Time Enough for Love (15 page)

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Domestic Problems

“After more than two thousand years, Lazarus?”

“Why not, Ira? Dave was my age, near enough as not to matter. I’m still here.”

“Yes, but—Was David Lamb a member of the Families? Under another name? There is no ‘Lamb’ in the lists.”

“I never asked, Ira. Nor did he ever offer me a password. In those days a member kept the fact to himself. Or, if he was, Dave might not have known it, since he left home so young and so abruptly. Back then a youngster wasn’t told until he or she was old enough to think about marriage. Eighteen for boys, usually, and sixteen for girls. Reminds me what a shock it was when I was told—at less than eighteen. By Gramp, because I was about to do something foolish. Son, one of the weirdest things about the human animal is that it grows up physically years and years before its brain grows up. I was seventeen, young and horny and wanted to get married the worst way. Gramp took me out behind the barn and convinced me that it was indeed the worst way.

“‘Woodie,’ he said, ‘if you want to elope with this girl, nobody will stop you.’

“I told him belligerently that nobody
could
stop me, because just over the state line I could swing it without my parents’ consent.

“‘That’s what I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘Nobody will stop you. But nobody will help you. Not your parents, nor your other grandparents—nor me. Not a one of us will even stake you to the price of a marriage license, much less help you support a wife. Not a dollar, Woodie, not a thin dime. If you don’t believe me, ask any of them.’

“I said sullenly that I didn’t want any help.

“Gramp had bushy eyebrows, they shot up. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Is
she
going to support
you?
Have you looked at the “Help Wanted” in the paper lately? If not, be sure to do so. And glance at the financial section while you’re about it; reading “Help Wanted” ads won’t take you more than thirty seconds.’ He added, ‘Oh, you can find a job peddling suck brooms from door to door on commission. Which will give you fresh air, healthy exercise, and an opportunity to demonstrate your charm, of which you don’t have much. But you won’t sell vacuum cleaners; nobody is buying.’

“Ira, I didn’t know what he was talking about. This was January, 1930. Does that date mean anything to you?”

“I’m afraid not, Lazarus. Despite much study of the Families’ history, I have to convert those earlier dates into Galactic Standard in order to feel them.”

“Don’t know as it would be mentioned in the Families’ records, Ira. The country—well, the whole planet—had just taken a plunge into an economic fluctuation. ‘Depressions,’ they called ’em. There were no jobs to be had—at least not for a smart-alec youngster who didn’t know anything useful. Which Gramp realized, having been through several of these swings. But not me. I was sure I could grab the world by the tail and swing it over my shoulder. What I didn’t know was that graduate engineers were taking jobs as janitors and lawyers were driving milk wagons. And ex-millionaires were jumping out windows. But I was too busy sniffing after girls to notice.”

“Senior, I’ve read about economic depressions. But I’ve never understood what caused them.”

Lazarus Long went tsk-tsk. “And yet you are in charge of a whole planet.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t be,” I admitted.

“Don’t be so confounded humble. I’ll let you in on a secret: At that time
nobody
knew what caused them. Even the Howard Foundation might have gone broke had not Ira Howard left firm instructions about how the fund must be handled. On the other hand,
everybody
, right down to street sweepers and professors of economics, was certain they knew both causes and cures. So almost every remedy was tried—and none worked. That depression continued until the country blundered into a war—which didn’t cure what was wrong; it just masked the symptoms with a high fever.”

“Well…what
was
wrong, Grandfather?” I persisted.

“Do I look smart enough to answer that, Ira? I’ve gone broke many times. Sometimes financially, sometimes through abandoning my baggage to save my skin. Um. Be durned if I’ll offer any fancy explanations but—what happens when you control machinery by positive feedback?”

I was startled. “I’m not sure I understand you, Lazarus. One doesn’t control machinery by positive feedback—at least I can’t think of a case. Positive feedback will cause any system to oscillate out of control.”

“Go to the head of the class. Ira, I’m suspicious of arguments by analogy—but from what I’ve seen over the centuries, there doesn’t seem to be anything that a
government
can do to an economy that does not act as positive feedback, or as a brake. Or both. Maybe someday, somewhere, someone smart as Andy Libby will figure out a way to tinker with the Law of Supply and Demand to make it work better, instead of letting it go its own cruel way. Maybe. But I’ve never seen it. Though God knows everybody has tried. Always with the best of intentions.

