Mules

Madeleine E. Robins

Tenniel sat in one shabby chair, the doctor in the other, and they shadowboxed. Over the doctor’s shoulder, a hologram, a grimly festive image of people swimming and running on a tropical beach, shimmered distractingly. Palm fronds pulsed in a silent breeze; sunbathers laughed soundlessly. Goals to aim for, Tenniel thought. He stared at the hologram and chattered about some minor event to fill up the empty time.

Periodically the doctor would interrupt. “How did that feel?”

Each time the answer was the same. “I don’t really know.”

Tenniel pulled his gaze away from the surfers and blue skies and examined the doctor: thin brown hair, mustache, brown eyes that tilted down at the corners sadly. Any age past thirty. He found himself wondering, as he always did: Mule? Lifer? The notion of being treated by a psychiatrist who was mortal was an unsettling one.

oOo

Mariclaire was in the apartment when Tenniel got there, dressed in the faded coverall she called her painting suit. She stood before a large canvas, examining the gelid blobs of paint on her palette, seeing something in them that Tenniel did not see. Oil was a demanding, old-fashioned medium for a painter, but Mariclaire loved the paints, the smell, even the mess. He recognized the painting; Mariclaire had been working on that canvas for years. Mostly she took it out, stared at it, and at the end of the day, put it away again.

“Hi.” She did not look up from the palette.

“Hi. Is that Blue Hell again?” He nodded at the canvas on his way past.

“I got a sudden idea about the composition. Now I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think—“ He looked from her to the painting and was dimly exasperated. “I think you should scrap the damned thing or finish it and start something new.”

She pushed her thick reddish bangs away from her eyes and stared at him, trying to figure him out: kidding or no.

“Mair—“ He struggled for words and watched from some far place as the outside Tenniel approached her. “You can work something into the ground, you know.”

She put her palette aside and moved away from him. “I’ve heard. But I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. Some things take time.”

“Some things take forever.”

Mariclaire watched him coolly. “Aaron, where did all this hostility come from?”

A fair question with no answer. “I don’t know,” he said uneasily. As suddenly as impatience had flooded him, it ebbed. “I’m sorry,” he said and, as a peace offering, “Are you hungry?”

“Not really.” She picked up her palette again, gave him one more appraising, unsettled glance, and returned to contemplation of her painting while Tenniel browsed aimlessly in the kitchen for something to snack on. Just killing time; he had a class in an hour.

“So where were you this morning?” Mariclaire asked casually.

“At the Howard Clinic, seeing a psychiatrist.” He watched her as he said it. She did not turn, but a muscle tightened in her jaw, and the clean line of her forehead was broken by a frown.

Mariclaire reached for a bag of linseed oil and hesitated for a few moments before squeezing a few drops of the stuff onto a crimson blob of paint. “I see,” she said, as if she had said Now I understand. “Again.”

“Again.”

“Is there any point to this, or are you just playing some academic game with yourself? Do you get supertenure points for staring into your navel?”

“Now who’s being hostile?”

“I don’t like this. It’s embarrassing.”

“I’m sorry if it embarrasses you. It doesn’t embarrass me. I’m trying to find something—“

“What? What do you need that you can’t find by yourself, with enough time and thought. Aaron, what’s the point of stirring things up?”

“I’m not trying to stir you up. I feel—“ He waved one hand, frustrated by the puzzle of needing her to understand, and by his inability to make the problem clear to her.

Mariclaire ignored his hand. She studied her palette again, intently, as if there were a message written among the daubs of paint. “You should leave for your class soon,” she said. She pushed her bangs back again and kept her eyes on the palette, ostentatiously absorbed in her work.

After a moment, Tenniel took up the disk reader with his notes in it and slung its strap over his shoulder. For a moment he hesitated, then he picked up a folder of paper illustrations he had promised to a student, and left her alone in the apartment.

oOo

He arrived on campus forty minutes early for his seminar and had tea with Nina Diaz, another supertenured member of the history faculty. In the faculty lounge, a comically traditional room paneled with dark wainscoting and antiqued red wallpaper, they gossiped quietly about department politics, the new staff, and new students, making the easy judgments of people who had seen decades of new students and new staff. Nina left first; when Tenniel walked to his seminar later, he looked through a window and saw her lecturing, pacing across the front of the room, sawing the air with her right hand to make a point.

