A Woman a Day

by Philip José Farmer

  Ava snarled back at him, and he decided it was sickness, not a communication, that had made Ava look so ill. Both were silent until the taxi brought them to the hospital.

  Leif was looking for notes from Rachel or Roe when Ava came in, paler than ever.

  “Did you find anything on the kymos?” Leif asked.

  Ava extended a shaking hand in which was a graph. He took it and read the recordings of Zack Roe’s semantic waves. Sigur, the assistant, had obeyed Leifs instructions and placed all the eegie work done during his absence in a special file. Ava had picked out the one with the message.

  He read, and he paled. When he looked up, be saw the automatic in Ava’s hand.

  “You’re the executioner?” he asked unbelievingly.

  Ava’s voice trembled. “No, I’m only the escort.”

  “And very prettily armed, too,” said Leif, recovering his poise. “Well, when does this drumhead take place?”

  “Leif,” Ava said, “I hate to do this. We’ve worked together so long. But orders are orders. And you shouldn’t have let that... that woman go to your head. How could you have put us all in jeopardy by deliberately disobeying the command to cremate that girl at once? And then making love to the other?”

  “So you did inform on me?” he said, gritting his teeth.

  “It was my duty.”

  “Hating Halla didn’t have anything to do with it, heh? Or was it hate? Did you have designs on her, too?”

  “That’s neither here nor there,” Ava replied. “Come on, Leif. If I put this gun away, will you promise not to try a break?”

  “All right. You’re still enough of a soldier. I suppose.”

  Ava went to a closet and pulled some garments from the false bottom of a dirty clothes hamper.

  “Here. Put these on.”

  He examined them. “So it’s that bad, is it? We’re through here.”

  “Yes. The thoughtpicker isn’t in the eegie, Leif. Our men must have moved it away sometime today when the word came.”

  Ava undressed and began putting on the blues of the unskilled laborer. “Lord, Leif, it’ll be good looking like a man again! Ten years of pretending to be a female!”

  “You gave up a lot for the Service,” he answered. “Tell me, Ava, honey, was it worth it?”

  “Any more of that, and I will shoot you,” she—he— said.

  Leif had become so accustomed to Avam Soski posing as his wife that he seldom thought of him in terms of his true sex. The little fellow was good, one of the greatest disguise-men in the CWC.

  Leif dressed, walked to the OB and flicked it on.

  Ava said, “None of that. Orders are that you communicate with nobody.”

  He ignored him and asked the autoperator for Mrs. Dannto’s room. She should be getting ready for the party. If the Sandalphon were with her his presence wouldn’t matter. They had arranged a code word.

  “Leif, I’ll shoot!” cried Ava.

  The cube showed Halla coming into the front room of her suite. She was in a robe.

  “Halla, is there anybody else to hear?” he asked.

  She shook her head and stared past him at Ava’s leveled gun.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Ava won’t shoot. Listen! The jig is up. I haven’t time to go into detail. The gist is that we’re getting out of here. I can’t tell you how, because this line may be monitored. I don’t think so; both you and I get automatic lamechian privileges; but you never know. Just meet me where we agreed to. Fast! Got it?”

  She nodded her head again, and he cut them off.

  Swinging around on Ava, Leif said, “I’m not going with you, baby. I intend to contact Jim Crew and get him to ship Halla and me to Bantuland.”

  “Jim Crew is in H,” said Ava flatly. He held his gun steady on Leif’s chest.

  “When did you learn that? In the women’s room on the coach?”

  “Yes. Roe told us to get under because he thinks the Uzzites will torture the truth from Crew. I think the ’picker has been moved close to H so Roe can listen in on the ordeal.”

  Leif hesitated and said, “Ava, listen. I know you’ll shoot me if I drive you too far. But what about giving me a break? What do you say you take both Halla and myself to the drumhead? I can make a plea that Roe let us go. I’m no use to CWC any more; killing me won’t help him.”

