Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  Kassianos felt his jaw drop. He became aware that he had not blinked for some time, either. In fact, he realized his expression had to resemble nothing so much as a fresh-caught perch’s. Pulling himself together with a distinct effort of will, he said slowly, “That is the most outlandish piece of casuistry I’ve heard in a lifetime of theological study.”

  He waited for his pompous wrath to burst forth in a great, furious shout. What came out instead was laughter. And once free, it would not let itself be restrained. Kassianos laughed until tears ran down his face into his beard, laughed until he doubled over. Now Menas and the woman were staring at him rather than the other way around.

  Slowly, the fit passed. Kassianos straightened, felt the sudden pain of a stitch in his side, ignored it. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, then, more or less in control of himself, asked Menas, “Your monks are all, hmm, entertained themselves, and do no entertaining?”

  “Of course, holy sir.” The abbot sounded genuinely shocked. “Did we act otherwise, we would violate our vows.”

  “Hmm,” Kassianos said again. “How long has this, ah, custom existed at the monastery of the holy Tralitzes?”

  “Truly, holy sir, I do not know. Since before I entered as a novice, certainly, and before the novitiate of the oldest brothers there at that time, for they knew no different way.”

  “I see.” And, curiously enough, Kassianos did. Develtos was just the sort of back-country town where a spurious practice like this could quietly come into being and then flourish for Phos only knew how long before anyone from the outside world noticed it was there.

  Menas must have been thinking along with him, for he asked, “Holy sir, is it not the same everywhere?”

  “Hardly.” Kassianos’ voice was dry. “In fact, I daresay you’ve found a loophole to appall the holy Pakhomios—and one untold generations of monks have prayed for in vain. I suppose I should congratulate you. Oh, my.” He wiped his eyes again.

  “Perhaps you should, but I doubt you will,” Menas’ ladylove observed. “What will you do?”

  The nomophylax eyed her with respect: no fool here. “Well, an inquisitor’s court might fight its way through your logic,” he said. Both the woman and Menas looked alarmed. Kassianos went on, “I doubt that will happen, though.”

  “What then?” Menas asked.

  “First, I’d guess, a synod will convene in Videssos the city to revise the holy Pakhomios’ Rule so no further, ah, misunderstandings of the seventh chapter will occur. That being accomplished, word of the corrected Rule will be sent to all monasteries in the Empire—including, I am comfortably certain, this one.”

  “And what will they do to us for having contravened their interpretation of the Rule?” Menas asked; Kassianos noted the slight emphasis the abbot put on “interpretation.” He smiled to himself. In Menas’ sandals, he would have tried to appear as virtuous as possible, too.

  He answered, “While I cannot speak for the synod, I would expect it to decree no punishments for what is here a long-established, even if erroneous, custom. I would also expect, however, that an epoptes—a supervising monk—will come out from the capital to make certain the monastery of the holy Tralitzes diligently adheres to the seventh chapter as redefined.”

  Neither Menas nor his companion looked very happy at that. The nomophylax had not thought they would. He went on, “I mean what I say. If you continue to flout the Rule after it is changed to mean in letter what it does in spirit, you will not enjoy the consequences.”

  He had intended to impress them further with the seriousness of the situation. But the woman said, “Then we will just have to make the most of the time we have left.” She shut the door in Kassianos’ face.

  He knew he should be angry. Instead, to his own discomfiture, he found himself admiring her. He realized with sudden regret that he had never learned her name. He raised his hand to knock on that closed door and ask. After a moment, he thought better of it.

  Shaking his head, he turned and slowly started walking back to Develtos.

  Twenty-one, Counting Up

  Some of you will have come straight here after reading “Forty, Counting Down.” Others—more, I hope—will have looked at some of the stories in between. Not much to say about this one that I didn’t say about the other, except to note that only my wife and I know which of these two pieces I wrote first; I submitted them simultaneously. I hope the answer isn’t obvious in the text. I know I’ve done my best to keep it from being so.

