All the Lives He Led

by Frederik Pohl

  As the stages began to approach the final it got even worse than that. You see, it moved.

  Vassarian Ilyitch was too good a doctor to let what was left of Brian’s, now Gerda’s, musculature deteriorate still more through the effects of lying still in bed for so many weeks and months on end. To prevent that, his nurses and assistants festooned her body with clips and needles connected to timed power sources. These ticklers made the unused muscles twitch and contract to forestall the decay of inanition as she lay there.

  It looked—Well, it looked obscene, or worse.

  There was a word from childhood that came to mind as I played the coil of all this. The word was “yucky.” And yes, I went right on loving that heaving, twitching mass of yuck.

  But, thank something, those very yuckiest times did come to an end. And then there came the time when Dr. Nevirovski at last began to show some actual improvements coming from his work.

  Gerda began looking a bit better, then a little later quite a lot better, as new physical structures settled in place and old ones began to heal. The studded muscle-ticklers vanished as Gerda began to be able to exercise herself. Vestiges of makeup appeared on her face.

  I won’t say she suddenly turned into the rather pretty woman I had first seen, but she had certainly become not really repulsive, especially when the lighting was controlled. Dr. N adjudged her ambulatory, and she again had the freedom of his mansion.

  She used it, too, especially the gardens, the gym (cautiously), and the library.

  I was interested in the library part of Gerda’s expeditions because my love had never really struck me as a bookish person. (That’s not a criticism; I wasn’t one myself.) What I knew of the subjects that interested her came through Dr. Nevirovski’s always available cameras, constantly snapping single shots of Gerda, I guess to study how her limbs moved as she performed various tasks. Since the doctor had no particular interest in her intellectual development his pictures did not include much of the subject matter she was viewing, so I often had to stop-motion and enlarge to learn what she was reading about. I wasn’t surprised that the first things she read were accounts of her successful but costly Toronto exploit; and then, one after another, the accounts of all her other “actions,” as she liked to call them. Well, even an aging Broadway star likes to browse through her old reviews.

  But she didn’t stay among her old press notices. She spent long afternoons in the surgeon’s collections of historical works, with what seemed particular attention to the ecological crimes of the human race. The extermination of creatures like the Indian elephant and the passenger pigeons whose flocks once filled the skies of America from horizon to horizon. And the near duplication of that feat on the buffalo herds of the plains, shot by the tens of thousands and their tongues cut out for the luxury trade and the rest of them left to rot. And nearly all the anthropoids, and dozens and even hundreds of other species. And slaughters of that other always endangered species, the human race. And, of course, histories of slavery in America, of the subjugation of women in the Afghan state, of the peonage of the poor everywhere. I might have imagined that she was lining up targets for future actions, in case she ever got back in the terrorism business again, because it was evil treatment of whole classes of human beings that seemed to interest her the most here. But these crimes were almost all ancient ones. It was a little late to reprise John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, or the Mau Mau in Kenya.

  Gerda didn’t get a lot of Nevirovski’s attention just then. There was no longer a lot of delicate surgery involved, mostly just healing. What little sharp-edged work needed to be done was trivial stuff like digging out any surviving hair follicles in Gerda’s chest, limbs, and face so she wouldn’t become a sideshow bearded lady, and minor chores like reshaping a left earlobe that didn’t quite match the right. That sort of trivial stuff was turned over to Nevirovski’s principal assistant, a young black surgeon known to Gerda as Rollo, though when I checked the medical directories in the library I found that his last name was something else and he seemed to be related to some kind of African king. Nevirovski’s own skills were reserved for those who really needed them. And, of course, for those who could pay the considerable price. When Gerda used the household TV links to look in on the hospital wing she saw two sad fourteen-year-old girls being readied for harlotry service as a favor for the pimp who was Nevirovski’s oldest customer, a handful of rich but no longer young patients who wished to conceal that fact and—oh, look at that!—the naked frame of an old and very sick but very rich man, diagnosed by other authorities as possessed of an incurable and very soon terminal cancer, who had come to Nevirovski for a miracle and looked like he was getting it.

