Friday (11 page)

For the next few days Brian avoided me; I saw him only at the dinner table. Came a morning when Anita said to me, “Marjorie dear, I’m going into town on a few errands. Will you come along and help me?” Of course I said yes.

She made several stops in the general neighborhood of Gloucester Street and Durham. There was nothing in which she needed my help. I concluded that she simply wanted company and I was pleased by it. Anita is awfully nice to be with as long as one doesn’t cross her will.

Finished, we strolled down Cambridge Terrace along the bank of the Avon and on into Hagley Park and the botanic gardens. She picked a sunny spot where we could watch the birds, and got out her knitting. We talked of nothing in particular for a while, or simply sat.

We had been there about half an hour when her phone buzzed. She took it out of her knitting bag, put the button to her ear. “Yes?” Then she added, “Thank you. Off,” and put the phone away without offering to tell me who had called her. Her privilege.

Although she did speak of it indirectly: “Tell me, Marjorie, do you ever feel regret? Or a sense of guilt?”

“Why, I do sometimes. Should I? Over what?” I searched my brain as I thought that I had been unusually careful not to upset Anita.

“Over the way you have deceived us and cheated us.”

“
What?
”

“Don’t play innocent. I’ve never had to deal with a creature not of God’s Law before. I was not sure that the concept of sin and guilt was one you could understand. Not that it matters, I suppose, now that you are unmasked. The family is asking for annulment at once; Brian is seeing Mr. Justice Ridgley today.”

I sat up very straight. “On what grounds? I’ve done nothing wrong!”

“Indeed. You forget that, under our laws, a nonhuman cannot enter into a marriage contract with human beings.”

An hour later I boarded the shuttle for Auckland and then had time to consider my folly.

For almost three months, ever since the night I had discussed it with Boss, I had for the first time been feeling easy about my “human” status. He had told me that I was “as human as Mother Eve” and that I could safely tell anyone that I was an AP because I would not be believed.

Boss was almost right. But he had not counted on my making a really determined effort to prove that I was not “human” under Ennzedd law.

My first impulse had been to demand a hearing before the full family council—only to learn that my case had already been tried
in camera
and the vote had gone against me, six to nothing.

I didn’t even go back to the house. That phone call Anita had received while we were in the botanic gardens had told her that my personal effects had been packed and delivered to Left Luggage at the shuttle station.

I could still have insisted on a poll of the house instead of taking Anita’s (slippery) word for it. But to what end? To win an argument? To prove a point? Or merely to split a hair? It took me all of five seconds to realize that all I had treasured was gone. As vanished as a rainbow, as burst as a soap bubble—I no longer “belonged.” Those children were
not
mine, I would never again roll on the floor with them.

I was thinking about this with dry-eyed grief and almost missed learning that Anita had been “generous” with me: In that contract I had signed with the family corporation the fine print made the principal sum due and payable at once if I breached the contract. Did being “nonhuman” constitute a breach? (Even though I had never missed a payment.) Looked at one way, if they were going to read me out of the family, then I had at least eighteen thousand Ennzedd dollars coming to me: looked at another way I not only forfeited the paid-up part of my share but owed more than twice that amount.

But they were “generous”: If I would quietly arid quickly vanish away, they would not pursue their claim against me. Unstated was what would happen if I stuck around and made a public scandal.

I slunk away.

I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that I did it to myself I realized that fact as soon as Anita announced the bad news. A deeper question is:
Why
did I do it?

I had not done it for Ellen and I could not hoodwink myself into thinking that I had. On the contrary, my folly had made it impossible for me to exert any effort on her behalf.

Why had I done it?

Anger.

I wasn’t able to find any better answer. Anger at the whole human race for deciding that my sort are not human and therefore not entitled to equal treatment and equal justice. Resentment that had been building up since the first day that I had been made to realize that there were privileges human children had just from being born and that I could never have simply because I was
not
human.

Passing as human gets one over on the side of privilege; it does not end resentment against the system. The pressure builds up even more because it can’t be expressed. The day came when it was more important to me to find out whether my adopted family could accept me as I truly am, an artificial person, than it was to preserve my happy relationship.

I found out. Not
one
of them stood up for me…just as none of them had stood up for Ellen. I think I knew that they would reject me as soon as I learned that they had failed Ellen. But that level of my mind is so far down that I’m not well acquainted with it—that’s the dark place where, according to Boss, I do all my real thinking.

I reached Auckland too late for the daily SB to Winnipeg. After reserving a cradle for the next day’s trajectory and checking everything but my jumpbag, I considered what to do with the twenty-one hours facing me, and at once thought of my curly wolf, Captain Ian. By what he had told me, the chances were five-to-one against his being in town
—
but his flat (if available) might be pleasanter than a hotel. So I found a public terminal and punched his code.

Shortly the screen lighted; a young woman’s face—cheerful, rather pretty—appeared. “Hi! I’m Torchy. Who’re you?”

“I’m Marj Baldwin,” I answered. “Perhaps I’ve punched wrong. I’m seeking Captain Tormey.”

“No, you’re with it, luv. Hold and I’ll let him out of his cage.” She turned and moved away from the pickup while calling out, “Bubber! A slashing tart on the honker. Knows your right name.”

As she turned and moved away I noticed bare breasts. She came fully into view and I saw that she was jaybird to her heels. A good body—possibly a bit wide in the fundament but with long legs, a slender waist, and mammaries that matched mine…and I’ve had no complaints.

I quietly cursed to myself. I knew quite well why I had called the captain: to forget three men in the arms of a fourth. I had found him but it appeared that he was fully committed.

