Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Hm.”

  “For example I’ll be practically restricted to marrying someone who’s also a Christian. If I get married at all.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, I just mean it takes an awful lot of work to make a marriage a success even when the two partners agree on the important things such as religion. And my marriage will have to succeed because Christians don’t have divorce, or at least not very often.”

  “Aren’t they divided into a bunch of splinter sects? I was reading about it the other day.” George had rarely given the subject of religion much thought, but just recently he had been reading up a bit on Christianity. He didn’t think it was for him. He couldn’t figure out whether violence was ever allowed or not. Maybe it was something like the traditional rules of karate, where you weren’t allowed to use it for real unless to protect yourself or another, loved one.

  “Christians used to be divided. Now they’re pretty much reunited again, what’s left of them.”

  “Well, I never even go to Church of Eros any more. I think religion’s not for me. They say that some of those churches, once you join them they never let you alone again afterwards.”

  After a little silence Ann said: “There are a number of thing that never let you alone.”

  “Yes,” agreed George, wondering just what things she had in mind.

  “George?” Her voice was different.

  “What?”

  “Would you like to have sex with me? Here and now?”

  “Why, yes,” he answered, speaking mechanically in his surprise. “That would be nice.”

  FOR LONG seconds she did not reply. She sat there so motionless that her toes no longer troubled the starry water. George tried to read her face in the near-darkness. Then abruptly she turned her face away. “The way you say that!” Ann said, and made a frightened, twisted sound that was a little like a laugh.

  “It’s just that you took me by surprise.” George slid closer to her along the side of the pool. “Oh, Ann. Annie? You’ve never wanted me to give you an erotic touch before.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’ve wanted.” She leaned away from him, supple and graceful in her sarong. Her toes left the water with a tinkle of tiny drops, and she stretched out on her back along the edge of the pool. Now she covered her eyes with one slender wrist.

  George could no longer control himself. He crept very close and bent over Ann, daring not to touch her at all. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  “I’m not afraid, I’m not ashamed.” Her voice was surprisingly firm and proud, and she was watching him from under her arm. “You don’t know me very well, George. But maybe you’ve heard some stories.”

  “Yes I have. But I don’t care if the stories are true.”

  “What do they say about me, the stories that you don’t care about?”

  “They say—” His voice went shaky on him and he had to pause. “What they amount to is that you’re still a virgin.”

  She moved her arm away and now he could see her face in the starlight, her face becoming calmer now with an inner change, the blooming of some beauty that George could not have named. “Yes.” She said it without a trace of shame. “That’s why I’m not at the Prom tonight. Nothing but one long orgy. George; just now I offered you my virginity. Can you understand what that means to me?”

  Watching her, listening to her, he thought he could. As if following some biological imperative his lust now began to recede, while at the same time there rose up in him-something else. His throat ached with his joy. He straightened up so that he was no longer bending over Ann but sitting at her side.

  Looking at him steadily, she asked again: “Now do you want to have sex with me?”

  “Yes. Sometime. Right now I want—something more.”

  Ann nodded agreement and lowered her eyes. Her breathing, that had quickened momentarily, now grew slow. In a gentle voice she asked: “Shall I take this sarong thing off? Or put on something thicker?”

  George could not find his voice to answer right away. What had happened in the brothel had afforded him an enjoyable, way-out kick, a fancy kind of reverse mental tickle. That tremendous gulfs of experience lay beyond had been suggested, but no more. In itself the visit to the whore had been not quite worth the effort to repeat it. This thing impending now, beginning now, was going far beyond. A winged thing had been born inside his chest and it was lifting at the roots of his being, lifting and pulling and expanding until it seemed that sex itself might be dissolved out of the flesh and carried outward to the stars.

  “Oh, I don’t care what you wear.” George groaned in a failing voice. “Oh, I love you, love you, love you. Oh, sublimation’s such a dirty word, there has to be a better.”

  “I know,” Ann whispered. “Don’t talk now.” She had done this before. He was the virgin here.

  Their hands came together and held, now just human hands more than they were male-female. She raised her eyes to his, and then on past his eyes, and he knew that she was looking at the stars. No turning back now. Never. They rose on the great lifting wings.

  X

  WAKING up, rejoining the inhospitable world, was a slow and intermittent and instinctive struggle. Art understood from the beginning of the struggle that he was sick, or hurt, and paradoxically this left him less worried than he had been before. Before whatever had happened to leave him in this state. He was less worried because now less would be expected of him. They would have to take care of him now.

  . . . they? Someone was trying. However he had come to be here, he lay in .a bedroom in somebody’s home. In one of the two beds crowded into the small cheaply furnished chamber. He had the vague impression of somebody having been in the other bed, and the covers there were rumpled, but now when he looked carefully there was no one. Perhaps, too, somebody had once shared this bed with him. He should have been polite and pawed at their genitals at least but right now he felt tired of genitalia and thank Eros he was sick or hurt and nothing much could reasonably be expected off him along that line.

