Lifehouse

by Spider Robinson

  “No!” June cried.

  Oh my God, she thought frantically, I finally got one last chance to have that Last Conversation after all, without Daddy around…and just like last time, it’s going to be over before I’ve even had a chance to remember all the things I needed to say, all the things I needed to ask—

  “Wait!”

  “As long as I can, dear,” her mother agreed, glancing at Myrna.

  “Mom, you were wrong a minute ago. I did listen to you. Always. I know I gave you hell. I’m sorry. But I always listened. Hardest when I pretended to be deaf, maybe. You won The Fight, you know. Stubborn bitch that I am, I held out until the day after you died—but you won. I always knew you would. I just didn’t want you to have the satisfaction.”

  “But I did know.”

  June blinked. Something knotted began to ease, deep within her. “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “I absolve you. Now ask the question you want to ask.”

  There’s only one? she thought dizzily, and opened her mouth to let it emerge of its own accord. “How could you stay with Daddy, all those years?”

  “It was my privilege,” she said.

  “Mom, forget the fact that on his best day, his brain was half as good as yours. The man is an emotional basket case. He needed round-the-clock care just to keep him functional, my whole life—hell, he managed to screw up your death scene! How could you waste a mind like yours on propping him up all those years?”

  Laura took her time answering, seeking the right words. “June,” she said finally, “you greatly underestimate my own selfishness. I got more from your father than I gave.”

  “But what?”

  “The thing I married him for. The thing I never had much of myself, until he taught it to me. The thing I hope Frank and I together managed to pass on to you. His kindness. His clumsy warm never-failing kindness.”

  June stared “But there’s kindness everywhere,” she protested. “The world is full of kindness.”

  “Oh, it certainly is,” Laura agreed. “And most marriages still end in divorce. Most people can be kind, honey. Your father is kind. That’s a different thing—and it’s worth more than rubies.” Seeing that her daughter still didn’t get it, she went on. “Okay, yes: you have to hang a sign on a joke for Frank to recognize it. But dear, once you do, he always laughs, even if it’s a poor joke. One time I’d gone with him to one of those awful sales conventions, and we were sitting in the most expensive restaurant in the convention complex, and by some accident they had a genuinely wonderful jazz combo playing. I looked up and saw a young couple we knew, a new salesman and his fiancée, standing in the entranceway, listening to the music and nodding. I started to wave and invite them to join us, quite automatically…and just as automatically, your father caught my hand and stopped me. ‘But that’s Jim and Shirley,’ I said, ‘You like them.’ And Frank stopped and thought about it and said to me, ‘Laura, look at the way they’re dressed. Look at the way we’re dressed. Why are they standing there in the doorway? If you wave to them, they’re going to have to come in and sit down and blow half their weekend’s budget on two drinks they don’t want, just to hear the music for a few minutes. Kindest thing you can do just now is ignore them.’ Once he explained it, I saw he was right, of course—but June, he had to stop and think to explain it. It’s instinctive with him. If anyone in a room with him gets their feelings hurt, it’s because his best wasn’t enough to prevent it.

  “Take the example you mentioned. Dear Frank tried to protect me from the terror of death. Clumsily, transparently, yes—and to the very best of his sweet ability. Even though it cost him his right to share his own crushing grief and loss with me. I had no choice but to let him think he was succeeding.” She took June’s hand again. “And in consequence, I could not allow myself to indulge in that terror. Do you see? For his sake, I kept whistling as I approached the graveyard—and so in the end he succeeded, and I died with as little fear as I could. Honestly, it wasn’t nearly as hard as I’d thought it would be. All our married lives, he did things like that for me. Without him, I might have been you without Paul.” She took his hand again as well, but kept speaking directly to June. “I approve of him as a son-in-law—but not because the boy is clever. Because I can tell he is kind.”

  “There are people who would disagree with you,” Paul said softly. “Some of them are listening right now.”

