“Lazarus—”
“Yes, Minerva?”
“The published literature makes one option both certain and safe. This method can be used to create your twin sister —identical rather than fraternal, save for sex. A host mother is indicated, with no forcing to maturity, since the brain would be allowed to develop normally. Would this meet your standards of newness and interest? To watch yourself grow up as a woman? ‘Lazuli Long,’ you might name her—your female other self.”
“Uh—” Lazarus stopped.
I said dryly, “Grandfather, I think I’ve won our second bet. Something new. Something interesting.”
“Now slow up! You can’t do it, you don’t know how. Nor do I. And the Director of this madhouse appears to have moral scruples about it—”
“We don’t know that. Mere inference.”
“Not so ‘mere.’ And I may have moral scruples. ’Twouldn’t interest me unless I stuck around and watched her grow up . . which might send me crazy either through trying to make her grow up just like me—what a fate for any girl!—or by trying to keep her from growing up as ornery as I am when that would be her nature. Nor would I be justified either way; she would be a separate human being, not my slave. Besides that, I would be her sole parent—no mother. I’ve had one crack at trying to raise a daughter alone—it’s not fair to the girl.”
“You’re inventing objections, Lazarus. I’ll give long odds that Ishtar would gladly be both host mother and foster mother. Especially if you promised Ishtar a son of her own. Shall I ask her?”
“You keep your biscuit trap shut, Son! Minerva, place that on ‘pending’—I won’t be hurried into a major decision about another person. Especially one who isn’t, quite. Ira, remind me to tell you about the twins who were no relation to each other. But twins.”
“Preposterous. You’re changing the subject.”
“So I am. Minerva, what else do you have, girl?”
“Lazarus, I have one program which involves low hazard and a probability approaching certainty of supplying one—or more—experiences completely new to you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Suspended animation—”
“What’s new about that? We had that when I was a kid, hardly two hundred years old. Used it in the ‘New Frontiers.’ Didn’t attract me then, doesn’t now.”
“—as a means of time travel. If you stipulate that in X number of years, something truly new will develop—a certainty based on history—then your only problem is to select whatever span of years will, in your opinion, produce the degree of novelty you seek. One hundred years, one thousand, ten thousand, whatever you say. The rest involves nothing but minor design details.”
“Not so ‘minor’ if I’m going to be asleep and unable to protect myself.” “But you need not go into hibernation until you are satisfied with my design, Lazarus. A hundred years is obviously no problem. A thousand years is not much problem. For ten thousand years I would design an artificial planetoid equipped with fail-safes to insure that you would be revived automatically in case of emergency.”
“That would take quite some designing, girl.”
“I feel confident of my capacity to do it, Lazarus, but you are free to criticize and reject any part of it. However, there is no point in my submitting preliminary designs until you give me the controlling parameter, namely the time span, which in your opinion will produce something new to you. Or do you wish my advice on that?”
“Uh . . hold your horses, dear. Let’s assume that you’ve got me in liquid helium and in free fall and thoroughly protected against ionizing radiation—”
“No problem, Lazarus.”
“So I stipulated, dear; I’m not underrating you. But suppose some tiny little fail-safe fails null instead and I go on snoozing through the centuries—and millennia—without end. Not dead. But not revived, either.”
“I can and will design to avoid that. But let me accept your stipulation. In such case, how would you be worse off than you would be if you used your termination-option switch? What do you lose by trying this?”
“Why, that’s obvious! If there is anything to this immortality talk—or any sort of afterlife—I’m not saying there is or isn’t —but if there is, then when the ‘Roll Is Called Up Yonder,’ I won’t be there. I’ll be asleep but not dead, somewhere off in space. I’ll miss the last boat.”
“Grandfather,” I said impatiently, “quit trying to wiggle out. If you don’t want it, just say No. But Minerva has certainly offered you a way to reach something new. If there is anything to your argument—which I don’t admit—you will have achieved something really unique: the only human being out of many billions to fail to show up for muster on this hypothetical-and-highly-unlikely Judgment Day. I wouldn’t put it past you, you old scoundrel; you’re slippery.”
He ignored my slur. “Why ‘highly unlikely’?”
“Because it is. I won’t argue it.”
“Because you can’t argue it,” he retorted. “There isn’t any evidence for or against—so how can you assign even a loose probability either way? I was pointing out the desirability, if there happens to be anything to it, of playing it kosher. Minerva, hold that under ‘pending,’ too. The idea has everything you claim for it, and I don’t doubt your ability as a designer. But, like testing a parachute, it’s a one-way trip with no chance to change my mind after I jump. So we’ll look over all other ideas before falling back on that one—even if it takes years.”
“I will continue, Lazarus.”
“Thanks, Minerva.” Lazarus looked thoughtful as he picked his teeth with a thumbnail—we were eating, but I have not mentioned breaks for refreshment, nor will I again. You may assume any food and rest breaks that make you feel comfortable. Like Scheherazade’s tales, the Senior’s anecdotes were chopped up by many irrelevant interruptions.
“Lazarus—”
“Eh, Son? I was daydreaming . . of a far country and the wench is dead. Sorry.”
