Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

And might or might not be able to cut it with Jack, she knew. It was easy to let the lizardman bulldoze me into going back to a Jack I thought I hated—Howards’ high-paid whore was all I started out to be—had nothing to lose, either be able to bring back the Jack I once loved or walk away with no regrets from cop-out Bug Jack Barron Jack.

But how could I know I’d start seeing for real the Jack I thought I’d have to fake seeing? Is it real? Is the old Jack back already, my Jack Berkeley boy now a man playing real man-game to make the old boy-dreams real, destroy Howards, Social Justice President of the United States, attic dream becoming a reality in ways we never imagined? Wouldn’t that Jack hate me, knowing I thought so little of him that I could use him to get us Frozen, gamble like a cold-blooded windowless white lizard that I could shock him into becoming what he really was all along? And if Jack’s really involved in some dirty deal with Howards, wouldn’t it just help the lizardman get Jack for whatever filth he wants him for if he knew that Howards was able to buy and use even me? Could… could that be what Howards was planning all along? Seeing through me seeing through him, letting me think I was putting one over, and that setting me up as his secret weapon against Jack…? Wanting me to tell Jack everything?

But if it’s half one thing, half the other, plans in conflict, neither Jack nor Howards’s in control, and Jack on the knife-edge between being the old Berkeley Jack or taking the biggest cop-out of all, then I’ve got to tell him. It’s all up to me…

The unbearable choice weighed heavy on her; existential choice holding past and future timelines in mortal balance, a woman-choice, she knew, and it was still hard not to think of herself as a girl, helpless in a larger-than-life man’s world.

The vidphone began chiming again.

Maybe it’s Jack? Maybe that’s why it keeps ringing, anyone else’d figure no one’s here, but Jack knows I’m here, knows I might not answer till I knew it was him ringing again and again…

Pissed at herself for being unable to make even such a piddling decision, she forced herself to the vidphone and made the connection.

And felt abysmal regret, cold numb terror clean through her, as the windowless white face of Benedict Howards stared out at her with knowing rodent eyes from the vidphone screen.

“It’s about time you decided to answer the phone,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get you for half an hour. What’s the matter with you.?”

“You… you were calling me?” Sara stammered, feeling serpent-coils winding themselves around her.

“I wouldn’t be calling Barron, would I? Not since I just spoke to him in the flesh. Of course I’m calling you. We’re… business associates. Remember?” and Howards smiled an awful I-own-you crocodile smile.

“Now you listen, and you listen good,” he said. “Barron is on his way home, far as I know. I’ve made my final offer to him, and he’s got about twenty-three hours to accept. Which means you’ve got about twenty-three hours to complete your end of our little bargain—or no Freezer for either of you. So you start working on him the moment he gets there, and you better make it good.”

From the greater fear of losing the Jack she had found again, Sara mustered the courage to face the lesser fear, held up her head in her mind’s eye, said: “I don’t care about that anymore. I’ve got Jack now, and nothing’s as important to me as that. You brought us together for your own dirty reasons, but you didn’t understand that we love each other, always have, always will. And that’s all that matters now.”

“Have it your way,” Howards said. “But just remember, all I have to do is tell Barron what you are, my whore, Miss Westerfeld, and where’s your great love then?”

“Jack will understand…”

“Will he? Will he want to? Will he believe you or me? He’ll believe me because he’ll want to, after what I’ve offered him.”

“You think you’re so smart,” Sara said, “but you’re a fool. You don’t understand what love is, stronger than anything you can use to buy people…”

Howards leered at her, and she realized he had anticipated her every action in the serpent-lair of his mind. “You think so?” he said. “But there’s something stronger than any… mortal love—immortal love. Barron loves you, eh? Would a man who loves you be willing to let you die, when instead he could give you the greatest gift a man can give a woman? Greatest gift a man can give himself?”

Sara felt something foul and gigantic in Howards’ voice that spoke of things she didn’t want to know, things that might really be stronger than love, monstrous jungle truths with great gleaming fangs of bone leering from lipless reptile mouths; but she felt herself fascinated, drawn on by the primal dawn-marsh stink that seemed to hover over Howards’ image on the vidphone screen.

“What… what could be stronger than love?” she asked.

“Life,” said Benedict Howards. “Without life, you got nothing—no love, no taste of good food in your mouth, no nothing. Whatever anyone wants the most, he loses it all when he’s dead.”

“You call that life—a body lying stiff and cold in a Freezer? You think Jack’d give up what really mattered to him for that, thirty or forty years from now?”

“He might,” said Howards. “He just might. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the real thing, Miss Westerfeld, immortality. Look at me! I’m immortal now, my scientists have made the breakthrough. Immortal! I’ll never get older, I’ll never die. Words, just words to you, what else can they be? But there are no words for what it’s really like to wake up in the morning knowing you’re gonna live for centuries— forever.

“That’s what I’m offering Barron, the next million years, immortality. Think he’d rather have you? Would you rather have him if the choice were yours? Immortality, Miss Westerfeld. Can you imagine what it’s like to know you’re not like ordinary men—don’t have to die? Can you imagine anyone turning his back on it? Can you imagine anything Barron wouldn’t do to live forever? Can you imagine anything you wouldn’t do? Love? How much is love worth when you’re dead?”

“It’s not true!” she cried. “You can’t be able to do it, not you . . .” Not you, you bloodless reptile, not with your plastic frozen money, not buying it like you buy everyone and everything, not Benedict Howards with power over death forever, on and on and on, webs of hate and power spinning on and on, forever, from your bone-white lizard-lair, it just isn’t right.

But Howards’ cold eyes stared straight through her, his lips parted in a thin smile, and she felt him digging her thoughts, sucking up her hate, fear, sense of wrongness, letting her know he knew the loathing she felt. And letting her know he found it amusing.

“It is true, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “You really can make Jack immortal…?” And she imagined Jack, knowing what could be his, loving her, being Jack Barron and… and what? Can he love me enough to die with me in forty or fifty years, when he can have forever? And I thought I had an impossible decision to make! But Jack… to choose between love and immortality… And it struck her like a sledgehammer: Howards has to be working on me because he knows Jack hasn’t decided. He wants me to make Jack choose immortality. And… and maybe he’s right, how can I want anything less than immortality for Jack, sell him on… on death, even though I die and Jack has to go on alone forever…? Oh, you miserable shit, Howards! Why is a bastard like you so damn clever?