“The possibilities raced through my mind the way a man’s past life is supposed to, when he is dying—which isn’t true, by the way. So I tackled it and was subtle about it. Diplomatic.
“I said, ‘Joe, which one do you lock up at night? Libby? Or this young wolf?’ ”
The computer chuckled. “ ‘Diplomatic,’ ” she repeated.
“How would you have put it, dear? They looked puzzled. When I made it clear, Llita was indignant. Deprive her kids of each other? When they had slept together since they were babies? Besides, there wasn’t room any other way. Or was I suggesting that she sleep with Libby while J.A. slept with Joe? If so, I could forget it!
“Minerva, most people never learn anything about any science, and genetics stands at the bottom of the list. Gregor Mendel had been dead twelve centuries at that time, yet all the old wives’ tale were what most people believed—and still do, I might add.
“So I tried to explain, knowing that Llita and Joe weren’t stupid, just ignorant. She cut in on me. ‘Yes, yes, Aaron, certainly. I’ve thought about the possibility that Libby may want to marry Jay Aaron—will want to, I think—and I know it’s frowned on here. But it’s silly to ruin their happiness over a superstition. So, if it works out that way, we think it’s best for them to move to Colombo—or at least as far as Kingston. Then they can use different family names and get married, and no one will be the wiser. Not that we want them to be so far away. But we won’t stand in the way of their happiness.’”
“She loved them,” said Minerva.
“Yes, she did, dear, by the exact definition of love. Llita placed their welfare and happiness ahead of her own. So I had to try to explain it—why the taboo against union of brother and sister wasn’t superstition but a real danger—even though it had turned out to be safe in their case.
“ ‘Why’ was the hard part. Starting cold on the complexities of genetics with persons who don’t even know elementary biology is like trying to explain multidimensional matrix algebra to someone who has to take off his shoes to count above ten.
“Joe would have accepted my authority. But Llita had the sort of mind that has to know why—else she was going to smile her sweetly stubborn smile, agree with me, then do as she had intended to all along. Llita was well above average smart but suffered from the democratic fallacy: the notion that her opinion was as good as anyone’s—while Joe suffered from the aristocratic fallacy: He accepted the notion of authority in opinion. I don’t know which fallacy is the more pathetic; either one can trip you. However, my mind matches Llita’s in this respect, so I knew I had to convince her.
“Minerva, how do you condense a thousand years of research in the second-most complex subject into an hour of talk? Llita didn’t even know she laid eggs—in fact she was certain she didn’t, as she had served thousands of eggs, fried, scrambled, boiled, and so forth. But she listened, and I sweated at it, with nothing but stylus and paper—when I needed the resources of a teaching machine in a college of genetics.
“But I kept at it, drawing pictures and simplifying outrageously some very complex concepts, until I thought they had grasped the ideas of genes, chromosomes, chromosome reduction, paired genes, dominants, recessives—and that bad genes made defective babies—and defective babies, thank Frigg under all Her many Names, was something Llita had known about since she was a little girl, listening to gossip of older female slaves. She quit smiling.
“I asked if they had playing cards?—not hopefully since they had no time for such. But Llita dug up a couple of decks from the children’s room. The cards were the commonest sort used on Landfall then: fifty-six cards in four suits, Jewels and Hearts were red, Spades and Swords were black, and each suit had royal cards. So I had ‘em play the oldest random-chance gene-matching simulation used in beginning genetics—the ‘Let’s-Make-a-Healthy-Baby’ game that children here on Secundus can play—and explain-long before they are old enough to copulate.
“I said, ‘Llita, write. down these rules. Black cards are recessives, red cards are dominants; Jewels and Spades come from the mother, Hearts and Swords come from the father. A black ace is a lethal gene, reinforced the baby is stillborn. A black empress reinforced gives us a ‘blue baby‘—needs surgery to stay alive—’ And so on, Minerva, except that I set the rules for a ‘hit’—a bad reinforcement—so that they were four times as probable for brother and sister as for strangers, and explained why—and then made them keep records for twenty games played by each set of rules for shuffling and matching, reduction and recombination.
