate of its mass was a bit over a hundred megatons, the size of a small
mountain, a fairly rare event. A comet that big, impacting the Earth, would
cause an untold catastrophe, its energy yield on the order of 200,000 megatons
of TNT, equivalent to all the nuclear weapons produced in the previous century.
But though V. Maro's 272 year orbit would be close in cosmic terms, no
measurable effect to Earth was expected beyond an interruption in
communications, and an incredible show.

The latest data on Virgilius Maro -- which everyone was calling Virgil now --
was everywhere. It was on CNN, VNN, running as an occasional window on the Obit
Channel.

A comet-related story was running on the wallscreen at Keiko's house the next
evening when I arrived for my promised dinner, the titanium urn and what
remained of the Judge's ashes in my hands. Yes, I'd told Keiko that the chip
inquiry had come to a dead end.

I was feverish with guilt and lust.

Unix, wearing a silver microdress decorated with signs of the Zodiac, met me at
the door and took the urn from my hands. She set it on the foyer table. "Aunt
Keiko's instructions," she said. "She's taking your advice about burying the
ashes and the urn in a regular grave. Burying what's left of Uncle -- my dad's
uncle, actually. Still, she's been like an aunt to me."

"I'm just trying to make her happy," I said.

"I can tell." She smiled. "She's out back .... "

I found Keiko outside in the neglected kitchen garden, hands dirty but cheerful.
She was filling pots with soil.

"Not much bigger than this," she said, holding up a parsley seed: I realized she
was talking about the chip. "Nothing to it, then?"

"No," I said. "Nothing at all. My technician still has the chip, but your
husband's ashes are otherwise intact. I wasn't sure you wanted the, uh, since
.... No noises anymore."

She shrugged. "Something from an implant then, after all," she said, shaking her
head. She drained her glass of vodka. "Now let's have dinner. I've got a
fifty-year-old bottle of wine."

Afterwards, we sat by a fire in the living room, drank port and watched a bit of
the comet special on VNN; Unix settled in with us. She'd had a falling-out with
her boyfriend.

The special was interrupted, to my dismay, by a commercial for IMMORTALITY NOW!
from Grateful Dead. Elderly men and women romped around a fountain in a cobbled
square -- Max had turned creative control entirely over to Fiat/Disney. The
little cartoon animals splashing in the water of the fountain, the voiceover
sales pitch, the promise of a Purgatorio sequel, made me burn with shame.

The tacky part, though, cheered up Unix, and she cheered me up, and we started
to chat, sunk so happily in the sofa by the Nomad firehearth that I didn't at
first realize that Keiko had been out of the room for some time.

Unix blushed a little, smiled, and disappeared.

It was getting late, and I wasn't sure what to do. Then the lights dimmed, and I
thought I saw someone in the hallway to the master suite at the rear of the
house, hand raised at about the level of a console for a house computer. A
moment later subdued harp music floated through the air. Then Keiko walked
slowly into the room wearing a black silk robe.

She stopped at the fire hearth, her hands resting on the slate platform, fingers
splayed, her hair down around her shoulders, the fire reflected on her face. She
had continued drinking -- I could see it in her eyes, in her breathing, in the
way she swayed, ever so slightly. I calculated the time since the Judge had been
cremated: a month, exactly. The grieving process takes different forms for
different people; I had used my professional experience to read her precisely.

"The kind of man he was, my late husband," she said. "He would have wanted me to
jump back in. You're that kind of man too."

I cleared my throat. Would you believe me if I told you that I realized then
that what I had encouraged in her was wrong, that things between us had moved
too fast, that for her own good I was going to turn her down, hug her gently and
lead her back to her bed and tuck her in and tell her to go to sleep? I'm not
sure I believe myself either. Oh, I realized I'd been wrong, certainly, but the
way she'd said jump back in I'd fallen completely, victim to my desires, victim
to the silky curve at her waist, to the huskiness in her voice.

Keiko and Unix, forgive me.

As it was, I was saved by my pager, which hummed against my heart insistently.

The message was from Lance, He was paging me from the mortuary lab in the
basement of the GD tower. The message read: Highest Urgency.

When I found him, Lance was crouched over a jury-rigged assembly surrounded by a
bank of instruments -- I recognized a light-enhancing stereo microscope.

"You'll never know what ecstasy you interrupted," I said dryly. "What is it?"

"Uncle Coop," Lance said, pointing to an eyepiece. "Look at this."

I put the bridge of my nose between the soft cups of rubber. At first I didn't
see anything but a mottled background, then discerned what seemed an aberration,
a comic little figure, a smaller grid of red and white.

"You may not believe me at first," Lance said, his voice tight with excitement,
"but I think that's the Judge. Or some manifestation of him, like a homunculus.
It was created by the chipset when I powered it up .... See, first thing it did
was output a nutrient program, carbon high. I used my Pepsi. Next thing I knew
.... See, it was a sequence, started with the sound chip, to call attention to
itself .... "

"Christ!" I said. "It's a little person. Those are plaid pants."

I continued to watch the figure in wonder as Lance brought me up to speed. The
Judge had bought into a duplication technology, he told me. "There's a DNA info
base in nanomemory, quark based, really something. Then a generator that kicks
in when that program runs, comes out of a lot of compression. Well, he
reproduces himself, see? This guy actually figured out a way to live forever."

"Guy? What do you mean, guy? This is some kind of bacteria."

"Yeah, that's true, right," Lance said. "There's a bug in the scalar routine?"

"Scalar routine?"

"Formally it's the function of two vectors, equal to the product of their
magnitudes and the cosine of the angle between them? Anyway, if you get the dot
point wrong .... "

"Lance, what are you talking about?"

"What went wrong. It's in the sequence for the scalar routine, what makes him
this size. See, the chipset reproduced him all right, but the dot point got
shifted. Got his scale wrong by a factor of one thousand. Poor sucker. I did the
calculations. He's one one-thousandth the size of an actual man."

So there he was, my rival, who less than an hour ago, in the strange complicated
way of human affairs, had interposed himself between me and the consummation of
my dreams. Who, I asked myself, stood between me and my dreams now?

I started to laugh, but I swear I saw a tiny fist raised, shaking, directly at
me.

I sucked in a deep breath. "I'd better contact Mrs. MacPhee immediately," I
said, reaching for the vidphone.

Part III

That was the beginning of the week you all remember, the week that changed all
our lives.

Later that Monday morning astronomers announced that Virgilius Maro's course had
unaccountably shifted. The large comet was now headed directly toward the planet
Earth.

Impact was expected in seven days, fourteen hours, and six minutes.

I see I've barely touched upon the catastrophic possibilities impact presented,
but I'm sure you remember some of them: how a comet V. Maro's size had crashed
into the Yucatan at the end of the Cetacean Era and ended the reign of the
dinosaurs, how the current human casualty estimate ran into the billions. Alone
in the glow of wallscreens and in groups from school auditoriums to cathedrals
we contemplated the possibility of a conflagration that would produce rampant
volcanism, sulfur clouds, an extended period of darkness, soaring temperatures
followed by a new ice age, the extinction of species after species and eliminate
most of the world's biomass. Scientists were scrambling to turn the comet off
its course with a thermonuclear explosion in space. NASA ran twenty-four-hour
shifts, and the Chinese mobilized their "factory-inspace" program to produce a
delivery vehicle loaded and launched from the UN Station. Nukes were being
readied and shuttled up, but as there were only a few hundred left on the
planet, NASA was having logistics problems, and the decision to go with the
Ukrainian multiple warheads (the infamous "cabbage bombs") made everyone
nervous. As well, as we all now know, we should have been.

As for Grateful Dead, Inc., the effect on the firm was paradoxical. With so much
potential death on the way, suddenly lots of people wanted to make arrangements.
They reasoned, and rightly so, that in the event of impact there would be a run
on deathcare services, and that the average consumer would be best accommodated
by the worldwide facilities of a full-service chain such as ours.

Just after the President's announcement, I finally found Max. He was up in the
boardroom, sprawled in his captain's chair at the end of the long slate table,
transfixed on the Obit Channel running full wallscreen on the other side of the
room. His little fax dish had pulled in a library of invoices, printed out
balance sheets and ledger pages, all heaped around him; on his laptop was loaded
a draft page from the upcoming annual report to shareholders.

"Fuck the business," I told him. "Go home to your wife and son. Nobody really
knows about this, nobody knows for sure we're safe until it's deflected." I was
still shaken by the tic the President had developed halfway through his speech.

"Coop, we've completely sold out Paradiso," Max said with barely controlled
excitement. "It's damned amazing. Purgatorio's half committed as of an hour ago
-- Purgatorio, where clients gotta shuffle around these circle things admitting
they ate too much or slept too much or whatever turned them on. Fiat/Disney's
even working up an Inferno segment. We got couples buying adjoining units as
gifts, we got groups who want to tape on the last day, like have a comet party
and tape their segments."

"Max," I said, "all of us may only have a week to live. Don't you understand?
The comet could hit the planet. Even a near miss .... "

Max blushed red: "Yeah, yeah," he mumbled. "I'm no rocket scientist, but hey,
Coop, I figure, it turned, it'll turn again, see?"

"How can you talk like that?"

Max pushed away from the table, got up, swung around and pulled his baggy suit
coat off the back of the chair. He shoved his arm into a coat sleeve. "Gotta go.
I got a presentation to give to FEMA. You wanna come? I know you're not up to
speed these days, Coop, but I always feel better if you're there. Backup?"

"FEMA? Who's FEMA?"

"Federal Emergency Management. You know. We're cutting a deal on a pre-need
thing. See, they got a mandated formula for disaster preparation. The front
money on this one alone gets us back up over three bil. Ain't that ironic? Just
when we get IMMORTALITY NOW! workin' better than expected? You dance for a
drizzle, you get a hurricane. And look at you. Who am I to say you haven't been
up to speed? Who gave us the comet?"

"Max, what's the fucking funeral business worth if the whole world ends? You may
never have another night to bounce on your bed with Dorothy. You may never have
another Monday afternoon to spend with Lance. Live a little, for Christ's sake."

As if on cue, Lance himself rushed in, his pale face flushed pink, waving a
sheaf of figures that turned out to be estimates for the FEMA meetings. He told
his father in clipped tones that they were going to be late if they didn't get
going. Max jammed papers into his briefcase, folded his battered old computer,
and the two of them ran off as I stood there, still scolding.

Even as I ranted on, I could see the error of my ways. There Max had gone: busy
with the company of his son, awash with business, fulfilled. Do you want to know
how desperate I was? I tried to get in touch with Harriet. She has a new
hyphenated name -- no, not just a hyphenated last name, but a hyphenated first
name as well. NuKiwi-Harriet Finney-Boyd. There's no going back at all in life,
is there.

At the request of Unix, I checked in on Keiko.

"How's your aunt taking it?" I asked in the foyer when she answered the door.

"She's doin' great. She is, anyway. You know, Coop, Aunt Keiko always went for
those short-man-syndrome, power-trip guys. The Napoleonic types? I mean, really,
now the Judge is as short as you can get, right?"

