“ ‘Startle’ me, or surprise me?”
“Never mind that old joke. Justin, I simply wanted to make clear that your relationship to Minerva, while close enough that it makes Minerva feel sentimental, is in fact so small that you barely qualify as a ‘kissing cousin.’ ”
“I feel very sentimental about it,” I told the Senior. “Most pleased and deeply honored—although I can’t guess why I was picked.”
“If you want to know which chromosome pair was swiped from you, and why, you had best ask Ishtar and get her to consult Athene; I doubt if Minerva still knows.”
“But I do know; I saved those memories. Justin, I wanted to retain some ability in mathematics. It was a choice between you and Libby Professor Owens—so I chose you; you are my friend.”
(Well! I respect Jake Hardy-Owens; I’m merely an applied mathematician, he is a brilliant theoretician.) “Whatever your reasons, dear kissing cousin, I am delighted that you chose me as one of your donor-fathers.”
“Grounded, Commodore!” announced one of the duplicate redheads—Lapis Lazuli—as the little nullboat clumped to a stop. (It appeared to be a Corson Farmsled and I was surprised to see it in a new Colony.) Lazarus answered, “Thank you, Captain.”
The twins bounced out; the Senior and I handed Minerva out—unnecessary help that she accepted with gracious dignity, that being another aspect of colonial life that surprised me, New Rome being rather short on such archaic ceremony. (Over and again I found the Boondockers to be both more formally polite, and more casually relaxed about it, than are Secundians. I suppost my notions of frontier life had been fed on too many romances: rough, bearded men fighting off dangerous animals, mules hauling covered wagons toward distant horizons.)
“Captain” Lazuli said, “Humpty Dumpty—go to bed!” The nullboat waddled away; the little girls joined us, one taking my free hand, the other taking the Senior’s free hand, with Minerva between us. These freckled flametops would have had my whole attention had not Minerva been there. I am not compulsively fond of children; some youngsters seem to me rather poisonous, especially precocious ones. But in their case I found their solemn precocity charming rather than irritating . . and to see the Senior’s features, rugged rather than handsome and with that too-large nose, unmistakably reproduced but transformed into piquant girlish features—well, had I been alone, I would have chuckled with delight.
I said “Just a moment,” and held onto Lorelei’s hand and thereby caused all to pause while I took a second look. “Lazarus, who is the architect?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Dead more than four thousand years. The original belonged to the political boss of Pompeii, a city destroyed about that long ago. I saw a model of it, restored, in a museum in a place called Denver, and took pictures; it pleased me. Those pictures are long gone, but it turned out that, when I tried to describe it to Athene, she had a solly in the historical section of her gizzards of the ruins of that same house—and from that and my description, she designed this version. Some minor mods, nothing that changed its sweet proportions. Then Athene built it, using extensionals and radio links. It’s practical for this climate; the weather here is much like that of Pompeii—and I prefer a house that looks inward, on a court. Safer, even in a place as safe as this one.”
“By the way, where is Athene? The main computer itself, I mean.”
“Here. She was still in the ‘Dora’ when she built this; now she’s under the house—she built her underground home first, then built our house on top of it.”
Minerva said simply, “A computer prefers to feel safe, and close to her own people. Lazarus—forgive me, dear, but you have reversed a time sequence; that was more than three years ago.”
“Oh, so I have. Minerva, when you have lived as long as I have—and you will—you’ll find yourself inverting time sequences endlessly, a flesh-and-blood shortcoming you had to accept when you took the plunge. Correction, Justin—‘Minerva,’ not ‘Athene.’ ”
“Yet it is Athene who built it—now,” Minerva added, “since engineering and the details of this construction and others are things I left behind in Athene, where they belong, and abstracted only a simplified memory of having built it—I wanted to remember that much.”