The classroom was almost full when Tenniel arrived, students gathered around the table talking quietly among themselves. It was his favorite class; enrollment was limited, and attendance was required; there was no broadcast to non-resident students. Tenniel set his reader on the table and sat down. The woman to whom he had promised the drawings sat halfway around the table; Tenniel looked at the name he had printed neatly on the folder: Cate German. He waved the folder to catch her attention and let her know he had not forgotten. She smiled.

“O.K.” Tenniel looked from face to face, gauging reactions, drawing them all in. An old teacher’s trick; when he got to Cate German, she smiled as if she had caught him at it. “We were talking about the proliferation of religious cults in the late twentieth century. Stipulate a premillennial panic—probably the more potent because the people who recognized it felt that it was some kind of cultural relic. Add the fact that ecological irresponsibility and overpopulation were beginning to really take a toll—remember, this was before emigration off-planet. So we begin to see jihads, death pacts, an increase in ideological tensions even between allies.To understand the kind of frenzy that overtook the human race at the end of the tenth and twentieth centuries, the neatest metaphor is Jagadowicz’s: a person faced with a terminal illness. In the pre-Radin era, there were considerable studies done on the psychology of the terminal patient. How does our hypothetical man-as-culture react to his imminent death?”

The woman to Tenniel’s left, a thin, narrow-eyed blonde, looked profoundly uncomfortable. “You’re comparing premillennial mankind to someone’s…dying?” She stumbled awkwardly over the last word.

“To someone who thinks he’s dying,” Tenniel corrected.

A frisson of distaste when through the room. Tenniel shook his head. “Come on, people, it’s only a word. Yes?”—to a dark, thin, wild-eyed man sitting a few seats away.

“Denial,” the student suggested.

“Repentance,” someone else offered.

“Urgency.” “The need to find and appease his God.” “Fear.” “Sorrow.”

“Absolute anarchy.” Cate German’s low-pitched voice cut through the murmurs of assent and suggestion. “Liberation.”

“Liberation?” Tenniel prodded.

“If you know you’re going to die—sooner rather than later—what’s to stop you from doing what you want to do while you can? If you hate someone and want to kill him—go ahead. If you want to have sex with anyone, everyone who pleases you—why not? Why not take risks? The immediacy of death would be very liberating. How can you be punished more than dying? And you’re doing that anyway.”

A chorus of horrified protest rose up, and the woman was pressed to defend her opinions. Tenniel sat back to listen, occasionally suggesting or correcting, watching them. When the musical tones that signaled the class’s end sounded, he waited for Cate German to come forward to pick up the illustrations. She was finishing a quiet argument with another student. Her long, honey-colored hair hung straight over her shoulders, scarcely stirring as she shook her head. Tenniel thought irrelevantly that he could almost sense the weight of her hair from across the room.

She joined him at last and flipped through the papers in the folder he handed her. She was working on a paper on propagandist art in the early twenty-first century. “Thank you for remembering. Oh, yeah, this is great stuff.” She tilted her head in the direction of the door. “You really got them with all that talk of d-y-i-n-g.”

“Sooner or later any course that deals with pre-Radin sociology will touch on d-y-i-n-g.” He gave it the same ironic lilt as she did; it was, after all, only a word. “It’s easy to forget how important personal mortality was.”

The woman nodded, smiling. Tenniel felt her attention keenly; her focus was distracting, powerful; he was suddenly aware of the way he was standing, his expression, what he wore. Her eyes were a very clear blue-green, set wide in a triangular face, and her smile was generous. She was nearly as tall as Tenniel

“Yes. Well,” she said after a moment. “Thanks for the pictures.” She paused; her smile deepened. “Dr. Tenniel, could I ask you to look over my notes and outline sometime? For my honors thesis?”

He was flattered. “Bring them next week,” he suggested.

“If it’s not too much trouble? Thank you.” She smiled again and left him.

Tenniel watched her go, smiling himself.

oOo

“Were you married long the first time?” the psychiatrist asked him. The palm trees on the wall behind bobbed and waved like an echo.

“About fifteen years. That was—“ Tenniel broke off uncomfortably. He still had no idea whether the other man was immortal or a mule; it made it difficult to know how to discuss Greta and his first marriage.“We met when I was thirty. She was twenty-three. She was—that is, she didn’t respond to the Radin Treatment.”