“Minerva, it was not as good a structural analogy as the ‘Make-a-Healthy-Baby’ kindergarten games, but using two decks with different back patterns did enable me to set up degrees of consanguinity. Llita was simply intent at Srst—then started looking grim the first time the turn of the cards caused a black to reinforce a black.
“But when we played by brother-and-sister rules, and she dealt the cards and twice in a row got the Ace of Spades matched with the Ace of Swords for a dead baby, she stopped. She turned pale and looked at them. Then said slowly, with horror in her voice: ‘Aaron . . does this mean that we must lock Libby into a virgin’s basket? Oh, no!’
“I told her gently that it wasn’t that bad. Little Libby would never be locked up that way or any way—we’d work it out so that the children would not marry and so that J.A. would not give his sister a baby even by accident. ‘Quit worrying, dear!’ ”
The computer said, “Lazarus, what method did you use to cheat in those card games? May I ask?”
“Why, Minerva, how could you think such a thing?’
“I withdraw the question, Lazarus.”
“Of course I cheated! All sorts of ways. I said those two had never had time to play cards . . whereas I had played with every sort of a deck and by endless rules. Minerva, I won my first oil well from a boy who made the mistake of putting readers into a game. Dear, I had Llita deal—but from a deck so cold it almost froze solid. I used all sorts of things—false cut, whorehouse cut, tops and bottoms, stacking the deck in front of their eyes. There wasn’t any money on the game; I simply had to convince them that inbreeding was for stock, not for their beloved children—and I did.”
(Omitted)
“ ‘—your bedroom here, Llita, yours and Joe’s, I mean. Libby’s room adjoins yours, while J.A. winds up down the hall. How you reshuffle later depends on the sex of the baby you are going to have and on how many more you choose to have and when—but putting a crib in with Libby must be considered temporary; you can’t figure on using it indefinitely as an excuse to keep an eye on her.
“ ‘But this is merely a stopgap, like not leaving the cat alone with the roast. Kids are slick at beating such arrangements, and nobody has ever been able to keep a girl off her back when she decides it’s time. When she decides—that’s the key to the matter, So our pressing problem is to get these children into sepa ate beds—then to see to it that Libby does not make a bad decision. Any reason Libby can’t go with me to Skyhaven and visit Pattycake? And how about J.A., Joe, can you get along without him a while? Lots of room, dears —Libby can room with Pattycake, and J.A. can bunk with George and Woodrow and maybe teach ’em manners.’
“Llita said something about imposing on Laura, Minerva, which I answered with a rude negative. ‘Laura likes kids, dear; she is one ahead of you, yet she started a year later. She doesn’t keep house; she simply bosses her staff, she’s never had to work harder than suited her. Furthermore, she wants all of you to pay us a visit—an invitation I heartily second, but I don’t think you two can get away until we find a buyer for this place. But I want Libby and J.A. now—so that I can give them blunt and practical instruction in genetics, using stock I’ve been inbreeding to show what I mean.’
“Minerva, this particular breeding schedule I had started to teach my own offspring the bald truth about genetics, with careful records and grisly photographs of bad culls. Since you manage a planet which has over ninety percent Howards an
d the remaining mixed fraction mostly following Howard customs, you may not know that non-Howard cultures don’t necessarily teach such things to their kids even in cultures open about sex.
“Landfall was then mostly short-lifers, only a few thousand Howards—and to avoid friction we did not advertise our presence even though it wasn’t a secret—couldn’t be; the planet had a Howard Clinic. But with Skyhaven a Dan’l-Boone distance from the nearest big town, if Laura and I wanted our children to have a Howard-style education, we had to teach them ourselves. So we did.
“When I was a kid, the grownups of my home country tried to pretend to kids that sex did not exist—believe it if you can! Not true of the little hellions Laura and I raised. They had not seen human copulation—I don’t think they had—because it puts me off stride to have spectators. But they had seen it in other animals and had bred pets and kept records. The older two, Pattycake and George, had seen the birth of our youngest of the time because Laura had invited them to watch. This I strongly approve of, Minerva, but I have never urged one of my wives to permit it because I figure that a woman in labor should be indulged in every possible way. However, Laura had a streak of exhibitionism in her makeup.