  She met Paul’s eyes. “Ah. I see. You were trying to unlearn the kindness…to impress June. She has always had enough mischief in her to get her boyfriends in trouble. Well, it didn’t work this time…did it?” She watched his eyes, and nodded. “Kindness does you less credit than it does Frank, because you’re smarter and more confident and less afraid: you can afford to be kind. But it’s still a rare and sweet thing to be by nature. Teach her everything you know about it, teach her to respect her father and you…and forgive her what she finds hard to learn.”

  “I do,” Paul said.

  “I will,” June said.

  Laura smiled again—beamed, this time. “I now pronounce you man and wife,” she said.

  June felt herself beaming back, and burst into tears. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, dear. And you too, son.” She reached up, captured one of June’s tears on her fingertip, and licked it. “We’re done, aren’t we?”

  “Yes,” June said in wonder, “I think we are.”

  At once her mother was gone. The pilot light went out behind her eyes, and as her vacated second body began to fall, it dissolved. There was no sound or heat. It was as though she simply turned to ash-laden smoke and blew away, like a digital special effect. In seconds, the last wisp was gone.

  June kissed her fiancé firmly, and was kissed back. Then she pulled away and faced Myrna and Johnson.

  “I’ll never know for sure if that was real,” she stated.

  “That’s right,” Myrna said.

  “I am in exactly the frame of mind a mark is just before I take ’em for everything they’ve got. Cold logic says I’m being set up, but I want to believe.”

  “I imagine so,” Johnson agreed.

  She squared her shoulders. “I’m wide open. Come on in.”

  Paul said nothing, very loudly.

  “Sit down,” Myrna said. “Since you are volunteering, it will not be necessary to invest you, the way we did Angel Gerhardt. There will be no orgasm involved. Or any other physical sensation.”

  June sat by the great ash tree, leaned back against it and relaxed utterly. “Go ahead.”

  “First, your stolen memories back,” Johnson said.

  There was a soundless explosion, an inertialess impact, and a vague inexpressible sense of relief, of healing from an unsuspected wound. She probed, and found that she had her missing minutes back. Quite dull and uninteresting minutes, really—but she cherished each one.

  “That felt…” she murmured, “that felt like…like scratching an itch on a phantom limb I didn’t know I had. Okay, I remember everything now. Scan away.”

  “It is done,” Johnson said. “You are free to go.”

  She shook her head in awe, and got slowly to her feet. “So little,” she said, “for all that trouble. Maybe I felt a tickle. Maybe I imagined it. I’m sure you didn’t hurt anything. Paul?”

  His voice was so well controlled that only his fiancée or a telepath could have detected the suggestion of a quiver in it. Wally probably never noticed. “I’m ready.” He sat.

  “It is done,” Johnson said again. “Thank you. Mr. Kemp? I can hear you directly…”

  Suddenly, so could June—with crystal clarity, as though he were present. “Well, it’s going to drive me nuts, that’s for sure—but I’d like to put this whole thing behind me as quickly as possible. Moira and I have a convention to run in two weeks, and we’ve already lost about all the time we can afford. Go ahead: I’m dropping my shields.”

  “It is done. Thank you, Wally. Ms. Rogers?”

  “The greatest puzzl
e of my life? And I can never ever know the answer? And never ever share it with anyone I haven’t already? Johnson, you know more about what makes a SMOF tick than even Paul, there. Besides, I go anywhere Wallace goes. Make it so.”

  “Thank you, Moira. Mr. MacDougal?”

  “You guys got a space program in the future?” Space Case asked.

  Johnson seemed to grin in spite of himself. “At the time we left, pretty much anyone who wanted to had spent at least a decade or two off Saturn, in the Ring, just gawking.”

  “That’s all I want to know. My lips are sealed, and I’m gonna die happy.”

  After a second, Johnson said, “I believe you will. Done.”

  June knew the meeting was over. She found herself reluctant to leave this place, this tranquil spot, these people she had wished dead for so many hunted days. Something wonderful was near here, and she would never know what it had been. “Will we ever see you again?” she asked Myrna and Johnson.

