Love Conquers All

by Fred Saberhagen

  Fred snapped into a tenser, much lower stance, poised to attack, his right fist cocked near his hip, left arm curved before him in a blocking position. “Jo-dan!” The word came out in an explosive breath.

  George grunted: “Uhss!”

  Fred sprang forward and advanced in long deliberate strides, and with each stride one of his fists drove like a piston at George’s chin. George flowed backward easily, staying just ahead of the punches, pressing each of them aside at the last moment with an economical open-handed block perfectly timed against Fred’s extended arm. His short legs gracefully matched the speed and rhythm of the long ones driving at him. What he was doing looked quite easy. After he had gauged the first punch, George’s eyes moved downward between punches, appraising the movements of Fred’s feet and hips.

  With his fifth punch Fred halted and stood motionless, arm still extended. Instantly George came blurring back at him with a counterpunch that was evidently an expected part of the ritualized combat; he snapped it to a halt a centimeter from Fred’s unmoving chin.

  Now it was Fred’s turn to draw himself up straight, while George crouched for the attack.

  “Jo-dan!”

  “Uhss!”

  George charged. Somehow he made his shortness look like an advantage. The sleeves of his white jacket snapped audibly with each punch. Fred retreated stiffly and hurriedly, parrying with heavy blocks that looked comparatively awkward. When it came time for his counterattack he essayed an arm-grab and kick to the stomach which George did not attempt to avoid. The snapping kick just touched George’s jacket, as it was evidently supposed to do, but George still seemed to find it unsatisfactory. “Try again,” he ordered.

  Fred went through the grab-and-kick again. George said nothing. Art got the impression that Fred was failing his test.

  George exchanged bows with his opponent, and turned to Art. “Art, switch the andys on, will you? The console by the desk.”

  Art found the power switch. There came a whispering of cables up above, and the four androids started to descend, hanged men coming down for vengeance. Their wire cables lowered them slowly, as their still-blind faces turned this way and that and their plastic limbs began to quiver and stir. By the time the androids feet had touched down on polished wood, their legs had life and balance enough to let them stand.

  The cables detached themselves and were quickly reeled up out of the way by the overhead machinery. Four men of about average height were left standing in the middle of the floor. Their heads and hands and feet were tan, the rest of their bodies white, as though clothed in beltless karate outfits. At the crotch of each appeared a small, formalized codpiece-bulge. Their tan faces were featureless except for small recessed eye lenses and flattish dummy noses. Like superior creatures lost in their own proud thoughts, they stood with loosely hanging arms, ignoring the three real men who watched them.

  George, coming over to the console, called back to Fred: “Want to run through heian number four?”

  Fred shrugged. “Okay.” He frowned at the man-like figures, as if hoping to intimidate them.

  The four androids were warmed up and fully active now, and as George set up their controls they obediently arranged themselves in the center of the floor, facing one another like four cardplayers looking across a large square table. Each was crouched in the same attacking position that the men had used for the ritual sparring.

  “You don’t fight all four at once, do you?” Art asked. “I’ve seen karate on television a few times, but I confess I never paid too much attention.”

  George dismissed television karate with a mere lipcurl of contempt. “What speed do you want, Freddy? How about Three or Four?”

  Fred flushed slightly. He stood with his hands on his hips, swinging his legs again. “I can handle One-point-five, or Two.”

  After a moment George said: “Try Two-point-five, then,” and set a dial. “Better get a helmet.”

  “Okay.” Fred trotted to the locker room.

  ART was interested. “Then he is going to fight all four at once.”

  “Just in a kind of formalized way, a prearranged exercise. They come at you one at a time, and anybody who has some training and who has memorized the moves of the particular heian can do it. If he keeps his nerve. And if the speed’s set low enough. He wants to do it pretty fast.” For a moment George’s face said openly: It’s his funeral.

  Something about the fighting machines fascinated Art. The way they stood there on the polished wood like outsize chessmen, waiting for an act of human control to impel them to ritual battle. He asked: “Is it all right if I take a closer look?”

