Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Art-failed to understand the reference.

  Jamison sipped at his newly foamy beer. “When I was a boy, a lot of people thought it was having brown skin, what was then called being black, that made young men go out and act like apes. And there was a grain of truth in what they said, a grain of truth, because brown skin could be a real burden then. It could make a man feel desperate and just lash out.”

  Art grunted something. He was growing sleepy and would have to be careful that he didn’t doze off, what with the drink and the hypnotic fire.

  “Arthur, if you should ever quote me as saying what I said about stargazing being not so bad after all, I shall of course deny it. Likewise with my speculations on comparative religion. On the other hand, if you should want to mention to me now your own problems that you said were so bad, I can at least guarantee secrecy. Maybe I could even offer help.”

  Art was abruptly wide awake again. “Well, my problem involves my wife. And the Bureau of Family Planning. It’s a rather serious . . .”

  Jamison was already shaking his head and putting up a hand to stop him. “No. Not Family Planning trouble, I’m staying clear of that. Sorry, no, it wouldn’t do for a man in my position to get involved. Too bad, my boy, but I can only wish you luck.”

  “That’s all right, sir, I understand, And I wish you luck. And Rose. Understand, bishop, I’m not having an affair with her, but she’s a very attractive girl and I can understand how a man might wish to do so. I mean that as a compliment.”

  “Hmf,” laughed Jamison, a single laugh, not loud. He was staring into the glow of his artificial fire, and looking into the long scroll of his memories he found Art’s words amusing. Then he was silent for a while, and Art was almost dozing again before Jamison asked suddenly: “You’re not angry about what Rose did to you today?”

  “Telling you I was the man? I almost fell through the floor. She didn’t spring it on me until we were here and I couldn’t run out. But I’m not angry now. She didn’t do it out of meanness.”

  “You’re right about that.” Jamison nodded. “There’s no meanness in her. But ever since that assault she’s been not quite right in her mind. Too much frightened of any least hint of violence. I think she’s scared that I’ll have violence done upon the real man, should I discover his identity. Now who could he be, that she should harbor that idea?”

  “I really wish I could help,” said Art. “But I guess there’s nothing I can do.”

  “She saw psychiatrists right after she was injured, and now she’s talking about going to another one, but I don’t put any faith in ‘em. Doctors, computers, modern science, and we still live in caves with the doors blockaded. Not that I want to damn modern science, not me with my artificial heart and arteries.” With a seeming effort Jamison roused himself frprarhisf musings, and once more got to his feet. “Go with Eros, my son. Is there anything else I might be able to do for you?”

  Art put down his glass and stood up. “I guess not, sir. Thanks again for getting me out of jail. I really was innocent.”

  When he emerged from the study, Rose, who had changed her red bikini for a transparent dress, jumped up from a sofa in the hall and hurried to him eagerly. “What happened?” she stage-whispered. “Did Daddy believe you?”

  “I think he believed everything I told him.”

  She was so delighted she jiggled up and down like a child. “And he didn’t explode?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Rose squealed. “My faithful protector! You took such a risk for me.” She threw her arms around Art and kissed him with a kind of innocent chastity. “Poor Daddy, sometimes at his age his mind wanders. I hate to deceive him. But I knew you’d manage somehow. Oh, how can I thank you?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It isn’t all right. You’ve done so much for me, that now I must do something in return.” Her voice turned suddenly cool, and she retreated from him half a step. “If I wasn’t pledged to be chaste with only one . . .”

  “Please, Rose!”

  “You’re right, what must you think of me?” She tugged Art down the hallway. Looking toward the door to the escalator, he could see that a different bodyguard was now on duty. Rose snuggled one breast against Art lustily. “I’m not promiscuous, you know,” she whispered. “Not like some of those bluenose girls, those terrible ones they throw in jail.”

  “I can tell you’re nothing like that.”

  As they were going down the escalator she said: “I bet they didn’t feed you properly in that awful jail. And, knowing my father, he gave you nothing but drink. Let’s go out and get something to eat, and we’ll talk.”