I looked at her with surprise.

"I don't mean to disrespect Uncle," she said. "He's my father's favorite uncle;
I do love him, and I'm glad that he's...back, sort of back. But he's always been
a real tyrant, little dictator bossing everybody around. Now he's even worse
than he was before."

I laughed. "I don't mean to disrespect him either," I said, "but I could tell by
the way he dressed."

"Myself, I prefer taller guys like you. Fewer insecurities."

I blushed. "Ah, Unix, I just wish I wasn't too old for you."

She giggled. "How old do you think I am?"

"Nineteen, at the outside," I told her.

"Try twenty-nine. Uncle bought a bunch of that life extension stuff for me too,
bless him." She was wearing that tight green microskirt again, and she turned
and walked away with a provocative wiggle. It is extraordinary how a bit of
information can change your point of view.

The threat of the end of the world aside, I remember thinking then, we live in
wonderful times.

A MINIATURE LIFE-SUPPORT unit, consisting of racks of equipment sent over from
GD Inc. and two exotic consoles from Switzerland, had been set up around a lab
table in the living room, a nest of tubing and thin wires terminating in a light
enhancing stereo microscope. Keiko was there, apparently keeping a constant
vigil. The Judge had grown but he was still quite small, inhabiting a heated
area on a textured slide.

Keiko was a feverish specter. After I had politely put my eye to the microscope
eyepiece for a moment she gave me her hand. An understanding had developed
between us.

"How can he live like that?"

"He can't," she said. "His doctors tell us that he'll survive for seven days
maximum."

"How tragic," I said, searching my professional vocabulary for the right thing
to say.

"What's it matter?" a strange elderly voice said. I looked around me, startled.
By the expressions on Keiko's and Unix's faces I realized we were listening to
the Judge; apparently his voice was picked up by sensors on the microscope stage
and piped through the home quatro sound. His voice seemed to come from
everywhere. The effect was eerie; my skin tingled and I felt myself tremble with
momentary fright. The voice spoke again: "Those goddamned NASA bunglers, we're
all about to die anyway."

They were behind schedule, it was true. But even given their failings, nothing
could quite justify the acid criticism, the savage personal insult, the vitriol
that filled the room for ten minutes as the Judge described NASA's response to
the crisis. And the rest of the world's. I spare you the details.

In the end, the Judge told me, his one regret was that he'd wanted to go out
big.

Unix rolled her eyes.

I had to bite my tongue.

"Put me back now, goddamnit," the Judge said.

"What does he mean?" I asked.

"He goes with Aunt Keiko," Unix said. "Has to do with body temperature.

"We'll rest now," Keiko said. "Thank you, Cooper, for coming by."

I held out my hand forlornly, and Keiko touched it briefly before turning to be
alone with her husband. The look in her eyes confirmed that I had lost her,
absolutely, to a 117-year-old man the size of a tomato seed. And a mean-spirited
bastard besides. Perhaps that's what it took to cling so tenaciously to life.

Keiko opened the top of her hospital gown and slipped him down into her bosom.
Out of respect I tried not to stare.

Unix looked at me with raised eyebrows. "For him, it's the adventure of a
lifetime." Then she swallowed and looked alarmed at having let slip an off-color
remark.

Embarrassed for her, I blurted out, "Finally conclusive proof that size isn't
everything." It was really a stupid joke, but Unix looked at me gratefully while
Keiko pretended not to hear, turned with dignity to leave the room.

Unix put her hand on my back. "Say, Coop," she said.

It must have been the comet.

Unix walked me out to my Lotus with a shy batting of her green-lined eyes and
thanked me for the way I'd helped her aunt.

"If you only actually knew," I said.

"I know. Look, what counts is, you did the right thing in the end. My aunt's
happy; little Caesar is back on his throne. Frankly, I think she's missing a
bet; I've thought so from the beginning. Especially now, with your comet in the
sky."

Then Unix kissed me, really kissed me.

I kissed back.

She slipped her tongue between my teeth and wiggled it around.

We fell against the car, shamelessly groping at one another, sliding down the
hood and along the fender and over the headlight, pulling at one another's
clothes, half-naked by the time we rolled onto the soft lawn.

What can I say of that first encounter that could do justice to our passion, to
the bliss that mixed with relief down through my bones? No words can quite
describe the sensation -- but oh, the touch of her flesh, the warmth of her
breath, that moment of slippery joy.

We went everywhere together for twelve hours, having sex. Like a lot of people.
We wound up in the boardroom on the eightieth floor of the GD Tower. I felt
wonderful, lying there on the slate table, my black Italian wingtips unlaced on
the floor, a cashmere sweater rolled into a pillow beneath my head, Unix's thigh
inches from my teeth.

On the wallscreen new infomercials for our Purgatorio offering produced by
Fiat/Disney were running. I hadn't quite understood the attraction of appearing
periodically throughout eternity suffering one of the punishments of Purgatory,
but when I saw the actress Candy Candiotti jogging around the Fourth Cornice to
show her victory over Sloth, I realized that Purgatorio would sell out
completely, too.

Later that morning I showed Unix around corporate headquarters; for all the
volume Max said we were doing, you'd have thought GD Inc. was shutting down. The
business floors were almost deserted, the Angel[TM] Imaging Center on skeleton
crew, all but one of Resurrection Chapel's Dial-a-Faith windows dark. The usual
staff was working in Preparation, but the Motor Pool was quiet, and there were
only two girls down in Floral. I'd called off my franchisee classes. I took Unix
through the Professional Education wing, looked into the great room. When I saw
the clock on the wall at eleven, I felt a pang of guilt, felt I ought to be
working.

It passed. Let the dead attend to themselves a bit, I remember thinking. Unix
and I went up two floors and wandered into the Casket Selection Suite. We wound
up unraveling a dozen bolts of satin and tunneling into a love nest of pillows.
The funeral business, more so than other work, gives you an enhanced
appreciation for life.

In the late afternoon we were back up on the slate table again. The Obit Channel
was still running on the far wallscreen.

"Coop," Unix said. "What's that?"

A news flash was crawling across the bottom of the screen, text shot through
with a red comet icon:

...authorities are investigating reports that changes to comet Virgilius Maro's
trajectory may be linked to a bizarre 'lights out' phenomenon in Puerto Rico on
Sunday. Near Arecibo, an unknown hacker diverted the entire electrical supply of
the island to the site of the SETI transmitter for more than thirty minutes ....

"Lance'll fix it. He's very sorry, but he and that friend of his down there ....
"

"Lance. What happened?"

"It's called a steering pulse, Uncle Coop, a microwave thing? Beam it up there.
We heat up one side of the comet, see, fiddle with its spin. We needed to move
the orbit just a tad closer to Earth to get the resolution we needed? The one we
contracted for with Fiat/Disney?"

"So they miscalculated a bit," Max said. "They're just students. They'll fix it,
don't get too upset. Hell, it's unbelievably great for us. You see the Obit
Channel numbers? We're kickin' butt."

By then society had ceased normal functioning; people stayed home from their
jobs, construction projects went on hold, kids skipped school. But the cities
were surprisingly peaceful. (Of course, it was still early in that historic
week.) Those were the days when traffic thinned and industries all but shut down
around the world and the air cleared. We all awaited the delayed launch from the
Cape. A backup was in position as well. We tried not to worry.

THE BUSINESS, you will appreciate, was entirely out of my hands. Cash and
electronic transfer money flowed into GD Inc.'s accounts like water from a dozen
fire hoses. On Wednesday I logged into the firm's proprietary accounting program
to see what Max had been up to with FEMA. In the face of disaster, he'd been
playing the market both ends against the middle. He'd contracted with FEMA to
service millions of potential fatalities, but he'd so fax underbid the
competition that our losses would be greater than our net worth if we had to
deliver from even a glancing blow of the comet. Meanwhile the virtual studios
were holotaping IMMORTALITY NOW! segments on double shifts throughout the
country.

The actual work continued to stall. The dead continued to go unburied in
coolers. The great room, the walks with my students, the lectures on setting
features, the insertions of the Mona Lisa[TM] smiles, these were out of my life
now. Some heroic funerals were being conducted: we did our part, sending our
maglev Fleetwoods out undermanned, deploying mobile embalming centers, express
shipping corpses around the country on chartered flights if it was too difficult
for surviving family to travel.

You don't need me to tell you that the story of those times was an epic
adventure which all of us helped write. I'll confine myself to finishing the
inside story of the comet, since that was what changed your life too.

As you've probably surmised, Lance was counting on a fix of the comet's path but
not getting results. And, as you remember from that week, on the morning of the
great launch, the unmanned shuttle carrying the Ukrainian warheads to the
"factory in space" blew up all but a dozen of the backup nukes on the pad. Then
there was the problem with the guidance system on the back-up shuttle, which
knocked the "factory-inspace" out of orbit and eventually back down to Earth.
Thankfully no one was hurt. The Chinese still say that problem with the guidance
system was caused by broad band radio noise pulsing somewhere out of the
Caribbean. Lance denies it.

I remember hearing about the collision between the backup shuttle and the
Chinese "factory-in-space" at Espagio's -- one of the few restaurants left open
-- where I'd gone for lunch with Unix. I took a call from Max immediately
afterwards.

Max said, "Do you want the good news or bad news first?"

"The bad news I just heard for myself. According to NASA we've got just one more
chance, with just one more nuke and that old launch vehicle from Vandenberg.
They're cutting it close-- going straight for the comet. I'm worried."

"Then let me cheer you up. Inferno sales are through the roof. We've got clients
wallowing around in frozen garbage in the circle of the gluttons, women biting
one another, employees getting their bosses sunk in shit. What a good idea."

I'd seen for myself, watched a famous criminal, the Organ Bandit, writhing
happily in flames in the Circle of Thieves; the punishment was only staged, but
his eternal celebrity promised to be real.

"One more thing," Max said. "We've made our greatest placement ever. Lance found
out they had room for half a kilo more payload on that last emergency attempt to
blow the comet off course. So we bought the spot in the nose cone."

"And what in the name of God are we going to do with that?"

"We'll be sending up a cremate. It's like burial at sea, but much grander."

"Who could have the vanity...?"

"That Judge," Max told me, "what's his name? MacPhee."

I recall it was Thursday night of that week when society started becoming really
unglued -- lawlessness swept the beaches, looting raged on Rodeo Drive, anarchy
on the freeways. Public safety followed public transport into frightened
hibernation. But the weather turned gorgeous the air crystal clear and the stars
shining brightly that night when the whole power grid went down, the stars of
the Milky Way lighting the bowl of the sky with celestial jewelry.

I braved the streets to Westwood on Friday.

Keiko was fortified at the mansion, spending her last days with the Judge. Max
had arranged for a cortege of armored hearses to transport the Judge up the
coast to Vandenberg Air Force Base for the launch when the time came.