  “Do you think that after you’ve messed up the Halla replacement and gotten involved with the Bantus and talked Halla into abandoning her post that Roe’ll pardon you? Leif, that girl has gone to your head!”

  “I know it.”

  “But, Leif—betraying your country?”

  “I didn’t. I just forgot it for the moment.”

  They walked out of the hospital. Leif took his personal car and drove to the front of the National Library. Halla was waiting inside. She walked out and got into the seat behind the two men.

  Before Ava could tell Leif where to go, Halla pulled a gun from her purse and stuck it against the little man’s neck. Leif reached over and removed Ava’s automatic from his pocket.

  “I could see what was coming,” he said. “So Halla and I made our plans, too.”

  Ava seemed stunned. “Leif, this isn’t... isn’t...”

  “Like me? Perhaps not. But I took one wrong step and that led me to the next. Not that meeting Halla was wrong. I wouldn’t pass that up for all the medals in the world. The thing is, the CWC would consider me disloyal from the first. I have no choice. Understand this—I’m not turning against March. After this is over, I’ll volunteer for a trial there, when emotions have cooled down some. But right now I’d get shot.”

  Fighting the savage desire to race pell-mell down the streets and take corners on two wheels, Leif drove slowly and carefully to a subway entrance close to the square that had once enclosed the Arc de Triomphe. They got out, and Leif put the car on auto for the hospital.

  He took one look at the four-hundred-foot statue of Sigmen, holding a sword and an hourglass, had a vagrant thought as to what successor to the Arc and the Forerunner would someday stand there, and then followed Ava and Halla down into a subway and from thence into the tunnels that would lead to the hideout of the Bantus.

  They rode to a spot four blocks from their destination, and walked the rest of the way. The meeting-place was a room in a house for lower-class workers. It was on one side of a very large square. Far on the other side was a huge block-like building that was, supposedly, a college for psych techs.

  Actually, it was H.

  The three approached the roominghouse from the rear, walked up three flights of rickety steps, down a hall stinking of cabbage and fish and sweat, and to a room that fronted the square. Ava tapped the code; the door opened; they stepped in.

  “Where’s Roe?” said Ava.

  The man gestured at the empty room and said, “He’s hiding. So is about half of the Corps. Candleman’s found out what we’re doing. He left me here so I could warn anyone who came to the drumhead.”

  Curiously, he looked at the guns Halla and Leif held in their hands, but he made no comment.

  “What about Barker?” said Ava.

  “He’s to hide like the rest of us. Get away as best he can. Roe will deal with him later.”

  Halla sighed with relief.

  Leif said, “Well, I did my best. From now on, if he wants me, he’ll have to come and get me.”

  He walked up to the ’picker which was standing by a closed windowblind and said, “Is it set to explode?”

  The man replied, “Not unless somebody tries to open it. I was using it on Jim Crew. They’re giving him a hell of a treatment over there.”

  Leif clucked and shook his head. He knew that in every one of these buildings scattered through the Union, the “unreal” thinkers were reconverted to reality.

  There techs drugged the subjects, laid them on couches, and attached minute synapse-wires to various nerve-endings. Through these they fed a series of stimuli that created the sensations the techs desired. T
hese, co-ordinated with words whispered by a recording, made the subject live artificial situations which he thought were actual happenings. The “story” was repeated over and over, until it was stamped unalterably for life upon the subject’s being, until it had all the unconscious authority of a conditioned-reflex.

  Released from H, the subject was convinced that he had gone through an experience that had shown him the error of his ways. Thereafter, he was an unquestioning citizen. No matter what his beliefs before his entrance into H, he was now a loyal disciple of Isaac Sigmen.

  The one disadvantage was that he no longer could think creatively. He was as close to being an automaton as a person could be.

  Leif knew this. Peering into Crew’s mind would be distressing, but an impulse he couldn’t fight made him turn on the ’picker and put on the ear phones. These latter gave him the auditory translations of the “semantic” waves radiating from the Bantu’s cortex.

