All the Lives He Led-A Novel (40 page)
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Let me think for a bit. And while I’m doing that why don’t we have those prawns?”
He didn’t say yes right away. But he did ultimately say yes, between the baked Alaska (I thought that would amuse him, and I guess it did) and the brandies that came with the coffee. And when I dreamed that night Gerda was as loving and as sweet as she had ever been.
WAITING FOR ARTIE
Artie Mason had taken me up on my offer, all of it. I really hadn’t had much doubt that he would—what other options did the poor slob have? And anyway when he said he’d do it I on the spot handed him the first thousand euros I’d promised to start paying, so he left the hotel that night with a smile on his face and the most money he’d seen in decades, or maybe ever, in his pocket—as well as a brand-new tendency to avoid alleys and doorways that might hold a mugger. (Though any mugger who would select somebody who looked as certifiably penniless as Artie Mason to attack clearly had no aptitude for the work.) I couldn’t help asking him how long he thought it would be before he could give me at least a preliminary report. Dumb question. There was no way Artie could answer it until he was on the scene, but he was polite enough to say, “That’s hard to estimate, but I’d guess at least a couple of weeks.” And I had to be satisfied with that—
Well, with that and the welcome attentions of the Gerda of my dreams that night. She might be only the phantasm of a dream, but she surely knew how to show appreciation.
There was a little new problem, though, that I hadn’t expected. Those dreams of Gerda were extremely nice, but they had one serious flaw. That is, that’s what they were. Dreams. They weren’t real. And physically speaking I was a healthy male in my twenties, which is to say at the peak of my sexual curve, and while I was getting ready to fall asleep I couldn’t help thinking that just a few dozen meters away, in the bedroom of the suite next door, was an equally healthy and sexually peaking female who had made it clear she would do pretty much anything I ever asked her to.
I wasn’t planning to do anything about it in any practical sense. Still, I couldn’t help reflecting that there were possibilities there that I wasn’t exploiting. It wasn’t even that I thought Dream Gerda would be jealous. Real Gerda certainly wouldn’t have been, I was sure. Under those circumstances she would have cheered me on.
The two weeks Artie had mentioned went by, and two weeks more before I heard from him. And then it was just one of those electronic greeting cards, with room for a few words. Artie didn’t need many. His message was just “Doing fine, more later.” And then nothing at all for another few weeks.
Of course there was nothing I could do about it but rehearse patience. My stock of patience continued to get help from Dream Gerda, which I took to mean she appreciated that I was doing the best I could for her plans, whatever they were … .
Well, no. Wait a minute. That’s not exactly right.
I wasn’t brought up to be superstitious, and I didn’t really think that Gerda was making that long, dreary trip back from the grave every night just to give me my jollies so I’d stay vigorous in her cause.
If anyone had asked me to explain it I guess I would have replied with more of that psychoanalytic babble that I hated so much when somebody tried it on me. You know, my id can open up as a whole other person. Or some other piece of my personality can disguise itself as Dream Gerda. Or whatever—that sort of thing.
That sort of analysis didn’t mean that I was enjoying those dreams any less, of course.
But, also of course, there were some objective facts at work here. One of them was, as I’ve said, that I was a healthy male in my twenties for whom wet dreams weren’t quite enough. And I noticed that I had begun looking at Shao-pin in quite a different way.
While I was waiting for Artie to get on with the job I was paying him to do—and while, I admit, I was sometimes beginning to have the unworthy suspicion that he was taking my money and laughing himself sick over my gullibility in some Stans gin mill—I tried to keep myself busy with attention to my own affairs.
One of those affairs was my own astonishing prosperity.
With all its faults, the human race had one trait that was of considerable benefit to me. They were all insatiably curious to get an in-the-flesh look at the guy who not only had banged the head Flu terrorist, but had ratted her out to her death.