  “All right.” He had nowhere else to go at present. It was almost four, hours since they had fed him at the midwifer’s hideout, and the whisky he had just taken was biting at his empty stomach. “Where shall we go?”

  “I know a place. I’m buying.”

  That seemed no more than fair, and he went along. They were just getting into the car again when Rose squealed, suddenly enough to make Art jump. “Artie, I forgot all about your problem, trying to help your poor wife save her baby! Did you get a chance to mention it to Daddy? What did he say?”

  She had the problem backwards, but he saw no point in enlightening her. “I did mention it to Daddy? What did he say?”

  She had the problem backwards, but he saw no point in enlightening her. “I did mention it to your father. He can’t do anything.”

  “Tell me more about it.”

  She sympathized and persisted until he had to elaborate on his story a little. Obviously she had the idea that he was trying to help Rita avoid an abortion, and he let her go on thinking so. Why upset the poor girl for nothing? He would share a meal with her, and maybe some sex again, and go his way and never see her more.

  “But where is she right now?” Rose questioned anxiously. By now she had driven the car into a drive-in automat of the better class and they had placed their orders.

  “Here in Chicago . . . really, Rose, it’s painful for me to even talk about it. And there’s nothing you can do.” He reached to take a tray of food from a robotic servitor at the window. When he looked back at Rose she was shaking her head slowly, and smiling as if in mischief.

  “Artie, as soon as you’ve eaten you’re coming with me to get some help. I know people Daddy doesn’t know!”

  XII

  ROSE urged him to hurry through the meal, and shortly they were on the road again. “But where are we going?” Art kept asking. “Who is it you want me to see?”

  When he began to grow angry, Rose at last stopped being coy. “We’re going to visit my psychiatrist, in his office.”

  “Rose, that’s not the kind of help I need. I’m not trying to adjust to my situation, I want out of it.”

  Rose dismissed such quibbles with a shake of her head. This time she was driving manually instead of riding on autopilot, proceeding slowly and cautiously, with fierce concentration- on the job. They were headed straight toward the center of the city.

  “It’s a good thing Daddy hasn’t started having me followed yet.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  No answer.

  “Rose, I’m sure you mean well, but I don’t see how—this is going to help me in the least.”

  “I know you don’t. But wait and see.”

  Art slumped back in his seat. He could demand to be taken somewhere else, but where?

  Probably by this time Rita was waiting for him at the Parrs’, with a red picnic cooler frosting over at her side, her belly flat and perfect once again. All right, Rita and George and Ann had won. So let them do the wondering and searching for a few hours. Meanwhile, let Rose lead him where she would.

  She parked in a public garage on the edge of the no-private-vehicle zone encompassing the city’s center, and from there went on with Art by slidewalk into the multilevel knots of moving pedestrian ways that in their plastic shields threaded the deep canyons between the skyscrapers. At ab
out forty stories above ground level they entered an office building, and boarded an elevator which bore them much higher still. From the elevator they walked an elegant, skylighted hallway, to stop at last before a door lettered

  RAOUL RIZZO M.D.

  D. PSYCH.

  Rizzo. Art had somewhere, recently, heard that name. He followed Rose into a doctor’s waiting room, small and luxurious but empty. Not even a receptionist. There was an alarmingly remote look on Rose’s face, and she put sexless fingers on Art’s arm. “Hush. Wait.”

  After a moment an inner door opened. The well-dressed young man who emerged from it was of no more than middle height, but so emaciated that he looked taller. His eyes did not turn for even a moment to Art, or in any other direction away from Rose. “My lady fair,” he said, his tense voice hardly louder than a whisper.

  “My true knight,” Rose breathed in answer. Her expression was becoming even more remote, moment by moment. “Oh, my champion.”

  They stepped closer to each other. They raised their right hands, and each caressed the air a few centimeters from the other’s face. Not once did they make actual physical contact. Staring woodenly over each other’s shoulders, they reminded Art of opposing chess pawns set down slightly off-center on their respective squares.

  Art just stood there. If they didn’t mind his watching, why should he?

