To Live Again and The Second Trip (3 page)

It might be interesting, she thought, to find out what it was like to be bosomy. To know what it is to carry all that meat below your clavicles. Risa made a mental note to request some top-heavy breasty wench when she applied for her first persona transplant. By checking through the memories she inherited, she’d get a notion of what voluptuousness was like without the bother of gaining all that nasty weight.

When will I get the transplant, though?

That was the frustrating part. At sixteen she was medically old enough for the Scheffing process, but not legally competent to apply for it. She needed her father’s consent. It had been simpler last year when Risa decided it was time for her to part with her virginity; she merely took the next rocket to Cannes, picked out a likely stud, and surrendered. But they’d throw her out of the soul bank, Kaufmann or not, if she walked in without the proper consent form.

She looked over her shoulder and saw figures moving on the far side of the sliding glass door between the living room and the terrace. Risa got to her feet. Her father was coming toward her. His girl friend, the Italian bitch, Elena Volterra, was with him. Smiling, Risa lounged against the wall of the terrace and waited for them to come out to her.

Her father was wearing some sort of sprayon business suit, very chic, very shiny. His long black hair was slicked down across his skull in a style that highlighted the savage cragginess of his features, the hard thrust of the cheekbones, the vulpine chin, the corvine nose. Somehow he managed to be handsome, Mark did, despite the collection of outcroppings and bladed planes that was his face. Risa was desperately in love with him, and they both knew it, of course. And hid the fact, as they must. His eyes barely flickered over his daughter’s angular nakedness.

“Looking to visit the hospital?” he asked. “April’s too early in the season for sunbathing in this latitude.”

“It’s warm enough out here, Mark,” she said sullenly.

“Put something on.”

“Why should I if I’m not cold?”

“All right,” Mark said. “Don’t. But I don’t have to talk to you, either. Not while you’re bare.”

“How bourgeois of you, Mark. Since when have you enforced the nudity taboo?”

“This has nothing to do with taboos, Risa. Simply with your health. Now and then I have to take some sort of interest in your physical welfare, don’t I? And—”

“Very well,” Risa said. “We’ll talk inside.”

Defiantly naked, she sauntered past them, through the glass door, and slung herself down in the abstract webfoam cradle near the great screen-window, wrapping her hands about an upraised knee. Her eyes passed from her father to Elena, who was clearly annoyed by the interchange. Good. Let her stew. Elena had the sort of body Risa had been thinking about a short while back. Fleshy. Indeed. Full hips, solid thighs, high, bulky breasts. And always dressed to display her assets. Risa didn’t envy her father’s mistress her figure. Usually Elena kept herself cosseted with stays and braces so that the flesh made its intended effect; but it was easy for Risa to summon the memory of that beach party last year when they had all been swimming naked, and poor Elena had jiggled and bounced so dreadfully. A body like that was designed for the nakedness of the bed, or the semibareness of formal dress, but not for casual outdoor nudity. Risa asked herself if, should Elena die tomorrow, she would request her persona on a transplant. She doubted it. It would be a pleasantly spiteful thing to do to Elena, but Risa didn’t think she cared to have the woman in her mind, even as a temporary.

Mark and Elena came in from the terrace. Risa chuckled. She had won that round by a dozen points. Her father had come up here with Elena because he knew it annoyed her to see the two of them together, but he had found her nude, which annoyed him because it awakened the nasty Electra thing in him and humiliated him before Elena, so he had made a fuss about her catching pneumonia in the cold outdoors. Whereupon she had come obediently inside, but remained nude, compounding the effect of rebellion and provocation. Mark was smiling too; he knew that he’d been beaten by an expert, and he couldn’t help being proud of her.

His apartment was a floor below hers. She had left a message for him, asking that he come up and see her when he came home for lunch.

She said, “I wanted this to be a private conference, Mark.”

“You can talk in front of Elena. She’s practically a member of the family.”

“That’s odd. I didn’t see her at Uncle Paul’s funeral.”

Mark winced. Risa chalked up another cluster of points. She was really sharp this morning. Elena was fuming!

Huskily, Elena said, “If this is a family conference and I’m intruding—”

“I’d just like to talk to my father a little while,” Risa said. “If it’s all right with the two of you. I hate to come between you, but—”

Mark shrugged a dismissal. Elena snorted in a way that made the pounds of flesh above her neckline ripple and dance. Wigwagging her hips, she stalked from the apartment.

“
Now
will you put something on?” Mark asked.