“Good intentions are no substitute for knowing how a buzz saw works, Ira; the worst criminals in history have been loaded with good intentions. But you got me sidetracked into making a speech when I was telling you hew I happened not to get married.”

“Sorry, Grandfather.”

“Hummph! Can’t you be rude occasionally? I’m a garrulous old man who has crowded you into wasting time listening to trivia. You ought to resent it.”

I grinned at him. “So I resent it. You are a garrulous old man who demands that I cater to your every whim…and I am a very busy man with serious matters worrying me and you’ve wasted half a day of my time telling me a yarn—pure fiction, I feel certain—about a man who was so lazy he always succeeded. Intended to irritate me, I think. When you implied that this fictional character was a long-lifer, you evaded a simple question about it and started talking about your grandfather. This—Admiral Ram, you said?—was he redheaded?”

“‘Lamb,’ Ira—‘Donald Lamb.’ Or was that his brother? It’s been a long time. Odd that you should ask about his hair—as that reminds me of another naval officer in that same war who was just the opposite of—Donald? No, ‘David.’ Just the opposite of David in every respect save that he had hair so red that Loki would have been proud of it. Tried to choke a Kodiak bear to death. Didn’t work of course. It doesn’t seem possible that you’ve ever seen a Kodiak bear, Ira.

“The fiercest carnivore that Earth ever spawned, and outweighed a man ten to one. Claws like scimitars, long yellow teeth, bad breath—and a worse disposition. Yet Lafe tackled him with bare hands…and mind you, when he had no need to.
I
would have faded over the horizon. Want to hear about Lafe and the bear and the Alaskan salmon?”

“Not now. It sounds like another whopper… You were telling me why you didn’t get married.”

“So I was. Gramp had just asked me, ‘Well, Woodie, how long has she been pregnant?’”

“No, he was explaining that you couldn’t support a wife.”

“Son, if you know this story,
you
tell it to
me
. I emphatically denied any such thing—to which Gramp replied that I lied in my teeth because that was the only reason a seventeen-year-old boy ever wanted to get married. His answer made me especially angry because I had a note in my pocket reading:

“‘Woodsie dearest—You have knocked me up and all is Chaos.’

“Gramp persisted, and I denied it three times, getting angrier and angrier, seeing as how it was true. Finally he says, ‘Okay, you’ve just been holding hands. Has she shown you a pregnancy test report, signed by a doctor?’

“Ira, I accidentally told the truth. ‘Why, no,’ I admitted.

“‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of it. But only this once. From here on
always
use Merry Widows, even if a sweet little darling tells you not to bother. Or haven’t you found a drugstore that’ll sell them to you?’ Then, after swearing me to secrecy, he told me about the Howard Foundation and what it would pay if I married a girl on their approved list.

“And that was that, as I got this letter from a lawyer on my eighteenth birthday, just as Gramp had predicted, and it turned out that I fell madly in love with a girl on their list. We got married and had a slough of kids, before she turned me in on another model. Your ancestress, no doubt.”

“No, sir. I’m descended from your fourth wife, Grandfather.”

“My fourth, eh? Let me see—Meg Hardy?”

“I think she was your third, Lazarus. Evelyn Foote.”

“Oh, yes! A fine girl, Evelyn. Plump, and pretty, and sweet-natured, and fertile as a turtle. A good cook and never a harsh word. They don’t hardly make ’em anymore. Maybe fifty years younger than I was, but it barely showed; my hair didn’t start to gray until I was a hundred and fifty. No secret about my age, since birth date, and track record, and so forth were on file for each of us. Son, thank you for reminding me of Evelyn; she restored my faith in matrimony when I was getting a little sour on it. Do the Archives show anything else about her?”

“Just that you were her second husband and that she had seven children by you.”

“I was hoping that there was a photograph. Such a pretty thing, always smiling. She was married to one of my cousins, a Johnson, when I met her, and I was in business with him a while. He and I, Meg and Evvie, used to get together Saturday nights for pinochle and beer, or such—and after a while we traded, legal and proper and through the courts, when Meg decided that she liked—Jack?—yes, Jack, that well, and Evelyn wasn’t averse. Didn’t affect our business relations, didn’t even break up our pinochle game. Son, one of the best things about the Howard Families is that we got cured of the poisonous vice of jealousy generations ahead of the rest of the race. Had to—things being the way they were. Sure there ain’t a stereopic of her around? Or a hologram? The Foundation started taking record pictures for marriage physical exams somewhere around then.”

