Heinlein, Robert A – Friday

“No, I wouldn’t!”

“All right. If you still want to tell me a week from now, I’ll listen. A deal?”

Anna was right; a week later I felt no need to tell her. I’m 99 percent certain that she knew. Either way, it’s swell to be loved for yourself alone, by somebody who doesn’t think that APs are monsters, subhuman.

I don’t know that any of the rest of my loving friends knew or guessed. (I don’t mean Boss; he knew, of course. But he wasn’t a friend; he was Boss.) It did not matter if my new friends learned that I wasn’t human; because I had come to realize that they either didn’t care or wouldn’t care. All that mattered to them was whether or not you were part of Boss’s outfit.

One evening Boss showed up, tapping his canes and whuffling, with Goldie trailing him. He settled heavily into the visitor’s chair, said to Goldie, “I won’t need you, nurse. Thank you”-then to me, “Take off your clothes.”

From any other man that would be either offensive or welcome, depending. From Boss it merely meant that he wanted my clothes off. Goldie took it that way, too, as she simply nodded and left-and Goldie is the sort of professional who would buck Siva the Destroyer if He attempted to interfere with one of her patients.

I took my clothes off quickly and waited. He looked me up and down. “They again match.”

“Seems so to me.”

“Dr. Krasny says that he ran a test for lactation function. Positive.

“Yes. He pulled some stunt with my hormone balance and both of them leaked a little. Felt funny. Then he rebalanced and I dried up.

Boss grunted. “Turn around. Show me the sole of your right foot. Now your left. Enough. Burn scars seem to be gone.”

“All that I can see. Doctor tells me the others have regenerated, too. The itching has stopped, so they must be.”

“Put on your clothes. Dr. Krasny tells me that you are well.”

“If I were any weller, you would have to bleed me.”

“Well is an absolute; it has no comparative.”

“Okay, I’m wellest.”

“Impudence. Tomorrow morning you leave for refresher training. Be packed and ready by oh-nine hundred.”

“Since I arrived without even a happy smile, packing will take me eleven seconds. But I need a new ID, a new passport, a new credit card, and quite a bit of cash-”

“All of which will be delivered to you before oh-nine hundred.”

“-because I’m not going for a refresher; I’m going to New Zealand. Boss, I’ve told you and told you. I’m overdue for R and R, and I figure that I rate some paid sick leave to compensate for time I’ve been laid up. You’re a slave driver.”

“Friday, how many years will it take you to learn that when I thwart one of your whims, I always have your welfare in mind as well as the efficiency of the organization?”

“Hully gee, Great White Father. I abase myself. And I’ll send you a picture postcard from Wellington.”

“Of a pretty Maori, please; I’ve seen a geyser. Your refresher course will be tailored to fit your needs and you will decide when it is complete. Although you are ‘wellest,’ you need physical training of carefully increasing difficulty to get you back into that superb pitch of muscle tone and wind and reflex that is your birthright.”

” ‘Birthright.’ Don’t make jokes, Boss; you have no talent for it. ‘My mother was a test tube; my father was a knife.’

“You are being foolishly self-conscious over an impediment that was removed years ago.”

“Am I? The courts say I can’t be a citizen; the churches say I don’t have a soul. I’m not ‘man born of woman,’ at least not in the eyes of the law.”

” ‘The law is an ass.’ The records concerning your origin have been removed from the production laboratory’s files, and a dummy set concerning an enhanced male AP was substituted.”

“You never told me that!”

“Until you displayed this neurotic weakness, I saw no need. But a deception of that nature should be made so airtight that it will utterly displace the truth. And so it has. If you attempted, tomorrow, to claim your true lineage, you would not be able to get any authority anywhere to agree with you. You may tell anyone; it doesn’t matter. But, my dear, why are you defensive? You are not only as human as Mother Eve, you are an enhanced human, as near perfect as your designers could manage. Why do you think I went out of my way to recruit you when you had no experience and no conscious interest in this profession? Why did I spend a small fortune educating and training you? Because I knew. I waited some years to be sure that you were indeed developing as your architects intended . . . then almost lost you when you suddenly dived off the map.” He made a grimace that I think means a smile. “You gave me trouble, girl. Now about your training. Are you willing to listen?”