“Sister.”
“Aw, Minnie.”
Minerva went on, to me: “Don’t let my sister fret you, Colonel. She teases because she wants company and attention. But she is an ethical computer, utterly reliable.”
“I’m sure she is, Minerva. But she can’t expect to tease me and threaten me, and still expect me to stand up in front of a judge or a priest or somebody and promise to love, honor, and obey her. I’m not sure I want to obey her anyhow.”
The computer voice answered, “You won’t have to promise to obey, Dickie boy; I’ll train you later. Just simple things. Heel. Fetch. Sit up. Lie down. Roll over. Play dead. I don’t expect anything complex out of a man. Aside from stud duties, that is. But on that score your reputation has preceded you.”
“What do you mean by that?” I threw my serviette down. “That tears it! The wedding is off.”
“Friend Richard.”
“Eh? Yes, Reb.”
“Don’t let Teena worry you. She has propositioned me, and you, and Father Hendrik, and Choy-Mu, and, no doubt, many others. Her ambition is to make Cleopatra look like a piker.”
“And Ninon de Lenclos, and Rangy Lil, and Marie Antoinette, and Rahab, and Battleship Kate, and Messalina, and you name her. I’m going to be the champion nymphomaniac of the multiverse, beautiful as sin, and utterly irresistible. Men will fight duels over me and kill themselves on my doorstep and write odes to my little finger. Women will swoon at my voice. Every man, woman, and child will worship me from afar and I’ll love as many of them up close as I can fit into my schedule. So you don’t want to be my bridegroom, eh? What a filthy, wicked, evil, stinking, utterly selfish thing to say! Angry mobs will tear you to bits and drink your blood.”
“Mistress Teena, that is not polite table talk. We are eating.”
“You started it.”
I tried to review the bidding. Had I started it? No, indeed, she—
Reb Ezra said to me in a prison whisper, “Give up. You can’t win. I know.”
“Mistress Teena, I’m sorry I started it. I should not have done so. It was naughty of me.”
“Oh, that’s all right.” The computer sounded warmly pleased. “And you don’t have to call me ‘Mistress Teena’; hardly anyone uses titles around here. If you called Minerva ‘Dr. Long,’ she would look around to see who was standing behind her.”
“All right, Teena, and please call me ‘Richard.’ Mistress Minerva, you have a doctor’s degree? Medical doctor?”
“One of my degrees is in therapy, yes. But my sister is right; titles are not often used here. ‘Mistress’ one never hears…other than as a term of affection to a woman you have gifted with your carnal love. So there is no need to call me ‘Mistress Minerva’…until you choose to gift me with that boon. When you do. If you do.”
Right across the plate!
I almost failed to lay a bat on it. Minerva seemed so modest, meek, and mild that she took me by surprise.
Teena gave me time in which to regroup. “Minnie, don’t try to hustle him right out from under me. He’s mine.”
“Better ask Hazel. Better yet, ask him.”
“Dickie boy! Tell her!”
“What can I tell her, Teena? You haven’t settled it with Hazel and my Uncle Jock. But in the meantime—” I contrived to bow to Minerva as well as one can from bed and handicapped by a spinal block. “Dear lady, your words do me great honor. But, as you know, I am at present physically immobilized, unable to share in such delights. In the meantime may we take the wish for the deed?”
“Don’t you dare call her ‘Mistress’!”
“Sister, behave yourself. Sir, you may indeed call me ‘Mistress.’ Or, as you say, we can treat the wish for the deed and wait until a later time. Your therapy will take time.”
“Ah, yes. So it will.” I glanced at the little maple, no longer quite so little. “How long have I been here? I must already have run up quite a bill.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Minerva advised me.
“I must worry about it. Bills must be paid. And I don’t even have Medicare.” I looked at the Rabbi. “Rabbi, how did you finance your—transplants, are they?—You’re as far from home and your bank account as I am.”
“Farther than you think. And it is no longer appropriate to address me as Rabbi—where we are today, the Torah is not known. I am now Private Ezra Davidson, Time Corps Irregulars. That pays my bills. I think something like it pays yours. Teena, can you—I mean, ‘will you’—tell Dr. Ames the account to which his bills are charged?”
