One Million Tomorrows M
Page 16
“So what?” Barenboim’s forehead crinkled slightly. “You aren’t the father.”
“I …” Pleeth’s throat worked convulsively, and his lipless mouth curved upwards in a parody of a smile. “I am the father, Hy. You wouldn’t deny me a child.”
“Have you gone crazy?”
“No, Hy, no.” Pleeth cupped his gold cigar in both hands and held it out to Barenboim. “I was twenty, Hy. Twenty years old and I’d never had a woman. It was my mother, you see—my father moved out before I was born, but she wouldn’t live in a commune. There was just the two of us. I’ve figured out, since, how it all happened. I was a substitute for my father, but I had to be a safe substitute. One who could never burden any woman with a child. There were all those things she told me about sex … the old books about old dead diseases … perhaps she had picked up a nonspecific urethritis, and thought it was …” Pleeth took a quavering breath, and his words camefaster.
“She—my mother, I mean—she didn’t like to be called she, objected to the personal pronoun—came into my bedroom one afternoon. The tridi set was on and there was a girl in the focus … I was never an image cuddler, Hy, not really … it was more like a sort of dance—but she, my mother, called it self-defilement …. She had a hypo gun, I don’t know how, and she shot me … made me kneel down in front of her… and she shot me …”
“Don’t come near me,” Barenboim said in a faint voice.
“I was only twenty years old,” Pleeth crooned, his eyes fixed on his gold cigar, “but I fooled her, my mother … she’d forgotten about the two days’ grace. Grace!” His eyes unfocused momentarily as he considered ironies inherent in the word. Barenboim moved impatiently but Pleeth regained his dominance, overwhelming the tableau with his naked agony.
“I had two days left to collect my own semen. Being a chemistry student, I had no difficulty in preserving it in a bacteriostat … then I designed this phallus to keep it in … and she, my mother, never guessed.”
“You’re ill,” Barenboim whispered strickenly.
“Not I.” Pleeth smiled as he revealed his secret triumph. “I’m still functional, Hy—not like you…. I still wear the badge of manhood. And I’ve had other women, even without using aphrodisiacs, sometimes … but none of them ever became pregnant. When I knew that Athene’s shot contained both an aphrodisiac and a fertility factor—well, what red-blooded man could resist an opportunity like that?” The pink curvatures of Pleeth’s face tightened as he grinned at Barenboim.
“You went to her house!” Barenboim’s face had become ashen. “You risked a billion-dollar operation—for this!” He snatched the gold cigar from Pleeth’s hands and, with a stiff-armed swing which snapped the fine supporting chain, hurled it towards the furnace. Its glittering trajectory took it through the heat shields and into the shimmering pink hell beyond. There was the briefest flare of light and the cigar was gone.
“You too,” Pleeth whispered, with a barely perceptible shaking of his head. “You’ve cooled me, Hy.”
He threw himself at Barenboim. The two men were locked together for a second, then the laser stabbed a smoking hole through Pleeth’s body. He went down immediately. Carewe felt himself moving as though in a dream; the very air had become a clear, clinging syrup. He launched himself over Pleeth’s crackling corpse, just as the laser was turning in his direction, and dubbed Barenboim with a fist that seemed to be made of lead. Barenboim crumpled, and Carewe prised the laser from his fingers. He shone its aiming spot into Barenboim’s eyes, watched the pupils shrink like receding black universes, and eased the slide forward.
“Will!” Athene’s voice came from far aw. “Nol”
Carewe paused, and won his way back to sanity. “I too,” he told Barenboim as he stood up, “am not like you.”
He walked across the laboratory to Athene, who had sunk onto the stairs, and sat down beside her. “You should have told me about Pleeth.”
“I couldn’t have told anybody about that night.” She caught his hand and pressed her lips against it. “I didn’t know what had happened to me. I felt so dirty, Will— I had to drive you away from me.”
“But I would have understood, worked it out some way.”
Athene smiled sadly, her left eyelid quivering. “Would you, Will? I didn’t believe you when you tried to tell me about the new drug … What made us think we were so special that our marriage could be immortal too?”
“We weren’t ready,” he assured her. “But we are now.”
XVII
Athene had been prepared to allow him a year, but he had settled for two months. It was high summer and the waters of Lake Orkney, visible from the hotel room, were sunfire and amethysts.
