Lady Slings the Booze Read online

  No, that wasn’t quite true. One thing was moving.

  Raffalli’s right arm. In ultraslow motion. I noticed it when the blade moved far enough for a swarm of glowing red gnats to take up temporary residence on it as reflected highlight. It visibly moved along the blade as I watched.

  I had discovered during my photo shoot that it was possible to torque my head out far enough forward to get a look at the three-digit readout on the damned watch on my forearm. He’d known it would be. Eight minutes and forty-five seconds.

  Was it time yet to think of Arethusa, and how achingly close I had come to having it all? Or save that for near the end? Better perhaps to total up all my life’s other regrets first. That ought to fill four minutes handily, even in this hypercharged state. Then another four minutes on what I’d do to Raffalli if I could. Try to avoid the subject of what he was going to do after I was dead: it wasn’t my problem any more. Let’s see: start with Uncle Louie?

  A very small group of red gnats winked at me softly, like a distant firefly. The knife was not the only thing moving in the room. There was one other thing.

  The doorknob. It was turning…

  A kind of sick joy swept over me. My friends were risking everything to attempt a desperate last-minute rescue. Either they had pieced together enough clues to guess it was a good shot, or they were placing their trust in God and getting partly lucky. They weren’t going to be in time—I knew my gonads were history, waiting only for publishing delay lag—but just maybe Raffalli would find mutilating me engrossing enough to distract his attention for just long enough for Priscilla to tear his spine out. I might even live to bleed on his corpse. The choice between live eunuch and dead stud is a hard but simple one. These days, maybe a man could even live long enough to see testicle regeneration put on Medicare. I was in the mood for any sort of consolation prize at all.

  So it was crucial to gauge just how good Pricilla’s timing was going to be, how good her odds of taking him successfully. I tried to cross my eyes, put one on the blade and the other on the doorknob, and estimate relative speeds and distances.

  The doorknob was turning awfully damned slow. But so was the knife moving toward me slowly. The doorknob had much less distance to cover than the knife. But the knife only had to reach me. The doorknob had to turn, then get out of the way, and then Pris had to cover a distance much greater than the knife did. But suppose Pris were holding? Say she had a knife herself: could she throw it across a room faster than a man could stab, with accuracy? If she had a gun, could she get a vital spot faster than he could retrieve his watch? So many variables. I spread the fingers of my left hand as far apart as I could, in the hope of preventing him from simply slipping the loosely bound watch off over my hand for faster retrieval. A watchband fastening can be awfully recalcitrant for a man in a hurry. On the other hand he could always duck behind me and use me for cover while he worked on it.

  My hopes kept rising and falling like a kangaroo on a trampoline. Minutes ticked slowly by while I oscillated between elation and despair. With every minute my data got better. By the time I had good long baselines for knife and doorknob, the doorknob had stopped turning and was coming toward me. I started to hope that Raffalli’s aim was good. It would be a shame if he missed slightly, got my femoral artery, and I never got to learn how it turned out. I couldn’t be sure, but my best guesstimate was that Priscilla was going to lose the race by a hair’s breadth. And all the rest of us, too—

  All at once my heart turned to stone as hard and unmoving as the room.

  All I could see by that point through the slowly widening crack at the door was a female fist, clenched and moving, oddly further away from the doorway than seemed right. But almost the instant I recognized it as a fist, I recognized whose it was. I can’t tell you how, but I was utterly certain. It was, of course, the last person on Earth I wanted to see come through that door first.

  Arethusa…

  I had a real bad twenty or thirty seconds of subjective time there—especially when her face began to come visible.

  And then it began to dawn on me just how unbelievably fast she was coming.

  Don’t get me wrong: it was a snail’s pace. But a snail’s pace was a hell of a lot faster than the door was moving. Or the knife. As I watched and marveled, she hit the door with her shoulder, and within only seconds had convinced it to start getting the fuck out of her way.

  I had lots of time for mental calculations. I did the math in my head three times, using varying assumptions. It seemed to me that she was moving just a little more than twice as fast as humanly possible. That gave me a broad enough hint to figure it out.

  For all of her life, Arethusa had been, as far as she was concerned, using one mind to run two bodies and two brains simultaneously. Both bodies were her, and she had plenty of energy and attention for both. But suppose she abandoned one?

  If she poured all her mental energy into a single body, could she not turbo charge it into prodigious feats of strength and speed?

  She had backed off to the far side of the hallway, signaled the second-quickest person in the building, Pris, to open the door, and gone into warp drive. At this point she was a cannon ball in flight.

  I tried not to wonder whether her other body could survive, even briefly, as a derelict. Was medulla alone enough to keep its machinery going for the extent of a firefight? And could the supercharged body take that kind of load without burning out? There was all too much time to consider both questions. And no way to answer them…

  She was running flat out, head down, in great slow leaping strides. She probably could not have interpreted very well what her eyes were seeing at that speed, so she wasn’t trying. She had planned her move in detail before the door ever opened, and was now utterly committed to whatever it was.

  With infinite slowness, I became ever more certain that she would succeed. She might actually even reach him before he gelded me!

