Lifehouse
Page 16
Which usually had neither changed in the slightest, nor suffered visibly from being used as an emotional dodgeball.
“Alright,” he conceded finally, and swallowed a mouthful of the coffee cake she had fetched to seal the truce. “We have to warn fandom. It is our fannish duty. But do we have to do it immediately?”
“Let’s use worst-case analysis,” she suggested. “Say Jude and Carla walked from Point Grey Road down to the water, climbed into a float-plane and flew straight to—let’s say, Edmonton. Okay, how long does Jude need to set up his next victims? How long did he need to set us up?”
He stopped a forkful short of his mouth. “Well,” he said, “it must have taken him awhile to select us as targets, and research us both—”
“Worst-case scenario, I said. Assume he selected and researched multiple targets, and now he’s going across the checker board: jump…jump…jump. Or maybe she does the research in advance for him. Like a celebrity surgeon: he holds out his palm, she slaps the next scalpel onto it. Whatever: once he knew he was coming after us, once he knew which window we’d be sitting beside, how much time did he need to take us?”
He took the bite, and chewed and swallowed it, before he was ready to say, “Half an hour to shave all over. Maybe an hour or two to buy and set up the magnesium. Then he could go as soon as it got dark enough. Oh, damn.”
“We have no way to be sure we’re the first fans he’s hit, Wally.”
“Butter me!” He spilled tea on his lap. “Ow. Oh, Moira, that’s a horrid thought.”
“And even if we are, he could have destroyed two more clubs already, by now. Every convention in North America with a Beatles fan on the concom is at risk, this minute.”
He prodded futilely at his soggy slacks with a handful of kleenex she’d given him, and gazed morosely at the results. “Heaven help me, I think I’d actually rather be a monumental sucker, than just another monumental sucker.” He shook his head. “Isn’t that appalling?”
“Well,” she said grimly, “if we are, we can at least be the first ones who didn’t fail the test of honor.” She turned and looked pointedly toward the office, where the computers waited. “We can sound the alarm. Even if we have to pull our pants down to the world to do it.”
For the first time he could recall, Wally didn’t feel like finishing his coffee cake. He sighed, assessed the results, and sighed again. “I guess it’s time to put my Asshole Principle to the test.”
Some years before, he had suddenly stopped their car on a country road, gotten out and walked around it several times, shaking his head and mumbling, then slowly climbed back in and propounded to his wife the stunning new insight he had been vouchsafed: that every living human, and every one who had ever lived, was an asshole. He had challenged her to name a single exception. Jesus? Trashed a harmless currency exchange, which merely let foreigners give sacrifice to God in legal tender. Handpicked a round dozen custodians for the most important words ever spoken: every man jack of them both illiterate and too stupid to find a ghostwriter—staged the most important event in history and forgot to invite the media. What an asshole. Albert Einstein? Instigates Manhattan Project; says Oops: major asshole. John Lennon? Saw his future with utter clarity—began the last Beatles album with the whispered words, “Shoot me,” wrote and recorded a prescient solo song called “I’m Scared”—then a few years later, forgot and stuck his head up again: poor asshole. Robert Heinlein had given Wally’s theory the most trouble—but even the First Grandmaster of Science Fiction had disparaged marijuana, and once permitted one of his more authoritative characters to refer to homosexuals as “the poor in-betweeners.” To be sure, Heinlein had more class than any other three assholes put together, but…
Once Moira had accepted her husband’s basic premise, that everyone is an asshole—and she could not dispute it; she had a fair amount of self-honesty—she’d seen the obvious corollary. The trademark of the true, dyed-in-the-wool, hopeless and irredeemable capital-A Asshole (Wally had explained) is the fixed belief that there exist some people, somewhere, who are Not Assholes. This immediately gives rise to the passionate desire to be mistaken for one of them. Wally himself—he now saw—had been wasting enormous amounts of energy, time and invention on trying to keep anyone from suspecting that he was one of the Assholes. “Dignity doesn’t have to be a suit of armor,” he had told her. “It can be as weightless and transparent as a force field.” And from that day forth, both had tried to refocus their efforts—to settle for being perceived (by anyone whose opinion mattered to them) as a pair of competent and pleasant and capable assholes. Assholes with class.
And, damn it, with senses of personal honor.
Building on his anal metaphor, and punning on a joke they both knew, so ancient it was almost due to come around again, she gestured with her head toward their office and said, “Time to answer the question, ‘How far is the old log-in?’”
He took one last look at his coffee cake and heaved up from his chair. “About thirteen steps away, I’d say.” He helped her out of her own chair, and they each put an arm around the other as they walked those steps to the gallows.
“Let’s compose it on your Mac,” he said as they waited for their machines to boot. “Then we’ll save it as text-only, and both upload it. Gee, there are still a few clubs that aren’t online yet, too—we better fax them. Don’t you have a database for them somewhere?”
“First let’s just sniff the Web and make sure we aren’t too late,” she said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky: somebody else will sing first, and we can go down as a subtitle instead of a headline.” Her browser stabilized on-screen and she began a staccato composition for keyboard and mouse.
