Time Enough For Love

VARIATIONS ON A THEME-IX

Conversation Before Dawn

The computer said, "Lazarus, aren't you sleepy?"

"Don't nag me, dear. I've had thousands of white nights, and I'm still here. A man never cuts his throat from a sleepless night if he has company to see him through it. You're good company, Minerva."

"Thank you, Lazarus."

"The simple truth, girl. If I fall asleep-fine. If I don't, then no need to tell Ishtar. No, that won't work; she'll have graphs and charts on me, won't she?"

"I'm afraid so, Lazarus."

"You durn well know so. A good reason for me to be a little angel and wash behind my ears and get this rejuvenation over is to get my privacy back. Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving him of either. That was another thing I accomplished by setting up Maison Long; I got my kids privacy they didn't know they needed."

"I missed that, Lazarus. I noted that they had more time for 'Eros'-and I saw that that was good. Should I have inferred something else from the data?"

"No, because I didn't give you all the data. Not a tenth. Just the outline of some forty years I knew them, and some-not all-of the critical points. For instance, did I mention the time Joe decapitated a man?"

"No."

"Not much to it and it wasn't important to the story. This young blood tried to share the wealth one night by sticking them up. Llita had J.A. in her right arm, nursing him or about to, and couldn't reach the gun she kept at the cashbox; she couldn't fight and was bright enough not to try against those odds. I suppose this dude didn't know that Joe had simply stepped out of sight.

"Just as this free-lance socialist was gathering up their day's receipts, Joe lets him have it, with a cleaver. Curtain. The only notable thing about it was that Joe acted so quickly and correctly in the crunch, for I feel sure that the only fighting that he had ever tried was that which I forced on him in the 'Libby.' Joe did everything else properly, too-finished taking the head off, threw the body into the street for his friends to take away if he had any, for the scavengers to remove if not- then displayed the head in front of the shop on a spike meant for such purpose. Then he closed his shutters and cleaned up the mess-then may have taken time to throw up; Joe was a gentle soul. But it's seven to two that Llita did not throw up.

"The city's committee for public safety voted Joe the usual reward, and the street committee passed the hat and added to it; a cleaver against a gun rated special notice. Good advertising for Estelle's Kitchen but not important otherwise, save that the kids could use that money-helped pay the mortgage, no doubt, and wound up in my pocket. But I wouldn't have heard of this minor dustup had I not been in New Canaveral and happened to stop by Estelle's Kitchen when the real head was removed-flies, you know-and the plastic trophy head custom required Joe to display was substituted for it by the street committee. But I was speaking of privacy.

"When I picked the property for Maison Long, I made sure that it included space for a growing family, that's all, since they had three bucking and one in the chute the night we planned it. Rearranging hours gave them privacy from each other, too. Happy as it is to snuggle and make love, nevertheless, when you are really tired, it is often good to have the bed to yourself-and the new routine not only allowed this but necessitated it, part of each day, through staggering their working hours.

"But I also planned room to give them privacy from their children-and to cope with another problem Llita did not have straight and Joe may not have thought about. Minerva, can you define 'incest'?"

The computer replied, "'Incest' is a legal term, not a biological one. It designates sexual union between persons forbidden by law to marry. The act itself is forbidden; whether such union results in progeny is irrelevant. The prohibitions vary widely among cultures and are usually, but not always, based on degrees of consanguinity."

"Y'r durn tootin' it's 'not always.' There are cultures which permit first cousins to marry-genetically risky-but forbid a man to marry his brother's widow, which involves no more risk than it did for the first union. When I was a youngster, you could find one rule in one state, then cross an invisible line and find exactly opposite laws fifty feet away. Or some times and places both unions might be mandatory. Or forbidden. Endless rules, endless definitions for incest, and rarely any logic to them. Minerva, so far as I recall, the Howard Families are the first group in history to reject the legalistic approach and to define 'incest' solely in terms of genetic hazard."

"That accords with the records in me," Minerva agreed. "A Howard geneticist might advise against a union between two persons with no known common ancestry but place no objection to marriage of siblings. In each case analysis of genetic charts would control."

"Yeah, sure. Now let's drop genetics and talk about taboo. The incest taboo, although it can be anything, most commonly means sisters and brothers, parents and offspring. Llita and Joe were a unique case, brother and sister by cultural rules, totally unrelated by genetic rules-or at least no more so than two strangers.

"Now comes a second-generation problem. Since Landfall had this taboo against union between siblings, I had impressed on Llita and Joe that they must never let anyone know that they thought of each other as 'brother' and 'sister.'

