To Live Again and The Second Trip (4 page)

Next he switched on the neutron flux scanner with which he monitored Risa’s apartment. There was little of the voyeur in his psychological makeup; he merely regarded it as good sense to keep an eye on his increasingly more unruly daughter. Especially when, as today, she had blackmailed him into giving his consent to a transplant by the elegantly simple method of threatening to get pregnant. Now that she had voiced the notion, he knew he had to guard against it. He was well aware of Risa’s sexual adventures of the past year, and had no objections to them, but a pregnancy was beyond the scope of the acceptable.

He watched her for a few moments.

She was naked again, rushing about the apartment, getting ready to go out. No doubt to make the preliminary arrangements for her transplant. Kaufmann allowed himself the pleasure of admiring her coltish grace, her long-limbed sleekness. Then he switched the scanner over to record and let it run; it would monitor her apartment so long as he wished.

Swinging around to his desk, he activated the telephone.

“I want my daughter traced wherever she goes today,” he said. “I expect her to visit the soul bank, and don’t interfere with that, but tell me where she goes afterwards. Especially if she goes to any of her friends. Male friends. No, no interceptions; just surveillance.”

He suspected he was being overcautious. Nevertheless, he would have her watched, at least today. If necessary, he’d order surreptitious external contraceptive measures as an extra precaution. Risa could sleep around all she liked, but he had no intention of allowing her to get more than a few days into any premarital pregnancies just yet.

Kaufmann said to the telephone, “Get me Francesco Santoliquido.”

It took more than a minute. Even Mark Kaufmann had to be patient about getting a call through to Santoliquido, who was not merely an important man, as chief administrator of the soul bank, but also a very busy one. Whole light-years of secretarial barricades had to be penetrated before Santoliquido could discover who was calling and was able to free himself long enough to respond.

Then the amiable face blossomed on the screen. Santoliquido was about fifty, ruddy of skin, white-haired, with a large, commanding oval face. He was a man of considerable wealth who had entered the bureaucracy out of a sense of mission.

“Yes, Mark?”

“Frank, I wanted you to know that my daughter will soon be on her way down to your bank to pick out a persona.”

“You broke down, then!”

“Let’s say Risa broke me down.”

Santoliquido shook with pleasant laughter. “Well, she’s a strong-willed girl. Strong enough to handle a transplant, I’d say. What shall I give her? A Mother Superior? A lady banker?”

“On the contrary,” said Kaufmann. “Someone softly feminine, to balance all the aggression in her. Someone who died young, quite sadly, after a life of suffering for love. Preferably a girl of an opposite physical type, too, less athletic, less masculine of build. You follow?”

“Certainly. And what if Risa isn’t interested in a persona of those specifications?”

“I think she will be, Frank. But if she isn’t, give her what she wants, I suppose. I’ll leave the final decisions up to the two of you.”

“You’ll have to,” said Santoliquido. His eyes regarded Kaufmann with some amusement. “You know, Mark, you were supposed to come to the bank yourself this month. You haven’t been recorded in nearly a year.”

“I’ve been so damned busy. Paul’s death, and everything—”

“Yes, I know. But you shouldn’t neglect the semiannual recording. A man of your stature—you owe it to the world, to the future inheritors of your persona, to keep yourself up to date, to etch all the new experiences into the record—”

“All right: You sound like a recruiter.”

“I am, Mark. We’ve been expecting you for weeks.”

“What if I come tomorrow, then? I wouldn’t want to be there today. If I ran into Risa, she’d think her horrible old father was spying on her.”

“True. Tomorrow, then,” Santoliquido said. “Is there anything else, Mark?”

“Just one thing.” Kaufmann hesitated. “The question of Paul’s persona.”

“No decision’s been taken yet. None. We’ve had dozens of applicants.”

“Roditis among them?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“You
could
say. Maybe you
won’t
say, but that’s a different thing. I know Roditis is hungry to add Paul to his collection of transplants. I’d merely like to emphasize that such a transplant would be distasteful and offensive not only to the immediate Kaufmann family, but to—”

Santoliquido’s ringed hand swept across the screen. “I’m aware of your feelings,” he said gently. “However, family wishes cannot be binding upon us. The decisions of the soul bank are made strictly on an impersonal basis, taking into account the stability of the recipient and the merit of his application, and you know very well that we regard it as desirable to go outside the genetic group whenever possible.”

“Meaning that you favor giving Paul to Roditis?”

