“Maybe I l-love you so much that it—it sort of magicked us. I don’t know.” She was sobbing. “Maybe jus ‘nother c-cosmic joke and n-not funny.”
“How’d you find out?”
“I— I m-missed my period last week and—”
“You have them?” he broke in.
“All females do… and usually I’m like clockwork. So I went to m-my mother—my real doctor mother—and she made some tests and… and you know now, and I’m scared to death. I don’t know what to do.”
Winter let out a sustained yell. The psycat scatted off his lap.
“Rogue! The neighbors!”
“One night. Knocked up in one glorious night. By God, we’ll beat the insects yet! Come here, Starmom. Come on!” He enfolded her. “If it’s a boy he’ll be named after both my fathers, Te Jay. If it’s a girl she’ll be named after all of you, Demure Delicious Double-jointed Gay Deceiver Demi. We’ll call her Decalcomania for short. There’s only one problem,” he added, “owing to a surfeit of tradition.”
“What?”
“The sunbursts. He’ll be King Te Jay Uinta, eventually. Is it fair to put a boy through the royal cheek-bit?” His hand reached in the automatic tic for the spectacles he wasn’t wearing.
“That isn’t the problem.”
“Think not?”
“I know not. The problem is, will he be a boy? Will she be a girl? What will the hybrid be?”
“What the hell do I care? He, she, or it will be ours, and that’s enough for me. You know, I thought you’d put on weight.”
“After a week? Don’t be silly.”
“You will, you will, and then—Hoop-la!”
“I thought you’d be scared, too.”
“Are you mad? I’ve spent my life synergizing other people’s patterns. Now we’ve got our own personal, home-grown, brand-new pattern to play with, Ms. Winter.”
She was laughing and crying. “Rogue Winter, this is the damnedest marriage proposal I’ve ever had, and I’ve had plenty. At the office the betting was that you’d wind up marrying a high-fashion model.”
“Yeh, I know that zokamamie syndrome. The sophisticated beauty who turns everybody’s head in the ski lodge. All girls are haunted by her. Usually she’s named Mystique d’Charisma.”
“Do be serious, Rogue.”
“What’s to be serious? Look at it. Odessa Partridge has cooled it with the Bologna fuzz. The Maori wipe is out, now that I been kinged. And the kid—whatever kind of weirdo we produce—will be a prince or a princess. This is a jaunty prologue to a jolly adventure.”
“It’s the weird that’s frightening me. It’s all new, the first time, so even my mother can’t advise me, and I do need advice… desperately. Please help me find it, Rogue.”
He nodded and thought hard for a long time, long enough for the smitten psycat to nestle back into his lap. “Tomas Young,” he said with decision. “He’s your man.”
“A doctor?”
“Better. Tomas is director of the Exobiology department at the university. He’s the mavin on the nature of all possible life-forms and their genesis. I did a piece once on the crazy life-constructs he and his crazy computer created. If you boned up on me to hook me, like you said, you probably read it.”
“Will you ask him to advise me?”
“He’ll be delighted, darling. Tom loves a challenge, and this one’s a beauty. I’ll see him first thing in the morning and set it up. Oh, one warning: Tom’s a trustable gent, in case you have to strip for an examination, but watch out for that computer. It’s a goddam letch.”
“Ssss.”
“So now let’s go to bed, love. Please?”
“I thought you’d go home to unpack.”
“Why d’you think I came straight here from the port?”
“Unga-unga-unga.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“Ssss in Maori,” and she began to transform into her idea of the hamstringing zapette.
CHAPTER SIX
More Deceivers
Love no man; trust no man: speak ill of no man to his face, nor well of any man behind his back. Spread yourself upon his bosom publicly, whose heart you would eat in private.
—Ben Jonson
I fell in love with “Soho” Young, which was the name Tomas used when I first met him, the time my roommate wanted to lose her virginity. We were Seven Sister freshmen, from “good” families, and I was a virgin, too, but never admitted it. Alas, well-brought-up boys never try to go all the way with nice girls, and that’s all we ever got to meet.