Carewe took the hypodermic gun from his traveling case and set it beside the small pile of books he had brought to read during the vacation. The books he had chosen were of the traditional printed type, not because they were experiencing a vogue, but because they conveyed a greater sense of history and continuity. He was learning to think of his own allotment of time as being an inseparable thread of all time, of himself as part of the forces of history and entropy. Reading was still not something he particularly enjoyed, and he had doubts about how well the occupation would sustain him down the years—but he had come to respect books themselves. The first immortals …
“I’m going for a swim—while I’m still presentable,” Athene said, examining her naked body in a mirrored wall. Her figure had filled out in the past two months, but only Carewe could detect the first swelling behind which lay the growing embryo, the baby they had decided to keep.
“You look wonderful,” he said. “Don’t bother with a swimsuit.”
“Oh, Will, do you think …?” She turned, saw the hypodermic and the pleased smile faded from her face. “Now?”
“Yes.” He nodded peacefully.
“Do you want me to stay with you?” Athene came towards him.
“No—I’d like you to go on down to the beach and soak up some of thatpensive sunshine. I’ll be right down.” She opened her mouth to argue, and he said, “Don’t you trust me?”
Athene closed her eyes, and they kissed. She tied a flimsy robe around herself and, without looking at him again, left the room. Where she had been, dust motes wheeled and countermarched in a shaft of sunlight. Carewe picked up the hypodermic and sat for a moment, his left hand resting on the books. Perhaps if he read enough he too would be able to write, someday, some year. If he ever did put stylus to paper he would like to set down a philosophy for immortals.
The great mistake is to be greedy, to try to hold on to all of one’s past and all of one’s future. An immortal must learn to accept that endless life is also endless death—of the successive personalities who inhabit his flesh and are gradually changed and worn away by the passage of time, by the shifting tides of events. But most important of all, immortality is also the endless birth of new personalities. An immortal must acknowledge, easily and gracefully, that he as he exists at any one point in time, will die just as surely as if he were one of those mindless, anonymous little shellfish whose featherlight remains are scattered across, and are part of, all the shores of eternity.
For a moment the warm, bright room seemed cold to Carewe, then he understood that he was a different person than the Carewe of three months earlier—and had no regrets about the change. The child Athene was carrying was not his; but, in another sense, he was the father of all the future Carewes. That responsibility was enough to replace the fulfillment of physical parenthood, and it would have to sustain him if ever he and Athene went separate ways.
He picked up the hypodermic, fired its contents into his wrist in an icy cloud, and went down to the beach to rejoin his wife at the beginning of their long, long summer.
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Also by Bob Shaw
Orbitsville
Orbitsville (1975)
Orbitsville Departure (1983) Orbitsville Judgement (1990)
Warren Peace
Who Goes Here? (1977)
Warren Peace: Dimensions (1993)
Land and Overland
The Ragged Astronauts (1986) The Wooden Spaceships (1987) The Fugitive Worlds (1989)
Other Novels
Night Walk (1967)
The Two-Timers (1968)
The Palace Of Eternity (1969)
One Million Tomorrows (1970)
The Shadow of Heaven (1970, rev 1991))
The Peace Machine (aka Ground Zero Man) (1971) Other Days, Other Eyes (1972)*
A Wreath of Stars (1976)
Medusa’s Children (1977)
Ship of Strangers (1978)
Vertigo (aka Terminal Velocity) (1978)
Dagger of the Mind (1979)
The Ceres Solution (1981)
Fire Pattern (1984)
Killer Planet (1989)
Collections
Tomorrow Lies In Ambush (1973) Cosmic Kaleidoscope (1976)
A Better Mantrap (1982)
* Not available as an SF Gateway eBook
Bob Shaw (1931 - 1996)
Bob Shaw was born in Belfast in 1931. After working in engineering, aircraft design and journalism he became a full time writer in 1975. Among his novels are Orbitsville, A Wreath of Stars, The Ragged Astronauts and his best-known work Other Days, Other Eyes, based on the Nebula Award-nominated ‘Light of Other Days’, the story that made his reputation. Although his SF novels and stories were for the most part serious, Shaw was well-known in fannish circles for his sense of humour, and his witty ‘Serious Scientific Talks’ were a favourite of attendees at Eastercons. Bob Shaw won two Hugos and three BSFA Awards. He died in 1996.
Copyrigt
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © The Estate of Bob Shaw 1971
All rights reserved.
The right of Bob Shaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11111 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VI
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Website
Also by Bob Shaw
Author Bio
Copyright