Collected Short Fiction, page 652
“Don’t—don’t—” Barrett grunted. “I won’t let you—”
“I don’t want to do this,” Hahn said.
He pushed again. Barrett felt himself buckling under the impact. He dug his hands as hard as he could into Hahn’s shoulders, and tried to shove the other man backward into the room, but Hahn held firm and all of Barrett’s energy was converted into a backward thrust rebounding on himself. He lost control of his crutch, and it slithered out from under his arm. For one agonizing moment Barrett’s full weight rested on the crushed uselessness of his left foot, and then, as though his limbs were melting away beneath him, he began to sink toward the floor. He landed with a reverberating crash.
Quesada, Altman, and Latimer came rushing in. Barrett writhed in pain on the floor. Hahn stood over him, looking unhappy, his hands locked together.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You shouldn’t have tried to muscle me like that.”
Barrett glowered at him. “You were traveling in time, weren’t you? You can answer me now!”
“Yes,” Hahn said at last. “I went Up Front.”
An hour later, after Quesada had pumped him with enough neural depressants to keep him from jumping out of his skin, Barrett got the full story. Hahn hadn’t wanted to reveal it so soon, but he had changed his mind after his little scuffle.
It was all very simple. Time travel now worked in both directions. The glib, impressive noises about the flow of entropy had turned out to be just noises.
“How long has this been known?” Barrett asked.
“At least five years. We aren’t sure yet exactly when the breakthrough came. After we’re finished going through all the suppressed records of the former government—”
“The former government?”
Hahn nodded. “The revolution came in January. Not really a violent one, either. The syndicalists just mildewed from within, and when they got the first push they fell over.”
“Was it mildew?” Barrett asked, coloring. “Or termites? Keep your metaphors straight.”
Hahn glanced away. “Anyway, the government fell. We’ve got a provisional liberal regime in office now. Don’t ask me much about it. I’m not a political theorist. I’m not even an economist. You guessed as much.”
“What are you; then?”
“A policeman,” Hahn said. “Part of the commission that’s investigating the prison system of the former government. Including this prison.”
Barrett looked at Quesada, then at Hahn. Thoughts were streaming turbulently through him, and he could not remember when he had last been so overwhelmed by events. He had to work hard to keep from breaking into the shakes again. His voice quavered a little as he said, “You came back to observe Hawksbill Station, right? And you went Up Front tonight to tell them what you saw here. You think we’re a pretty sad bunch, eh?”
“You’ve all been under heavy stress here,” Hahn said. “Considering the circumstances of your imprisonment—”
Quesada broke in. “If there’s a liberal government in power, now, and it’s possible to travel both ways in time, then am I right in assuming that the Hawksbill prisoners are going to be sent Up Front?”
“Of course,” said Hahn. “It’ll be done as soon as possible. That’s been the whole purpose of my reconnaissance mission. To find out if you people were still alive, first, and then to see what shape you’re in, how badly in need of treatment you are. You’ll be given every available benefit of modern therapy, naturally. No expense spared to—”
Barrett scarcely paid attention to Hahn’s words. He had been fearing something like this all night, ever since Altman had told him Hahn was monkeying with the Hammer, but he had never fully allowed himself to believe that it could really be possible.
He saw his kingdom crumbling, now.
He saw himself returned to a world he could not begin to comprehend—a lame Rip van Winkle, coming back after twenty years.
He saw himself leaving a place that had become his home.
Barrett said tiredly, “You know, some of the men aren’t going to be able to adapt to the shock of freedom. It might just kill them to be dumped into the real world again. I mean advanced psychos—Valdosto, and such.”
“Yes,” Hahn said. “I’ve mentioned them in my report.”
“It’ll be necessary to get them ready for a return in gradual stages. It might take several years to condition them to the idea. It might even take longer than that.”
“I’m no therapist,” said Hahn. “Whatever the doctors think is right for them is what’ll be done. Maybe it will be necessary to keep them here. I can see where it would be pretty potent to send them back, after they’ve spent all these years believing there’s no return.”