  Chapter 21

  LEIF TOOK TWENTY minutes to find Jim Crew’s brainwave pattern. His beam probed here and there, stabbed up and down corridors and into rooms where techs sat, metal helmets on heads, watching dials, running tapes and making records. Wires from their helmets and various instruments pierced the walls and ran to the bodies of the subjects. Each wire ended in an exceedingly fine network that connected with this or that nerve-plexus. Through these techs were feeding the pre-set stimuli that gave the subjects their illusions.

  Leif, of course, could not see anything within the building, but he could visualize it because of what he’d been told about H and because of thoughts he caught from those techs whose heads weren’t shielded by the impenetrable metal caps.

  The men working on Jim Crew had a beautifully evil situation for him, one that followed the pattern of his own thinking. Leif tapped the Bantu’s semantic-waves just as they were beginning the story for the first or hundredth time. He was at a loss to understand it, but in a short time he began inserting his own interpretations in the inevitable gaps and static. He was helped by the fact that the man was sub-vocalizing much of what he was undergoing, just as a man talks in his sleep.

  The subject was awakened from a sound sleep by a gentle voice whispering over and over, “Jim Crew, open your eyes. Jim Crew, don’t cry out.”

  And when he did so, or, rather, thought he did, he saw a man standing in the corner of his cell. The stranger was black-skinned and naked and had a face that was Jim Crew’s own, though the features were somewhat ethe-realized. He looked as Jim Crew would have liked to look.

  Jim wasn’t too surprised at seeing this visitor. He had always known that sooner or later he would come. He calmly accepted the obviousness of his having walked through the wall. He was, however, thrilled to see a shimmering nimbus around the close-cut hair.

  “Come, Jim Crew,” the man said. “I am here to take you away, far from these people who know not what they do.”

  As if in a dream, Jim floated to his feet and seized the hand held out to him. It was large and strong and warm with a power Jim had never felt before, not even when he’d held hands in the big tribal dances and the whirling circles had created power for healing and for understanding and love.

  This was an energy that flowed to him as the higher potential flows to the lower. This was the source of that power that he’d dreamed about and sometimes seen in his prayers when he was alone or had glimpsed, oh so briefly, at the climax of a great dance.

  Child-like, Jim took the hand and followed the man through the wall and felt not a tinge of fear when the brief darkness closed around him. Then he was through the cement, and he was rising in the air, borne upwards by the power of the hand. Below him, Paris was spread out in night and in clusters and strings of glowpearls, and then it dwindled and grew small and the curve of the earth was far off and the air grew colder. A warmth spread out from the man like a robe, and though Jim Crew shivered at the first stroke of the fingers of space he quickly enough forgot about it.

  They were poised between earth and moon with Jim Crew gazing curiously at the moon, for in this day where men rode to the stars, he had never left the atmosphere, thinking that this planet was big enough and beautiful enough for what he wanted to do in his life.

  The man with the head like a saintly Jim Crew’s said, “Look! You have been faithful to your Master, and so I reward you with this.”

  And he gestured at all of Earth and the moon and the stars.

  Jim Crew cried out, “But, Lord, this isn’t what I want!”

  His words fell out into dark space and froze and hurtled like cold iron towards the globe below, and when they struck the air they burned and sent out long tails of flame and released their content so that he heard his voice, fire-streaked and amplified in the vast bowl of Earth, coming back at him, mockingly and somehow distorted, “But, Lord, this isn’t what I want!”

  And the man said, “But what do you want? What else is there but this?”

  And when Jim Crew turned to look at him, for the meaning and the tones chilled him as space itself had not done, he saw that the man’s face was as wise and kind and loving as before. But he also saw that the voice came from another’s mouth, and when he looked into the eyes that went with that mouth, he felt for the first time in his life a Fear. This head was his too, and it was what Jim Crew had hoped he would never become, for there was evil stamped so deeply into it that it would never come out.

