Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (54 page)

He hauled out a picture of his mother. Antoinette Donnelly practically jumped at it. "I've never seen this one," she squealed. "Oh, how lovely, how unexpected."

George says he was just beginning to come out of his bafflement. Why his parents? Well, if a man is maximum famous, there are all sorts of biographies written about him; there are chapters on his parents, there'd be pictures of his parents in the illustration section, you know, all the interesting stuff about his origins.

She was still crooning over his mother's photograph. And you know, he says, it was just a very ordinary studio shot. He listened to her go
oh!
and
ah!
and make the kind of breath-kissy sounds girls do when they're all overcome, and then, suddenly, she said something. She definitely
said
something.

"My ancestor," she said. "My very own ancestor."

"Your wha-at?"

"My ancestor. My great-great-great-grandmother."

George says it hit him harder than the gin was hitting her. He says he went all kinds of rubbery. "Your ancestor," he got out after a while. "That makes me..."

"My great-great-grandfather. Exactly. How do you do, great-great-granddad?"

She shook hands with him, you know, solemn-comical. George says he didn't feel he had much muscle in the arm she was shaking.

"Is that the reason you came back to see me?" he asked.

The question seemed to upset her a little bit. "Most of," she said. Then she thought for a second or two and grimaced. "Some of," she added.

Naturally, George took a good hard look at her now. There seemed to be a real family resemblance, but he wasn't sure how much he was reading into it. On the other hand, there'd been no red hair in the family, none at all that he remembered. And Antoinette Donnelly's hair was bright red, flame red, almost orange. Well, maybe he was going to marry a red-headed woman. Or maybe his son would. Or his grandson.

But here he'd been half-planning to put it to her—his own great-great-granddaughter. Wow.

And then he thought, why wow? First, who would know? Second, was it really incest? She was a lot farther away, relationwise, than a second cousin, say. And nobody objected to anyone making it with a second cousin. What an opportunity! It was his chance to make it with the next century—something no cocksman before him had ever done.

He freshened her drink again and took a sip from his—just to keep things looking right.

And the point was also to get the information out of her. George says it hit him that what he had to do was both. And he knew he could. If he got her loose enough to get her into bed, she'd nine chances out of ten be loose enough to tell him what he wanted to know. There's nothing like the aftermath of the sack to make a person feel like talking.

You know George. He knows.

"Would you like to see a picture of the two of them together?"

"Oh, yes."

"It's in the bedroom. Bring your drink with you."

And that's all it took, George says.

He says he got the framed wedding picture out of a bureau drawer and, while she crooned over it, he got his arm around her waist, and then she fast slurped the rest of her drink down, and he fast slurped at the base of her throat and the side of her throat and then on down. He says he didn't even have to push her into bed. She flowed.

The big problem was that jumpsuit or playsuit she was wearing. George says that trying to remove it reminded him of way back in his teens and the first time he'd tried to get a brassiere off a girl while kissing her passionately and all the time acting suave and man-of-the-world. That red stuff just wouldn't come off her, no matter how he pulled or pushed or got his fingers inside. There was no catch, no hook anywhere, that he could find.

She had to do it for him—just like with that first girl and that first brassiere. She just put her finger on one of the little knobs or buttons, and the whole garment let out a wheeze and shriveled up into a little red bump on her right shoulder.

And off they went.

How good was she? Not great, George says. Not at all bad; just not great. And, he says, sex in the twenty-first century is still pretty much sex as we know it. If you've been in one century, he figures, you've been in them all. Maybe the two biggest differences are how many clothes you have to take off and what you do about birth control. She looked like a level-headed female so he decided he could trust her on birth control.

That left the incest angle, and I asked him about that. He says that making it with your great-great-granddaughter from the twenty-first century is not much different from making it with your clothes-designer neighbor from across the hall.

If that's what he says, that's what it is. You have to figure he knows.

