“He said Barry was unfaithful!”
I nodded. “I imagine he did. The library did the best they could for him. They may have actually persuaded a surgeon to attend him, but you had hacked his right arm at the shoulder and even an expert surgeon can only do so much. The library has gotten the poor old reclone you’d mutilated new shirts with little magnets glued in place, so that his empty sleeve would stay folded against his chest.” There was a pause while I swallowed and tried not to sound as angry as I felt. “That was before somebody cut his throat. I’ve got on one of the poor guy’s old shirts now.”
“I came here to talk about Chandra, you fool!”
Audrey jumped in. “I want to talk about her too. She isn’t one of us any more than you are. She’s fully human, not a library reclone; and if you treat your daughter the way you seem to have treated an earlier copy of Ern, they’ll lock you up in an asylum and throw away the key.”
There was one of those long silences. Adah glared at us and we gave it back doubled. Finally I told Adah, “Like I said, I’m wearing one of that earlier copy’s shirts. If I were to take off this coat, you’d see stains up here near my shoulder—his blood had soaked through his bandages, and bloodstains are damned hard to get out. If Prentice back at the library has half the guts she looks like she has, she’ll have hung on to your deposit. Did she?”
Without saying a word, Adah turned on her heel and marched out.
After that Audrey and I got dressed, and in half an hour or so we were leaning over the rail side by side, just a happy couple looking out to sea. Here I ought to explain that we were up on the top deck, on top of the cabins, the bridge, and so on. It was the first time I’d been up there, and I had climbed up because the Three Sisters was taking green water over the bow every five minutes or so. If you didn’t want to stay in your cabin or get your feet wet, you left the main deck and climbed up on this upper deck quick. Adah had new sea boots and Audrey had old ones, but Chandra and I were stuck with shoes.
To me, the sea is always beautiful. When it is calm, it’s like looking at a beautiful woman, a giantess so big that you cannot see all of her at once even though you know she goes on and on, more and more lovely smooth skin with thrilling curves longer than a man’s eyes can ever take in. Only when it’s as rough as it was then, looking out to sea is like looking at the biggest tiger the world has ever seen, and that tiger is raging, clawing at you, huge white-tipped claws by the thousands and hundreds of thousands crashing against the hull, eager to grab anybody it can reach, pull them overboard, and drown them in a heartbeat. And yet it’s still beautiful and I loved it even when it seemed to be trying to sink us. Beauty will do that to you.
Finally Audrey said, “Does this make you think of our patron, Ern?”
“It didn’t,” I told her, “but now it does. Now it always will, I suppose.”
“Sometimes the ocean is lovely and peaceful, and sometimes it’s like this. Sometimes it’s just a little rough, busy and energetic, with a whistling wind.” She waited for me to speak, and when I said nothing she added, “Doesn’t that remind you of somebody we know?”
I thought I knew what she was asking. “Perhaps Adah’s like that at times, but I’ve never seen her when she was. Do you know psychology?”
Audrey shook her head. “I’m not superstitious, so no. I haven’t studied it because I don’t believe a lot of things the psychologists say.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “I’ve been wondering whether Dr. Barry Fevre does—or rather, just how much psychology he knows. Since he’s a doctor he must be familiar with the basics, or so it seems to me.”
“If he were here now, what would you ask him?”
“Since he’s surely had plenty of chances to see that there’s something wrong with his wife, why he doesn’t get her treatment?” When Audrey made no reply, I finished the thought. “I suppose it’s possible he did.”
Audrey said something then, but the wind whirled her words away like so many scraps of paper. I got her to repeat them, and she said, “I asked if Chandra would know.”
“Maybe she would. I’ll find out.”
There was another silence. The sun was rising, but it seemed to bring no warmth; its light was fitful and brief, too often stifled by clouds.
“I think you’re out to avenge the death of that earlier copy. Am I right, Ern?” Audrey’s words were softer than down.
“Yes, I am. I want justice for my earlier self. How did you know?”
“From the way you sounded when you talked about him this morning. Was his throat cut at the Fevres’?”
I shook my head. “He was sitting in the lobby of the library. When I came in, he was all right. Dispirited, and wearing a fire-sale price, but alive. When I went out, he was dead.”
“And he was you.”
I thought that one over. “In a sense, he was. Yes. We were both Ern A. Smithe, if you like. He was an earlier copy. Of course the original, the manuscript, passed away long before I was published.”
“Same here.” Audrey was smiling. “My original’s been gone for a couple of centuries. How did yours die? Do you know?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. Cancer or a heart attack, probably. But I really have no idea.”
“Mine drowned.”
I could only stare at her.
“Another book, of course. I was left on an island in the South Pacific with a few hand tools, a saw and a hatchet, a coil of rope, and so on. I was to build a boat—a vessel of some kind—and sail it back to civilization. There was no cameraman with me. I just set the timer and aimed the camera so I’d be in the picture, working or whatever. Roasting a fish.” Audrey smiled. “That made a good picture, and there were quite a few good fish to spear, too.”
“Did your boat sink?”
She shook her head. “I built a raft. That was what I’d planned all along, although I didn’t tell anyone. I felled trees of the right size, trimmed off limbs, dragged the trunks to the beach, and all the rest of it. I built my raft where it floated at high tide but lay on the beach at low tide. That was when I worked on it, mostly.”
I nodded to show I understood.
“A storm—a hurricane—was the chief risk. I knew that. You don’t get them often in the South Pacific, but if one came…”
“It sounds terribly risky.”
“It was. Riskier than I had realized. Lonelier too. I started talking to myself, and I still do it now and then.”
I said, “I’ve never noticed.”
“It’s mostly when I’m alone, or when I’m trying to do something really difficult.”
Mostly to keep things rolling, I said, “That can’t have been the first time you were on your own.”
Audrey shrugged. “Of course I’d been alone on a lot of one-woman voyages, but building the raft while foraging for food took longer than the longest of those solo adventures. I lost weight I couldn’t afford to lose, and—”
I said, “Wait a minute. When was your last scan?”
“About a year before that. Let me think.” Audrey was quiet for a few seconds. “Eleven months before I went to the island. You’re wondering how I know all this.”