"Fine so far as it went. They did as I told them, and there was never a lifted eyebrow. Now comes the night we planned Maison Long-and my godson is thirteen and interested, and his sister is eleven and beginning to be interesting. Full siblings-both genetically hazardous and contrary to taboo. Anyone who has raised puppies-or a number of children-knows that a boy can get as horny over his sister as over the girl down the street, and his sister is often more accessible.

"And little Libby was a redheaded pixie so endearingly sexy at eleven that even I could feel it. Soon she was going to have every buck in the pasture pawing the ground and snorting.

"If a man pushes a rock, can he ignore an avalanche that follows? Fourteen years earlier I had manumitted two slaves- because a chastity girdle on one of them offended my concept of human dignity. Must I find some way to put a chastity girdle on that slave's daughter? Around we go in circles! What was my responsibility, Minerva? I pushed the first rock."

"Lazarus, I am a machine."

"Humph! Meaning that human concepts of moral responsibility are not machine concepts. Dear, I wish you were a human girl with a spankable bottom long enough for me to spank it-I would! In your memories is far more experience on which to judge than any flesh-and-blood can have. Quit dodging."

"Lazarus, no human can accept unlimited responsibility lest he go mad from unbearable load of unlimited guilt. You could have advised Libby's parents. But your responsibility did not extend even to that."

"Um. You're right, dear-it's dismal how regularly you are right. But I am an incurable buttinsky. Fourteen years earlier I had turned my back on two puppies, so to speak-and that the outcome was not tragic was good luck, not good planning. Now here we go again, and the outcome could be tragic. I felt no 'morals' about it, dear-just thumb rules for not, hurting people unintentionally. I didn't give a hoot if these children 'played doctor' or 'make a baby' or whatever the kids there called their experimenting; I simply did not want my godson giving little Libby a defective child.

"So, I did butt in and took it up with their parents. Let me add that Llita and Joe knew as much about genetics as a pig knows about politics. Aboard the 'Libby' I had kept my worries to myself, and never discussed the matter with them later. Despite their remarkable success in competing as free human beings, in most subjects Llita and Joe were ignorant. How could it be otherwise? I had taught them their Three R's and a few practical matters. Since arrival on Landfall they had been running under the whip; they hadn't had time to fill in gaps in their education.

"Perhaps worse yet, being immigrants, they had not grown up exposed to the local incest taboo. They were aware of it because I had warned them-but it wasn't canalized from childhood. Blessed had somewhat differenct incest taboos-but the taboos there did not apply to domestic animals. Slaves. Slaves bred as they were told to, or as they could get away with-and my two kids had been told by highest authority- their mother and their priest-that they were a 'breeding pair'...so it could not be wrong, or taboo, or sinful.

"It was simply something to keep quiet about on Landfall because Landfellows were tetched in the head on this subject.

"So I should have thought of it earlier. Yeah, sure, Sure! Minerva, I plead other obligations. I could not spend those years playing guardian angel to Llita and Joe. I had a wife and kids of my own, employees, a couple of thousand hectares of farmland and twice that much in virgin pinkwood- and I lived a long way off, even by high-orbit jumpbuggy.

Ishtar and Harnadiyad, and, to some extent, Galahad, all seem to think I am some sort of superman simply because I've lived a long time. I'm not; I have the limitations of any flesh-and-blood, and for years I was as busy with my problems as Llita and Joe were with theirs. Skyhaven didn't come to me gift-wrapped.

"It wasn't until we put aside restaurant business and I got out presents Laura had sent to their kids, and had admired the latest pictures of their kids and shown them pictures of Laura and my kids and all that ancient ritual, that I thought about it at all. The pix, of course. This tall lad, J.A., all hands and feet, wasn't the little boy I recalled from my last visit. Libby was about a year younger than Laura's oldest, and J.A.'s age I knew to the second-which is to say that he was about the age I was when I was almost caught with a girl in the belfry of our church about a thousand years earlier.

"My godson was no longer a child; he was an adolescent whose balls were not just ornaments. If he had not tried them as yet, he was certainly jerking off and thinking about it.

"The possibilities raced through my mind the way a man's past life is supposed to, when he is dying-which isn't true, by the way. So I tackled it and was subtle about it. Diplomatic.

"I said, 'Joe, which one do you lock up at night? Libby? Or this young wolf?'"

The computer chuckled. "'Diplomatic,'" she repeated.

