All the Lives He Led

by Frederik Pohl

  Now I’m going to skip over quite a long stretch of Gerda’s life, five or six years at least. What it showed was that Gerda’s principal occupation in those years became sex. Lacking any real purpose, she tried to give some meaning to her life with drinking and partying. And the way the drinks and the parties wound up was often in bed with someone, very likely a perfect stranger, or even several of them.

  Her master, the surgeon Vassarian Nevirovski, must have known what she was doing. Nevirovski himself gave up using her for his personal sex partner, but he didn’t interfere with her other affairs, just kept her around as, as Gerda said, “his trophy ho.”

  Ethnically speaking the people who ran the affairs of the Stans were mostly descendants of Russians from a few generations past, sent there by higher authority to run those mighty technological establishments. Or sometimes they were Russians who had moved there for reasons of health. (Careers bloomed faster in Moscow, but the more distance you could put between you and the Kremlin, the less likely you were to get caught up in some purge.) And then there were also the research guys who had immigrated to the Stans well after the breakup of the USSR, the ones who had come to the Stans for their unparalleled research opportunities.

  Gerda was in a good position to have a great time as Nevirovski’s companion with all these people. Unfortunately I could see that she wasn’t happy. Even more unfortunately, so could Nevirovski. His cheerful trophy ho … wasn’t. So at last a day of reckoning came and Rollo knocked on the door of her suite, looking regretful.

  “It’s his highness,” he said when she answered. “He gave me a message for you. You’re cured, so now you can leave any time.”

  Gerda got the message, the real one that was imperfectly hidden in the subtext. She was being evicted.

  She didn’t waste time in either complaining or pleading. She just said practically, “His bills wiped out my bank account. Where am I supposed to go?”

  Rollo looked embarrassed. “Well,” he said, “I could put you up until you got straightened out.”

  She knew what strings that offer came with, but she just said, “And wouldn’t Vassarian object to that?”

  Rollo looked even more embarrassed. “Well, no. He said it would be all right.”

  And so she became the trophy ho of Rollo Mbwirda. And after Rollo there was, well, everybody.

  Those mean years must have been interminable for Gerda, living her threadbare and unhappy life. The unhappy part was not simply because so much of it was threadbare. It cut deeper than that. The great blast had made her question what her own life had been about. Was she the unfailing nemesis of evildoers anywhere in the country? Well, sure, sort of. But Yellowstone, you see, had created more abject misery in a few weeks than everything she had ever managed to do to punish the wicked had amounted to in her whole lifetime. And it had done even more, and worse, to millions upon millions of innocents, as well.

  It broke my heart to watch those sections of the data coil. Gerda of course was still the woman I loved with all my heart. Now she was drinking, depressed, and bouncing from man to man, and I could do nothing about it.

  Of course what I was seeing on the coil was ancient history, no more reversible by me than the murder of Abe Lincoln or the drowning of those who went down with the Titanic; yet I yearned to save her.

  And, although that was quite impossible for me, someone else came along to do it for me. Astonishingly, that someone was the person I had known as Maury Tesch. I had not guessed that Maury’s occasional glimpse of Gerda on some other man’s arm had inspired him to want to possess her himself. But I think that must be the way to read it.

  As to Gerda I know exactly what led her to grab Maury’s offer so rapidly. It was certainly not sexiness on his part; she told him quite openly what an uninspiring bed partner he was. But there was also all that money left over from the aborted purchase of a nuclear submarine. She had not forgotten that Maury had once been a kind of terrorist himself and, although he told her many times that he had no wish to take another single human life, Gerda clung to the hope that he might someday change his mind and go back to the days of punishing evil with fire and blood. And meanwhile there were all the pleasurable things that life in the Stans had to offer to those who could afford them, for which Maury didn’t mind spending the money. One might suppose that Gerda might also have felt gratitude for his kindness, but my darling never mentioned that.