The doctor’s eyebrow hitched up slightly, the only reaction he seemed to permit himself. “She was mortal.”

Tenniel found himself explaining, trying to make it clear, as if, after two hundred years, it really mattered. “We thought it would work out. I didn’t realize how tough it would be for her, watching me stay the same. The first eight, ten years, it didn’t matter. Really, I don’t think it did. We were crazy about each other. But eventually we started fighting. Greta really hated me toward the end.” He shuddered involuntarily at the distant memory. “I should have known better. If one of my friends had married a mu—a mortal, I would have known better. I was just swept away.”

The boxy tan room was silent for a few moments except for faint inhalations. Tenniel listened for the sound of a tropic breeze that did not come. “How did you feel about that?” the doctor asked at last.

“About Greta? It was two hundred years ago. It’s sad, I suppose….”

“No.” The doctor shook his head. “How do you feel about knowing better now?”

Tenniel let the words sink in heavily, feeling a slow electricity as he considered the question. “I hate it,” he said at last.

oOo

That afternoon in his seminar, Cate German had shifted her seat at the table. Through the class, Tenniel was deeply aware of her nearness, two seats away; her concentrated focus when he was speaking, a waft of light, flowery scent when she shook her head. She asked questions from time to time, enough to keep Tenniel’s attention peripherally on her. Stirred by her focus, he was brilliant himself, pulling references out of the air, making connections, heady with a scholar’s love of his subject and communicating that love. The class responded. The room crackled with electricity. They stayed beyond class time, and when Tenniel finally adjourned the meeting, everyone left with a small reluctance.

“Dr. Tenniel? Will you be able to look at my notes?” She stood by the door with her reader tucked loosely under her arm. She smiled. “I’ll bribe you with a cup of tea.”

Tenniel remembered why he had kept the afternoon open. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” He shuffled disks together into a glittering pile, slid them into a case.

“Good class today. You got everyone involved.”

“Some days it’s like that,” Tenniel smiled. What was he feeling? Goofy pleasure, avidness, the lingering rush of a good class, Cate German’s odd, stirring presence. A remembered excitement he could not put a name to, as if anything could happen. “Thank you for bringing up Vatican III. I hate to pull all the rabbits out of the hat myself.”

Cate raised her sandy eyebrows mockingly. “Showboating. I read ahead, that’s all.”

“Thanks anyway.” They left the classroom amiably rehashing the class as they walked to the Student Center. Cate brought the tea while Tenniel settled at one of the tables, took the ordered stack of disks she had given him, and slipped the first into his reader. When she reached the table with a tray, two cups, and a large flask of hot tea, he had already scanned half the files on the first disk.

He read quickly, with the same excitement he had felt in class. The pleasure of encountering a good mind, a creative mind in his own field; he admired her way of putting together facts, drawing outrageous conclusions and making them stick; he was impressed. More, he was enjoying his own pleasure, and the subtle warmth of Cate’s body near, but not too close, to his own.

“This is good,” he said once, not looking up from the reader, almost afraid to meet her eyes. “This is very good.” He drank his tea, reading, while Cate German sat beside him watching the younger students come and go.

After an hour, Tenniel looked up. “You’ve done very well. This is terrific.” Still, he mentioned several sources she might check, questioned a point he thought not as tightly substantiated as the others. “I’d like to read the paper when you have it in draft. With notes this good—you should publish, you know.”

“Publish? I hadn’t thought about it.” She laughed. “It’s a thought.”

“If you’re going to start building up a reputation in the field,” he began. “That is, you are in the history department, aren’t you?”

She smiled. “No. Not officially. I’m a floater, still.”

He let his astonishment show. “If you can do this kind of work—what are you doing in a graduate seminar if you aren’t—why would you take my course?”

“It sounded interesting. Why not? If all the courses are as good as yours, maybe I’ll apply to the history faculty for a fellowship.” She met his eyes with an open blue-green gaze.

Tenniel suddenly felt helpless, startled by the clarity of that look. He flushed. “Can we go somewhere?”

Cate smiled again. “Yes.”

Her flat was two rooms in a student habitat within bare walking distance of he campus. They spoke very little. If someone had asked him, Tenniel would have sworn there was an aura surrounding them, setting them off from the rest of the world. The low, jazzing sweep of hovercars; the spare gleam of campus buildings in the white afternoon light, the students in ones, twos, knots of three or four struggling along the carefully landscaped paths—everything around them seemed distant and sparkling and unnaturally real. The word enchantment occurred to Tenniel, and he rejected it hastily, embarrassed. The feeling remained.