“More than that,” said Barrett. “There’s a lot of work that can be done here. Scientific works. Exploration. I don’t think Hawksbill Station ought to be closed down.”
“No one said it would be. We have every intention of keeping it going. But not as a prison. The prison concept is out.”
“Good,” Barrett said. He fumbled for his crutch, found it, and got heavily to his feet. Quesada moved toward him as though to steady him, but Barrett shook him off. “Let’s go outside,” he said.
They left the building. A gray mist had come in over the Station, and a fine drizzle had begun to fall. Barrett looked around at the scattering of huts. At the ocean, dimly visible to the east in the faint moonlight. He thought of Charley Norton and the party that had gone on the annual expedition to the Inland Sea. That bunch was going to be in for a real surprise, when they got back here in a few weeks and discovered that everybody was free to go home.
Very strangely, Barrett felt a sudden pressure forming around his eyelids, as of tears trying to force their way out into the open.
Then he turned to Hahn and Quesada. In a low voice he said, “Have you followed what I’ve been trying to tell you? Someone’s got to stay here and ease the transition for the sick men who won’t be able to stand the shock of return. Someone’s got to keep the base running. Someone’s got to explain things to the new men who’ll be coming back here, the scientists.”
“Naturally,” Hahn said.
“The one who does that—the one who stays behind—I think it ought to be someone who knows the Station well, someone who’s fit to return Up Front, but who’s willing to make the sacrifice and stay. Do you follow me? A volunteer.” They were smiling at him now. Barrett wondered if there might not be something patronizing about those smiles. He wondered if he might not be a little too transparent. To hell with both of them, he thought. He sucked the Cambrian air into his lungs until his chest swelled grandly.
“I’m offering to stay,” Barrett said in a loud tone. He glared at them to keep them from objecting. But they wouldn’t dare object, he knew. In Hawksbill Station, he was the king. And he meant to keep it that way. “I’ll be the volunteer,” he said. “I’ll be the one who stays.”
He looked out over his kingdom from the top of the hill.
Bride Ninety-One
She was a typical blushing bride—though she blushed into the far ultraviolet!
It was a standard six-month marriage contract. I signed it, and Landy signed it and we were man and wife, for the time being. The registrar clicked and chuttered and disgorged our license. My friends grinned and slapped me on the back and bellowed congratulations. Five of Landy’s sisters giggled and hummed and went through complete spectral changes. We were all very happy.
“Kiss the bride!” cried my friends and her sisters.
Landy slipped into my arms. It was a good fit; she was pliable and slender, and I engulfed her, and the petals of her ingestion-slot fluttered prettily as I pressed my lips against them. We held the pose for maybe half a minute. Give her credit: she didn’t flinch. On Landy’s world they don’t kiss, not with their mouths, at least, and I doubt that she enjoyed the experience much. But by the terms of our marriage contract we were following Terran mores. That has to be decided in advance, in these interworld marriages. And here we kiss the bride; so I kissed the bride. My pal Jim Owens got carried away and scooped up one of Landy’s sisters and kissed her. She gave him a shove in the chest that knocked him across the chapel. It wasn’t her wedding, after all.
The ceremony was over, and we had our cake and hallucinogens, and about midnight someone said, “We ought to give the honeymooners some privacy.”
So they all cleared out and Landy and I started our wedding night.
We waited until they were gone. Then we took the back exit from the chapel and got into a transport capsule for two, very snug, Landy’s sweet molasses fragrance pungent in my nostrils, her flexible limbs coiled against mine, and I nudged a stud and we went floating down Harriman Channel at three hundred kilometers an hour. The eddy currents weren’t bad, and we loved the ride. She kissed me again; she was learning our ways fast. In fifteen minutes we reached our programmed destination and the capsule took a quick left turn, squirted through an access sphincter, and fastened itself to the puckered skin of our hotel. The nose of the capsule produced the desired degree of irritation; the skin parted and we shot into the building. I opened the capsule and helped Landy out, inside our room. Her soft golden eyes were shimmering with merriment and joy. I slapped a privacy seal on the wall-filters.
