Friday (6 page)

But Boss did not have rules just for the sake of rules. Once having met a colleague through duty one could continue the contact socially. Boss did not encourage such fraternizing but he was no fool and did not try to forbid it. In consequence Anna often called on me in the late evening just before she went on duty.

She never did try to collect her pound of flesh. There wasn’t much opportunity but we could have found one if we had tried. I didn’t try to discourage her—hell, no; if she had ever presented the bill for collection, I would not only have paid cheerfully but would have tried to convince her that it was my idea in the first place.

But she didn’t. I think she was like the sensitive (and fairly rare) male who never paws a woman when she doesn’t want to be pawed—he can sense it and doesn’t start.

One evening shortly before my discharge I was feeling especially happy—I had acquired two new friends that day; “kissing friends,” persons who had fought in the raid that saved me—and I tried to explain to Anna why it meant so much to me and found that I was starting to tell her how I was not quite what I seemed to be.

She stopped me. “Friday dear, listen to your big sister.”

“Huh? Did I goof?”

“Maybe you were about to. ’Member the night we met, you returned through me a classified document? I have supreme top-secret clearance awarded to me by Mr. Two-Canes years back. That book you returned is where I can get at it anytime. But I have never opened it and never will. The cover says ‘Need to Know’ and I have never been told that I have need to know. You’ve read it but I don’t know even the title or the subject—just its number.

“Personnel matters are like that. There used to be an elite military outfit, a foreign legion, that boasted that a legionnaire had no history before the day of his enlistment. Mr. Two-Canes wants us to be like that. For example, if we were to recruit a living artifact, an artificial person, the personnel clerk would know it. I know, as I used to be personnel clerk. Records to forge, possibly some plastic surgery needed, in some cases laboratory identifications to excise and then regenerate the area…

“When we got through with him, he would never again have to worry about a tap on the shoulder or being elbowed out of a queue. He could even marry and have children without worrying that someday it might cause trouble for his kids. He wouldn’t have to worry about
me
, either, as I have a trained forgettery. Now, dear, I don’t know what you had on your mind. But, if it is something you don’t ordinarily tell people, don’t tell me. Or you’ll hate yourself in the morning.”

“No, I wouldn’t!”

“All right. If you still want to tell me a week from now, I’ll listen. A deal?”

Anna was right; a week later I felt no need to tell her. I’m 99 percent certain that she knew. Either way, it’s swell to be loved for yourself alone, by somebody who doesn’t think that APs are monsters, subhuman.

I don’t know that any of the rest of my loving friends knew or guessed. (I don’t mean Boss; he knew, of course. But he wasn’t a friend; he was
Boss
.) It did not matter if my new friends learned that I wasn’t human; because I had come to realize that they either didn’t care or wouldn’t care. All that mattered to them was whether or not you were part of Boss’s outfit.

One evening Boss showed up, tapping his canes and whuffling, with Goldie trailing him. He settled heavily into the visitor’s chair, said to Goldie, “I won’t need you, nurse. Thank you”—then to me, “Take off your clothes.”

From any other man that would be either offensive or welcome, depending. From Boss it merely meant that he wanted my clothes off. Goldie took it that way, too, as she simply nodded and left—and Goldie is the sort of professional who would buck Siva the Destroyer if He attempted to interfere with one of her patients.

I took my clothes off quickly and waited. He looked me up and down. “They again match.”

“Seems so to me.”

“Dr. Krasny says that he ran a test for lactation function. Positive.”

“Yes. He pulled some stunt with my hormone balance and both of them leaked a little. Felt funny. Then he rebalanced and I dried up.”

Boss grunted. “Turn around. Show me the sole of your right foot. Now your left. Enough. Burn scars seem to be gone.”

“All that I can see. Doctor tells me the others have regenerated, too. The itching has stopped, so they must be.”

“Put on your clothes. Dr. Krasny tells me that you are well.”

“If I were any weller, you would have to bleed me.”

“Well is an absolute; it has no comparative.”

“Okay, I’m wellest.”

“Impudence. Tomorrow morning you leave for refresher training. Be packed and ready by oh-nine hundred.”

“Since I arrived without even a happy smile, packing will take me eleven seconds. But I need a new ID, a new passport, a new credit card, and quite a bit of cash—”

“All of which will be delivered to you before oh-nine hundred.”

“—because I’m not going for a refresher; I’m going to New Zealand. Boss, I’ve told you and told you. I’m overdue for R and R, and I figure that I rate some paid sick leave to compensate for time I’ve been laid up. You’re a slave driver.”

“Friday, how many years will it take you to learn that when I thwart one of your whims, I always have your welfare in mind as well as the efficiency of the organization?”

“Hully gee, Great White Father. I abase myself. And I’ll send you a picture postcard from Wellington.”

“Of a pretty Maori, please; I’ve seen a geyser. Your refresher course will be tailored to fit your needs and you will decide when it is complete. Although you are ‘wellest,’ you need physical training of carefully increasing difficulty to get you back into that superb pitch of muscle tone and wind and reflex that is your birthright.”

“‘Birthright.’ Don’t make jokes, Boss; you have no talent for it. ‘My mother was a test tube; my father was a knife.’”

“You are being foolishly self-conscious over an impediment that was removed years ago.”

“Am I? The courts say I can’t be a citizen; the churches say I don’t have a soul. I’m not ‘man born of woman,’ at least not in the eyes of the law.”

“‘The law is an ass.’ The records concerning your origin have been removed from the production laboratory’s files, and a dummy set concerning an enhanced male AP was substituted.”

“You never told me that!”

