Lifehouse

by Spider Robinson

  Space Case grinned, brushed stringy hair from his face, and pointed to the wall behind him. “Ask me a hard one. Panasonic okay?”

  Paul squinted. “Are they powerful?”

  The grin widened. “Well, that’s your basic good news/bad news situation. The good news is yes and yes, and the bad news is yes.”

  Paul reminded himself that he was supposed to be a Canadian, too polite to mind having his chain yanked. “Beg pardon?”

  “You ask me if it’s powerful, you’re asking three things. First, does it play loud? Answer: yes, it’ll play just as loud as anything else in the world with earphones—as loud as the law allows, and no louder. Second, does it pull in all the signals, even the weak ones? Answer: maybe better than the tuner you have back home; your whole skull kind of acts as an antenna, fillings and all. Those are the good news. Part three: does it put out a strong field? Answer: well, yeah, kind of, relatively speaking.”

  Paul’s ears grew points. “I don’t think I follow you. A radio receiver puts out a signal of its own?”

  “Well, a weak one. So does a Walkman, or a CD player, or a computer. It’s why they don’t want you to use one in a plane during takeoff and landing. Which by the way is a total crock: the field strength falls off so fast with distance, you’re as likely to interfere with the pilot’s electronics as you are with his menstrual cycle. Airlines are just lawsuit-happy.”

  “So why is this bad news?”

  Space Case took two sets of FM headphones from the wall and set them on the counter, then recaptured his hair and tucked it behind his ear again. “Well, a lot of experts say it isn’t, actually. But I notice that your personal skull gets a lot closer to one of these than the cockpit does. Even a Walkman at the end of one of those little cords gives you more distance. And there’s this cube-square thing happening.”

  “So if the experts are wrong, and there is any danger in low-level electromagnetic fields…”

  “This is about as good a test as you can get,” Space Case agreed. “Short of building a cabin under a power line.”

  Paul frowned. He wanted the things more than ever, now…but staying in character required him to appear dubious. “Are you saying they’re dangerous, then?”

  Space Case shrugged. “I’m saying, anybody who claims to know that for sure either way at this point in history is lying or kidding himself. Put it like this: Panasonic is willing to undertake the risk of selling them to you…and I’m willing to accept the karma of taking your money. I’m just into full disclosure. Like I say, a lot of experts say they’re perfectly harmless. But the way I see it, an expert is an ordinary person, a long way from home.”

  Paul considered, wrestling with a tiny, absurd dilemma. In New York, he would simply have bought the headphones now—long since, in fact. But as a putative Canadian, he needed a polite reason to ignore the salesman’s clear reluctance to sell them, to override the other’s judgment. He took refuge in quotation. “Well, as a great man once said, ‘You can go as far wrong by being too skeptical as by being too trusting.’ I guess I’ll give Panasonic the benefit of the doubt: let me have two sets, please.”

  Space Case grinned even wider. “A fan!”

  Paul blinked. “Beg pardon?”

  “That was a Lazarus Long quote. You’re a fan, right?”

  Very faintly—in fact, almost below the conscious level entirely—an alarm went off in the back of Paul’s mind. Those who lie for a living must pay close attention to any mental notes they leave themselves…and one part of the prophylactic debriefing procedure he’d automatically put himself through as he had walked out Wally and Moira’s door with ninety-eight thousand of their dollars in his hand had been to instruct himself: For the next little while, if anyone asks you if you know anything about science fiction, say no. “Sorry,” he lied fluently. “I don’t know this Nazareth fellow. I was quoting an English teacher I had once, Mr. Leamer.”

  “Ah. Well, never mind; it’s a long story. Pun intended. Several books long, actually. Will that be cash or charge?”

  “Cash, please.”

  “How are you fixed for goo?”

  Paul stopped sorting bills by color, and stared. “Could you run that by me again?”

  “You said you and the wife walk a lot. I got some great blister goo.”