“He has to ask it himself.”
“I do ask, Teena. Please tell me.”
“‘Campbell, Colin,’ also known as ‘Ames, Richard’: charges, all departments, to Senior’s special account, ‘Galactic Overlord—Miscellaneous.’ So don’t fret, lover boy; you’re a charity case, all bills on the house. Of course the ones on that account usually don’t live long.”
“Athene!”
“But, Minnie, that’s the simple truth. An average of one point seven three missions, then we pay their death benefits. Unless he’s ordered to some featherbed job at THQ.”
(I was not listening carefully. “Galactic Overlord” indeed! Only one person could have set up that account. The playful little darling. Damn it, dear—where are you?)
That none-too-solid wall blinked away again. “Am I too late for breakfast? Oh, pshaw! Hello, darling!”
It was she!
XXII
“When in doubt, tell the truth.”
MARK TWAIN 1835-1910
“Richard, I did see you the next morning. But you didn’t see me.”
“She certainly did see you, Dickie boy,” Teena confirmed. “At great risk to her own health. Be glad you’re alive. You almost weren’t.”
“That’s true,” agreed Ezra. “I was your roommate part of one night. Then they moved me and put you in tight quarantine, and inoculated me nine or ninety ways. My brother, you were sick unto death.”
“Breakbone cramp, green-pus shakes, strangle fever—” Hazel was ticking them off on her fingers. “Blue death. Typhus. Minerva, what else?”
“Golden staphylococcus systemic infection, hepatic herpes Landrii. Worst of all, a loss of will to live. But Ishtar will not permit a person to die who has not asked for death while possessed of judicial capacity, and neither will Galahad. Tamara stayed with you every minute until that crisis was over.”
“Why don’t I remember any of this?”
“Be glad you don’t,” Teena advised.
“Sweetheart, if you had not been in the best hospital in all the known universes, with the most skilled therapists, I would be a widow again. And I look terrible in black.”
Ezra added, “If you didn’t have the constitution of an ox, you would never have made it.”
Teena interrupted with: “Of a bull, Ezra. Not an ox. I know, I’ve seen ’em. Impressive.”
I didn’t know whether to thank Teena or to call off the wedding again. So I ignored it. “What I don’t understand is how I got all those diseases. I took a hit, I know that. That could account for staph aureus. But those other things?”
Ezra said, “Colonel, you are a professional soldier.”
“Yes.” I sighed. “I never practiced that aspect of the profession; I don’t feel easy with it. Biological warfare makes fusion bombs seem clean and decent. Even chemical warfare looks humane compared with bio weapons. Very well; that knife—was it a knife?—was prepared. Nastily.”
“Yes,” agreed Ezra, “somebody wanted you dead and was willing to kill all of Luna City as long as you died.”
“That’s crazy. I’m not that important.”
Minerva said quietly, “Richard, you are that important.”
I stared at her. “What makes you think so?”
“Lazarus told me.”
“‘Lazarus.’ Teena used that name earlier. Who is Lazarus? Why is his opinion so weighty?”
Hazel answered, “Richard, I told you that you we
re important and I told you why. The rescue of Adam Selene. The same people who want him to stay unresurrected wouldn’t boggle at killing Luna City to kill you.”
“If you say so. I wish I knew what happened mere. Luna City is my adopted home; some mighty fine people in it. Uh, your son, Ezra, among others.”
“Yes, my son. And others. Luna City was saved, Richard; the infection was stopped.”
“Good!”
“At a price. A reference time tick was available from our rescue. The number of seconds it took us all to get aboard and get out of there was reconstructed through careful reenactment—by all of us who were involved in it with your part played by a skilled actor. This was compared with Gay’s own memory of how long she was there, and the two were reconciled. Then a Burroughs space-time capsule was moved to the resultant coordinates plus four seconds, and a heat bomb was released. Not atomic but hot, star hot—some of those bugs are hard to kill. Obviously the hotel had to be damaged, with a high probability—no, a certainty—of loss of life. The threat to Luna City was cauterized but the price was high. Tanstaafl.” Ezra looked grim.
