him.
“Though those bruises on your face do make you look a little scary.”
“You don’t have to flatter me. You’ve really never seen her?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die. So now you go back to him and tell him you scared the hell out of me and I will never bother him ever again, no matter how he ruined my life.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Don’t get me started.” Yolanda leaned over and poured the last of the green apple martini. But Bernal found himself looking at the bumps of her spine as it curved. She brushed her hair back and smiled slightly as she poured.
“No, I’m curious.” He had to think about what to do next. He’d been more than half hoping that Yolanda would tell him exactly where Muriel was.
“My uncle died a couple of years ago. Uncle Solly. I always liked Uncle Solly. When I was little, I used to go play with all that space stuff he had in his house. Telescopes, star charts, little Revell models of spaceships. All that stopped once I hit puberty, of course, and got to find that stuff kind of boring. Poor Uncle Solly. I ignored him for quite a while. I got interested in other things.
“Solly didn’t have kids. His wife, my aunt Helga, died quite a few years before him. I never really knew her. Solly had worked hard his whole life. Nice house, nothing too big. But when he died, it turned out he had a lot of money stashed away. And aside from a branch of the family that moved to Colorado, I was it as far as relatives was concerned.
“There wasn’t really a funeral, just a kind of ceremony at Long Voyage, that cryobank over toward Prescott, where that charlatan Spillvagen worked. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that Solly wanted to get himself frozen. Just his kind of thing. His little statement that they read at the ceremony said that he wanted to live to see human beings on other planets. A lot of stuff like that. Very inspiring. But it was a little room, hot, and he had a lot of people read stuff, and someone even played a video of the first man landing on the Moon. Don’t you think that flag on a stick was kind of silly? I mean, if you don’t have wind, think of something else. You should be able to. Those space types tend to be unimaginative.
“Okay, fine. He’d set up his accounts in a variant of a dynasty trust called a ‘personal revival trust.’ Seems to be legal, though it hasn’t been tested in court. Dynasty trusts let you leave stuff to remote descendants. A personal revival trust lets you leave it to yourself, when you’re revived. And, of course, there’s rental. On the facility. There’s a fund for that too, otherwise there’s a chance they’d just dump you at some point, when you couldn’t pay to keep the liquid nitrogen cold or something. And that’s the way things stood, for a couple of years. I’d go visit Uncle Solly, now and again, just to see how he was getting on.”
Bernal thought two things. One was that she had done a fair amount of research on the structure of her uncle’s trust. And two, that there was no way she had ever struggled over to Long Voyage to visit her frozen uncle.
“Then, things went kablooie.”
“What do you mean?”
“Of course, if Uncle Solly had picked a classier cryo-bank, one housed in a black glass pyramid or something, none of this would have happened. ‘And we pass the savings on to you!’ just wasn’t the most comforting marketing positioning for a cryobank, even though it actually makes sense. Somebody has to pay for keeping that damn black glass pyramid clean. That stuff really shows marks.
“Long Voyage was in an abandoned mall along with lot of other low-rent places. Well, something went wrong, and there was a fire. It was a pretty serious fire, and there were all sorts of power failures, the works. And their security was down for who knows how long.”
“Do you think your uncle was . .. defrosted?” he said.
“Of course I do! Why else would they stonewall that way? They
“Though those bruises on your face do make you look a little scary.”
“You don’t have to flatter me. You’ve really never seen her?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die. So now you go back to him and tell him you scared the hell out of me and I will never bother him ever again, no matter how he ruined my life.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Don’t get me started.” Yolanda leaned over and poured the last of the green apple martini. But Bernal found himself looking at the bumps of her spine as it curved. She brushed her hair back and smiled slightly as she poured.
“No, I’m curious.” He had to think about what to do next. He’d been more than half hoping that Yolanda would tell him exactly where Muriel was.
“My uncle died a couple of years ago. Uncle Solly. I always liked Uncle Solly. When I was little, I used to go play with all that space stuff he had in his house. Telescopes, star charts, little Revell models of spaceships. All that stopped once I hit puberty, of course, and got to find that stuff kind of boring. Poor Uncle Solly. I ignored him for quite a while. I got interested in other things.
“Solly didn’t have kids. His wife, my aunt Helga, died quite a few years before him. I never really knew her. Solly had worked hard his whole life. Nice house, nothing too big. But when he died, it turned out he had a lot of money stashed away. And aside from a branch of the family that moved to Colorado, I was it as far as relatives was concerned.
“There wasn’t really a funeral, just a kind of ceremony at Long Voyage, that cryobank over toward Prescott, where that charlatan Spillvagen worked. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that Solly wanted to get himself frozen. Just his kind of thing. His little statement that they read at the ceremony said that he wanted to live to see human beings on other planets. A lot of stuff like that. Very inspiring. But it was a little room, hot, and he had a lot of people read stuff, and someone even played a video of the first man landing on the Moon. Don’t you think that flag on a stick was kind of silly? I mean, if you don’t have wind, think of something else. You should be able to. Those space types tend to be unimaginative.
“Okay, fine. He’d set up his accounts in a variant of a dynasty trust called a ‘personal revival trust.’ Seems to be legal, though it hasn’t been tested in court. Dynasty trusts let you leave stuff to remote descendants. A personal revival trust lets you leave it to yourself, when you’re revived. And, of course, there’s rental. On the facility. There’s a fund for that too, otherwise there’s a chance they’d just dump you at some point, when you couldn’t pay to keep the liquid nitrogen cold or something. And that’s the way things stood, for a couple of years. I’d go visit Uncle Solly, now and again, just to see how he was getting on.”
Bernal thought two things. One was that she had done a fair amount of research on the structure of her uncle’s trust. And two, that there was no way she had ever struggled over to Long Voyage to visit her frozen uncle.
“Then, things went kablooie.”
“What do you mean?”
“Of course, if Uncle Solly had picked a classier cryo-bank, one housed in a black glass pyramid or something, none of this would have happened. ‘And we pass the savings on to you!’ just wasn’t the most comforting marketing positioning for a cryobank, even though it actually makes sense. Somebody has to pay for keeping that damn black glass pyramid clean. That stuff really shows marks.
“Long Voyage was in an abandoned mall along with lot of other low-rent places. Well, something went wrong, and there was a fire. It was a pretty serious fire, and there were all sorts of power failures, the works. And their security was down for who knows how long.”
“Do you think your uncle was . .. defrosted?” he said.
“Of course I do! Why else would they stonewall that way? They
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