“I love you,” she said in more-or-less English.
“I love you,” I told her in her own language.
She pouted at me. “This is a Terran marriage, remember?”
“So it is. So it is. Champagne and caviar?”
“Of course.”
I programmed for it, and the snack came rolling out of the storage unit, ice-cold and inviting. I popped the cork and sprinkled lemon juice on the caviar, and we dined. Fish eggs and overripe grape juice, nothing more, I reminded myself.
After that we activated the periscope stack and stared up through a hundred storys of hotel at the stars. There was a lover’s moon in the sky that night, and also one of the cartels had strung a row of beady jewels across about twenty degrees of arc, as though purely for our pleasure. We held hands and watched.
After that we dissolved our wedding clothes.
And after that we consummated our marriage.
You don’t think I’m going to tell you about that, do you? Some things are still sacred, even now. If you want to find out how to make love to a Suvornese, do as I did and marry one. But I’ll give you a few hints about what it’s like. Anatomically, it’s homologous to the process customary on Terra, so far as the relative roles of male and female go. That is, man gives, woman receives, in essence. But there are differences, pretty major ones, in position, texture, sensation, and response. Of course there are. Why marry an alien, otherwise?
I confess I was nervous, although this was my ninety-first wedding night. I had never married a Suvornese before. I hadn’t been to bed with one, either, and if you stop to reflect a little on Suvornese ethical practices you’ll see what a damn-fool suggestion that was. I had studied a Suvornese marriage manual, but as any adolescent on any world quickly realizes, translating words and tridim prints into passionate action is trickier than it seems, the first time.
Landy was very helpful, though. She knew no more about Terran males than I did about Suvornese females, of course, but she was eager to learn and eager to see that I did all the right things. So we managed excellently well. There’s a knack to it. Some men have it, some don’t. I do.
We made love a good deal that night, and in the morning we breakfasted on a sun-washed terrace overlooking a turquoise pool of dancing amoeboids, and later in the day we checked out and capsuled down to the spaceport to begin our wedding journey.
“Happy?” I asked my bride.
“Very,” she said. “You’re my favorite husband already.”
“Were any of the others Terrans?”
“No, of course not.”
I smiled. A husband likes to know he’s been the first.
At the spaceport, Landy signed the manifest as Mrs. Paul Clay, which gave me great pleasure, and I signed beside her, and they scanned us and let us go aboard. The ship personnel beamed at us in delight. A handsome indigo-skinned girl showed us to our cabin and wished us a good trip so amiably that I tried to tip her. I caught her credit-counter as she passed me, and pushed the dial up a notch. She looked aghast and set it right back again. “Tipping’s forbidden, sir!”
“Sorry. I got carried away.”
“Your wife’s so lovely. Is she Honirangi?”
“Suvornese.”
“I hope you’re very happy together.”
We were alone again. I cuddled Landy up against me. Interworld marriages are all the rage nowadays, of course, but I hadn’t married Landy merely because it was a fad. I was genuinely attracted to her, and she to me. All over the galaxy people are contracting the weirdest marriages just to say that they’ve done it—marrying Sthenics, Gruulers, even Hhinamor. Really grotesque couplings. I don’t say that the prime purpose of a marriage is sex, or that you necessarily have to marry a member of a species with which a physical relationship is easy to maintain. But there ought to be some kind of warmth in a marriage. How can you feel real love for a Hhinamor wife who is actually seven pale blue reptiles permanently enclosed in an atmosphere? At least Landy was mammalian and humanoid. A Suvornese-Terran mating would of course be infertile, but I am a conventional sort of person at heart and try to avoid committing abominations; I am quite willing to leave the task of continuing the species to those whose job is reproduction, and you can be sure that even if our chromosomes were mutually congruent I would never have brought the disgusting subject up with Landy. Marriage is marriage, reproduction is reproduction, and what does one have to do with the other, anyway?
