Contemporary Gay Romances

by Felice Picano

  There would be time enough for that. His sense of his body odor was growing stronger by the second from long enclosure and he must get away from it. He reached out his right hand, struck the smooth surface, tore at it, and it collapsed all about him with a soft hiss.

  Instantly a soft chiming began somewhere below the plinth upon which he lay.

  He tried to sit up and found it difficult: His muscles wouldn’t work, not even supported by his hands. He tried again and felt slightly nauseated.

  The room around him was an even softer lilac color, nearly pearl; its surfaces were smooth, indistinguishably similar, at least from this level and position.

  He tried to sit up again and this time achieved an inch or two of head height. His body was unclothed and the Heal-All’s therapeutic dews were quickly drying in the ambient warming air. His chest hair was sparse, golden; his abdomen flat, muscled, his legs were long and also golden haired, his feet were large and personable.

  A fourth attempt to sit up got him onto his elbows facing his large perfect toes, and what he now saw, since it slid open with a whoosh, was a door, through which three completely clothed and hooded figures stepped and immediately came to his side.

  “You’re awake, Mr. Andresson? How do you feel? Not too disoriented, we hope?” said One.

  “You must be thirsty. And hungry too, I’m guessing,” said Two.

  He was. And nodded so.

  “Your personal secretary has been notified,” said Three. “You’re unexpectedly early and she is out of town on her own business and can be here in a few hours. Should we contact her? Or a friend or relative? Your mother is listed as next of kin. There is as well as a relationship that might have been as close as fiancée before your injury.”

  A slight transparent tube arrived from out of nowhere right at his lips and he received a delicious cold drip of water that he then sucked at greedily. After which he said, “No. Thank you, don’t bother anyone,” somehow surprised by the deepness of his voice (was it because of this resonant little enclosed chamber?). “In fact, my secretary need not hurry back if she doesn’t have to. I’d prefer her to finish her business already begun.”

  What he wanted more than anything else was time, he’d already decided. Because now there was another unanswered question: “How long have I been here? In the Medical Cocoon?”

  “Close to a year”: One.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Andresson, you were very seriously injured”: Two.

  “You’re fine now. Perfect, in fact”: Three.

  No, I’m not, Blue thought. I don’t remember things. Things I believe I ought to remember.

  The plinth tilted slowly and a shelf came out at his feet. He realized he was being stood up.

  An opposite wall mirrored over and he could see himself in it.

  “You see. You’re perfect”: Three, again?

  He was in fact, physically perfect. Medium-height, handsome in a square-jawed, straight-nosed, blue-eyed way, with thin lips and a facial fuzz of light hair. His upper body was strong and muscular, with well-developed arms and legs. No scars apparent anywhere, naturally; the Heal-All would have gotten rid of any. No sign of any kind of deformity. Everything looked size appropriate, except maybe slightly larger than normal genitals. He figured he must be about thirty years old.

  Why did all this seem ever so slightly, although by a mere hairsbreadth, off? Blue wished he knew.

  There was more chiming now and One said: “Contamination is nonexistent. Quarantine off!”

  Their masks melted off the medicals’ faces and two were revealed as females, one male.

  “We’re going to stand here and help if you need help walking. Take one tiny step,” Female one said.

  She and the male medical held out supportive arms for him to lean upon. Blue did put out his hands and he was able to stand away from the plinth for a few seconds before total exhaustion set back in.

  “Excellent start. Your physical rehabilitation will set in later today,” Female one assured him. “It will be constant, and, I’m afraid, rather annoying at first.”

  “But it’s necessary,” the male said. “If you’re to get on your feet and be a full member of our community again.”

  “We think you can do it in a few days. Less than a week,” she added.

  He lay back on the plinth and it slowly angled back so he was in a partially sitting position again.

  They left and Medical Number Three arrived again with a tray in which he could smell simple food. Eggs, toast. He was ravenous.