  Damn: ten minutes of boring suspense, and then a photo finish! I hoped she’d planned wisely. There was no visible margin for error. The knife was no more than a foot or two away—and the ten minutes had to be nearly up…

  Halfway to him she gathered herself and left the floor. Her body began rotating slowly, her head and upper body falling behind and her feet coming up.

  Her plan became apparent. She had long since reached the highest possible speed any amount of running could give her. Now she planned to send all that awesome kinetic energy down those strong legs and deliver it with both feet to his kidneys. It is the kind of blow that will cause any man to pull his elbows back sharply, instantly, and quite involuntarily. She knew the layout of the room well, and knew his height, and had made an excellent guess as to where he would probably be standing.

  The only part she had gotten wrong was the one that only a lot of prior rehearsal could have helped. She fractionally misjudged how long it would take her to get her feet up high enough.

  Even then it might have been all right. Her piledriving feet might just have caught him behind the knees, making his torso jerk backwards violently enough to make the knife miss me. Or at least fall short of its intent.

  But somehow she sensed her problem in midflight—faster than she should have been able to, and by pure acrobat’s intuition—and used the last ten seconds of her trajectory to tuck her feet. It was her knees that caught him in the kidneys, just as no-time ran out on the watch, and flung him into me like a body-checking hockey player.

  Suddenly everything was happening at once.

  I had a tiny increment of time—how long it was, on what scale, I cannot say—in which to exult. Then I looked down and saw the knife. Or rather the hilt of the knife, sunk flush into the meat between ribs and hip, on my left side. Oh hell, I thought, that’s not a problem. It’ll be at least five great long seconds before it even starts to hurt. But as I thought that, I was simultaneously interpreting a loud dull noise I’d heard at the instant of Time-Start as the front of Arethusa’s head impacting
against the back of Raffalli’s. I recalled that the chances of producing unconsciousness are slightly higher for an impact from the front than one from behind. Sure enough, there was Arethusa coming to rest on the floor, bouncing slightly, out cold—and there was Raffalli, still on his feet, ignoring his shock and the agony he must have been in, and snatching the watch from my forearm with damnably nimble fingers. I could not prevent him.

  I saw Priscilla crouched in the open doorway, pointing a gun at him. But the fucking door itself was just bouncing closed again from that initial titanic shove. I saw her decide to hold fire rather than fire wild. Mike or someone would surely kick the door out of her way again for her—but Raffalli had the watch now. He slapped it against his wrist to set the connection, held it there, and reached with one finger for the stud. The door rebounded open and Pris came into view again, but I understood with terrifying certainty that he could reach and press that stud before even a high-velocity slug could reach him.

  I still think I was right. But the question never came up. Priscilla’s gun did not throw slugs. A red wire, incredibly vivid and bright, suddenly ran arrowstraight from her fist to his head, through it, and past my ear. His head exploded, spraying boiling meat and juice, and the incandescent red wire vanished. A second one grew between Pris and the watch, which was in mid-air, spinning end over end, and it exploded too.

  I don’t care who else is in the race, or what their stats are. The laser wins, every time. Lightspeed, you know.

  My God, I thought, I’ve shit myself. And I don’t even care. Glad I skipped dinner, I suppose, but I wouldn’t mind if I needed a ladder to climb down off the pile. What a tough guy. Wait’ll the boys find out.

  I blinked down at Arethusa. And silently said to a God I didn’t believe in even then, Lord, if you’ve only got enough blessing for two bodies, give it to her. Doctor Kate was at her side, that was nice. And good ol’ Mike was just finishing the unstrapping of my wrists. It’s about time, I thought, and giggled at the pun. I tried dopily to remove that annoying knife, for cosmetic reasons. He did not have to stop me: my hands were useless. I gave up, and collapsed into Lady Sally’s strong, comforting arms.

  “You done good, Joe,” Mike’s booming voice said in my ear. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but it was a pleasant thought to take with me into darkness…

  11. Dick and Jane Are Friends

  With thee conversing I forget all time,

  All seasons and their change; all please alike.

  —JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

  “WHAT the hell kind of gun was that?”

  It wasn’t the first thing I asked. The first was, “How is Arethusa?” and I couldn’t get a really good breath into my chest until I heard the answer, “She’ll be just fine, I promise.” But it was the second question.

  We were alone in Doctor Kate’s surgery at the time. Nonetheless Lady Sally McGee took time answering. “A hand laser,” she admitted finally.

  “Bullshit,” I snarled, knowing it was not. My side was hurting a great deal, and it was my own fault for refusing the painkiller she had offered me when I woke, and I was giving consideration to becoming as violently pissed off as a post-op patient can be. I had a lot of anger built up, and what seemed like a perfectly good reason to take some of it out on her. She had been instrumental in risking and then saving my life; I wasn’t sure just then which was more unforgivable. “I know a lot more about weapons than some mercs, especially esoteric weapons. Call it a hobby. And I am absolutely certain not even the Joint Chiefs or the Politburo could build a laser powerful enough to boil a man’s brain in under a second, that would fit in anything smaller than a van.”

  “But you saw it with your own eyes, did you not? Didn’t I promise to believe in a damned ghost on the same evidence? If it wasn’t a laser pistol, what was it?”

