“Twenty,” Mark told her. “And it was a mistake. I had to have it erased. We were incompatible. Can you imagine it, Risa, despite all the testing and matching I took on the persona of an ardent anti-Semite? And of course he woke up and found himself in a circumcised body and nearly went berserk.”
“How did you pick him?”
“He was a man I had admired. An architect, one of the great builders. I wanted his planning skills. But I had to take his lunacy with his greatness, don’t you see, and after three months of sheer hell for both of us I had him erased. It was several years before I dared apply for another transplant.”
“That must have been unfortunate for you,” Risa said. “But it’s getting off the subject. I’m old enough for a transplant. It’s unreasonable of you to deny your consent. It isn’t as if we can’t afford it, or as if I’m unstable, or anything like that. You just don’t want to let me, and I can’t understand why.”
“Because you’re so young! Look, Risa, sixteen is also the minimum legal age for getting mated, but if you came to me and said you wanted to—”
“But I haven’t. A transplant isn’t a marriage.”
“It’s far more intimate than a marriage,” Mark said. “Believe me. You won’t merely be sharing a bed. You’ll be sharing your brain, Risa, and you can’t comprehend how intimate that is.”
“I want to comprehend it,” she said. “That’s the whole point. I’m hungry for it, Mark. It’s time I found out, time I shared my life a little, time I began to experience. And there you stand like Moses saying no.”
“I honestly think you’re too young.” Her eyes flashed. “I’ll translate that for you, dearest. You want me to stay too young, because that way you stay young too. So long as I remain a little girl in your estimation, your whole time scheme stays fixed. If I’m eight years old, you’re thirty-two, and you’d like to be thirty-two. But I’m past sixteen, Mark. And you won’t see forty again. I can’t make you accept the second, but I wish you’d stop denying the first.”
“All your cruelty is exposed today, Risa.”
“I feel like going naked today. Physically and emotionally. I won’t hide anything.” Languidly Risa selected a second drink for herself; then, as an afterthought, she offered her father the tray. As she pressed the capsule’s snout to her pale skin she said, “Will you sign my consent form or won’t you?”
“Let’s put it off till July, shall we? The market’s so unsettled these days—”
“The market is always unsettled, and in any event it has nothing to do with my getting a transplant. Today is April 11. Unless you give in, I’m going to bear an illegitimate child on or about next January 11.”
Mark gasped. “You’re pregnant?”
“No. But I will be, three hours from now, unless you sign the form. If I can’t experience a transplant, I’ll experience a pregnancy. And a scandal.”
“You devil!” She was afraid she might have pushed her father too far. This was a raw threat, after all, and Mark didn’t usually respond kindly to threats. But she had calculated all this quite nicely, figuring in a factor of his appreciation for her inherited ruthlessness. She saw a smile clawing at the edges of his mouth and knew she had won. Mark was silent a long moment. She waited, graciously allowing him to come to terms with his defeat.
At length he said, “Where’s the form?”
“By an odd coincidence—” She handed it to him. He scanned the printed sheet without reading it and brusquely scrawled his signature at the bottom. “Don’t have any babies just yet, Risa.”
“I never intended to. Unless you called my bluff, of course. Then I would have had to go through with it. I’d much rather have a transplant. Honestly.”
“Get it, then. How did I raise such a witch?”
“It’s all in the genes, darling. I was bred for this.” She put the precious paper away, and they stood up. She went to him. Her arms slid round his neck; she pressed her smooth cheek to his. He was no more than an inch taller than she was. He embraced her, tensely, and she brushed her lips against his and felt him tremble with what she knew was suppressed desire. She released him. Softly she whispered her thanks.
He went out. Risa laughed and clapped her hands. Her robe went whirling to the floor and she capered naked on the thick wine-red carpet. Pivoting, she came face to face with the portrait of Paul Kaufmann that hung over the mantel. Portraits of Uncle Paul were standard items of furniture in any home inhabited by a Kaufmann; Risa had not objected to adding him to her dйcor, because, naturally, she had loved the grand old fox nearly as deeply as she loved his nephew, her father. The portrait was a solido, done a couple of years back on the occasion of Paul’s seventieth birthday. His long, well-fleshed face looked down out of a rich, flowing background of green and bronze; Risa peered at the hooded gray eyes, the thin lips, the close-cropped hair rising to the widow’s peak, the lengthy nose with its blunted tip. It was a Kaufmann face, a face of power.
She winked at Uncle Paul. It seemed to her that Uncle Paul winked back.
Mark Kaufmann took the dropshaft one floor to his own apartment, emerged in the private vestibule, put his thumb to the doorseal, and entered. From the vestibule, the apartment spread out along three radial paths. To his left were the rooms in which he had installed his business equipment; to his right were his living quarters; straight ahead, directly below his daughter’s smaller apartment, lay the spacious living room, dining room, and library in which he entertained. Kaufmann spent much of his time in his Manhattan apartment, though he had many homes elsewhere, at least one on each of the seven continents and several offplanet. At each, he could summon a facsimile of the comforts he enjoyed here. But these twelve rooms on East 118th Street comprised the center of his organization, and often he did not leave the building for days at a time.
He walked briskly into the library. Elena stood by the fireplace, beneath the brooding, malevolent portrait of the late Uncle Paul. She looked displeased.
“I’m sorry,” Kaufmann told her. “Risa was simply in a bitchy mood, and she took it out on you.”
“Why does she hate me so much?”
“Because you’re not her mother, I suppose.”
“Don’t be a fool, Mark. She’d hate me even more if I were her mother. She hates me because I’ve come between herself and you, that’s all.”
“Don’t say that, Elena.”
“It’s true, though. That child is monstrous!” Kaufmann sighed. “No. She isn’t a child, as she’s just finished explaining to me in great detail. And she’s not even monstrous. She’s just an apt pupil of the family business techniques. In a way, I’m terribly pleased with her.”
Elena regarded him coldly. “What a terrible tragedy for you that she’s your own daughter, isn’t it? She’d make a wonderful wife for you in a few years, when she’s ripe. Or a mistress. But incest is not one of the family business techniques.”
“Elena—”
“I have a suggestion,” Elena purred. “Have Risa killed and transplant her persona to me. That way you can enjoy both of us in one body, quite lawfully, gaining the benefit of my physical advantages joined to the sharp personality you seem to find so endearing in her.”
Kaufmann closed his eyes a moment. He often wondered how it had happened that he had surrounded himself with women who had such well-developed gifts of cruelty. Steadier for his pause, he ignored Elena’s thrust and said simply, “Will you excuse me? I have some calls to make.”
“Where do we eat lunch? You talked yesterday about Florida House for clams and squid.”
“We’ll eat here,” said Kaufmann. “Have Florida House send over whatever you’d like to have. I won’t be able to go out until later. Business.”
“Business! Another ten millions to make before nightfall!”