“As he would have had me kill Wendell,” I muttered into my lap.
“Precisely.”
The knot in my gut refused to loosen. In all the weeks since I had booby-trapped the bathroom I had, by an effort that only now seemed remarkable, entirely avoided thinking about the matter at all. Poor Wendell had accepted the news with no comment at all—I don’t suppose he felt qualified to make moral judgments anymore. And so there were no rationalizations to surrender, no defenses to come tumbling down around my ears. There was only the pain, the horror and the pain that formed a molten lump in my belly. It was plenty.
The words clawed themselves up my throat with ragged talons, pried open my teeth and escaped. “I loved him! I l-loved him. The bastard, the motherfucker, I loved him. Cold-hearted self-serving madman I loved him killed him HATE HIM!” I was screaming, beating my thigh with my hand, stump flailing.
Gowan reached through the bars and captured my hand in his. I’d never thought of him as a strong man, but his grip was unbreakable. The painful pressure of his fingers was an input from the world outside my skull, and I could not break the connection; it anchored me to reality. All the tension that made my body shiver and spasm seemed to drain off down my arm and into those clenching fingers. For an endless time I seemed to be dangling from them over some bottomless abyss, and just as the pain reached the breaking point it began to ease, until finally I was only sitting on a hard floor with a wet face and a sore arm.
“‘Can any man,’” Gowan quoted softly, “‘be asked to be more than a man?’ You did what you had to do, Isham. You were who you were, and are now someone different in consequence.” His voice was somewhat hoarse. I smelled sweat, glanced up and saw his face beaded with it, his hand white in my grip. I released it hastily.
He held my eyes, and suddenly he laughed and stood up. “First my window, then my hand. You’ve got a blacksmith’s grip, friend.”
I seemed to be looking up at him out of a well. “I had the idea you were holding me.” I wiped my nose.
“I guess I was, at first.”
“I…I’m glad you came.”
“How do you feel?”
I thought about it. “At peace,” I said at last, surprised. “First time in—a long while.”
“Then I’m glad I came too. I was going to bring you some books, but I forgot. I’ll come back with them tonight. Have you read The Count of Monte Cristo?” He winked gently on the side away from Shorty.
It was beautifully done. The sudden chatter sounded natural after the extreme intensity of the moment past—and Shorty is completely illiterate.
“As a matter of fact I already have, yes,” I told him, smiling. “I liked old Valjean—he did things for himself.” No, I don’t need any help in escaping.
“I should say so. Well, do you need anything, then?”
“No, thanks. You’ve given me the only help I needed.”
His lean face lost twenty years’ worth of tension. “I’m glad, Isham. I’m glad. You always were one of my brighter pupils. If only you weren’t so utterly undisciplined…”
I waved my arm in silent pantomime, mouthed “Avoid the Tool Shed” with exaggerated clarity.
“…you might have amounted to something,” he continued without missing a beat, nodding when I finished.
“Not me. I’m going to be a teacher when I grow up,” I replied aloud.
He grimaced. “Enough of my pupils are Stoned already, thank you.”
I awarded the pun a wince. “As opposed to cap-and-Gowaned?” I asked, then peered at him closely. “Your pupils don’t look stoned to me.” He winced right back, and we almost smiled.
“Enough of this chitchat, Isham. I’ve got Sarwar’s ear to bend, and George’s, and especially Helen’s. In fact, I believe I’ll see her first. Tomorrow is a long way off. Be of hope.”
“I am, Dr. Mike. Thanks for stopping by.”
“Be seeing you, lad.” He left with his usual jaunty stride, and the memory of his smile, framed in wispy blond beard, stayed with me longer than his spoor.
I went to the cell window. It faced on Town Square and the Pond, a macabre touch. I spent about ten minutes watching children sail small wooden boats in the shade of the weeping willows, wishing for a good case of amnesia.