In the passage outside her habitat, he watched Cate pass her palm over the lock to her door. She moved into the room and did a quick pirouette with her arms spread and hands open. “Welcome, Doctor.”

“Aaron.” He stepped inside and dropped his reader onto a chair by the door.

“Cate.” She waved the door shut, looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then moved toward him. She put her arms up and around his neck, kissed him with deliberateness and thoroughness. Tenniel closed his arms around her, felt his hand tangle in her thick hair, pressed and moved against her.

He opened his eyes for a moment to see hers, blue-green and very close. “Well.”

“Well?” she asked. Her right hand reached behind to pull Aaron’s hand from her waist. She raised his fingers to her mouth and kissed them. “Come on, then. Life’s too short to stand here all afternoon.” The phrase was an echo of Mariclaire, but before he could think of her, Cate kissed him again and pulled him with her into the next room.

Later, in her bed, after the last sensitive ripples had ebbed, they lay almost touching, looking at one another. Cate looked young, in her early twenties, but Aaron himself looked no more than thirty-five. As if he were reading her, he examined the breadth of her forehead, the long, spiky brown lashes around her eyes. She was not beautiful, but she was lovely with the rich, surprising imperfect charm of a desert at sunrise or a forest after rain. Poetry? he thought, bemused.

Cate raised her head up, propped on one flat palm, and asked, “So what is it like to live forever?” So she was young.

“I haven’t lived forever yet,” Aaron parried, playing with a lock of her hair.

“I mean, to know you might.”

Aaron closed his eyes and opened them again. No change, still the blue-green eyes intent upon his face; the rounded, soft breasts brushing against his chest, her full, swollen smile. So young. It was difficult to ask, “You’re not?”

“I won’t. Mortal. Mule,” she said, challenging his pity.“Metabolically Unsuited to Life Extension. When I was five, they brought me to the Radin Clinic like everyone else, only, I’m one of the ones it doesn’t work for. I was sick for a week, puking, fever, the works.” Cate grimaced reminiscently; her tone was dry and detached. “So.” She ran a finger from his shoulder to his navel. “What’s it like? I know what being mortal’s like. Tell me the story of your life.”

Aaron felt a bubble burst, filling him with weird giddiness. Terror, and he felt like laughing, a combination of embarrassment and relief and lingering arousal. “Living a long time is just like living any other kind of time,” he said at last. “The seconds don’t expand or anything; you don’t live differently. You just live more.”

“Sounds good to me. Living more.” She ducked her head and ran her tongue across his nipple. “Want to live a little more?” She smiled at him teasingly.

“Cate?” For a moment, Aaron ignored the excitement she roused in him. “Why me, this afternoon?”

She smiled. “Because I wanted to. Life’s too short to sit on the fence. My life is, anyway. Come here.” She kissed him, mock fierce. “Because I wanted to.”

oOo

He mentioned Cate in his therapy meeting at the clinic, watching the doctor’s impassive face and wondering if he might not have done better to opt for computer therapy instead. He did not mention Cate to Mariclaire. Tuesdays were busy, filled with the early visit to the clinic, his seminar, and Cate. Cate began to spill over into other days; the thought of her spilled into Aaron’s working and writing time. Mariclaire did not seem to notice; had she asked about his absence, Aaron would have immediately told her about Cate—a new lover was not an extraordinary event for either of them. But Mariclaire was absorbed herself. She had started a new painting.

Aaron arrived home from a meeting one afternoon and found her working energetically, working in blues and grays, long diagonals across a raw canvas. She was smiling to herself, humming a strand of aimless notes, concentrating. Aaron had to repeat his “hello” twice before she heard him.

“Hi.” Her smile enlarged to include him. Aaron circled around her to view the canvas. “I just got the idea today. I’m really excited. I think I’ve really latched on to something.” Her eyes remained jealously on the canvas. “Good class?”

“Yeah. Very good. You hungry?”

She looked at him sideways. “If you’re cooking. I’m involved.”

