“Hmm.”
“And,” he said, “so did the aliens. And that was the handle by which we grabbed and destroyed them.”
“Fix an egg.”
“Okay.” He punched buttons on the stove.
“Can an egg,” Lilo said pausing in her coffee-drinking, “think?”
“No.”
“Can it feel what you said? Agape?”
“Of course not.”
“Then,” Lilo said, as she accepted the warm, steaming, sunny-side-up egg from the stove, plate included, “if we’re invaded by sentient eggs we’ll lose.”
“Damn you,” he said.
“But you love me. I mean, you don’t mind; in the sense that I can be what I am and you don’t approve but you let me anyhow. Bacon?”
He punched more buttons, for her bacon and for his own toast, applesauce, tomato juice, jam, hot cereal.
“So,” Lilo decided, as the stove gave forth its steady procession of food as instructed, “you don’t feel agape for me. If, like you said, agape means caritas and cantos means to care. You wouldn’t care, for instance, if I—” She considered. “Suppose,” she said, “I decided to go back to Peep-East, instead of running your Paris branch, as you want me to. As you keep urging me to.” She added, thoughtfully, “So I’d even more fully replace her.”
“That’s not why I want you to head the Paris branch.”
“Well…” She ate, drank, pondered at length. “Perhaps not, but just now, when I came in here, you were looking out the window and thinking. What if she was still alive. Right?”
He nodded.
“I hope to God,” Lilo said, “that you don’t blame me for her doing that.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said, his mouth full of hot cereal. “I just don’t understand where the past goes when it goes. What happened to Maren Faine? I don’t mean what happened that day on the up-ramp when she killed herself with that—” he eradicated a few words which came, savagely, to mind—”that Beretta. I mean. Where is she? Where’s she gone?”
“You’re not completely awake this morning. Did you wash your face with cold water?”
“I did everything that I’m going to do. I just don’t understand it; one day there was a Maren Faine and then there wasn’t. And I was in Seattle, walking along. I never saw it happen.”
Lilo said, “Part of you saw it. But even if you didn’t see it, the fact remains that now there is no Maren Faine.”
He put down his cereal spoon. “What do I care? I love you! And I thank God—I find it incredible—that it wasn’t you who were killed by that pelfrag cartridge, as I first thought.”
“If she had lived, could you have had us both?”
“Sure!”
“No. Impossible. How?”
Lars said, “I would have worked it somehow.”
“Her by day, me at night? Or her on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, me on—”
“The human mind,” he said, “couldn’t possibly be defeated by that situation, if it had the chance. A reasonable chance, without that Beretta and what it did. You know something that old Vincent Klug showed me, when he came back as the old war veteran, so-called, that Ricardo Hastings? It’s impossible to go back.” He nodded.
“But not yet,” Lilo said. “Fifty years from now, maybe.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I just want to see her.”
“And then what?” Lilo asked.
“Then I’d return to my own time.”
“And you’re going to idle away your life, for fifty years or however long it is, waiting for them to invent that Time Warpage Generator.”
“I’ve had KACH look into it. Somebody’s undoubtedly already doing basic research on it. Now that they know it exists. It won’t be long.”
“Why,” Lilo said, “don’t you join her?”
At that he glanced up, startled. “I am not kidding,” Lilo said. “Don’t wait fifty years—”
“More like forty, I calculate.”
“That’s too long. Good God, you’ll be over seventy years old!”
“Okay,” he admitted.
“My drug,” Lilo said quietly. “You remember; it’s lethal to your brain metabolism or some damn thing—anyhow three tablets of it and your vagus nerve would cease and you’d die.”
After a pause he said, “That’s very true.”
“I’m not trying to be cruel. Or vengeful. But—I think it would be smarter, saner, the better choice, to do that, take three tablets of Formophane than to wait forty to fifty years, drag out a life that means absolutely nothing—”
“Let me think it over. Give me a couple of days.”
“You see,” Lilo said, “not only would you be joining her immediately, without waiting more years than you’ve lived already, but—you’d be solving your problems the way she solved hers. So you’d have that bond with her, too.” She smiled, grimly. Hatingly.
“I’ll give you three tablets of Formophane right now,” she said, and disappeared into the other room.
He sat at the kitchen table, staring down at his bowl of cooling cereal and then all at once she was back. Holding out something to him.
He reached up, took the tablets from her, dropped them into the shirt-pocket of his pajamas.
“Good,” Lilo said. “So that’s decided. Now I can go get dressed and ready for the day. I think I’ll talk to the Soviet Embassy. What’s that man’s name? Kerensky?”
“Kaminsky. He’s top-dog at the embassy.”
“I’ll inquire through him if they’ll take me back. They have some idiots they’re using in Bulganingrad as mediums, but they’re no good—according to KACH.”
She paused. “But of course it’s not the same as it was. It’ll never be like that again.”
31
He held the three tablets of Formophane in his hand and considered the tall, cool glass of tomato juice on the table before him. He tried to suppose—as if one really could—how it would be, swallowing the tablets here and now, as she—the girl in the bedroom, whatever her name was—dressed for the day ahead.
While she dressed, he died. That simple. That simple, anyhow, to the easy scene-fabrication faculty available within the psychopathically-glib human mind.
Lilo paused at the bedroom door, wearing a gray wool skirt and slip, barefoot. She said, “If you do it I won’t grieve and hang around forty years waiting for that Time Warpage Generator so I can go back to when you were alive. I want you to be certain of that, Lars, before you do it.”
“Okay.” He hadn’t expected her to. So it made no difference.
Lilo, remaining there at the door, watching him, said, “Or maybe I will.”
Her tone, it seemed to him, was not contrived. She was genuinely considering it, how she would feel, what it would be like. “I don’t know. I guess it would depend on whether Peep-East takes me back. And if so, what my Me there would be like. If it was like the way they treated me before—” She pondered. “I couldn’t stand that and I’d begin to remember how it was here with you. So maybe I would; yes, I think I would start grieving for you, the way you are for her.” She looked up at him, alertly. “Consider this aspect before you take those Formophane tablets.”
He nodded in agreement; it had to be considered.
“I really have been happy here,” Lilo said. “It’s been nothing like life was at Bulganingrad. That awful ‘classy’ apartment I had—you never saw it, but it was ugly. Peep-East is a tasteless world.”
She came padding out of the bedroom toward him. “I tell you what. I’ve changed my mind. If you still want me to I will take charge of the Paris office.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning,” Lilo said levelly, “that I will do exactly what I said I wouldn’t do. I’ll replace her. Not for your sake but for mine, so I don’t wind up in an apartment in Bulganingrad again.” She hesitated and then said, “So I don’t wind up the way you are, sitting there in your pajamas with those tablets in your hand, trying to decide whether you want to wait out the forty years or take care of it right now. You see?”
“I see.”
“Self-preservation.”
“Yes.” He nodded.
“I have that instinct. Don’t you? Where is it in you?”
He said, “Gone.”
“Gone even if I head the Paris branch?”
Reaching for the glass of tomato juice with one hand he put the three tablets in his mouth with the other, lifted the glass… he shut his eyes, felt the cool, wet rim of the glass against his lips and thought then of the hard, cool can of beer that Lilo Topchev had so long ago presented him that first moment together in Fairfax when they met. When, he thought, she tried to kill me.
“Wait,” Lilo said.
He opened his eyes, holding in the three tablets, un-dissolved because they were hard-coated for easier swallowing, on his tongue.
“I have,” Lilo said, “a gadget plowshared from item—well, it doesn’t matter much which. You’ve used it before. In fact I found it here in the apartment. Ol’ Orville.”