I added, “She crossed the Irish Sea all by herself in a canoe.”
“I didn’t know.” Chandra sounded apologetic.
Audrey said, “What I’m trying to get at is that somebody your age going to sea had better listen to anybody who’s willing to teach her. You can’t know too much, and the smaller your boat the smarter you’ve got to be. Do you know how I died? The original me?”
Slowly, Chandra shook her head. “I never even thought about it.”
“I drowned when my raft fell apart. Maybe I’ll tell you more about that sometime, but I really don’t enjoy talking about it.”
“Were you alone on the raft?”
Audrey nodded.
“You liked that. Liked being alone.”
“Sometimes I did. Yes.” Audrey fell silent, and I wished I could hear what she was thinking.
Chandra said, “I like being alone, too. Sometimes.”
Before the silence became awkward, I said, “You must have friends at school.”
“Some.” Chandra shrugged. “Friends, but I’m not really tight with anybody. We’re friends in the morning, only not after lunch. You know how I mean?”
I nodded.
Audrey said, “There are people who’ll work without being told, and not talk unless you want to talk too. But not a lot of them. Really, very few.”
There was more conversation before we caught up to the lugger, but I don’t remember everything and none of it was all that interesting.
What happened when we caught up was somebody on the lugger shouted, “Permission to come aboard?”
You would have thought our boat would have asked one of us if it was all right, but it did not unless maybe it asked Adah Fevre. It just shot a fishing net out to the lugger. I suppose it was thirty or forty meters, but the net reached and there was enough left over for the lugger’s crew to tie it down some way.
A man jumped on it a lot quicker than I would have and started climbing across. Of course the net sagged into the water between our boat and the lugger, and for quite a bit of that distance his head went under every time a wave hit. He stayed with it though; I like to think I’m tough, but I had to admit that he was a lot tougher than I am.
Writing like this, it can be pretty close to impossible to tell about a certain thing so that it reads the way the thing actually was, and this is one of them. When the man finally scrambled up onto the main deck, oilskins and all and everything dripping wet, he saw us and I saw him. As soon as I did I knew who he was. I’d only gotten a glimpse of him in the library, but I knew anyway. I whispered to Audrey, “Adah’s husband!”
Half a minute later he was standing on the top deck with us; he stuck out his hand and said, “Barry Fevre.”
8
TO LICHHOLM
If there had been time to think, I might not have taken his hand; after all, I thought he had cut the old me’s throat. That was bad, and the way I saw it he was certain-sure to try for mine the first good chance he had, which was a whole bunch worse. Thing was, I didn’t have time to think; and the way he’d crossed on the net through that wild sea, climbing from one boat to the other, was the bravest thing I’d ever seen. So I shook his hand and said, “I’m Ern A. Smithe, Doctor,” the way you do, and introduced Audrey. She gave him her hand and a nice smile, but I felt certain her fingers were crossed.
After that he kissed Chandra’s cheek, and said, “Good to see you again, honey.”
She sort of nodded, he straightened up, and Audrey said, “You must be freezing.”
He shivered. “I am. If there’s a warm cabin in there…?”
I said, “Sure.” My brain had caught up to what was going on by then, which was that it had two big facts to wrestle with. First, I believed he’d cut the throat of the old man who had been an earlier edition of me. Second, I didn’t know that for certain. It seemed likely as hell because he’d been right there. But why would he do it? Motive, means, and opportunity; from what I’ve read, those are the three legs of a criminal investigation. Dr. Fevre had the second and the third, but that first one looked terribly iffy. He would have had to know Adah’d checked out the old me because she was looking for him. He’d also have to know, or anyway believe, that the old me had found out quite a bit. But—and this was one hell of a big glitch—he couldn’t know that Adah had cut off the old me’s arm and returned him to the library, which meant the old me was no danger to him anymore. No more motive, which made Doc Fevre’s guilt pretty damned unlikely.
It gets worse. He couldn’t help but know that he could’ve bought the old me for peanuts. The price had been hanging around the poor old me’s neck, and for a tenured professor it wasn’t much more than pocket money. If he bought him, he could cut his throat or burn him, or just shove him off a nice high cliff; and there would be no trouble about it. It would be perfectly legal. As it was, the library’s lobby was full right then, there were people all around. Sure, maybe nobody would notice, but it was more likely that somebody would. Suppose it got out? Wouldn’t there be questions at the faculty meeting? Lots of questions from his students, too, after his sabbatical was over?
So why not buy the old me—dirt cheap like I said—off him in private, and hand him over to the students to dissect? You needed bodies for that, but did they have to be fully humans? Leaving aside facial details, there isn’t a broken token’s worth of difference between a reclone and a fully human. How could there be?
Could I have heaved Dr. Fevre over the side some dark night? I’d seen glowing things down there that were too big to be human and too much like humans to be fish. So if I grabbed him when he wasn’t expecting it … Only I needed to know one hell of a lot more before I tried anything like that. You can see why I was thinking so fast that smoke might come out of my ears any minute.
Right then Audrey told him, “We’ve got two warm cabins with chairs and so on. Ern and I sleep beside your wife’s bed—Adah Fevre’s your wife, isn’t she?”
He nodded.
“She has one and Chandra has the other. If you’d like to see your wife now…?”
Dr. Fevre shook his head. “I need to dry off first. Dry off and get warm. Can I strip somewhere private, wrap myself in a blanket, and put my clothes in the dry washer?”
Chandra said, “I’ll do that, and you can change in my cabin.”
So we went down to the main deck and I fetched one of the spare blankets. Then Audrey and I went back up onto the top deck, leaving Dr. Fevre alone in Chandra’s cabin, with Chandra waiting outside. When he was dressed again, Chandra came up and got us. We found him nice and dry, sitting in one of her bolted-down chairs and sipping kafe.
He raised the cup. “I ordered this. I don’t think my wife will object.”
Audrey said, “I’m sure she won’t. Order something to eat, too, if you want it.” By then the Three Sisters had begun pitching hard as well as rolling; so maybe I ought to explain that the kafe cups had lids with slots you could sip out of. Dr. Fevre did it a lot smoother than I would have; you could see he was an old sailor.
“I took a shower, too, to rinse off the seawater.” He waited for one of us to say something. “I tried not to use much fresh water, desalinization should take care of my gallon or so, and we ought to reach Lichholm in a couple of days. There’s plenty of fresh water there.”