  George glanced at the controls. “Go ahead.”

  Art padded over to the androids. They did not seem to notice him, as they waited with impassive poise. If you order us to punch and kick you, Lord Man, so will we do. Art peered into dull lens-eyes and wondered what image they made of him. With a cautious finger he touched the plastic knuckles of one cocked tan fist. Not as hard as the proverbial rock, but not what one would call safely padded, either. The fingers of the hand were not really separate, but only indicated by grooves in the one plastic piece.

  “Feels as if it could kill you.”

  “Not likely, they don’t really hit like black belts.” George smiled briefly. “Does sting a little, though.”

  “You’ve been hit, then.”

  “Oh, sure. Not seriously. Yes, these things can be dangerous. We sometimes put big padded hands and feet on’em for novices. But if there’s no real element of danger when you train, you can’t really train properly”. He glanced toward the locker room. There came the sound of a toilet flushing. “Fred’s no novice. But he’s nowhere near as good as he’s been telling me he is. I just can’t hire him now.”

  “Then why—?” Art gestured at the androids.

  “Oh, I owe him a full fair tryout, I guess. And he’s got good potential if he’d settle down and practice every day.”

  Fred game back, fitting on something like a fencer’s mask. “I found a face protector. I like it bettern a whole helmet.”

  “All right,” said George, standing by the console.

  Fred moved in among the androids, and oriented himself carefully at the center of the space between them, where he was the focus of all their lenses. He drew a deep breath and then stood up relaxed. “Ready.”

  George touched a red control, and instantly bright red warnings glowed into life in the eyes of each mechanical figure. Somewhere a small repeater chime began to sound, one, two, three, four, five notes and the android at Fred’s left lunged at him with a punch too fast for Art to follow. Fred was ready though and his left arm snapped up to block the attack while his right hand came whipping around edgewise to hit home like a hatchet on the tan plastic neck. The aggressor machine was sent staggering back. Meanwhile another was already charging.

  Each android charged in turn, was beaten off, reset itself quickly, and in its next turn came back to the attack again, aiming another blow or kick at Fred, or grabbing at his jacket with clamplike finger less hands, About half a minute passed, while Fred piled up points.

  Fred spun from side to side, defending himself with vicious blocks, counterattacking with fists and feet and elbows. His face was rigid with concentration—or was it fear and hate he showed? He reached out and pulled down an android’s head, smashing the blank uncaring face against his driving knee. Again he spun around—not quite in time. A savage punch glanced off his skull, and down he went.

  Art moved with an electronic technician’s instinct for the power switch, but George’s hand was there already. For an instant the androids hesitated, looking for fair game. Then their eyes died and their bodies fell clattering to the wooden floor.

  Fred was rolling over on the floor, gasping and moaning, clutching at his head. Art and George went to him. He rolled just as Art bent down, and Art’s hand was besmeared with a drop of Fred’s blood.

  “They changed speed!” Fred sat up, dripping b
lood onto his white jacket. “I almost had’em, and then something went wrong . . . ah, triplets, that hurts! I swear they changed on me . . .” Fred was practically sobbing with exertion, pain, defeat.

  Having played chess against computers, Art thought that perhaps he understood Fred’s feelings. But since he had risked no blood against the chess computers, Art said only: “Lie still, I’ll get a towel.” Fred’s scalp was torn but still the damage didn’t look too serious.

  George stayed with the victim, gently getting his face-protector off, while Art went to the locker room and found a towel and also picked up a first aid kit that hung there on the wall. He had just gotten back to the disaster area when the street door of the dojo opened and a tall man came in. This man was well dressed in translucent shorts and business jacket, and had dark skin and Oriental eyes. As he was starting to bow to the flags he noticed what was happening, and immediately slipped off his shoes and came across the floor.

  “Have an accident?”

  “Oh, hello, Doc. Yes,” said George, getting to his feet. Fred also started to get up, then sat back on the floor as the man who had just come in bent to look at his torn scalp.

