Lifehouse

by Spider Robinson

  “Yes, I will,” she heard herself say.

  He understood her perfectly and at once. His smile was a beautiful thing to see. “Then everything’s okay, then.”

  “Yes, Paul,” she said. Her pulse thundered in her ears.

  “I was broke when I met you.”

  “So was I,” she agreed. “Ow.”

  He eased his grip on her hand, snapped their gaze-lock with a visible effort, and turned his smile-beam on their guests. “It’s a deal. You’ll want it up front.” Both nodded firmly. “It’ll probably involve a little pick and shovel work: the bastard burned my house down around it. But it should still be there, perfectly safe, untoasted and undiscovered, not far from a basement entrance I know survived. Best done in darkness; if we catch the next ferry the timing should work out.” June had tuned out, distracted by the stunning awareness that she had somehow, despite a lifetime of wariness, become a fiancée. But her attention was caught again when Paul went on, “I guess the only thing left to be settled is whether you need to pistol-whip me before we can put the heat away and get this show on the road.”

  Moira visibly deferred to her husband. He considered the matter, frowning speculatively. “You’re a prick,” he said finally, “but I’ve worked for pricks without violence all my life. And for about twenty-four hours, there, I thought I’d saved John Lennon’s life. Maybe that is worth what it cost me.” He engaged the safety catch on his gun and put it in his lap. (Moira, startled, started to take her own safety off…then left it the way it was, and put the gun in her purse.)

  June was so relieved she shamelessly allowed it to show.

  Paul nodded. “In that case, I believe the moment has come when honor will permit me to apologize, to you and your wife, for what I did to you. I don’t have any excuse, and I don’t expect you to accept the apology, but I give it gladly.”

  No response.

  “So do I,” June said, largely to see if her numb lips could produce speech. “We’re quitting the business.”

  “One last thing and then we can head for the ferry,” Paul went on. “You’re the first to know: we just got engaged.”

  Wally and Moira both raised their eyebrows and exchanged a glance. And began to smile.

  “June,” Moira said, “all your sins will be satisfactorily atoned for.”

  “You lucky duck,” Wally added.

  She found her cheeks were being squeezed up so tight by the corners of her mouth that water was threatening to leak from her eyes. “I hope we’re as lucky as you two.”

  “Not a chance,” Wally said. “But it’s something to shoot for.”

  “Then I take it we’re adjourned?” Paul asked.

  “Just one thing,” Wally said. “That PC I saw in the den—is that the one with the Pentium 133 chip?”

  Moira smacked him on the shoulder. In spite of herself, June giggled. After a moment and a few blinks, so did Wally.

  This might, June decided, just work out.

  The ride to the ferry terminus in Wally and Moira’s Toyota was undertaken in a slightly strained silence. All four knew that further discussion of the time traveler would be improper until the consultants had received their advance, and the only other interest they all seemed to have in common was the Beatles, which seemed inappropriate under the circumstances.

  But by the time they shut off the engine at the tail end of the lineup waiting for the next sailing (at this end of the trip, perhaps thirty whole vehicles—for which no accommodation whatsoever had been provided, stacked up in most of the downhill lane of “downtown” Snug Cove’s “main street”), the women could stand it no longer. “How long have you and Wally—” June began, at the same instant Moira asked, “How long have you and Paul—” and everyone laughed, and that broke the ice. Then they swapped How We Met stories. June went first, and gave both the version they told people, and the truth. So Moira felt compelled to do the same when it was her turn. Sharing embarrassment forged another small bond. Yet another formed between Paul and Wally as each attempted and failed to edit his mate’s account: that peculiar, wry late-twentieth-century brotherhood of shared public submission.

