Eternal Life Inc. (15 page)

Jericho nodded. “Right,” he said and looked slightly embarrassed. “One tangent too many, information overload, running off at the mouth again. Is that it?”

Diana smiled and nodded. She turned to Harry. “A month after they lost contact with that search and rescue team, my sister received a personal invitation from Rielly Logan to visit Las Vegas.”

25

A Beast of Burden

“What did you say?” Harry asked in disbelief. He’d heard what she said, it was just it didn’t make any sense.

Diana nodded. “I know,” she said with a tight, sympathetic smile. “It hit me like that too. As crazy as it sounds, Rielly Logan sent her a personal invitation. It was hand-delivered by her old Norma-gene contact, the one who inspired her famous monogram. He’d gone to the New Jerusalem of Las Vegas to be re-made, but Rielly sent him back for Isis along with a promise that if she came, he would remake the old man in front of her eyes.

“She had two days to decide and put her affairs in order. She also had to agree to stay in Las Vegas for a minimum six months. After that, she could leave whenever she wished.

“Isis had no doubts. She was bubbling over with excitement when she told me. It was the chance of a lifetime. No scientist had ever seen a re-making first hand and, to top it off, Rielly promised her complete access as his personal guest. That was the real deal maker. She was like a school girl going on her first date.

“I tried to talk some sense into her. Didn’t she know what was going on in the Nevada Quarantine? Did she realize Rielly had just carried out a war of extermination and was building something on the outskirts of Las Vegas that scared even the Church? I shouldn’t have told her that or about the Valkyrie we lost trying to find out what it was, but I did. She was my sister, my twin, and I wasn’t about to let her walk into that without trying to stop her. I could have been talking to a wall.”

“Why Isis?” Harry asked.

“I asked the same question,” Diana said. “Apparently, Rielly read her monogram and thought that she was the only scientist
who could appreciate what he was doing and explain it to the world.”

“So she could play John the Baptist to his Jesus Christ, maybe,” Jericho said sourly.

Diana glared at him out of the corner of her eye and then waved his comment aside as if it was a mildly irritating insect. “Maybe everything Rielly said was true,” she said. “But I had my doubts. Remember, we lost Valkyries walking in there.

“On the other hand, Isis and I both knew she was going to go no matter what I said or did.” She shook her head. “Even so, I should have tried harder to stop her. For my own sake.” She gave him a sad, sardonic twist of a smile. “At least then I could tell myself I really tried.”

Harry caught a glimpse of something in her eyes, something he recognized. It was something he saw every time he looked in his own mirror. A kindred spirit, he thought, another beast of burden carrying hell on its back. In the next instant, it was gone; her eyes cleared and she made a quick throw away gesture. “Water under the bridge,” she said. “I would have had to chain her to the wall for the rest of her life to stop her.”

“Neither of you told me anything about this,” Jericho chided. “I didn’t find out until three months after she left. As your legal guardian I should have…”

Diana straightened up and looked Jericho in the eye. “We are not children anymore, Doctor Jericho,” she pointed out frostily. “We do not have to ask your permission or tell you anything anymore.”

Harry looked at Jericho. “Her legal guardian?”

Jericho waved his question aside and instead leaned across the table and said to Diana, “But you were happy enough to ask my help last night, weren’t you?”

Once again, Harry felt as if he had just walked into the middle of an ongoing family feud.

Diana’s eyes didn’t waver. “You’re right of course, and I thank
you,” she said with all the regal dignity of a queen indulging a wayward servant.

Harry watched Jericho’s thin, testy smile turn into a broad grin. Then he shook his head and started to chuckle. “I forget sometime how much you’ve grown beyond me,” he said affectionately.

“Let’s not get carried away,” Diana said drily. “Besides, we didn’t tell you because Isis wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but there was no way she wasn’t going to tell me. She knew that if she just disappeared, I’d have every Valkyrie in the Quarantine and every cop and Tong in the Empire looking for her.

“Of course we didn’t tell Rielly either,” she said turning to Harry with a street-wise grin. “He didn’t even know I existed. No one except Chueh and Jericho and a handful of other people knew that Isis had a sister or that we were Jake Lloyd’s daughters or that he even had daughters.”

