Doing Lennon - Gregory Benford, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 1
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Doing Lennon
Gregory Benford
A DF Books N.E.R.D’s Release
Copyright (C)1975 Gregory Benford
First published in Analog Magazine of Science Fact and Fiction, April 1975
Sanity calms, but madness
is more interesting.
—JOHN RUSSELL
As the hideous cold seeps from him he feels everything becoming sharp and clear
again. He decides he can do it, he can make it work. He opens his eyes.
“Hello.” His voice rasps. “Bet you aren't expecting me. I'm John Lennon.”
“What?” the face above him says.
“You know. John Lennon. The Beatles.”
Professor Hermann—the name attached to the face which loomed over him as he
drifted up, up from the Long Sleep—is vague about the precise date. It is either 2108
or 2180. Hermann makes a little joke about inversion of positional notation; it has
something to do with nondenumerable set theory, which is all the rage. The ceiling
glows with a smooth green phosphorescence and Fielding lies there letting them prick
him with needles, unwrap his organiform nutrient webbing, poke and adjust and
massage as he listens to a hollow
pock-pocketa
. He knows this is the crucial moment,
he must hit them with it now.
“I'm glad it worked,” Fielding says with a Liverpool accent. He has got it just right,
the rising pitch at the end and the nasal tones.
“No doubt there is an error in our log,” Hermann says pedantically. “You are listed
as Henry Fielding.”
Fielding smiles. “Ah, that's the ruse, you see.”
Hermann blinks owlishly. “Deceiving Immortality Incorporated is—”
“I was fleeing political persecution, y'dig. Coming out for the workers and all.
Writing songs about persecution and pollution and the working-class hero. Snarky
stuff. So when the jackboot skinheads came in I decided to check out.”
Fielding slips easily into the story he has memorized, all plotted and placed with
major characters and minor characters and bits of incident, all of it sounding very
real. He wrote it himself, he has it down. He continues talking while Hermann and
some white-smocked assistants help him sit up, flex his legs, test his reflexes. Around
them are vats and baths and tanks. A fog billows from a hole in the floor; a liquid
nitrogen immersion bath.
Hermann listens intently to the story, nodding now and then, and summons other
officials. Fielding tells his story again while the attendants work on him. He is careful
to give the events in different order, with different details each time. His accent is
standing up though there is mucus in his sinuses that makes the high singsong bits
hard to get out. They give him something to eat; it tastes like chicken-flavored ice
cream. After a while he sees he has them convinced. After all, the late twentieth was a
turbulent time, crammed with gaudy events, lurid people. Fielding makes it seem
reasonable that an aging rock star, seeing his public slip away and the government
closing in, would corpsicle himself.
The officials nod and gesture and Fielding is wheeled out on a carry table.
Immortality Incorporated is more like a church than a business. There is a ghostly
hush in the hallways, the attendants are distant and reserved. Scientific servants in the
temple of life.
They take him to an elaborate display, punch a button. A voice begins to drone a
welcome to the year 2018 (or 2180). The voice tells him he is one of the few from his
benighted age who saw the slender hope science held out to the diseased and dying.
His vision has been rewarded. He has survived the unfreezing. There is some
nondenominational talk about God and death and the eternal rhythm and balance of
life, ending with a retouched holographic photograph of the Founding Fathers. They
are a small knot of biotechnicians and engineers clustered around an immersion tank.
Close-cropped hair, white shirts with ball-point pens clipped in the pockets. They
wear glasses and smile weakly at the camera, as though they have just been shaken
awake.
“I'm hungry,” Fielding says.
* * * *
News that Lennon is revived spreads quickly. The Society for Dissipative
Anachronisms holds a press conference for him. As he strides into the room Fielding
clenches his fists so no one can see his hands shaking. This is the start. He has to
make it here.
“How do you find the future, Mr. Lennon?”
“Turn right at Greenland.” Maybe they will recognize it from
A Hard Day's Night
.
This is before his name impacts fully, before many remember who John Lennon was.
A fat man asks Fielding why he elected for the Long Sleep before he really needed it
and Fielding says enigmatically, “The role of boredom in human history is
underrated.” This makes the evening news and the weekly topical roundup a few days
later.
A fan of the twentieth asks him about the breakup with Paul, whether Ringo's death
was a suicide, what about Allan Klein, how about the missing lines from
Abbey Road
? Did he like Dylan? What does he think of the Aarons theory that the Beatles could
have stopped Vietnam?
Fielding parries a few questions, answers others. He does not tell them, of course,
that in the early sixties he worked in a bank and wore granny glasses. Then he became
a broker with Harcum, Brandels and Son and his take in 1969 was 57,803 dollars, not
counting the money siphoned off into the two concealed accounts in Switzerland. But
he read
Rolling Stone
religiously, collected Beatles memorabilia, had all the albums
and books and could quote any verse from any song. He saw Paul once at a distance,
coming out of a recording session. And he had a friend into Buddhism, who met
Harrison one weekend in Surrey. Fielding did not mention his vacation spent
wandering around Liverpool, picking up the accent and visiting all the old places, the
cellars where they played and the narrow dark little houses their families owned in the
early days. And as the years dribbled on and Fielding's money piled up, he lived
increasingly in those golden days of the sixties, imagined himself playing side man
along with Paul or George or John and crooning those same notes into the
microphones, practically kissing the metal. And Fielding did not speak of his dreams.
* * * *
It is the antiseptic Stanley Kubrick future. They are very adept at hardware.
Population is stabilized at half a billion. Everywhere there are white hard decorator
chairs in vaguely Danish modern. There seems no shortage of electrical power or oil
or copper or zinc. Everyone has a hobby. Entertainment is a huge enterprise, with
stress on ritual violence. Fielding watches a few games of Combat Gold, takes in a
public execution or two. He goes to witness an electrical man short-circuit himself.
The flash is visible over the curve of the Earth.
* * * *
Genetic manipulants—
manips
, Hermann explains—are thin, stringy people, all lines
and knobby joints where they connect directly into machine linkages. They are
designed for some indecipherable purpose. Hermann, his guide, launches into an
explanation but Fielding interrupts him to say, “Do you know where I can get a
guitar?”
Fielding views the era 1950-1980:
“Astrology wasn't rational, nobody really believed it, you've got to realize that. It was
boogie woogie
. On the other hand, science and rationalism were progressive jazz.”
He smiles as he says it. The 3D snout closes in. Fielding has purchased well and his
plastic surgery, to lengthen the nose and give him that wry Lennonesque smirk, holds
up well. Even the technicians at Immortality Incorporated missed it.
* * * *
Fielding suffers odd moments of blackout. He loses the rub of rough cloth at a cuff on
his shirt, the chill of air-conditioned breeze along his neck. The world dwindles away
and sinks into inky black, but in a moment it is all back and he hears the distant
murmur of traffic, and convulsively, by reflex, he squeezes the bulb in his hand and
the orange vapor rises around him. He breathes deeply, sighs. Visions float into his
mind and the sour tang of the mist reassures him.
Every age is known by its pleasures, Fielding reads from the library readout. The
twentieth introduced two: high speed and hallucinogenic drugs. Both proved
dangerous in the long run, which made them even more interesting. The twenty-first
developed weightlessness, which worked out well except for the re-entry problems if
one overindulged. In the twenty-second there were aquaform and something Fielding
could not pronounce or understand.
He thumbs away the readout and calls Hermann for advice.
* * * *
Translational difficulties:
They give him a sort of pasty suet when he goes to the counter to get his food. He
shoves it back at them.
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