  * * *

  Justin Kloster looked from his blue book to his watch and back again. He muttered under his breath. Around him, a hundred more people in the American history class were looking at their watches, too. Fifteen minutes left. After that, another breadth requirement behind him. His junior year behind him, too. Three down, one to go.

  At precisely four o’clock, the professor said, “Time! Bring your blue books up to the front of the lecture hall.”

  Like everybody else, Justin squeezed out another couple of sentences before doing as he was told. He wrung his hand to show writer’s cramp, then stuck the pen in the pocket of his jeans and headed for the door.

  “How do you think you did?” somebody asked him.

  “I’m pretty sure I got a B, anyhow,” he answered. “That’s all I really need. It’s not like it’s my major or anything.” The prof could hear him, but he didn’t much care. This wasn’t a course for history majors, not that Cal State Northridge had many of those. It was a school for training computer people like him, business types, and teachers. After a moment, he thought to ask, “How about you?”

  “Probably about the same,” the other fellow said. “Well, have a good summer.”

  “Yeah, you, too.” Justin opened the door and stepped from air conditioning and pale fluorescent light into the brassy sun and heat of the San Fernando Valley. He blinked a couple of times as his eyes adapted. Sweat started pouring off him. He hurried across campus to the parking lot where his Toyota waited. He was very blond and very fair, and sunburned if you looked at him sideways. He was also a little—only a little—on the round side, which made him sweat even more.

  When he unlocked the car, he fanned the door back and forth a couple of times to get rid of the furnacelike air inside. He cranked the AC as soon as he started the motor. After he’d gone a couple of blocks, it started doing some good. He’d just got comfortable when he pulled into the gated driveway of his apartment building.

  The Acapulco was like a million others in Los Angeles, with a below-ground parking lot and two stories of apartments built above it around a courtyard that held a swimming pool, a rec room, and a couple of flower beds whose plants kept dying.

  The key that opened the security gate also opened the door between the lot and the lobby. Justin checked his snailmail and found, as he’d hoped, a check from his father and another from his mother. His lip curled as he scooped the envelopes from his little mailbox. His folks had gone through a messy divorce his senior year in high school. These days, his father was living with a redheaded woman only a couple of years older than he was—and his mother was living with a dark-haired woman only a couple of years older than he was. They both sent money to help keep him in his apartment . . . and so they wouldn’t have to have anything more to do with him. That suited him fine. He didn’t want to have anything to do with them these days, either.

  He used the security key again to get from the lobby to the courtyard behind it, then walked back to his apartment, which wasn’t far from the rec room. That had worried him when he first rented the place, but hardly anybody played table tennis or shot pool or lifted weights, so noise wasn’t a problem.

  His apartment was no neater than it had to be. His history text and lecture notes covered the kitchen table. He chuckled as he shoved them aside. “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks,” he chanted—and how long had people escaping from school been singing that song? He grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator and started to
sit down in front of the space he’d cleared. Then he shook his head and carried the soda back into the bedroom instead.

  He really lived there. His iMac sat on a desk in a corner by the closet. Justin grinned when he booted it up. It didn’t look like all the boring beige boxes other companies made. As soon as the desktop came up, he logged on to Earthlink to check his e-mail and see what was going on in some of the newsgroups he read.

  None of the e-mail was urgent, or even very interesting. The newsgroups . . . “How about that?” he said a couple of minutes later. Dave and Tabitha, who’d both been posting in the Trash Can Sinatras newsgroup for as long as he’d been reading it, announced they were getting married. Justin sent congratulations. He hoped they’d get on better than his own folks had. His girlfriend’s parents were still together, and still seemed to like each other pretty well.

  Thinking of Megan made him want to talk to her. He logged off Earthlink—having only one line in the apartment was a pain—and went over to the phone on the nightstand. He dialed and listened to it ring, once, twice . . . “Hello?” she said.