During the six subjective weeks of our journey, we amused ourselves in various ways aboard the ship. We made love a good deal, of course. We went gravity-swimming and played paddle-polo in the star lounge. We introduced ourselves to other newlywed couples, and to a newlywed super-couple consisting of three Banamons and a pair of Ghinoi.
And also Landy had her teeth transplanted, as a special surprise for me.
Suvornese have teeth, but they are not like Terran teeth, as why should they be? They are elegant little spiny needles mounted on rotating bases, which a Suvornese uses to impale his food while he rasps at it from the rear with his tongue. In terms of Suvornese needs they are quite functional, and in the context of her species Landy’s teeth were remarkably attractive, I thought. I didn’t want her to change them. But she must have picked up some subtle hint that I found her teeth anti-erotic, or something. Perhaps I was radiating an underlying dislike for that alien dental arrangement of hers even while I was telling myself on the conscious level that they were lovely. So she went to the ship’s surgeon and got herself a mouthful of Terran teeth.
I didn’t know where she went. She vanished after breakfast, telling me she had something important to attend to. All in ignorance, I donned gills and went for a swim while Landy surrendered her pretty teeth to the surgeon. He cleaned out the sockets and implanted a rooting layer of analogous gum-tissue. He chiseled new receptor sockets in this synthetic implant. He drill-tailored a set of donor teeth to fit, and slipped them into the periodontal membranes, and bonded them with a quick jab of homografting cement. The entire process took less than two hours. When Landy returned to me, the band of colorvariable skin across her forehead was way up toward the violet, indicating considerable emotional disturbance, and I felt a little edgy about it.
She smiled. She drew back the petals of her ingestion-slot. She showed me her new teeth.
“Landy! What the hell—!”
Before I could check myself, I was registering shock and dismay from every pore. And Landy registered dismay at my dismay. Her forehead shot clear past the visible spectrum, bathing me in a lot of ultra-violet that distressed me even though I couldn’t see it, and her petals drooped and her eyes glistened and her nostrils clamped together.
“You don’t like them?” she asked.
“I didn’t expect—you took me by surprise—”
“I did it for you!”
“But I liked your old teeth,” I protested.
“No. Not really. You were afraid of them. I know how a Terran kisses. You never kissed me like that. Now I have beautiful teeth. Kiss me, Paul.”
She trembled in my arms. I kissed her.
We were having our first emotional crisis. She had done this crazy thing with her teeth purely to please me, and I wasn’t pleased, and now she was upset. I did all the things I could to soothe her, short of telling her to go back and get her old teeth again. Somehow that would have made matters worse.
I had a hard time getting used to Landy with Terran choppers in her dainty little mouth. She had received a flawless set, of course, two gleaming ivory rows, but they looked incongruous in her ingestion slot, and I had to fight to keep from reacting negatively every time she opened her mouth. When a man buys an old Gothic cathedral, he doesn’t want an architect to trick it up with wiggling bioplast inserts around the spire. And when a man marries a Suvornese, he doesn’t want her to turn herself piecemeal into a Terran. Where would it end? Would Landy now decorate herself with a synthetic navel, and have her breasts shifted about, and get the surgeon to make a genital adjustment so that—
Well, she didn’t. She wore her Terran teeth for about ten shipboard days, and neither of us took any overt notice of them, and then very quietly she went back to the surgeon and had him give her a set of Suvornese dentals again. It was only money, I told myself. I didn’t make any reference to the switch, hoping to treat the episode as a temporary aberration that now was ended. Somehow I got the feeling that Landy still thought she ought to have Terran teeth. But we never discussed it, and I was happy to see her looking Suvornese again.
You see how it is, with marriage? Two people try to please one another, and they don’t always succeed, and sometimes they even hurt one another in the very attempt to please. That’s how it was with Landy and me. But we were mature enough to survive the great tooth crisis. If this had been, say, my tenth or eleventh marriage, it might have been a disaster. One learns how to avoid the pitfalls as one gains experience.