When I looped back through downtown I found Max and Lance camped out up in
accounting. Business was still streaming in; Max had Lance shunting in overload
invoice servers into the corporate mainframe. Max was filled with enthusiasm for
the Judge's journey as payload on the third rocket, but guarded about the
details, as if he didn't trust me with them. A marketing vision of cosmic
proportions danced in his eyes: GD's greatest triumph, he told me, the beginning
of a whole new range of franchise-level services, symbolic of his joining with
Lance.

Then fires began to smoke the atmosphere. From the eightieth floor window I
watched a sooty cloud rise from South Central, then a fireline start further
south, by Long Beach Harbor, where Nomads lived on boats. The winds were pulling
the smoke across the whole basin. Even as I watched, a string of brush fires
ignited above Malibu.

That's when we flew to Mauna Kea, Unix and I.

Since the late twentieth century, Mauna Kea has been the premier optical and
infrared imaging site on the globe. Fourteen thousand feet high, isolated by
thousands and thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean from the nearest landmass,
Mauna Kea is impacted only by air pollution downstream from China, a high
mustard haze which that week had slowly dissolved into nothingness.

It is a rugged site, rust-red and black with lava ash and boulders, the fixed
observatories on their little knolls, a gravel road winding up from the
astronomer's quarters a few thousand feet below. I found out I could image from
the summit itself, a cinder cone just east of the large instruments. Unix and I
staked out a spot and I deployed my small imaging package on the night we
arrived. By midnight I'd set celestial coordinates, and we settled in.

We had a little self-erecting tent and good down bags, picnic hampers of food,
our own satlink to watch the madness back on the mainland. But mostly we watched
the sky, rich with stars, the great silver swipe of Virgilius Maro wide across
the heavens, Mars and Venus bumping one' another on the horizon, as if jostling
to get out of the way. The firmament seemed a vast deep blue bowl; up there,
with the sky so clear and nothing around you, you feel yourself suspended in
space, a cosmic traveler.

We thought we could make out the launch of the Vandenberg rocket, its passage
through the ionosphere. "Uncle's up there," I heard Unix whisper in wonder.

Unix and I grew very close. Our zipped-together bags made a womb from which we
emerged only late on the final day.

As you know, the nuke merely turned Virgilius Maro off course. It wasn't the way
it might have been in an old sf movie, blowing up. No, that would have sent
fragments in the direction of Earth. Rather, it was a flash, albeit a diamond
bright human flash, and then the turning, the quickening across the sky.

I don't mean to diminish it. What a night that was: the thrill of the comet
turning, the colors spreading across the heavens, refracted light in bands of
red and orange and water blue, Unix against my side, my equipment whirring ....
It was lovelier, and more dangerous, than any other moment I have experienced.

The comet streaked across the sky, some cosmic fulfillment, an instrument, a
sign of change for myself, for the world I lived in. As the rocket had slivered
into the comet's albedo, as the nuke had blossomed, as the shifting colors had
climaxed, I'd tracked the nearby click of servos and the squeaks of optical
drives to confirm my hopes: my equipment had grabbed just the right fourteen
seconds.

In the ensuing silence we stood there, Unix and I; our breaths vaporizing before
us, the cold rock hard beneath our feet, our hearts beating together. I cannot
tell you how happy I felt at that moment, how fulfilled.

My pager hummed against my heart.

I took the call through the backup monitor on my imaging equipment, my chilly
fingers fumbling with the thin lead. Keesha was on the tiny screen. She looked
stricken.

She was calling to tell me that Max Sczyczypek was dead, of massive cardiac
arrest.

You of course know all about the near miss's unexpected effects that tidal
thing, the way the ozone layer was restored to pre-1900 levels, the way the
lower atmosphere cleared. I remember the day after we returned to California,
waking up and gazing through the clear, crisp air that had been with us since
the comet passed. The rapid ionization of the atmosphere had picked up the
particulates and plopped them on the ground, where they were washed by heavy
rains; the world seemed fresh and new. It changed all our lives, that near-death
experience.

Max, as I've mentioned, got a little nearer than most.

His funeral was one of the most spectacular and professionally accomplished in
the modem history of deathcare management. It was understood that I would handle
the basic interment, though I left the stainless steel instruments, the needles,
the gloves and the fluids to Preparation. I dressed Max in his best black suit,
picked out a casket, and laid him out, setting his features with a number six
Mona Lisa[TM] smile. Dorothy helped me with his obituary; the Sierra Club
managed the flowers and the stands of virgin Redwood offered in his name,
Espagio's did the catering, Fiat/Disney produced the wake and the procession.
The High Mass was held at St. Christopher's, with a little virtual hookup to all
GD Homes. Burial was at St. Mary's: Digger O'Donald was there, an orchestra,
celebrities by the hundreds, with a special presentation by the union of
professional mourners Max himself had helped found.

That was when I first spotted the chemistry between Unix and Lance. I was
surprised, but then it seemed to me a good thing. I wasn't sure I could keep up
with her, and she needed someone who looked further ahead than I do these days.

Lance and I run the company now. Max left us very well off. We have all that
front money from FEMA in the bank, all those fees from IMMORTALITY NOW! without
the liability to produce it as advertised; since the comet had been redirected
by the Government under an action classified by the courts as an Act of God or
War, our warrantee must exclude any mention of "comet." No comet, no signal. The
broadband noise that had been converted into holounits from The Divine Comedy
would continue to be broadcast by the redirected Virgilius Maro, but only in the
path of the M31 Galaxy for the next four hundred million years.

We own the Obit Channel now -- under a dummy corporation, however those things
are done. All of the Angels[TM] have been dusted, the Fleetwoodsshine, and our
new South American division is expanding at the rate of two new Homes per week.

I still feel deep satisfaction with the image I'd grabbed of Virgilius Maro up
on Mauna Kea. During the final edit I doubled the length of the hololoop. The
finished piece hangs in the boardroom these days, replacing an image of Mars.
The now half-minute loop, bright silver with a banded spectrum in slo-mo, opens
and turns like a timelapse flower bathing in quasar light against a backdrop of
deep space.

I see Keiko a lot. It's a bit unreal. Lance and Unix are a couple. We're all
into life extension. Lance is working with those Swiss engineers you've been
hearing about on the news. I mean, why not stick with a good thing?

One more thing I need to tell you about.

After all the dust had settled, Keiko and Unix and Lance and I took what
remained of the Judge's ashes and placed them into a crypt. He had refused to
take his ashes up with him to Vandenberg; he'd called it a morbid idea. The
left-behind ashes had been moved to GD Tower, but Keiko understandably wanted
closure. Burial was my advice, a small traditional service; I was glad to see my
thinking confirmed by Keiko's therapist and the MacPhee family counselor. The
obsequies were set for a Friday afternoon.

I set out driving alone in my Lotus from downtown to meet the rest of the
funeral party at Forest Lawn. I'd picked up the ashes from GD Tower and was
carrying them on the passenger's seat. They were resting in a beautiful onyx
urn. I rounded a comer, my suspension let out a squeak, a groan, and I found
myself remembering my first encounter with the Judge's ashes in the Model 986
Urn. I started seeing him as a rival again. Instinctively, I reached for the
glove box, pulled out the plastic bag containing the ashes of Balthazar, my old
Lab, and exchanged them for the ashes of the Judge. The idea that the um
containing the Judge's ashes would make a noise during interment spooked me more
than I can explain. I know what I did was unethical; I couldn't help myself.

Anyway, the modest ceremony went well. Unix had arranged for Scottish Pipers,
and a representative from NASA stood in uniform and saluted. Keiko achieved her
closure.

The thing is, after the dinner at Espagio's, when I was driving back to Westwood
with Keiko, swinging up Santa Monica Boulevard?

I swear I heard something from the glovebox: a creak, a pop, a long high note
that sang eerily into the gathering night.

Keiko looked at me.

"Balthazar," I said. "Hush."





ROBERT ONOPA

THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Let's talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs.
Shakespeare

WE WERE JUST SITTING THERE in the boardroom, Max and I, our black Italian
wingtips propped up at one end of the long slate table, our backs sunk into
charcoal velour. We were watching the Obituary Channel scroll by on the
wallscreen. That's really when it all began: during one of those moments of
stasis which originates a seminal, life-altering sequence of events, an
otherwise preternaturally calm patch of time in which the tiniest seed of chaos
fractalizes into a full-blown reordering of the cosmos. It goes without saying
that what happened from this quiet beginning unalterably changed my life. It
changed yours, too, I apologize to admit, as you will recognize once you fully
understand what I am revealing now, publicly, for the first time.

To the industry, watching the Obits scroll by is "trolling." Differentsized
vessels troll for different catches: the small firms troll for individual
clients, those recently deceased for whom the mauve icon in the encoded rainbow
of the color bar across the top of the screen indicates a still-open service
contract. On our level -- GD Inc. has six hundred franchised Homes nationwide
and operations in Canada, Mexico, and Korea -- we're more interested in
demographic shifts, tracking market share, the kinds of data indicated by the
shape of the color bar itself, its waves and fluctuations.

We started doing business even before "Elliott Anderson's Obituary Channel" was
first bounced down from a satellite. Our genesis lay in the demise of the 20th
Century "baby boomer" generation: as that population died off early in this
century, the demand for funerals increased so rapidly the deathcare industry
grew like bread rising under the action of yeast. We were the first chain to go
interstate, the first to use CDC statistics to locate new Homes, the first with
group plans {beginning with our benchmark contract with AARP}. We shaped the
franchise system of funeral homes you see today. So when Max minded the
boardroom wallscreen, he eyed it with a proprietary air, like an institutional
investor watching the big board dance before his or her eyes.

I confess I wasn't paying attention. I was staring past the wallscreen through
our eightieth floor window at the mustard-colored atmosphere of downtown L.A.,
wondering whether or not I was going to be able to sight Object 21/3847 -- a new
comet, just named Virgilius Maro -- as it finally hove into Earth's sight next
week. My hobby is imaging astronomical objects with VHD clarifying video. I was
concluding that the only way I was going to be able to see V. Maro for the full
fourteen seconds it would take for me to properly capture its image was by
leasing space on Mauna Kea. This gave new meaning to the phrase "visible to the
naked eye."

"Pass the fucking embalming fluid," Max growled, "They're killin' us."

"Mmmm. Us?"

He pointed at a new symbol, an ideograph, showing up in the color bar of the
Obit Channel screen. "Like who's this new outfit, Ancestors?"

"Asian specialists. In from Beijing," I said, stretching, sitting up. At least
I'd been keeping up with Post Mortem, our trade magazine. "They started out as
All Friends Mortuary Society. Special noodle feature on all banquet menus,
monk's food, saffron theme. Niche market. Specials include ancestors appear in
holocube .... "

"They're not the only ones."

"C'mon, Max. We're still doing close to three billion a year."

Max took a deep breath, rubbed his eyes, and spoke softly. "Not anymore.
Two-eight is what we billed last year. This year we thought twosix. Now look at
the way the market's turned on us. We'll be lucky to hurdle one-five.""

Really?"

"Your head's been in the clouds, Coop. Ever since Harriet took off last year."