  Paul had made up his mind over an hour ago: he was going to walk back to Casa O’Leary with his new radio headphones, and then he was never ever going to walk anywhere again as long as he lived. Painkiller he already had. So the only operative consideration was, what would a real walker say to an offer like this? “No, thanks,” he said. “We’ve got some prescription stuff her sports medicine doctor gives her.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s it called?”

  He took refuge in incompetence. “I know it as ‘foot gunk.’ It’s white, if that helps any.”

  Space Case kept his face straight. “Yeah, that narrows it down some.”

  Out of professional admiration, Paul kept his own face straight, and kept playing dumb. “Really?”

  “Yeah, all them white ones are only manufactured on days that end in y.”

  He did his double-take so beautifully he drew a shout of laughter from Space Case. “I suppose they are just about all white, eh?” he said with a great show of rue. “I wonder why that is.”

  “I’d imagine,” Space Case said, still chuckling, “for the same reason every brand of creme rinse you can buy for your hair looks exactly like ejaculate. You want powerful magic, invoke semen.”

  Paul obliged by looking mildly scandalized but too ashamed to admit it, and left, well pleased. Even the nosiest clerk tended to forget the dull ones quickly.

  All the way back to O’Leary’s A-frame he strained his ears for Moe Lycott’s truck, without success. Halfway there the rain suddenly went from drizzle to downpour. He went through a kind of epiphany, and by an act of the will forced himself to stick his thumb out, the way he’d seen people do in old movies. This turned out to be sound strategy: the savage satisfaction he achieved when fourteen successive cars blew by him without slowing was more comfort than a ride would have been. Even here, there were traces of civilization…

  He arrived home lamed but in a fine sour spirit that tasted like unsweetened chocolate, and hung up his mackinaw prepared to resume the burden of not being permitted to comfort his lover—

  —only to find something out of a nightmare.

  Sitting, safe and sound, in the chaise lounge on the lower deck, under the overhang of the deck above. Serene and tranquil, internal thunderclouds past, funk miraculously over, days ahead of schedule. Heartbreakingly lovely in the grey light of rainy afternoon: his lover, his partner, his best friend June. Who at his approach looked him square in the eye, and said, quietly and without a trace of humor, words which frightened and shocked him more than being stalked by a brain-raping house-burning time traveler had:

  “Paul, I’m getting out of the business.”

  Paralysis. There were so many possible responses—so many sheafs of different kinds of possible responses—that his quick wit and quick body alike were mazed, and he made no response at all. He stood there expressionless and motionless and almost thoughtless, for the first time in years simply waiting to find out what would happen next.

  “However this thing with the time traveler works out, I’m through,” she said. “I’d like to keep half title to the Key West place, if we’re alive when this is over, and the stash in Chicago. The rest is yours. The store, all the other cushions, the software, everything. I’m cashing out.”

  His eyelids closed of their own accord. He could think of no reason to raise them, but then he heard a voice rather like his own, miles away, croak, “You’re leaving me?” and opened his eyes to see who had said that and what she would answer.

  It must have been one of those two tiny copies of him swimming in her eyes who’d spoken. “Not unless you ask me to,” she said carefully. “We can keep separate finances, and you won’t talk about work at h
ome. I’ll go where you go, and lie for you, and cover you when you have to run, and catch up when I can. I’ll bind your wounds and tolerate your bullshit and I’ll bury you if it comes to that. But I won’t so much as rope for you: I won’t even consult. I’m through.”

  Idly he wondered what new—legit!—profession she would dream up for herself, flexible and portable enough to be compatible with a mate in The Life: he knew it was certain to be interesting. But that was a consideration for the distant future—whole minutes from now. At the moment the important thing was to get his heart restarted.

  Unh. There…

  “You want to hear something amazing?” his voice said. Yeah, it was coming from one of those little reflections in her eyes: the distance and volume sounded about right. “My feet don’t hurt a bit. Not at all. You feel like going for a hike in the rain, I’ll be glad to come along.”

