A Borrowed Man (12 page)

When we got back, Arabella Lee was sitting beside the loaded book carts waiting for us. I wanted to shout when I saw her, but she was in my arms and kissing me before I could catch my breath.

I guess some other driver might have broken us up, or tried to. And maybe I might have killed him for it, or tried to. I think probably this one grinned at us for a minute or two before he began loading books. I was not paying attenion. Right then, Arabella's kiss was all I cared about.

Eight or ten kisses later, she wanted to know what I was doing there. I tried to explain and she said, “Then let's help.” Which we did. The driver told us where to put each bundle of books, so the ones we'd unload first would be nearest the back of the truck. We made some mistakes but nothing serious. While we were working, I asked if Arabella was on her way back to Owenbright. She said she wasn't, that she belonged here and was going out on interlibrary loan. This was a different copy, of course.

So we kept working, and all the time I was hoping that Arabella was bound for Spice Grove. Only hoping, because I did not dare ask.

When we had finished and were ready to go, where we would sit started a big argument. Arabella wanted to ride alone in back. I said no way! She had to ride up front with the driver. The driver said that according to our bargain, I got to ride in front. There was nothing in there about her riding up front. For a new setup there would have to be a new bargain. I said that if she was going to ride in back, I'd ride back there with her. Great, except that once she understood the bargain I'd made with the driver, she swore up and down she'd never agree to that. I had to ride up front.

I began to argue, but then I had an idea and shut up instead.

The driver sighed. “You got more to say? I been hopin' you were finished.”

“Dame fortune,” I told him, “dashes our hopes to the ground with one hand while lifting them to the highest heavens with the other. I was about to say—indeed, I will say—that I know Arabella well. For two years she and I were wed, as she will doubtless confirm. I know her intimately and she is an angel, but she's as stubborn as a brass monkey.”

“Ern!”

“Well, you are, you know.” I turned back to the driver. “I will pay for dinner tonight for all three of us, but you must permit Arabella to ride in front, seated on my lap, for the remainder of the trip.”

The driver got his thoughts going by scratching his head. “Here's the first thing. I'm not changing our route. That's firm. I'd be risking my job, and I need it.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“So she's got to get out at Inspiration. That's where she's bound for, the Inspiration Popular Learning Center. It's on her tag.”

“That's right,” Arabella whispered.

I wanted to swear and maybe spit, but I tried hard not to show it.

“Here's the second thing. You two got to sleep in the truck tonight. I know you're going to want to rent a cabin for you and her, or a room, or whatever. That won't wash. It'd be worth my job if they found out, so I won't allow it. You sleep in the truck and I lock you in.”

Arabella said, “Agreed.”

“Third thing. You got to promise not to fight. If you fight up front you'll drive me right over the edge, and I'm not going to stand for it. If you fight, you've got to do it in back. And no hitting, neither. If she's got a fat lip or a black eye when we get to Inspiration, I'll never hear the end of it.”

I turned to Arabella. “We argued a great deal when we were married. Marriage does that, I'm afraid. Did I ever strike you?”

She thought for a minute before she answered. “There was that one birthday. You spanked me.”

“Not hard,” I said.

“Brutally!” She made it firm. “Absolutely brutally. I cried for a week.”

I told the driver, “That's an exaggeration. It is only for decency's sake that I refrain from characterizing it as a lie.”

He pushed me out of the way so he could stand directly in front of Arabella. “What was he hitting you with when he spanked you? Was it his hand, or did he have a belt or something?”

“With his hand, but very, very hard.”

“That don't count. Now quit fighting, or I'll dump the both of you, and tell 'em you run away.”

“Peace,” I said, and held out my hand to Arabella, hoping to God she would take it. She did, and in another minute we were both smiling.

“One more thing. When you sleep in back, you're going to have to lie on the books. Don't mess 'em up. Not any of 'em. You can use the bucket, like Smithe here did last night.”

