‘The monkey in you will remember how to do it—believe me.” She came over and very gently removed his fam. Incredible that he let her commit this ultimate rudeness without even a whimper. He was shocked into a daredevil excitement.
The world changed. He could still question his surroundings but what he sensed no longer echoed with answers.
He was listening to music... suddenly void of culture or history or his stem musicology lessons... leaving him only...to hear...the bells, the gentle booms of the tym-panella, the acrobatics of the electrovibs. Who was the composer? He no longer knew. He looked to her question-ingly. Almost he panicked; he had also forgotten her name, too, and he wasn't sure why he was here. But certainly she must be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen with flaxblue eyes set in ebony. She had said the monkey would remember. He remembered that. He was swinging toward her through the aeneous green of sun-drenched trees with a gibbering joy. He had no intention of exchanging names. Something wasn’t controlling his chemistry as it should be. Lust. Where was his mind when he needed it? Was he all senses? It was raining emotions and the juices coursing through his body were at flood level.
She sat down on the bed beside him and he felt the sheets and the warmth of her thighs. She handed him one of the goblets and took one herself. They had transmogrified into marvelous miniature universes shaded in erbium glazes. The scripted designs were runes coding the wisdom of ages—but he no longer had a mind capable of decoding anything. He was raw animal sapiens from Rith. She dipped a finger into her goblet and offered it to his tongue. It tasted as might elixir from the lost cellar of an ancient emperor. Monkey see; monkey do. He dipped his finger into his goblet and offered it in sacrifice to her tongue. He was an apprentice far-man. So many galactic rituals he didn’t know.
They drank, elbows entwined, looking into each other’s eyes. It was like being her. What would really holding her be like? A frantic minority voice was urging him to get his fam back now. But all the action his toes desired was to reach up and wrap themselves around her. Every movement attracted him. She ran the palm of her hand against the wall behind her, drawing his attention to her face as if it were a portrait against that delicate aquarelle background. Then she reached over and ran her palm down his back. She kissed him where his fam had been. Nobody had ever kissed him there, not even his mother.
He wasn’t a monkey. He was paralyzed by his obsessive need to remember her name. Somehow a name would give him permission to embrace her. All he could think of was “Melinesa,” and he knew that wasn’t right. He needed to touch her so he invented a name, ‘Azalea,” and whispered it into her ear as he awkwardly took her down onto the bed. What kind of flower was an Azalea? It didn’t matter. He liked the name. He liked whispering into her ear.
“My sweet baby boy,” she whispered back into his ear. She wasn’t, he realized, as original a thinker as he was.
“Azalea,” he whispered tenderly, marveling at his intelligence, pleased that he still had it. She held his hips, not letting him make a mistake.
One hundred million years of famless evolution did the rest. He felt very normal for a hairless monkey who had taken to walking around on the forest floor. She giggled. He wasn’t sure that was normal. They hugged each other and grinned. That was good. Then he went to sleep with his nameless mate in his arms, struggling in his dreams to find the language of poetry that he had lost. It was an ancient dream of a garden of Eden, flowered, scented, textured, full of sensory delights, the tree of knowledge still forbidden.
He woke as the sunlight crossed his face. A lazy hand touched nothing, reached out and still touched nothing. He was alone! His eyes shot open. He sat up, one single thought on his mind; he was a mental cripple. Where was his fam? Find it! But his mind wasn’t answering with a strategy, just with a will. He ran from room to room like a headless chicken.
She wasn’t in the dispozoria. She wasn’t in the dressing room. Nor the study. He wheeled downstairs and found her in the underground workroom where she had shown him her diagnostic equipment. She was dressed—clinical clothes—and wearing her fam. She was at her console, and—horror of horrors—she was examining his fam, peering over some instrument, intent at her work. It was clipped to a board, the screens of multiple instruments reading excitedly.
“All is well,” she said without looking up. “I think I’m done.”
He resisted the impulse to run to her and snatch it away. She had his whole precious life in her hands. “I’m starting to miss myself,” he said, half in panic, frozen where he had first spotted his fam. Was she going to grab it and run, teasing, making him chase her all over the grounds to get it back? Or worse?
She turned and smiled, gently extricating his extra brain from her apparatus. “You are thinking that I would hurt you, sweet young boy. Never. At least not beyond skinning your knees. Come here. You’ll find that reintegration is as much of an experience as doing without.” She held up his fam for him. With awesome relief he let her reattach the transducers.
“Nemia.” That was her name. Of course. He knew that all along. It had been on the tip of his tongue. A flurry of other answers came as he did a wild, random, wide-ranging systems check. All there, it seemed. Undamaged. What had
she been doing? “Did you fix something? Am I more intelligent now?”
“I doubt it. Perhaps you’ve become wiser. I was only being curious. It’s my trade. It’s an unusual design.”
“It’s a stupid Faraway design. I’m condemned to be stupid ” complained Eron. “I want add-ons.”
Nemia became stem. “Never overreach. Your fam has above-average capacities. It is not state of the art, but it’s good. There is an old saying you should take to heart, ‘It’s not how versatile your fam is, it’s what you do with it.’” “That’s just a fancy way of telling me to get used to being stupid. You’re telling me that I’ll make a good monkey.” “You’re a genius for a monkey.” She laughed. “When you’re grown up, you’ll be a gorilla. Let’s get breakfast. I’ve been working hard all night and I’m famished.”
“You tricked me,” he said sullenly, refusing to move.
“Sex energizes women and puts overanxious boys to sleep,” she teased.
“You don’t love me. You just wanted my fam.”
“Eron my darling, you are a most lovable boy. How could I help but love you? Our mutual friend has told me that you have mathematical ambitions. He says you’re good. I hate to see people overreach themselves. I was just checking to see that your fam can actually take you where you want to go. I must say, you’re carrying around a very good mathematical machine, whatever you think. Make sure you use it. Waste is a terrible thing.”
“Can my fam be upgraded?” he asked resolutely.
“Yes,” she said sadly.
18
PARTNERS IN CRIME, 14,791 GE
You can’t cross a galaxy merely by standing and staring at the sky and wishing upon a star. Flap your wings, and if that fails, try something else. I did and here I am an interesting distance from home
—Epitaph on a tombstone found on Iral IV
The corridor lights along the eastern window-wall of the Glatim mansion were dimming as the dawn glory peeked above the lake’s surface. Hiranimus Scogil was up early and pacing. He glanced out the tall windows for the hundredth time at the ruffled blue water, golden streaked by the primary sun, his eyes fam-set to high magnification, searching for the wake of Eron’s runabout—not that he expected Eron home so soon from his escapade. Nemia had given Scogil a surprise call last evening telling him to stay away as she had arranged a critical rendezvous with her young admirer, an unlikely story; it would be Eron who had arranged the rendezvous. The little brat took after his homy father in more ways than one!