Aaron began to work in the kitchen, enjoying the texture of the foods, the cutting, measuring, cooking. Both he and Mariclaire enjoyed the process of making a meal, and saw no reason for the kind of timesaving kitchen that was no more than a productor, warmer, and a cabinet for dishes. The kitchen they had was as coolly spacious as the rest of the apartment, but old-fashioned, with utensils, pots, a rack of seasoning herbs they grew and dried together. “Can you tear yourself away for a while?” he asked at last.“Food’s ready.”

Mariclaire made one last, delicate daub on the canvas, then put the palette aside, cleaned up swiftly, and came to the table, brushing her bangs out of her eyes with the back of her hand. They ate slowly in companionable near-silence. After dinner, Aaron cleaned up and read for a time while Mariclaire went back to her painting. In the dark of the apartment, they made two islands of light: Aaron relaxed over the glow of his reader, Mariclaire straight-backed on a stool, flanked by two high-intensity lamps trained on her canvas. Finally, by silent agreement, Aaron turned off the reader and Mariclaire cleaned her brushes. They went to bed, made love, and slept side by side, companionably.

Sometime in the night Aaron woke, thirsty, and went to get juice from the kitchen. As he passed the easel, he looked again at Mariclaire’s new painting. It was undoubtedly strong, even this early in its creation. The colors were bold slashes fading upward to a shadowy mass at the upper right corner. An evocative skeleton, a sketch of what would come; it reminded him of something but he was not sure of what. He poured some juice, looked at the painting again, and fancied the resemblance was gone. He went back to bed.

oOo

“I hear myself talking and it sounds fatuous. I sound like a seventeen-year-old kid or something, but it’s true. This thing with Cate has changed—is changing—my life.”

Aaron leaned back in the shabby chair, watching the doctor’s face, refusing to be distracted by the hologram. Daring the doctor to agree or disagree, it hardly mattered to him which. Of late his sessions had been filled with Cate.

“Obviously you think these changes are good,” the doctor said, and smiled slightly.

“Good? Hell, yes. It’s like a romance. I whistle on the way to the university. I’ve been noticing things again, birds, faces, the color of the sky. Everything sparkles. That sense I had of losing something with the years, of not being connected anymore, indurative lack of affect—“

“You’ve been reading ahead in the text,” the doctor said coolly. “Please don’t borrow my terms.”

“Not feeling anything, then. I feel things again. I feel wonderful.”

“And how does Cate feel? The same?”

“Of course.” Aaron paused. “I think so. She’s working on an honors thesis, very exciting work. And we’ve both got other responsibilities, but…I think she feels the same.”

“What does Mariclaire say about Cate?”

Aaron was surprised to feel himself flushing. “I haven’t mentioned it to her.” The doctor’s eyebrows started to lift. “No, we’ve both gone through other lovers, that’s not the problem. We’ve been together for a long time; it happens. I just haven’t gotten around to mentioning Cate to her yet. They’re different.” It seemed important to make that clear. “Cate has me doing things, stuff I haven’t tried in years. She takes years off me. I’m looking at everything fresh.” He chuckled nervously. “She’s taking me skiing this weekend.”

The doctor raised both eyebrows. “Skiing? Downhill?”

“Yes. She wants to go speed-jumping next week. I’m thinking about it.”

The question again; Aaron could see it coming. “And how do you feel about all this?”

He smiled. “Scared. Terrified. It’s great.”

The doctor smiled politely.

oOo

The sun hid behind a sullen gray overcast, a white circle that gave no warmth. Aaron shivered a little despite the warmsuit he wore; the air was still silver-cold on his face and his lungs. His eyes were half-closed against the dull flare.

“Bracing,” he said, a little less than enthusiastically, to Cate.

She laughed. “It’s supposed to be. Come on, top of the mountain this time.”

She had been edgily patient with him, giving him a chance to practice, remember ancient skills. Aaron had not tried downhill snow skiing in more than two centuries, since he had passed through what he thought of as his daredevil phase. Most lifers went through it; most survived it and learned caution. Well, he thought, watching as Cate started of for the airlift, to hell with caution. Seeing Cate, admiring the hungry gusto with which she attacked even a gentle slope, Aaron wanted that hunger for himself. He pushed off with one pole and followed her.

At the lift line, they stood with heads together, flirting dangerously with their eyes and words, their breath mingled. It seemed to Aaron that every smile was a private touch.

“Aaron? Hey, Aaron!”

It took him a moment to realize that the voice was real and familiar. He raised his head and looked around to find Nina Diaz standing five feet behind him, dressed in an orange speedsuit and goggles. A dark, heavyset man was with her, less flashy in a warmsuit like Aaron’s own. Nina introduced him as David Campoy.

