Chris Adrian - The New World

At last they had gone all the way up, so then they went all the way down, into the basements and subbasements and sub-subbasements, lit at first with skylights and then with snaking optic cables that carried actual sunlight from tens of thousands of collecting nodes (Poppy said ecstatically) in the glass walls of the pyramid. The basement was full of research; Poppy told them about a vigorous twenty-five-year-old mouse named Methuselah, which she’d fed from her own hand.

“I think my ears are popping!” said Sally, just as they came to the first of the three dewar chambers.

“Are you ready?” Poppy whispered reverently, as she keyed a code in the tiny door. “Are you really, really ready for this?” They all nodded hard, even Jane, who, despite the pressure behind her back that she thought might push her right through the steel door before Poppy could open it, suddenly didn’t feel ready at all. “Then… let’s go!” Poppy said, and swept them inside.

Days or weeks or months later, Jim was ready. He lost track of the hours, and lost track of the others in the house, even his Alice, taking his meals alone and spending the little time when he wasn’t working asleep, or walking through the orchard and beyond. The morning he finished his book, he put his head down to rest and was woken again by the noise of the bus in the yard. He went to the window to see who was going to leave today, and stood a long while before Alice knocked on his door and he understood that the bus was waiting for him.

Alice held his hand the whole way to the city. Except for his book, he brought no luggage. Though the bus had no driver, it seemed to know just where it was going, rolling confidently over the hills on its big moon-buggy tires. Neither he nor Alice said anything for the first hour of the trip. Jim stared out the window at the lovely landscape, pretty streams and tidy woods and stark blue lakes that looked like they belonged high in the mountains somewhere.

“Do you feel ready for your Debut?” Alice asked at last, squeezing his hand.

“I think so,” Jim said. “I feel ready for something . I’m not having stage fright, if that’s what you mean. It doesn’t sound too hard, anyway. I just burn the book, right? As a pledge. And then I say I’m ready to become a citizen if everybody will have me. I make my testimony, and cross my fingers that they’ll all say yes.”

“No need to cross your fingers,” she said. “You’ve already done the hard part. I have every expectation that you’ll succeed today. You’ve made this last part just a formality. I’m very proud of you.” She pointed out the bus’s curved window. “Look, we’re nearly there now.”

Jim turned his head and saw a slender metal spire rising from one of those displaced tarns. Mercury-silver, the tower looked almost liquid itself. A door opened in the lake and the bus drove in. Shortly, they came to a brightly lit underground garage.

Alice led him out of the bus to a smooth elevator, which seemed to move in a variety of directions. They stepped into an immaculate hallway, so white it was hard to tell the bright lamps in the wall from the wall itself, but carpeted in neatly clipped green grass. He laughed when she brought him into the greenroom, which was green all over, not just the floor carpeted in grass but the walls and even the furniture upholstered with it as well. “It’s the greenest greenroom I’ve ever seen,” Jim said. “Now what?”

“Now you can rest, and prepare. You won’t see anyone else until you see everyone else. But look, a friend has sent you some flowers.” They were on the table, a giant bouquet of sunflowers and posies and daisies, all of them shivering, vastly more alive than any flower Jim had ever seen before. There was a card stuck in them, from Franklin. Break a leg! it said. Jim smiled, then winced and held his belly where he had a sudden pain.

“Lie down,” Alice said when she saw his face, leading him to the verdant couch. “You’re pale. It’s all right to be nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” he said. “It’s just a little stomachache. I’m fine, really.” He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, Alice was fixing something to his hair.

“A microphone,” she said. “The hall is very large. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And how is your stomach?”

“I think it was actually my heart,” he said. “But it’s all better now.”

“Excellent,” she said, with a beautiful smile. She stood him up and offered him her arm. “Then James Arthur Cotton, Polaris Member 10.77.89.1, let us proceed to your Debut!”

In no time at all they had passed down a hall, through a door, and up some stairs, into darkness and a noise he recognized as the susurration of an enormous crowd. She took him onto the stage and stood with him behind the curtain. There was a little brazier set up a few feet upstage, and next to that, on a little stand, a large tin of lighter fluid and a box of wooden matches. “I’ll be just over there,” Alice said, handing him his book just when he realized he had forgotten it in the greenroom. “Good luck, my dear, dear client. Remember, I’m proud of you! How do you feel?”

“Good,” Jim said. “I feel good. I feel ready .” Alice gave him a long, hard hug, and then withdrew. The curtain rose. A spotlight picked him out.

Peering into the audience, all Jim could see was the light on him, but he could hear a great variety of bodies, shuffling and breathing. People are very patient in the future , he said to himself as the empty minutes went by without a single catcall. Maybe because they have so much time , he thought, and then he began to speak.

“Thank you for having me today,” he said. “I’m so glad to be here. I mean, I’m so grateful . I really am. It’s been really charitable of you all, to take care of me like you have. I thought I should say that, before I get started.” He stood up straighter and cleared his throat, and held the book behind his hips with both hands. “My name is James Arthur Cotton. I am Polaris Cryonics Member 10.77.89.1. I am here to formally declare my readiness to enter your world, the world of the future, a world I have diligently prepared myself to understand. I have severed every lingering attachment to my old world, the old life, liberating myself to enter a new one.” He held the book up for them all to see, and then he held it tight against his chest.

“By these flames,” he said. “I ask you to let me in .” He put the book in the brazier and gave it a good soaking with the lighter fluid. His hands were shaking, so he got as much on the floor as on the book. Jim giggled nervously. “I make a mess when I pee, too,” he said to his audience. “So I always have to sit down.” Nobody laughed, but of course the toilets in the future caught the urine no matter how freely you peed. These people couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about. “Somebody used to get angry at me,” he added softly. He stood there a moment, until Alice whispered from stage left, “You should light the fire now!”

“Of course!” he said, and he lit a match, but not the fire. “A Viking funeral always was the best kind of funeral,” he said, staring at the little flame. “I think I should just say a few words, if that’s all right?” He was asking the audience, which remained silent, but Alice was shaking her head vigorously. “Funny to preside at a funeral for somebody you don’t know, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t even know what’s in there anymore.” The motion of pointing at the book extinguished the match, so he lit another one. “I forgot everything else, but I still remember what to do at a funeral. You just put your head down and try to bear as humbly as you can your good luck at still being one of the living.”