To Sail Beyond the Sunset (3 page)

“Partners for what?” I tried to sound innocent. I’m not much for orgies. All those knees and elbows—

“What do you think? It’s a fertility rite, my dear girl, to insure fat crops. And fat bellies, for that matter. By now, any virgins left in this fair city are locked up.” He added, “But you won’t be bothered simply going with me to my office…and I promise I’ll find you some sort of clothing. A coverall. A nurse’s uniform. Something. Does that suit you?”

“Thank you, Doctor. Yes!”

“If I were you and I was still jumpy, I would look for a big beach towel in that bathroom, and make a caftan out of it. If you can do it in three minutes. Don’t dilly-dally, dolly; I’ve got to get back to the grind.”

“Yessir!” I hurried into the bathroom.

It really was a bathroom, not a refresher. When I had searched the suite for clothing, I had noticed a stack of Turkish towels in there. Now I looked more closely and spotted two that bulged fat in that stack. I worked one out and unfolded it. Eureka! A towel fit for a rich South American, one at least six feet long and three feet wide. A razor blade from the medicine chest placed a slit big enough for my head spang down the center. Now to find something, anything, to tie around my waist.

While I was doing this, a human head appeared in front of—in place of, rather—the hair dryer. A head female and rather pretty. No body. During my first century this would have made me jumpy. Today I’m used to realistic holos.

“I’ve been trying to catch you alone,” the head said in an organlike baritone. “I speak for the Committee for Aesthetic Deletions. We seem to have caused you some inconvenience. For that we are truly sorry.”

“You should be! What became of that baby?”

“Never mind that baby. We’ll be in touch.” It flickered.

“Hey! Wait!” But I was talking to the hair dryer.

Dr. Ridpath looked up from scratching Pixel’s chin. “Five minutes and forty seconds.”

“I’m sorry to be late but I was interrupted. A head appeared and spoke to me. Does that happen often around here? Or am I hallucinating again?”

“You really do seem to be a stranger here. That’s a telephone. Like this—Telephone, please!”

A head appeared in a frame that had contained a rather dull still-life, a male head in this case. “Your call, sir?”

“Cancel.” The head blinked out. “Like that?”

“Yes. But a girl.”

“Of course. You’re female and the call reached you in a bathroom, so the computer displayed a head matching your sex. The computer matches lip movements to words…but the visual stays an impersonal animation unless you elect to be seen. Same for the caller.”

“I see. A hologram.”

“Yes. Come along.” He added, “You look quite fetching in that towel but you looked still better in your skin.”

“Thank you.” We went out in the hotel corridor; Pixel cut back and forth in front of us. “Doctor, what is ‘The Committee for Aesthetic Deletions’?”

“Huh?” He sounded surprised. “Assassins. Criminal nihilists. Where did you hear of them?”

“That head I saw in the bathroom. That telephone.” I repeated the call, word for word, I think.

“Hmm. Interesting.” He did not say another word until we reached his office suite, ten stories down on the mezzanine.

We ran across several hotel guests who had “jumped the gun.” Most were naked save for domino masks but several wore full masks—of animals or birds, or abstract fantasy. One couple was dressed most gaudily in nothing but paint. I was glad that I had my terry cloth caftan.

When we reached Dr. Ridpath’s office suite, I hung back in the waiting room while he went on into an inner room, preceded by Pixel. The doctor left the door open; I could hear and see. His office nurse was standing, her back to us, talking “on the telephone”—a talking head. There appeared to be no one else in the suite. Nevertheless I was mildly surprised to find that she had joined the epidemic of skin; she was wearing shoes, minipanties, and a nurse’s cap, and had a white nurse’s uniform over one arm as if caught by the phone while she was undressing. Or changing. She was a tall and slender brunette. I could not see her face.

I heard her say, “I’ll tell him, Doc. Keep your guard up tonight. See you in jail. Bye.” She half turned. “That was Daffy Weisskopf, Boss. He has a preliminary report for you. Cause of death, suffocation. But—get this—stuffed down the old bastard’s throat, before the catsup was poured in, was a plastic envelope with a famous—or infamous—card in it: ‘The Committee for Aesthetic Deletions.’”

“So I figured. Did he say what brand of catsup?”

“Fer cry eye yie!”

“And what are you doing peeling down? Festival doesn’t start for another three hours.”