  “Paul—”

  “It’s like the old joke,” the reflection interrupted; he lip-synched along. “You’re supposed to lead up to a thing like that. First you say, ‘I’ve found Krishna; please call me Moonbeam now.’ Then you say, ‘Your test came back: it’s cancer of the penis.’ Then, you say you’re retiring.”

  She returned his gaze steadily, and said something so absurd he and the reflections all had to smile: “I’m sorry.”

  For the first time Paul understood why the commander of the Light Brigade had followed those blundering orders and mounted an impossible charge. Because there is no despair so vast or cold or stony that some drifting idiot seed of hope cannot take root, wither, and decay there, all in an instant. “June,” he said, in the freedom of futility, “your mom—”

  “She didn’t like what I do, Paul. She never said so. Not once, or we could have argued it, and maybe I could have persuaded her. But we both knew.”

  “Of course she didn’t like it: she’s your mother, she was scared for you—”

  “She was ashamed of me. I think she was wrong, most of the time, but she was ashamed of me. Not because she had to lie whenever her friends asked what I was up to; she didn’t mind lying at all. Because the truth hurt her. She wanted to be proud of me. And she was—but not all the way.”

  “If she’d understood—”

  “I’ll tell you the worst. I’ve been sitting here reviewing the last year or so, and I’m ashamed of me, too.”

  He had been stunned for some time, now he was shocked: different things. He raised his arms as if to summon divine witness. “Why?”

  His reflections, thrashing around in their tubs like that, made them spill over and run down her cheeks. “Our standards have been slipping.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She shook her head hard enough to displace the tears, but they were replaced almost at once. “What did we say, back at the beginning? Only jerks, right? Only people that deserved it.”

  “That’s right,” he agreed. “You’re the one who taught me that. I was feeding on anything with blood when you found me. And feeling shitty about it.”

  “Think about my last two games. How about Frazier?”

  “He hired us to kill his wife!”

  “And you said yourself it was a shame not to go through with it.”

  “But—but then it wouldn’t have been a sting. It would have been…work.”

  “The point remains. Being driven beyond his endurance doesn’t make a guy a jerk. Remember, he even asked us to make it quick and painless.”

  “Sure—till I told him that’d be extra.”

  “Being on a budget doesn’t make you a jerk either. She had no money, there was no real insurance on her to speak of: all he wanted was his sanity back. We didn’t even leave him enough to try again.”

  Change tack. “Well, what was wrong with Wo Fat? He had it coming.”

  “Sure, he deserved to get stung. I ruined him. Not because he ripped off immigrants. Because he offended me. Because he treated me exactly the way his culture had raised and trained him to treat women. The way I encouraged him to treat me, to set up the gaff. What I was trying to do was sting his whole sexist society.”

  “So?”

  “So I forgot it’s half women.”

  Paul was lost. “Okay, so maybe you’ve slipped into a couple of grey areas, lately—”

  Water had continued to leak, silently and slowly, from her clear eyes. Now she began to cry: different thing. “I’ve even got you doing it lately.”

  “Huh?”

  “It really was brilliant, honey. I never wrote a better scam in my life. But tell me: just what did your Wally and Moira do to deserve to lose ninety-eight large that wasn’t even theirs?”

  For the second time he waved his arms. “Are you nuts? They’re true believers. Sci fi fans, for God’s sake.”

  “Those are lapses of taste, not lapses of morality. And you didn’t just take their money. You also took their friends’ money, entrusted to them. Right now their universe is forever fucked because they wanted John Lennon alive and the Beatles back. Accept that criterion and we can sting anybody over thirty, and anybody younger than that with taste.”

  He got a grip, and patiently began to explain to her why she was wrong. Assembling his arguments, he discovered she was right.

  The only trouble with owning an unusually acute and flexible mind (aside from the loneliness) is that you can’t make it blind or stupid when you need to. Paul Throtmanian shifted gears instantly for a living. Against his will, his universe now precessed about two degrees, and clicked into a new alignment, for the second time in as many minutes. He tried desperately to put it back the way it had been, but it wouldn’t go. He had been stunned and shocked, now he was horrified: different thing.