That was weird. In a creepy way I felt that it was almost flattering to me. It was also immensely profitable. Remember I once worried that Shao-pin’s 10 percent might not pay for her trouble? Actually it had already made her a multimillionaire. In euros. How much money it had earned for me I don’t know. I didn’t even have to show up for performances to earn it anymore. From the virts of the ones I had already done the techs had put together three or four docudramas—with me talking and varied shots of Gerda and everyone else involved sprinkled in. A lot of the stuff about Gerda was pretty racy. They had taken every intimate thing I ever said about her and slanted them to make them look more intimate still. I didn’t mind, though. Why should I care what they think? And Gerda didn’t mind, either, because she was too dead to have an opinion one way or the other.
Then there were the things I was discovering in those coils the professor had given me. For example, at some point Bu Deng’s (male) true love had come back into his life. That didn’t directly affect me, except that the man was large in all dimensions, almost the same size as Bu himself, and he looked vaguely familiar. I puzzled over that from time to time, replaying bits from all over those coils, until one day when Shao-pin was in the house, checking her ledgers against the ones my household accounts kept for her and I had retired to my bedroom to get out of her way. I was playing bits from the coils to give myself something to do. I had reached one episode where the stranger and Bu were the principal figures (I’ll tell you about it later) when, for the first time, I caught a fragment of conversation between a man and a woman also present. I had to play that little fragment four or five times before (my excitement mounting) I was sure what they said, but then I was:
Woman: I thought he was never going to quit until he offed old Harry.
Man: I guess those royal guards were just too much for him. Anyway he says he’s giving it up.
That was it! “Old Harry.” “Royal guards.” They had to be talking about the ancient and decrepit king of England, Henry IX. And that meant that Bu’s lover was in fact a much younger version of the man I had known as that hater of the British royal family, Jeremy Jonathan Jones, otherwise known as the Bastard who ran all the behind-the-scenes operations at the Jubilee.
It was a revelation. The colonel had told me to keep the coil secret, but this was too good to keep to myself, and how fortunate it was that Shao-pin was only a couple of corridors away. When I asked her on the house intercom to come and join me she didn’t ask why. She was there in minutes, and when she heard what I had just discovered she was even more excited than I was. “But this is wonderful!” she cried. “It puts Gerda and this Jones person together earlier than anyone knew!”
“Not to mention Maury Tesch,” I pointed out.
“No, Tesch, too,” she agreed. “All three of them together! Oh, Brad, I have to report this right away!”
That wasn’t the kind of response I had expected, but I could see that for Shao-pin it was inevitable. I cleared my throat. “And if they want to know where I got those coils?”
For a moment she looked stricken, but then brightened. “I’ll report it to the colonel and let him handle it. Excuse me for a moment—” But of course I wouldn’t do that until she told me that, yes, the colonel was indeed still alive and, yes, he had had a confirmed case of the Flu, and now his life was no longer in danger but he had suffered some disfigurement.
She left me then, withdrawing to my dressing room to make her call, leaving me to think about exactly what that word “disfigurement” might mean. When she came back I was quick to offer her some wine, some coffee, just about anything she wanted, because I suddenly didn’t want her to leave. She put up a little resistance, but when I offered to show her the exact point at which Gerda first began to believe that the enemy was the entire human race she gave in.
I could tell that she was wondering why I was so reluctant to let her leave.
The curious thing is that at that point so was I.
THE PHONE CALL
As I was running the coil to the exact spot I wanted I had to explain to Shao-pin that Gerda was allowed to attend an occasional luncheon with that dealer in potions and spells, Bu Deng. In this one they were at the luncheon table in his grapevine arbor with six or eight of the other good-looking young women that were Bu’s favorite guests. Gerda was seated on Bu’s right hand and was busily trying to get Bu to get specific about what militarized disease organisms he had, and would he ever show her how they worked? He wouldn’t. He got a touch testy about it once or twice, too. At that point Gerda immediately backed off and began to tell him how much she appreciated being asked to join him for the meal and how beautiful everything was.