  . . . should have grabbed and pawed as those little plastic figures were doing to each other, those cheap Church of Eros icons that someone had shoved to the rear of the top of that high plastic wardrobe over there and then forgotten.

  It was a BI bedroom from the look of it, or could it be a room in a cheap hotel? Or some rented room where tenant after tenant rushed through, forgetting and leaving things, and none of the haphazard objects in the room fit with anything else, There on the wall was the founder of Christianity nailed up, as in Ann’s children’s room, but here two pieces of plastic were doing the job instead of wooden beams. And there on the other wall, a reproduction of a painting that looked like a Caravaggio, but a Caravaggio that Art had never seen before. Nothing like Eros trampling the violin, or Bacchus lounging amid bowls of fruit. In this picture there were men around a table doing something, counting money, and on the right two men entering, one of them important, a mysterious figure of light and shadow and power, extending a hand that said: here, you, enough of playing with those trifles on the table, more important things are waiting. The summons had come, and everyone in the picture knew about it except the man for whom it was intended.

  . . . so he himself was sick, no, he was hurt, for now he remembered something about being frightened put there in the street, and now there was this sex awful pain in his head that only intermittently would go away. And now truly there was a long-haired girl resting, indecently covered, in the room’s other bed, and now, whup, a trick of the illusionist’s art and she was gone again. Meanwhile it might , have been that Art had slept.

  Standing before him was a man, tall and narrow-shouldered, with a sandy beard and impressive green or gray or blue eyes, it was hard to tell because the color seemed to change, who looked at Art intently. And this man was a somewhat familiar figure, because he had been standing in the same place an hour ago (a day ago?) and asking Art some questions.

  “What’s your name?” the man a
sked now, looking at Art intently. He had a mild, slow voice that contradicted a look in his eyes of being fierce and concentrated and somehow ready to pounce.

  “ARTHUR Rodney?”

  The man smiled and nodded, as if this were very good news indeed. He had shut the door of the room behind him; outside somewhere in the background printout was clacking noisily from a computer terminal in need of mechanical adjustment. “Art, what year is this?” Art’s second correct answer was just as satisfying as his first. “How do you feel, Art?”

  “Not good. I’ve got a triplet of a headache.” All of a sudden the lobby of Family Planning came back, and then the frantically waving picket signs outside, the jam of bodies on the statwalk. What should come after that? He didn’t know. He had reached a real blank.

  The man stepped closer to his bed. “Let’s have a look at that,” With what were unmistakably a doctor’s hands, professionally sure and gentle, he probed through or around some kind of dressing on Art’s scalp.

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry. Well, that’s not looking too bad. And I’m glad you’ve waked up fully now.” The man stepped back, pulling at his curl of sandy beard. “But I still want to make an X-ray or two. Haven’t been able to as yet.”

  “How long have I been here? And where am I, anyway?”

  “You’ve been here several hours. Let’s say you’re with some people who gave you shelter when it appeared to them that otherwise you’d go to jail. May I ask—what is the last thing you remember clearly?”

  Art closed his eyes. His head throbbed. “Coming out into the street, in front of the Family Planning building. There was some kind of demonstration, or riot . . . but why should I have gone to jail?”

  The doctor shrugged and gave a tiny smile. “I don’t know that you would have. Some of the Young Virgins on the scene evidently mistook you for one of their own casualties and brought you here. Some of them think that if a person gets clobbered in the street he must be a good guy, and anyone who’s a good guy is automatically in danger of being thrown in jail.”

  He approached Art again, and with the aid of a tiny light looked closely into his eyes.

  “How am I doing, doctor?”

  “Not bad, not bad. Rest. It’s important that you take it easy for a while. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  When the door had closed behind the doctor Art lived in silence for a while with the pain in his head, alternately opening and closing his eyes. Somewhere in the distance the faulty computer terminal clacked away again. The room had one small window with bright daylight coming in around the edges of a closed shade. This was some Young Virgins’ refuge, then. But he was not back in the Diana Arms; at least, Rita’s room had looked very little like this one.

  The door opened and a girl in a long, opaque sweater came in, bringing him a cup of something warm and chocolately to drink, and Art was abruptly conscious of being entirely naked beneath the bedsheet.

  “Medicine?” he asked, while routinely starting to put a hand up under the bottom of her sweater.

  “No.” She gave him a cool smile and turned away, so that his hand slid free. “Just a drink. Thought you might like some.”

  She went out again right away. The stuff in the cup tasted good. Soon he might try getting up. He wondered if his clothes, and his watch and his money, were in the plastic wardrobe, and he wondered what time of day it was. About the time he had finished the drink, sipping ‘slowly, the doctor was back.