“I said nothing of the kind.” Santoliquido’s geniality began to ebb. “We’re still weighing all applicants.”

“I wish I could take Uncle Paul myself, and keep him out of the skull of that—that fishmonger!”

“What about the consanguinity laws?” Santoliquido asked. “Not to mention your uncle’s own will? He’ll have to go outside the family, Mark. And I suspect we won’t be giving him to any Schiffs or Warburgs or Lehmans or Loebs, either. Can we drop the subject, now?”

“I suppose.”

Santoliquido smiled again. “I’ll see you tomorrow. And then, Saturday, your party, Dominica.”

“Yes. Dominica on Saturday.”

The screen went dark. Kaufmann felt cross; he had played his hand poorly, making that frontal attack on Santoliquido just now. Risa had upset him, clearly, shaking his tactical faculties. Or was it Roditis?
Roditis. Roditis.
For ten years, now, Kaufmann had watched that grasping little man accumulate first wealth, then power, and then some measure of social prestige. Now the audacious upstart wished to thrust himself deep into the core of a fine old family, making up for his own lack of ancestry by seizing the available persona of the late Paul Kaufmann. Mark scowled. He was less of a snob than he had a right to be, considering who and what he was, but nevertheless the thought of Roditis lying down on a pallet in the soul bank and emerging with Uncle Paul was intolerable to him. He had to be blocked.

Kaufmann’s own three personae stirred and squirmed. Ordinarily they were mild, passive, guiding him without making their presence known, but the tensions of this hideous morning were seeping into their place of repose. He put his hands to his forehead. I’m sorry, friends, he told the three captive souls beneath his scalp. We’ll all relax on Saturday. I’m genuinely sorry about this.

Damn
Roditis!

Kaufmann turned back to the ticker. The market was rallying, but now the utilities were weak. He scanned the tape, made a quick velocity projection of Pacific Coast Power, and went five thousand shares short at 43. Moments later it came across the tape on high volume at 45%. Not my day, Kaufmann thought, and covered his sale for a rapid loss. Not my day at all.

C
HARLES NOYES AWOKE SLOWLY
, reluctantly, fighting the return to the waking world. He lay alone in a bed that was just barely long enough for his lanky body. His arms twitched; his eyelids fluttered. Morning was here. Time to rise, time to toil. He fought it.

—Come on, you cowardly bastard, said James Kravchenko within his mind. Wake up!

Noyes moaned. He jammed his eyelids together. “Let me alone.”

—Up, up, up! Greet the morning’s glow.

“You aren’t supposed to talk to me, Kravchenko. You’re just supposed to
be
there.”

—Look, I didn’t ask to be pushed into your brain. Anytime you’d like to let me out, you know where to go.

“You don’t mean that. You’re only bluffing. You want to stay right where you are, Kravchenko. Until you can take me over entirely, and run me like a puppet.”

Kravchenko did not reply. Several minutes passed, and the persona remained silent. Once again Noyes considered getting out of bed, but waited, convinced that Kravchenko would nag him again, and willing to arise only when nagged. But in the continued silence he knew the onus was on him to get their shared body up. He pushed back the covers and disconnected the night monitor.

Beside his bed lay the deadly flask of carniphage. Noyes eyed it tenderly. His first thought upon arising, like his last at night, was of suicide. No. Duicide. When he went, he would take Kravchenko with him. He picked up the flask and cradled it in his hand, stroking it with affection.

Within the fragile container lay a lethal quantity of beta-13 viral DNA, a replicative molecule whose action it was to persuade the cells of the body to release autolytic enzymes, certain acid hydrolases, from the lysosomes or “suicide bags” within themselves. Moments after ingestion, the carniphage created such a cascading wave of autolysis that the body literally fell apart; cell death was general and consecutive, and as each cell in turn succumbed to the flow of fatality, the carniphage devoured it. It was a swift but unusually agonizing way to die, since the body turned to slime from the digestive tract outward, and as much as eight or ten minutes might pass before the nerve centers were no longer able to register the pain of dissolution. But the splendor of the poison lay in its total irreversibility. There was no known antidote, nor even a conceivable one; neither could a stomach pump or any sort of similar device halt the process once it had begun to affect even a few cells. Let that cascade of destruction begin, and the victim was irrevocably doomed. Noyes sometimes thought of it as the Humpty Dumpty effect.

He set the carniphage down.

—Go on, gulp it, why don’t you!