  The tray attached easily to the extensor sides that he just now noticed were part of his plinth-bed, and he could reach out for the transparent bulbs of food.

  “We’ll begin therapy with you reaching,” Three said. She was the least attractive of the three medicals and the nicest.

  “We’ll also be exposing you to visual, audio, and then intellectual stimuli,” she said.

  A Vid-set suddenly turned itself on where the mirror had just been, with soft-focus moving pictures of the outer world: a countryside, a pond, an ocean, along with music he almost recognized.

  “All you say is ‘more’ and it will provide you with stories, newscasts, weather, sports, specific information, whatever you ask,” she added. “You can also ask it to repeat. Or to be only music, or only voice.”

  “I understand,” Blue said. “I can control it by my voice.”

  “There is an important intercontinental air-race final taking place,” she suggested.

  His hands could barely grasp and hold the bulbs containing 1) a poached egg 2) a fruit juice concoction 3) a weak herbal tea. When he dropped the last one it bobbed right up and floated toward his hand again as though somehow attached.

  He could do this, Blue decided.

  Three fussed about him, covering his body with a light sheet, tucking it in, beneath. As she was leaving he asked:

  “What was it?”

  “What was what, Mr. Andresson?”

  “My serious injury?—I can’t seem to recall it.”

  “You really can’t?”

  “Not at all. No.”

  “That’s probably because you were shot in the brain.”

  “I was shot in the brain?”

  “Yes. Twice. Once in each lobe. In the brain twice and once each in the kidneys, the liver, and the heart.”

  With that, she sailed out of the room, humming to herself.

  *

  Andresson Investigations inhabited a stylish three-room suite on the ninety-eighth floor of an upscale bronzed glass building at the northwestern transportation-hub edge of the city. The rooms were spacious, comfortably lighted with diffused and slightly dimmed afternoon sunlight, and with built-in storage areas. His own office appeared to be the most functional and most characterless of the rooms.

  Another, slightly smaller office, had been converted by his secretary for use in her new part-time business, which as far as he could figure out involved stock option bids on speculative off-world futures. It was filled with computers and printer-scanners, all merrily chugging away by themselves, accessible to his secretary he assumed through the Vid-net. The third room, the outer waiting area, had received the most attention of the three in terms of design and expense—fine carpets, posh furniture, gleaming coffee tables, sculptures of lighting, individual framed artwork, etc. It all showed Andresson Investigations to be a successful business—to have been once successful.

  It was six days after he’d awakened and Blue was just too bored and itching to do something, anything, to remain in the Heal-All Center. When he’d checked out, he’d been warned by Medicals One and Two there that he was still only at about seventy-four percent of his required physical capacity to continue his vocation as usual and that he would have to continue therapy for weeks more.

  He’d noted with satisfaction in the downstairs lobby of this edifice that a new health club had opened twenty-six stories below. He’d sign up later today.

  His secretary, a woman approx
imately forty-five years old, had not yet appeared except by Vid-screen phone. When she did, she remarked that although his vocational insurance had covered all the expenses included in keeping the agency afloat for six months, that she had become quickly immersed in her own sideline, and that she’d begun showing profits early enough in that sideline that she took over the suite’s lease, utilities, and other incidentals for the following five and three-quarter month period.

  She told Blue she was prepared to share the quarters with him for as long as he wished. She had no interest at all in his line, she stated rather bluntly, being a “fearful type, unlike yourself,” whom she characterized as “curious and adventurous.” She had referred his newer clients to a competitor at the other end of the city who was prepared to refer clients back as soon as Andresson was once again in business. She doubted that he would need a secretary for another few months yet, and she agreed to hire one for Blue when he did.

  I’m an investigator,” Blue had thought, the first time he’d clearly been able to think about his past and future in the Heal-All Center. “I’m privately established, financed, and client-paid. So I must have been pretty good. And I specialize in ‘Difficult Interpersonal Relations’ and ‘Potentially Criminal Conflicts.’ So I must have been very good.”

