And one slightly warmer night, Timeth returned from three days alone in the woods, healthy and fit and profoundly alive, and he asked Zachary Mountain-Born a question, and Zack made the answer which he had prepared.
And one pleasant Spring evening, two weeks later, Zack was sitting alone on a bluff overlooking the garden, watching the stars, when a darkness occulted one of them. The star reappeared and its neighbour vanished, and he smiled a soft smile and went in to bed, sleeping soundly for the first time in a month, waking before dawn for the first time in years.
The knock came as the coffee was perking, and Zack carefully slid the pot to a cooler place on the stove before he answered the door. Abernathy walked in without greeting, followed by the large manservant, and the three of them stood for a moment, regarding each other. For Zack it was almost a moment of déjà vu—the same kitchen, the same people, the same stack of travel cases awash with the light of dawning.
But Abernathy methodically assessed the room, identified the missing element, and frowned. “Where is the boy?”
“The boy is dead,” Zack said truthfully. “He will not be returning with you.”
Abernathy’s planed features had never held emotion, and were not about to start at this late date, but he looked as if he wished his eyebrows would let him frown.
“There was an avalanche last week,” Zack explained. “A rockslide to the east. I watched him fall. I could not recover his body. Tell Raoul I…” he broke off, strong emotion on his own face.
Abernathy stood stock-still for a long moment, nodded and said, “I see. Was his death your fault?”
“No,” Zack said slowly, “it was his own doing.”
Abernathy read truth in his sturdy face, and nodded again. Without another word he spun on his heel like a drill instructor and left. The servant followed with the forlorn travel cases.
Zack watched from the window until the landing craft rose into view from the tall neopines at the base of the mountain and arced off over the bay toward the orbiting mothership he had seen in the sky last night. Then he put down his empty coffee cup and went to the smallest room in his house. As he opened its door he noted with approval that the sunburst painted on its door was dry now.
A new-carved, diamond-shaped window let in the morning sun; it splashed across a great majestic bed, seasoned maple timbers and a mighty slab of driftwood for a headboard, held together by careful, macrame-like lashings of thick blue cord, a great canopy arching overhead with a hand-stitched representation of this sector of the galaxy on its undersurface. It was nowise perfect or neat, but its craftsman had obviously enjoyed himself.
Zack coughed. “All clear, old son.”
From beneath the magnificent bed came—not a boy—but a young man, the beginning of an eager grim below a proud, new mustache. “They’re really gone, Zack?”
“They’re really gone, Timeth. They won’t be coming back.”
“I…I guess I’ll miss my parents some.” The grin faltered.
“I guess you will,” Zack agreed, wondering for the thousandth time whether he had chosen rightly.
Timeth shrugged, and his grin returned full strength. “Even feeling bad is better than not feeling,” he said positively, and to his own surprise Zack laughed. They embraced for a moment, as comrades-in-arms and then Timeth pulled away smiling. “Let’s go outside, Zack,” he said. “There’s a shed to be built.”
“Whoa, lad. What about breakfast?”
“The hell with breakfast,” Timeth said, and raced to the window. Flinging it open, he breathed in a great chestful of spruce and earth and distant sea.
“Look!” he cried, pointing. “It’s a sunny day!”
High Infidelity
High Infidelity
Ruby hung at the teetering edge of orgasm for as long as she could bear it, mewing with pleasure and with joy. Then control and consciousness spun away together: she clenched his hair with both hands, yanked in opposite directions, and went thundering over the edge. Her triumphant cry drowned out his triumphant growl; she heard neither. When the sweet explosion had subsided, she lay marinating in the afterglow, faintly surprised as always to be still alive. Her fingers toyed aimlessly with the curly hair they had just been yanking. The tongue at her clitoris gave one last, lazy lick, and a shudder rippled up her body. I am, she thought vaguely, a very lucky woman.
After a suitable time her husband lifted his head and smiled fondly up at her. “Who was I this time?” he asked.
“Sam Hamill,” she said happily. “And you were terrific.”
“My dear, your taste is as good as your taste is good,” Paul Meade said.
She smiled. “Damn right. I married you, didn’t I?”
“Was I in this one?”
“Watching from the doorway. Even bigger and harder than usual.”
He climbed up her body. “Really?” She reached down to guide him into her, and he was even bigger and harder than usual. They both grinned at that, and gasped together as he slid inside. “I’ll bet my eyes were the size of floppy discs.”
“The old-fashioned big ones,” she agreed. “Who can I be for you now?”
“Anonymous grateful groupie,” he murmured in her ear, beginning to move his hips. “The Process saved your child’s life, and you’re thanking me as emphatically as you can.”
If Ruby Meade had an insecurity, this was it. She knew that Paul got such offers—his work and his achievement made it inevitable—and she supposed that they must be uniquely hard to turn down. But she had trusted her husband utterly and implicitly for more than two decades now. “Oh, doctor,” she said in an altered voice, and locked her legs around his familiar back. “Anything you want, doctor, any way you want me.” She suggested some ways in which he might want her, and his tempo increased with each suggestion, and soon she no longer had the breath to speak. Automatically he covered both her ears, the way she liked him to, with his left cheek and his left hand, and dropped into third gear. When he was very close, he lifted his head up as he always did, replacing his cheek with his right hand, and murmured “Give me your tongue,” and as always she gave him all the tongue she had, and he sucked it into his mouth with something just short of too much force as he galloped to completion. He roared as his sperm sprayed into her, and with the ease of long practice she brought her legs down under his and pointed her toes so that his last strokes could bring her off too.