“What are you doing here? I never knew you skied.”

“I haven’t in centuries,” he admitted. He slid one hand along Cate’s shoulder to bring her into the conversation. “It’s all Cate’s fault.” He introduced her. “Today skiing, next week, speed-jumping. But you look—professional, almost. Have you been skiing long?”

“A couple of years.” Nina laughed. “David is a slowpoke, he won’t do the speed trails with me.” The look she gave him was an edgy token of long-standing complaint.

“No interest in making a fool of myself,” Campoy said. He seemed quite unaffected by Nina’s obvious displeasure. “Or in coming home in a basket.”

The line shifted forward again and Cate nudged Aaron. “Come on, Aar. We’re up next.” She smiled blankly at Nina and Campoy. “Maybe we’ll meet you on the speed trails.”

Aaron nodded. “Yeah, maybe. Nina, Dave.” He let Cate lead him toward the bench that would carry them up the mountain.

Aaron managed skiing well enough, he thought. Some vestige of the years of caution clung to him, though, and he was not able to attack the mountain with all of Cate’s verve.

The next week it was speed-jumping. The week after that, bobsledding; that same weekend, riding with Cate in a sleek hovercar at speeds both dangerous and illegal. Aaron kept one finger crooked in feigned casualness around the hang-strap and ignored the silver rime of panic on his tongue. The next week, it was skiing again.

“So, when are you going to tell me about this new lady?” Mariclaire asked dryly one evening at dinner.

Aaron blinked. “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”

“Aaron, love, aside from the time you’ve been spending elsewhere, you come home with bruises, aches, and fingernail marks on your shoulders. What am I to think? Is she a wrestler?”

“A history student,” Aaron grinned. “Only the fingernail tracks are her fault.”

Mariclaire pushed her bangs out of her eyes and pursed her lips, amused and doubtful. “So where do the bruises come from?”

He knew without question that the skiing, the bobsledding and the racing would upset Mariclaire far more than the fact of Cate would.

“So?” she prodded.

“We’ve gone skiing a couple of times. Bobsledding. That kind of thing.”

Her face iced over, the mood of teasing gone completely. “That kind of thing? Since when have you gone in for that kind of thing? I thought you went through all that nonsense when you were seventy.”

“It’s not the same thing at all,” Aaron said quickly. “Cate likes risk sports. I thought I’d try it out again, now that I’m beyond the age—“

“Right. Beyond the age. Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Yes.” He met her look squarely. “It’s a kind of high. It makes me feel alive, you should try—“

“Oh, I’m quite alive enough, thanks. Now you need stupid risks to make you feel alive? Great. Terrific. Aaron, I don’t care about your lovers, but I do care if you get yourself k—“ She stammered on the word, tried again. “I care if you get yourself killed trying to impress one of them.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You’re right. First there was the nonsense with psychotherapy, now this garbage. What’s wrong with you? Why must everything be drama? Isn’t it enough to be comfortable? Isn’t that what age is supposed to do for you?”

“Make you feel comfortable, or freeze you till you’re dead?”

“I don’t feel dead. I just don’t go through major crises over every God-damned daffodil I see. I don’t need to risk my life—in which I have invested many years—in order to know I’m still drawing breath.”

“There’s a difference between keeping the machine going and having a reason to go on.”

“And this bobsledding history student is giving you a reason to go on? Aaron, you’ve made it almost three hundred years without having to play high-speed downhill tag to find meaning in your life.” She weighted the words with irony, the first positive sign of anger she had given. “And your history student, is she looking for a reason to keep the engine running, too?”

“It’s different for her,” he began. “She’s not a lifer—“

Mariclaire stared at him, a muscle working near one eye. “A mortal. Aaron, you scare me. If you think the only thing that’s going to shake you up is to rub shoulders with the romance of mortality—Jesus, Aaron.” She shook her head. “It’s a kind of sickness, you know that? And I really resent you making me feel like I’m some kind of monster because I don’t want to wallow in pain and resentment and anger—all that stupidity.”

“At least they’re feelings! Hell, Mariclaire, you’re afraid of the damned words!”

“They are ugly words. They’re ugly feelings. There’s enough of them in life without courting them! I’ve better things to do with my time.”