“You could help Minerva in this search.”
“So? Seems unlikely. She’s better equipped to conduct a needle-in-a-haystack search than I am—she impresses me.”
“Yes. But she needs data. There are these great gaps in what we know about you. If we knew—if Minerva knew—those fifty-odd professions you’ve followed, she might be able to cancel several thousand possibility pockets. For example, have you ever been a farmer?”
“Several times.”
“So? Now that she knows that, she won’t suggest anything relating to agriculture. While there may be sorts of farming you have never done, none would be novel enough to meet your stringent requirements. Why not list the things you have done?”
“Doubt if I can remember them all.”
“That can’t be helped. But listing what you do remember may call to mind others.”
“Uh . . let me think. One thing I always did every time I reached an inhabited planet was to study law. Not to practice —not usually, although for a number of years I was a very criminal lawyer—on San Andreas, that was. But to understand the ground rules. Hard to show a profit—or to conceal one—if you don’t know how the game is played. It’s much safer to break a law knowingly than to do so through ignorance.
“But that backfired once and I wound up as High Justice of a planetary Supreme Court—just in time to save my bacon. And neck.
“Let me see. Farmer, and lawyer, and judge, and I told you I had practiced medicine. Skipper of many sorts of craft, mostly for exploration but sometimes for cargo or migrant transport—and once art armed privateer with a crew of rogues you wouldn’t take home to mother. Schoolteacher—lost that job when they caught me teaching the kids the raw truth, a capital offense anywhere in the Galaxy. In the slave trade once but from underneath—I was a slave.”
I blinked at that. “I can’t imagine it.”
“Unfortunately I didn’t have to imagine it. Priest—”
I had to interrupt again. “ ‘Priest’? Lazarus, you said, o
r implied, that you had no religious faith of any sort.”
“Did I? But ‘faith’ is for the congregation, Ira; it handicaps a priest. Professor in a parlor house—”
“Excuse me again. Idiomatic usage?”
“Eh? Manager of a bordello . . although I did play the pianette a little, and sang. Don’t laugh; I had a pretty good singing voice then. This was on Mars—you’ve heard of Mars?”
“Next planet out from Old Home Terra. Sol Four.”
“Yes. Not a planet we’d bother with today. But this was before Andy Libby changed things. It was even before China destroyed Europe but after America dropped out of the spacing business, which left me stranded. I left Earth after that meeting of 2012 and didn’t go back for a spell—which saved me much unpleasantness, I shouldn’t complain. If that meeting had gone the other way—No, I’m wrong; when a fruit is ripe, it will fall, and the United States was rotten ripe. Don’t ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun—and neither can stop the march of events.
“But we were speaking of Mars and the job I had there. A fill-in job for coffee and cakes—but pleasant, as I was also the bouncer. The girls were all nice girls, and it was a pleasure to throw out some slob who was misbehaving toward them. Throw him so hard he bounced. Then blacklist him so he couldn’t come back. One or two like that every evening and the word got around that ‘Happy’ Daze demanded gentlemanly behavior toward the ladies, no matter how big a spender a man was.
“Whoring is like military service, Ira—okay in the upper brackets, not so good lower down. These girls were constantly getting offers to buy up their contracts and get married—and all of them did get married, I think, but they were making money so fast that they weren’t anxious to grab the first offer. Mainly because, when I took over, I put a stop to the fixed price the governor of the colony had set, and reinstated the Law of Supply and Demand. There was no reason why those kids shouldn’t charge every ruble the traffic would bear.
“Had trouble over that until the Governor’s Provost for Rest and Culture got it through his thick head that slave wages won’t work in a scarcity situation. Mars was unpleasant enough without trying to cheat those few who made it tolerable. Or even delightful when they were happy in their work. Whores perform the same function as priests, Ira, but far more thoroughly.
“Let me see—I’ve been wealthy many times and always lost it, usually through governments inflating the money, or confiscating—‘nationalizing’ or ‘liberating’—something I owned. ‘Put not your faith in princes,’ Ira; since they don’t produce, they always steal. I’ve been broke even oftener than I’ve been wealthy. Of the two, being broke is more interesting, as a man who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from is never bored. He may be angry or several other things—but not bored. His predicament sharpens his thoughts, spurs him into action, adds zest to his life, whether he knows it or not. Can trap him, of course; that’s why food is the usual bait for traps. But that’s the intriguing part about being broke: how to solve it without being trapped. A hungry man tends to lose his judgment—a man who has missed seven meals is often ready to kill—rarely a solution.
“Advertising copywriter, actor—but I was very broke that time—acolyte, construction engineer and several other sorts, and even more sorts of mechanic, for I’ve always believed that an intelligent man can turn his hand to anything if he will take time to learn how it works. Not that I insisted on skilled work when my next meal was at stake; I’ve often pushed an idiot stick—”
“Idiom?”
“An old gandy-dancer expression, Son, a stick with a shovel blade on one end and an idiot on the other. I was never that for more than a few days, just long enough to sort out the local setup. Political manager—I was even a reform politician once . . but only once: Reform politicians not only tend to be dishonest but stupidly dishonest—whereas the business politician is honest.”