Harry was about to ask why, but she raised a stop sign hand, palm forward. “Don’t,” she said. “Let’s just say we like our privacy. Keep it at that for now.”

Harry shook his head. Jake Lloyd’s family had more secrets than the Borgias.

Diana closed her notebook and reached up and unhooked one of the silver crescent earrings she wore. She looked at Jericho and raised a questioning eyebrow. The old man pursed his lips with distaste and nodded.

She laid the earring on the table and started to unhook the other and stopped. “I gave these to Isis just before she left,” she said. “It was the only thing I could think of. They probably wouldn’t protect her but…”

She gave her head a quick, defiant toss. “What else could I do?” Once again Harry caught a glimpse of that beast of burden, walking through her eyes, carrying its heavy load of guilt. “I was still Jaganmatri Valkyrie,” she said, “and the Church needed to know what happened to our Sisters and what Rielly was
building. As long as Isis was going into the lion’s den anyway, why not take advantage of the situation, right? Kill two birds with one stone so to speak.”

Suddenly she started to laugh, a bitter, cynical, self-lacerating laugh. Then her voice broke, control broke, and tears ran down her cheeks. She shook her head and kept shaking it. “I couldn’t protect her!” she said. “I couldn’t even stop her. I’m a Valkyrie, god damn it! I should be able to do stuff like that!”

She leaned back, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When she spoke again, it was as if she was speaking only to herself. “I should have guessed,” she said, her voice a whisper of despair. “I’m Jake Lloyd’s daughter! I climbed the Nano Tree, I walked out on its branches. How could I be so blind? I had all the Church intelligence on Rielly. I knew what his people called him. I even knew where he lived in Las Vegas and the name of his pet wolf, and I didn’t put it together. I let her walk right into it.”

“Isis was Jake’s daughter too,” Jericho said. “She should have seen it coming, she should have at least suspected.”

Diana’s eyes shot open. For an instant, she stared at Jericho with something akin to hatred. Then she shook her head in violent denial. Harry recognized the symptoms. This was her burden of guilt and she wasn’t about to let anyone take it away from her or push it off on someone else. “Don’t you see? She was in love with Rielly!” she said. “It blinded her. Before she even met him, she was in love with the idea of him, the romantic hero, the messiah, the savior of his people. And when she saw him in the flesh and he was everything she ever dreamed of, she was lost.

“I wasn’t though. I didn’t have that excuse,” she said, and there was only the blank acceptance of her own guilt as a kind of absolute truth. “I should have known. I should have stopped her even if it meant chaining her to the wall.” She gave a savage, disgusted laugh. “Jake Lloyd’s daughter, the all-seeing, all-knowing,
Jaganmatri Valkyrie, and I let my sister walk right into the claws of the Anubis!”

She turned away and looked out at the Ryoanji Gardens. The wind had picked up, whipping the trees and bushes in the background and driving the rain in a slant across the garden and against the windows.

Harry glanced over at Jericho. “I assume the Anubis are these wolf-thing invaders you were talking about.”

The old man was watching Diana closely and didn’t answer.

She sat very still, very straight, and very self-contained. She’d regained her disciplined self-control, wrapping it around herself like a suit of armor. She folded her hands on top of the notebook and glanced down. A second later, she unclasped her hands and folded them in her lap.

Finally, she looked up, straight at Harry. Once again he saw the tortured beast of burden walk through her eyes, but this time it was different. This time she was openly showing it to him, not trying to conceal anything, letting him know that she too recognized a kindred spirit, carrying its own load of guilty hell. She sat perfectly still, watching him…waiting.

Waiting for what, he wondered. The answer came with almost clairvoyant certainty. She’s waiting for the final hammer to fall, you fool! She’s waiting for the playboy debaucher to pass final judgment!

He leaned back and closed his eyes with a weary sigh. Then he looked out the window. The wind ripped leaves and twigs from the trees and scattered them across the garden. It drove the rain against the window like buckshot. Even the fifteen stones seemed to be hunkered down, riding out the storm in their water logged bed of raked gravel.

