"Minerva, I would not have spanked the kids no matter who had been on top. Intellectually I knew that Laura was right, and I had to agree that fathers tend to be possessive about daughters. I was pleased that Laura had gained the confidence of both kids so fully that they had neither tried very hard to keep from being caught, nor had they been scared when she happened to catch 'em at it. Perhaps J.A. was scared but Pattycake just said, 'Mama, you didn't knock.'"
(Omitted)
"-so we traded sons. J.A. liked farm life and never did leave us, whereas George turned out to have this perverse taste for cities, so Joe took him on and made a chef out of him. George was sleeping with Elizabeth-Libby, that is-I forget how long before they decided to hatch one and were married. A double wedding, the four youngsters remained close.
"But J.A.'s decision solved a problem for me: what to do with Skyhaven later. By the time Laura decided to leave me, all of my sons by her had heard the wild goose one way or another; George was the only one still on planet, and our daughters were married and not one of them to a farmer. Whereas J.A. had become my overseer and was de-facto boss of Skyhaven the last ten years I was there.
"I might have worked some compromise with Roger Sperling if he hadn't tried to grab the place. As it was, I deeded a half interest to Pattycake, sold the other half to my son-in-law J.A. on a mortgage, then discounted the paper to a bank and bought a better ship than I would have had I given that half interest to Roger and Laura. I made a similar deal, part gift and part sale, with Libby and George, of my share in Maison Long- and Libby changed her name to Estelle Elizabeth Sheffield-Long; there was continuity there as well-which pleased both me and her parents. It worked out well. Laura even came down and kissed me good-bye when I left."
"Lazarus, I do not understand one factor. You have said that you do not favor marriage between Howards and ephemerals. Yet you let two of your children marry outside the Families."
"Uh, correction, Minerva. One does not let children get married; they do get married, when and as and to whom they choose."
"Correction noted, Lazarus."
"But let's go back to the night I intervened for Libby and J.A. That night I gave Llita and Joe everything that slave factor had turned over to me as proof of their old heritage- even the bill of sale-with a suggestion that they destroy the stuff or lock it up. Among those items was a series of photographs showing them growing up, year by year. The last one seemed to have been taken just before I bought them, and they confirmed it-two fully grown youngsters, one in a chastity
girdle.
"Joe looked at that picture and said, "What a couple of clowns! We've come a long way, Sis-thanks to the Skipper.' "'So we have,' she agreed, and studied the picture. 'Brother, do you see what I do?'
"What?" he said, looking again.
"'Aaron will see it. Brother, take off your clout', she said, while starting to unwrap her sarong, 'and pose with me against the wall. Not the selling pose, but the way we used to stand against a grid for these record pictures.' She handed me that last picture in the series, and they stood and faced me.
"Minerva, in fourteen years they had not changed. Llita had had three kids and was just pregnant with her fourth and both of them had worked themselves silly...but, stripped naked, no makeup on her and her hair down, they looked as they had the first time I saw them. They looked like that last record shot-end of adolescence, somewhere between eighteen and twenty in Earth terms.
"Yet they had to be past thirty. Thirty-five Earth years old if those Blessed records were to be trusted.
"Minerva, I have just one thing to add. When I last saw them, they were past sixty in Earth years, about sixty-three if you accept the records from Blessed. Neither one had a gray hair, both had all their teeth-and Llita was pregnant again."
"Mutant Howards, Lazarus?"
The old man shrugged. "Isn't that a question-begging term, dear? If you use a long enough time scale, every one of the thousands of genes a flesh-and-blood carries is a mutation. But by the Trustees' rules, a person not derived from the Families' genealogies can be registered as a newly discovered Howard if he can show proof of four grandparents surviving at least to one hundred. And that rule would have excluded me, had I not been born into the Families. But on top of that, the age I had reached when I got my first rejuvenation is too great to be accounted for by the Howard breeding experiment. They claim today that they have located in the twelfth chromosome pair a gene complex that determines longevity like winding a clock. If so, who wound my clock? Gilgamesh? 'Mutation' is never an explanation; it is simply a name for an observed fact.
"Perhaps some natural long-lifer, not necessarily a Howard, had visited Blessed-the naturals are forever moving around, changing their names, dyeing their hair; they have all gone through history-and earlier. But, Minerva, you recall from my life as a slave on Blessed one odd and unsavory incident-"
(Omitted)
"-so my best guess is that Llita and Joe were my own great-great-grandchildren."
VARIATIONS ON A THEME-X
Possibilities
"Lazarus, was that why you refused to share 'Eros' with her?"
"Eh? But, Minerva, dear, I didn't reach that conclusion-or suspicion-that night. Oh, I admit to prejudice about sex with my descendants-you can take the boy out of the Bible Belt, but it is hard to take the Bible Belt out of the boy. Still, I had had a thousand years in which to learn better."
"So?" said the computer. "Was it simply that you still classed her as an ephemeral? That troubles me, Lazarus. In my own-deprived-state, I find that, like her husband Joe, I see her side of it. Your reasons seem excuses, not sufficient grounds to refuse her need."
"Minerva, I did not say I refused her."
"Oh! Then I infer that you granted her this boon. I feel a lessening of tension."
"I didn't say that, either."
"I find an implied contradiction, Lazarus."
"Simply because there are things I have not said, dear. Everything I tell you winds up in my memoirs; that was the deal I made with Ira. Or I can tell you to erase something, in which case I might as well not have told you at all. Perhaps my twenty-three centuries do hold something worth recording. But I see no possible excuse for placing on record each time some darling lady shared with me simply for pleasure, not for progeny."
The computer answered thoughtfully, "I imply from this addendum that, while I am precluded from inferring anything about the boon Llita requested, your rule with respect to ephemerals extended only to marriage and to progeny."
"Nor did I say that!"
"Then I have not understood you, Lazarus. Conflict." The old man brooded, then answered slowly and sadly, "I think I said that marriage between a long-lived and a short-lived was a bad idea...and so it is...and I learned it the hard way. But that was long ago and far away-and when she died, part of me died. I stopped wanting to live forever." He stopped.
The computer said brokenly, "Lazarus- Lazarus, my beloved friend! I am sorry!"
Lazarus Long sat up straight and said briskly, "No, dear. Don't be sorry for me. No regrets-never any regrets. Nor would I change it if I could. Even if I had a time machine and could go back and change one cusp-I would not do so. No, not one instant, much less that cusp. Now let's speak of something else."
"Whatever you wish, dear friend."
"All right. You keep coming back to me and Llita, Minerva, and seem bothered that I denied her this 'boon.' But you don't know that I denied her anything and you certainly don't know that it was a 'boon.' Can be, surely-but not always, and often sex is not. Trouble is that you don't understand 'Eros,' dear, because you can't; you aren't built to understand it. I'm not running down sex; sex is swell, sex is wonderful. But if you put a holy aura around it-and that is what you are doing- sex stops being fun and starts being neurotic.