  “What’s the story, morning glory?” Justin said—Megan was wild for Oasis. He liked British pop, too, though he preferred Pulp, as someone of his parents’ generation might have liked the Stones more than the Beatles.

  “Oh. Hiya, Justin.” He heard the smile in her voice once she recognized his. He smiled, too. With exams over for another semester, with his girlfriend glad to hear from him, the world looked like a pretty good place. Megan asked, “How’d your final go?”

  “Whatever,” he answered. “I don’t think it’s an A, but I’m pretty sure it’s a B, and that’s good enough. Want to go out tonight and party?”

  “I can’t,” Megan told him. “I’ve got my English lit final tomorrow, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right.” Justin hadn’t remembered till she reminded him. “I bet you’re glad to get through with most of that lower-division stuff.” She was a year behind him.

  “This wasn’t so bad.” Megan spoke as if telling a dark, shameful secret: “I kind of like Shakespeare.”

  “Whatever,” Justin said again. All he remembered from his literature course was that he’d been damn lucky to escape with a B-minus. “I’ll take you to Sierra’s. We can get margaritas. How’s that?”

  “The bomb,” Megan said solemnly. “What time?”

  “How about six-thirty? I start at CompUSA tomorrow, and I’ll get off a little past five.”

  “Okay, see you then,” Megan said. “I’ve got to get back to Macbeth. ’Bye.” She hung up.

  Justin put This Is Hardcore, his favorite Pulp album, in the CD player and pulled dinner out of the freezer at random. When he saw what he had, he put it back and got another one: if he was going to Sierra’s tomorrow night, he didn’t want Mexican food tonight, too. Plain old fried chicken would do the job well enough. He nuked it, washed it down with another Coke, then threw the tray and the can in the trash and the silverware into the dishwasher. When he started running out of forks, he’d get everything clean at once.

  He went back into the bedroom, surfed the Net without much aim for a while, and then went over to bungie.net and got into a multiplayer game of Myth II. His side took gas; one of the guys didn’t want to follow their captain’s orders, even though his own ideas were a long way from brilliant. Justin logged off in disgust. He fired up his Carmageddon CD-ROM and happily ran down little old ladies in walkers till he noticed in some surprise that it was after eleven. “Work tomorrow,” he sighed, and shut down and went to bed.

  Freshly showered, freshly shaved, a gold stud in his left ear, he drove over to Megan’s parents’ house to pick her up. Her mother let him in. “How are you, Justin?” she said. “How do you like your new job?”

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Tricoupis,” he answered. “The job’s—okay, I guess.” One day had been plenty to convince him his supervisor was a doofus. The guy didn’t know much about computers, and, because he was pushing thirty, he thought he could lord it over Justin and the other younger people at the store.

  Megan’s mom caught Justin’s tone. Laughing, she said, “Welcome to the real world.” She turned and called toward the back of the house: “Sweetie! Justin’s here!”

  “I’m coming,” Megan said. She hurried into the living room. She was a slim, almost skinny brunette with more energy than she sometimes knew what to do with. “Hiya,” she told Justin. The way she looked at him, she might have invented him.

  “Hi.” Justin felt the same way about her. He wanted to grab her right then and there. If her mother hadn’t been standing three feet away, he would have done it.

  Mrs. Tricoupis laughed again, on a different note. It didn’t occur to Justin that she could see through Megan and him. She said, “Go on, kids. Have fun. Drive carefully, Justin.”

  “Whatever,” Justin said, which made Megan’s mom roll her eyes up to the heavens. But he’d been in only one wreck since getting his license, and that one hadn’t quite been his fault, so he couldn’t see why she was ragging on him.

  He didn’t grab Megan when they got into the car, either. At the first red light, though, they leaned toward each other and into a long, wet kiss that lasted till the light turned green and even longer—till, in fact, the old fart in the SUV behind them leaned on his horn and made them both jump.