I found myself thinking of Wendell. I was desperately anxious to know if he still lived. He was an old man; his heart wasn’t up to running around the city, jumping in and out of subway tunnels. But the transmitter which had been causing me to limp for so many miles had barely enough range to set off the bomb at the Tool Shed, and no receiving capacity. There’s a limit to how much you can build into a hollow heel, even if you know what you’re doing and have all the resources of New York City to draw from. There was no way for Wendell to tell me if he lived.
I gave it up and put in an hour’s hard thinking on Gowan’s words.
Chapter Eleven
It was the second visitor that surprised me.
I’d just finished a tolerably good Last Meal, and from a strong sense of tradition as much as from prudence I ate heartily. Being upwind of the building’s front door, I didn’t even get spoor warning. I simply looked up and Alia was there.
A giant punched me under the heart with considerable vim, and the overseer part of my brain that wanted to slam the cerebrum into high gear was informed that the cerebrum was not accepting calls at this time. I rummaged desperately in my bag of wisecracks and grabbed the first one I found.
“If Shorty’s had his dessert, would you ask him to come in?” I rolled to my feet.
“Isham, I…”
“Aren’t you the heroine who brings the prisoner a Pfeil with a cake in it? You can’t be the prison chaplain, and Collaci doesn’t wear his grenades under his shirt like that. I know you’re not my lawyer, or they wouldn’t let you see me. What are you here for?”
“I came to hear a babbling idiot do vaudeville routines,” she said dryly.
“Den you in de right place. Fus’ dey gimme ten years in Leavenworth. Den dey gimme ’leven years in Twelveworth. Now I gets five and ten in Woolworth, and do you know how much wool worth these days? Say, why haven’t you asked me to shut up by now? It sure is a hell of a note when you can’t even piss people off any…”
“Isham, please shut up.”
I shut up, and we looked each other over for a hundred years or so. My first conscious thought was that she looked different somehow, the first person I had seen who didn’t look precisely as they had before I’d left home to go shorten Wendell. I couldn’t nail down the difference, and, finally controlling my funk, looked closer.
The hair was the same, soft brown wings falling from a center part, worn just a bit longer than was practical. The line of her jaw was as regally strong as I remembered it. Same almond eyes, with that improbable tiny red splotch next to the left pupil and no eyebrows worth mentioning. Same slender neck, skin the color of coffee extra light disappearing beneath the familiar blue turtleneck. Powerful shoulders, hands callused but surprisingly graceful for a blacksmith’s, with long spatulate fingers. Same generous, low-slung breasts, the right still markedly larger than the left. Same wide hips, soft belly and pouting mound under the very same patched jeans I had last seen pooled at her feet, four months ago…
I ceased my catalog hastily; a breeze was blowing and I was upwind. And as my eyes traveled prudently upward, I saw the little things I had missed, the subtle differences. At the place where waist became hips, two pads of flesh that I didn’t recall distorted the twin curves. The belly and breasts appeared fuller, more padded. The mouth, for which I had never found any adjective but “chewable,” now had firm things happening in the corners—as if it’d done some chewing of its own. That, combined with the fact that the almond eyes were bloodshot, made her overall face subtly older, stronger somehow but in a melancholy way. There was something about those eyes…
“You’ve changed, Isham.”
I snorted. “Yeah. I used to be bilaterally symmetri
cal.”
“Stop it. I don’t mean your arm, and I don’t mean the changes losing an arm makes in your face and in the way you carry yourself. I was expecting them.”
“What do you mean, then?” Dammit, I was trying, consciously, to make my voice soft, but the edge just would not come off it.
She lowered her eyes. “I don’t know. Forget it.”
“Okay. You’ve changed too.” For Christ’s sake, say something nice. “You’re getting fat.”
She shook her head. “Getting thin. I’ve lost five pounds in the last two weeks. I got fat while you were away.”
“I must say I’m astonished to see you.”
“You are?” Her face fell. “Didn’t you know I’d—”
“Hell, I was surprised they let Dr. Mike in, and your father can reasonably rely on him to keep his mouth shut. But you?”