"How would you have put it, dear? They looked puzzled. When I made it clear, Llita was indignant. Deprive her kids of each other? When they had slept together since they were babies? Besides, there wasn't room any other way. Or was I suggesting that she sleep with Libby while J.A. slept with Joe? If so, I could forget it!

"Minerva, most people never learn anything about any science, and genetics stands at the bottom of the list. Gregor Mendel had been dead twelve centuries at that time, yet all the old wives' tale were what most people believed-and still do, I might add.

"So I tried to explain, knowing that Llita and Joe weren't stupid, just ignorant. She cut in on me. 'Yes, yes, Aaron, certainly. I've thought about the possibility that Libby may want to marry Jay Aaron-will want to, I think-and I know it's frowned on here. But it's silly to ruin their happiness over a superstition. So, if it works out that way, we think it's best for them to move to Colombo-or at least as far as Kingston..

Then they can use different family names and get married, and no one will be the wiser. Not that we want them to be so far away. But we won't stand in the way of their happiness."

"She loved them," said Minerva.

"Yes, she did, dear, by the exact definition of love. Llita placed their welfare and happiness ahead of her own. So I had to try to explain it-why the taboo against union of brother and sister wasn't superstition but a real danger-even though it had turned out to be safe in their case.

"'Why' was the hard part. Starting cold on the complexities of genetics with persons who don't even know elementary biology is like trying to explain multidimensional matrix algebra to someone who has to take off his shoes to count above ten.

"Joe would have accepted my authority. But Llita had the sort of mind that has to know why-else she was going to smile her sweetly stubborn smile, agree with me, then do, as she had intended to all along. Llita was well above average smart but suffered from the democratic fallacy: the notion that her opinion was as good as anyone's-while Joe suffered from the aristocratic fallacy: He accepted the notion of authority in opinion. I don't know which fallacy is the more pathetic; either one can trip you. However, my mind matches. Llita's in this respect, so I knew I had to convince her.

"Minerva, how do you condense a thousand years of research in the second-most complex subject into an hour of talk? Llita didn't even know she laid eggs-in fact she was certain she didn't, as she had served thousands of eggs, fried, scrambled, boiled, and so forth. But she listened, and I sweated at it, with nothing but stylus and paper-when I needed the resources of a teaching machine in a college of genetics.

"But I kept at it, drawing pictures and simplifying outrageously some very complex concepts, until I thought they had grasped the ideas of genes, chromosomes, chromosome reduction, paired genes, dominants, recessives-and that bad genes made defective babies-and defective babies, thank Frigg under all Her many Names, was something Llita had known about since she was a little girl, listening to gossip of older female slaves. She quit smiling.

"I asked if they had playing cards?-not hopefully since they had no time for such. But Llita dug up a couple of decks from the children's room. The cards were the commonest sort used on Landfall then: fifty-six cards in four suits, Jewels and Hearts were red, Spades and Swords were black, and each suit had royal cards. So I had 'em play the oldest random-chance gene-matching simulation used in beginning genetics- the 'Let's-Make-a-Healthy-Baby' game that children here on Secundus can play-and explain-long before they are old enough to copulate.

"I said, 'Llita, write down these rules. Black cards are recessives, red cards are dominants; Jewels and Spades come from the mother, Hearts and Swords come from the father. A black ace is a lethal gene, reinforced the baby is stillborn. A black empress reinforced gives us a 'blue baby'-needs surgery to stay alive-And so on, Minerva, except that I set the rules for a 'hit'-a bad reinforcement-so that they were four times as probable for brother and sister as for strangers, and explained why-and then made them keep records for twenty games played by each set of rules for shuffling and snatching, reduction and recombination.

"Minerva, it was not as good a structural analogy as the 'Make-a-Healthy-Baby' kindergarten games, but using two decks with different back patterns did enable me to set up degrees of consanguinity. Llita was simply intent at first-then started looking grim the first time the turn of the cards caused a black to reinforce a black.

"But when we played by brother-and-sister rules, and she dealt the cards and twice in a row got the Ace of Spades matched with the Ace of Swords for a dead baby, she stopped. She turned pale and looked at them. Then said slowly, with horror in her voice: 'Aaron...does this mean that we must lock Libby into a virgin's basket? Oh, no!"

"I told her gently that it wasn't that bad. Little Libby would never be locked up that way or any way-we'd work it out so that the children would not marry and so that J.A. would not give his sister a baby even by accident. 'Quit worrying, dear!'"