So that was what we did, more or less. Mostly we were both up front, with Arabella on my lap; now and then I rode in back, and once or twice she did. I am not about to pretend that I thought a whole lot about Colette or her brother's murder on that leg of the trip. I did not. A little bit now and then, but not very much. Arabella and I talked about how it was when we were married, and what we had done, and all the good, happy times. When I thought at all, it was mostly about those. That was what was really important as far as I was concerned. To you the important stuff is probably the rest of it, and that was sort of important to me, too. I kept wanting to ask Arabella why she had divorced me, what the real reason had been. Only I knew if I did I would get a whole list of shit, money, and I was cheating (that one was a lie and she knew it), and I wanted to screw all the time (only she wouldn't say that, just hint, and it was another lie anyway), money, and I was always telling the truth when I should have said something nice. There were a couple of dozen others, too, like kicking my dirty socks under the bed.

Only listening to her and thinking back, I believe I finally got it. I did not like it and I still do not, but here it is. Mysteries sell and poetry does not, or hardly ever. Not even great poetry. My editor was always after me for another book, another Red Searcher story or another Mrs. Jacoby story; but Arabella had to go from publisher to publisher and finally she just put her books out on the Internet and let it go at that—you could download them if you wanted to, only there were not any hard copies.

That was when she divorced me. Once I had figured it out I tried not to talk about any of that shit, and I think she did, too. We talked about the classes she used to teach, and a magazine that I had tried to start one time.

Another thing I thought about was how she would take this trip of ours and make a poem out of it. A good one, and maybe a great one.

“It's all so different now, isn't it?” Arabella said that, and when she did it hit me harder than it ever had before that she was right.

I nodded, thinking, and finally I said, “This is full humanity's retirement. I have sensed that ever since they brought me back, and now I understand what it is that I was sensing.”

“You mean you have retired from writing? Ern, they made us. They are forcing us not to.”

“No, it's not that at all. I mean real humanity has retired. That's what we're seeing, the meaning of all the new places we're being chauffeured through. They chipped flint and made fire and exterminated the short-faced bears with nothing but spears and clubs, even though those were probably the most dangerous animals real humanity has ever faced. They had children and more children, and those children spread out and did the same and more until real humans were everywhere. The artic was a waste of deadly cold, but they were there. There was no jungle so hot, so wet, so disease-ridden that they didn't live in it. Some of them lived in caves of radioactive rock. The oldest died in their thirties, but they were born and grew up and gathered and hunted and died there anyway.”

Our driver rolled down the window and spat. “You sound like one of those professors on roundvid. You got to talk like that?”

“Yes.” I tried to explain. “I do. I wrote mysteries and crime fiction, you see; so many of my characters used a great deal of slang and made egregious grammatical errors. To prevent any confusion between their conversations and my narration, I made the latter rather stiff and formal. One requires contrast to prevent vulgar speech from becoming ordinary. The authorities responsible for the creation of my reclones—of whom I myself am one—appear to have supposed that I habitually spoke in this style.”

Arabella said, “Or they believed that your readers probably thought so, Ern. That could be it. They knew that no one would assume I spoke free verse, but that's only because the readership for poetry is so much more intelligent.”

“No doubt. What I was about to say was that the real humans warred with one another and explored every corner of this planet. They built cities under the sea and flitters that would fly as fast as bullets—then space probes that flew still faster. Their robots explored every gas cloud and orbiting rock in this solar system. They stretched real human life over and over again, but this system's radiation makes manned interplanetary flight virtually impossible, and nothing they could build would reach even the nearest stars in a hundred stretched lifetimes.”

“Go on,” Arabella whispered.

“And when they had done all those things and reached their limits, they found that they were old. That's all. I say ‘they' because although you and I are human, we are not fully human. We're not real humans, or at least we do not count as such.”

Our driver chuckled. “Well, there's times when I have a real tough time rememberin' that. Listenin' to you two, anyway.”