  At last Rose turned, breaking off the non-embrace. “Raoul, Raoul my cold one, this is Art; the man who helped me on the tube train. You remember my telling you.”

  “I thought that today I would have you all to myself, Rose, rose petal, rose essence, dear specter of a rose.” The psychiatrist sighed, still staring into the air. At last he roused himself and put out a hand to Art. In Art’s grasp the thin fingers felt as weak as they looked. Raoul’s gaze was penetrating at first but then it kept sliding self-consciously away. “Raoul, dearest. Today Art was kind enough to help me again. Now he has a problem of. his own, and we’ve just got to do something about it for him.”

  Raoul thought this over for ten or fifteen seconds, nodding slowly. He dug a pipe out of a pocket in his translucent shorts. He looked from Rose to Art and back again. “Come in then, all of you,” he invited in his solemn near-whisper. He held open for them the door by which he had come out into the waiting room.

  In his inner chamber Raoul pushed a pair of reclining chairs together side by side, and gestured for Rose and Art to seat themselves. Looking out the window as he sat down, Art saw the June sun working its way lower in the northwest sky, beyond a palisade of towers and a groundcover of distant, much lower rooftops.

  Raoul perched himself cross-legged on his desk and lit his pipe. Judging by the aroma of the first fumes, the tobacco certainly contained an admixture of something stronger.

  “Mr. Rodney.” Raoul paused and puffed. “You witnessed the greeting that passed just now between Rose and myself. Have you ever beheld even a brother and sister going to greater extremes of anti-erotism? My purpose in posing the question is not to shock you.”

  Art, watching the lowering sun and wondering if Rita could also see it, had not been paying close attention. “Are you brother and sister? But I thought . . .”

  “No, no, we are not. Perhaps I failed to make my meaning plain. Would you have described our behavior as obscene?”

  No, thought Art, just exhibitionistic. He doubted that the greeting would have been quite so extravagantly repressive had there been no audience. But, wanting to be a good fellow, and uncertain whether Raoul wanted to be thought obscene or not, he answered: “I suppose most people would call it that.”

  IT WAS Raoul’s turn not to listen. “I just wonder,” he murmured, as if to himself, “why did I employ that sibling analogy? Brother and sister may repress a mutual sex attraction and the repression is tolerated by society.”

  “Of course.” Art glanced over at Rose, wondering if she still hoped that he would benefit from this visit. Her inscrutable lenses were aimed steadily at Raoul.

  Raoul rocked back and forth on his desk and puffed his pipe. “Taking a larger view, are not all men and women in some sense siblings? What then is more natural than our occasional urges to escape from sex? We are all of us subject to the deep powers of the subconscious. Modern science tells us that dreams, produced in the subconscious, are attempts of the ego to flee the restrictions of the body. In every human adult lies the buried wish to return to sexless-infancy. In all honesty, isn’t letting these urges out into the open the only healthy course to take?”

  “I suppose.” If Art spoke honestly he would say he thought his healthiest course would be getting up to leave as soon as he could think of someplace to go. Rose meant well, and he didn´t Want to hurt her feelings, but this was quite ridiculous.

  With an unfolding of bony legs Raoul got down, or rather stood up, from his low desk.

  “Personally, I have never conducted an analysis in which I did not uncover a strong, buried celibacy wish in the subject. Our differences from other animals are inescapably part of our natures; and we ignore them at our peril.”

  “You may be right.” Now she was going to have the chaste baby anyway and he was not going to be with her when she needed him the most. That was all his campaign to rescue her had accomplished. What had he done? But what else could he have done?

  “Face these things in yourself,” Raoul was saying, in a brooding voice. Behind him on his walls were abstract photographs, and a couple of Vandalist splash-paintings, up-to-date and arrogant in expensive frames. Yes, the art had been dead for a century, all right. “Face them squarely, and they will begin to lose their power over you.”

  Art cleared his throat.

  Raoul’s eyes fastened on his, this time not to be easily driven away. “Face the truth about what has happened between you and Rosamond! When you first saw her she was alone, she was frightened, she was in danger.”