  Accepting the towel from Art, Doc dabbed around the wound. “This looks like it’ll need some glue. Ivor, fetch my bag in from the car, will you?”

  Another man, youngish and of undistinguished appearance, who had followed the doctor in and then had remained uncertainly near the door, gave a little salute with his fingers like a chauffeur or a servant and then ducked put.

  “Doc,” said George, “this is Art Rodney, my sister’s husband. Art, this is Dr. Hammad.”

  With a look as of recognition, the doctor nodded, and reached to shake Art’s hand.

  George said: “Art, when you have a chance, you can consult the doctor about your problem. He’s your man.”

  TO BE CONTINUED

  In his desperate attempt to save his wife from her own madness Art Rodney has just located a doctor—one who specializes in illegal parturitions.

  WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE

  By the mid-21st century the revolution in sexual morals had advanced to the point where chastity, and the repression or sublimation of sexual impulses were considered social offenses, if not actual crimes—but were still sought by many as secret pleasures. Most members of the Establishment belonged to the Church of Eros. Concurrently, crowding and hunger in the world had led to severe restrictions on reproduction even among the wealthy. A woman who had borne two children was required by law to have any subsequent pregnancies aborted.

  ART RODNEY, California electronics engineer and chessmaster, finds that his wife, RITA, has fled to Chicago to locate a midwifer and bear a third child rather than have the abortion required by law. Art pursues Rita to convince her that her plan is both wrong and dangerous before it is too late.

  Art’s transcontinental tube train is halted at the Mississippi. Under attack there by rioters is a monastery of Christians (a sect long in decline) where experiments on preserving life in freshly aborted fetuses are thought to be under way. Art helps a distraught girl named ROSAMOND JAMISON get on the train for Chicago.

  In Chicago, Rita’s brother GEORGE PARR, a karate master, and his wife, ANN, live like many other city dwellers in a complex of townhouses fortified against the random violence of the age. Art arrives to find that Rita has come and gone, leaving the two Rodney children with Ann, a militant free-birth advocate and Christian. Art and Ann futilely argue the right and wrong of compulsory abortion in an overcrowded world.

  FRED LOHMANN, Ann’s brother, awakens with his assigned roommate MARJORIE, in a Chicago Y (Young Persons’ Play Club), a strait-laced place where nightly sex activity is required of all. Fred is a karate student on his way to becoming an ape, the current term for one who roams the streets inflicting apparently pointless violence on strangers.

  MR. HALL, representing the Bureau of Family Planning, visits Art and is soon convinced that Art himself is innocent of conspiring toward an illegal birth. Hall brings him up to date: the very latest medical technology allows a just-removed fetus to be quick-frozen and later placed in an artificial womb where it will develop into a normal baby. (Some doctors are preserving fetuses on moral grounds, while others are performing these illegal operations for the money.)

  Art convinces the Parrs that he must be allowed to talk to Rita, face to face, George takes him on a tour of the city, supposedly to arrange the contact but really to confuse any Family Planning agents who might be watching them. High points on the tour are a stadium where the unemployed are paid to watch , baseball, and rioting threatens when the home team loses; and a slumburb tavern where Art hears a disheartening broadcast of world news.

  George takes Art to his karate dojo where Fred, who wants George to hire him as an instructor, has come to be evaluated. Fred fails in combat against humanoid karate-machines. One of George’s students, Dr. Hammad, is introduced to Art as the man who can arrange his meeting with Rita.

  “I HAPPENED to see your wife this morning,” the doctor was telling Art a few minutes later. “She’s in good health and good spirits.” The doctor was hanging his street clothes in a locker, getting ready for his private karate lesson. George was out in the main room of the dojo, discussing some refinement of mayhem with the bodyguard Ivor. From where Art stood in the locker room he could see Fred sitting out there too, the picture of defeat, head resting in his hands, blood drying brownish on his jacket. His brown belt had come unknotted.

  “Where is she?” Art asked.