“Anyhow, our kids could discuss chromosome reduction and the merits and demerits of linebreeding as knowledgeably as my own contemporaries when I was a kid could discuss the World Series—”
“Excuse me, Lazarus—that last term’s referent?”
“Oh. Nothing important. One of the commercially induced surrogate interests of my childhood. Forget it dear; it is not worth cluttering your memories. I was about to say I asked Joe and Llita what J.A. and Libby knew about sexual matters —since Landfall had so diversified a background that it could be anything and I wanted to know where to start—especially as my oldest, Pattycake, had turned twelve and reached menarche at the same time and was smug about it, likely to boast.
“Turned out that Libby and J.A. were sophisticated in an ignorant, unscientific fashion about matching their parents. They were one up on my kids in one respect: copulation they had seen from birth, at least to the time Estelle’s Kitchen had moved uptown—which I should have figured out from recalling the still more cramped living quarters of the original Estelle’s Kitchen.”
(7,200 words omitted)
“Laura was sharp with me and insisted that I not see them until I calmed down. She pointed out that Pattycake was almost as old as J.A., that it was nothing but play as Pattycake had had her four-year sterilization after menarche, and that, in any event, Pattycake had been on top.
“Minerva, I would not have spanked the kids no matter who had been on top. Intellectually I knew that Laura was right, and I had to agree that fathers tend to be possessive about daughters. I was pleased that Laura had gained the confidence of both kids so fully that they had neither tried very hard to keep from being caught, nor had they been scared when she happened to catch ‘em at it. Perhaps J.A. was scared but Pattycake just said, ‘Mama, you didn’t knock.’ ”
(Omitted)
“—so we traded sons. J.A. liked farm life and never did leave us, whereas George turned out to have this perverse taste for cities, so Joe took him on and made a chef out of him. George was sleeping with Elizabeth—Libby, that is—I forget how long before they decided to hatch one and were married. A double wedding, the four youngsters remained close.
“But J.A.’s decision solved a problem for me: what to do with Skyhaven later. By the time Laura decided to leave me, all of my sons by her had heard the wild goose one way or another; George was the only one still on planet, and our daughters were married and not one of them to a farmer. Whereas J.A. had become my overseer and was de-facto boss of Skyhaven the last ten years I was there.
“I might have worked some compromise with Roger Sperling if he hadn’t tried to grab the place. As it was, I deeded a half interest to Pattycake, sold the other half to my son-in-law J.A. on a mortgage, then discounted the paper to a bank and bought a better ship than I would have had I given that half interest to Roger and Laura. I made a similar deal, part gift and part sale, with Libby and George, of my share in Maison Long—and Libby changed her name to Estelle Elizabeth Sheffield-Long; there was continuity there as well—which pleased both me and her parents. It worked out well. Laura even came down and kissed me good-bye when I left.”
“Lazarus, I do not understand one factor. You have said that you do not favor marriage between Howards and ephemerals. Yet you let two of your children marry outside the Families.”
“Uh, correction, Minerva. One does not let children get married; they do get married, when and as and to whom they choose.”
“Correction noted, Lazarus.”
“But let’s go back to the night I intervened for Libby and J.A. That night I gave Llita and Joe everything that slave factor had turned over to me as proof of their old heritage—even the bill of sale—with a suggestion that they destroy the stuff or lock it up. Among those items was a series of photographs showing them growing up, year by year. The last one seemed to have been taken just before I bought them, and they confirmed it—two fully grown youngsters, one in a chastity girdle.
“Joe looked at that picture and said, “What a couple of clowns! We’ve come a long way, Sis—thanks to the Skipper.’
“‘So we have,’ she agreed, and studied the picture. ‘Brother, do you see what I do?’
“ ‘What?’ he said, looking again.