"I am reading the trades." I blushed. My divorce aside, the truth is, the
business end of things had never seized me the way it had Max -- a business
which, I recalled with a pang of guilt, had treated me very well {ask Harriet,
whose settlement included a condo complex in Cabo). Lately I had been acting
like the numbers had little to do with me.

"We were the first with drive-through viewing," Max ruminated, "the first with
unit pricing, the first with mobile embalming centers .... "

My implanted pager hummed against my heart. I used the excuse to ease myself out
of my chair. "Cheer up," I tried. "We'll think of something."

"Well, you're the artist, Coop," Max teased with his crooked grin. "Right ?"

Right, I suppose. I started out as a videographer, got into deathcare by
scanning in sample make-up treatments on a part-time basis for Max when he was
still Sczyczypek Family Funeral Home. I stuck with Max when the business took
off. It was I who unified the company image with the Angel*" theme when we went
national, I who selected the Mozart Requiem[TM] as the signature for our
international line. It was I who designed our logo, the gilt letters G and D
surrounded by a gold, O-shaped frame, spelling in an oblique way a sacred
three-letter word to those of our customers who wanted reassurance that they'd
chosen the right provider in their time of need.

My only disagreement with Max had been over the name change, from Sczyczypek to
Grateful Dead. Not that I didn't think Sczyczypek couldn't be improved upon; but
how could the dead -- let me call your attention to the operative noun here --
be Grateful[TM]? Oh, I know the history of the term, its use by a 20th-century
rockgroup, its source as a descriptive term for a British ballad in which a
human helps a ghost find peace. But we're talking about corpses here, not
ghosts. Max pursued the fiction of their satisfaction as our trademark marketing
strategy. Another one of our signatures became the Mona Lisa[TM] smile on the
face of each of our clients. (True, I was the one who fabricated the mold for
the plastic insert -- who was I to argue with success?) But aside from giving
the franchise its name, Max mostly stuck to the books and left the rest to me.

Which meant that I was the one who was paged that morning. I had a warrantee
problem to deal with.

In the previous month the Westwood Grateful Dead had cremated the remains of a
prominent judge. His widow had called the Westwood facility to report that the
urn containing her husband's ashes had been stay with me here -- making noises.
I mean producing sounds: creaks, pops, strings of rapid ticks, little noises
like that. The Westwood unit had sent their man out, but he'd come back baffled.
They'd kicked the problem up to the franchise level, where it bounced over to
me.

You may already know me well enough to know that I prefer to work away from the
boardroom. Yet that day the relief I felt in walking away from Max's news was
balanced by a chill that ran down my spine when I identified the gray east I'd
been seeing over our flotilla of maglev Fleetwoods in the motor pool, limos
whose paint usually gleamed so black they shimmered in the light. They'd started
looking like funereal battleships.

I hadn't understood what was turning them that color: they were gathering dust.

It took me twenty minutes to drive to Westwood.

I found a pastel mansion at the address, all flat planes and glass walls; when I
activated the residential scanner the door was answered by a tall, leggy blonde
in a microskirt, hair all frizzed out, green lipstick. "I'm her niece," she
said, then promptly disappeared.

She left a rich cinnamon odor in the air.

Then Keiko MacPhee appeared in the foyer, dressed in black. She was younger than
I'd expected, thin but sturdy, with dark eyes and full lips. Her long hair was
pulled back in an austere way. I was struck by the way I could see her bones
beneath the spare flesh of her shoulders, her forearms, her long elegant
fingers, as if her mortality lay waiting just beneath her skin. Which of course
it did. I found her very attractive.

"I'm Cooper Boyd," I said. "From GD Inc."

"This way," she said, turning and pulling me in her wake into a living room with
a vaulted ceiling, faux rustic furniture, and a stark stone fireplace, a tribal
hearth in the Nomad style that's been so big for the past few years. I
recognized the pyramid set like a trophy in the center of the rough mantel as a
customized Model 986 Solid Titanium Urn, our finest unit -- a phoenix sculpted
in bas relief on its front.

The leggy blonde slipped through the room, now with a jacket over her shoulder,
pecking her aunt on the cheek. "Back about midnight," she said. Then she smiled
at me through her green lipstick. "My name's Unix. Nice suit."

"Italian," I assented, pleased. I watched her leave. "Mrs. MacPhee," I said,
turning my attention back to widow, "you don't look old enough to be her aunt.
And yet the Judge .... "

"...was a hundred and seventeen when he died. I'm...thirty-nine. The Judge spent
a lot of money on life extension. And the dear man, he insisted on spending some
on me."

We made small talk about adjusting to the loss of a loved one, about the house,
about the noise she'd been hearing. Judge MacPhee, I confirmed, was the elderly
gentleman in the nearby holopix. Big ears, a rapacious smile, the red and white
plaid pants only judges can wear with impunity. Mrs. MacPhee -- call me Keiko,
she insisted -- explained with quiet intelligence how the Judge, whom she'd met
clerking out of law school, had died during his third artificial heart
installation. She'd had him cremated on his instructions, against her own wishes
for cryogenic preservation in an elaborate home sarcophagus offered by one of
our competitors.

Above the low hum of the house's climate control, I was startled to hear a pop
that definitely seemed to have come from the um; it was followed by a long, low
whistle, mournful and remote.

Keiko shivered. "It's...now he's started doing that."

When I looked at her in silence, she sighed.

"Oh, I understand," she said. "Those are only ashes and an urn."

"Cremation is very conclusive." I nodded slowly. She'd beaten me to where I had
come to try, for her own good, to take her. I admired her good sense. "So
there's probably a fairly .... "

"...pedestrian explanation," she completed my sentence. She took a deep breath.
"I'm trying to live with that. What I can't live with," she said, smiling wryly,
"is a noisy urn." She looked away. "I loved him dearly. It's like he's still
here somehow."

The urn made another pop. Keiko and I stood together in the ensuing silence and
exchanged raised eyebrows, then she looked away again. There was a sensuous
quality to the way she filled out her dress, to her scent, to the way she worked
her lower lip with her teeth.

I inspected the unit, which appeared to be capable of surviving its three
hundred year warrantee: terrific heft, perfect seams, that quality anodized
titanium finish. "I'll take it in," I suggested. "Do some scans, replace the
urn, see what happens." I pictured myself returning the unit personally.

"I'd be grateful," she said. "I'm sure you understand. How can I let go?" She
sighed, then bit her lower lip. "When you come back, come for dinner."

"I'll call you just as soon as I know something," I said, my heart flooding with
joy.

I STOPPED BY MAX'S spread in Santa Monica. I'd been avoiding my own home since
Harriet left. I set my Lotus on autopark and ducked in the kitchen door after
acknowledging the residential scanner. I was whistling as I walked into the den.

Max's son Lance -- a pudgy kid, pale as a mushroom -- was home on spring break
from Cal Tech. He was as smart as his dad was savvy, but to Max's dismay he was
utterly indifferent to the funeral business. Max had no other kids.

"Well, you're happy," Lance said, looking up from the green glow of a holocube
game he'd reconfigured. "Did you see your comet?"

"Something like that." I smiled, realizing that I'd forgotten my sighting
problems, forgotten the problems at work.

"Maybe you can cheer up Dad. He's really a case."

"Never fucking mind," Max said as he shuffled into the room. He was already
wearing his bathrobe, a bad sign.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Try we lost the regional contract for Triple A."

There goes all that holiday business, passed through my mind. There goes 500
mill. There goes 1-800-FATALITY. I cleared my throat, tried at least to speak
positively. "Max, you know, when we started, there were six billion people on
the planet. Now there are twelve. I don't care what contract we lose,
potentially .... "

"What do you want us to do, start bumping people off?" Max had migrated to his
bar, behind which hung my videograph of a slowly rotating Jupiter. He poured
himself a tumbler of the green Japanese melon liquor he favored. "We need a new
idea. Something big."

I was thinking about Keiko and her niece, about her late husband, about life
extension. "Immortality," I mused.

"What?" Lance said.

I paused. "Convince the market that you can provide clients some way to live
forever."

"We had a plan once," Max told Lance, his face crinkling with a memory from our
early days, and now I remembered too, to my embarrassment. "We planned to
holotape people," Max told his son, "You know, like a presentation thing about
them, THIS IS YOUR LIFE, they signed on when they were alive. Once they died,
we'd broadcast the tape on the anniversary of their deaths. The idea was, we'd
beam it down from a satellite on Fox, say, or Disney, or Fiat. Like during
halftimes, or even in commercial slots. It was perpetual care, see? Every year
you'd come back. We called it IMMORTALITY NOW!"

"Cool," Lance said. "Technology's a little dated, but still .... "

"`A holographic eternal flame; electrons and photons dancing to the virtual
reincarnation of your self,'" I quoted from the brochure we'd worked up.

"Very cool," Lance said. "There's your lost market share."

Max's eyes gleamed. "Market share? Did you hear this kid? Market share?"

"I like the technology, Dad." Lance blushed. "Why didn't you run the program,
Uncle Coop?"

I took a deep breath. "Didn't cost out. You sell broadcast in perpetuity, how do
you support all that transponder time, Obit Channel fees, all that? Turns out
we'd need our own satellite, permits from the U.N. Space Agency, production
facilities, all that for starters, just to make a go of it. Your dad worked out
the figures."

Lance scrunched up his nose. "Maybe if you tweaked the hardware...?"

Max was beaming at him. But in the end, I knew he was going to have to admit to
his son that the idea didn't go anywhere. I thought I'd spare myself the
unpleasant part. "Busy morning tomorrow," I said. "I'm out of here."

Max wasn't at the office when I drove in the next morning, which I took to be a
good sign -- why take our reverses so seriously? We'd earned our dollar. So what
could we do? By giving up on everything else, I was able to concentrate on my
class.

I teach the franchisees what we in the business call "setting features." The
corpses that come to us often stare up from their gumeys, eyes wide and mouths
agape, cheeks slack from gravity. Our service is to make them look dead; not
actually dead, transfixed with the abyss or vacant-eyed as cooked lobsters, but
properly, conventionally dead. So we shave them, close their eyes, their mouths,
shut the openings that in life were ever active: we set the features. We fold
the hands, one over the other, over the umbilicus: a posture of repose, peace
with dignity at last. The final detail, here at GD, is insertion and adjustment
of the Mona LisaTM smile.

The fitting comes in seven sizes.

It's a serene time for me, passing from corpse to corpse among the Angels[TM] on
the walls, Mozart's Requiem[TM] in the air, murmuring with the students, seeing
peace drive out fright on the faces below my hands.

About eleven I got back to my office and was able to start on the urn. It looked
seamless, but a magnetic lock inside the Model 986 responds to a proprietary
magnetic key and the pyramid unfolds into four triangles.

The Judge's ashes were intact in a traditional ziplock bag: a generous cup of
fine white and tan powder, bone fragments and white chunks, a couple the size of
stream pebbles: although we burn at 4500 degrees, not every part of the body
vaporizes, and some of the body's bones -- the pelvis, for example t are so
large as to resist reduction. Still, the total mass only came to seven point
four ounces, a handful of dust. It is instructive how little even the rich and
powerful come to, in the end.