  Whatever their business differences, it is difficult for really intelligent people not to enjoy each other’s company. Each couple had good and recent reason to respect the other’s intelligence. None of the four ever quite completely forgot that there were loaded firearms in the vehicle, or just where they were located; nonetheless they were all about as relaxed with each other as crime partners, for instance, ever get by the time the Queen of Something-or-Other snugged itself into its tire-studded berth, stuck out its steel tongue and began vomiting Jaguars, Ladas and 4X4s onto the land.

  As Wally parked in the vehicle bay, they agreed they were all hungry, but not enough to eat ferry food. The two grifters went first up the steep narrow stairwell, out of an intuitive sense that they were still not fully trusted yet. The first time you climbed those stairs, you wondered why the handrails had studs along most of their length; halfway up you came to appreciate the pitons. June became slightly aware of Wally’s nose only a few inches from her buttocks, and tried to climb as unprovocatively as possible. Apparently she succeeded; when they all sat together on a life-jacket locker outside on the upper passenger deck, Moira did not interpose herself between them.

  It was quite pleasant on deck, no cooler or windier than they were dressed for. The rain had been over for so long it was not necessary to dry the surface of the locker before sitting on it. The sun was just settling toward the treetops, behind the ferry, crowning Bowen Island with glory. They were on the south or starboard side of the ship as it left Snug Cove and headed out into the bay; thunderheads comfortably far away on the horizon produced a Disney sunset. June mentioned that it reminded her a little of Key West; Moira said it reminded her of her and Wally’s summer place in Nova Scotia. Paul observed that both couples seemed to look for similar sorts of things in a vacation home: remoteness, simple circumstances, few and tolerant neighbors. Wally suggested the needs of con organizers and con artists were not all that different—using the latter term somewhat shyly until he saw neither Paul nor June took offense at it. Conversation became general; each of the four performed a few of their standard anecdotes, and was pleased with their reception. Wally beta-tested a new pun he was working up, to the effect that if the promised paperless digital world ever materialized, writers would all be The Artists Formerly Known In Prints. He lived; the only one armed besides himself within earshot had married him knowing of his affliction.

  Shortly, the captain made a general announcement over the loudspeakers, and the four got up and joined ninety percent of the vessel’s passengers on the north side to gawk in awe and inexplicable pleasure at a whale. A bitter argument broke out among several of their fellow passengers as to just which sort of whale it was. An elderly man loudly demanded to know why, for this kind of money, the captain couldn’t for chrissake drive the damn boat closer so he (the jerk) could get some better shots of the fish. The air was cooler out of the cove, and the wind was from the south, so it was somewhat less nippy there on the port side; they remained by tacit mutual consent even after the whale had gone about its business, and most of the other passengers had gone back indoors to enjoy “food” or videogames or virtuously display their nonsmoking status.

  It would not have made the slightest difference if they had remained where they’d started. The trackfly passed the ferry on the south side, no more than half a kilometer away at closest approach, but as stated, the wind was from that direction. The fly was not quite bright enough to change course to pass the ferry to leeward; in order to bring the search down to something manageable, it had been programmed to regard bodies of water as null areas, to be traversed as quickly as possible. Ignoring the can of pheromones downwind, it continued on a straight line toward Bowen Island.

  If it had so much as glanced their way, even its rather poor vision might have picked out Paul’s fuzzy skull, decided that it fit the p
arameters of a male head which had been bald three days ago, and vectored in for a quick sniff. If any of the four had been scanning the right quarter of the sky with good binoculars at precisely the right instant, and known what to look for, they might just have glimpsed the fly. They did, in fact, like all the other passengers out on deck, hear a muffled sound that might be termed a sonic poof, and like everyone else dismissed it as some sort of ferry noise, or perhaps a far-distant Canadian Forces jet.

  It was—as it had been at the very start—just that tantalizingly close. But they were sailing to Horseshoe Bay, not playing horseshoes, and so again “close” was simply not good enough.

  They ate in a wonderful place Wally and Moira knew just outside Horseshoe Bay. (A law of nature states that all sf fans know all superb and most good restaurants within a fifty-kilometer radius of their home. SMOFs generally at least double the radius.) The food was so good that it was not until the check was actually on the table that Paul remembered to blush.

