“He doesn’t, however, explain any of this to the king. How can he? Not only would explaining it indicate that Yeager’s admiration for Arthur was puffed up, was small talk, was mostly bullshit, but it might suggest that Yeager thought the king himself was creepy. The dying king, who, even while he’d been expressing his admiration for Yeager, had continued to play a kind of half-assed, distracted-type peekaboo with Arthur. This dying king who had a wife, and children, and grandchildren, too, and who could, presumably, have done just about anything he wanted to do in what he knew to be the final hours of his life, and yet chose to spend a portion of those final hours talking to an ex–test pilot he’d never met before while fucking around with a flesh-and-bone robot that he seemed to earnestly believe was his friend. To this dying king of Jordan, Hussein bin Talal—who Yeager admitted to me he had found creepy, but who, for reasons of common decency, not to mention international diplomacy, hadn’t been willing to suggest he found creepy—he could not admit the truth about his aversion to Curios.
“So Yeager tells the king he can’t take Arthur, and the king does not insist that Yeager take Arthur, not even once does the king insist, which Yeager says to me causes him, despite himself, to lose a measure of respect for the king because it seems to indicate that the king had only offered Yeager Arthur with the knowledge that Yeager would, out of politeness, have to refuse the offer at least once: that the king had expected Yeager to refuse the gift of Arthur, that he’d never intended to give Yeager Arthur, and so that even on his deathbed he’d shown a false face. Yeager judges the king disingenuous. Unmanly.
“To make matters worse, the king, in place of insisting that Yeager take Arthur, elaborately and speciously reasons aloud. Reasons in a way designed to make his failure to insist appear to be thoughtful and generous, kindhearted, noble. King Hussein tells Yeager that, seeing as Arthur’s bound to autodact anyway once it goes a few days without access to the king’s body heat, Yeager, were he to accept the gift of Arthur, would have to overload on Arthur on Arthur’s schedule, i.e. perhaps before he (Yeager) really wanted to, and that what the king should have offered, according to the king, was one of Arthur’s marbles, which Yeager could emerge an Arthur clone out of at his leisure, cause to clone itself at his leisure, and then overload on at his leisure, and so that’s what he’s offering now, to Yeager, the king tells Yeager. And he unsleeves a marble, holds it out to Yeager.
“And Yeager, instead of calling the king out on his bullshit—instead of telling him, ‘Look, if you give me the Arthur you’re playing peekaboo with, I could do everything you just explained I’ll be able to do with the one that’ll emerge from the marble you’re offering, plus overload on the Arthur you’re playing peekaboo with.’—instead of saying any of that, Yeager thanks the king graciously, reaches for the marble, and, as he does so, the king takes hold of Yeager’s hand, fixes his watery eyes on Yeager, speaks some Arabic words Yeager takes for prayer, lets Yeager’s hand go, and says he’d better get to sleep.
“Yeager pockets the marble, leaves the king’s bedside, and, the way he describes it to me at the bar, he has this kind of delayed reaction to King Hussein. He’s standing in the hospital corridor, waiting for the elevator, and it seems to him that something has changed between himself and the king, that somewhere between the king’s speciously reasoned explanation and his letting go of Yeager’s hand, something—something—had passed between them, something real and human and inexplicable that communicated, beyond all the usual, definable boundaries, that the king was one of the great human beings, and that Yeager had completely misunderstood the king’s seeming renege on his offer of Arthur. Something had passed between the two men that indicated to Yeager that the king was a deeply sensitive man, a deeply sensitive man who had sensed that Yeager had been uncomfortable being offered Arthur for reasons that Yeager had been reluctant to make clear to the king, reasons that the king was too respectful to press Yeager to elaborate, and that the reason the king had speciously reasoned aloud and offered Yeager the marble wasn’t that the king had wanted to keep Arthur for himself, but rather that he’d wanted to prevent Yeager from feeling as though he, Yeager, were compelled to take Arthur. The king wasn’t, Yeager told me, disingenuous, much less unmanly. The king was honorable and decent, despite not having to be, despite being a king, who, even if he hadn’t been on his deathbed, could have behaved as thoughtlessly as he pleased toward a peasant like Yeager, yet hadn’t behaved at all thoughtlessly toward Yeager. Had behaved, in fact, more thoughtfully toward Yeager than Yeager felt he, Yeager, deserved, given how judgmental he’d been of the king. Pure and simple, Yeager said, the king was a mensch.
“Sounded fishy to me. Something passed between them. Sentimental. New-agey. UnYeagerish. But that’s what Yeager said to me, that day in the bar, after the funeral of whoever, and who was I to argue? I hadn’t been there. Yeager seemed moved just telling the story. The long and the short of it is that by the time Yeager got into the hospital elevator, the marble had become invaluable to him. He determined not to sell it or give it away—wouldn’t even give it to one of his grandkids. He himself would emerge a cure from it, keep Arthur’s line perpetuated in honor of the king, who, on his deathbed, knowing it would be one of the last things he’d ever do, gave it to Yeager, wanted Yeager to have it, and, in the meantime, he, Yeager, would hope to somehow—perhaps by the same type of magic or osmosis that he believed the king’s menschiness had been communicated to him—he’d hope to somehow, in the course of keeping Arthur’s line perpetuated, come to better understand King Hussein, the only king Yeager had ever admired.
“That meeting with the king was five or six years before, though—before our drunken conversation at the bar. And since then, the duty Yeager’d honor-bound himself to—the duty of perpetuating Arthur’s line—had proved totally thankless. None of the clones of Arthur that Yeager’d emerged had done anything for him but creep him out, and he had no better an understanding of the king he’d admired. To add insult to injury, he’d never been able to get any of the clones to become quadrupedal. See, the cures that creeped Yeager out the most, Yeager said, were double-legged bipeds. For whatever reason, they just gave him the willies. He couldn’t understand why anyone would want a Curio to walk like a man, why anyone ever trained them not to walk on all fours. So the first thing he did, each time he emerged a clone of Arthur, was he’d try to train it to walk on all fours, but something was wrong with them, with these clones of Arthur. He couldn’t get them to do it. Well, he could get them to do it for a couple of minutes at a time, but they’d always end up upright again, bipedal. So these clones of Arthur—they were pretty much waking nightmares for Yeager, each and every one, every time he looked at one.
“Now, remember, we’re drinking, I’m getting Yeager drunk. And the whole reason I was getting Yeager drunk to begin with was so I could weaken his resolve a little, then convince him to take his medals back. That’s why I’d asked to see the cure to begin with. So I could admire it. I had no idea I actually would admire it, but I asked to see it so I could express admiration for it, and then offer to trade Yeager back his medals for it. That was my plan. But then he tells me this sentimental story that I just told you, which makes the matter a little more delicate, right? I mean, on one hand, I have Yeager’s medals, which he wants, and he has that cure, which he plainly doesn’t want, and which it’s more than obvious I do want: I should be able to convince him to accept the medals in exchange for the cure, no face lost. But there’s this whole problem with his honor, with his feeling honor-bound to perpetuate the cure for the sake of his memory or whatever of King Hussein.