He knew she could netsurf better and faster; he left her to it, and began to triage their e-mail. First he identified the VanCon traffic, which had to be sorted into business (hotel and other subcontractors), pro (the Guests of Honor and honored guests), and fan (everybody else with a right to yank on their chain). All three folders bulged with unread posts which he was just beginning to realize he was going to have to deal with after all, now that the con was tentatively back on. But he left them all unread and pressed on. Next he culled out and filed several professional messages—related, that is, to the cottage industry by which he and Moira earned their bread: writing and distributing stable software patches for existing computer operating systems, which made them more useful for the handicapped. He was briefly tempted to stop and read one of these messages, a beta-tester’s critique of a new program intended to assist one-handed typing and eliminate mousework altogether in Mac System, but restrained himself. Finally he was down to personal mail, and began to read it—for once leaving his Joke of the Day subscription for last. If there were going to be a report of a major fiscal fiasco anywhere in fandom, this was (after the Web) where it was most likely to be.
Two sentences into the third message, he turned to stone in his chair.
Even a statue can read good news, though, given enough time, and happily the text of this message was short enough to fit on Wally’s oversized screen without scrolling.
When his screen began to shimmer at the edges, he remembered to blink. He stopped when he realized he was making it strobe. “Darling?” he said faintly. “Anything?”
“Bugger all so far.”
He reached out, groped, found her wrist and clamped down hard. “Have you committed us to anything yet?”
She stopped work, looked down at his hand on her wrist, then up at him. “Of course not—we said we’re going to write it together, didn’t we? Aren’t we?”
“Maybe not.”
Her eyes widened, and she gripped his hand with her other one. “Tell me.”
“Take a look at this e-mail from Steve.”
Sender: stevethesleeve@eworld.com
Received: from vanbc.eworld.com
(vanbc.eworld.com [204.191.160.2]) by dub-img-2.eworld.com (8.6.10/5.950515)
id JAA08556; Tue, 2 November 1995 09:58:32 -040
0
Received: by vanbc.eworld.com
(Smail-3.1.29.1 #32) id mOuJKeR-0690WpC; Tue, 14 May 96 06:58 PDT
Message-Id:
From: stevethesleeve@eworld.com (Steve Tomas)
Subject: Forwarded message from Space Case
To: moira@eworld.com (Wallace Kemp)
Date: Tue, 14 May 1996 06:58:30 -0700 (PDT)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8b]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Length: 1291
Found this in my mailbox this morning.
Will be happy to forward any reply you want to send.
--- Forwarded message from Space Case (John Edw. MacDougal, III) ---
From spacecase@teleport.com Mon May 13 22:33:15 1995
Message-Id:
<999605140533.WAA05535@desiree.teleport.com>
From: spacecase@teleport.com (John Edw. MacDougal, III)
To: stevethesleeve@eworld.com (Steve Tomas)
Subject: smooth fen
Date: Tue, 14 May 1995 05:29:51 GMT
X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82
Dear Sleever:
On 31 October 1995 00:19:57, you wrote:
>If you happen to run across any new fans, or even just
>fellow travelers, who look like they’d cast well as
>Captain Picard, let me know ASAP. (Please route thru
>me as Wally and Moira are busy with VanCon coming up.)
>As you might imagine, close facial resemblance is not
>as important here as willingness to go bald for awhile
>--and if he’s articulate, so much the better. Please
>pass the word.<
Don’t know if helps, but am out here on Bowen Island, hard by your friends’ meat address, and gent just walked into my store today with 3-4 days’ beard -- all over head. Backs of hands, too. Not stilyagi: if had to guess, would say he bet Reform in last election. Late 20s, tall, in great shape, narrow face. IMHO, with right makeup could make wizard Picard -- and if wife he mentioned let him shave head once, might again if asked quickly enough.
Funny thing: specifically stated was NOT fan -- but quoted Lazarus Long…accurately. Perhaps one of those legendary poor bastards who got self de-fan-estrated for life, for some ripoff or cosmic concern blunder. Or perhaps, as he claimed, favorite English teacher once passed off Heinlein quote as own. Pleasant cobber, seemed a little dull to be fan. But note for whatever may be worth he also claimed to be hiker, and was full of shit about that. Still, get that lie all time out here…
Want me to ask grapevine for his 20?
Probably take <5 minutes and .5 droplet of sweat. Please advise.
CU at VanCon; will have latest NSS updates for our panel as promised.
-- Space Case
Regional Rep, National Space Society
O * * * * * * * ***>=======» ∞
--- End of forwarded message from Space Case (John Edw. MacDougal, III ---
--
--
stevethesleeve@eworld.com
stevethesleeve@eslvcr.whimsey.com (Steve Tomas)
http://www.whimsey.com/~steve/
Key fingerprint = B9 4F BO 4U 2B +/ 2B 4Y I8 69 4U 82 1C U8 12 6C
“He’s on Bowen Island,” Moira said, pounding on a thigh (Wally’s) with a fist (hers). “With his girlfriend, enjoying the spoils of war. There’s only one or two ways on and off that island. And we have a large war chest to hunt him down with.”