We were in the Jungle-Mother exploring the single bars and drinking too much and too damn clumsy and shy to pick up a man or even recognize that we were the pickups occasionally. Couple of nice, naïve kids full of rude health and clean living.
Anyway, Marj was determined to get rid of “it” at a posh stud place advertised in a handout offered to us in the street, but we’d run out of large money. However, we hadn’t run out of bravado so we decided to hock something. I knew about as much about hockshops as I did about men but off we went, the two vivandieres, and luck, fate, or The Great Pawnbroker in the Sky led us to Soho Young’s Loan Shop just as he was closing up.
He looked like Ivan the Terrible and later I wondered whether Young was a shortening of some impossible Mongol name. He wasn’t too enthusiastic about this late rush, but we explained that we had to get back to school that night and had run out of money for fare and could he please help us raise fifty. Soho cocked an eye and said, “Fifty? You Chicago? Northwestern?”
I cleverly covered up. “No, Mr. Young. Maine. University of.”
“Must be going by boat,” Soho said. “What’ve you got?”
We offered our “sensible” jewelry, the little that our families would let us wear, and Soho disdained everything but touched my wristwatch with a finger. “That’s an antique Patek. Man’s. Your father’s?”
“Yes, Mr. Young.”
“He shouldn’t let you wear it. Too good for a freshman.”
Marj blurted, “How’d you know we—”
Soho’s knowing eye cut her off. “I can lend you fifty on this,” he told me. He slid a ticket across the counter and showed me how to fill it in and instructed me how to reclaim the watch. He handed me two twenties and a ten. “All gig?”
I nodded. He hesitated, inspected us glancingly, then permitted a crease to turn up a corner of his mouth. He opened a tiny cabinet behind the cash register. It was full of medicines and he took out a small white box and gave it to me. “Bonus,” he said. “Cordial customer relations.”
“Thank you, Mr. Young.” I was bewildered. “What is it?”
“Seasick pills,” he said and hustled us out of the Loan Shop. On the street I opened the box. It contained four “senza’s,” Venucci oral contraceptive pills. How in God’s name did that amazing man know? I gave the pills to Marj while I gave my heart to Soho Young.
I redeemed the watch the next time I was in the Jungle and only much later discovered that Soho had done something very generous; he’d had it cleaned and renovated for me. When I tried to thank him he brushed me off. “Didn’t do it for you, did it for the watch. You’re just a kid; you don’t realize how precious an old watch is. They got to be treasured like rare paintings, so don’t be wearing it when you’re back-and-forth-handing on the goddam tennis team.” That was typical of him; he’d quietly checked me out and knew all about me.
There isn’t much difference between pawnbrokers and psychiatrists. Soho knew all about everything, which made him the kind of father that a girl dreams of; experienced, sophisticated, never at a loss, never judging, never without a wry sense of humor. I infested his place every chance I got and spent hours watching and listening and receiving an education whenever Soho was there, which wasn’t often; he seemed to leave most of the business to his clerks.
I remember that crease quirking in the corner of his mouth when he said that he’d have preferred to send me to Yale. My school was, in h
is opinion, a fag-dyke school, and Matthew Vassar’s beer had been undrinkable. To cure me of piss-elegant campus culture, Soho administered strong doses of hockshop reality.
For instance, there was a bona fide Indian princess with the red dot on her forehead, the sari, and practically everything else except “Indian Love Lyrics” by Amy Woodforde-Finden. She pulled into the Loan Shop one afternoon wearing a brand-new mink coat. Without a word she took it off and put it on the counter. Soho glanced at it and handed her fifteen hundred. She left without counting the cash.
“She comes in every month with a new coat,” he explained as he wrapped it up. “Her mother’s a maharanee or something from Ganymede. Loaded. They got charge accounts at all the expensive stores, but the old lady won’t give her daughter an allowance. So the princess, she just charges a new coat and hocks it for spending money. I figure her mother pays bills without bothering to read them. That loaded.” Soho gave me a stern look. “I think the princess, she uses the money to buy rough studs off the street, and I know she’s got V.D. Let that be a lesson to you.”