  “Wally?” he said. “Are you familiar with a condition called shellout falter?”

  Wally’s eyebrows rose sympathetically. “You suffer from a reach impediment?”

  “Well, it’s been a hard week.”

  Wally waved a hand, and grinned. “Take it from your mind. I cannot tell you how much you will have improved this whole anecdote if you will allow me to buy you dinner.”

  Paul and June considered that…and burst out laughing.

  Moira joined in too, but when the laughter had subsided she said to June, “So you two took off so fast you didn’t have time to grab any cash?”

  June nodded. “There are still a couple of small accounts around town we could tap in theory—but none I’d dare access until we settle this.”

  “So what were you going to do when O’Leary’s fridge emptied out?”

  “Pocket cash has never—” Paul began automatically, and then trailed off.

  “What?” Moira said.

  “Pardon me,” he said slowly. “A phantom ache in an amputated limb. I said goodbye to my life out there on Bowen Island, but I’ll be awhile unlearning old habits, I guess.” He looked away.

  June took his hand. “What Paul means,” she said quietly, “is that he started to say cash has never been a problem for us, we’d just have worked some short con or other on some mark for operating capital. And then he remembered that we’ve retired, and there’s no answer to your question anymore.”

  After an awkward silence, Moira spoke up. “You meant that about quitting your line of work?”

  June nodded.

  “Why?” In spite of herself she giggled. “I mean, you’re good at it,” she tried to explain. “That eye of power thing is awesome. And you had no way of knowing Wally and I were going to catch up with you. Why were you thinking about retiring?”

  “To change your pattern, make it harder for the time traveler to track you?” Wally suggested.

  Still looking at her fiancé’s expressionless profile, June shook her head. “Basically,” she said, “we woke up one day and found ourselves stinging nice people. People who we could have liked. We always swore we weren’t going to. Maybe every grifter swears that, starting out—the good ones, anyway. Maybe not. But over the years, your standards slip, a centimeter at a time, while you aren’t paying attention. Your partner’s standards slip, too. Soon you’re like two drunks trying to hold each other up, each certain you’re sober. The next thing you know, you find you’ve written a truly brilliant new con…that only works on smart, kind people.” She reached out and stroked Paul’s cheek. “So you look back to see just where you lost control, and you can’t pin it down. So maybe you’ve had it all wrong from the start, and nobody deserves to get stung.”

  “I’m not certain I agree with that part,” Moira said. “There are bastards on this planet. Maybe you’ve just lost faith in your own wisdom to judge.”

  It was not said unkindly; June considered it, and shook her head. “My right to.”

  “It isn’t right to be Simon Templar, and smite the Ungodly,” Wally suggested, “unless you’re in a book, where you don’t make mistakes, and you can guarantee there won’t be any innocent bystanders.”

  “Exactly,” Paul said, and turned back to face the table. “There’s a song James Taylor’s brother Liv wrote, that goes, ‘Life is good—when you’re proud of what you do…’” he said to Wally. “Well, for a long time now, I’ve been trying to skate by on being proud of how I do it, instead. It just stopped being good enough.”

  “I see,” Wally said.

  “I mean, look at my masterpiece. My most brilliant artistic creation. Like June says, it only works on bright sensitive misfits with unusually flexible minds. I mean, it’s pretty obvious who I’m really trying to sting, isn’t it?”

  “Your mother,” June said.

  He spun on her, thunderstruck, and started to cloud up—then his face went blank. “Good one,” he said after a few seconds of thought. “I was going to say me, but that was infuriating enough to have some truth in it.”

  “Maybe some of both,” she suggested.

  “You two are going to be good at this marriage business,” Moira said.

  “And the rest will fall into place,” Wally agreed. “It always does, if you’ve got the basic stuff covered.”