  And when the twisted mouth, wicked, yet his as much as was the mouth of the man who’d rescued him, repeated, “But what else is there?” Jim Crew squeezed upon the man’s hand for all the power he could absorb. But the man had turned partly sidewise, and Jim could see that he had grown a long thick tail that stuck up behind him like a saucy monkey’s. Upon its end, as if the tail were a neck, was the head of the twisted-mouth Jim Crew. When it saw that Jim understood, it laughed and said, “Did you really think there was anything beyond that, Jim Crew, beyond those hard hot and cold globes drifting aimlessly through infinity and eternity? Did you really believe in a Something else?”

  Jim Crew cried out and tried to jerk away and run on the nothingness beneath his feet, for the hand holding his had grown icy and was sucking power from his body, and the head that had been what Jim wanted to be was melting like a hot candle and changing features.

  But he could not run, for he was sprawled out on the bosom of space, great breasts that offered no sustenance and no love, and though he frantically rowed hands and kicked feet, he moved nowhere.

  And then the two-headed man had placed a foot like a talon upon his back and sent him down with a shove that made the universe reel. He fell and left space and struck the air as if it were the surface of the sea and slowed and then fell faster again as the air whistled by and the earth came up as if thrown at him. His skin began burning because he was a meteor of flesh now and would go up in flames and smoke and agony long before he struck.

  He shouted, “Lord, surely none of your martyrs ever burned before in such a manner!”

  And no sooner had the words left him than he became aware of a hand that gripped his shoulder and slowed him down so that the flaming air cooled and he drifted gently. When he looked up, he saw that the man who had saved him had the red hair and narrow bright-blue eyes and big vulture’s beak of Isaac Sigmen, the Forerunner.

  His voice was that of the dove.

  “Now that you have been betrayed by the one you thought was your master, and now you have seen that there is nothing beyond the palpable, and now you have been saved by the true prophet, the traveler in time, founder of the Sturch that will save all men, surely you must see what a lie you have been living in and how you must work with the followers of the Forerunner to remedy your misdirected labors to make reality into pseudo-time.”

  And though Jim Crew knew that what he was experiencing was that which was—for he could see and feel and hear—he still knew that he was being tempted in a subtle manner that none of his fellows had ever faced.

  He turned and wrest
ed himself from the Forerunner’s grasp and breathed deeply and shouted, “Master, wherever you are, come now, or I am lost!”

  The next moment Leif Barker’s ears were filled with such a crackling of static he had to tear off his ear phones. But he found that it did no good, for something had reached him from the building across the street and plunged deep into him in a manner that was shattering. A light, blinding, explosive, so filled him that he could see nothing else. He fell backwards upon the floor and did not hear Ava and Halla when they yelled, or feel them when they lifted him up.

  Then, in the next second, the light was gone, and he was back in the world he knew.

  Ignoring their questions or protests, Leif rose, shook his head, and put the ear phones back on. He found what he’d expected. Jim Crew’s brainwaves no longer existed.

  He switched to a searchbeam and centered upon the head of a tech who had taken his helmet off and had run into the room where the Bantu lay beneath his cocoon of wires. As the tech was vocalizing, Leif had no trouble understanding.

  The man was saying, as reported by his semantic waves, “I don’t know what happened! He was responding the way he should have. He’d just reached that part of the record where the Forerunner was telling him he’d been betrayed. Then, just like that, the needles on our dials shot over to full, staying there a second, and then fell to zero! He must have been pouring out a super-human amount of energy! Much more than I would have thought possible!”

  Leif poked his beam around the room until he picked up another man.

  “He’s dead. What killed him? Heart attack?”

  Another replied, “He doesn’t look as if he died of a heart attack. Look at the smile on his face. What in Sig-men’s name could have he been thinking of?”

  That was enough for Leif. He removed the phones and said to the others in the room, “Let’s get out of here. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  The man who had admitted them to the room refused to go back with them into the subway. He had another place to hole up. After hesitating, Ava, however, said he would go with Leif and Halla. The three left at once. They didn’t bother with the thoughtpicker. When the Uzzites tried to open it, it would explode.