“Look here, slave driver! See that clock?—ticking off the precious seconds of my life. See what it says? Eleven past five. My contract says that I work until five.”

“It says that you are on duty until I relieve you, but that overtime rate starts at five.”

“There were no patients here and I was changing into my festival costume. Wait till you see it, Boss! It ’ud make a priest blush.”

“I doubt it. We do have a patient and I need your help.”

“Okay, okay! I’ll get back into my Florence Nightingale duds.”

“Don’t bother; it would just waste time. Mrs. Long! Come in, please, and take off your clothes.”

“Yes, sir.” I came in at once, while peeling off that scrounged caftan. I could see what he was doing: a prudent male doctor has a chaperon when examining a female patient; that’s a universal. A multi-universal. If the circumstances happen to supply a chaperon in her skin, so much the better; there need be no time wasted on “angel robes” and other such nonsense. Having helped my father and having stood years of watches in the rejuvenation clinic at Boondock and in the associated hospital I understood the protocol invoked; a nurse in Boondock wears clothes only when the job requires it. Seldom, that is, as the patient is usually not clothed. “But it’s not ‘Mrs. Long,’ Doctor. I am usually called ‘Maureen.’”

“‘Maureen’ it is. This is Dagmar. Roast, meet Alice; Alice, meet Roast. And Pixel, too, Dagmar. He’s the one with the short legs.”

“Howdy, Maureen. Hi, Pixel.”

“
Mee-ow.
”

“Hi, Dagmar. Sorry to keep you late.”

“
De nada,
ducks.”

“Dagmar, either I am out of my skull, or Maureen is. Which is it?”

“Couldn’t it be both? I’ve had my doubts about you for a long time, Boss.”

“Understandable. But she really does seem to have lost a chunk of her memory. At least. Plus possible hallucinations. You’ve studied
materia medica
much more recently than I have; if someone wanted to cause a few hours’ temporary amnesia, what drug would he choose?”

“Huh? Don’t give me your barefoot boy act. Alcohol, of course. But it might be almost anything, the way the kids nowadays eat, drink, snort, smoke, or shoot almost anything that doesn’t shoot back.”

“Not alcohol. Enough alcohol to do that produces a horrible hangover, with halitosis, twitches and shakes, and bloodshot eyes. But look at her—clear eyes, healthy as a horse, and innocent as a pup in the clean laundry. Pixel! Stay out of that! So what do we look for?”

“I dunno; let’s operate and find out. Urine sample. Blood sample. Saliva, too?”

“Certainly. And sweat, if you can find enough.”

“Vaginal specimen?”

“Yes.”

“Wait,” I objected. “If you intend to poke around inside me, I want a chance to douche and wash.”

“Not bleedin’ likely, ducks,” Dagmar answered gently. “What we need is whatever is in there now…not after you’ve washed your sins away. Don’t argue; I wouldn’t want to break your arm.”

I shut up. I do indeed want to smell good, or not smell at all, when being examined. But as a doctor’s daughter (and a therapist myself) I knew that what Dagmar said made sense…since they were looking for drugs. I didn’t expect that they would find any…but they might; I certainly was missing some hours. Days? Anything could have happened.

Dagmar had me pee in a cup and took my blood and saliva, then told me to climb onto the table and into the stirrups. “Shall I do it? Or the Boss? Out of the way, Pixel! And stop that.”

“Either of you.” (A truly considerate nurse. Some female patients can’t stand to be touched down below by females, others are shy with males. Me, I was cured of all such nonsense by my father before I was ten.)

Dagmar came back with a dilator…and I noticed something. Brunette, I said she was. She had remained undressed save for scanty panties—which were not opaque. She should have shown a dark, built-in fig leaf, no?

No. Just skin shade and a hint of the Great Divide.

A woman who shaves or otherwise depilates her pubic curls has a profound interest in recreational sex. My beloved first husband Brian pointed this out to me in the Mauve Decade,
circa
1905 Gregorian. I’ve checked Brian’s assertion through a century and a half, endless examples. (I am not counting prepping for surgery or for childbirth.) The ones who did it because they preferred that styling were without exception hearty, healthy, uninhibited hedonists.

Dagmar wasn’t prepped for surgery; she (obviously!) was not about to give birth. No, she was about to take part in a saturnalia. QED.