I am, Ruby thought vaguely sometime later, an especially lucky woman.
Paul rolled off with his usual care and reached for his cigarettes. “‘They say,’” he sang softly, puffing one alight, “‘Ruby you’re like a dream, not always what you seem…’”
“I love you too, baby.”
They shared a warm smile, and then he pulled his eyes away. “I have to go to Zurich tomorrow,” he said. “Be gone about a week, maybe a week and a half. They called while you were working.”
“A week—?” she began, and caught herself.
“I know,” he said, misunderstanding. “It’s a long time. But it can’t be helped. It seems they tried The Process over there with a donor of the opposite sex. Rather important official, and they didn’t dare wait for another donor. I want to check it out—I expect it to be fascinating.”
I am, Ruby thought, going to kill him.
“Besides,” he said, “think how thirsty I’ll be for you when I get home. And how thirsty you’ll be for me.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice convincing, “that’ll be nice.”
“I’ll be moving around a lot,” he said, “but if you need to get hold of me in an emergency, just get in touch with Sam. He’ll know where I am day to day.”
“Okay,” she said, thinking briefly that it would serve him right if she did. Get in touch with Sam. Paul’s tendency toward automatic punning had, over the years, rubbed off on her. She was ashamed of the rogue thought at once, but her disappointment remained.
She examined that disappointment the next morning, over a cup of caff,
after she had kissed him good-bye and sent him on his way.
It was not the trip itself she minded. He had been away for longer periods before, and would be again; the biophysicist whose work had made brain-transplant a simple and convenient procedure would always be in demand, and he refused as many invitations as he possibly could. Nor did she envy him the trip; one of the reasons she had become a writer was that she liked squatting in her own cave, alone with her thoughts; most strange places and strange people made her uneasy. She was not truly jealous of his groupies either, not seriously—she knew that she would get the full benefit of whatever erotic charge he got from them. (Oh, anyone could be tempted beyond their ability to withstand…but she knew from long experience that Paul was wise enough and honest enough with himself not to get into such situations. He was much more likely to be mugged than seduced, and he had never been mugged.) Besides, she got propositions of her own in her fan mail.
No, it was the timing of the trip that gave her this terrible hollow-stomach feeling.
He had forgotten.
How could he forget? Next Monday, the eighteenth of July, 1999, was not only her forty-fifth birthday, but their twentieth anniversary.
To be sure, he had been busier this last year, since the news of his brain-stem matching process had become public knowledge, than ever before in their lives. His grasp on minutiae had begun to slip; he tended to be absentminded at times now. Nonetheless, he should have remembered.
She finished her caff and looked at his going-away present. As was their custom when he went on a trip, they had given each other erotic videotapes; “a little something to keep you company,” was the ritual phrase. The one she had given him was a homemade job, featuring her in a nurse’s uniform (at least at the outset), since she knew that nurses figured prominently in his fantasy life. Paul and Ruby had made a few erotic tapes together—most couples did nowadays—but somehow, from a vestige of old-fashioned shyness, perhaps, she had never made a solo tape for him until now. She had intended it for an anniversary present, one of several she had hidden away, and she resented a little not getting to see his reactions as he premiered it. But there had been no time to slip out to the store and pick up something else before his semiballistic had lifted for Zurich.
In fact, she had secretly hoped that he would express surprise at her having a present on hand for an unexpected trip, thereby forcing her to explain. But he truly was getting absent-minded, for he had simply thanked her for the gift and put it into his luggage.
She unwrapped his gift now. It was a thoughtful selection; from the still on the box-cover she could see that it starred an actress she liked, a woman who had the same general build, colouration, and hairstyle as Ruby, and generally seemed to share an interest in multiple partners. She would probably enjoy the tape—would probably have enjoyed it, rather, if it had been given to her on July eighteenth. Somehow that made it worse.
She tossed the tape into the back of a drawer, poured more caff, and went into her office to forget her resentment in work. Working on a novel always cheered her when she was down; her characters’ problems always seemed so much more immediate and urgent than her own.
He’ll remember, she thought just before sinking entirely into the warm glow of creation. Sometime between now and next Monday he’ll see a calendar, or something will jog his memory, and boy will he be contrite when he calls! Why, he might even cancel and come right home.
But he did not call that night, or Friday night, or Saturday night, and by Sunday she had stopped believing that he would.
So she thought of calling him. But if she told him, reminded him of the date, she would spoil his trip. And if she didn’t, she would hurt even more when she hung up. Besides, to contact Paul she would have to go through Sam Hamill, and if she called Sam he would want to come over and chat—Sam was a lonely divorcé—and a wise instinct told her not to spend time with a single man, about whom she had frequently fantasized, at a time when she was mad as hell at her absent husband. It was wisdom of the kind that had kept Paul and Ruby’s marriage alive for twenty years.