He appeared, dressed but not much—a lava-lava. He looked puzzled, then recognized me. “Hey! Miss…
Baldwin!
That’s it. This is sonky-do! Where are you?”

“At the port. I punched on the off chance of saying hello.”

“Stay where you are. Don’t move, don’t breathe. Seven seconds while I pull on trousers and shirt, and I’ll come get you.”

“No, Captain. Just a greeting. Again I am simply making connections.”

“What is your connection? To what port? What time is departure?”

Damn and triple damn—I had not prepared my lies. Well, the truth is often better than a clumsy lie. “I’m going back to Winnipeg.”

“Ah so! Then you are looking at your pilot; I have the noon lift tomorrow. Tell me exactly where you are and I’ll pick you up in, uh, forty minutes if I can get a cab fast enough.”

“Captain, you are very sweet and you are out of your mind. You already have all the company you can handle. The young woman who answered my call. Torchy.”

“Torchy isn’t her name; that’s her condition. She’s my sister Betty, from Sydney. Stays here when she’s in town. I probably mentioned her.” He turned his head and shouted. “Betty! Come here and identify yourself. But get decent.”

“It’s too late to get decent,” her cheerful voice answered, and I saw her, past his shoulder, returning toward the pickup and wrapping a lava-lava around her hips as she did so. She seemed to be having a little trouble with it and I suspected that she had had a few. “Oh, the hell with it! My brother is always trying to get me to behave—my husband has given up. Look, luv, I heard what you said. I’m his married sister, too true. Unless you are trying to marry him, in which case I am his fiancée. Are you?”

“No.”

“Good. Then you can have him. I’m about to make tea. Do you take gin? Or whisky?”

“Whatever you and the Captain are having.”

“He must not have either; he’s lifting in less than twenty-four hours. But you and I will get smashed.”

“I’ll drink what you do. Anything but hemlock.”

I then convinced Ian that it was better for me to find a hansom at the port where they were readily available than it was for him to send for one, then make the round trip.

Number 17, Locksley Parade, is a new block of flats of the double-security type; I was locked through the entrance to Ian’s flat as if it were a spaceship. Betty greeted me with a hug and a kiss that showed that she had indeed been drinking; my curly wolf then greeted me with a hug and a kiss that showed that he had not been drinking but that he expected to take me to bed in the near future. He did not ask about my husbands; I did not volunteer anything about my family—my former family. Ian and I got along well because we both understood the signals, used them correctly, and never misled the other.

While Ian and I held this wordless discussion, Betty left the room and returned with a red lava-lava. “It’s formal high tea,” she announced, with a slight belch, “so out of those street clothes and into this, luv.”

Her idea? Or his? Hers, I decided, before long. While Ian’s simple, wholesome lechery was as clear as a punch in the jaw, he was basically rather cubical. Not so Betty, who was utterly outlaw. I didn’t care, as it moved in the direction I wanted to go. Bare feet are as provocative as bare breasts, although most people do not seem to know it. A female packaged only in a lava-lava is far more provocative than one totally nude. The party was shaping up to suit me, and I would depend on Ian to shake off his sister’s chaperonage when the time came. If necessary. It seemed possible that Betty would sell tickets. I didn’t fret about it.

I got smashed.

Just how thorough a job I did on it I did not realize until next morning when I woke up in bed with a man who was
not
Ian Tormey.

For several minutes I lay still and watched him snore while I poked through my gin-beclouded memories, trying to fit him in. It seemed to me that a woman really ought to be introduced to a man before spending a night with him. Had we been formally introduced? Had we met at all?

In bits and pieces it came back. Name: Professor Federico Farnese, called either “Freddie” or “Chubbie.” (Not very chubby—just a little pot from a swivel-chair profession.) Betty’s husband, Ian’s brother-in-law. I recalled him somewhat from the evening before but could not now (next morning) recall just when he had arrived, or why he had been away…if I ever knew.

Once I placed him I was not especially surprised to find that I (seemed to have) spent the night with him. The frame of mind I had been in the night before no male would have been safe from me. But one thing bothered me: Had I turned my back on my host in order to chase after some other man? Not polite, Friday—not gracious.

I dug deeper. No, at least once I decidedly had
not
turned my back on Ian. To my great pleasure. And to Ian’s, too, if his comments were sincere. Then I had indeed turned my back but at his request. No, I had not been ungracious to my host, and he had been very kind to me, in exactly the fashion I needed to help me forget how I had been swindled, then tossed, by Anita’s gang of self-righteous racists.

Thereafter my host had had some help from this late arrival, I now remembered. It is never surprising that an emotionally troubled woman may need more soothing than one man can supply—but I could not remember how the transaction was achieved. Fair exchange? Don’t snoop, Friday! An AP cannot empathize with or understand the various human copulation taboos—but I had most carefully memorized all the many, many sorts while taking basic doxy training, and I knew that this one was one of the strongest, one that humans cover up even where all else is wide open.

So I resolved to shun even a hint of interest.

Freddie stopped snoring and opened his eyes. He yawned and stretched, then saw me and looked puzzled, then suddenly grinned and reached for me. I answered his grin and his grab, ready to cooperate heartily, when Ian walked in. He said, “Morning, Marj. Freddie, I hate to interrupt but I’m already holding a cab. Marj has to get up and get dressed. We’re leaving at once.”

Freddie did not let go of me. He simply clucked, then recited:

“Captain, your attention to duty and to the welfare of our guest does you credit. What time must you be there? Minus two hours? And you lift at high noon as the clock is striking the steeple. No?”