10000 Light Years From Home Part 20

"I haven't done a thing to daddy, Uncle Vic."

Her uncle marched over to the bunk, grabbed up the blanket, hissed, and threw it on the floor.

"You-you-"

"Daddy had no right to do that!" Loolie cried. "It's my life. It didn't work, anyway. I-I love it here, I mean, I think I-"

"No!" the little man shrieked. He scuttled back to Loolie and started shaking her. "Your father!" he yelled. "He will have you psyched, he will have you deleted! Puta! Pffah! And as for you, you-" He whirled on Dov and began to spray old-world discourtesies.

At which point, Dov, although a nice person, was starting to get considerably browned. He recalled coming up here for some peace and quiet. Now he looked at the little man, and the big man, and Loolie, and finished lacing up his boots.

"Get up! Move!" the little man screamed. "You come with us!"

"My folks will wonder where I am," Dov objected reasonably, thinking the two men looked like urban types. "On your feet, felo!" Uncle Vic flapped his hands at the big man, who came away from the door and jerked his head at Dov.

"Get moving, boy." He had one hand in his pocket like an old movie.

Dov got up.

"O.K., but you need some clothes for Miss Aerovulpa, don't you think? Maybe her father won't be so wild if you bring her back dressed."

Uncle Vic glared distractedly at Loolie, who was sticking out of her blanket.

"I'll get a snowsuit in the closet," Dov said. He moved carefully toward the woodshed door by the fireplace, wondering if urban types would buy the idea of a closet in a mountain cabin. The big man took his hand out of his pocket with something in it pointed at Dov's back, but he didn't move.

Just as Dov's hand reached the latch he heard Loolie's mouth pop open and held his breath. She didn't say anything.

Then he was twisting through the door and yanking out the main brace of the woodpile. Cordwood crashed down against the door while Dov a.s.sisted matters by leaping up the pile, grabbing the axe as he went. He scrambled around the eaves onto the lean-to and whipped around the chimney, hearing bangings from below.

From the chimney he launched himself up to the roof-ridge. The big front drift was still there. He rode a snow-slide down over the front door, slamming the bar-latch as he landed, grabbed up his skis and was galloping through the drifts to the far side of the helicopter.

The first shots came through the cabin window as he swung his axe at the main rotor bearings. His body was behind the copter and the cabin windows were too small for the big man. When his axe achieved an unhealthy effect on the rotors Dov gave the gas tank a couple of whacks, decided not to bother igniting it, buried the axe in the tail vane and scuttled down the morraine into a private ravine.

Gla.s.s was cras.h.i.+ng, voices bellowing behind him.

The ravine became a long narrow tunnel under the s...o...b..wed spruces. Dov frog-crawled down it until the noise was faint, like coyote pups. Presently the ravine widened and debouched into a steep snowfield. Dov buckled on his skis. The moon rode out of a cloudrack. Dov straightened up and took off down the flittering white. As he flew along gulping in the peace and quiet, he hoped Loolie would be all right. Vic was her uncle, it had to be o.k.

In an hour he had reached the parked snowcat and was headed back to Calgary where his uncle, Ben Rapelle, was chief of. the RCM mountain patrol.

He felt free.But he wasn't.

Because Loolie-Loolie Number One, that is-had said her last name was Rapelle. And his toe swelled up.

That turned out to be, as she'd also said, very important.

Next morning, after the patrol brought Loolie and Uncle Vic and his enforcer all safe and sound down to Headquarters, Loolie insisted on phoning her psychomed. So when her father, Mr. Aerovulpa, arrived in his private VTOL the psychomed was with him.

Mr. Aerovulpa turned out to be quite unlike Uncle Vic, who was actually, it seemed, only a distant cousin. For too many generations swarthy Aerovulpa sperm had been frisking into blond Scandinavian-type wombs; the current Mr. Aerovulpa was a tall yellow-gray glacier with a worried, lumpy Swedish face. If he were wild he didn't show it. He appeared only very weary.

"Eulalia," he sighed depletedly in Ben Rapelle's office. That was Loolie's real name and he always called her by it, having no talent for fatherhood. He looked from his only child to the psychomed whom he had employed to ensure a marriageable product.

Now it had all blown up in his face.