  But that sort of patient never got the run of the mansion. Gerda did.

  I’ve told this as though it was like some summer afternoon’s idle viewing. Well, it wasn’t really like that at all. To get this far filled up long days of opticle-using, and it was as little as that only because I skipped through as much as I could.

  But when I got to the point where Gerda began to appear relatively decent I stopped for a time. There was more, much more, on the coil and from that point on, I was sure, Gerda would be looking more and more rewardingly like Gerda. But it would have to wait. By the time I was that far my opticle eye was sore and blurry and my head was pounding.

  On the good side it had kept me from worrying about unanswerable questions, and even almost stopped the brooding about dead beloveds. Of course I hadn’t forgotten that my beloved was dead, and that I was responsible for it. But with these startling new pictures to look at it only occasionally lanced through my heart and wasn’t still a permanent agonizingly bitter pain.

  And I certainly hadn’t given a thought to the other coil the professor had given me, or to the new career as a Twenty-first Century Lola Montez that he wanted me to start.

  30

  PRESENTING MY GERDA

  The lawyers showed up with their papers and I signed them. Now Shao-pin was my attorney in fact, which meant that she was authorized to receive and disburse and invest funds and otherwise transact necessary business, including the negotiation and payment of all appropriate taxes, of all my receipts whether in the form of cash, of shares of stock, or of commercial paper in any form. I shook my head as I signed them and passed them back to her. “I hope you know what all that means, because I don’t,” I told her.

  She smiled. “All Greek to me,” she said, “but that’s what we’ve got accountants for.”

  I blinked at her. “We do?”

  This time she laughed out loud. “The colonel said a lot of this was going to worry you. ‘Tell him it’s your department and you’ll take care of it,’ he said to me. I will, too, and yes, I’ve hired accountants and lawyers. Next week I’ll be interviewing investment advisors,” she finished, and kissed the top of my head and was gone.

  I took a quick shower, slipped into the slacks with the deep pockets—patting them to make sure my increasing quantity of contraband was still safely stowed, and was almost out the door when I remembered that I had another coil in that pocket that I hadn’t really looked at, the one the professor had given me. I popped the coil into the earpiece, and suddenly I seemed to be slowly flying over a ruined city as a voice said, “—was the city scheduled for dropping the second bomb. But weather conditions there ruled out the primary target.” The name of the city, or former city, seemed to be Nagasaki. I recognized it as something that I was pretty sure was Japanese, one of the first cities to get creamed by a nuclear weapon—a relatively feeble one, of course, because that had been back in the mid-Twentieth Century, though as I looked at the ruination below I couldn’t think of it as weak.

  I tried again and got another ruined cityscape, but one that had no features I recognized, and the soundtrack was in a language I didn’t know. The third try was a forest. It seemed to be springtime, the leaves on the trees fairly small, and one or two trees—of the hundreds visible—were bearing blossoms. The trees looked he
althy enough, but the ground was dug up in shallow pits as far as the eye could see, and the commentary, accompanied by mournful music, was in a language I couldn’t understand. But as I puzzled over it there was one word, said with great, sad emphasis, that sounded like “cat in,” and when I fed it to my opticle’s search program they came up with a Polish forest where a lot of Polish army officers had been murdered and buried in unmarked graves. It apparently had happened around the same middle of that bloody Twentieth Century, but I didn’t stay with the search long enough to find out exactly when, or why.

  In fact it seemed that nearly everything on this coil had to do with substantial numbers of people getting killed. There had been, I remembered, a certain amount of that sort of thing in Gerda’s notes earlier, but not anywhere nearly as many examples or reported in as much detail as here.

  But I was tiring of scenes of mass death. I was entitled to something pleasant, not to say delightful, and what could be more so than just a few minutes of looking at the love of my life? Especially when the surgeons had finished with their work of making her even more attractive.

  When I found the right time frame it was exactly what I had hoped for.