  “Understand, I have no direct connection with the place she’s staying at. It’s been my experience, though, that they do a good job of taking care of guests.”

  “You have no connection? Aren’t you the one who’s intending to—?”

  “Oh, no, no, I’m not handling your wife’s case myself. No, the connection between me and George is too obvious, you see. In such cases a referral to another physician is more prudent.”

  “Who is he, then? When am I going to see her? When is the operation to be?”

  “It’ll be soon, I suppose. She’s young and healthy, and I would anticipate an uneventful parturition and freezing.”

  The casual words brought on an icy congealing in Art’s own bone marrow. He had no clear idea of what a three-months’ fetus actually looked like, but in his mind he saw a mindless finger of tissue, extracted like an appendix and then frozen into an icicle.

  He asked: “If a fetus is treated this way, then grown in one of those artificial wombs— what are its chances of becoming a normal child?”

  “Oh, very good. Excellent. Is that what’s worrying you? Don’t let it. Freezing an organism that small and then revivifying it is nothing, these days. And an artificial womb actually offers several advantages over a full-term pregnancy and birth. Development of the fetus can be watched day by day and the flow of nutrients perfectly controlled. It’s much more physically convenient for the mother, too, of course. I expect the FDA will release the wombs for unrestricted use with legitimate children soon; they’re probably only delaying because more women would want kids if pregnancy wasn’t such a bother.” Dr. Hammad pulled on his loose white karate trousers; he smiled reassuringly, as if he had just solved all Art’s problems for him.

  “That’s all very well, doctor. That helps to ease my mind of one kind of worry. But now what about my wife?”

  “Oh, this is safer for her than a normal birth would be. I understand she’s had two of those.”

  “I mean legally. Suppose she’s caught and convicted and sent to jail and sterilized against her will? What’s all that going to do to her?”

  “See here,” said Hammad sharply, “I thought you wanted this child. There are always certain risks involved, for everyone.”

  “I don’t want this frozen so-called child, Rita does. I want to talk to her, to reason with her, before it’s too late.”

  The doctor had turned his face away and was adjusting his jacket, slowly and meticulously. �
��You’ll have to see someone else about it, then, Mr. Rodney. I told you I’m not operating.”

  “I insist that I be allowed to see my wife, face to face!” Art was keeping his voice low, but he felt it becoming shaky with his anger.

  “Now you know where she can be found. And I’m quite ready to stir up trouble, if you refuse to help me talk to her!”

  Knotting a green belt at his waist, the doctor glared at Art as if he had found the wrong specimen laid out on a dissecting table. Art glared right back.

  “All right,” the doctor said at last. “I’ll find out if some arrangement can be made for her to phone you. Though it’s not wise, phones can be tapped. Where are you staying?”

  “No. I want to be able to talk with her in person. Alone.”

  Hammad was ready now, but he did not go out. “All right, all right. It’s against my judgment but since you insist on taking the risk I’ll see if there’s any way a meeting can be arranged.”

  “Soon. Very soon.”

  “All right. Where can you be reached by phone?”

  FRED Lohmann stood inside the Megiddo Bar & Coffee House, on the edge of a mean little urban BI district near State Street, not far from the Y where he was rooming. He was alone in a crowd. On a low dais some people with medieval musical instruments were twanging out a ballad about pure-hearted love, and a chill silence had crept into the huge dim room. The place was befogged with the exhaled smoke of several kinds of leaves and synthetic mixtures, tobacco being only one. At every table there were glassy staring eyes, and few of them seemed to be aimed at anybody else.

  Fred slouched his tall frame over the coffeebar, nursing what they called a small Turkish, which had coffee and other things mixed in it, along with a vague dull hope that someone might ask him about the little bandage on the side of his head. After all, mighty few men could have handled those andys at the speed they were set for today. Not one in a hundred, probably, even given the chance to train, could do it. Black belt George, of course. Third degree black belt, no less. He probably set them on speed One and knocked them down like bowling pins. Toward George, Fred felt envy, but there was no malice in it.