“Very funny, Kravchenko.”

—I mean it. Do you think you frighten me, waving that suicide juice around? I’ll get a new body soon enough, once you’re gone. Maybe you’ll be right in there with me, when I’m transplanted the second time.

Noyes reached for the flask.

—Just put it to your lips and go crunch. It’s easy.

“No, damn you! I’ll do it when
I
want to. Not to amuse you!”

It seemed to him that he heard Kravchenko’s ghostly laughter. Putting the flask aside again, Noyes shed his nightclothes and began his morning rituals.

Religious observance.
He reached for the
Bardo.
Untold generations of Episcopalian ancestors whirred like turbines in their New England tombs as the last and least scion of the Noyeses opened the barbarous Tibetan holy book. He turned, as usual, to the
Bardo
of the dying, the early section, before the demons appear, when nirvana is still within reach. In a low voice he read:

O nobly-born, listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or color, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good. Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as the voidness of nothingness, but as being the intellect itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling, and blissful, is the very consciousness, the All-good Buddha.

Cleanliness.
He stood in the vibrator field for a minute.

Nutrition.
He programed an austere breakfast.

Bodily hygiene.
Grunting a bit, he performed the eleven stretchings and the seven bendings.

He ate. He dressed. The time was ten in the morning. He had returned with Roditis from San Francisco the night before, and he was still living on Pacific Standard Time, which made his awakening even more difficult than it normally was. Activating the screen, Noyes saw that the outer world looked cheerful and sunny, and the sunlight was the yielding light of April, not the harsh winter light that had engulfed this part of the world so long. He lived in a small apartment in the Wallingford district of Greater Hartford, Connecticut, close enough both to Manhattan and to his ancestral Boston. He tried to keep away from Massachusetts, but old compulsions drew him there periodically. One, at least, was external: at Roditis’ insistence, the two of them attended their Harvard class reunion each year. That was painful.

Any window into the past was a source of pain. Anything that reminded him of a time when he had been young, with prospects before him: a legal career, a fruitful marriage, a fine home, the joys of tradition. He had flunked out of law school. Flunked out of marriage, too. Today he was a wealthy man, but only because Roditis had picked him up from the junkheap and stuffed money in his pockets, as the price of his soul. Noyes’ credit balance was high, but he spent little and lived in a kind of genteel poverty, not out of miserliness but merely because he refused to believe that the largesse Roditis had showered upon him was real.

“Charles! Charles, are you up yet?”

—His master’s voice, said Kravchenko slyly.

“I’m here, John,” Noyes called into the other room, while sending a subliminal shout of fury at his persona. “I’m coming!”

One entire wall of the sitting room bore a viewscreen that was hooked into Roditis’ master communications circuit. No matter where Roditis was, at any station along the territory of his far-flung empire, he could activate that circuit and introduce himself, life-size, three dimensions, into Noyes’ apartment. Noyes presented himself before the screen and confronted the blocky figure of his friend and employer. The furniture surrounding Roditis was that of his office in Jersey City: stock tickers, computer banks, data filters, the huge green eye of an analysis machine. Roditis looked wide awake. He said, “Feeling better?”

“Passable, John.”

“You were in lousy shape when we got back last night. I was worried about you.”

“A night’s sleep, that’s all I needed.”

“The acknowledgment on the lamasery gift just came in. Want to see what the guru’s got to say?”

“I suppose.”

Roditis gestured. His image shattered and vanished, and for a moment a cloudy blueness filled the screen; then came the sharp snap of a message flake being thrust into a holder, followed by the appearance in Noyes’ sitting room of the holy man from San Francisco. Noyes had the illusion that he smelled incense. The guru, all smiles, poured forth a honeyed stream of praise and gratitude for Roditis’ generous gift. Noyes sat through it impatiently, wondering why Roditis was bothering to inflict these few minutes of fatuity on him. Of course the guru was going to sound grateful, after having been handed a million dollars; of course he was going to say that Roditis was blessed among men in wisdom, and worthy of many rebirths. Noyes had the uneasy suspicion that Roditis genuinely
believed
what the guru was saying—that he felt it was praise earned through merit, not merely bought for cash. It was something like a sonic sculptor who bribed the
Times
critic to give him a rave, then called up all his friends and proudly read them the glowing review. Not a day passed on which Noyes failed to rediscover the core of naïveté that lay within John Roditis’ energetic, shrewd, ruthless spirit.