“Come on,” he said. “You know me. Yeah. Yeah.”
The voice, the cheekbones, the lips, the eyes—the eyes, the eyes, the eyes. Yes, I knew him. But it wasn’t possible. Fazio? Here? How? So long a time, so many light-years away! And yet—yet—
He nodded. “You got it, Chollie. Come on. Who am I?”
My first attempt at saying something was a sputtering failure. But I managed to get his name out on the second try.
“Yeah,” he said. “Fazio. What a surprise.”
He didn’t look even slightly surprised. I think he must have been watching me for a few days before he approached me—casing me, checking me out, making certain it was really me, getting used to the idea that he had actually found me. Otherwise the amazement would surely have been showing on him now. Finding me—finding anybody along the starways—wasn’t remotely probable. This was a coincidence almost too big to swallow. I knew he couldn’t have deliberately come after me, because the galaxy is so damned big a place that the idea of setting out to search for someone in it is too silly even to think about. But somehow he had caught up with me anyway. If the universe is truly infinite, I suppose, then even the most wildly improbable things must occur in it a billion times a day.
I said shakily, “I can’t believe—”
“You can’t? Hey, you better! What a surprise, kid, hey? Hey?” He clapped his hand against my arm. “And you’re looking good, kid. Nice and healthy. You keep in shape, huh? How old are you now, thirty-two?”
“Thirty.” I was numb with shock and fear.
“Thirty. Mmm. So am I. Nice age, ain’t it? Prime of life.”
“Fazio—”
His control was terrifying. “Come on, Chollie. You look like you’re about to crap in your pants. Aren’t you glad to see your old buddy? We had some good times together, didn’t we? Didn’t we? What was the name of that fuckin’ planet? Weinberg? Weinfeld? Hey, hey, don’t stare at me like that!”
I had to work hard to make any sound at all. Finally I said, “What the hell do you want me to do, Fazio? I feel like I’m looking at a ghost.”
He leaned close, and his eyes opened wider. I could practically count the concentric red rings, ten or fifteen of them, very fine lines. “I wish to Christ you were,” he said quietly. Such unfathomable depths of pain, such searing intensity of hatred. I wanted to squirm away from him. But there was no way. He gave me a long slow crucifying inspection. Then he eased back and some of the menacing intensity seemed to go out of him. Almost jauntily he said, “We got a lot to talk about, Chollie. You know some quiet place around here we can go?”
“There’s the gravity lounge—”
“Sure. The gravity lounge.”
We floated face-to-face, at half-pull. “You promised you’d kill me if I got nailed,” Fazio murmured. “That was our deal. Why didn’t you do it, Chollie? Why the fuck didn’t you do it?”
I could hardly bear to look into his red-ringed eyes.
“Things happened too fast, man. How was I to know paramedics would be on the scene in five minutes?”
“Five minutes is plenty of time to put a heat bolt through a guy’s chest.”
“Less than five minutes. Three. Two. The paramedic floater was right overhead, man! It was covering us the whole while. They came down on us like a bunch of fucking angels, Fazio!”
“You had time.”
“I thought they were going to be able to save you,” I said lamely. “They got there so quickly.”
Fazio laughed harshly. “They did try to save me,” he said. “I’ll give them credit for trying. Five minutes and I was on that floater and they were sending tracers all over me to clean the synsym goop out of my lungs and my heart and my liver.”
“Sure. That was just what I figured they’d do.”
“You promised to finish me off, Chollie, if I got nailed.”
“But the paramedics were right there!”
“They worked on me like sonsabitches,” he said. “They did everything. They can clean up the vital tissues, they can yank out your organs, synsym and all, and stick in transplants. But they can’t get the stuff out of your brain, did you know that? The synsym goes straight up your nose into your brain and it slips its tendrils into your meninges and your neural glia and right into your fucking corpus callosum. And from there it goes everywhere. The cerebellum, the medulla, you name it. They can’t send tracers into the brain that will clean out synsym and not damage brain tissue. And they can’t pull out your brain and give you a new one, either. Thirty seconds after the synsym gets into your nose it reaches your brain and it’s all over for you, no matter what kind of treatment you get. Didn’t you hear them tell you that when we first got to the war zone? Didn’t you hear all the horror stories?”
“I thought they were just horror stories,” I said faintly.
He rocked back and forth gently in his gravity cradle. He didn’t say anything.
“Do you want to tell me what it’s like?” I asked after a while.
Fazio shrugged. As though from a great distance he said, “What it’s like? Ah, it’s not all that goddamned bad, Chollie. It’s like having a roommate. Living with you in your head, forever, and you can’t break the lease. That’s all. Or like having an itch you can’t scratch. Having it there is like finding yourself trapped in a space that’s exactly one centimeter bigger than you are all around, and knowing that you’re going to stay walled up in it for a million years.” He looked off toward the great clear wall of the lounge, toward giant red Betelgeuse blazing outside far away. “Your synsym talks to you sometimes. So you’re never lonely, you know? Doesn’t speak any language you understand, just sits there and spouts gibberish. But at least it’s company. Sometimes it makes you spout gibberish, especially when you badly need to make sense. It grabs control of the upper brain centers now and then, you know. And as for the autonomous centers, it does any damned thing it likes with them. Keys into the pain zones and runs little simulations for you—an amputation without anesthetic, say. Just for fun. Its fun. Or you’re in bed with a woman and it disconnects your erection mechanism. Or it gives you an erection that won’t go down for six weeks. For fun. It can get playful with your toilet training, too. I wear a diaper, Chollie, isn’t that sweet? I have to. I get drunk sometimes without drinking. Or I drink myself sick without feeling a thing. And all the time I feel it there, tickling me. Like an ant crawling around within my skull. Like a worm up my nose. It’s just like the other guys told us, when we came out to the war zone. Remember? ‘Kill yourself fast, while you have the chance.’ I never had the chance. I had you, Chollie, and we had a deal, but you didn’t take our deal seriously. Why not, Chollie?”
I felt his eyes burning me. I looked away, halfway across the lounge, and caught sight of Elisandra’s long golden hair drifting in free-float. She saw me at the same moment, and waved. We usually got together in here this time of night. I shook my head, trying to warn her off, but it was too late. She was already heading our way.
“Who’s that?” Fazio asked. “Your girlfriend?”