  “She wasn’t exactly alone.”

  “Immediately you went to her aid. Your relationship thus began with no erotic values, but society tolerates that in an emergency, and you yourselves did not realize that in your hearts you wanted it that way.

  “When the immediate danger was past, perhaps you turned to sex? Yes. Then, when your lust was temporarily in abeyance, there came the moment of temptation. The forces of the subconscious were no longer to be denied. The fragile remnants of your lust were to be sacrificed upon the altar of repression. You wanted to flee with Rose from the world of flesh, to climb a crystal stair to an ethereal palace, to enter the world of sublimation. Yes. Perhaps you draped her body—”

  “Enough of this.” Art pushed away his suddenly vigorous memories of that sunset with Rose on the bank of a wide river. He tried to get to his feet forcefully but the reclining chair betrayed him and he staggered and had to make an effort to keep from falling. “Look here, I haven’t asked you—to analyze me.”

  Raoul fell silent, gazing at Art with what seemed a mixture of pity and antagonism.

  “Dearest?” Rose spoke up timidly. “Raoul? The reason I thought you might be able to help Art is because his wife is looking for a mid-wifer. Art want to help her save her baby, but there are obstacles.”

  Raoul, professionally unshockable, took the news in stride. “I can help him live with the situation, provided he wants to be helped.”

  Rose shook her head. “No, my chill one, that isn’t what I meant.”

  Raoul blinked. “What, then?”

  “Oh, for you to see your father about it, of course.” Rose was lovingly irritated by her lover’s obtuseness.

  At mention of his father, Raoul’s face twitched, and he laughed bitterly. He sat on his desk again and tried to relight his pipe.

  “Please, dearest. You mustn’t be jealous. Art and I are not having an affair. He and I are strongly erotic together, really we are.”

  Puff and pause. “Why do you say that?”

  “Who is his father?” Art asked, standing now with his arms folded.

  Rose flowed e
asily to her feet; probably she had some experience with these chairs. “I say it because you are my knight. Do you think I could ever want to sit coldly beside any other man?”

  Raoul closed his eyes and let his pipe go out.

  Rose hovered near him, pleading. “My champion! Won’t you do this little thing for me? Take Art to see your father?”

  “Who is his father?”

  Raoul’s eyes opened. His whisper had a broken sound. “For you, my lady, my chaste one, I will do it. Sometime tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow might be too late for his poor wife. Couldn’t you do it now?”

  “I thought that you and I would have this evening alone together.”

  “Please. Take Art to your father now. I set you this task, to prove that you revere me.”

  “Then I have no choice but to obey.” Raoul came to life and slid off the desk. “Will you wait for me here, my lady?”

  Rose squirmed as if with repressed desire and took a step back, avoiding any possible physical contact with her knight. “I’ll wait here all night for you, if need be. When you come back, maybe . . . we’ll play chess.”

  “My lady, not that childish game, I beg of you. Anything else.”

  “Who is your father?” Art asked the ceiling. “And what good is seeing him supposed to do me?” Like as not Rizzo Sr. would turn out to be the head of Chicago’s branch of the Family Planning office. Soon everyone in the city would know about Rita’s warped reproductive cravings and her illegal plans. No one would do anything to save her, but everyone would know, even irredeemable idiots who thought chess was a childish game.

  After staring incredulously at Art for a moment, Raoul asked: “You don’t know who my father is?” And then he laughed bitterly and long.

  STILL not knowing, Art went along with Raoul, first in a taxi to a garage, and then in Raoul’s car. In spite of all, a nagging hope persisted.

  Whatever his occupation might be, Rizzo Sr. had evidently made a success of it. The blockhouse in which he lived was every bit as high-walled and luxurious as the Jamisons’. The Rizzo garage space was even larger than the archbishop’s had been, and protected by heavier gates. As Raoul eased his fine car to a stop and turned its turbines off, Art was once more nagged by the sense of having recently heard the Rizzo name in some other connection. Was it something about this very structure, Rizzo’s townhouse?