They had two, three rolls, and she seemed to get a little drunker with each roll. When it was all over and they lay apart, George looked her over carefully. A real fine body—and you know what? He says she was still clutching the wedding picture of his parents in one hand. As a matter of fact, up to a few seconds ago, she'd been banging away at the sheets with it.

He got up, took it away from her and put it back in the bureau drawer.

This Antoinette Donnelly. She was still breathing hard. "You are fantastic," she said. "You are absolutely fantastic, Mr. George Rice."

"Thanks," he said with as much of a modest smirk as George can manage. "My father thanks you. My mother thanks you. And I thank you." He took her drink off the night table and handed it to her. Keep her loose.

She drank some—you know, sex always makes me thirsty too—and held up a hand. There was a wiggly black dot inside her wrist. "Ooch," she said. "It's late."

George figured it was now or never to move. "You're not going without at least giving me a hint?" he whimpered—you know how George does. "Just a hint? Not even that?"

She seemed to say something to the red bump on her right shoulder. There was a fast wheeze or something and the red playsuit kind of boiled up and out and over her body. She was obviously thinking hard.

"You are so very, very good," she grinned. "You even know exactly how to ask for something you have no right to ask."

"No right? Aw, come on." He bent down and kissed her. "I've got a perfect right. A great-great-grandfather's right."

She giggled. "Some great-great-grandfather!"

He walked back to the living room with her. Feeling great. It was obvious she couldn't refuse him, couldn't hold back. He was probably strutting a bit as he walked. You know George.

"Come on. Why did you have to see me? What's so great about me?"

"Well, to begin with there are—I mean, were—your parents. Their accomplishments."

"My parents? What are you talking about? They were all right, they led okay lives, but, hey, they didn't
do
very much. What accomplishments?"

"Well, for just one thing, your mother's critical study of the academic novel. That by itself is a pretty big item."

"Mom's book? Oh, no. She had to have it published by a vanity press. It cost her four thousand dollars. And it came out a year after she died."

Antoinette shrugged. "So? It's still definitive. The seminal study of the academic novel of the twentieth century. Everything else takes off from that."

"My God. And Dad? Poor old nutty Dad? Don't tell me his matchbook collection, or his beer can collection... Hey, don't tell me that."

At this point, the girl touched a couple of raised knobs on her playsuit. A kind of tinkling started up. "Well," she said, "if you're talking about his famous seven collections—the ones he left to his local branch of the public library—if you're talking about those, that's exactly what I do have to tell you."

"Famous. You said famous. Those crappy collections? I mean you couldn't walk around in our basement because of that junk."

"Yes, I said famous. Of course, I meant his accompanying monograph as much as the collections themselves. There's a two-year course at most universities based on that monograph:
Popular Culture and Its Industrial Base
. Well, actually only half of it is based on your father's monograph; the other half has to do with the extension into musical theory that one of your children did late in life."

"Which one of my children? How many kids will I have? Will they—"

"No. I can't go into that kind of detail about future events. Surely you can see why?" She rubbed hard on a reddish button and the tinkling developed into a definite and noticeable rhythm. A kind of hiccuppy rhythm. "I wish I could. I'd particularly like to tell you about my grandmother, one of your granddaughters. So much of her research on the speed of light as a sometime constant has been the background of all my work on time travel. Although, her cousin's theories, I'd say, are also really—"

"Cousin! That's one of my descendants, too, right? I hear what you're telling me. From my parents down, quite a goddam family!"

"Oh, yes, quite a family. A genetic delight, a eugenic fantasia. A family that's been scrutinized exactly as the Bachs of Germany have been scrutinized."

And now she was playing around with a whole bunch of those rosy buttons. Back and forth. Up and down. It almost sounded like a tune. And it was getting loud.

But George was paying no attention to that. He was hot on the trail now.

"And of that whole famous family, you picked me to come back to. Me you wanted to see. Just me!"

She was concentrating on those buttons, but she looked up, a little annoyed. "Of course you were the one I wanted to see. You have to be the most interesting one of the lot."