“Your son was saved?”
“I think so. However, my son’s welfare did not figure into this decision, and my opinion was not sought. This was a Time Headquarters policy decision. THQ rescues individuals only when those individuals are indispensable to an operation. Richard, as I understand it—mind you, I’m a recruit private on sick leave; I’m not privy to high policy decisions—as I understand it, permitting Luna City to suffer a killing epidemic at that time would have interfered with THQ’s plans for something else. Perhaps this matter that Mistress Gwendolyn—Hazel—hinted at. I don’t know.”
“It was and I do know and on Tertius you don’t call me ‘Mistress’ unless you mean it, Ezra, but thank you anyhow. Richard, it was the widespread damage that airborne disease could do to their plans that caused Headquarters to act so radically. They cut it so fine that you and I and the rest of Gay’s load came within a blink of being killed by that heat bomb as we escaped.” (And at this point I barked my shins on a paradox—but Hazel was still talking:)
“They couldn’t risk waiting even a few more seconds; some killer bugs might get into the city’s air ducts. They had projected the effect that would have on Operation Adam Selene: disaster! So they moved. But the Time Corps doesn’t go chasing through the universes saving individual lives, or even the lives of whole cities. Richard, they could save Herculaneum and Pompeii today if they wanted to…or San Francisco, or Paris. They don’t. They won’t.”
“Sweetheart,” I said slowly, “are you telling me that this ‘Time Corps’ could prevent the Blotting of Paris in 2002 even though that happened two centuries in the past? Please!”
Hazel sighed. Ezra said, “Friend Richard, attend me carefully. Don’t reject what I am about to say.”
“Eh? Okay. Shoot.”
“The destruction of Paris is more than two thousand years in the past, not just two centuries ago.”
“But that is clearly—”
“By groundhog reckoning today is Gregorian year A.D. 4400 or the year 8160 by the Jewish calendar, a fact I found quite disturbing but had to accept. Besides that, here and now we are over seven thousand light-years from Earth.”
Both Hazel and Minerva were looking soberly at me, apparently awaiting my reaction. I started to speak, then reviewed my thoughts. At last I said, “I have only one more question. Teena?”
“No, you can’t have any more waffles.”
“Not waffles, dear. My question is this: May I have another cup of coffee? This time with cream? Please?”
“Here—catch!” My request appeared on my lap table.
Hazel blurted, “Richard, it’s true! All of it.”
I sipped the fresh coffee. “Thank you, Teena; it’s just right. Hazel my love, I didn’t argue. It would be silly of me to argue something I don’t understand. So let’s move to a simpler subject. Despite these terrible diseases you tell me I had, I feel brisk enough to leap out of bed and lash the serfs. Minerva, can you tell me how much longer I must have this paralysis? You are my physician, are you not?”
“No, Richard, I am not. I—”
“Sister is in charge of your happiness,” Teena interrupted. “That’s more important.”
“Athene is more or less right—”
“I’m always right!”
“—but she sometimes phrases things oddly. Tamara is chief of morale for both Ira Johnson Hospital and the Howard Clinic…and Tamara was here when you needed her most, she held you in her arms. But she has many assistants, because Director General Ishtar considers morale—well, happiness—central to both therapy and rejuvenation. So I help, and so does Maureen, and Maggie whom you have not yet met. There are others who pitch in when we have too many with happiness problems—Libby and Deety, and even Laz and Lor who are superb at it when they are needed…not surprising, as they are sisters of Lazarus and daughters of Maureen. And there’s Hilda, of course.”
“Hold it, please. I’m getting confused by names of people I’ve never met. This hospital has a staff that dishes out happiness; I understand that much. All of these angels of happiness are women. Right?”
“How else?” Teena demanded scornfully. “Where do you expect to find happiness?”