  It would not have been a bad life for Gerda, except that she was becoming increasingly aware that she couldn’t think of any reason for going on living it.

  In the old days (that is, when she had still been a he) she had had many motivating purposes—which is to say, many evils to avenge. Even before Brian-Gerda got into such large-scale actions as attacking whole cities he had causes like the way the cattle herds were treated in New Mexico, the coal miners in West Virginia, and with that the ruined West Virginia landscape, too. The minke whales. The fur seal pups.

  Wherever the weak were being exploited, Brian showed up. He didn’t always get the victims made whole, no, but he certainly made their exploiters wish they hadn’t done whatever they did.

  And he could not help but notice that all the villains had one conspicuous trait in common. They were all human beings.

  Wherever Gerda turned in her obsessive quarrying of the history texts she found fresh atrocities to horrify her. Some were lacking precise quantification. The Fourth Century Emperor Theodosius executed seven thousand in Macedonia for rioting over the murder of one of his generals, or the Eleventh Century when England’s King Ethelred the Unready ordered the murder of all the Danes living in England—a bad move, because then the Danish king invaded his lands, taking out Ethelred himself. Or, some decades later, when Moorish mobs in Granada killed their Jewish citizens—to the surprise of the Jews, because their people had lived peaceably in Muslim lands for centuries until then. Or Richard the Lion-Hearted, lion-heartedly dragging out three thousand bound and helpless Saracen prisoners and one by one putting them to the sword.

  I haven’t talked yet about the biggest one—which I think was probably in the early Twentieth Century—when the sultan of Turkey ordered the massacre of all the Armenian people—men, women, and kids—and actually killed about a million. And there were a lot, with names I sort of recognized—My Lai, the Israeli Olympic team in Munich—that had piddling little death tolls of hardly a hundred, or even less. Shoshone Indians plundering an emigrant wagon train in the Utah Territory, no doubt a horrible time for the victims, but only six dead; the employees and customers of a Browns Chicken during a robbery in a place called Palatine, Illinois—just seven killed there, curiously the same number as the much more famous gangland St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago.

  But for sheer numbers nobody outdid the two Twentieth Century titans of bloodshed, Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler and the USSR’s Josef Stalin. They didn’t deal in small numbers, and it was only fair that a good many of their decimations were done to each other.

  All that seemed to make Gerda just more depressed. Maury spent a lot of his time trying to cheer her up. But that didn’t happen.

  35

  COMING BACK TO PRESENT TIME

  So once again I’m getting ahead—way ahead—of myself. For example, I haven’t told about what news Artie Mason had for me from the Stans when I saw him again.

  The reason for that is that I’m not going to tell that ever—or, at least, not all of it. I’m willing to say that the poor slob had done a first-rate job for me. The Pompeii Flu had come from Bu Deng’s laboratories. There wasn’t much left of those. After Bu’s death the government seized them, located everything that could be militarized, and destroyed it. (Or said they did. Some people retained doubts.) What was left was mostly fragrances and flavors, and that was allowed to continue to exist. But Artie had managed to find a few people who had been part of the laboratories’ glory days, and they had had a lot to say about what they called the “revolution.” What they meant by that was
the time when Bu Deng mysteriously died and his marriage partner and heir, J. J. Jones, impetuously made a lot of changes in Bu’s labs. One was to destroy most of the carefully hoarded stores of militarized disease organisms because, J. J. had said in his most sanctimonious tones, he didn’t want to benefit from the possession of what he quaintly called “weapons of mass destruction.” That wasn’t all he destroyed, either. He gave orders that the grapevines in Bu’s favorite dining spot, the arbor he had been lunching in with Gerda when the news of Yellowstone arrived, be cut down and burned—because, he just as sanctimoniously said, he couldn’t bear to be reminded of the person he had loved with all his heart every time he passed by.