I said, “Whoever built it, it’s beautiful.” I was suddenly upset. It is one thing to accept intellectually the startling idea that a young woman has had a former life as a computer—and even to accept that one had worked with that computer years back and light-years away. But this discussion suddenly brought home to me emotional belief that this lovely girl with her arm warm in mine had in sober fact been a computer so short a time ago that she had built this new house—while a computer. It shook me—even though I am a historiographer, old, and my sense of wonder was dulled even before my first rejuvenation.
We went in, and my upset was swept away by greetings. We were kissed all around—two beautiful young women, one of whom I recognized when I heard her name, Ira’s daughter Hamadryad and she looks like one, the other a statuesque blonde whose name, Ishtar, was familiar to me through talk, and a young man as beautiful as the women and who seemed familiar though I could not place him. Even the twin flametops insisted on kissing me since they had not greeted me that way earlier.
In Boondock a kiss of greeting is not the ritual peck it usually is in New Rome; even the twins bussed me in a fashion that made me certain of their sex—I’ve had poorer kisses from grown women whose intentions were direct and immediate. But the young man, introduced as “Galahad,” startled me. He hugged me, with kisses on my cheeks followed by a kiss on my mouth worthy of a Ganymede—which surprised me, but I tried to return as good as I got.
Instead of letting me go, he pounded my back and said, “Justin, it tickles my root to see you again! Oh, this is wonderful!”
I pulled my face back to look at his. I must have looked puzzled for he blinked, then said mournfully: “Ish, I boasted too soon! Hamadear, get me a towel, I’m weeping. He’s forgotten me . . after all the things he said.”
I said, “Obadiah Jones, what are you doing here?”
“Weeping. Being humiliated in front of my family.”
I don’t know how long it had been since I had seen him. It may have been more than a century since it has been that long since I left the Howard campus. Brilliant young specialist in ancient cultures he was then, with an impish sense of humor. I recalled, dredging it up out of memory, having shared a Seven-Hours with him and two other savants, both female and happily so—but I could not recall their faces nor who they were; what I remembered was his playful, joyous, boisterous good company. “Obadiah,” I said sternly, “why are you calling yourself ‘Galahad’? Hiding from the police again? Lazarus, I’m shocked to find this, uh, macho in your house—lock up your daughters!”
“Oh, that name!” he said brokenly. “Don’t repeat it, Justin. They don’t know it. When I reformed, I changed my name. You won’t give me away? Promise me, dear!” Suddenly he grinned and said in a cheerful voice, “Come on into the atrium and let’s get a skinful of rum into you. Lazi, who has the duty?”
“Lori does. Even-numbered day. But I’ll help. Straight rum?”
“Better flavor it. I want to add a welcome the Borgias used on old friends.”
“Sure thing, Uncle Cuddly. Who are the Borgias?”
“A family from the greatest days of Old Earth’s rise and fall, sugar lump. The Howards of their time. Very suave in handling guests. I’m descended from them, and their secrets were passed down to me by word of mouth.”
“Laz,” said Lazarus, “ask Athene for a rundown on the Borgias before you mix a drink for Justin.”
“I see; he’s at it again—”
“—so we’ll tickle him—
“—and blow in his ears—
“—until he cries Pax—
“—and promises Veritas—
“—he’s no problem. Come on, Lazi.”
I had found the village of Boondock pleasantly unimpres
sive, more pleasant and less impressive than I had expected. Ira and Lazarus had accepted only seven thousand for their first wave from applicants numbering more than ninety thousand; therefore the present population of Tertius could not be much over ten thousand and was in fact slightly less.
Boondock seemed to have only a few hundred people and was centered on a few small buildings for public and semipublic purposes, most colonists being scattered around the countryside. The home of Lazarus Long was by far the most impressive structure I had seen—not counting the large flat cone of the Senior’s yacht and the much larger bulk of one robot space freighter on the skyfield where my packet had grounded. (The skyfield was a level place a few kilometers across; one could not call it a port. There was not one godown. It must have an autobeacon since I grounded safely; I did not see it.)
