To Live Again

He flipped the retrofile, triggering it to see what calls might have come in while he spoke with Donahy. Risa’s Image appeared. The file told him that she was waiting in London to speak with him.

“Put her on,” he said, transferring the call to the large screen. A moment passed; then Risa appeared, life-size, on the screen. She looked frayed and weary. It was after midnight in London. No doubt this legal business involving her persona was taking a heavy toll of her energy.

“Well?” he said. “How does it go?”

“It’s moving very fast, Mark. The autopsy report on Tandy came in this morning.”

“And?”

“She was almost four weeks pregnant at the time of her death.

That checks with the mindpick information they got out of Claude Villefranche’s dybbuk.”

“I see,” Mark said. “She went to Claude and told him she was pregnant and wanted him to marry her, and he refused, and they had a fight over it and he killed her.”

Risa laughed. “Oh, no! The way you tell it, it’s straight out of one of the old melodramas. Tandy wouldn’t have tried to use a pregnancy to blackmail a man into marrying her. Especially not a man like Claude.”

“What’s the story, then?”

“The gene tests show that she was pregnant by Stig The Swede, her other lover. Sometime between the time Tandy made her last persona recording in June and the time she died in August, she decided that it would be interesting to have a baby, I guess. So she stopped the pill and Stig filled her up. She knew that Stig would be willing to marry her. He’s a decent sort. Claude excited her more, but she didn’t trust him. Then she went off to Switzerland to have her last fling with Claude. At St. Moritz she broke the news to him that this was where he got off. He was furious and told her to have the fetus aborted, to forget about getting mated to Stig.”

“But you said that Claude wasn’t interested in marrying her,” Mark said, puzzled.

“He wasn’t. But he wasn’t about to let Stig have her either. Or put a child in her. He saw that as an attack on his reputation for virility. He was wild with jealousy. So they had a fight, and finally they went out on the ski slope and he took the feeder pin out of her gravity repulsor, and down she went. If he couldn’t run her life, she had to die. It’s all there in the persona he last recorded. He made the recording two months after the killing.”

“Didn’t anyone think of examining her skis after the accident?”

“They were badly damaged, Mark. It was impossible to determine anything.”

“And there was no autopsy?”

Risa shrugged. “When a girl is smashed up in a hundred-meter fall, there’s no real point in an autopsy, is there? No one suspected she might be pregnant.”

“What happens to this dybbuk now?”

“Claude? Well, they’ve got him on a double murder charge. The mindpick evidence shows that he killed Tandy, and there’s also the little matter of what he did to his host. So the quaestorate has requested a complete erasure. They’re going to blot him out entirely. He’s being shipped to New York tomorrow and the job will be done at the Scheffing Institute. They’ll clean him out of his host’s mind and also destroy all his existing persona records.”

“You must feel very proud of yourself, Risa, exposing this criminal.”

“Well, actually, I could never have done it without Tandy. She was the one who guessed she’d been murdered, and she put the finger on Claude as a dybbuk. After that it was just a matter of seeing what was in his mind.”

“And in Tandy’s uterus,” Kaufma

“I’m glad. Risa, are you all through playing detective?”

“I think so. Why?”

“It would be nice if you’d stay closer to home for a while, with this business settled.”

“I’ll be home in about a week,” she said. “Is that all right?”

“Fine,” said Kaufma

“I’m drawing on the general family balance. All right?”

“Have mercy,” he told her. “I will. I’ll see you soon.” Out of her tired eyes there twinkled a look of warmth, love, kinship He smiled at her. She was a fine girl, he decided. A credit to their line. She had the promise of true greatness. He blew her a kiss, and the screen darkened.

A pity she was a girl, he thought. Of course, they had had an option to fix that. But Kaufma

He turned back to his ticker. Three quick trades produced a handsome profit for him. A cheerful omen.

By the end of this week he’d have all the shrewdness of Paul Kaufma

Kaufma

Surprised, Kaufma

Kaufma

“No.”

“No?”

“I’ve weighed this a million times, Mark. I’ve come around to your way of thinking: that Roditis has such power already that it would be a grave mistake to let him have Paul. That would set up an extraordinary concentration of ability in one individual, with unpredictable results.”

“Of course.”

“I’ve also taken into account the objections of the Kaufma

“Kind of you, Frank. But what will you do with old Paul, then? There can’t be many others around you could safely award him to. I suppose it’s best simply to leave him in storage a few years, until he’s so far out of touch with events that he can be let loose again as someone’s persona. I—”