He glanced at Jericho who was idly flipping through The Greatest Hits of Nineteen Fifty-six on the little chrome juke box selector at the end of the table. It looked like the old man had programmed quite a storm to go with his Ryoanji Garden. Harry
wondered to what purpose. With people like Jericho and Chueh there was always a purpose, but he knew from experience it would probably be a waste of time to try to untangle it.

He looked over at Diana. She was once again sitting straight backed, composed and self-contained. Her hands were folded demurely in her lap. She stared at the truck-stop beige wall just over his right shoulder. This time her eyes gave away nothing.

“You know,” he said, “there should be a statute of limitations on guilt. It never does any good to keep beating yourself up for what you did or didn’t do. Believe me, I know.”

Diana looked down at her clasped hands and said nothing.

“After the car crash that left Susan brain dead,” he said and couldn’t believe he was doing this, “I let guilt beat me senseless with a whiskey bottle. After that, I let it kill me fifty-one times. That has to make me some kind of world expert on guilt.”

“But your guilt brought Susan back to life,” Diana said without looking up.

“No, it didn’t,” Harry said.

“But everyone knows you signed that contract with Eternal Life to bring her back,” she said. There was a bit more animation in her voice this time.

Harry shook his head. “No, I didn’t. That’s just advertising spin. I could have paid an exorbitant fee and had Susan cloned and resurrected on the spot, without ever signing that contract. The technology was in place. It’d been tested and proved. It was just they hadn’t gone public yet.

“Roger was waiting for the right moment, looking for the right angle, something they could spin into a worldwide publicity campaign. Just bringing Susan back would and did give the project an enormous boost, but Roger wanted more.”

Harry shook his head. “I have to hand it to him. He recognizes potential when he sees it. Where everyone else saw only a broken-down, guilt-ridden, alcoholic has-been, Roger saw a suffering, romantic hero, willing to die for love in the most
successful advertising campaign the world has ever seen.

“And the beauty of it was, he knew I couldn’t say no because he was giving me everything I wanted. Not only would I get Susan back, which I could have gotten anyway but, more importantly, and this is the kicker, he was giving me a chance to atone for what I did to her. By dying again and again, I could expiate the demons of my own guilt. I jumped at the chance…especially when it was tied up in such a noble, heroic package,” he added.

“After about the seventh or eighth death, I realized that atonement was highly overrated and guilt a blind alley for burn-brained masochists, but by then, it was too late. I had signed a contract, and the whole world expected me to fulfill it. I was trapped in the role of self-sacrificing, romantic hero and couldn’t get out.”

He shook his head. “You can’t imagine how many times I got down on my knees and begged Roger to release me from the hell of that contract. I wish…” Harry stopped, embarrassed.

“I’ve never told anyone about this before,” he said, looking past her and out the window. The rain and wind had let up, but there were more thunderclouds blowing in from the horizon, their bruised underbellies heavy with rain. The fifteen stones of the Ryoanji Garden stood fixed, solid, and immutable in a world of windblown change.

“Didn’t you tell Susan?” Diana asked.

Harry shook his head. “What good would that have done? She would only have blamed herself, and a new cycle of guilt would have begun. Besides, none of it was her fault. I figured I made my bed of guilt and had to lie in it alone…” he gave her a sardonic smile. “Well, not exactly alone.”

“But she must have known,” Diana persisted.

“Believe it or not, I’m a pretty good actor,” he said and flashed his crooked, Harry Neuman, blockbuster grin.

“I’m not telling you this to seem noble,” he added. “There was nothing noble in what I did. I died fifty-one times for guilt, not
for the woman I loved! It was a stupid, useless waste. It destroyed that love and drove Susan away from me…all because of guilt.”

There was a long silence. Raindrops began to beat against the window again. Harry watched them slide down the glass.

Diana sat perfectly still, watching him with a kind of amazed wonder. She felt her inner demons slink away to hide under whatever mental rocks inner demons hide under. For the first time in months, she began to feel at peace with herself. She knew it probably wouldn’t last, that the demons were still there and would be back to demand their pound of flesh. But that was why she was here, wasn’t it? That was why she was going to walk out on the Nano Tree and ask this man to follow her. Screw all her father’s prophecies! She thought. She was doing this for herself and for Isis.

She looked down at the one earring lying on the table. Slowly, she reached up and unhooked the other and laid it on the table beside the first.