  When old Vassarian and his teams of anesthesiologists and surgery nurses and organ donors got through revising Gerda she looked pretty good. She wasn’t really beautiful, no, but she was definitely nice enough looking to interest any normal man. And she was something else. She was young.

  Vassarian hadn’t preserved her appropriate status of maturity. That is, he didn’t make her thirty-something-ish, as the former Brian Bossert had rightfully been, he made her a barely legal eighteen-year-old, almost jailbait—that is, he made her the vintage of human female that nearly every human male would like to find dropped in his bed some lucky Christmas Eve. Especially, I believe, if that male human himself is pushing seventy but pumped full of goatish androgens. Like Vassarian Nevirovski. So, she said in a note on the coil, when all the scars had healed, and she was beginning to get good at acting the part of her new role, Vassarian showed up one evening at the door of her tiny room after dinner with a spray of roses and a bottle of wine and asked, politely enough, if she would care to give her new plumbing a test hop.

  She did it.

  Why not? She was curious, too. Maybe she thought it would be interesting to find out what it had been like for the various women that the unaltered Brian Bossert had tried out over the years as opportunities occurred. So she sniffed the roses, and took a good hit of the wine, and then let him do her.

  It wasn’t bad for her, she said, even that very first time. On the other hand, it wasn’t particularly great, either, because Vassarian, the dedicated and compulsive artist that he was, had gone to the trouble of capping off her private parts with a working hymen, along with all her other bits and pieces of femaleness. She wasn’t grateful for that final touch of artistry. When he gave himself the pleasure of busting it open that night, it hurt.

  Later on, it didn’t hurt anymore, though, and—why should I lie when Gerda didn’t?—it got to be fun for her, too. For a man of at least seventy (who could know how often he’d rejuvenated himself?) old Nevirovski was pretty spry.

  That was the beginning of a new life for Gerda.

  What kind of a life was that? Well, I don’t know what Gerda called it, but I had heard my own mother use a descriptive term—about someone else, of course—when I was no more than ten years old. It had required the questioning of all the kids I knew and the piecing together of all their scraps of information to find its meaning. Gerda Fleming, once the nightmarish terror of evildoers everywhere, had become a Kept Woman.

  How did I feel about this development?

  Oh, I hated it. But, to tell the truth, I didn’t hate it all that much. What I was seeing had happened a long, long time ago. Gerda wasn’t two-timing me. Gerda didn’t know I existed, and if she had magically seen some kind of picture of me at that time, what would she have seen?

  A little kid, that’s what she would have seen, because that’s what I was in the year when Brian Bossert finished being turned into a woman. Actually, I have to say that what Gerda was putting herself through at that time was really kind of touching. It was not just the lopping off of unwanted anatomy bits and their replacement with other varieties that made her so utterly female. Quite a lot of learning was involved. After watching some people at a party having a good time the cameras caught her complaining to Rollo Mbwirda, the surgeon’s main assistant, “Oh, my God, I think I’m going to have to learn to dance backward, like a girl!” In fact, her long hours spent on the tricky business of learning to be girlish were kind of sweet. I think I played those parts of her coil more often than any others, especially when missing her got particularly painful. Things the cameras caught her doing, or telling someone like Rollo what she had been doing, tongue clasped between her teeth, working at the tricky business of putting on a little lip gloss to make her mouth look sexier and shaving her armpits to make the rest of her body look nakeder and, oh, all kinds of things. Like pretending she was having a menstrual period now and then. Not to mention doing weird personal things that no man would ever do, like using a tissue to dab herself dry after peeing.

  Indeed, she was getting good enough at being a woman that Nevirovski began letting her join his other guests now and then for those dinner parties. And what she hadn’t expected—and neither had I—was that she was beginning to enjoy it.

  In the real world—not in the planet of bliss that I had had with Gerda, nor yet in the world of love and pain evoked by Gerda’s coil—people were still dying of the Flu. Nevertheless the death rate was dropping every day. So the world had begun to celebrate. Some hundreds of its people, at noon, three, and six PM each day, chose to do it by attending the freak show in the arena, which consisted of me.