“I’ll look into it,” I told him. Then I had what seemed a brilliant idea. “Lazarus, as we all know, the same physical types show up time and again in the Families. I’ll ask Archives for a list of Evelyn Foote’s female descendants living on Secundus. It is highly probable that one of them will seem like her identical twin—even to the happy smile and the sweet disposition. Then—if you consent to full rejuvenation—I’m sure she would be as willing as Ishtar to dissolve any present contractual—”

The Senior chopped me off. “I said something
new
, Ira. There’s no going back, ever. Sure, you might find such a girl, one who would match my memory of Evelyn to ten significant figures. But it would lack an important factor. My youth.”

“But if you finish rejuvenation—”

“Oh, hush up! You can give me new kidneys and a new liver and a new heart. You can wash the brown stains of age out of my brain and add tissue from my clone to make up for what I’ve lost—you can give me a whole new clone body. But it won’t make me that young fellow who took innocent pleasure in beer and pinochle and a pretty plump wife. All I have in common with him is continuity of memory—and not much of that. Forget it.”

I said quietly, “Ancestor, whether you wish to be married to Evelyn Foote again or not, you know and I know—for I’ve been through it, too, twice—we both know that the full routine restores youthful zest in life as well as restoring the body as a machine.”

Lazarus Long looked gloomy. “Yeah, sure. It cures everything but boredom. Damn it, boy, you had no
right
to interfere with my karma.” He sighed. “But I can’t hang in limbo either. So tell ’em to get on with it. The works.”

I was taken by surprise. “May I record that, sir?”

“You heard me say it. But that doesn’t get
you
off the hook. You still have to show up and listen to my maunderings until I’m so rejuvenated that I’m cured of such childish behavior—and you still have to go on with that research. To find something
new
, I mean.”

“Agreed on both points, sir; you had my promise. Now one moment while I tell my computer—”

“She’s already heard me. Hasn’t she?” Lazarus added, “Doesn’t she have a name? Haven’t you given her one?”

“Oh, certainly. I could not deal with her all these years without animism, fallacy though it is—”

“Not a fallacy, Ira, machines are human because they are made in our image. They share both our virtues and our faults—magnified.”

“I’ve never tried to rationalize it, Lazarus, but Minerva—that’s her formal name; she’s ‘Little Nag’ in private because one of her duties is to remind me of obligations I would rather forget. Minerva does feel human to me—she’s closer to me than any of my wives have been. No, she has not registered your decision; she’s simply placed it in her temporaries. Minerva!”

“Si, Ira.”

“Speak English, please. Retrieve the Senior’s decision to undergo full antigeria, file it in your permanents, transmit it to Archives and to the Howard Rejuvenation Clinic for action.”

“Completed, Mr. Weatheral. Congratulations. And felicitations to you, Senior. ‘May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.’”

Lazarus looked suddenly interested—which did not surprise me because Minerva surprises
me
quite frequently even after a century of being “married” to her in all but fact. “Why, thank you, Minerva. But you startled me, girl. Nobody talks about love anymore; that’s a major thing wrong with this century. How did you happen to offer me that ancient sentiment?”

“It seemed appropriate, Senior. Was I mistaken?”

“Oh, not at all. And call me ‘Lazarus.’ But tell me, what do
you
know of love? What
is
love?”

“In Classic English, Lazarus, your second question can be answered in many ways; in Lingua Galacta it cannot be answered explicitly at all. Shall we discard all definitions in which the verb ‘to like’ is as appropriate as the verb ‘to love’?”

“Eh? Certainly. We aren’t talking about ‘I love apple pie’—or even ‘I love music.’ Whatever it is we are talking about, it’s ‘love’ the way you used it in the old-style well-wishing.”

“Agreed, Lazarus. Then what remains must be divided into two categories, ‘Eros’ and ‘Agape,’ and each defined separately. I cannot know what ‘Eros’ is through direct knowledge, as I lack both body and biochemistry to experience it. I can offer nothing but intensional definitions in terms of other words, or extensional definitions expressed in incomplete statistics. But in both cases I would not be able to verify such definitions since I have no sex.”