I spread the ashes on a lab table for inspection. One bone fragment reminded me
strongly of the new Matsushita turtle logo, but that was about it. I ran a
series of scans on the urn's inner sleeve, came up with nothing. I tried heating
and cooling the unit and listened for thermal flex noises. Nothing again. I
delaminated the phoenix, sent each strata through computer-aided tomography.
Nada. What the hell was going on?

I took my lunch up to the boardroom, brought an extra corned beef sandwich,
spread it out on the slate table -- but Max still wasn't around. His wife
Dorothy didn't know where he was either; I supposed he was worrying the bean
counters on the twenty-fourth floor.

Morosely I ate and watched the Obit Channel. Our GD logo continued to shrink as
our market share fell. When I looked away, out the window, the atmosphere was
socked in again, this time with a browner cast to it, like the mustard had gone
bad. You couldn't remotely see the heavens; you'd have trouble framegrabbing a
streetlight tonight.

Then late in the afternoon, using a stereo zoom technique from cosmic body
imaging, I finally discovered an anomaly in the ashes: a tiny green drop, shiny,
like a fused gemstone. Its hardness registered in the diamond range and its
translucent surface, like Chinese jade, offered no clue to its interior. I
thought I could make out a minuscule rectangle of shaded stripes, but it might
have been my imagination.

Then I heard the little bugger creak.

I called Keiko who toggled on video when she recognized my voice. She was
wearing navy blue today, which suggested an advance in her grieving process. I
told her what I'd found.

"Did the Judge have any gems on his person, any implants, anything like that?"

"No implants that weren't recycled. Do you think you've solved the problem ?"

"Once I figure out what this green thing is ...."

My efforts were interrupted by a message from Max asking me to cover a business
meeting. I still couldn't find Max himself-- but since he knew how I hated
taking meetings, I was hardly surprised.

Keesha, Max's secretary, gave me a wink of conspiratorial approval when she
ushered in the sales rep, an ancient gnome with the unlikely name of Slaughter.

The salesman represented a line of containers suitable for the cremates of
family pets. They looked like stuffed animals, fluffy birds and cats and fish
with big eyes, had microprocessors inside and made lifelike twitches for months
on a tiny rechargeable. "Max said you needed to work on your numbers," Mr.
Slaughter said with a wet smile.

Has it come to this? I asked myself. True, when my black Lab Balthazar died, on
the way back from the crematorium I'd wound up shoving his ashes into the
glovebox of my Lotus, where they'd stayed for want of a proper spot. Maybe a
full service franchise should have something for everybody passed through my
mind. But this was going too far.

I ran Mr. Slaughter out. Keesha gave me the evil eye. "It's not like we don't
have a problem," she hissed.

AS FOR the little green thing, I kept thinking chip, though I'd never seen
anything quite like it. At noon the next day, I finally found Max.
Inadvertently. I was tracking down Lance to help me identify the green blob. I
found my call forwarded from Lance's holocube game to a lab at CalTech in
Pasadena.

"It may be the remains of one of those new biochips," Lance said after a
moment's study on the vidphone. "Looks fried. You can still read the barcode,
though .... Huh. Lemme scan this .... "

The vidphone screen was suddenly taken up by Max's face, bushy eyebrows wagging.
He looked manic. "We're back in business," he shouted.

"What are you talking about?"

Max pushed Lance back in front of the camera sensor. Lance was blushing. "You're
the one who gave us the idea, Uncle Coop," Lance said. "It started with your
comet."

"What about my comet? What idea?"

"We're using Virgilius Maro to produce the signal we need for IMMORTALITY NOW!
I've been taking courses in radio astronomy this semester. Did you know comets
and their tails move through the solar system like huge generators?" He waved
his hands around. "They come slicing through the system with a bigtime surge of
radio frequency signals we get as broadband noise. I mean, comets produce it,
generate radio frequency signals, in a major way. It's, like, the snow between
channels?"

"Yes," I said, vaguely familiar through radio imaging. "And?"

"All we need to do is organize that RF noise and transform it into something
useful -- our image carrier, say. Digitize it, modulate it with the holounits
you want broadcast .... Then you send back to the comet a one-time countersignal
to reshape the original RF noise into the signal you want broadcast. Bingo ....
"

"Bingo?"

"Bingo. You've got a customized signal that'll be transmitted through the solar
system on every pass of the comet until, uh .... ten to the seventh over pi ....
for about, uh, four hundred million years ?"

"You're not seriously .... Max?"

There was his face again, shiny with perspiration, beatific with a kind of
madness.

"Look, Max," I said, "It's nice to have Lance in the loop here, but aren't we
reaching a bit? Selling radio noise from a comet? Isn't that a little out of our
range?"

Max's grin might have been shaped by a Mona Lisa[TM] insert. "Not like we have a
choice, Coop."

"It's O'Donald's, Uncle Coop," Lance said off-camera.

I saw Max wince. He was particularly touchy about the mortuary arm of McDonald's
Corp., the O'Donald's chain. "Those cheap maggots," Max said grimly, "with their
fake Irish Wakes and that stupid fucking clown, Digger O'Donald."

"What did they do?"

"They underbid us for the AARP contract."

Now it was my turn to wince. Perhaps we were finished after all. No business can
downsize by half overnight and not experience disaster. I looked up. The
Angels[TM] on the wall seemed surprised too. I noticed a film of dust on their
wings; were we already laying off maintenance staff up here in the suites as
well?

The monitor framed the faces of both Max and his son: the Earth and the Moon,
Jupiter and Io. I imagined retiring into another life with a woman like Keiko,
working through the night somewhere, framegrabbing shooting stars. How nice it
would be to have that kind of human satisfaction when the business was coming
down -- a son you loved, a loyal wife. "You guys do what you want," I said.
"We're due for some luck." I was certain, of course, that our luck had run out.

"Send me the chip!" Lance blurted out under a squeeze from his dad.

Part II

"A memory chip?" Keiko said.

"Apparently it survived the cremation, so it's clearly some hardened circuit.
Maybe part of a life extension implant that didn't melt down, maybe something
else .... "

She was sitting across from me at Espagio's. Its aquarium wall bubbled behind
her in an algae-laden homage to Venice, the Italian city which had sunk just the
year before to rising sea-levels. Keiko's niece Unix had suggested the place,
winking at me in a way which, I felt, boosted my stock. I'd needed the boost;
the news about her husband's remains had changed Keiko. She'd put more holopix
of the Judge around the house and she was wearing black again. She seemed drawn
into herself.

"Is the chip readable?"

I recited again the printout of the message text Lance had sent me that morning.
"Bubble memory nanochip exchanging gasses through a quantum field. Proprietary
barcode, unlisted, bio range."

"Bio range. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that."

I folded the mostly blank paper down to a sixth its size, the proportions of a
coffin. "All of us wait for signals from the dead," I told her. "We watch for
signs that they're still there, listen for voices to tell us that they still
care. People are even happy when we hear that some deceased soul has done some
outrageous thing, like disappeared from a grave or sat up in a coffin or made
noise from an urn. As if any of that proves they're much like the living and
that we're still on their minds. You have to be realistic, Keiko."

"Do you know I'm really fifty-nine?" she said quietly. "He was a bastard to a
lot of people. But not to me."

I'd guessed fifty; not bad. "Mrs. MacPhee. Keiko ...."

"First the noises, now this chip. It would be like him to leave something. Maybe
he's just saying hello. Maybe ...." She sighed, looking away with dark eyes that
mixed sadness and hope.

Well, the surprise was on me. Life always turns out to be more complex than
you'd planned for it to be. I'd only just figured out what I really wanted in
life -- the love of a woman like Keiko, a life together to complete my own
approaching sixties -- and now here I was, the rival of a bag of ashes. And
losing. I put my two hands over hers on the center of the table, nudging aside
my plate, felt a tremor in my palm. "Maybe you ought to get out more," I said,
deciding to go for it. "Unix told me that you've been alone in your house since
.... Go for a walk. Anywhere, to a park. Dig around in your garden." I blushed
and muttered, "Have um, a fling."

She smiled.

"Well, it would be a mistake to give you hope about the Judge."

"I suppose you must be right. But until I really know about this chip .... "

"Give me a couple more days. Just don't expect a miracle. The only real miracle
is .... "I said, waving my arms, "all round you." I'd intended to wave at life
itself, but I found myself waving at replica Espagio's, at the movie people at
the tables, at Unix, coming in the bluegreen glass door, a head-turner in her
short reflective dress.

Still, my strategy with Keiko seemed to be working. As I helped her into Unix's
van at the curb she let her hand linger in mine and smiled. "My niece was right
about you," she said. "You're a lot of fun."

At breakfast the next morning I found myself watching an infomercial on the Obit
Channel whose strangely familiar elements took a long time for me to fully
recognize.

The screen had gone European with archaic reds and blues and golds, morphed into
an ersatz ancient tapestry whose vague robed figures came to life holding hands
and ascending through some sort of stagy empyrean busy with GD Angels[TM]. A
smooth, deep voice intoned: "Star with saints and heroes in a dazzling
holographic celebration your descendants will cherish forever. Travel through
eternity clothed in the authentic finery of medieval Florence ..."

I recognized the voice from an ad for our International Line. Medieval Florence?
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. What I was looking at was an
infomercial for IMMORTALITY NOW!

I was even partly responsible for it. When we'd kicked around the idea years ago
I'd suggested holotaping the clients Ior, failing their actual presence, their
computer generated images) in scenes set in the ascending circles of Paradise as
imagined by Dante Alighieri. I mean, it had been just an idea. Now apparently
Max had gotten someone to develop it.

I paged the rest of the executive floor for Max, got forwarded to Pasadena.

"We're getting great results," Lance told me enthusiastically from the CalTech
lab. Max, who appeared disheveled, was behind him, teleconferencing with a bank
of monitors; I recognized the rainbow colors of the GD Regional Franchisee Net.
"Fantastic results," Lance went on. "A friend of mine from the radio astronomy
club has an internship at the SETI transmitter in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. We're
working with him. Dad leased the site for the duration."

"Arecibo? The whole site?"

"We're going for a burst transmission on the 31st," Lance gushed.

Max had migrated to the vidphone and joked about buying down the national debt
with the deal for Arecibo.

"Cripes," Lance said, "are we getting bandwidth! We'll be able to encode enough
information to broadcast tactile holography in a window of about eight hours
real time. Then with compression .... We're trying to squeeze in a full
twenty-four hour day."

"I still don't get it," I said, trying to stay calm. "How does this signal
override all the other signals people get?"

"The way sunspots affect even hardened satellites; you fiddle with the
magnetosphere a bit. Virgilius Maro's that big, and we punch him up besides.
Terrific lot of RF noise. Now if Virgil was just a little closer to Earth, ha
ha."

