CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Friend In Deed
While his body moved at the glacial pace demanded by his disease, Al Burgey’s mind whirled. He had a hard time fathoming what he had just done. Or, why. Especially, why.
After holding in his hand a piece of the puzzle he had spent years trying to obtain, he had handed it back along with his future. Was he trying to reclaim his soul at the price of his body?
Knowing the long reach Dicky Baudgew had from his over-decorated web, Burgey doubted that he or the girl had much time before they would be dealing with that deadly little spider’s attention. The girl had thrummed a thread and there would be hell to pay.
The crippled geri shuffled around the house collecting clothes, papers and pills. His heart beat rose. His fingers became so frantic as they tried to cull what he might need that they dropped as much as they gathered. As parts of his body extended their betrayal, he asked himself unanswerable questions.
Why would he not fight back with every weapon against such a horrible death? But, could he live two hundred more years of a life mired in guilt? Even if it was the right thing to do to give the girl back her crystal, why had he given up his own? He had sold his soul for more life, but, suddenly, when longer life was put into his hand, he had refused. Was he insane? Senile? Or a late-blooming saint?
As Burgey haphazardly filled the large suitcase on top of his bed, his mind reviewed his sins.
It had started with a fall. A misreading of gravity’s rules. A thirteen stitch gash to his forearm. A somewhat larger wound to his head. A much much larger wound to his sense of self. His first thought was that he was becoming fragile. Frail. But the tests said otherwise. He was in the beginning stages of ALS. With the latest treatments, it would take time, but over the course of five or ten years, every muscle in his body would die. He wouldn’t die. Just his body. His mind would continue to work as well as if ever had.
As Burgey contemplated the horror of his future, he began to think about the crystal that had lain hidden in its little preserve for so long. His prodigious mind considered how his disease might be cured or curtailed if his piece of the longevity puzzle could be reunited with the other two. He came to the conclusion, a result based as much in fear-driven hope as science, that if all three parts of Trinity could be brought back together, both his mind and his body might be able to continue on its interesting way for a very long time.
As had been true sixty years before when Trinity—Nora Winslow, Elena Howe and he, Glen Laureby—first discovered how they could triple the lifespan of an individual, deciding the best way to gather up that ancient, dangerous and purposefully scattered knowledge took time.
He knew that if he went to Elena Howe and asked for her piece of the puzzle, having only his own in hand, she wouldn’t give it to him. But, if he were to come to her in possession of two crystals, then she might be willing to add the third, especially if she herself were feeling as unacceptably mortal as he was. Consequently, he decided that he needed to get Roan’s piece first. He did not delude himself that achieving that goal would be easy. First, he didn’t know where she was. Since Roan had never quite trusted him when he was Glen Laureby, he doubted that she would be immediately won over by his reincarnation as Al Burgey.
As the sick geri struggled to pile papers into the suitcase, he thought how correct Roan was to have doubted him. Before they were lovers, he had tried to steal some of her research. While they were lovers, he had had an affair with Elena Howe. And sixty years after they had last seen one another, he had been responsible for her death.
Whether as Glen Laureby, or his reincarnation as Al Burgey, the man who was throwing handfuls of socks and underwear into his suitcase had always been smart. Indeed, Laureby/Burgey was so smart that he occasionally didn’t know what limitations there were on his intelligence. That is what had happened in Africa three years ago as well as in Cold Spring Harbor more than a half century before.
After the fiasco Fflowers had caused by using Trinity’s longevity research before it had been perfected, Glen Laureby had known that he had to get free of the megalomaniac. His plan was to leave and take Roan Winslow with him, but before Laureby could decide where to go, Roan had happened onto a new approach to solve the problems with the old longevity formulation. With that discovery, a complicated weaving of prions with a person’s DNA, Laureby’s plans changed. Rather than just leaving, he had the idea of taking the discovery with them. Tripling a life span would lead to even greater riches than giving the world wings; however Roan convinced Laureby that taking what Fflowers would consider his own would greatly shorten their own life spans.
Laureby felt stalemated until Fflowers gave Elena wings. Laureby saw that prideful act as an opening. He nurtured Elena’s anger and comforted her beyond just words. When Roan discovered that her gallant was not so gallant, things came to a head.
The disaffected members of Trinity, while not trusting each other, found that their hatred and fear of Joshua Fflowers bound them together. It was Laureby who came up with the idea of faking the deaths of Roan and himself. It was Elena who had the idea that if she took the Etruscan embryos Fflowers might be so afraid of the political consequences that he would let her go. It was Roan who decided that the best way to protect herself from Fflowers’ wrath, if he happened to see through their ruse, as well as keep Trinity bound to itself, was to split up the longevity solution among the three of them. To reassemble the prion-extended DNA of the longevity solution it would be necessary to reconnect the information etched within the three crystals.
The plan had worked. Winslow and Laureby had died in an explosion and gone off to start new lives. Elena had taken the embryos and left a letter explaining what would happen if Fflowers came after her. For sixty years, a balance had been maintained.
Until Al Burgey fell and cut his arm.
It had taken Burgey more than a year and much more money than he could have imagined to find Roan. Over the years he had received the occasional communication from her. Usually, she would write as a fellow scientist. What did he think about this or that line of inquiry? It was not until his hirelings had managed to backtrack from a post office box in Bratislava through Teheran, Haifa, Monaco, and a half-dozen other dead ends and cut-outs, that Laureby realized how great Roan’s distrust of him was. The trail had gone dead until he chanced upon a small news item that led him to believe that East Africa might be a good place to focus the search. It took more money and time to follow up the rumors about some unusual guinea hens. It had taken even more time and more money to find that Roan Winslow had become Nora Elieson.
Burgey developed a plan based on pity. He would go to Africa and convince Roan to give up her part of the puzzle. After all, he had been her colleague, friend, lover and fellow conspirator. She might not trust him, but she certainly wouldn’t allow him to die in the way that was ordained. She would listen. She would understand.
When Al Burgey arrived in Bujumbura, he found that Nora Elieson wasn’t there.
He had hired a roto, tracked her to the village where she had been staying only to find that she had left that morning. When he finally caught up with his old colleague, Laureby found she was not as understanding as he had assumed. She wanted no part of his plan. When she wouldn’t agree to give him what he had come for, Burgey threatened to harm her or her family.
That had been a mistake he would long regret.
Elieson had tried to get away. In her attempt, by accident or choice, she had careened off the road to her death.
Guilt and remorse over his former lover’s death effectively ended Burgey’s quest. He returned to Noramica and the slow, maddening drama of his disease.
After awhile Allen Burgey came to believe that he had accepted his fate. In a strange way, he saw the progress of the ALS as penance for his former lover’s death. However, at that moment when he took from the girl Roan Winslow’s portion of the DNA sequence, Burgey’s fist had closed tight and did not want to reopen.
Even now, as h
e threw shirts into the suitcase, he was monumentally ambivalent. One moment he would feel an unconquerable urge to track down Prissi Langue and snatch back what should be his. A second later would come a surge of serenity welling from the idea that he might obtain forgiveness from helping her.
In the end, as the complicated Glen Laureby/Allan Burgey waited for the Wingcab to take him to his hidey-hole, he did both. He left Prissi Langue clues that would take her someplace where she might be safe, but that also would provide him an opportunity to take back what he craved.