“Does my body make you that uncomfortable, Mark?”

“Risa, it’s been a difficult morning, and—”

“Yes. Yes, all right.” She knew when it was time to cash in her winnings. She picked up a robe, wrapped it about herself, and politely offered her father a tray of drinks. He chose one capsule and pressed it to his arm. Risa did not hesitate to select a golden liqueur herself, administering it expertly and shivering a little as the ultrasonic spray drove the delicious fluid into her bloodstream. She eyed her father carefully. He was tense, wary; this Roditis thing had him worried, no doubt. Or perhaps it was merely the complexity of unraveling Uncle Paul’s will that keyed him up.

She said, “I think you know what I want to ask you about.”

“Summer vacation on Mars?”

“No.”

“You need money?”

“Of course not.”

“Then—”

“
You
know.”

He scowled. “Your transplant?”

“My transplant,” Risa agreed. “I’m well past sixteen. Uncle Paul’s funeral is out of the way. I’d like to sign up. Can I have your consent?”

“What’s your hurry, Risa? You’ve got a whole lifetime to add new personae.”

“I’d like to begin. How old were you when
you
got your first?”

“Twenty,” Mark told her. “And it was a mistake. I had to have it erased. We were incompatible. Can you imagine it, Risa, despite all the testing and matching I took on the persona of an ardent anti-Semite? And of course he woke up and found himself in a circumcised body and nearly went berserk.”

“How did you pick him?”

“He was a man I had admired. An architect, one of the great builders. I wanted his planning skills. But I had to take his lunacy with his greatness, don’t you see, and after three months of sheer hell for both of us I had him erased. It was several years before I dared apply for another transplant.”

“That must have been unfortunate for you,” Risa said. “But it’s getting off the subject. I’m old enough for a transplant. It’s unreasonable of you to deny your consent. It isn’t as if we can’t afford it, or as if I’m unstable, or anything like that. You just don’t want to let me, and I can’t understand why.”

“Because you’re so young! Look, Risa, sixteen is also the minimum legal age for getting married, but if you came to me and said you wanted to—”

“But I haven’t. A transplant isn’t a marriage.”

“It’s far more intimate than a marriage,” Mark said. “Believe me. You won’t merely be sharing a bed. You’ll be sharing your brain, Risa, and you can’t comprehend how intimate that is.”

“I
want
to comprehend it,” she said. “That’s the whole point. I’m hungry for it, Mark. It’s time I found out, time I shared my life a little, time I began to experience. And there you stand like Moses saying no.”

“I honestly think you’re too young.”

Her eyes flashed. “I’ll translate that for you, dearest. You want me to stay too young, because that way you stay young too. So long as I remain a little girl in your estimation, your whole time scheme stays fixed. If I’m eight years old, you’re thirty-two, and you’d like to be thirty-two. But I’m past sixteen, Mark. And you won’t see forty again. I can’t make you accept the second, but I wish you’d stop denying the first.”

“All your cruelty is exposed today, Risa.”

“I feel like going naked today. Physically and emotionally. I won’t hide anything.” Languidly Risa selected a second drink for herself; then, as an afterthought, she offered her father the tray. As she pressed the capsule’s snout to her pale skin she said, “Will you sign my consent form or won’t you?”

“Let’s put it off till July, shall we? The market’s so unsettled these days—”

“The market is always unsettled, and in any event it has nothing to do with my getting a transplant. Today is April 11. Unless you give in, I’m going to bear an illegitimate child on or about next January 11.”

Mark gasped. “You’re pregnant?”

“No. But I will be, three hours from now, unless you sign the form. If I can’t experience a transplant, I’ll experience a pregnancy. And a scandal.”

“You devil!”

She was afraid she might have pushed her father too far. This was a raw threat, after all, and Mark didn’t usually respond kindly to threats. But she had calculated all this quite nicely, figuring in a factor of his appreciation for her inherited ruthlessness. She saw a smile clawing at the edges of his mouth and knew she had won. Mark was silent a long moment. She waited, graciously allowing him to come to terms with his defeat.

At length he said, “Where’s the form?”

“By an odd coincidence—”

She handed it to him. He scanned the printed sheet without reading it and brusquely scrawled his signature at the bottom. “Don’t have any babies just yet, Risa.”

“I never intended to. Unless you called my bluff, of course. Then I would have had to go through with it. I’d much rather have a transplant. Honestly.”

“Get it, then. How did I raise such a witch?”