“Like paint?” He thought of Blue Hell and the other unfinished canvases.

“Yeah, like paint. I don’t need to blow my time on this heroic passion garbage; life is too short.”

“Not for us, it isn’t.” Aaron pushed his uneaten dinner away with a hand he distantly realized was trembling.

For a moment Mariclaire looked stricken. “Aaron, no. Look, Aaron—“ she reached for his hand as he got up from his chair. “I just don’t want you to be hurt.”

He pulled away from her. “I don’t want to be hurt, but at least it would be feeling something. Those are the risks you take.” Aaron pulled a cape from the closet and left the apartment for the library.

oOo

The next day was Tuesday. At the clinic he danced around the subject of his quarrel with Mariclaire, unwilling to repeat the whole thing for the therapist’s benefit. At last, freed from the hour, Aaron walked to campus, drank tea by himself in the Student Center, and went over his seminar notes, watching pale characters blink quickly against the dark screen of his reader. A stocky man in a dark suit passed Aaron’s table, recognized him, and stopped.

“Aaron?”

Blinking, Aaron looked up and realized that it was David Campoy, the man he had met with Nina Diaz at the ski lift weeks before. Seeing Campoy in regular dress, Aaron recognized him as a faculty member in one of the sciences. “Hi. Join me?”

Campoy looked around uneasily. “I have a class in a few minutes. But I thought you should know—you’re a friend of Nina’s, right?”

“Yes.” Aaron was instantly on edge; there was a tone to Campoy’s voice that he recognized, did not understand but recognized. “Yes,” he said again, prompting Campoy.

“Then you should know. Nina died yesterday.”

A moment of electric stillness while the words threaded themselves through Aaron’s mind. Then the shock hit; he was dazzled, bewildered by pain. “Nina can’t—she’s a lifer.”

Campoy said dryly, “Skiing. She went into a tree at sixty K per hour. The Radin Treatment’s not much good against trees.” His voice was like paper, crisp and lifeless. “I wouldn’t go down the hill with her; I was afraid.”

“Dave—“

He pressed on, unhearing. “She’d been getting crazier and crazier all the time, looking for bigger thrills. She stood at the crest of the hill and yelled at me.” Campoy lowered his voice. “’Come on, Dave, who wants to live forever!’”

Aaron stared at the man in horror. “Look, Dave—“

“I just thought you should know.” Campoy smiled, or tried to. The attempt did not reach the haunted cold of his eyes. “I’ve got a class waiting.”

Aaron watched him go. After a long while he rose and crept to the building where his seminar was held; when he looked through the window of Nina’s classroom, he saw someone else in her place, speaking quietly.

oOo

Cate was sorry to hear about Nina. “She was a friend?” But she was more interested in her thesis. “You did say you’d read the draft this week,” she reminded him. “Or is that taking advantage of my relationship with the teacher?” She flirted at him through the warm curtain of her hair. They sat on an uncomfortably overstuffed futon that slouched toward the center, crushing them together.

“I’ll read it.” He was unable to tease back.

“Hey, Aaron!”

“I’m sorry. This thing, Nina’s death, it has me upset.”

Cate cupped one warm hand around the back of his neck, leaned into him so one breast pressed against his arm. Aaron shrugged his shoulders, leaned slightly away. Her breath followed him, grazing an ear, an irritating invitation. “Cate—“ he began edgily.

“Right.” She shook her hair from her eyes and stood up.“Well, maybe another day.” She picked up his reader and jacket from the chair where he had dropped them, and handed them to him.

“Cate, I didn’t mean—“

“I’m sorry, Aaron. I can’t get worked up about your friend, and I feel like you expect me to. I didn’t know her. My own life is too short to spend it wrapped up in someone else’s grief. I’m sorry.” The regret was genuine, but she was adamant. “Give me a call when you’re feeling better.”

She let him out of her apartment.

Two days later they went bobsledding. Aaron had to clench his teeth on the fear that walled up in him, while Cate shone golden, fear transmuted into something piercingly beautiful and exciting. Afterward they went back to her rooms at the habitat and made love, and Aaron yearned toward her golden glow, the energy and appetite she exuded.

Mariclaire said nothing about the welts on his shoulders or the bruises on his sides. When he was in the apartment, she always seemed to be reading or working; the air was always scented with linseed oil and solvent.The new painting took shape slowly, incomplete but compelling. As it grew, Aaron and Mariclaire were polite and careful with each other; neither referred to their quarrel.