“Until you displayed this neurotic weakness, I saw no need. But a deception of that nature should be made so airtight that it will utterly displace the truth. And so it has. If you attempted, tomorrow, to claim your true lineage, you would not be able to get any authority anywhere to agree with you. You may tell anyone; it doesn’t matter. But, my dear, why are you defensive? You are not only as human as Mother Eve, you are an enhanced human, as near perfect as your designers could manage. Why do you think I went out of my way to recruit you when you had no experience and no conscious interest in this profession? Why did I spend a small fortune educating and training you? Because I knew. I waited some years to be sure that you were indeed developing as your architects intended…then almost lost you when you suddenly dived off the map.” He made a grimace that I think means a smile. “You gave me trouble, girl. Now about your training. Are you willing to listen?”

“Yes, sir.” (I didn’t try to tell him about the laboratory crèche; human people think all crèches are like those they’ve seen. I didn’t tell him about the plastic spoon that was all I had to eat with until I was ten because I didn’t want to tell how, the first time I tried to use a fork, I stabbed my lip and made it bleed and they laughed at me. It isn’t any one thing; it’s a million little things that are the difference between being reared as a human child and being raised as an animal.)

“You’ll be taking a bare-hands combat refresher but you are to work out only with your instructor; there are to be no blemishes on you when you visit your family in Christchurch. You will receive advanced training in hand weapons, including some you may never have heard of. If you change tracks, you will need this.”

“Boss, I am
not
going to become an assassin!”

“You need it anyhow. There are times when a courier can carry weapons and she must have every edge possible. Friday, don’t despise assassins indiscriminately. As with any tool, merit or demerit lies in how it is used. The decline and fall of the former United States of North America derived in part from assassinations. But only in small part as the killings had no pattern and were pointless. What can you tell me of the Prussian-Russian War?”

“Not much. Mainly that the Prussians got their hides nailed to the barn when the smart money figured them for winners.”

“Suppose I tell you that twelve people won that war—seven men, five women—and that the heaviest weapon used was a six-millimeter pistol.”

“I don’t think you have ever lied to me. How?”

“Friday, brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value. Any human organization can be rendered useless, impotent, a danger to itself, by selectively removing its best minds while carefully leaving the stupid ones in place. It took only a few careful ‘accidents’ to ruin utterly the great Prussian military machine and turn it into a blundering mob. But this did not show until the fighting was well under way, because stupid fools look just as good as military geniuses until the fighting starts.”

“Only a dozen people—Boss? Did we do that job?”

“You know that is the sort of question I discourage. We did not. It was a contract job by an organization as small and as specialized as we are. But I do not willingly involve us in nationalistic wars; the side of the angels is seldom self-evident.”

“I still don’t want to be an assassin.”

“I will not permit you to be an assassin and let us have no more discussion of it. Be ready to leave at nine tomorrow.”

Nine weeks later I left for New Zealand.

I’ll say this for Boss: The supercilious bully always knows what he’s talking about. When Dr. Krasny let me go, I wasn’t “wellest.” I was simply a recovered patient who no longer needed sickbed nursing.

Nine weeks later I could have taken prizes in the old Olympics without working up a sweat. As I boarded the SB
Abel Tasman
at Winnipeg freeport, the skipper gave me the eye. I knew I looked good and I added a waggle to my seat that I would never use on a mission—as a courier I usually try to blend into the scenery. But now I was on leave and it’s kind of fun to advertise. Apparently I hadn’t forgotten how as the skipper came back to my cradle while I was still belting in. Or it may have been the Superskin jump suit that I was wearing—new that season and the first one I had had; I bought the outfit at the freeport and changed into it in the shop. I’m sure that it is only a matter of time until the sects that think that sex has something to do with sin will class wearing Superskin as a mortal sin.

He said, “Miss Baldwin, is it not? Do you have someone meeting you in Auckland? What with the war and all it is not a good idea for an unescorted woman to be alone in an international port.”

(I did not say, “Look, Bub, the last time I killed the bloke.”) The captain stood a hundred and ninety-five, maybe, and would gross a hundred or more and none of it fat. Early thirties and the sort of blond you expect in SAS rather than ANZAC. If he wanted to be protective I was willing to stand short. I answered, “Nobody’s meeting me but I’m just changing for the South Island shuttle. How do these buckles work? Uh, do those stripes mean you’re the captain?”

“Let me show you. Captain, yes—Captain Ian Tormey.” He started belting me in; I let him.

“Captain. Gol
lee!
I’ve never met a captain before.” A remark like that isn’t even a fib when it’s a ritual response in the ancient barnyard dance. He had said to me, “I’m on the prowl and you look good. Are you interested?” And I had answered, “You look acceptable but I’m sorry to have to tell you that I don’t have time today.”

At that point he could adjourn it with no hurt feelings or he could elect to invest in goodwill against a possible future encounter. He chose the latter.

As he finished belting me in—tight enough but not too tight and not using the chance to grab a feel—quite professional—he said, “The timing on that connection will be close today. If you’ll hang back when we disembark and be last out, I’ll be happy to put you aboard your Kiwi. That’ll be faster than finding your way through the crowds by yourself.”

(The connection timing is twenty-seven minutes, Captain-leaving twenty minutes in which to talk me out of my comm signal. But keep on being sweet about it and I may give it to you.) “Why, thank you, Captain!—if it’s really not too much trouble.”

“ANZAC service, Miss Baldwin. But my pleasure.”

I like to ride the semiballistics—the high-gee blastoff that always feels as if the cradle would rupture and spurt fluid all over the cabin, the breathless minutes in free fall that feel as if your guts were falling out, and then reentry and that long, long glide that beats any sky ride ever built. Where can you have more fun in forty minutes with your clothes on?

Then comes the always interesting question: Is the runway clear? A semiballistic doesn’t make two passes; it can’t.