“And two warm guns,” Wally murmured dreamily, temporarily immune to physical pain. “Double happiness.” He began to sing. “Bang bang, shoot shoot…”
She had to lean past him and use his keyboard to reply to Space Case.
Chapter 12
The Lifehouse
Johnson would have found the successive days of almost relentless rain frustrating—even though waiting was his life, and his life was long—had it not freed him up to devote most of his time and attention to cheering up his dying wife Myrna. This had the side effect of cheering him considerably as well.
Their emotional state during this period is difficult to convey to a normal human; different postulates controlled. Most adults who mate know, and sometimes reflect, that they will one day see their loved one die, if they are the lucky one of the pair; it has been thus since before we invented language. Johnson, however, had lived several long centuries without ever truly believing in his heart that this fate could come to him some day. (And in that respect, at least, was like all other men—save that in his case it had not been denial, but only optimism.) The fact was emotionally wrenching—could have been devastating, if he had not regarded death as a correctable nuisance.
Myrna did, too…but understandably, she needed more cheering up than he did. She was the one who was probably going to have to do the dying.
And even that (maddeningly) was not certain. Her body was newly mortal, but not particularly fragile—especially for its age—and the Great Change was not impossibly far away. With luck and good management, she might very well survive, enfeebled, until the day when the long Masquerade could end, and she could have not just immortality and invulnerability and youth again, but literally anything she could conceive.
Unfortunately, luck and good management did not appear to be in inventory just at present, which was where/when they were needed. “Might not die” is admittedly better than “will certainly die”—but not a hell of a lot better, for one who has long been immortal.
So Myrna’s husband did his best to cheer her.
Music was one of his favorite methods of sharing, a nonprescription mood-elevator almost as potent as sex and laughter themselves. The artistic challenge he faced was that he had been writing her love songs for some seven hundred years, during which he had been perpetually on duty but almost never busy. The subject had been picked pretty clean: believe it or not, there are a finite number of ways to say “I love you.”
Happily, the dilemma itself suggested a line of attack, and by the evening of the third rainy night, he was able to take up his current guitar, borrow a sprightly tune no one was using at the moment, and sing to her:
I want to tell you how I feel, love
But it ain’t exactly news
Got no secrets to reveal love
But I’m gonna say it anyway,
’cause I’m alone and you’re away
I haven’t got a blessed thing to lose…
(so here goes:)
Water ain’t dry, the sky goes up high,
And a booger makes pretty poor glue
You can’t herd cats, bacteria don’t wear hats
—and I love you
Sugar ain’t sour, it’s damp in the shower
And murder’s a mean thing to do
Trees got wood, and fucking is pretty good
—and I love you
I’m belaboring the obvious:
You will have noticed all the good times
This is as practical an exercise
As taping twenty cents to my transmission
so that any time I want to
I can shift my pair o’ dimes…
(but God knows:)
Goats don’t vote, and iron don’t float
And a hippie don’t turn down boo
Dog bites man, the teacher don’t understand
—and I love you
Sickness sucks, it’s nice to have bucks
And the player on first base is named Who
Kids grow up, and fellows pee standing up
—and I love you
Guess I didn’t need to say it
Just a message that my heart sent
And I kinda like the way it’s
More redundant than is absolutely
necessary according to the Department
of Redundancy Department…
(I must close:)
Fun is nice,
you can’t fry ice,
And the money will always be due
Bullshit stinks, and no one outsits the Sphinx
—and I love you
Living ain’t bad, and dying is sad
And little we know is true
But that’s just karma—baby,
you can bet the farm on this:
I do love you.
“I call it ‘Belaboring The Obvious’—or is that redundant?” he said, after the last notes echoed away.
He had already gotten the smile he had hoped for. Once he had set down the guitar, he got the kiss, too.
Smile and kiss were both like oil of cloves on a toothache, like the warm bath of pharmaceutical morphine, melting pain for each spouse. Their telempathic connection caused this analgesic energy to oscillate back and forth between them like alternating current, reinforcing itself, and generating a third, resultant field that acted to stabilize both. Their vibrant love had been the sole constant in a millennium of slow tedious change; they knew well that it was stronger than death, and that they differed from all the other lovers alive only in that they could explain why. Johnson, a scholar of his wife’s body language, decoded runes in their hug which indicated that while this was not yet the right time to proffer an erection, a fellow who was patient and played his cards right might not die of waiting. Every songwriter loves applause, however promissory.
As they disengaged, he caught himself reaching for a cigarette. He was not addicted to nicotine, of course—he and Myrna could self-generate any desired drug effect they wished—but his cover persona appeared to be, drawing smoke deep into his lungs in public without ever actually metabolizing a molecule of it. And he was meticulous enough about tradecraft that he had formed the policy of smoking even when in private, sometimes, so his home would smell right to the rare visitor. It was that (true) habit which had caused his hand to start toward his breast pocket.