So she took refuge in logic. My husband is a good and kind and considerate man who has dedicated himself to making me happy since 1979. He is as good and as successful in his profession as I am in mine. He is trustworthy and responsible. He is a gifted lover and a valued friend, and surely I cannot be so irrational as to stack up against all that something as trivial as a single memory-lapse, and I’m going to kill the son of a bitch if he hasn’t called me in ten seconds, I swear I will.
Unfortunately, she finished her novel that afternoon.
Late that night she selected one of her favorite tapes, an “old reliable” that starred the actress who vaguely resembled her, and popped it into the deck. But halfway to her orgasm the tape reminded her of Paul’s going-away gift, which reminded her of her gift to him and the warm glow in which it had been recorded, the happy expectation of sharing it with him on their anniversary. Suddenly, and for Ruby unusually, orgasm was unattainable. Shortly she gave up, popped the tape, and cried herself to sleep.
And of course the next day was Monday. She woke sad and stiff and horny in equal proportions, and her house had never seemed emptier. Three times before lunch she was strongly tempted to call him, once coming so close as to put on make-up preparatory to getting his number from Sam. But she could not. She thought of rereading the new book to see if it was any good, but knew she should give it a week to seep out of her short-term memory before tackling it. At four in the afternoon the phone rang and she ran the length of the house…to find that the call was from their son Tom in Luna City. He wanted to wish them both a happy anniversary and her a happy birthday, and he expressed great tactless surprise that Paul was away from home on this day of days. She loved Tom dearly, but he was no diplomat, and although she kept a cheerful mien through the conversation, she hung up in black depression. It had occurred to her briefly to have Tom call Paul, but it was not fair to involve the boy, and besides, he could not really afford a second interplanetary call. But an opportunity just out of reach is even worse than no opportunity at all.
Finally she decided that horniness was churning up her emotions unnecessarily. What she wanted, of course, was Paul, his lips and fingers and penis. She reckoned that the closest available substitute was to masturbate to the new tape he had given her. But her subconscious recalled her failure of the night before; she found herself taking the slidewalk to a pharmacy for a tube of Jumpstarts. It was a particularly hot day; the sun baked thoughts and feelings from her brain, and she was grateful to get back indoors again.
Ruby had never taken libido-enhancers in her life before, had never expected to need to. But she was in a go-to-hell mood, she was forty-five and alone on her anniversary, and she was determined to have herself a good time if it killed her. She took two Jumpstarts from the tube and washed them down with vodka. Then she got the new tape and took it into the bedroom, whistling softly. She stripped quickly. As she broke open the seal on the tape box, the drug smacked her, suddenly and hard: the hollow feeling in her stomach moved downward about a third of a meter, and she felt herself smiling a smile that Paul was going to regret having missed. She slid the tape home into the slot, acutely conscious of the sexual metaphor therein, and rummaged in her nighttable for her favorite vibrator, the one that strapped to her pubis and left both hands free. As she finished putting it on, she started to the window to polarize it. But when she was halfway there the TV screen lit up with the tape’s teaser, and she stopped in her tracks. Her first impulse was to laugh—when Paul heard about this, he would just die!—which sparked her second impulse, to burst into tears, but both of these were washed away in an elapsed time of about half a second by her third impulse, which was to switch on the vibrator and jump into bed. No, she corrected just in time, the other way round!
The actor who shared the screen with her doppelganger was an unknown. Not only had she never seen him before, the tape’s producers had not seen fit t
o use his face on the cover. Paul could not have known. But the resemblance that the star bore to Ruby was nothing compared to the resemblance that this rookie bore to Sam Hamill.
Jumpstart is a time-release drug. It keeps the user on a rising crest of excitement for anywhere from a half hour to an hour before it permits climax. The tape was perhaps twenty minutes along, in the midst of an especially delicious scenario, when Ruby thought she heard a noise outside her bedroom window. She cried out and tore her eyes from the screen, and was not sure whether or not she caught a flicker of a head pulling away from view. At once she put the tape on pause and darkened the screen, her pulse hammering in her ears, and decided she should grab a robe and then phone the police. No, dammit, the other way round! Occasionally the MD plates on the car in the garage attracted a junkie. She shut down the vibrator to hear better.
The front door chimed.
Awash in adrenaline, she grabbed her robe, got the family pistol and went to the door. She activated the camera—and this time she did burst out laughing. Standing on her doorstep, looking not in the least like a junkie or a man who had just been peering in a lady’s bedroom window, was Sam.
Either the drug is making me hear things, she decided, or Sam scared him away. She safetied the pistol and put it aside, and activated the door mike. “Hi, Sam. What’s up?”
“Hi, Ruby. Nothing much. Paul asked me to look in on you while he was away.”
He did, did he? she thought, and without thinking about what she was doing she shrugged on the robe and let him in.
She had forgotten what she must look and smell like. As he cleared the door he raised his eyebrows and said, “Oh, I—uh, I hope I’m not…disturbing you.”
She blushed and then recovered. “Not at all, Sam, really. What are you drinking?”
Melancholy Elephants Page 21