“Yes, Mr. Young,” I said.
One bright morning a young man in black tie and bombed out of his brain came in carrying a beautiful antique lantern clock. Soho allowed him two hundred on it and he staggered out with the money. I started to ask something, but Soho motioned me to wait. A few moments later an excessively English butler entered, paid two hundred plus interest on the loan and departed with the clock. The entire transaction had been as silent and automatic as that with the Ganymede princess.
“Dutch kid from Callisto,” Soho explained. “Rich. Always needs money for skag, so he steals something from the house. I got an arrangement with his mother. She guarantees any loan I make him.”
“But if she knows what he’s doing, why doesn’t she give him the money herself?”
“She can’t get him off horse, so she figures the least she can do is make him sweat for his smack.” Soho gave me another steely look. “He picked up the habit in your fag-dyke college. Let that be a lesson to you and watch yourself. Only habit you should have is work.”
“Thank you, Mr. Young.”
Soho’s slogan was: If it isn’t alive and you can get it through the door, you can hock it. His clerks, Roland and Eli showed me the damnedest things that were brought in; animal heads, outboard motors, an entire gypsy cimbalom, a python skin forty feet long. One old character pawned fourteen sets of false teeth, not his own. Soho never did find out how he got them.
“Craziest thing that ever came in was a mummy,” he told me.
“A mummy? Like from a pyramid?”
“Gig. My first thought was, this guy zigged it from some museum, so I checked.”
“How, Mr. Young?”
“Pay attention and learn. Mummies are so special they’re all pedigreed. The experts know every one.”
“Oh. Like vintage cars, Mr. Young?”
“Now you dig it. This one was legit. The guy was an Egyptologist trying to raise money for another expedition up the Nile or wherever. So I let him have fifteen thousand.”
“Did he redeem it?”
“No. Wrote and told me to sell it.”
“Did you get your money back?”
“Now you go too far,” Soho said sternly.
“Sorry, Mr. Young.”
But behind him Eli silently raised a thumb and forefinger for a “two” and then ringed them into a “zero” and jerked his hand four times.
One glorious afternoon Soho permitted me to stand in the pledge cage as an acting clerk. “Teach you something you can’t learn in that fag-dyke school,” he said, “How to size people up. Half the Solar is goniffs conniving to rip the other half.” Of course his assistants kept a watchful eye on me, but my first customer was an astonishing lesson in human “idio-nys-canaries,” as Soho always put it, which no one could possibly have predicted.
An engineer off one of the Solar ships—his radiation badge read, “CUNARD BRIGADIER”—rolled in, obviously enjoying a Happy Hour, and asked, “Hoi, you jocks hock any whatsoever?”
“If it isn’t alive and you can get it through the door,” I parroted, “you can pawn it.”
“R,” he said and planked a Lloyd’s thousand banknote down on the cage counter before me. “Wanna hock this.”
I stared. “You want to pawn cash?”
He grinned. “Gotta red-hot momma in tow. Don’t want her find out got this much on me. Sure to take me. Leave it where’s safe. R?”
I looked at Eli and Roland. They shrugged and nodded, so I started filling out a ticket. “How much do you want on this, sailor?”
“Nothin’. Jussa ticket.”
“It’ll cost you the standard five percent all the same.”
“A-Oke.” He fished a five out of his pocket and handed it over. “Sort of protection money, har? Pay five, save a milli.” He received his ticket and rolled out singing, “He knew the world was round-O, he knew it could be found-O…”
An hour later the red-hot momma came in with the ticket and collected the thousand.
Soho’s clerks told me that small-time crooks devote a lot of time and thought to ripping pawnbrokers. They hock painted diamonds, rings with doublet stones (glass with a sliver of diamond cemented on top to pass the scratch test), dummy cameras from window displays, and watches and accordions without internal works. Roland said, “They pick the rush hours when everyone’s crowding the buffet and we haven’t the time to look inside the sandwiches.” Roland had a sort of Madison Avenue advertisingese nostalgia, which he got mixed up occasionally. Once I heard him say, “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if it gets off at Grand Central.”