The computer said, "Lazarus, what method did you use to cheat in those card games? May I ask?"

"Why, Minerva, how could you think such a thing?

"I withdraw the question, Lazarus."

"Of course I cheated! All sorts of ways; I said those two had never had time to play cards...whereas I had played with every sort of a deck and by endless rules. Minerva, I won my first oil well from a boy who made the mistake of putting readers into a game. Dear, I had Llita deal-but from a deck so cold it almost froze solid. I used all sorts of things-false cut, whorehouse cut, tops and bottoms, stacking the deck in front of their eyes. There wasn't any money on the game; I simply had to convince them that inbreeding was for stock, not for their beloved children-and I did."

(Omitted)

"-your bedroom here, Llita, yours and Joe's, I mean. Libby's room adjoins yours, while J.A. winds up down the hall. How you reshuffle later depends on the sex of the baby you are going to have and on how many more you choose to have and when-but putting a crib in with Libby must be considered temporary; you can't figure on using it indefinitely as an excuse to keep an eye on her.

"But this is merely a stopgap, like not leaving the cat alone with the roast. Kids are slick at beating such arrangements, and nobody has ever been able to keep a girl off her back when she decides it's time. When she decides-that's the key to the matter. So our pressing problem is to get these children into separate beds-then to see to it that Libby does not make a bad decision. Any reason Libby can't go with me to Skyhaven and visit Pattycake? And how about J.A., Joe, can you get along without him a while? Lots of room, dears-Libby can room with Pattycake, and J.A. can bunk with George and Woodrow and maybe teach 'em manners."

"Llita said something about imposing on Laura, Minerva, which I answered with a rude negative. 'Laura likes kids, dear; she is one ahead of you, yet she started a year later. She doesn't keep house; she simply bosses her staff, she's never had to work harder than suited her. Furthermore, she wants all of you to pay us a visit-an invitation I heartily second, but I don't think you two can get away until we find a buyer for this place. But I want Libby and J.A. now-so that I can give them blunt and practical instruction in genetics, using stock I've been inbreeding to show what I mean."

"Minerva, this particular breeding schedule I had started to teach my own offspring the bald truth about genetics, with careful records and grisly photographs of bad culls. Since you manage a planet which has over ninety percent Howards and the remaining mixed fraction mostly following Howard customs, you may not know that non-Howard cultures don't necessarily teach such things to their kids even in cultures open about sex.

"Landfall was then mostly short-lifers, only a few thousand Howards-and to avoid friction we did not advertise our presence even though it wasn't a secret-couldn't be; the planet had a Howard Clinic. But with Skyhaven a Dan'l-Boone distance from the nearest big town, if Laura and I wanted our children to have a Howard-style education, we had to teach them ourselves. So we did.

"When I was a kid, the grownups of my home country tried to pretend to kids that sex did not exist-believe it if you can! Not true of the little hellions Laura and I raised. They had not seen human copulation-I don't think they had-because it puts me off stride to have spectators. But they had seen it in other animals and had bred pets and kept records. The older two, Pattycake and George, had seen the birth of our youngest of the time because Laura had invited them to watch. This I strongly approve of, Minerva, but I have never urged one of my wives to permit it because I figure that a woman in labor should be indulged in every possible way. However, Laura had a streak of exhibitionism in her makeup.

"Anyhow, our kids could discuss chromosome reduction and the merits and demerits of linebreeding as knowledgeably as my own contemporaries when I was a kid could discuss the World Series-"

"Excuse me, Lazarus-that last term's referent?"

"Oh. Nothing important. One of the commercially induced surrogate interests of my childhood: Forget it dear; it is not worth cluttering your memories. I was about to say I asked Joe and Llita what J.A. and Libby knew about sexual matters-since Landfall had so diversified a background that it could be anything and I wanted to know where to start-especially as my oldest, Pattycake, had turned twelve and reached menarche at the same time and was smug about it, likely to boast.

"Turned out that Libby and J.A. were sophisticated in an ignorant, unscientific fashion about matching their parents. They were one up on my kids in one respect: copulation they had seen from birth, at least to the time Estelle's Kitchen had moved uptown-which I should have figured out from recalling the still more cramped living quarters of the original Estelle's Kitchen."

(7,200 words omitted)

"Laura was sharp with me and insisted that I not see them until I calmed down. She pointed out that Pattycake was almost as old as J.A., that it was nothing but play as Pattycake had had her four-year sterilization after menarche, and that, in any event, Pattycake had been on top.

"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."