It made me feel warm toward her. Brian, bless his lecherous soul, would have appreciated her.

By now, in the course of chatting while she took samples, she knew the essentials of my “hallucination,” so she knew that I was a stranger in town. As she was adjusting that damned dilator (I have always detested them, although this one was blood temperature and was being handled with the gentle care that a woman can bring to the task, having been there herself)—while she was busy with this, I asked a question in order to ignore what she was doing. “Dagmar, tell me about this festival.”

“La Fiesta de Santa Carolita? Hey, you clamped down! Watch it, ducks you’ll hurt yourself.”

I sighed and tried to relax. Santa Carolita is my second child, born in 1902 Gregorian.

The Garden of Eden

I remember Earth.

I knew her when she was clean and green, mankind’s beautiful bride, sweet and lush and lovable.

I speak of my own time line, of course, numbered “two” and coded “Leslie LeCroix.” But the best known time lines, those policed by the Time Corps for the Circle of Ouroboros, are all one at the time I was born, 1882 Gregorian, only nine years after the death of Ira Howard. In 1882 the population of Earth was a mere billion and a half.

When I left Earth just a century later it had increased to over four billion and that swarming mass was doubling every thirty years.

Remember that ancient Persian parable about doubling grains of rice on a chessboard? Four billion people are a smidgen larger than a grain of rice; you quickly run out of chessboard. On one time line Earth’s population swelled to over thirty billion before reaching final disaster; on other time lines the end came at less than ten billion. But on all time lines Dr. Malthus had the last laugh.

It is futile to mourn over the corpse of Earth, as silly as it would be to cry over an empty chrysalis when its butterfly has flown. But I am incurably sentimental and forever sad at how Man’s Old Home has changed.

I had a marvelously happy girlhood.

I not only lived on Earth when she was young and beautiful but also had the good fortune to be born in one of her loveliest garden spots, southern Missouri before people and bulldozers ravaged its green hills.

Besides the happy accident of birthplace, I had the special good fortune to be my father’s daughter.

When I was still quite young my father said to me, “My beloved daughter, you are an amoral little wretch. I know this, because you take after me; your mind works just the way mine does. If you are not to be destroyed by your lack, you must work out a practical code of your own and live by it.”

I thought about his words and felt warm and good inside. “Amoral little wretch—” Father knew me so well.

“What code should I follow, Father?”

“You have to pick your own.”

“The Ten Commandments?”

“You know better than that. The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.”

“All right, teach me about the second five. How should they read?”

“Not on your tintype, lazy bones; you’ve got to do it yourself.” He stood up suddenly, dumping me off his lap and almost landing me on my bottom. This was a running game with us. If I moved fast, I could land on my feet. If not, it was one point to him.

“Analyze the Ten Commandments,” he ordered. “Tell me how they should read. In the meantime, if I hear just once more that you have lost your temper, then when your mother sends you to discuss the matter with me, you had better have your McGuffey’s Reader tucked inside your bloomers.”

“Father, you wouldn’t.”

“Just try me, carrot top, just try me. I will enjoy spanking you.”

An empty threat—He never spanked me once I was old enough to understand why I was being scolded. But even before then he had never spanked me hard enough to hurt my bottom. Just my feelings.

Mother’s punishments were another matter. The high justice was Father’s bailiwick; Mother handled the low and middle—with a peach switch. Ouch!

Father spoiled me rotten.

I had four brothers and four sisters—Edward, born in 1876; Audrey in ’78; Agnes in 1880; Tom, ’81; in ’82 I came along; Frank was born in 1884, then Beth in ’92; Lucille, ’94; George in 1897—and I took up more of Father’s time than any three of my siblings. Maybe four. Looking back on it, I can’t see that he made himself more available to me than he did to any of my brothers and sisters. But it certainly worked out that I spent more time with my father.

Two ground-floor rooms in our house were Father’s clinic and surgery; I spent a lot of my free time there as I was fascinated by his books. Mother did not think I should read them, medical books being filled with things that ladies simply should not delve into. Unladylike. Immodest.

Father said to her, “Mrs. Johnson, the few errors in those books I will point out to Maureen. As for the far more numerous and much more important truths, I am pleased that Maureen wants to learn them. ‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ John, eight, verse thirty-two.”