62
With all the love he possessed, Pashnak tended Garth’s ailing body as he dwindled toward death. He dimmed the library lights, turned the laser fireplace on high, knelt beside the sofa. His mind whirled as he tried to make the artist more comfortable, to make him recuperate. Somehow.
As he had feared, they had heard nothing from Eduard in hours. “He’s run off, Garth. He has your body now, and he won’t come back until it’s too late.”
“Pashnak, don’t be dense. That’s what I wanted him to do in the first place.” Garth turned his head on the pillow. “We’ll just stay here. That’s the best thing.” Pashnak looked down intently at the shriveled, gray-skinned body of the man he had served so long and so well. “You’re always so good to me.”
The assistant fought back tears. “I just wish you treated yourself better.”
With a gnarled hand, he patted Pashnak’s wrist. “This is my decision. Don’t pester me about it.” Garth smiled up at him, and Pashnak saw a bleary haze of contentment he hadn’t seen on the artist in far too long. “I can’t think of any better way to top off my career than to help my friend. A crowning achievement.”
Pashnak bit his lower lip, holding back a moan. “How can you say that?” He wished he had never let Eduard inside the house, never even answered the door call. If only he had turned away the sick old fugitive, that would have been the end of the matter. “Think of all the ideas you can still have, the exhibitions, the—” His voice cracked. “All the books we still have to read out loud to each other!”
Lying back, propped on the pillows, Garth studied the syn-oak moldings on the ceiling. “Ah, let’s leave it at that. I did some great work, didn’t I?” He closed his eyes and let his wrinkled face settle into a sigh. “As long as I saved Eduard, it was worth it.”
He shifted on the pillows, drawing a breath that felt like shrapnel in his chest. Pashnak still hovered beside him, as if wondering whether he should make more coffee. Garth said, “Now here’s a new experience I never managed before—heroism and self-sacrifice. Probably the noblest part of being human.”
Pashnak’s lips trembled. “Sure, but now that you understand it, you won’t live to express it as art. Garth, you have to stay alive!” He nearly shouted the last sentence. For a long time, wrapped up in business matters, he had tried to ignore Garth’s growing malaise, chalking it up to another mood swing, an oscillation of the artistic temperament. Now, though, his eyes flashing with anger and dismay, Pashnak paced the library. “You’ve always been selfless and giving, generous with your money. You experienced everything, suffered all the foibles and problems people can have, shouldered that burden just so you could contribute back to humanity through your art.”
“Yeah, but this time I did it for a friend.” Garth’s eyes shone. “That’s even better.”
Suddenly, the library’s filmscreen burned bright as a transmission came in. A selectively highlighted COMnews broadcast, sorted by Garth’s priority filters. Annoyed, Pashnak got up to blank it, not wanting to lose one of his precious moments with Garth, but the artist raised a trembling hand. “Wait.”
A story about Eduard. A news-download, a special report, a breaking story. He knew it even before the details scrolled across the screen. “Oh no.”
Sharp video images showed a BTL action, some kind of crackdown at a local expansion-chip facility. Stun pellets peppered the walls of the building. Uniformed Bureau troops ran about, heads down, smashing glass and marching inside. Garth saw the neon-etched name on the front of the facility. Precision Chaos. Where Eduard had gone to find Teresa.
A spear of pain ripped through his lungs, his heart. He coughed, and tasted blood deep in his throat. The simulated announcer pattered his report, firing words like BTL gunshots. “The Bureau officers managed to take the target alive, with only minor injuries among their own ranks, thus marking the end to a long and bloody chase.” The reporter appeared suitably grim, his expression stern.
On the library screen, he and Pashnak stared as a stun-shackled Eduard, wearing Garth’s familiar home-body, was hauled toward an armored hovervan, apprehended after a “flawless Bureau operation.” COMnews reporters clustered around BTL Inspector Daragon Swan, the person in charge of the long manhunt, but Daragon brushed them aside, ignoring the attention, and staggered to his private vehicle. He looked sick.
All available evidence had already been submitted before an “impartial” jury panel, and in the face of such overwhelming evidence they’d had no choice but to find Eduard guilty. Once apprehended, the prisoner was currently being interviewed behind closed doors, and the BTL had already denied appeals. Months ago, Eduard Swan had been sentenced to COM upload by the Bureau of Incarceration and Executions.
Weak-kneed with despair, Pashnak leaned against the sofa. “Ah, no. This can’t be! Now what is it for? You’ve sacrificed yourself for nothing, Garth. Eduard’s going to be executed—we’ve got to get your home-body back.”
The artist lay back, stunned and speechless in his failing body. He felt no strength at all now.
The COM screens faded to gray-black static. Behind the nothingness a face resolved itself, the weathered but compassionate face of a bald woman. She gazed out from the depths of the computer/organic matrix as if it were a window. She spoke directly to the dying form sprawled on the sofa. “Garth, little Swan, I can do nothing to help him.” Then the image faded completely into static.
Garth had witnessed a terrorist’s execution many years earlier, back at the artists’ bazaar. Was COM really a “sweatshop of souls,” as the justice system insisted? The Splinters hadn’t thought so. He remembered Soft Stone’s wondrous “death” when she had voluntarily uploaded herself from the Falling Leaves library. And now she was here.
Garth tore the silkweave afghan away from his skeletal body. Startled, Pashnak bent over, attempting to mother him. “Garth, you’ve got to lie down! Don’t exert yourself.”
Instead, Garth pushed him away and placed his feet on the floor, wobbling, as if his legs were splintered chunks of wood. He could barely stand, maintaining his balance as he feebly pushed the assistant away.
“No, I’ve got to do something.” Garth wheezed, then coughed a splash of blood, but he swore that he wouldn’t let himself die yet. “I’ve got a little more life left, even in this body.”
He held out a trembling hand, insisted that Pashnak help him across the room. “You won’t make it down the sidewalk, let alone to Eduard! Please let me call a medical center now—your identity doesn’t matter anymore.” Pashnak wrung his hands, unable to stifle his despair. “Eduard’s already caught!”
“Yes, Eduard’s caught. That’s the only thing that matters. I’ve got to go to him, make some sort of plan.”
“Maybe you’ll get your body back. The BTL will return it to you, won’t they? Daragon knows it’s yours.”
“And he also knows I’m an accomplice, then. They’ll impound it, go through the standard routine. I won’t last long enough for all the red tape.”
Then, realizing what he could do, he decided upon it immediately. He wiped a bony wrist across his chapped, blood-flecked lips. He would give one last thing to his friend.
Soon, Eduard would be on the auction block in Garth’s strong, blond-haired body. Convicted criminals had to sacrifice their physiques as well as their lives. People would bid to hopscotch into his body permanently, leaving Eduard to die in a weak, used-up form. Garth had enough credits to outbid anyone else at the auction. If he could just make it there in time.
He looked at the bookshelf in the library, the treasured tomes resting on a broad oak shelf just above the laser fireplace. He ran his gaze along the spines of the Dickens titles, and smiled wistfully.
“Garth, what are you thinking?” Pashnak sounded concerned and suspicious. “I don’t like the look in your eyes.”
Garth smiled at his assistant, content. As soon as the artist spoke, Pashnak’s eyes went wide in horror. He understood exactly what Garth planned to do, how he would save Eduard.
“It is a far, far better thing I do . . .”