This rudimentary settlement had not prepared me for the Senior’s house. Its lines and plan were simple; that long-dead Roman had picked a good designer. It was a walled garden, the house itself being its four walls. But it had two stories, and each level could have been divided, it seemed to me, into twelve to sixteen large rooms plus the usual ancillary spaces. Twenty-four or more rooms for a household of eight? The more blatantly rich in New Rome might display ego in so much space, but it seemed inappropriate in a new colony, as well as out of tune with what I had learned in my long research of the Senior’s lives.
Simple—Half the building was given over to a rejuvenation clinic, a therapy clinic, an infirmary; these could be reached from the foyer without entering the private part of the house. The number of family rooms remaining was indefinite; most interior walls were movable. The Howard Clinic and the medical facilities would be moved to a nearby site when the colony needed larger facilities, when size of the Senior’s family made more home space desirable.
(I was lucky in that, when I arrived, no client was being rejuvenated, no patient was in the infirmary—or most of the adults would have been busy.)
The size of his family seemed as hazy as the number of rooms. I had thought there were eight—three men, the Senior, Ira, and Galahad; three women, Ishtar, Hamadryad, and Minerva; two youngsters, Lorelei Lee and Lapis Lazuli—but I was not aware of two girl toddlers and a small boy. Besides that, I was neither the first nor the last to be urged to move in and stay as long as one wished. Whether such stay was as a guest or as a member of the Senior’s family might also be unclear to an outsider.
Relationships inside his family also were vague. Colonists are always families; a single colonist is a contradiction in terms. But all of Tertius Colony were Howards, and we Howards have used every sort of marriage, I think, except lifetime monogamy.
But Tertius has no laws about marriage; the Senior had not thought them necessary. The few laws it has are in the migration contract, written by Ira and Lazarus jointly. It contains the usual covenants about homesteading, with the colony leader absolute arbitrator until such time as he resigns. But it says not one word about marriage and family relationships. The colonists register their babies; Howards always do —in this case with the Computer Athene as surrogate for the Archives. But-I found when I reviewed these records that parentage of children was expressed in genetic classification code, not by marriages and putative ancestry. This system the Families’ geneticists have been urging for generations (and I agree), but it does make a genealogist work harder, especially if marriages have not been registered at all, as was sometimes the case.
I found one couple with eleven children, six his, five hers, none theirs. I understood it when I read their codes—utterly incompatible. I met them later, a fine family on a prosperous farm and no suggestion that the swarm of children were anything but “theirs.”
But the Senior’s family was even more vague. Genetic ancestry in each case was a matter of record, surely—but who was married to whom?
Their bathing room was as “decadent” as had been promised; it was a lounging room, as well as a refresher, and planned for family relaxation and entertaining. It stretched all along the ground floor on the side facing the foyer across the inner garden, and its walls could be pushed back to open it to the garden in clement weather—which this was and quite warm.
It had anything a jaundiced Sybarite could ask for: a fountain in its center matching a fountain in the garden and each with comfortably wide rims to sit on while soaking tired feet and enjoying a drink; a sauna in one corner; a huge happy shower at the other end with space for several cycles to be enjoyed at once without waiting turns; a companion querafansible with sophisticated controls; a long soaking pool kneedeep at the blue end to chin-deep at the red, and flanked by two bathing pools lavish for one person and comfortable for two or three; couches for napping, for cooling, for sweating, for intimate talk and touch; a cosmetics table with a big duomirror in which one could see her back as readily as her front simply by asking Athene’s help; a comer big enough for a dozen people in which floor cushioning was bed-soft and lavish with pillows large and small, firm and soft; a refreshments counter which backed onto their kitchen—and if I failed to name something, it is my omission, not that of the designers. All the more commonplace items were of course at hand.
I had thought that the lighting was random until I realized that Athene was changing it endlessly so as not to shine it in anyone’s eyes while changing the light level in all parts of that big room to match what was going on—high key for makeup, subdued light for lounging, and so on—and to match personalities too; our little redheads were crowned with light no matter how they bounced around—as they did.
