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?
“Not only Barron,” Howards said. “Anyone I choose. You, for instance. You’re right about one thing: Barron loves you. First thing he asked when I made the offer was for immortality for you too. And…”
The cruelty in Howards’ eyes raped her as he smirked, waited for her to ask the question, sucking pleasure like a junkie from watching her squirm.
“And?”
Howards laughed. “Why not?” he said. “I can afford it. It’s a nice little daisy-chain this way—I buy Barron with immortality for the both of you, and I buy you with the same thing, and I buy your help in making sure he sells. Three for the price of one. You can have love and life, both forever. Think about that, you and Barron, forever. And if you don’t deliver, I tell Barron everything and you’ve blown it all—him and immortality. That’s not such a hard choice, is it, Miss Westerfeld? You’ve got twenty-three hours. I won’t be talking to you again. I don’t really have to, do I?”
And he broke the connection.
Sara knew how right he was, how right he had been every step of the way. Eternal life with Jack or… nothing. She thought of Jack, young and strong beside her, together for a million years, growing and growing together in the innocent strength of adolescence—the strength that comes from not really believing you’ll ever have to die—but based now on truth, not self-delusion, giving the courage to do anything, dare anything, soft-flesh knight in the armor of immortality, and the world what they could make it forever and ever… Growing without growing older, like that ocean sunfish that keeps getting bigger and bigger, never ages, never dies… Jack like that, and me with him forever!
And Benedict Howards forever, a small sly voice reminded her. Feeding forever on power and fear and death and Jack… Jack his flunky, keeping him there in his bone-white temple of death while aeons and billions of people are born and die and are gone forever like smoke, while Howards and those who fawn on him like on some awful death-god live forever at the price of their souls… With a pang of despair she realized that this was the world that was coming, Jack or no Jack, with his help or despite him, inexorable as Judgment Day, and no one could stand against it, against Foundation power of money and life eternal against death. Benedict Howards was right. He was almost a god, god of life and death. God on the side of evil and nothingness; the Black Christ, and no one his size to stand against him.