There was Max over his shoulder, munching popcorn. "Isn't it great how Lance's
finally taken an interest in the business?" Max said. "It's been a dream, to
pass it on to the kid: Sczyczypek forever. Wait till you see the spots we've got
running on the Obit Channel."

"Max, that's what I called you about."

"Virgil, everybody's calling the comet Virgil, don't you love it? How could we
pass the Dante angle up? I know you usually handle the art director end of
things, but how you've been lately ... I thought I'd turn it over to
Fiat/Disney."

"Max ...."

"It's a business decision, Coop." The way Max tensed his jaw when he spoke, that
distant look in his eyes, reminded me that it was, after all, his business. I
held my tongue. Anyway, I thought, who wants to paint the hull of a sinking
ship?

"We're already selling units," he went on. "From six this morning we've had a
lease on reference studio space in the Valley. We'll have virtual setups in
every franchise city by week's end. Overnight we've sold sixty thousand slots of
that Paradiso so far -- hey, you think that's too Italian? ParadiseLand maybe?"

Max downloaded other segments of the advertising program into a window on my
wallscreen and I saw more of Fiat/Disney's work, even one of the holounits
themselves. Now I knew what those high production levels, those make-up jobs
reminded me of: soap opera. Set in thirteenthcentury Florence, laced with
special effects, but soap opera all the same. It was painful to watch. I felt
the way any writer feels when a story of his or hers is worked over, distorted.
I felt surrounded by disaster.

It had been a good run with the company, I found myself thinking.

"Don't look so glum, Uncle Coop." Lance seemed a little embarrassed himself. "I
got something else on the chip. Set of chips, I guess we should say. Apparently
the, uh, cooking it went through? Thermal conversion auto-booted a runnable file
to access mass storage? Or at least so say the probes. Amazing how the lines
hold up. I think I got the power leads identified to the CPU and the bubble
memory. Who knows, I might even be able to mn that sucker. Or ruin it for good.
I mean, it's really a long shot."

"Do what you can," I smiled automatically, but the room really began to swim
around me now. Destroy it! I wanted to shout. Give it to me! I'll ruin it. I had
just been comforting myself with a vision of retirement with Keiko and my
rival's dust refused to settle, if you know what I mean.

After I hung up, different schemes passed through my mind. Get it back from
Lance, send it down the trash chute, flush it down the john. But gradually,
after twenty minutes of controlled breathing, I settled down.

I did have qualms of conscience about destroying it, after all. And I was
curious about what would happen if Lance tried to run the program ("ruin it for
good" ran through my mind). Still, I resolved to withhold this latest
development from Keiko. I would tell her that we hadn't made any progress, that
it looked like there was nothing to the chip after all.

As the comet approached, I could lose myself in setting up the imaging
equipment, dirty though the atmosphere continued to be. I'd planned to invite
Keiko to drive down to Baja with me, but word was even Baja was socked in. So I
would have to console myself with beta-testing new Zeiss filters; they were
ingenious: including power supply the whole set fit into the palm of my hand.

My specialty is the suitcase-sized observatory. There is a special pleasure in
handling such fine equipment, calibrating the sensors, cleaning the lenses,
inputting the current project's program, coordinating frame-action with
celestial coordinates, running through simulations whose successes and failures
both leave you hanging, peacefully and without messy human contact, somewhere
among the stars.

THE COMET WAS a big event in the news: icy infalling interstellar material from
the Kuiper Belt, a remnant of the formation of the solar system. The best
estimate of its mass was a bit over a hundred megatons, the size of a small
mountain, a fairly rare event. A comet that big, impacting the Earth, would
cause an untold catastrophe, its energy yield on the order of 200,000 megatons
of TNT, equivalent to all the nuclear weapons produced in the previous century.
But though V. Maro's 272 year orbit would be close in cosmic terms, no
measurable effect to Earth was expected beyond an interruption in
communications, and an incredible show.

The latest data on Virgilius Maro -- which everyone was calling Virgil now --
was everywhere. It was on CNN, VNN, running as an occasional window on the Obit
Channel.

A comet-related story was running on the wallscreen at Keiko's house the next
evening when I arrived for my promised dinner, the titanium urn and what
remained of the Judge's ashes in my hands. Yes, I'd told Keiko that the chip
inquiry had come to a dead end.

I was feverish with guilt and lust.

Unix, wearing a silver microdress decorated with signs of the Zodiac, met me at
the door and took the urn from my hands. She set it on the foyer table. "Aunt
Keiko's instructions," she said. "She's taking your advice about burying the
ashes and the urn in a regular grave. Burying what's left of Uncle -- my dad's
uncle, actually. Still, she's been like an aunt to me."

"I'm just trying to make her happy," I said.

"I can tell." She smiled. "She's out back .... "

I found Keiko outside in the neglected kitchen garden, hands dirty but cheerful.
She was filling pots with soil.

"Not much bigger than this," she said, holding up a parsley seed: I realized she
was talking about the chip. "Nothing to it, then?"

"No," I said. "Nothing at all. My technician still has the chip, but your
husband's ashes are otherwise intact. I wasn't sure you wanted the, uh, since
.... No noises anymore."

She shrugged. "Something from an implant then, after all," she said, shaking her
head. She drained her glass of vodka. "Now let's have dinner. I've got a
fifty-year-old bottle of wine."

Afterwards, we sat by a fire in the living room, drank port and watched a bit of
the comet special on VNN; Unix settled in with us. She'd had a falling-out with
her boyfriend.

The special was interrupted, to my dismay, by a commercial for IMMORTALITY NOW!
from Grateful Dead. Elderly men and women romped around a fountain in a cobbled
square -- Max had turned creative control entirely over to Fiat/Disney. The
little cartoon animals splashing in the water of the fountain, the voiceover
sales pitch, the promise of a Purgatorio sequel, made me burn with shame.

The tacky part, though, cheered up Unix, and she cheered me up, and we started
to chat, sunk so happily in the sofa by the Nomad firehearth that I didn't at
first realize that Keiko had been out of the room for some time.

Unix blushed a little, smiled, and disappeared.

It was getting late, and I wasn't sure what to do. Then the lights dimmed, and I
thought I saw someone in the hallway to the master suite at the rear of the
house, hand raised at about the level of a console for a house computer. A
moment later subdued harp music floated through the air. Then Keiko walked
slowly into the room wearing a black silk robe.

She stopped at the fire hearth, her hands resting on the slate platform, fingers
splayed, her hair down around her shoulders, the fire reflected on her face. She
had continued drinking -- I could see it in her eyes, in her breathing, in the
way she swayed, ever so slightly. I calculated the time since the Judge had been
cremated: a month, exactly. The grieving process takes different forms for
different people; I had used my professional experience to read her precisely.

"The kind of man he was, my late husband," she said. "He would have wanted me to
jump back in. You're that kind of man too."

I cleared my throat. Would you believe me if I told you that I realized then
that what I had encouraged in her was wrong, that things between us had moved
too fast, that for her own good I was going to turn her down, hug her gently and
lead her back to her bed and tuck her in and tell her to go to sleep? I'm not
sure I believe myself either. Oh, I realized I'd been wrong, certainly, but the
way she'd said jump back in I'd fallen completely, victim to my desires, victim
to the silky curve at her waist, to the huskiness in her voice.

Keiko and Unix, forgive me.

As it was, I was saved by my pager, which hummed against my heart insistently.

The message was from Lance, He was paging me from the mortuary lab in the
basement of the GD tower. The message read: Highest Urgency.

When I found him, Lance was crouched over a jury-rigged assembly surrounded by a
bank of instruments -- I recognized a light-enhancing stereo microscope.

"You'll never know what ecstasy you interrupted," I said dryly. "What is it?"

"Uncle Coop," Lance said, pointing to an eyepiece. "Look at this."

I put the bridge of my nose between the soft cups of rubber. At first I didn't
see anything but a mottled background, then discerned what seemed an aberration,
a comic little figure, a smaller grid of red and white.

"You may not believe me at first," Lance said, his voice tight with excitement,
"but I think that's the Judge. Or some manifestation of him, like a homunculus.
It was created by the chipset when I powered it up .... See, first thing it did
was output a nutrient program, carbon high. I used my Pepsi. Next thing I knew
.... See, it was a sequence, started with the sound chip, to call attention to
itself .... "

"Christ!" I said. "It's a little person. Those are plaid pants."

I continued to watch the figure in wonder as Lance brought me up to speed. The
Judge had bought into a duplication technology, he told me. "There's a DNA info
base in nanomemory, quark based, really something. Then a generator that kicks
in when that program runs, comes out of a lot of compression. Well, he
reproduces himself, see? This guy actually figured out a way to live forever."

"Guy? What do you mean, guy? This is some kind of bacteria."

"Yeah, that's true, right," Lance said. "There's a bug in the scalar routine?"

"Scalar routine?"

"Formally it's the function of two vectors, equal to the product of their
magnitudes and the cosine of the angle between them? Anyway, if you get the dot
point wrong .... "

"Lance, what are you talking about?"

"What went wrong. It's in the sequence for the scalar routine, what makes him
this size. See, the chipset reproduced him all right, but the dot point got
shifted. Got his scale wrong by a factor of one thousand. Poor sucker. I did the
calculations. He's one one-thousandth the size of an actual man."

So there he was, my rival, who less than an hour ago, in the strange complicated
way of human affairs, had interposed himself between me and the consummation of
my dreams. Who, I asked myself, stood between me and my dreams now?

I started to laugh, but I swear I saw a tiny fist raised, shaking, directly at
me.

I sucked in a deep breath. "I'd better contact Mrs. MacPhee immediately," I
said, reaching for the vidphone.

Part III

That was the beginning of the week you all remember, the week that changed all
our lives.

Later that Monday morning astronomers announced that Virgilius Maro's course had
unaccountably shifted. The large comet was now headed directly toward the planet
Earth.

Impact was expected in seven days, fourteen hours, and six minutes.

I see I've barely touched upon the catastrophic possibilities impact presented,
but I'm sure you remember some of them: how a comet V. Maro's size had crashed
into the Yucatan at the end of the Cetacean Era and ended the reign of the
dinosaurs, how the current human casualty estimate ran into the billions. Alone
in the glow of wallscreens and in groups from school auditoriums to cathedrals
we contemplated the possibility of a conflagration that would produce rampant
volcanism, sulfur clouds, an extended period of darkness, soaring temperatures
followed by a new ice age, the extinction of species after species and eliminate
most of the world's biomass. Scientists were scrambling to turn the comet off
its course with a thermonuclear explosion in space. NASA ran twenty-four-hour
shifts, and the Chinese mobilized their "factory-inspace" program to produce a
delivery vehicle loaded and launched from the UN Station. Nukes were being
readied and shuttled up, but as there were only a few hundred left on the
planet, NASA was having logistics problems, and the decision to go with the
Ukrainian multiple warheads (the infamous "cabbage bombs") made everyone
nervous. As well, as we all now know, we should have been.