  Artie kept talking. I kept listening, too. I don’t want you to think I didn’t hear and understand everything he said. I know that he thought that—or maybe just thought that I was out of my mind, because when he was describing some things that these old-timers could do if paid to do them—I burst out laughing.

  That stopped Artie in mid-flow. It took him a while to get back to what he’d been talking about—that is, the unimaginable horrors that he thought these old men and women would visit on the hapless human race if I chose to pay them enough money to do it—enough money, that is, to anesthetize what was left of their tiny, feeble consciences.

  But at the same time another part of my mind had been processing a separate line of thought, starting with J. J.’s pitiful need to burn Bu’s grapevines for sentimental reasons. You see, I knew Jeremy Jonathan Jones. I didn’t think he was that sentimental. Which meant that I was trying to think of some other reason. And that corner of my mind, working with memories of how Bu’s death had puzzled some observers because, after exhaustive post-mortem studies, they couldn’t find a poisonous agent that could have done it. Oh, there were such poisons, but Bu ate nothing that had not passed through the hands of his private cook—who was also a doctoral-degree chemist who would have detected even the undetectable.

  But—that corner of my mind began to shout, momentarily drowning out Artie’s words, as the thought reached me—there were things that Bu ate that his chef never inspected: the grapes in his arbor.

  J. J. had murdered the one person in his life that he had, he had said, “loved with all his heart!” And finally I understood why Gerda and Maury had referred to him as “the Bastard.”

  It took me a while to get Artie to continue with his line of thought. Even so, at first he was hesitant and frowning, but the majesty of the evil these old men and women could achieve took over, and he became almost lyrical. And, he said, they would do it if I would put up the money.

  I would. I don’t think I want to be specific about the details.

  Artie warned me that what he thought possible would not only cost a lot of money—by which, he said, he meant a lot of money—but would take quite a lot of time. I said neither the money nor the time worried me, and he said, then so let it be.

  I had noticed that he was a lot better dressed than he had been. When he left I saw that he, too, had employed a pair of off-duty New York cops for bodyguards—one on the jump seat in the back of the limousine with him, the other in the front seat with the driver and a machine gun.

  I had wondered why his expense vouchers had been so high, but I didn’t begrudge him a dime of it.

  Oh, and one other thing.

  When Shao-pin and I watched that portion of the coil together we sat together in what I believe is called a loveseat—a sort of two-person abbreviated sofa. It had been part of some decorator’s plan, and I found the extra space useful for setting down my coffee cup or drinks tray or whatever, but never before to hold the handsome hips of a pretty guest.

  It was better that way.

  When Shao-pin shared the loveseat with me I was feeling quite upbeat—mostly, I think, because I could tell myself that I was doing what Gerda would have wanted me to do. So it was only natural that we held hands. Then it was just as natural that we got closer and finally, when the coil clip was over, got closer still in that huge bed that, with Gerda gone, I had never expected to put to a recreational use.

  In the event, though, it worked fine.

  I did wonder—though not until the heavy-breathing part was over and Shao-pin was softly purring her sleep sounds in the curl of my arm—just what Dream Gerda would make of this new development.

  I needn’t have worried. Once I drifted off to sleep myself it all became clear that she had no objection. I should add that that was the first time I had ever dreamed of a threesome.

  36

  SHARING A BED AGAIN

  Now that Shao-pin had a new status in my household, sleeping over with me almost as often as she went back to her own sweet little villa, I began letting her in on selected previously withheld fractions of my own life. I showed her, for instance, more of the relationship between Gerda and Bu Deng. That was when I discovered that she really had no good idea who Bu Deng was, and I had to fill her in, starting with Bu’s early job as a biochemist on the faculty of a Sichuan university until some of the students got political in unapproved ways. The students got themselves expelled. The professors who were thought to have encouraged them got downgraded, and where Bu wound up was at the Chengdu panda breeding station.