  “I never said it wasn’t,” I told her. “What I said was ‘Bullshit,’ and maybe I did get that wrong. Maybe what I meant to say was ‘Chickenshit.’”

  Did you ever see somebody who wanted to frown but wasn’t sure she should? It’s an expression only a Raffalli could really enjoy. But I didn’t hate it, as I should have. I was steamed. “Speak plainly, Joe.”

  “I will if you will,” I taunted. “After what I’ve been through in your service, don’t you think maybe you owe me the truth?”

  Maybe it had been a long time since anybody had caught her on a spot that raw. I started to lose steam when I saw her expression. But I couldn’t quite make myself take the question back.

  Finally she reached her decision. “It is not a kind of truth that can be ‘owed’ to someone—in the way that I can now give you my solemn oath that I will never tell another living soul your birth name. It is not a kind of truth that is mine, to give as a gift to anyone, no matter how great a favor they do me. In the military sense, you do not have adequate Need To Know.” She sighed. “But I find I have adequate need, and justification, to tell you—and now is as good a time as any, I suppose.” She got up from her chair and began to pace. “But I do owe you this much: I will warn you first. If I tell you the truth you want, I will be recruiting you—irrevocably—into a war that will make this last skirmish with Raffalli seem as insignificant as any other knife fight.”

  “Why does this not surprise me?” I said bitterly. “Come on, spit it out!”

  “You sure you won’t wait until you’re more than a few hours out of abdominal surgery? Your judgment is legally impaired.”

  “Who says I’m going to pull through?”

  “Doctor Kate, who is rarely wrong—but I take your point,” she agreed. “All right. If worse comes to worst, I…well, we’ll leave it at ‘all right.’ Joe, I am—”

  “—a time traveler,” I said before she could.

  She stopped pacing. For the second time in twenty-four hours I had succeeded in making her gape like an accident witness. It may be a record; I’d have to ask Mike.

  “You knew?” she finally managed to say.

  “Oh Christ, Lady, I’ve suspected ever since the mention of the words ‘time machine’ made all your circuits short out. It seemed a little whacky even for me, I’ll grant you: for once in my life I refused to believe what my intuition told me. But that fucking laser pistol was like a neon sign. In more ways than one. There’s only one time in history when they made laser hand weapons—and it hasn’t happened yet. Do I look stupid?”

  “Yes, actually, a little. It’s one of your greatest professional assets. People underrate you easily. I did myself for a short while.”

  I was beginning to be mollified. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Well? Do I get to hear what you’re doing here? I mean ‘now’? And Mike too?”

  She looked embarrassed. “I’m through lying to you, Joe. We don’t know why Mike is here/now…exactly. Only that it will soon turn out to be terribly necessary that he is, and has been. But I’ll tell you what he does here, while he waits for the Call, if you like. And more important, I’ll tell you why I’m here, and what I am doing—and how you can help, if you’re willing.”

  “Attagirl,” I said.

  “But Joe, listen to me. You are only hours out of OR. I would like you to pull through. If you have the bad grace to die on me now, Doctor Kate will have my hide for a skirt, and it will take me the better part of a year to put Arethusa back together again. What I’m asking you is: do you truly need to hear all of this right now?”

  I thought about it. Hell, I hadn’t even gotten past number two on my original list of questions, and now there was a newer and longer list.

  So I listened to my body. Now that my bubble of anger was belched, there was no question at all that I was in absolutely last-class shape. My wound hurt brightly. Maybe what a certified superdick like me should do was take a nice nap, and then tackle the idea of something that made Christian Raffalli look like a cheap shiv artist.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Your gird is solid wold, and I think I stopped being in
a hurry permanently sometime back there while I was hanging on the cross, waiting for that clown to butt my calls off.” Something about that didn’t sound right. “And I am just a tittle bit liared. Tell Arethusa I said—”

  “Tell her yourself,” Lady Sally said, smiling. “At this moment she is right outside that door on matching gurneys, waiting with immense patience for me to shut the hell up and let Kate and Priscilla wheel her in so you two can start recovering together.”

  Halfway through her sentence my vision started to grey out, but I managed a smile of my own. Doctors recommend them for postsurgical patients. “The family that heals together—” I began…and could not think of a rhyme for “heal.” Oh, I was in good shape.

  “I do not believe,” Lady Sally murmured, putting a tablet on my tongue, “that you will often encounter Arethusa with her heels together.” She headed for the door.

  “Wait,” I called feebly. “Look, I don’t know, maybe I talk in my sleep. Does Arethusa know about you?”

  “She’s the one who first advised me to recruit you,” Lady Sally said. “She can start filling you in when you both wake, if you like.”

  “I’d rather year it from who,” I told her.

  “As you wish.”

  I held on long enough to feel Arethusa take both of my hands in one of hers from either side. Hey, I’m a tough guy.

  I wanted to thank her for saving my life. But there’s only one good way to do that—and I simply wasn’t strong enough. No hurry. We didn’t exchange a single word, as a matter of fact. There was no need.

  To this day, we don’t need many.

  I hadn’t had narcotics for years.