"But how... ?" asked Mr. Aerovulpa. "You a.s.sured me, Doctor-" His voice was quiet but not warm. "Uncle" Vic s.h.i.+ed nervously. They were all standing around the Patrol office, Dov with a socmoc on one foot.

"The time-jump," shrugged the psychomed. He was plump and slightly walleyed, which gave him an air of manic cheer. "It was the older Loolie who was in this body, Louis. This older persona was no longer conditioned. You really should have been more careful. What on Earth did you want with a thing like that, time-jumping at your age? And the cost, my G.o.d."

Mr. Aerovulpa sighed.

"I acquired it for a particular purpose." He frowned abstractedly at the Rapelles. "A very small trip, I wished to observe-"

"To see if you had a grandson, eh? Eh, eh?" The psycher chortled. "Of course. Well, did you?"

For some reason Mr. Aerovulpa chose to continue this intimate topic. "I found myself at my desk,"

he said. "On it was a portrait." His bleak eyes searched his daughter, froze onto Dov.

Dov blinked. It had just occurred to him that a securely hyped and guarded virgin might not be otherwise defended from maternity. Loolie sucked in her lower lip, made a, face.

The psychomed eyed them both, head c.o.c.ked.

"Tell me, Loolie, when you came back to yourself, did you find this young man, ah, disgusting?

Repellent? The situation was traumatic."

Loolie smiled at him, wider and wider, swinging her head slowly from side to side. "Oh, no. Oh, no!

It was fantastic, he's fantastic, he's beautiful. Only-"

"Only what?"

Her smile turned to Dov, melted. "Well, we never, I mean, I wish-"

"All right!" The psychomed held up his hand. "I see. Now, tell me, Loolie. Think. Did you by any chance bite his toe?"

"Uncle" Vic made a noise, Loolie looked incredulous. "Bit his toe?" she echoed. "Of course not."

The psychomed turned to Dov. His gaze sank to the socmoc. "Did she, young man?"

"Why?" asked Dov cautiously. Everybody began looking at the socmoc.

"Did she?"

"I never!" said Loolie indignantly.

"You don't know," Dov told her. "You did, before. When you were seventy-five.""Bite your toe? What for?"

"Because that was the key cue," said the psychomed. He pulled his ear. "Oh bother. You remember, Louis. I told you."

Mr. Aerovulpa's expression had retreated further into the ice age.

"The idea was not to make you s.e.xless for life, my dear," the psycher told Loolie. "There had to be a cue, a key to undo the conditioning. Something easy but improbable, which couldn't possibly happen by accident. I considered several possibilities. Yes. All things considered, the toe-bite seemed best." He nodded benevolently. "You recall, Louis, you wanted no matrimonial scandals."

Mr. Aerovulpa said nothing.

"A beautiful job of imprinting, if I do say so myself." The psycher beamed. "Absolutely irreversible, I guarantee it. The man whose toe she bites-" he pointed at Dov, one eye rolling playfully "-or rather, bit, she will love that man and that man only so long as she lives. Guaranteed!"

In the silence Mr. Aerovulpa pa.s.sed one hand over his Dag Hammarskjold forehead and breathed out carefully. His gaze lingered from Loolie to Dov to Ben Rapelle like a python inspecting inexplicably inedible rabbits.

"It is... possible... that we shall see more of each other," he observed coldly. "At the moment I trust it is... agreeable to you that my daughter return to her schooling. Victor."

"Right here, Louis!"

"You will remain to provide our... apologies to these gentlemen and to accomplish any necessary, ah, restorations. I am... not pleased. Come, Eulalia."

"Oh, Dovy!" Loolie cried as she was hustled out. Dov's uncle Ben grunted warningly. And the Aerovulpas departed.

But not, of course, permanently.

Came springtime in the Rockies and with it a very round-bellied and love-lorn teenager, escorted this time by a matron of unmistakable character and hardihood. Dov got out the ponies and they rode up into the singing forests and rainbow torrents and all the shy, free, super-delights of the wild country Dov loved. And he saw that Loolie truly wanted to live there and share his kind of life in addition to being totally in love with him, and anyone could see that Loolie herself was luscious and warm-hearted and potentially sensible in spots, especially when it came to getting rid of the matron. And Dov really was a nice person, in spite of his distrust of the Aerovulpa ambiance. (The ambiance was now making itself felt in the form of a so-called demographic survey team snooping all over Calgary.) So when summer ripened Dov journeyed warily to the Aerovulpa island off Pulpit Harbor, where he soon discovered that the ambiance didn't repel him half as much as Loolie attracted him. Even the nicest young man is not immune to the notion of a beautiful semi-virginal ever-adoring child-bride of great fortune.