“ ‘Aaron will see it. Brother, take off your clout,’ she said, while starting to unwrap her sarong, ‘and pose with me against the wall. Not the selling pose, but the way we used to stand against a grid for these record pictures.’ She handed me that last picture in the series, and they stood and faced me.
“Minerva, in fourteen years they had not changed. Llita had had three kids and was just pregnant with her fourth and both of them had worked themselves silly . . but, stripped naked, no makeup on her and her hair down, they looked as they had the first time I saw them. They looked like that last record shot—end of adolescence, somewhere between eighteen and twenty in Earth terms.
“Yet they had to be past thirty. Thirty-five Earth years old if those Blessed records were to be trusted.
“Minerva, I have just one thing to add. When I last saw them, they were past sixty in Earth years, about sixty-three if you accept the records from Blessed. Neither one had a gray hair, both had all their teeth—and Llita was pregnant again.”
“Mutant Howards, Lazarus?”
The old man shrugged. “Isn’t that a question-begging term, dear? If you use a long enough time scale, every one of the thousands of genes a flesh-and-blood carries is a mutation. But by the Trustees’ rules, a person not derived from the Families’ genealogies can be registered as a newly discovered Howard if he can show proof of four grandparents surviving at least to one hundred. And that rule would have excluded me, had I not been born into the Families. But on top of that, the age I had reached when I got my first rejuvenation is too great to be accounted for by the Howard breeding experiment. They claim today that they have located in the twelfth chromosome pair a gene complex that determines longevity like winding a clock. If so, who wound my clock? Gilgamesh? ‘Mutation’ is never an explanation; it is simply a name for an observed fact.
“Perhaps some natural long-lifer, not necessarily a Howard, had visited Blessed—the naturals are forever moving around, changing their names, dyeing their hair; they have all gone through history—and earlier. But, Minerva, you recall from my life as a slave on Blessed one odd and unsavory incident—”
(Omitted)
“—so my best guess is that Llita and Joe were my own great-great-grandchildren.”
X
Possibilities
“Lazarus, was that why you refused to share ‘Eros’ with her?”
“Eh? But, Minerva, dear, I didn’t reach that conclusion—or suspicion—that night. Oh, I admit to prejudice about sex with my descendants—you can take the boy out of the Bible B
elt, but it is hard to take the Bible Belt out of the boy. Still, I had had a thousand years in which to learn better.”
“So?” said the computer. “Was it simply that you still classed her as an ephemeral? That troubles me, Lazarus. In my own—deprived—state, I find that, like her husband Joe, I see her side of it. Your reasons seem excuses, not sufficient grounds to refuse her need.”
“Minerva, I did not say I refused her.”
“Oh! Then I infer that you granted her this boon. I feel a lessening of tension.”
“I didn’t say that, either.”
“I find an implied contradiction, Lazarus.”
“Simply because there are things I have not said, dear. Everything I tell you winds up in my memoirs; that was the deal I made with Ira. Or I can tell you to erase something, in which case I might as well not have told you at all. Perhaps my twenty-three centuries do hold something worth recording. But I see no possible excuse for placing on record each time some darling lady shared with me simply for pleasure, not for progeny.”
The computer answered thoughtfully, “I imply from this addendum that, while I am precluded from inferring anything about the boon Llita requested, your rule with respect to ephemerals extended only to marriage and to progeny.”
“Nor did I say that!”
“Then I have not understood you, Lazarus. Conflict.”
The old man brooded, then answered slowly and sadly, “I think I said that marriage between a long-lived and a short-lived was a bad idea . . and so it is . . and I learned it the hard way. But that was long ago and far away—and when she died, part of me died. I stopped wanting to live forever.” He stopped.
The computer said brokenly, “Lazarus—Lazarus, my beloved friend! I am sorry!”
Lazarus Long sat up straight and said briskly, “No, dear. Don’t be sorry for me. No regrets—never any regrets. Nor would I change it if I could. Even if I had a time machine and could go back and change one cusp—I would not do so. No, not one instant, much less that cusp. Now let’s speak of something else.”