Her face got up again. “What do you mean? Keep my mouth shut about what?”
“Whoa. Back up. What do you know about why I’m here?”
A muscle tightened in her jaw. “Papa says you admitted murdering Dr. Stone. And some foofooraw about collaborating with Muskies.”
“He say anything about Carlson?”
She paled a little, but her voice was steady. “He says Carlson has brainwashed or subverted you in some way, that he made you kill your father.”
“Mmm-hmm. And you know my sentence?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand it. Krish must be nuts to let you speak with me. He must know in his heart that I can convince you of the truth in about ten minutes, and that no power on earth will shut you up. He can’t let the true story get out—folks might not…”
“Isham?”
“…unless—yes?”
“What makes you think Papa knows I’m here?”
I blinked. “But Shorty would never let you back here unless—”
“—unless I told him that Papa authorized it. So I did.”
“Oh.” Prison life is making you stupid, old son. “Suppose he’d checked?”
“I leaned on him just a little. I told him Papa’d written out the authorization, and showed him a memo about a crew chiefs’ meeting with Papa’s signature on the bottom.”
“And Shorty bought it?”
“He can say he did—if anyone ever asks. Who’s going to mention it—you?”
“Shorty’s a nice fella. I’m gonna be extra careful not to get him hurt.”
Her eyes widened, and I was somehow subtly pleased at the operating speed of her uptake. Interesting datum, that pleasure.
“Need any help?”
I hesitated, and she sensed my distress. “Shorty’s stepped out for a breath of air.”
“Shorty is a gentleman and no I don’t think I need any help.” Her face once again landed on its face. Dammit, she wants to help. Make nice—need something, for Chrissake. “No, wait—if you can occupy Teach’ somehow between, say, midnight and one tonight, without sticking your neck out—”
“It’s done.”
“And for the love of Carlson, stay away from the Tool Shed!”
“Damn.” She grinned. “Dr. Gowan hinted about that. I should have added two and two.” I liked the grin.
“Oh, the doc he is a subtle man.” In the same funny way as before, I was pleased at the questions she wasn’t asking. Never rains but it pours, does it? I was sort of out of things to say; we sat in silence for a measureless space, whirling thoughts surely hidden behind both sets of eyes. We were taking each other’s measure.
I began to speak, telling her the story she had not yet heard, recapitulating all the events that had led me to where I was. And as I spoke, my thoughts kept returning to where I’d been, to the even earlier events which had led me to the start of the road whose journey I was recounting.
Specifically the ones having to do with Alia. We have known each other forever, and shared some intensely traumatic times, good and bad. She was, for instance, there when Mom was cut down by a Musky on the Lake shore before our eyes, and we cried together all that day. I was, for instance, there with her on the day when her mother died by her own hand, and we both took guilty comfort in having another before whom we did not have to cry and look sad. We were together much, feeling somehow closer to each other than to the other children of Fresh Start, whose fathers were not movers and shapers. And somehow it was not until we both were fourteen that we first made love.
I understand by Pre-Exodus standards that’s shockingly young, and I guess I believe it. But things are different nowadays—in fact, Alia and I were a trifle backward. By virtue of our parentage, we probably got a better sexual education than most do these days—but only from the academic standpoint. We were playmates for years before we caught on that those particular scents meant that.
From there, of course, it is a short step to combining the scents to see what results. As it happened, it was Dr. Mike who found us, in the woods east of the Lake, lost in the wonders of scientific inquiry, covered with mosquito bites and hickeys. He apologized for disturbing us, we told him that was all right, and he went back to his walk, looking thoughtful. We too returned to our exercise, and thought no more about the encounter. But that night we each walked into the windmill back at our respective homes.
Characteristically, Dad had never given my sexual identity a thought—it was after all right under his nose. Alia’s dissimilar plumbing had, on the other hand, literally rubbed Krish’s nose in the matter some years earlier—but he had been too embarrassed to do more than give her a coldly factual lecture on procreation and genetics that went in one ear and out the other.