Soft music was there and in the garden, or on request anywhere, selected by Athene unless someone asked for something—it seemed as if she had stored in her all the music that ever was written. Or she might harmonize with the twins while continuing to take part in three different conversations in other parts of the bath lounge. A self-aware computer of her capacity—great enough to manage Secundus—can and often must talk simultaneously at many places, but I had never encountered it before in such a way as to notice it. But big computers are not often members of a family.
The rest of the house was almost unautomated—a matter of taste as Athene’s capacity was largely unused. My hostesses actually cooked, with Athene helping only by seeing to it that nothing burned and watching the timing in other ways—twice on Athene’s advice Hamadryad left the bath lounge, once in such a hurry that she fled bare and dripping, not stopping to grab a towel robe.
Bathing with Lazi and Lori is indeed “squirmy but fun,” plus squeals, giggles, chatter in which one sentence would be chopped several times before one of them put a period on it (I hypothesized that they were telepathic with each other and had an uneasy suspicion that they sometimes read thoughts of persons in their presence—but was not anxious to find out)—all charmingly blunt and childishly innocent.
First they slathered me all over with scented liquid soap and demanded the same service from me and threatened me with chin quivering when I held back a little, and said loudly that “Uncle Cuddly” (my old friend Obadiah, now Galahad) washed them better than that and everybody knows how lazy he is—or didn’t I like them well enough to soapy-cuddle them and if they married me, would I go along with them in their spaceship, and while they were still virgins, though not from lack of opportunity, don’t worry about that one bit as both Mama Hamadryad and Mama Ishtar were coaching them in beginning and advanced sensuality and would speed up the course if I happened to want to marry them now—won’t you, Mama Hamalambie?—tell him!
Hamadryad from a meter away (she was soaping Ira) assured us that she would, if they could persuade me to marry them that quickly. I assumed that the youngsters were farcing me and that their mother—one of their mothers—was going along with the jest. I’ve wondered since whether I missed a diamond opportunity. Lazarus was in hearing distance; he did not tell them to stop teasing me, he simply advised me not to offer them more than a ten-year contract as their span of attention was limited—which made them indign
ant—and advised them that, if they intended to get married that night, they had better trim their toenails first, which made them still more indignant so they stopped bathing me to assault him from both sides.
This wound up with one of them under each of his arms and still struggling. Lazarus asked if I would accept custody or should he drop them into the deep end of the soak?
I accepted custody, and we showered each other off and went into the soak pool together—and I was standing in it up to my shoulders with my back to the garden, and supporting them a little, an arm each, as their toes did not touch bottom, when someone placed hands over my eyes.
The twins squealed, “Aunt Tammy!” and levitated out of the water while I turned to look.
Tamara Sporting—I had thought she was on Secundus, in retirement up country. Tamara the Superb, the Superlative, the Unique—in my opinion (and many others) the greatest artist of her profession. I feel sure that I am not the only man who chose when she left New Rome to remain celibate for a long time.
She had come in, seen that the family was in the bath lounge, dropped her gown in the garden, hurried in without stopping to remove her high sandals, spotted me, and blindfolded me with her lovely hands.
Why? She was my dinner partner—and (if I could rely on an exchange I had heard that afternoon) willing to be my guest wife if I were willing. Willing? Fifty years earlier I had offered her any contract she would accept every time she let me visit her and had finally shut up only after she had told me repeatedly, patiently, and gently that she did not intend to have more children and would not marry again for any other purpose.
But there she was, rejuvenated (not that it mattered), looking gloriously young and healthy—and a colonist. I wondered who the man was who had persuaded her to do this? I envied him and wondered what superhuman qualities he possessed—but whatever they were, if Tamara was willing to share a bed with me even for one night and only for old times’ sake, I would take what the gods offered and not worry about him; her wealth is endlessly divisible. Tamara!—bells sound at her name.
Time Enough for Love Page 47