  “My God,” he breathed. “We have been slipping. You’re right. We’ve been acting like…like executives, or muggers or something. Robbing anybody who comes along.” He shook his head, in awe as much as horror. “Haven’t we?”

  Her crying escalated to sobbing. “I never got to work it out with her. She died ashamed of me. It has to stop.”

  He had never seen her sob, not even when that mark in Calgary had broken her finger. After stunned, shocked and horrified comes terrified. “Okay,” he cried, and threw himself on his knees to embrace her. “Okay,” he kept saying, over and over. “Okay, it stops now.”

  He didn’t mean it yet. But he already knew he would, eventually.

  After they had been silent and still for awhile, he suddenly began to giggle. She pulled away and searched his face, more than glad for something to laugh about. “What?”

  “J-just one thing b-bothers me—”

  All of a sudden she got it, and began to giggle herself. “The time traveler—”

  He nodded. “If he gets us—”

  “—we’ll forget we ever made this decision!”

  They howled.

  Later, as he helped her to her feet, she gripped his shoulder. “So we won’t let him get us. Right?”

  “Well, now that we’ve finally got a good reason…” He stopped smiling, then, and put his hand over hers. “We won’t let him get us.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  He squeezed her hand tightly. “And so well.”

  As they cleared the doorway, his feet began to hurt again.

  Chapter 11

  The Immortal Storm

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” Wally said. “I’m sorry to bother you a second time, but I intend to break and enter Ms. Bernardo’s home shortly, and I was wondering if you could help me.”

  He held his breath, poised like a cat to spring to safety, while she blinked blearily at him.

  In America it might not have worked. But Canadians could still afford a romantic view of crime. “Why, yesh,” she said finally. “I believe I could be of shome asshistance.”

  He had to wonder why she had failed to slur the last two sibilants. For that matter, why hadn’t she shooshed last night, when she’d been just as drunk? “Thank you, Mrs. Live Here. That’s very kind of you.”

  He
still did not relax. He was not poised to escape an adverse reaction, but to dodge any more attempted bourbon kisses. Moira had agreed with him that this audacious approach, long shot though it might be, was the only possible way to burgle a home on Point Grey Road, but she had been extremely emphatic on precisely how far he was and was not authorized to go in securing assistance. If her sensitive nose detected a single molecule of bourbon—or worse, soap—anywhere above his collar or below his belt when he got home tonight…well, he wouldn’t be able to go home, no matter what he found out at the Bernardo house.

  “Why do you call me that?”

  He slapped his forehead. Clumsy start. “I’m sorry. I have this…well, odd sense of humor. When I asked your name last night, you said, ‘Never mind, I live here,’ so I’m afraid ever since, I’ve been thinking of you as ‘Mrs. Live Here’ in my head.”

  She pursed her lips and blinked some more. “All thingsh considered, that’ll do. But it’s Ms. Live Here. Call me Liv for short.”

  “Ah.” Oh God, don’t let that mean she’s single. “Well, Liv, is there any particular method of entry you would recommend? I’d prefer to keep this as discreet as possible. Actually, I’d like it if no one ever finds out I was in there; frankly, we’re sort of hoping to come up on Ms. Bernardo’s blind side. If you should know anything about the nature of her alarm system, for instance—”

  “I only know one thing about it,” she said, blinking, “but it’s a pip. There ishn’t one.”

  Wally blinked back at her. “Bless my soul. Really?”

  “She told me once it was ludicroush to spend a penny on shecurity on Point Grey Road. She said she had no alarm, never locked her windowsh, and, for icing on the cake, as she put it, she always left the back door shlightly ajar.”

  “You know,” Wally said slowly, “that makes a kind of sense. You see an open door, unlocked windows, you assume someone’s inside.”