  It wasn’t lost on him also that he couldn’t have been all that good, or at least all that lucky, since he’d ended up so seriously wounded that it had required almost a year to return to health. Surely something or someone he’d been investigating had been responsible for putting those five bullets into fatally strategic spots of his body.

  As an investigator it was his job to find out how that had happened—and why.

  But right now it was his job to find out who he was, since that also remained alarmingly unfilled and in fact mostly blank.

  His desk had six drawers. Two locked, one with a touch-print, the other with a key and vocal recognition. He had the key, and while the drawer’s primitive system hesitated at first, it must have been voice-keyed because it did open upon the second utterance of a simple sentence, “Open up for me. Go on, open!”

  In the first were leather billfolds filled with cheques and cash cards. Confirming that he was quite well off in business. The other drawer held six files that had still been “open” at the time that he was so seriously injured.

  He began reading them.

  Looking for a stylus to take notes with, he rummaged in a bottom drawer and there Blue came upon a small leather woman’s purse. Inside it, no ID but the expected articles: lipstick, compact and powder, breath mints, eye shadow, etc. Presumably, he thought, it belonged to the fiancée who had been mentioned in the Heal-All Center twice, but who had made no attempt to see Blue while he’d been there.

  No surprise. He probably wouldn’t have seen her if she had tried to contact him. The reason being, he didn’t remember her at all. Didn’t remember any kind of close sexual or affectionate relationship with a woman. He could bring up no face, voice, nor perfume that was at all familiar.

  Some other faces did come up as he remained awake and pensive, if very slowly: his mother’s (after four days) and just barely, and actually just before he accepted a Vid-screen phone call from her, confirming that’s who she was. She rather looked like a much more refined version of himself, at least from the neck up, with a porcelain complexion and a darker version of his light hair. She also had a familiar-sounding voice, but Blue didn’t truly recognize her, and he didn’t hide that fact, and she was sweet and accepting about that fact, saying twice how she’d been certain he’d never awaken and certainly not with a full memory, not after what the medicals had told her when he’d first entered the Heal-All Center.

  Once Blue had seen some Vids of her, his former secretary also seemed somewhat if again not deeply familiar. She’d been fairly new anyway, he’d been told, having only worked for him for four months before his shooting, so there was no big surprise there.

  In what little there was of Blue’s memory beyond the cognitive, the practical—i.e., what the brain surgeon-bots had hurriedly worked on getting reconnected before sticking him into the Heal-All cocoon a year before, there had been traces of memory of a male his own age, or thereabouts, nice-looking, darker-haired, slender, named Bern or Burn, something like that.

  A relatively strong trace memory of affection was connected with him. Perhaps they had been boyhood pals who’d remained friendly after they’d grown up. That would be okay. He would probably be trustworthy—if anyone could be considered so in a life that had nearly ended, violently, explosively, like his almost had. No word from this friend, of course, and frankly Blue hadn’t trusted his “mother” or his own memory sense of her well enough to ask her who this male friend might be.

  But he had no trace memory of any woman. So whom did this purse and this make up belong to?

  “Face it, Blue,” he said to his bathroom mirror, shaving before leaving the Heal-All Center, “She could be anyone. You’re a hot and handsome man.” Medical Number Three had slipped in while he was napping on Awake Day number two and made her own investigations of certain lower body areas of his physiological condition. When he’d joked about it to Medical Number One, she’d asked, “Would you like that to stop? Or continue?” He’d said “continue, please” and she had replaced the lower-status doctor with herself. This also had not been surprising. As far as he could figure, his personality structure was undoubtedly that of a person who’d had great looks and who’d used them to get what he wanted and needed. Except…

  Odd, this memory business.

