“He had it coming,” Ben said. “We would’ve hung him.”
“You don’t know that,” the man said.
“If ever a man deserved killing, it’s Standish,” a man said, and most of the group agreed with him.
Frigate had known that the man was dead before anyone else had. He had seen Standish’s wathan disappear, whisked away by the magician Death.
He turned off the scene and told the Computer to get a fix on Standish’s wathan. That was not as easy as it should have been because of the recency of Standish’s death. In two minutes, seventeen other wathans had entered the well after Standish’s.
Frigate asked the Computer if Standish had been killed before this. The Computer said that the man had died three times on this world.
Had the Computer scanned and taped any of Standish’s memory during these times?
After carefully defining violence to the Computer, Frigate told it to quick-check all periods of violence in Standish’s life. “Beginning when he was fifteen years old.”
That meant that the Computer would first have to determine when Standish was at that age. It made a run but took an hour to locate the period that gave definite proof. Fortunately, Standish had been given a birthday party in 1965. (Which meant that he was born in 1950, Frigate thought.) Frigate had the birthday party displayed. Standish’s mother was a short, very fat slattern; his father was a big pot-bellied man with many broken veins on his face. Both were reeling drunk. So were all the guests, many of whom were Standish’s schoolmates. The house was dirty, and the furniture was threadbare and broken. The father was, according to some remarks made by a guest, a carpenter who did not work as much as he could have. Standish puked up beer and pretzels and bologna sandwiches late in the evening, and the party broke up when the parents started screaming insults and obscenities at each other. It looked as if they were going to hit each other when Frigate shut the scene off.
Frigate told the Computer that that was an example of verbal violence. What he wanted was physical violence. Frigate then went to the evening meeting, held in Li Po’s apartment. The Computer continued its search, which was for the time being limited to the ten years between 1965 and 1975.
At the party, Frigate found out that others were also conducting searches. Alice, for instance, was trying to locate her three sons, her parents, and her brothers and sisters.
“Do you plan on resurrecting them?” Frigate said.
Her dark eyes seemed troubled.
“Frankly, I don’t know. I think I just wish to make sure that they’re all right. Happy. Of course, they, some of them, might be dead. Then, of course …”
What she meant was that any who were locked away in the records, their wathans in the central shaft, could not live again unless she raised them. But she was not certain what effect their presence would have on her, how they would circumscribe her. Or what their reactions to what she now was would be. What would they think if they knew that she had been the mate of that wicked man, Dick Burton?
Also, the reunion of parents with children could be unhappy. The parents were used to ruling their children, were, at least, in Alice’s time. But here there were no evident marks of age; the parents looked as young as their children. Moreover, after a separation of so many years and such different experiences, both parents and children had changed considerably. There was, literally, a world between them, a gap that few could cross.
Yet Alice had loved her mother, father, sons and siblings.
Frigate noticed that she had said nothing of her husband, Reginald Gervis Hargreaves. He was too discreet to mention it.
“You’ve had no success so far?” Frigate said.
Alice sipped from her cut-quartz goblet of wine and said, “No. I’ve given their names and birth and death dates to the Computer, all except the death date of my son Caryl. I don’t know that, but I’m sure I can find a book or a newspaper in the records that will, and I’m looking for photographs that the Computer can match up with its files. That all takes time, you know. If any or all are dead and in the records, then they’ll be found. But if they’re living, the chances that they’ll be located are less. The Computer can make a grailstone-scan. However, unless my people happen to be in range during the necessarily quick scan, they won’t be found. Perhaps not then.”