That night, though, both our fathers suddenly discovered a great deal they had meant to say, all of it intensely personal and personally intense. I remember Dad’s oration very well. He could be pretty Old Testament when he put his mind to it, and I got both barrels that night.
The basic theme was that a warrior can’t afford to go and get himself entangled with no women—at least not until he’s discharged his duty. “With Civilization gone, there just isn’t any kind of contraception left, Isham—except self-control! I know you’re reaching the age when girls will seem like the only thing in the world—but there’s another thing in the world, and its name is Wendell Carlson, and it must be destroyed. If I hadn’t had you and your mother to care for, I’d have gone after Wendell myself long since. I, I nearly did when Barbara died…well. I’m an old man now, son, and our revenge won’t wait much longer. If you think for one minute that you can…”
You get the idea. I certainly did—by the time Dad had finished pulling all the stops on the emotional organ, I was sobbing with remorse, and shaking with fear that Alia and I had already made a baby. I avoided her, and all women my age, like plague vectors for months thereafter, practicing my karate and becoming preternaturally adept at masturbation.
I never did learn what Alia’s father told her, but I gathered it was more racial in theme. At any rate, she and Tommy Ostermyer had an abortion together the next spring (which I was not supposed to know about and never let on I did), and she was thereafter seen in the company of other young men, all of them white. If this bothered me, I didn’t tell myself about it.
It was, oh, years later that we were next within twenty yards of each other.
I had actually left Fresh Start on my way to New York City for my destined meeting with Wendell Carlson, loaded down with good wishes and bad advice and grim courage and growing terror, and made my first camp about twenty miles to the south with the onset of evening. I intended to take my time and arrive fresh and full of beans, and so I went to sleep soon after supper.
Sometime in the small hours I found myself awake with Musky gun in one hand and knife in the other. The moon was full, the night crisp and still. I saw her at once, much closer than she should have been able to get without waking me. She stood quite still, a few yards from my feet, and her eyes gleamed unnaturally bright. She was naked, her clothes pooled at her feet. I had the idea she’
d been standing there for some time.
As I stared, unable to shake off the unreality of the moment enough to speak, she began walking toward me, slowly and with grace. I smelled the scent of her, pungently female. I felt myself harden in response. I saw the muscles of her thighs ripple under skin the moonlight had turned to new meerschaum. I heard the whisper of her feet on soft earth. I tasted desire, harsh behind my tongue.
The glistening at her eyes spilled over and ran down her cheeks as she knelt at my feet, but she made no sound. She grabbed the end of my sleeping bag and pulled, slowly and firmly. As it slid downward I said something like “Hey.” I dropped my weapons, but did not grab the sleeping bag. She tossed it carelessly into the darkness, breasts jiggling, and sat on her heels staring up the length of my body. Her lower lip hung slack and her head seemed too heavy for her neck to support; my head swam with the scent of her. The ground was cold beneath me.
I spoke her name, a dry croak around a leather tongue. She almost smiled.
“They can’t say I kept you from going, now,” she whispered huskily. “And you might not be back.”
And all at once she swarmed up my body and sealed my mouth with her tongue, and she was warm and wet and urgent. She rode me like a succubus, demanding and insistent, the way men take women in all the books, her own climaxes coming in clusters as she rocked on my groin. White heat boiled my brain and ecstasy nailed me to the ground. I spasmed, screamed, spasmed, arching back lifting us both from the earth, clutching fingers prying at her shoulder blades. And fell, boneless like a Jell-O man, through an endless sea of black molasses, gasping for air.
The second time was slower, longer, much more tender, and infinitely sweeter, the first truly profound thing I had ever known. The crashing chord of its resolution blended indistinguishably into total sleep without ever permitting even momentary return of conscious thought.
And in the morning she was gone, and the road was before me.
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