Arabella and I slept in the back of the truck that night, spreading my blanket over the books and huddling together. Fortunately, the night was warm. We were not very comfortable; but I was happy and I believe she was, too.

About midmorning of the following day we got to the Inspiration Popular Learning Center. We unloaded a couple dozen books there, and Arabella turned herself in to the librarians. I went with her to look at the shelf they were giving her; and—hell, let's be honest about this—I wanted to see if there was another copy of me there, a me that I could turn her over to knowing he would take good care of her and even die for her if it came to that. There was not.

We kissed. The librarian did not like us much after that. For myself I did not care, but I worried about what it might mean for Arabella. I still do. Legally we cannot own tablets or eephones, or use screens, or even send paper letters by Continental Package Service. Even if I could get my hands on a tablet or something, which I probably could, Arabella could not get my message. What I really wanted was one from her, anyhow.

By the time I got off the truck, the Spice Grove Public Library was ready to close. So it had been about an eight-hour trip. Knock off an hour for lunch and two more for a stop between Inspiration and Spice Grove. So five hours of actual travel. Say that we averaged ninety kilometers per hour. That means that the distance by road from Inspiration to Spice Grove is roughly four hundred and fifty kilometers. In the yellow flitter, they would be practically on top of each other. Walking it might take me close to ten weeks or more.

I'm giving all that mental math because I started doing it as soon as I caught sight of the Spice Grove Public Library, and I was still doing it when I got out of the truck and we started unloading. Besides me, there was not much.

A librarian came up. I would give her name here, but we make a point of not learning their names and not using them even if we know them. You have got to keep your pride up somehow, or they will soon be feeding you out of a bowl on the floor.

“E. A. Smithe?”

The driver said, “Returned from interlibrary loan. You have to sign a paper.”

The librarian shook her head. “He was never so loaned, only checked out.”

Eventually she signed, but it was only after writing something on the paper and crossing out some other things. I could not see it well enough to read what she was crossing out, but I could see what she was doing perfectly.

“You're dirty, Smithe.”

I said I had not been able to shower since leaving Owenbright.

“We're closing in another hour anyway. You'll bathe, won't you?”

I wanted to say no; but I knew what would happen if I did, and that the 'bots would keep ducking my head into the water and holding it there. So I told her I was looking forward to it, which I actually was.

“Good. There are two patrons waiting to check you out. I've promised to notify them when you're returned.” She paused. “That's unusual. It's usually disks or cubes. Hardly ever books or reclones.” Another pause. “Do you like books? I realize you used to write them. He did, I mean.”

I said, “Yes, very much.”

“So do I.” She hesitated. “Someday I really must read some of yours.”

Of course I wanted to ask about the people who wanted me, but I didn't. In the first place, she probably knew nothing at all about them, not even their names. In the second place, it was certain to piss her off; and the less she knew the more pissed off she would be. The thing to do was to ask some of ours if they had seen anybody in there looking for me. So I did, after I had a nice hot shower and washed my hair and all that. I went around in one of those stupid hospital gowns they give you for the night sometimes and asked at least half a dozen people. Millie Baumgartner (yes, the cookbook lady) was the only one who had seen anything, a little guy in dark clothes and a tall guy in uniform. She hadn't recognized the uniform, but she told me she was not good on them. Just a uniform. Green, maybe. Or blue. They had been together.

The small one sounded like he might be the guy who had given me money. He might also have been any of a million other guys.

So that night I went to bed back on my own shelf. It was a lot more comfortable than the truck, but here's the funny thing. I would rather have been back on the truck. I do not know why, except that I had convinced myself by then that it was all over. I would never see Colette again or Arabella either. I would sleep there on my shelf until I burned, remembering plots, and reviews they had gotten, and the quotes on the backs of my books. Not eating too much because I would get fat and would not look right, and not eating too little either because I would get skinny and then I would look wrong.