  Now Blue recognized that he had the most difficult job of all: finding out which case had come so close to doing him in. He’d need to know that. He hadn’t decided whether to avoid anyone and anything connected with it in the future or not. Maybe, some little mental itch suggested somewhere in the periphery of his mind, maybe he might also figure out why he’d been targeted.

  *

  It was later that afternoon that the downstairs auto-desk called and told him he had a visitor. A Vid showed her to be a woman in her mid forties, made up rather severely, dressed carefully, and surprisingly ethnic looking, perhaps from off-world? He knew from the Vid-channels he’d been watching that very few people chose to highlight their ethnic origins by retaining inborn characteristics. Especially when it was so easy to lose them. The name given for her was Dusk Martila, with no matronymic or patronymic supplied, and which meant nothing to him.

  Naturally Blue asked the auto-desk if she’d been to his office before, and it named the date he’d been told he had been killed. Negative. Several weeks before then and once since, the auto desk said, so Blue let her come up. The auto lift CT scanned her for metal and other types of weapons or powders or explosives. Negative.

  “What can I do for you?” he greeted her at the door. Close up, Martila was taller, and more prepossessing. Her voice was somewhat guttural, too, with a slight and difficult to place accent, so she’d not had vocal cord reparation either. On purpose, it must be, as she dressed well-to-do to be able afford the simple operation.

  “Blue Andresson?” she asked, slightly surprised.

  “We’ve not met?” he asked. Then added, “You heard of my Heal-All experience?”

  “We have met, yes, but you are—changed,” she said.

  “Only physically,” he assured her. “You didn’t take Davis’s suggestion to go to my colleague, Mr. Chango Blocksson?”

  “I did. We met. I didn’t trust him. Not like you,” Martila said, not looking to be all that trusting in Blue either; at least not at the moment.

  They sat and his work screens brought up her case and the work done so far, and in seconds they were discussing the business she’d come for: which had apparently been held in abeyance for almost a year. It was a Missing Person: and both a Difficult Interpersonal Relation with a Potentially Criminal Conflict. Her first husband had vanished three years previously, mysteriously, from his place of business, which he shared with his wife.
Through Blue’s earlier efforts, she had already received permits to continue operating the family business in full sole authority, and even sell and or lease it out. But now she had met a countryman, she said, and he wanted her to get a more permanent declaration so they could unite their businesses and “other matters,” which Blue took to be interpersonal and probably marriage. “Also,” she added, “before you ended up in a Heal-All, you left a message saying you thought you had an idea where my husband might have gone to. I took it you were looking into that idea.”

  Blue didn’t recall that at all, of course. And if he had, he had left no clue to himself among these screen files on the case.

  Martila renewed the bank number where money could be deposited into his agency’s account and left. For the next half hour, Blue listened to his many notes on the case as the auto-Vid played them back to him. To his surprise, he made a mental connection that the pre-Heal-All Blue had never made before, concerning a bank account and an important client.

  He caught Martila by pad-phone in her private vehicle, not very far away from his office, and checked the information. The minute Blue mentioned it, she grew excited.

  “Yes,” she said, darkly, “this I can well believe of this person,” and she used some kind of foreign obscenity. Blue said he would need as much information as she had on the new suspect, and he would delve into it more deeply.

  Feeling renewed, and suddenly comfortable in his new skin now that he had proved to himself that he was useful, he strode over to the floor-high windows and stared out through the triple-paned, multiply tinted glass. The blue-white sun was setting, quickly falling behind the artificial-looking skyscraper scrim of the city’s far horizon. Only the dull orange sun still hung in the crepuscular sky, casting a warm evening glow.

  *

  “It was a lovely funeral, Blue,” Andre Clarksdotter gushed. “I spared no expenses. After all, you’re my only child. Our life insurance was all paid up and it had accrued so well; it’s been decades since anyone has died and I decided to do it up full scale. Everyone came. Family, of course, they flew in from all over. Many of your school friends, and even some of your clients.”