  June found herself smiling. “Well, if we don’t get caught and killed, or shipped off to the Stone Age or something, I think we’ve got a shot. That’s why I accepted his proposal.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Wally assured her. “I think we can deal with that.”

  Paul and June stared at him.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, somewhat abashed. “I worked it out on the way to the ferry. A plan, I mean. It needs a little polish, but it ought to work.”

  Moira’s eyes were gleaming. “My heroin,” she said in a swooning, theatrical voice.

  Her husband smiled at her. “Aw, shocks.”

  The good fellowship that had grown up between the four of them made it sort of necessary for Wally to outline his idea then, even though he and Moira had not yet been paid their consulting fee. His scheme was not, at first, received with great enthusiasm, since it required large amounts of trust and faith and hope—ingredients Paul and June were mostly accustomed to selling to other people. But eventually they were forced to concede that their only other option was to cut their own throats, right now. June then spotted a potential hole in the scenario, but Moira was able to patch it brilliantly. They all left the restaurant feeling confident, and with that special warmth that comes from having made good new friends. Wally and Paul talked together in the front of the Camry, and Moira and June talked in the back, all the way back to Vancouver. When they reached the building behind Paul’s former address, the ladies split the chore of keeping lookout—June in the parking garage, Moira on the other side of the burned-out property—while Paul and Wally excavated together, armed with a shovel and a good tire iron Wally kept in his trunk. Wally was poor at gruntwork, but turned out to be world-class at thinking of easier ways to do things.

  The camaraderie thus engendered helped considerably to smooth over the awkward moment that arose when they reached the site of Paul’s secret stash, and found only shrapnel.

  After several minutes of silence, during which Paul considered using his swearing litany—after all, the house had already burned down—but couldn’t work up the heart to begin, he felt Wally’s pudgy hand on his bowed shoulder. In all the countless permutations of the English language, there was only one right thing Wally could possibly have said just then, and Paul was immensely gratified to hear him say it.

  “You can owe us.”

  Too moved to speak, he nodded.

  “Let’s get our women and go to war,” Wally said.

  Paul nodded again, and they left.

  Chapter 14

  “…Danny Boy, this is a showdown…”

  Myrna and Johnson were alertly waiting—desperately hoping—for word of June Bellamy
and Paul Throtmanian; indeed, they had done very little else in the thirty-six hours since they’d loosed the trackfly. It didn’t help them much.

  The one thing they’d thought they knew for sure about June and Paul’s location was that it was distant. The fly had long since swept the entire Greater Vancouver area in a Drunkard’s Walk pattern, conclusively reported null results, and expanded its search area to encompass all the inhabited islands nearby. It had scanned most of the small ones, was already halfway through the immense Vancouver Island. If it came up empty there as well, it would begin quartering the Lower Mainland and upper United States. The more infuriating minutes dragged by without news of success, the more distant became June and Paul’s proved location. By now, it was certain they could not be within eighty kilometers of Pacific Spirit Park—or so the Lifehouse Keepers believed.

  The truth came as a rude shock. A similar emotion might be experienced by a submarine skipper who—having lobbed a deckgun round through the night at a distant gunboat, and while waiting out the endless long seconds before he will know for sure whether or not he has scored a hit and is committed to battle, or has wasted a round but is still safe—feels the cold muzzle of a pistol against the back of his own personal neck, and hears the click of the hammer being cocked. By the time Myrna and Johnson’s own personal alarms—which had seemed perfectly adequate for nearly a thousand years, and which had been tuned most carefully—sounded in their skulls, June was standing about half a kilometer from their home.

  And about a hundred meters from the Lifehouse…

  She got that far without being identified as more than just another passing hiker, biker or stroller because Myrna and Johnson’s own sentries were nowhere near as sophisticated as the trackfly. A change of hair and eye color, cheek inserts and lifts sufficed to fool them on the physical level, as they would probably have fooled another human. They neither knew nor cared what she smelled like.