  HE LOOKED in Art’s eyes again with his little light and then pulled up a chair and sat. “Art, I took the liberty of going through your wallet while you were unconscious. Just to see if there was a record of anything, diabetes or allergies or so forth, that might bear on your medical condition.”

  “No doubt I owe you thanks for taking care of me. And you found out my name. I didn’t catch yours.” . .

  No answer.

  “I suppose now I had better get up and put on my clothes and leave.”

  “I don’t want to scare you, Art, but before you go walking out on the street I must insist we take some X-rays. I hope .to be able to make them downstairs here in just a few minutes. If X-rays show no skull fracture we can drive you home right away, take you anywhere in the city you want to go. If they do show a fracture we are going to have to somehow arrange to move you on a stretcher to a hospital.”

  “I—see. Or maybe I don’t.”

  “The point is that your presence puts us here in something of an awkward position. If you do have a fracture, we can’t simply call an ambulance to come and get you. And for your own good I wouldn’t want you riding folded down and blindfolded in the back seat of a car.”

  “I know how that works,” Art muttered, feeling a little sick.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. Evidently I’m in some kind of a —secret hideout.”

  The doctor looked relieved. “I’m glad you understand. It’s quite important to a number of us here that the location of this house be kept a secret. And we’ve realized by now that you’re no sympathizer of ours. Nevertheless we wish you well. We don’t want to—to make you feel you’re being held a prisoner. As soon as the X-ray film I need arrives, which I hope will be any minute now, we’ll take a couple of pictures and then you’ll be on your way.”

  Art relaxed wearily in the bed. “All right, all right. I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m really glad you’re being understanding about this, Art. I feel a personal responsibility in this matter. For your being in the Family Planning office to begin with, I mean.”

  Art looked at him, trying to puzzle it out.

  “You see, I’m Rita’s midwifer.”

  A COUPLE of sturdy male Young Virgins came along shortly, pushing a regular hospital cart. They got Art’s clothes out of the wardrobe—he noticed the strap of his watch sticking out of a pocket, and also the faint bulge of a billfold that had evidently been scrupulously replaced—and helped him put on his codpiece and loaded him onto the cart beneath an opaque sheet. Meanwhile, of course, he was demanding again and again to be told where his wife was.

  “She’s not here, not in this building,” the doctor, kept answering him calmly. “The parturition will be quite soon. She’s well. And she’s worried about you—more precisely, as I interpret what she says, she’s worried about whether you’ll want her back when she has her third child.”

  It took Art a moment to understand. “You mean she thinks I might divorce her? But that’s foolish, how would that help? It wouldn’t help her or the children, and it certainly wouldn’t help me.” He lay on his back with his head on a low pillow as the two husky Virgins propelled the cart out of the room and along a rambling hallway, through what appeared to be an ancient house of mansion size, or else perhaps the rundown dormitory of some private school. Not at all like the Diana Arms. “Sure, I hope she doesn’t have a third baby when she comes back. But even if she does, I most certainly want her. So, you’re the one who’s doing it. How can you interfere in people’s lives like this? How much are you being paid?”

  The doctor was walking beside the cart, now and then going ahead or falling behind when the way became too narrow. “I’m not getting a dollar from Rita or anyone in her family. If she’s paid out money it must be going to the doctor who referred her to me, or to someone else along the line. In a clandestine business like this you’re always going to get some people going into it for the money.”

  “And you?”

  “For the good of my immortal soul. That’s how I see it. That I have an inescapable moral duty to do what I am doing here.”

  The cart rolled into a small, old-looking elevator. The two orderlies remained behind as the doors closed and the elevator started down with Art still lying on the cart and the doctor standing beside it.

  “You don’t inspire a great deal of confidence, doctor. If you are a doctor, really. If you’re not you’d better keep your hands off my wife.”

  �
��I assure you I am an obstetrician. And you’ll be glad to hear that I haven’t lost a mother in some years of practice.” The slow descent of the elevator stopped and the doors slid open. “I haven’t lost anyone to a head injury, either. But then yours is about the first I’ve treated since I was an intern.” And with that the cart was rolling again.

  The opaque sheet came over Art’s face in two thicknesses as they left the elevator. The voice of his captor said: “I’m covering your eyes up here, so you won’t be able later to identify or locate this house.”

  Art only grunted. He felt the cart jolt lightly over a threshold, and then there came a whiff of outside air, summer-warm and fragrant, but he stoically refused to look or listen or sniff for clues. Once before he had been granted knowledge that secretive guides were trying to withhold from him, and knowledge had done him no good at all. This game was hopeless, for him at any rate, and he was about ready to give it up. Not to accept that his opponents were in the right, but to admit that they had him beaten. The law and the bulk of society were on his back but he could not call them in. When you went into the endgame a rock down and your clock running out, maybe you had better resign and save some mental energy for the next game. There would be a lot of tough games to play against the world when Rita came home again, whether she had to go to jail first or not. If she went to jail who was he going to get as a steady, dependable babysitter in California?