  Myrna shook her snow-white head. “Not for a very long time,” she said. “And not here.”

  “Is there anything you two need, that we can get you?” Paul asked.

  June turned and looked at him with new and growing respect.

  “One thing, perhaps,” Johnson said. “And I’m afraid it’s a dreadful cliché.”

  “Name it,” Paul said.

  “When you remember this—” he said.

  “—and you will—” Myrna said.

  “—think of us with kindness.”

  “We will,” June said, and took Paul’s hand, and they left Pacific Spirit Park without looking back, and with the firm resolve never to return.

  They did, of course—but did not bring their bodies with them when they did, and never experienced a subjective instant of all the long years they spent there together in the Lifehouse. The answers they had wanted so badly would be granted them only in the next life—the longer and happier one. But their reward had already begun. For the remainder of their short first life together, they would display such uncanny talent at remaining married that their many close friends would often say it was as if they had been granted some secret knowledge no one else had.

  Chapter 16

  Dead Dog

  Every other house on the south side of the block had a front balcony or deck on its upper story, facing north toward the harbor and North Vancouver on its far side and the magnificent mountains beyond. Paul or June could turn their heads and see all those decks and balconies, up and down this side of the street—all quite empty, at sunset after a sunny day.

  To get the same view from Wally and Moira’s house, one climbed out an upstairs bedroom window and stretched out on the sloping roof. The roof showed signs of hard use, and was extremely comfortable. There was, for instance, a nook sheltered from the rain, up against the house, in which stood a minifridge, thermal mugs, and a coffeemaker Wally had connected to the house wiring and water systems: one need only bring a basket of grounds, and remember to leave the carafe out for the rain to rinse afterward. The nook also held a large bottle of John Jameson’s Irish whiskey, whose continued existence was in doubt, and the controls for a set of external speakers. At the moment they were rendering Don Ross’s percussive acoustic guitar, an excellent choice for a sunset.

  Early November is right at the end of Vancouver’s six-month spring, and the beginning of its six-month fall; it was chilly enough for the Irish coffees to be welcome. Paul took a gulp of his, and felt warmth spread through him—especially to his scalp: though furthest to leeward of the four, he was still unused to being bald. “Wally,” he said, “my hair’s off to you. It worked like a Swiss watch. I’m not sure how far they got on their own—but I’m certain they never got a definite count of how many of us there were, let alone where we all were, until we let them in.”

  “I don’t think they even got as far as me,” Moira said, “and even if they had, they’d never have found Space Case.”

  “Not even if they’d taken over your mind,” Paul agreed. “It was a sweet bit, and I could never have thought of it in a hundred years.”

  “Aw shucks,” Wally said, and something in the tone of his voice made June recall her mother’s words about her fiancé’s kindness. She tightened the arm she had around Paul, and grinned fiercely at the sunset. “I think the alien mask worked good, too,” she said. “Did you see them frown at that, Paul?”

  “Well, I just had it lying around in my masquerade trunk, and I happened to think of it,” Moira said, clearly as pleased as Wally. “So what will you and Paul do now, June?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest,” she said happily, and took a swallow of Irish coffee. “Something good.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Paul said confidently. “Our requirements are modest. All we really need is identities, a house, a car, and a modest income, ideally in the next twenty-four hours. Oh, and one other detail: I owe a guy ninety-nine large.”

  “Aw Jeeze, look—” Wally began.

  “Even worse,” Paul went on, “the guy is a friend of mine, so I can’t just weasel.”

  Wally subsided, but bit his lip.

  “You can’t go back to the Point Grey Road place?” Moira asked.

  June shook her head. “We were going to have to leave there soon anyway. Any time now, the bank and the realtor are due to figure out the money we bought it with was imaginary. I don’t even think it’s safe to go back and get my dirty comic books.”

  Wally coughed, and bit his lip some more.