When respectables visited the hockshop for the first time, they were usually ashamed, imagining that they were at the bottom of the financial line and groveling in the gutter. This always annoyed Soho, who told me, “Man’s got a mortgage on his home and he isn’t ashamed. So why should he be ashamed of a mortgage on his watch? Answer me that, girlie.”
“I can’t, Mr. Young.”
“Did you and your friend who wanted to get laid feel that way when you come in the first time? Did she?”
“She wasn’t ashamed, Mr. Young.”
“I don’t mean that. Did she get to use the Seasick pills?”
“Oh. Yes. Just in case. That was very nice of y—”
“Like it?”
“I think she was scared more than anything else, Mr. Young.”
“Uh-huh. Figures. Were you ashamed, hocking your watch?”
“No, Mr. Young. It was an adventure.”
“Uh-huh. Got to get you fixed up soon. Nice girl like you. You’re overdue.”
“Oh, Mr. Young…”
“Romantic, that’s your problem. At Yale your ass would have been banged off seventeen ways to Tuesday by now. Run up a score before you fall in love. Dig? Fag-dyke college!”
But I’d done so brilliantly my first year at fag-dyke Vassar—and I really do believe that it was Soho’s dynamic influence that drove me—that the TerraGardai Section contacted me at the beginning of the sophomore term and I began my long association with Intelligence. And Soho Young abruptly disappeared. Pouf! Just like that. Spurlos versenkt. Without realizing it, much less intending it, I’d made his ancillary decoy cover too dangerous to continue. Intelligence (bureaucrats prefer to call us the TerraGardai Section) didn’t brief me on that until long after the event.
And that late, great Soho Young was the same Tomas Young, exobiologist, whom Winter was to consult on Demi Jeroux’s behalf. I can hear Winter now: “Who? Whom? I busted pronouns owing to a surfeit of—————.” Fill in the missing word and you may win one of five giant cash prizes.
“To my knowledge I’ve never seen a Titanian, Rogue. Of course I must have—they’ve filtered all through the Solar—but I couldn’t know. How’d you spot your loved one?”
“I didn’t, Tom.”
“She tell you?”
“She showed me.”
“Fascinating. I’d love to have a look inside her.”
“No way.”
“Just a little peek? It wouldn’t hurt.”
“Forget it.”
“Oh well, I’ll settle for the Roentgen caper.”
“Will that do anything to her?”
“How should I know?”
“Then it’s out.”
“Selfish! How’d your sprite find out she was pregnant for sure?”
“Tests.”
“Then she’s seen a doctor. He’ll make a splash in the medical journals. First time a physician’s ever had the chance to examine a Titanian. Either they’re outrageously healthy or they go home for treatment.”
“It was a lady doctor.”
“Then she’ll make the headlines.”
“Demi’s mother. Titanian.”
“What? I wonder how the Terran Medical Association will take that when they find out?”
“We’re not going to snitch. Now look, Tom, d’you want to advise my Demi or not? It’s your big chance to make a splash.”
“No internal examination?”
“Tom! I love the girl. I won’t have her running the chance of getting hurt.”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
“Don’t try to bamboozle me. I’m a king.”
“So I hear. Le Roi Malgré lui. Big two-hearted ruler. When do they chop your head off?”
“What’s that damn noise?”
“The think-tank. It gets lonely.”
“You spoil it.”
“I catch more lemmas with sugar than vinegar.” Young dropped the light tone and spoke sincerely. “Gig, Rogue. I’m honored and grateful that you came to me. I want very much to meet your Titanian girl, and I swear that I’ll do nothing that could possibly hurt her.”
“Then how are you going to help her?”
“Ask personal questions to find out whether her anabolic and catabolic functions parallel Terran metabolism. If they do, great and not to worry. If they don’t, then ask more questions and feed her data to Goody Gumdrops in there. We’ll come up with a prognosis and a regimen for your Demi. She said they pop them out like shelling peas?”
THE DECEIVERS Page 9