"What, ah, career do you plan for yourself?" Mr. Aerovulpa asked Dov on one of his rare appearances on the island.

"Avalanche research," Dov told him, thus confirming the survey team's report. Mr. Aerovulpa's eyelids drooped minutely. The alliances he had contemplated for Loolie had featured interests of a far more seismic type.

"Basically, sir, I'm a geo-ecologist. It's a great field."

"Oh, it's wonderful, Daddy!" sang Loolie. "I'm going to do all his records!"

Mr. Aerovulpa's eyes drifted from his daughter's face to her belly. The Lump was now known to be male. Mr. Aerovulpa had not arrived where he was by ignoring facts, and he was really not a twenty-first-century man. "Ah," he said drearily, and departed.

But the wedding itself was far from dreary. It was magnificently simple, out on the lawn above thesea, with a forcefield keeping off the Maine weather and an acre of imported wildflowers. The guest list was small, dominated by a number of complicated old ladies of exotic t.i.tle and entourage among whom the Alberta contingent stood out like friendly grain elevators.

And then everybody went away and left Dov and Loolie for a week to themselves in paradise.

"Oh, Dovy," sighed Loolie on the third day, "I wish I could stay like this the rest of my life!"

This not very remarkable sentiment was uttered as they lay on the sauna solarium glowing like fresh-boiled shrimps.

"You just say that because you bit my toe," said Dov.

He was thinking about sailing, to which he had recently been introduced.

"I never!" Loolie protested. She turned over. "Hey, you know, I wonder. When did I actually meet you?"

"Last Christmas."

"No, that's what I mean. I mean, I came there because I already loved you, didn't I? And that's where I met you. It's funny."

"Yeah."

"I love you so, Dovy."

"I love you too. Listen, let's take your big boat out today, should we?"

And they had a wonderful sail on the dancing trimaran all the way around Acadia Park Island and back to a great clam dinner. That night in bed afterwards Loolie brought it up again.

"Unh," said Dov sleepily.

She traced his spine with her nose.

"Listen, Dovy. Wouldn't it be fantastic to live this day over again? I mean like when we're old."

"Hunh-unh."

"Daddy has the juniper right here, you know. I was here over Christmas when I did it. That's what the big power plant over by the cove is for, I told you."

"Hunh."

"Why don't we do it tomorrow?"

"Unh," said Dovy. "Hey, what did you say?"

"We could time-jump tomorrow, together," Loolie smiled dreamily. "Then when we're old we could be young like we are for a while. Together."

"Absolutely not," said Dov. And he told her why it was an insane idea. He told her and told her.

"It's dangerous. What if one of us turned out to be dead?"

"Oh, if you're dead nothing happens, I mean, you can only switch places with yourself. The, the persona something symmetry, I mean, if you're not there nothing happens. You just stay here. The book says so, it's perfectly safe."

"It's insane anyway. What about the Lump?" Loolie giggled. "It would be a great experience for him."

"What do you mean? What if he finds himself with the mind of a six-month embryo while he's driving a jet?"

"Oh, he couldn't! I mean, he'd know it was going to happen, because it did, you know? So when he got that old he'd sit down or something. Like when I get to be seventy-five I'll know I'll be jumped back here and go and meet you."

"No, Loolie. It's insane. Forget it."

So she forgot it. For several hours."Dovy, I worry so. Isn't it terrible we have to get old? Think how great it would be, having a day to look forward to. Being young again, just for a day. For half an hour, even. Isn't it rotten, thinking about getting old?"

Dov opened one eye. He had felt thoughts like that himself.

"I mean, we wouldn't miss a few hours now. We have so much time. But think when you're, oh, like sixty, maybe you'll be sick or degenerating-and you'll know you're going to jump back and feel great and, and go sailing and be like we are!"

Crafty little Loolie with that "sailing." Loolie gripped by the primal dream: pay now, play later.

"You can't be sure it's safe, Loolie."