  Sierra’s had stood at the corner of Vanowen and Canoga for more than forty years, which made it a Valley institution. They both ordered margaritas as they were seated, Megan’s strawberry, Justin’s plain. The waiter nodded to her but told Justin, “I’m sorry, señor, but I’ll need some ID.”

  “Okay.” Justin displayed his driver’s license, which showed he’d been born in April 1978, and so had been legal for a couple of months.

  “Gracias, señor,” the waiter said. “I’ll get you both your drinks.” Justin and Megan didn’t start quietly giggling till he was gone. Megan was only twenty, but people always carded Justin.

  The margaritas were good. After a couple of sips of hers, Megan said, “You didn’t even ask me how I did on my final.”

  “Duh!” Justin hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. “How did you do?”

  “Great,” she said happily. “I think I might even have gotten an A.”

  “That rocks.” Justin made silent clapping motions. Megan took a seated bow. He went on, “How do you feel like celebrating?”

  “Well, we probably ought to save club-hopping for the weekend, since you’ve got to go to work in the morning.” Megan stuck out her tongue at him. “See? I think about what’s going on with you.” Justin started to get chuffed, but didn’t let it show. A couple of seconds later, he was glad he didn’t, because Megan went on, “So why don’t we just go back to your place after dinner?”

  “Okay,” he said, and hoped he didn’t sound slaveringly eager. Maybe he did; Megan started laughing at him. But it wasn’t mean laughter, and she didn’t change what she’d said. He raised his margarita to his lips. At twenty-one, it’s easy to think you’ve got the world by the tail.

  He hardly noticed what he ordered. When the waiter brought it, he ate it. It was good; the food at Sierra’s always was. Afterwards, he had to remember to stay somewhere close to the speed limit as he drove up Canoga toward the Acapulco. Getting a ticket would interrupt everything else he had in mind.

  When he opened the door to let Megan into his apartment, she said, “You’re so lucky to have a place of your own.”

  “I guess so,” Justin answered. He thought she was pretty lucky to have parents who cared enough about her to want her to stay at home while she went through college. As far as he was concerned, the checks his father and mother sent counted for a lot less than some real affection would have. He’d tried explaining that, but he’d seen it made no sense to her.

  She bent down and went pawing through his CDs and put on I’ve Seen Everything, the Trash Can Sinatras’ second album. As “Easy Road” started coming out of the stereo,
she sighed. “They were such a good band. I wish they’d made more than three records before they broke up.”

  “Yeah,” Justin said. However much he liked the Sinatras, though, he didn’t pay that much attention to the music. Instead, he watched her straighten and get to her feet. He stepped forward to slip an arm around her waist.

  She turned and smiled at him from a range of about six inches, as if she’d forgotten he was there and was glad to be reminded. “Hiya,” she said brightly, and put her arms around him. Who kissed whom first was a matter of opinion. They went back into the bedroom together.

  They’d been lovers for only a couple of months. Justin was still learning what Megan liked. He didn’t quite get her where she was going before he rather suddenly arrived himself. “Sorry,” he said as his heartrate slowed toward normal. “Wait a few minutes and we’ll try it again.” It was only a few minutes, too. At his age, he could—and did—take that for granted. After the second time, he asked, “Better?”

  “Yeah,” Megan answered in a breathy voice that meant it was quite a bit better. Or maybe that breathy voice meant something else altogether, for she was still using it as she went on, “Get up, will you? You’re squashing me.”

  “Oh.” Justin slid his weight—too much weight, he thought, not for the first time—off her. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “A gentleman,” she said darkly, “takes his weight on his elbows.” But she laughed as she said it, so she couldn’t have been really mad.

  Justin scratched his stomach, which gave him an excuse to feel how too much of it there was. He wasn’t really tubby. He’d never been really tubby. But he would never have six-pack abs, either. Twelve-pack or maybe a whole case, yeah. Six-pack? Real live muscles? Fuhgeddaboutit. Unlike some other girls he’d known, Megan had never given him a hard time about it.