“I don’t see that Lazarus. History seems to show—”
“Use your head, Ira. I don’t mean that a business politician won’t steal; stealing is his business. But all politicians are nonproductive. The only commodity any politician has to offer is jawbone. His personal integrity—meaning, if he gives his word, can you rely on it? A successful business politician knows this and guards his reputation for sticking by his commitments—because he wants to stay in business—go on stealing, that is—not only this week but next year and years after that. So if he’s smart enough to be successful at this very exacting trade, he can have the morals of a snapping turtle, but he performs in such a way as not to jeopardize the only thing he has to sell, his reputation for keeping promises.
“But a reform politician has no such lodestone. His devotion is to the welfare of all the people—an abstraction of very high order and therefore capable of endless definitions. If indeed it can be defined in meaningful terms. In consequence your utterly sincere and incorruptible reform politician is capable of breaking his word three times before breakfast—not from personal dishonesty, as he sincerely regrets the necessity and will tell you so—but from unswerving devotion to his ideal.
“All it takes to get him to break his word is for someone to get his ear and convince him that it is necessary for the greater good of all the peepul. He’ll geek.
“After he gets hardened to this, he’s capable of cheating at solitaire. Fortunately he rarely stays in office long—except during the decay and fall of a culture.”
I said, “I must take your word for it, Lazarus. Since I have spent most of my life on Secundus, I know little of politics other than theoretically. You set it up that way.”
The Senior fixed me with a stare of cold scorn. “I did no such thing.”
“But—”
“Oh, hush. You are a politician yourself—a ‘business’ politician, I hope—but that stunt of transporting your dissidents gives me doubts. Minerva! ‘Notebook,’ dear. My intention in deeding Secundus to the Foundation was to set up a cheap and simple government—a constitutional tyranny. One in which the government was forbidden to do most things . . and the dear people, bless their black flabby little hearts, were given no voice at all.
“I didn’t have much hope for it. Man is a political animal, Ira. You can no more keep him from politicking than you can keep him from copulating—and probably shouldn’t try. But I was young then, and hopeful. I hoped to keep politicking in the private sphere, keep it out of government. I thought the setup might last a century or so; I’m amazed that it has lasted as long as it has. Not good. This planet is overripe for revolution—and if Minerva doesn’t find me something better to do, I might show up under another name, with my hair dyed and my nose bobbed, and start one. So be warned, Ira.”
I shrugged. “You forget I’m migrating.”
“Ah, yes. Though the prospect of suppressing a revolution might change your mind. Or perhaps you would like to be my chief of staff—then displace me with a coup d‘état after the shooting is over and send me to the guillotine. That would be something new—I’ve never tended to lose my head over politics. Doesn’t leave much for an encore, does it? ’A tisket, a tasket, a head in a basket—it cannot reply to questions you ask it.’ Final curtain, no bows.
“But revolutions can be fun. Did I tell you how I worked my way through college? Operating a Gatling gun11 for five dollars a day and loot. Never got higher than corporal because each time I had enough money for another semester, I deserted—and, being a mercenary, I was never tempted to become a dead hero. But adventure and change of scene are appealing to a young man . . and I was very young.
“But dirt, and missing meals, and the wheet of bullets past your ears stop being glamorous as you grow up; the next time I was in the military—not entirely my idea—I chose Navy instead.
J.F. 45th
Wet Navy, although I was space Navy at later times and under other names.
“I’ve sold almost everything—except slaves—and worked as a
mind-reader in a traveling show, and was a king once—a much overrated profession, the hours are too long—and designed women’s styles under a phony French name and accent and with my hair long. Almost the only time I’ve worn long hair, Ira; not only does long hair need a lot of timewasting care, it gives your opponent something to grab in close combat and can obscure your view at a critical moment —either one can be fatal. But I don’t favor a billiard-ball cut because a thick mat of hair—not so long as to fall over your eyes—can save you a nasty scalp wound.”
Lazarus appeared to stop to think. “Ira, I don’t see how I can list all the things I’ve done to support myself and my wives and kids, even if I could remember them. The longest I ever stuck to one job was about half a century—very special circumstances—and the shortest was from after breakfast to just before lunch—again, special circumstance. But no matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers. I prefer the first category but I haven’t spurned the other two. Whenever I was a family man—usually, that is—I haven’t let compunctions stop me from keeping food on the table. I won’t steal another child’s food to feed my own—but there is always some way not too sickeningly fake to garner valuta if a man isn’t too picky—which I never was whenever I had family obligations.
“You can sell things which have no intrinsic value, such as stories or songs—I’ve worked every branch of the entertainment profession . . including a time in the capital of Fatima when I squatted in the marketplace with a brass bowl in front of me, telling a story longer than this one, and waiting at cliff-hangers for the clink of a coin.
“I was reduced to that because my ship had been confiscated and foreigners weren’t permitted to work without a permit—a high squeeze on the theory that jobs should be reserved for local citizens, there being a depression. Telling stories without a fee wasn’t classed as work, nor was it begging—which required a license—and cops let me alone as long as I volunteered the customary daily gift to the Police Benevolent Fund.