As for Grateful Dead, Inc., the effect on the firm was paradoxical. With so much
potential death on the way, suddenly lots of people wanted to make arrangements.
They reasoned, and rightly so, that in the event of impact there would be a run
on deathcare services, and that the average consumer would be best accommodated
by the worldwide facilities of a full-service chain such as ours.

Just after the President's announcement, I finally found Max. He was up in the
boardroom, sprawled in his captain's chair at the end of the long slate table,
transfixed on the Obit Channel running full wallscreen on the other side of the
room. His little fax dish had pulled in a library of invoices, printed out
balance sheets and ledger pages, all heaped around him; on his laptop was loaded
a draft page from the upcoming annual report to shareholders.

"Fuck the business," I told him. "Go home to your wife and son. Nobody really
knows about this, nobody knows for sure we're safe until it's deflected." I was
still shaken by the tic the President had developed halfway through his speech.

"Coop, we've completely sold out Paradiso," Max said with barely controlled
excitement. "It's damned amazing. Purgatorio's half committed as of an hour ago
-- Purgatorio, where clients gotta shuffle around these circle things admitting
they ate too much or slept too much or whatever turned them on. Fiat/Disney's
even working up an Inferno segment. We got couples buying adjoining units as
gifts, we got groups who want to tape on the last day, like have a comet party
and tape their segments."

"Max," I said, "all of us may only have a week to live. Don't you understand?
The comet could hit the planet. Even a near miss .... "

Max blushed red: "Yeah, yeah," he mumbled. "I'm no rocket scientist, but hey,
Coop, I figure, it turned, it'll turn again, see?"

"How can you talk like that?"

Max pushed away from the table, got up, swung around and pulled his baggy suit
coat off the back of the chair. He shoved his arm into a coat sleeve. "Gotta go.
I got a presentation to give to FEMA. You wanna come? I know you're not up to
speed these days, Coop, but I always feel better if you're there. Backup?"

"FEMA? Who's FEMA?"

"Federal Emergency Management. You know. We're cutting a deal on a pre-need
thing. See, they got a mandated formula for disaster preparation. The front
money on this one alone gets us back up over three bil. Ain't that ironic? Just
when we get IMMORTALITY NOW! workin' better than expected? You dance for a
drizzle, you get a hurricane. And look at you. Who am I to say you haven't been
up to speed? Who gave us the comet?"

"Max, what's the fucking funeral business worth if the whole world ends? You may
never have another night to bounce on your bed with Dorothy. You may never have
another Monday afternoon to spend with Lance. Live a little, for Christ's sake."

As if on cue, Lance himself rushed in, his pale face flushed pink, waving a
sheaf of figures that turned out to be estimates for the FEMA meetings. He told
his father in clipped tones that they were going to be late if they didn't get
going. Max jammed papers into his briefcase, folded his battered old computer,
and the two of them ran off as I stood there, still scolding.

Even as I ranted on, I could see the error of my ways. There Max had gone: busy
with the company of his son, awash with business, fulfilled. Do you want to know
how desperate I was? I tried to get in touch with Harriet. She has a new
hyphenated name -- no, not just a hyphenated last name, but a hyphenated first
name as well. NuKiwi-Harriet Finney-Boyd. There's no going back at all in life,
is there.

At the request of Unix, I checked in on Keiko.

"How's your aunt taking it?" I asked in the foyer when she answered the door.

"She's doin' great. She is, anyway. You know, Coop, Aunt Keiko always went for
those short-man-syndrome, power-trip guys. The Napoleonic types? I mean, really,
now the Judge is as short as you can get, right?"

I looked at her with surprise.

"I don't mean to disrespect Uncle," she said. "He's my father's favorite uncle;
I do love him, and I'm glad that he's...back, sort of back. But he's always been
a real tyrant, little dictator bossing everybody around. Now he's even worse
than he was before."

I laughed. "I don't mean to disrespect him either," I said, "but I could tell by
the way he dressed."

"Myself, I prefer taller guys like you. Fewer insecurities."

I blushed. "Ah, Unix, I just wish I wasn't too old for you."

She giggled. "How old do you think I am?"

"Nineteen, at the outside," I told her.

"Try twenty-nine. Uncle bought a bunch of that life extension stuff for me too,
bless him." She was wearing that tight green microskirt again, and she turned
and walked away with a provocative wiggle. It is extraordinary how a bit of
information can change your point of view.

The threat of the end of the world aside, I remember thinking then, we live in
wonderful times.

A MINIATURE LIFE-SUPPORT unit, consisting of racks of equipment sent over from
GD Inc. and two exotic consoles from Switzerland, had been set up around a lab
table in the living room, a nest of tubing and thin wires terminating in a light
enhancing stereo microscope. Keiko was there, apparently keeping a constant
vigil. The Judge had grown but he was still quite small, inhabiting a heated
area on a textured slide.

Keiko was a feverish specter. After I had politely put my eye to the microscope
eyepiece for a moment she gave me her hand. An understanding had developed
between us.

"How can he live like that?"

"He can't," she said. "His doctors tell us that he'll survive for seven days
maximum."

"How tragic," I said, searching my professional vocabulary for the right thing
to say.

"What's it matter?" a strange elderly voice said. I looked around me, startled.
By the expressions on Keiko's and Unix's faces I realized we were listening to
the Judge; apparently his voice was picked up by sensors on the microscope stage
and piped through the home quatro sound. His voice seemed to come from
everywhere. The effect was eerie; my skin tingled and I felt myself tremble with
momentary fright. The voice spoke again: "Those goddamned NASA bunglers, we're
all about to die anyway."

They were behind schedule, it was true. But even given their failings, nothing
could quite justify the acid criticism, the savage personal insult, the vitriol
that filled the room for ten minutes as the Judge described NASA's response to
the crisis. And the rest of the world's. I spare you the details.

In the end, the Judge told me, his one regret was that he'd wanted to go out
big.

Unix rolled her eyes.

I had to bite my tongue.

"Put me back now, goddamnit," the Judge said.

"What does he mean?" I asked.

"He goes with Aunt Keiko," Unix said. "Has to do with body temperature.

"We'll rest now," Keiko said. "Thank you, Cooper, for coming by."

I held out my hand forlornly, and Keiko touched it briefly before turning to be
alone with her husband. The look in her eyes confirmed that I had lost her,
absolutely, to a 117-year-old man the size of a tomato seed. And a mean-spirited
bastard besides. Perhaps that's what it took to cling so tenaciously to life.

Keiko opened the top of her hospital gown and slipped him down into her bosom.
Out of respect I tried not to stare.

Unix looked at me with raised eyebrows. "For him, it's the adventure of a
lifetime." Then she swallowed and looked alarmed at having let slip an off-color
remark.

Embarrassed for her, I blurted out, "Finally conclusive proof that size isn't
everything." It was really a stupid joke, but Unix looked at me gratefully while
Keiko pretended not to hear, turned with dignity to leave the room.

Unix put her hand on my back. "Say, Coop," she said.

It must have been the comet.

Unix walked me out to my Lotus with a shy batting of her green-lined eyes and
thanked me for the way I'd helped her aunt.

"If you only actually knew," I said.

"I know. Look, what counts is, you did the right thing in the end. My aunt's
happy; little Caesar is back on his throne. Frankly, I think she's missing a
bet; I've thought so from the beginning. Especially now, with your comet in the
sky."

Then Unix kissed me, really kissed me.

I kissed back.

She slipped her tongue between my teeth and wiggled it around.

We fell against the car, shamelessly groping at one another, sliding down the
hood and along the fender and over the headlight, pulling at one another's
clothes, half-naked by the time we rolled onto the soft lawn.

What can I say of that first encounter that could do justice to our passion, to
the bliss that mixed with relief down through my bones? No words can quite
describe the sensation -- but oh, the touch of her flesh, the warmth of her
breath, that moment of slippery joy.

We went everywhere together for twelve hours, having sex. Like a lot of people.
We wound up in the boardroom on the eightieth floor of the GD Tower. I felt
wonderful, lying there on the slate table, my black Italian wingtips unlaced on
the floor, a cashmere sweater rolled into a pillow beneath my head, Unix's thigh
inches from my teeth.

On the wallscreen new infomercials for our Purgatorio offering produced by
Fiat/Disney were running. I hadn't quite understood the attraction of appearing
periodically throughout eternity suffering one of the punishments of Purgatory,
but when I saw the actress Candy Candiotti jogging around the Fourth Cornice to
show her victory over Sloth, I realized that Purgatorio would sell out
completely, too.

Later that morning I showed Unix around corporate headquarters; for all the
volume Max said we were doing, you'd have thought GD Inc. was shutting down. The
business floors were almost deserted, the Angel[TM] Imaging Center on skeleton
crew, all but one of Resurrection Chapel's Dial-a-Faith windows dark. The usual
staff was working in Preparation, but the Motor Pool was quiet, and there were
only two girls down in Floral. I'd called off my franchisee classes. I took Unix
through the Professional Education wing, looked into the great room. When I saw
the clock on the wall at eleven, I felt a pang of guilt, felt I ought to be
working.

It passed. Let the dead attend to themselves a bit, I remember thinking. Unix
and I went up two floors and wandered into the Casket Selection Suite. We wound
up unraveling a dozen bolts of satin and tunneling into a love nest of pillows.
The funeral business, more so than other work, gives you an enhanced
appreciation for life.

In the late afternoon we were back up on the slate table again. The Obit Channel
was still running on the far wallscreen.

"Coop," Unix said. "What's that?"

A news flash was crawling across the bottom of the screen, text shot through
with a red comet icon:

...authorities are investigating reports that changes to comet Virgilius Maro's
trajectory may be linked to a bizarre 'lights out' phenomenon in Puerto Rico on
Sunday. Near Arecibo, an unknown hacker diverted the entire electrical supply of
the island to the site of the SETI transmitter for more than thirty minutes ....

"Lance'll fix it. He's very sorry, but he and that friend of his down there ....
"

"Lance. What happened?"

"It's called a steering pulse, Uncle Coop, a microwave thing? Beam it up there.
We heat up one side of the comet, see, fiddle with its spin. We needed to move
the orbit just a tad closer to Earth to get the resolution we needed? The one we
contracted for with Fiat/Disney?"

"So they miscalculated a bit," Max said. "They're just students. They'll fix it,
don't get too upset. Hell, it's unbelievably great for us. You see the Obit
Channel numbers? We're kickin' butt."

By then society had ceased normal functioning; people stayed home from their
jobs, construction projects went on hold, kids skipped school. But the cities
were surprisingly peaceful. (Of course, it was still early in that historic
week.) Those were the days when traffic thinned and industries all but shut down
around the world and the air cleared. We all awaited the delayed launch from the
Cape. A backup was in position as well. We tried not to worry.

THE BUSINESS, you will appreciate, was entirely out of my hands. Cash and
electronic transfer money flowed into GD Inc.'s accounts like water from a dozen
fire hoses. On Wednesday I logged into the firm's proprietary accounting program
to see what Max had been up to with FEMA. In the face of disaster, he'd been
playing the market both ends against the middle. He'd contracted with FEMA to
service millions of potential fatalities, but he'd so fax underbid the
competition that our losses would be greater than our net worth if we had to
deliver from even a glancing blow of the comet. Meanwhile the virtual studios
were holotaping IMMORTALITY NOW! segments on double shifts throughout the
country.