  I hadn’t thought I was going to like being the Lola Montez of the late Twenty-first Century. I got that right. I didn’t.

  That first session had been a nightmare. It was a good thing I had taken the professor’s advice and signed Shao-pin on as my manager, because she had written the contract for my services. It wasn’t just the money, though the amount of it was astonishing. I had the right to refuse to answer any questions that were too explicitly intimate. Which a large proportion of them were. It astonished me that so many people wanted me to describe Gerda’s sexual organs, breasts, nipples, and pubic hair.

  Of course I could have done that. I knew all those answers. Those were the sorts of memories I played back in my mind every night as I was waiting for the pills that Shao-pin gave me to put me to sleep. But I deeply, truly hated being asked such things in front of a crowd. I often refused to answer. Then I found a better way to handle it. Asked about some feature of Gerda’s anatomy, I would pick out a woman in the first row to point to and say, “Probably a lot like hers.”

  All this might sound as though things were in some ways going well for me. In an objective sense, maybe they were. Certainly, the money was—what was that word I used—astonishing.

  Paragraph one of the contract Shao-pin had written and made the Giubileo sign obligated them to pay my Indenture off and provide me with a €100,000 advance before I spoke a single public word. That was a pretty nice thing for my parents, back in the refugee housing in Staten Island. I gave the money to them. I didn’t check the rate of exchange, but it had to give them at least a million or two of those feeble American dollars—perhaps enough to make up for the time when their screeching, giggling neighbor had banged on their door and summoned them to the newscast on their shared screen so they could see what their rotten son had been doing over in Pompeii.

  So I gave the crowds what they had paid for, and then every day I retired to my lonely room—make that rooms, as many as I wanted, and furnished in whatever I wanted—to play the coils again and wish again that I was dead.

  Brian was still in his teens by the time he began going after bigger game.

  His first grown-up action was in, or against
, New York City, to punish the city for its sins, whatever they were. Sixteen-year-old Brian stole a liquefied natural gas tanker truck in New Jersey, drove it halfway across the George Washington Bridge, and abandoned it there for a motorcycle the panicked rider had deserted—having first opened all the valves that released the gas. Then, safely on the New York side, he found a McDonald’s with a good view of the bridge. There he enjoyed an Egg McMuffin and a couple of cups of coffee while he waited for the fairly large number of police who had flocked to the scene to try to figure out a good solution.

  They never did.

  When the blast did at last blow, it took with it the lives of six firemen, four civilians who had deserted their stuck cars for a better view, and two policemen. It made all the newscasts, too.

  After that Gerda kept on running through her long list of other crimes, nearly all of them before my time, or even before I was born. Some of them I had heard of, like the bomb that blew up the New York subway tunnel under the middle of the East River. Others were news to me.

  And then, of course, there was the big one. The one that, at least temporarily ended his (her!) terrorist career.

  Toronto.

  Toronto had happened well before my concern about general world events, but by the time I reached the age of fascination with horrible news I began hearing about it. Gerda showed us the web stories about it.

  The Toronto thing happened when four men and one woman, led by the notorious terrorist Brian Bossert, overpowered the crew and drove the domestic heating oil tanker Jewel of Ipanema at its maximum speed of twenty-six knots directly onto the Toronto shoreline. Both the inner and outer hulls were breached by the impact. More than fifteen thousand tons of light oil spilled out onto the buildings of the shore and into the lake itself. It was quickly set afire by the collision. All of the terrorists were trapped in the fire (the news stories said) and their bodies were never found. Since Lake Ontario was Toronto’s only source for its domestic water system, the city was immediately paralyzed. Its inhabitants were evacuated, and the city was deserted for more than fifty days until the bulk of the spill was siphoned away and the rest largely dissipated though natural processes. Torontonians bought more than 160,000 copies of a T-shirt that said, “Why Us? It Should Have Been Detroit.”