Well, that was easy conversation for her to manufacture. Beautiful was what everything was in Bu’s mansion. Bu himself was a very Westernized Chinese, whose favorite apparel was knee-length plaid shorts, open-toed sandals, and the kind of huge fly-eye goggles that the Antica people chose to wear. He liked to have his luncheons, six or eight female guests at a time, within one of the dozen or so grape arbors on his estate, surrounded by the vines to dilute the heat of the sun, with Bu’s expensive stingless bees doing what bees did so well on flowering plants and Bu’s personal Stannish manservant bringing them small increments of delicious foods. It was clear that Gerda wanted to get back to her questions about the militarized disease organisms Bu might have created to give the Stans a bargaining chip in dealing with the outside world. Bu was being indulgent enough to let her come titillatingly close. There was a minute or two of lighthearted chatter among the lunchers—
And then Bu’s phone went off.
Half a minute later so did Gerda’s, and of course, so did most of the other phones in the world because they were from some people trying to tell some other people some horrid news. Gerda’s call was from the junior surgeon, Rollo. “Are you still at Bu’s,” he asked—had to ask, because she had turned off her vision circuits.
“Where else would I be?” she asked. “Is something the matter?”
“It surely is, heavenly bod,” he said. “Get yourself to the nearest news screen! A big piece of America is blowing itself up.”
It quickly became obvious that what Rollo was trying to tell Gerda about, of course, was Yellowstone, the super-volcano that changed everybody’s life when it blew in 2062. My own life included.
For everybody Yellowstone was scary. It gave some really bad dreams to just about every human being on Earth in just the same way. But for Gerda it was worse. It threatened her very sense of purpose.
Now I’m going to skip over quite a long stretch of Gerda’s life, five or six years at least. What it showed was that Gerda’s principal occupation in those years became sex. Lacking any real purpose, she tried to give some meaning to her life with drinking and partying. And the way the drinks and the parties wound up was often in bed with someone, very likely a perfect stranger, or even several of them.
Her master, the surgeon Vassarian Nevirovski, must have known what she was doing. Nevirovski himself gave up using her for his personal sex partner, but he didn’t interfere with her other affairs, just kept her around as, as Gerda said, “his trophy ho.”
Ethnically speaking the people who ran the affairs of the Stans were mostly descendants of Russians from a few generations past, sent there by higher authority to run those mighty technological establishments. Or sometimes they were Russians who had moved there for reasons of health. (Careers bloomed faster in Moscow, but the more distance you could put between you and the Kremlin, the less likely you were to get caught up in some purge.) And then there were also the research guys who had immigrated to the Stans well after the breakup of the USSR, the ones who had come to the Stans for their unparalleled research opportunities.
Gerda was in a good position to have a great time as Nevirovski’s companion with all these people. Unfortunately I could see that she wasn’t happy. Even more unfortunately, so could Nevirovski. His cheerful trophy ho … wasn’t. So at last a day of reckoning came and Rollo knocked on the door of her suite, looking regretful.
“It’s his highness,” he said when she answered. “He gave me a message for you. You’re cured, so now you can leave any time.”
Gerda got the message, the real one that was imperfectly hidden in the subtext. She was being evicted.
She didn’t waste time in either complaining or pleading. She just said practically, “His bills wiped out my bank account. Where am I supposed to go?”
Rollo looked embarrassed. “Well,” he said, “I could put you up until you got straightened out.”
She knew what strings that offer came with, but she just said, “And wouldn’t Vassarian object to that?”
Rollo looked even more embarrassed. “Well, no. He said it would be all right.”
And so she became the trophy ho of Rollo Mbwirda. And after Rollo there was, well, everybody.
Those mean years must have been interminable for Gerda, living her threadbare and unhappy life. The unhappy part was not simply because so much of it was threadbare. It cut deeper than that. The great blast had made her question what her own life had been about. Was she the unfailing nemesis of evildoers anywhere in the country? Well, sure, sort of. But Yellowstone, you see, had created more abject misery in a few weeks than everything she had ever managed to do to punish the wicked had amounted to in her whole lifetime. And it had done even more, and worse, to millions upon millions of innocents, as well.