George grabbed her shoulders and began shaking her. "
Why?
You've got to tell me
why
. What did I do? What
will
I do?"

"Please!" She pushed him away hard. George says she had a lot of power for something her size. "Please! You'll defuse the spirillix. It's already falling fast."

George bounced back. "Come on. Don't do this. Tell me why. Why me particularly?" He says his voice had gotten hoarse. He was practically yelling in a whisper.

She looked up from the buttons and stared at him. "Don't you see? Surely you know!"

"Know what? What's special about me?
What?
"

"You're the only one in the family, the only one for a whole bunch of generations who achieved nothing, absolutely nothing. And, when I was given the chance, I just had to find out why."

"Nothing? Nothing at all?" George says his two lips tasted like paper.

"Nothing at all. I've been puzzled by it all my life. Nor am I the only one in my time who finds it baffling. The articles! The hypotheses! And I found out why just two minutes or so after I arrived. It's so obvious."

"Obvious?" George says he croaked out.

"Yes. You're just too good at what you do do." She gestured toward the bedroom. "The way you managed me into there. And the way—How could there be room for any other skill?"

Those musical sounds got very loud and very fast. And then she was gone. George says like a bubble bursting, a bubble bursting where no bubble had been.

And that's all. I mean, that's all, folks.

It's a pretty weird story, you have to admit. It's not a story every guy would tell about himself.

But he says Antoinette Donnelly missed the whole point. He says the record will damn well show he was first-rate at
something
. He grins like a cat when he says that.

Well, you know George.

I think this is not at all a bad story. In fact, it has some rather really good bits. But I couldn't figure out a way to end it. When my agent, Virginia Kidd, began pointing out to me that it had been a long time since I had given her a chance to show me her marketing ability, out of sheer shame I finished up the piece and sent it to her. She sold it immediately.

I still don't quite like the ending. I need help, I feel, with the last couple of paragraphs. I've never found that help.

Can you, do you think...

Written 1987——Published 1993

Banderling, you are a fathead!

Yes, yes. I know. It is rather improbable that this message will reach you in the years that remain of your smug life; but if something, some new discovery—an unexpected warp in the plenum, say—should bring these pages to the surface, I want Thomas Alva Banderling to know that I consider him the most dilated, augmented, and amplified fathead in the history of the race.

Excepting myself, of course.

When I consider how happy I was puttering around my collection of dolik and spindfar, how splendidly my paper on Gllian Origins of Late Pegis Flirg-Patterns was progressing—when I recall that bliss, only to be recalled in turn to the filthy, dripping necessities of my present vocation, I tend to become somewhat unacademic in my opinions of Banderling. What chance do I have now of ever returning to the creamy towers of the Institute rising in plastic beauty from the septic Manhattan soil?

—|—

I like to dream of the scholarly exhilaration I felt the day we of Field Party Nineteen returned from Mars with a shipload of punforg out of the Gllian excavation. I like to muse on my delighted reacquaintance with the problems I had left unsolved when the field trip was offered me. Banderling and his obscene radiation depressor? Why, that night was the first time I really noticed him!

"Terton," he asked suddenly, his face focusing sharp and studious in the screen of my benscope, "Terton, could you look in at my lab for a moment? I need an extra pair of hands."

I was startled. Beyond occasional meetings at Institute Assemblies, Banderling and I had had little reason for conversation. And it was fairly rare for an Associate Investigator to call on a full Investigator for mechanical assistance, especially when their fields were so different.

"Can't you get a labtech or a robot?" I asked.

"All the labtechs have gone. We're the only ones left in the Institute. Gandhi's Birthday, you know. I told my robot to package himself two hours ago when I thought I was leaving."

"Very well," I sighed, necklacing both my flirgleflip and the dolik I had been examining with it. As I walked into the benscope, giving my necklace the required tugs for the opposite wing of the Institute, I had already ceased to wonder at the oddity of Banderling's request.