“I escaped. How have you been, Beryl?”
“You can see that. I’m taking the cure.”
“Cure?”
“I was a triline addict. Can’t you see? My eyes, my face? It melted me away. But it was peaceful. Like disconnecting your soul. Only it would have killed me, another year of it. Now I’m on the cure. They tapered me off last month. They’re building up my system with prosthetics. I’m full of plastic now. But I’ll live.”
“You’ve remarried?” Cassiday asked.
“He split long ago. I’ve been alone five years. Just me and the triline. But now I’m off that stuff.” Beryl blinked, laboriously. “You look so relaxed, Dick. But you always were. So calm, so sure of yourself. You’d never get yourself hooked on triline. Hold my hand, will you?”
He touched the withered claw. He felt the warmth coming from her, the need for love. Great throbbing waves came galloping into him, low-frequency pulses of yearning that filtered through him and went booming onward to the watchers far away.
“You once loved me,” Beryl said. “Then we were both silly. Love me again. Help me get back on my feet. I need your strength.”
“Of course I’ll help you,” Cassiday said.
He left her apartment and purchased three cubes of triline. Returning, he activated one of them and pressed it into Beryl’s hand. The green-and-milky eyes roiled in terror.
“No,” she whimpered.
The pain flooding from her shattered soul was exquisite in its intensity. Cassiday accepted the full flood of it. Then she clenched her fist, and the drug entered her metabolism, and she grew peaceful once more.
Observe the next one: with a friend.
The annunciator said, “Mr. Cassiday is here.”
“Let him enter,” replied Mirabel Gunryk Cassiday Milman Reed.
The door-sphincter irised open and Cassiday stepped through, into onyx and marble splendor. Beams of auburn palisander formed a polished wooden framework on which Mirabel lay, and it was obvious that she reveled in the sensation of hard wood against plump flesh. A cascade of crystal-colored hair tumbled to her shoulders. She had been Cassiday’s for eight months in 2346, and she had been a slender, timid girl then, but now he could barely detect the outlines of that girl in this pampered mound.
“You’ve married well,” he observed.
“Third time lucky,” Mirabel said. “Sit down? Drink? Shall I adjust the environment?”
“It’s fine.” He remained standing. “You always wanted a mansion, Mirabel. My most intellectual wife, you were, but you had this love of comfort. You’re comfortable now.”
“Very.”
“Happy?”
“I’m comfortable,” Mirabel said. “I don’t read much any more, but I’m comfortable.”
Cassiday noticed what seemed to be a blanket crumpled in her lap—purple with golden threads, soft, idle, clinging close. It had several eyes. Mirabel kept her hands spread out over it.
“From Ganymede?” he asked. “A pet?”
“Yes. My husband bought it for me last year. It’s very precious to me.”
“Very precious to anybody. I understand they’re expensive.”
“But lovable,” said Mirabel. “Almost human. Quite devoted. I suppose you’ll think I’m silly, but it’s the most important thing in my life now. More than my husband, even. I love it, you see. I’m accustomed to having others love me, but there aren’t many things that I’ve been able to love.”
“May I see it?” Cassiday said mildly.
“Be careful.”
“Certainly.” He gathered up the Ganymedean creature. Its texture was extraordinary, the softest he had ever encountered. Something fluttered apprehensively within the flat body of the animal. Cassiday detected a parallel wariness coming from Mirabel as he handled her pet. He stroked the creature. It throbbed appreciatively. Bands of iridescence shimmered as it contracted in his hands.
She said, “What are you doing now, Dick? Still working for the spaceline?”
He ignored the question. “Tell me the line from Shakespeare Mirabel. About the flies. The flies and wanton boys.”
Furrows sprouted in her pale brow. “It’s from Lear,” she said. “Wait. Yes. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’”
“That’s the one,” Cassiday said. His big hands knotted quickly about the blanket-like being from Ganymede. It turned a dull gray, and reedy fibres popped from its ruptured surface. Cassiday dropped it to the floor. The surge of horror and pain and loss that welled from Mirabel nearly stunned him, but he accepted it and transmitted it.
“Flies,” he explained. “Wanton boys. My sport, Mirabel. I’m a god now, did you know that?” His voice was calm and cheerful. “Good-bye. Thank you.”
One more awaits the visit: swelling with new life.
Lureen Holstein Cassiday, who was thirty-one years old, dark-haired, large-eyed and seven months pregnant, was the only one of his wives who had not remarried. Her room in New York was small and austere. She had been a chubby girl when she had been Cassiday’s two-month wife five years ago, and she was even more chubby now, but how much of the access of new meat was the result of the pregnancy Cassiday did not know.
“Will you marry now?” he asked.
Smiling, she shook her head. “I’ve got money, and I value my independence. I wouldn’t let myself get into another deal like the one we had. Not with anyone.”
“And the baby? You’ll have it?”
She nodded savagely. “I worked hard to get it! You think it’s easy? Two years of inseminations! A fortune in fees! Machines poking around in me—all the fertility boosters—oh no, you’ve got the picture wrong. This isn’t an unwanted baby. This is a baby I sweated to have.”
“That’s interesting,” said Cassiday. “I visited Mirabel and Beryl, too, and they each had their babies, too. Of sorts. Mirabel had a little beast from Ganymede. Beryl had a triline addiction that she was very proud of shaking. And you’ve had a baby put into you, without any help from a man. All three of you seeking something. Interesting.”
“Are you all right, Dick?”
“Fine.”
“Your voice is so flat. You’re just unrolling a lot of words. It’s a little frightening.”
“Mmm. Yes. Do you know the kind thing I did for Beryl? I bought her some triline cubes. And I took Mirabel’s pet and wrung its—well, not its neck. I did it very calmly. I was never a passionate man.”
“I think you’ve gone crazy, Dick.”
“I feel your fear. You think I’m going to do something to your baby. Fear is of no interest, Lureen. But sorrow—yes, that’s worth analyzing. Desolation. I want to study it. I want to help them study it. I think it’s what they want to know about. Don’t run from me, Lureen. I don’t want to hurt you, not that way.”
She was small-bodied and not very strong, and unwieldy in her pregnancy. Cassiday seized her gently by both wrists and drew her toward him. Already he could feel the new emotions coming from her, the self-pity behind the terror, and he had not even done anything to her.
How did you abort a fetus two months from term?
A swift kick in the belly might do it. Too crude, too crude. Yet Cassiday had not come armed with abortifacients, a handy ergot pill, a quick-acting spasmic inducer. So he wrought his knee up sharply, deploring the crudity of it. Lureen sagged. He kicked her a second time. He remained completely tranquil as he did it, for it would be wrong to take joy in violence. A third kick seemed desirable. Then he released her.
She was still conscious, but she was writhing. Cassiday made himself receptive to the outflow. The child, he realized, was not yet dead within her. Perhaps it might not die at all. But it would certainly be crippled in some way. What he drained from Lureen was the awareness that she might bring forth a defective. The fetus would have to be destroyed. She would have to begin again. It was all quite sad.