“It’s all in the genes, darling. I was bred for this.” She put the precious paper away, and they stood up. She went to him. Her arms slid round his neck; she pressed her smooth cheek to his. He was no more than an inch taller than she was. He embraced her, tensely, and she brushed her lips against his and felt him tremble with what she knew was suppressed desire. She released him. Softly she whispered her thanks.

He went out.

Risa laughed and clapped her hands. Her robe went whirling to the floor and she capered naked on the thick wine-red carpet. Pivoting, she came face to face with the portrait of Paul Kaufmann that hung over the mantel. Portraits of Uncle Paul were standard items of furniture in any home inhabited by a Kaufmann; Risa had not objected to adding him to her décor, because, naturally, she had loved the grand old fox nearly as deeply as she loved his nephew, her father. The portrait was a solido, done a couple of years back on the occasion of Paul’s seventieth birthday. His long, well-fleshed face looked down out of a rich, flowing background of green and bronze; Risa peered at the hooded gray eyes, the thin lips, the close-cropped hair rising to the widow’s peak, the lengthy nose with its blunted tip. It was a Kaufmann face, a face of power.

She winked at Uncle Paul.

It seemed to her that Uncle Paul winked back.

Mark Kaufmann took the dropshaft one floor to his own apartment, emerged in the private vestibule, put his thumb to the doorseal, and entered. From the vestibule, the apartment spread out along three radial paths. To his, left were the rooms in which he had installed his business equipment; to his right were his living quarters; straight ahead, directly below his daughter’s smaller apartment, lay the spacious living room, dining room, and library in which he entertained. Kaufmann spent much of his time in his Manhattan apartment, though he had many homes elsewhere, at least one on each of the seven continents and several offplanet. At each, he could summon a facsimile of the comforts he enjoyed here. But these twelve rooms on East 118th Street comprised the center of his organization, and often he did not leave the building for days at a time.

He walked briskly into the library. Elena stood by the fireplace, beneath the brooding, malevolent portrait of the late Uncle Paul. She looked displeased.

“I’m sorry,” Kaufmann told her. “Risa was simply in a bitchy mood, and she took it out on you.”

“Why does she hate me so much?”

“Because you’re not her mother, I suppose.”

“Don’t be a fool, Mark. She’d hate me even more if I
were
her mother. She hates me because I’ve come between herself and you, that’s all.”

“Don’t say that, Elena.”

“It’s true, though. That child is monstrous!”

Kaufmann sighed. “No. She isn’t a child, as she’s just finished explaining to me in great detail. And she’s not even monstrous. She’s just an apt pupil of the family business techniques. In a way, I’m terribly pleased with her.”

Elena regarded him coldly. “What a terrible tragedy for you that she’s your own daughter, isn’t it? She’d make a wonderful wife for you in a few years, when she’s ripe. Or a mistress. But incest is not one of the family business techniques.”

“Elena—”

“I have a suggestion,” Elena purred. “Have Risa killed and transplant her persona to me. That way you can enjoy both of us in one body, quite lawfully, gaining the benefit of my physical advantages joined to the sharp personality you seem to find so endearing in her.”

Kaufmann closed his eyes a moment. He often wondered how it had happened that he had surrounded himself with women who had such well-developed gifts of cruelty. Steadier for his pause, he ignored Elena’s thrust and said simply, “Will you excuse me? I have some calls to make.”

“Where do we eat lunch? You talked yesterday about Florida House for clams and squid.”

“We’ll eat here,” said Kaufmann. “Have Florida House send over whatever you’d like to have. I won’t be able to go out until later. Business.”

“
Business!
Another ten millions to make before nightfall!”

“Excuse me,” he said.

He left Elena arrayed like a fashionable piece of sculpture in the library and made his way to his office. He touched the door-seal, full palm here, not merely thumb. The thick tawny oaken door, inset with twining filaments of security devices, yielded to him, an obedient wife that would surrender only to the right caress. Within, Kaufmann consulted the stock ticker the way an uneasy medieval might have searched for answers in the sortes of Virgil, or perhaps in a random stab into the Talmud. The market was off six points; the utilities averages were up, finance steady, interworld transport a little shaky. Kaufmann’s fingers tapped the console as he executed two swift trades for ritualistic purposes. He closed out at 94 a thousand shares of Metropolitan Power purchased that morning at 89%, and an instant later accepted a realized loss of half a point on a lot of eight hundred Königin Mines. The net effect on his central credit balance was inconsequential, but Kaufmann had learned the therapeutic value of making small trades in times of stress from his uncle, long ago.