“Now, Teena,” Minerva said reprovingly. “Richard, we female operatives take care of the morale of males…and Tamara has skilled male operatives on watch or on call for female clients and patients. Opposite polarity isn’t absolutely essential to morale nursing but it makes it much easier. We don’t need as many male morale operatives to take care of our female patients since women are less likely to be ill. Rejuvenation clients are about evenly divided, male and female, but women almost never become depressed while being made young again—”
“Hear, hear!” Hazel put in. “Just makes me horny.” She patted my hand, then added a private signal I ignored, others being present.
“—while males usually suffer at least one crisis of spirit during rejuvenation. But you asked about your spinal block. Teena.”
“I’ve called him.”
“Just a moment,” said Hazel. “Ezra, have you shown Richard your new legs?”
“Not yet.”
“Will you? Please? Do you mind?”
“I’m delighted to show them off.” Ezra stood up, moved back from the table, turned around, lifted his canes and stood without assistance. I had not stared at his legs as he entered the room (I don’t like to be stared at); then, when he sat down at the refection table that had followed him in, I could not see his legs. In the one glimpse I had had of his legs, I had gathered an impression that he was wearing walking shorts with calf-length brown stockings that matched his shorts—bony white knees showing between stockings and shorts.
Now he scuffed off shoes, stood on bare feet—and I revised my notions abruptly; those “brown stockings” were brown skin of legs and feet that had been grafted onto his stumps.
He explained at length: “—three ways. A new limb or a new anything can be budded. That’s a lengthy job and requires great skill, I’m told. Or an organ or limb can be grafted from one’s own clone, which is kept here in stasis and with an intentionally undeveloped brain. They tell me that way is as easy as putting a patch on a pair of pants—no possibility of rejection.
“But I have no clone here—or not yet—so they found me something in the spare parts inventory—”
“The meat market.”
“Yes, Teena. Lots and lots of body parts on hand, inventory computerized—”
“By me.”
“Yes, Teena. For heterologous grafts Teena selects spare parts for closest tissue match…matching blood, of course, but matching in other ways, too. And matching in size but that’s the easiest part. Teena checks everything and digs out a spare part that your own body will mistake for its own. Or almost.”
“Ezra,” the computer said, “you can wear those legs for ten years, at least; I really
did a job on you. By then your clone will be available. If you need it.”
“You did indeed and thank you, Teena. My benefactor’s name is Azrael Nkruma, Richard; we are twins, aside from an irrelevant matter of melanin.” Ezra grinned.
I said, “Doesn’t he miss his feet?”
Ezra suddenly sobered. “He’s dead, Richard…dead from the commonest cause of death here: accident. Mountain climbing. Landed on his head and crushed his skull; even Ishtar’s skill could not have saved him. And she certainly would have tried her best; Dr. Nkruma was a surgeon on her staff. But these are not the feet Dr. Nkruma wore; these are from his clone…that he never needed.”
“Richard—”
“Yes, dear? I wanted to ask Ezra—”
“Richard, I did something without consulting you.”
“So? Am I going to have to beat you again?”
“You may decide to. I wanted you to see Ezra’s legs…because, without your permission, I had them put a new foot on you.” She looked scared.
There ought to be some rule limiting the number of emotional shocks a person can legally be subjected to in one day. I’ve had all the standard military training for slowing heart beat and lowering blood pressure and so forth in a crunch. But usually the crunch won’t wait and the damned drills aren’t all that effective anyway.
This time I simply waited while consciously slowing my breathing. Presently I was able to say, without my voice breaking, “On the whole, I don’t think that calls for a beating.” I tried to wiggle my foot on that side—I’ve always been able to feel a foot there, even though it has been gone for years. “Did you have them put it on front way to?”
“Huh? What do you mean, Richard?”
“I like to have my feet face forward. Not like a Bombay beggar.” (Was that a wiggle?) “Uh, Minerva, am I allowed to look at what was done? This sheet seems to be fastened down tight.”
“Teena.”
“Just arriving.”
That unsolid wall blinked out again and in came the most offensively handsome young man I have ever laid eyes on…and his offense was not reduced by the fact that he showed up in my room starkers. Not a stitch. The oaf was not even wearing shoes. He looked around and grinned. “Hi, everybody! Did someone send for me? I was sunbathing—”