  The pandas had been dying in record numbers, and Bu’s new assignment was to develop microorganisms that would predate on the microorganisms that made the pandas sick. He did it, too. He went farther. He developed a shot that made the boy pandas and the girl pandas more interested in sex, which they hadn’t much been before.

  At that point Shao-pin gave me a startled look. “You mean like—I mean, something like the stuff—”

  I took pity on her. “Yes, it’s related to something like the stuff the colonel says is responsible for my feelings about Gerda. Mine was special. The product they made for general human consumption—the dealers called it Stannish fly, back when I was a boy—is related to what he did for the pandas, but what Gerda did, or is said to have done”—I saw the way her eyes narrowed, so I didn’t press that point—“was a superstrong variation on the regular fly.”

  “Oh,” she said, but she didn’t press it either. So I told her how the production of baby pandas had nearly doubled after the adults got Bu’s joy juice, and as a result of all that good work, the Chinese government gave him an exit visa so he could sharpen his skills at a French university.

  Bu didn’t go to France. He went to the Stans. Where he prospered, and before you knew it had a whole lavish lab of his own, with the finest state-of-the-art equipment building on what the Soviets had left behind, and the biddablest of graduate students to do the heavy lifting. And like the surgeon who re-created Gerda, just kept getting richer and richer.

  “So he had it made,” Shao-pin commented.

  “Sure did,” I said, “up to a point, anyway. Want to see what his place looked like?” And I showed her Bu’s mansion, and then the surgeon’s, and a few more of their parties, and when it was over I caught her looking around my own far from humble accommodations with a more judgmental eye. So I let her add on some improvements, because I wanted her to be happy and I still had more money than I was ever going to need—a hot-house that she filled with flowering plants and a dressing room of her own off the bedroom we shared and a few other niceties, and a lap pool in the backyard. Put it all together and she was as happy as a pig in ordure, and because she was happy so was I.

  Well, because of that and perhaps because of one other thing: Artie Mason was turning out to be a treasure, diligently doing everything I had hoped he could, which was a lot. In fact, so much was involved that it took all of eight years to get it all done. During that time Artie located people who had worked for Bu in the old days, and—making some heavy inroads into my money—set them up in a lab of their own, where they made ingenious variations on some of Bu’s old proprietaries. This had the happy effect of making quite a lot of money itself, which enabled him to give his new friends significant incomes of their own while considerably reduci
ng the amounts he needed from me. And then he put them to work on the purpose of the whole project, which was to manufacture some of the stuff described on that ruby-red coil.

  None of that went quickly. By the time Artie was able to hand me the transparent, multiply cushioned box that contained ten little black marbles full of Bu’s secret weapon eight years had gone by.

  I had become even richer with the endless flow of euros that came from the show the world never seemed to tire of. And I was thinking of asking her to marry me.

  Getting around to that point had used up several of those years. There were a lot of stumbling blocks in the way. My own complicated feelings about the late Gerda Fleming, for one thing. But even after I had persuaded myself that that was all right there remained one major problem. Shao-pin didn’t particularly seem to want to get married to me.

  From time to time I had turned the conversation in that general direction, but she was too swift for me. She either ignored what I was saying or swiftly turned it away again. Her attitude was almost annoying—well, would perhaps have been if she hadn’t been so great in every other way.

  The other thing that was going on between me and Shao-pin was that I was teaching her all about Gerda.

  The two of them had never met. Shao-pin’s ideas about her were—well, I guess the best words for them is “confused.” Working for Security Shao-pin had been affected by that pervasive Security doctrine that terrorists were pond scum to begin with, and the more effective they were the more evil. That, of course, was in conflict with the fact that I was smitten. Probably, Shao-pin must have supposed, the party line that all my love for Gerda came out of a test tube was the right way to look at it. But my feelings were unchallengeably still there.

  Anyway, I wanted her to understand, so I was making it my business to watch bits and pieces of Gerda’s coils, sitting side by side with Shao-pin in what Shao-pin herself once called Ex-Girlfriend 101.