  “But like I say, I’m in the mood to scale back a little,” Paul said. “A Honda gets you the same place a Porsche does—cheaper—and you don’t have to keep it locked up as tight. I don’t need a really good house, like this one—I’d settle for one of those modern pieces of crap.” He gestured casually to his right. “As for work, the first thing that occurs to me is that this is a big movie and TV town, and June and I both have relevant skills.”

  “WOW!” Wally cried, loud enough to startle Paul and June.

  Moira merely turned to him and raised an eyebrow.

  “I almost got it,” he said excitedly. “Help me, spice!”

  Moira nodded, and he turned to present the back of his head to her. She quickly surveyed the tools available to her, finished her coffee in a long draught, and used the soft thermal plastic mug to whack her husband solidly on the occiput.

  He caught his glasses as they flew off, and put them back on. “Got it—thanks,” he said, and turned to Paul, who was regarding him with a strange expression. “You are both excellent actors,” he stated.

  “Well, actually, when I said ‘relevant skills’ I meant bullshitting—and I was thinking of bullshitting on a more serious scale than mere acting,” Paul began. “I was thinking producer, or—”

  “I have two jobs for you,” Wally said. “I would also take both of them as personal favors. The first one requires acting—and bullshitting: specifically, writing.”

  Paul pursed his lips. “Well…I believe Heinlein said the difference between a writer and a con man was, the writer could work in bed and use his right name if he happened to feel like it. What did you have in mind?”

  “Remember the story we gave the Net to track you down?” Wally said. “If Moira and I don’t want to have to waste a whole lot of the precious two weeks left before the con doing a lot of fast talking, somebody is going to have to write and produce a play called ‘Data Takes A Dump,’ that stars a guy who looks like Jean-Luc Picard.”

  In spite of himself, Paul smiled. “Well, it’s a little out of our line.”

  June was smiling too. “What the hell. Dad’ll let us use the barn; I can sew costumes—”

  “Wait,” Wally said. “You haven’t heard the second job. It goes along with the first. Both or no deal.”

  “Go ahead,” Paul said.

  “That house you just pointed to next door belongs to a life-form named Gorsky. He’s the one you bought your magnesium from, and he’s the one who gave you up as Metkiewicz.”
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  “Oh, really?” Paul said, turning to look more closely at the Gorsky home. His smile had become faintly feral.

  “He’s also sued Moira and me half a dozen times in eight years. Now I realize that you are both retired. But if you’re willing to skirt grey areas like movie producers…would you be willing to lecture other citizens on the tricks of your former trade? Could you, for instance, explain to me how an unscrupulous enough individual could con, say, someone who lived on a block like this out of their house and land?”

  Paul looked at June; she looked back. “You want him in jail?”

  “No. Just somewhere else. And I want that property.”

  Paul’s smile became positively vulpine.

  “If you and June will do those two jobs for me,” Wally said, “I will pay you ninety-nine thousand dollars Canadian, and lifetime free rent in that house—on the condition that you plant crabgrass.”

  “And we’ll throw in free room and board here, until both jobs are done,” Moira said. “Paul, you know what our guest room is like.”

  Paul and June exchanged another glance, finished their coffees, put their cups down, and stuck out their hands.

  More coffee was poured, considerably more whiskey was poured, and the sunset was roundly toasted. As the sky darkened, conversation became general, veered around for awhile, and inevitably wandered back to the events of the day just finished.

  “You know,” Paul said, “I almost wish there was some effective way they could have edited my memories, without leaving gaps too big to shrug off as a bender. I mean, in a way I’m almost glad I’m never going to know any more than I do right now…but at the same time, the little I do know is going to stick in my mind like a burr under my saddle for the rest of my life, and drive me crazy.”

  “Tell me about it,” June said. “I know my mother was dead. But that was her, today. How do you make sense of something like that?”

  Wally sent Moira a glance she could read even in the dark, that meant, They haven’t figured it out.