The actual work continued to stall. The dead continued to go unburied in
coolers. The great room, the walks with my students, the lectures on setting
features, the insertions of the Mona Lisa[TM] smiles, these were out of my life
now. Some heroic funerals were being conducted: we did our part, sending our
maglev Fleetwoods out undermanned, deploying mobile embalming centers, express
shipping corpses around the country on chartered flights if it was too difficult
for surviving family to travel.

You don't need me to tell you that the story of those times was an epic
adventure which all of us helped write. I'll confine myself to finishing the
inside story of the comet, since that was what changed your life too.

As you've probably surmised, Lance was counting on a fix of the comet's path but
not getting results. And, as you remember from that week, on the morning of the
great launch, the unmanned shuttle carrying the Ukrainian warheads to the
"factory in space" blew up all but a dozen of the backup nukes on the pad. Then
there was the problem with the guidance system on the back-up shuttle, which
knocked the "factory-inspace" out of orbit and eventually back down to Earth.
Thankfully no one was hurt. The Chinese still say that problem with the guidance
system was caused by broad band radio noise pulsing somewhere out of the
Caribbean. Lance denies it.

I remember hearing about the collision between the backup shuttle and the
Chinese "factory-in-space" at Espagio's -- one of the few restaurants left open
-- where I'd gone for lunch with Unix. I took a call from Max immediately
afterwards.

Max said, "Do you want the good news or bad news first?"

"The bad news I just heard for myself. According to NASA we've got just one more
chance, with just one more nuke and that old launch vehicle from Vandenberg.
They're cutting it close-- going straight for the comet. I'm worried."

"Then let me cheer you up. Inferno sales are through the roof. We've got clients
wallowing around in frozen garbage in the circle of the gluttons, women biting
one another, employees getting their bosses sunk in shit. What a good idea."

I'd seen for myself, watched a famous criminal, the Organ Bandit, writhing
happily in flames in the Circle of Thieves; the punishment was only staged, but
his eternal celebrity promised to be real.

"One more thing," Max said. "We've made our greatest placement ever. Lance found
out they had room for half a kilo more payload on that last emergency attempt to
blow the comet off course. So we bought the spot in the nose cone."

"And what in the name of God are we going to do with that?"

"We'll be sending up a cremate. It's like burial at sea, but much grander."

"Who could have the vanity...?"

"That Judge," Max told me, "what's his name? MacPhee."

I recall it was Thursday night of that week when society started becoming really
unglued -- lawlessness swept the beaches, looting raged on Rodeo Drive, anarchy
on the freeways. Public safety followed public transport into frightened
hibernation. But the weather turned gorgeous the air crystal clear and the stars
shining brightly that night when the whole power grid went down, the stars of
the Milky Way lighting the bowl of the sky with celestial jewelry.

I braved the streets to Westwood on Friday.

Keiko was fortified at the mansion, spending her last days with the Judge. Max
had arranged for a cortege of armored hearses to transport the Judge up the
coast to Vandenberg Air Force Base for the launch when the time came.

When I looped back through downtown I found Max and Lance camped out up in
accounting. Business was still streaming in; Max had Lance shunting in overload
invoice servers into the corporate mainframe. Max was filled with enthusiasm for
the Judge's journey as payload on the third rocket, but guarded about the
details, as if he didn't trust me with them. A marketing vision of cosmic
proportions danced in his eyes: GD's greatest triumph, he told me, the beginning
of a whole new range of franchise-level services, symbolic of his joining with
Lance.

Then fires began to smoke the atmosphere. From the eightieth floor window I
watched a sooty cloud rise from South Central, then a fireline start further
south, by Long Beach Harbor, where Nomads lived on boats. The winds were pulling
the smoke across the whole basin. Even as I watched, a string of brush fires
ignited above Malibu.

That's when we flew to Mauna Kea, Unix and I.

Since the late twentieth century, Mauna Kea has been the premier optical and
infrared imaging site on the globe. Fourteen thousand feet high, isolated by
thousands and thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean from the nearest landmass,
Mauna Kea is impacted only by air pollution downstream from China, a high
mustard haze which that week had slowly dissolved into nothingness.

It is a rugged site, rust-red and black with lava ash and boulders, the fixed
observatories on their little knolls, a gravel road winding up from the
astronomer's quarters a few thousand feet below. I found out I could image from
the summit itself, a cinder cone just east of the large instruments. Unix and I
staked out a spot and I deployed my small imaging package on the night we
arrived. By midnight I'd set celestial coordinates, and we settled in.

We had a little self-erecting tent and good down bags, picnic hampers of food,
our own satlink to watch the madness back on the mainland. But mostly we watched
the sky, rich with stars, the great silver swipe of Virgilius Maro wide across
the heavens, Mars and Venus bumping one' another on the horizon, as if jostling
to get out of the way. The firmament seemed a vast deep blue bowl; up there,
with the sky so clear and nothing around you, you feel yourself suspended in
space, a cosmic traveler.

We thought we could make out the launch of the Vandenberg rocket, its passage
through the ionosphere. "Uncle's up there," I heard Unix whisper in wonder.

Unix and I grew very close. Our zipped-together bags made a womb from which we
emerged only late on the final day.

As you know, the nuke merely turned Virgilius Maro off course. It wasn't the way
it might have been in an old sf movie, blowing up. No, that would have sent
fragments in the direction of Earth. Rather, it was a flash, albeit a diamond
bright human flash, and then the turning, the quickening across the sky.

I don't mean to diminish it. What a night that was: the thrill of the comet
turning, the colors spreading across the heavens, refracted light in bands of
red and orange and water blue, Unix against my side, my equipment whirring ....
It was lovelier, and more dangerous, than any other moment I have experienced.

The comet streaked across the sky, some cosmic fulfillment, an instrument, a
sign of change for myself, for the world I lived in. As the rocket had slivered
into the comet's albedo, as the nuke had blossomed, as the shifting colors had
climaxed, I'd tracked the nearby click of servos and the squeaks of optical
drives to confirm my hopes: my equipment had grabbed just the right fourteen
seconds.

In the ensuing silence we stood there, Unix and I; our breaths vaporizing before
us, the cold rock hard beneath our feet, our hearts beating together. I cannot
tell you how happy I felt at that moment, how fulfilled.

My pager hummed against my heart.

I took the call through the backup monitor on my imaging equipment, my chilly
fingers fumbling with the thin lead. Keesha was on the tiny screen. She looked
stricken.

She was calling to tell me that Max Sczyczypek was dead, of massive cardiac
arrest.

You of course know all about the near miss's unexpected effects that tidal
thing, the way the ozone layer was restored to pre-1900 levels, the way the
lower atmosphere cleared. I remember the day after we returned to California,
waking up and gazing through the clear, crisp air that had been with us since
the comet passed. The rapid ionization of the atmosphere had picked up the
particulates and plopped them on the ground, where they were washed by heavy
rains; the world seemed fresh and new. It changed all our lives, that near-death
experience.

Max, as I've mentioned, got a little nearer than most.

His funeral was one of the most spectacular and professionally accomplished in
the modem history of deathcare management. It was understood that I would handle
the basic interment, though I left the stainless steel instruments, the needles,
the gloves and the fluids to Preparation. I dressed Max in his best black suit,
picked out a casket, and laid him out, setting his features with a number six
Mona Lisa[TM] smile. Dorothy helped me with his obituary; the Sierra Club
managed the flowers and the stands of virgin Redwood offered in his name,
Espagio's did the catering, Fiat/Disney produced the wake and the procession.
The High Mass was held at St. Christopher's, with a little virtual hookup to all
GD Homes. Burial was at St. Mary's: Digger O'Donald was there, an orchestra,
celebrities by the hundreds, with a special presentation by the union of
professional mourners Max himself had helped found.

That was when I first spotted the chemistry between Unix and Lance. I was
surprised, but then it seemed to me a good thing. I wasn't sure I could keep up
with her, and she needed someone who looked further ahead than I do these days.

Lance and I run the company now. Max left us very well off. We have all that
front money from FEMA in the bank, all those fees from IMMORTALITY NOW! without
the liability to produce it as advertised; since the comet had been redirected
by the Government under an action classified by the courts as an Act of God or
War, our warrantee must exclude any mention of "comet." No comet, no signal. The
broadband noise that had been converted into holounits from The Divine Comedy
would continue to be broadcast by the redirected Virgilius Maro, but only in the
path of the M31 Galaxy for the next four hundred million years.

We own the Obit Channel now -- under a dummy corporation, however those things
are done. All of the Angels[TM] have been dusted, the Fleetwoodsshine, and our
new South American division is expanding at the rate of two new Homes per week.

I still feel deep satisfaction with the image I'd grabbed of Virgilius Maro up
on Mauna Kea. During the final edit I doubled the length of the hololoop. The
finished piece hangs in the boardroom these days, replacing an image of Mars.
The now half-minute loop, bright silver with a banded spectrum in slo-mo, opens
and turns like a timelapse flower bathing in quasar light against a backdrop of
deep space.

I see Keiko a lot. It's a bit unreal. Lance and Unix are a couple. We're all
into life extension. Lance is working with those Swiss engineers you've been
hearing about on the news. I mean, why not stick with a good thing?

One more thing I need to tell you about.

After all the dust had settled, Keiko and Unix and Lance and I took what
remained of the Judge's ashes and placed them into a crypt. He had refused to
take his ashes up with him to Vandenberg; he'd called it a morbid idea. The
left-behind ashes had been moved to GD Tower, but Keiko understandably wanted
closure. Burial was my advice, a small traditional service; I was glad to see my
thinking confirmed by Keiko's therapist and the MacPhee family counselor. The
obsequies were set for a Friday afternoon.

I set out driving alone in my Lotus from downtown to meet the rest of the
funeral party at Forest Lawn. I'd picked up the ashes from GD Tower and was
carrying them on the passenger's seat. They were resting in a beautiful onyx
urn. I rounded a comer, my suspension let out a squeak, a groan, and I found
myself remembering my first encounter with the Judge's ashes in the Model 986
Urn. I started seeing him as a rival again. Instinctively, I reached for the
glove box, pulled out the plastic bag containing the ashes of Balthazar, my old
Lab, and exchanged them for the ashes of the Judge. The idea that the um
containing the Judge's ashes would make a noise during interment spooked me more
than I can explain. I know what I did was unethical; I couldn't help myself.

Anyway, the modest ceremony went well. Unix had arranged for Scottish Pipers,
and a representative from NASA stood in uniform and saluted. Keiko achieved her
closure.

The thing is, after the dinner at Espagio's, when I was driving back to Westwood
with Keiko, swinging up Santa Monica Boulevard?

I swear I heard something from the glovebox: a creak, a pop, a long high note
that sang eerily into the gathering night.

Keiko looked at me.

"Balthazar," I said. "Hush."