I paused to give them a chance, but nobody spoke.
“You were the guy who bought us coats and gave me a pair of his old boots, but never got either one of us a hat or gloves. If you want your coat back, I’ll fight you for it. If I win, I get your hat and your gloves. I’ll give one glove to Audrey.”
“You—” Dr. Fevre began.
“I’m not finished yet!” I swung around to Adah. “You’re our patron, the fully human lady who had checked out both of us. You walked away from us like you might have set down a couple of magazines because they were too much trouble to carry around. Were you planning to come back for us? We don’t belong to you. Do you care about us at all?” One of the angels, a lovely girl of seventeen or so, nodded.
Adah stood up. From somewhere she had gotten a weird hatchet with a straight handle and a spike on the back like a fire axe. “You’re correct, Smithe. I left you thinking that the less-than-human I had chosen to solve a point that puzzled me was at least capable of following my husband, my daughter, and me. You failed that simple test. Your library will be better off without you.” She raised the hatchet as she finished that, and when she did I got a surprise every bit as big as the warm house of ice or the angels. Sven grabbed her wrist.
“Well done.” Dr. Fevre said it absently, like you might pat a dog.
“I could’ve handled her, but I’m glad you helped.” I gave Sven my best smile. “I owe you.”
Dr. Fevre told Adah to sit down. It got him exactly nowhere, but he got hold of her hatchet and twisted it out of her hand.
“There are more chairs back there.” He pointed toward the dark back of the ice room. “Bring two for us.”
I did, thinking it was one for him and one for me, but I was wrong. The blond angels got them both and had to be coached into them. The doctor did the coaching, motioning and touching the backs of their knees to get them to bend their legs and sit. At first their expressions were as blank as Sven’s, then one smiled at me. I had known she would have a great smile just by looking at her, and it lit up the room.
“I was explaining to my wife what it is I do here,” Dr. Fevre began. “My daughter already knows, or at least knows most of it. Now I’ll explain to you as well, and to these two girls.”
I interrupted him. “You must know about the screes of broken ice. I left Audrey at the top of one with a brunet called Peggy Pepper. You know her, I think.”
He nodded. “She’s a coworker.”
Adah snorted.
“As a matter of fact, she’s taking some of my classes while I’m on sabbatical. That’s probably what she wants to see me about.”
He turned to Chandra. “Will you be a darling and have a look for those two ladies? You won’t be sorry you did, I promise.”
I motioned toward the blondes. “Why not send one of them?”
“For one thing, they don’t know these caves. Chandra does—rather better than I, I believe. That’s enough, but another is that they have no warm clothing. Chandra does, as you know.”
I wanted to say she had more than Audrey and I, but that would have brought it down to she’s my daughter while you two are reclones. It would not have helped Audrey and me a bit to go there.
“Do you fear that their hearing what I’m going to tell you may cause trouble? It’s a reasonable fear, yet you and I must run the risk.”
That one threw me.
More softly, Dr. Fevre added, “They need to understand that I chose them when I might have chosen any of a thousand others.”
“He has a harem,” Adah snapped. “The inmates are dead.” She sounded like she was about to walk out; that may have been why Sven was there.
Her husband ignored her. “Most of your experience is a century out of date, Smithe.”
“More than that,” I told him.
“Yet even in your own time you must have heard or read of people who had fallen through ice being revived. Their bodies were freezing. Their hearts had stopped and so had all thought. Yet they were restored to life. To normality, or near it.”
Looking at the angels, I nodded. They were barefoot, both of them, something I had not noticed before. Something about their long white skirts reminded me that people cover bodies with sheets sometimes.
“Their breasts are lovely,” Dr. Fevre said, “I quite agree—yet you might learn several things of interest if you listened to me.”
I told him I was.
“That such people—patients who had not drawn breath in an hour or more and whose temperatures had fallen to the point at which water turns to ice—could be restored to life was common knowledge for more than a century; yet no one had acted upon it.”
When no one spoke he added, “I teach anatomy.”
I nodded. “I know that.”
“It is not hard to learn, or very difficult to teach provided one has a sufficient supply of cadavers for one’s students to work on. Without those…” He shrugged. “It simply cannot be taught well. Any bright child could learn the names of the bones and the notoriously mazed muscles of the back. Drill and encouragement. You wrote novels?”
“Yes, mysteries. Whodunits.”
“Could you teach a bright student to write those if he could never try his hand at one?”
I said, “I’ve got it.”
“Just so. The hardest part of my job is securing a sufficient supply of cadavers. A friend joked to me about going to Lichholm. I questioned him, and found he had sighted it when he and his wife had gone on a cruise to Norway. He had asked the cruise director about it, and had been told that it was merely a barren island inhabited by a few fishermen.”
“True enough!” Adah snapped. “I would never have come here if I hadn’t been looking for you. I know you think I’m insane.”
“Disturbed, darling.”
“While you yourself are sane. Hasn’t it struck you, my darling living doctor, that you and I are surrounded by the re-animated dead? That man you’re instructing”—Adah pointed to me—“is dead. These beautiful, speechless girls you’re itching to toy with—”
“Adah!”
“Are dead. This guard you’ve set upon me is dead too.”
One of the blondes shouted, “I’m not dead!” and burst into tears.
Sometimes I do things that are flat-out crazy, and that was one of the times. When it happens, it’s like I am outside myself watching what I do. Up until then I thought my conscious mind was all alone in my skull; when I ran over to the blonde I found out that there is at least one other mind in there, and saying, Oh never mind! does not fix one damned single thing. I was crouched down beside her chair before I knew it and had my arms around her. Want to know what she smelled like?
She smelled like ice.
A whole lot more calmly, our patron said, “You’d better do something, Barry; you’re about to lose a concubine.”
If he heard her, he gave no sign of it. He sort of patted the sobbing girl’s head, smoothing her golden hair, and said, “Of course you’re not dead, darling. Adah’s being vindictive. Neither the law nor I can hold her responsible for her acts.”
I said, “She knows you’re alive just as well as we do,” and after a while the two of us got the girl calmed down. Pretty soon I found out that her name was Ricci, and when I think of Ricci now I always remember how she pulled up the bottom of that long white sheet-turned-skirt and buried her face in it.