The end of the term was nearing. Aaron was weighted down with theses, listening, reading, marking, evaluating arguments and documentation. Cate’s thesis came in with the rest, and Aaron read it with the same excitement he had felt on looking at her notes and first draft. The arguments were crisp and original, the documentation excellent, the style entertaining and the conclusions exciting. Aaron was smiling when he gave Cate’s paper back to her.

“It should be published. It’s excellent work, and it would give you a fine entrée into the field.” They sat in the small, sparsely occupied plaza in front of the Student Center, drinking tea.

“Maybe.” She seemed unimpressed.

“If you’re still undecided, at least take my Nineteenth Century Imperialism course. And maybe Wu’s course in—“

“I’m thinking of moving,” she said abruptly.

He ignored a pricking of dismay, pursued his argument.“O.K., so you take a course by relay; two thirds of my students have never set foot on the campus. You could—“

“Look, I’ve had it with history for a while. It’s just done, O.K.?”

There was something more in her face, the way her eyes slid away from his. The world shifted further out of balance.

“Are we talking about history?” he asked.

The blue-green eyes flickered. “Yes.”

He was unable to leave it at that. “Is that all we’retalking about?”

A long sigh. “No.” Her eyes met his, distant, already withdrawn. “I’m sorry, Aaron. Look, it was never anything serious. I don’t have time for anything serious. You knew—“

“Then why?” It was a force of effort, centuries of practice that kept his voice low and even.

“Why not?” She shook her head, and a faint burst of her scent was released. “You don’t understand. I don’t have a thousand years. I don’t have five hundred years. I told you when we began: I wanted you.”

“Before the Radin Treatment, when we all mortals, people had time for something serious,” he began.

“That was when we were all mortals,” she echoed. “I don’t have enough time to waste doing anything but what I want. Look, if you built up some kind of fantasy about me—I didn’t ask you to.” Her tone was aggrieved. She watched him, injured and sulky behind the curtain of honey-colored hair.

Aaron stood up. “O.K.” He took his reader and shuffled disks together every which way, into the carrier. “O.K.” Slung the reader from its strap over his shoulder. Stood for a moment looking at Cate, waiting for a reprieve he knew would not come, one last time. Then he turned and left her.

Walking back to campus through the mass of university habitats, Aaron kept his mind studiously blank. When he felt prickling behind his eyes, a tightness in his chest, I’m all right, he insisted. I am O.K. And he was; it surprised him to feel so little. He had meant to return to his office, but, once back on campus, Aaron was unable to feel any enthusiasm for reading more theses. He took a roundabout path home through the older section of the campus, studying the buildings, avoiding the eyes of people he passed. I’m all right. Mariclaire was out of the apartment when he reached home. Aaron left his reader on his desk and dropped into a chair in the living room, exhausted. He was asleep before Mariclaire got home.

I’m O.K. The more often he said it in the next few days, the truer it was. I am O.K. He did not tell Mariclaire what had happened with Cate, but the tension between them seemed to diminish of itself.Everything was returning to the way it had been. I’m all right. He kept office hours, finished up his classes, held the last session of the seminar with Cate’s seat empty across the table from him, and felt nothing. When he left the seminar building, he saw Cate, talking animatedly with one of the instructors from the literatures faculty. I am fine. Halfway across the campus, he passed David Campoy sitting alone in the Student Center. Just fine. He had almost reached his office when he realized his face was wet; he was crying. Suddenly he hurt so much the pain almost doubled him over.

At the Howard Clinic he had to strain to remember his psychiatrist’s name while the clerk watched him with cool impatience. “Dr.Brizzi,” he said at last.

“You don’t have an appointment? I can’t…no, wait, I’ll page him.” Aaron sat in the lounge, his face tight where the salt tears had crossed it.

“Mr. Tenniel?” Dr. Brizzi’s narrow, sad-eyed face was impassive.

“Do you have any time—“ Aaron began.

“Let’s go into my office.”

The hologram had been switched off. Aaron faced the doctor and a blank white wall as he clumsily tried to explain what had happened. As he spoke, he wept, and anger and rage and hurt tore at him physically until he was sick with them. Dr. Brizzi listened, nodded, urged him on in his confessions. And did not once ask how Aaron felt. Finally, Aaron told him: “It hurts. Jesus, it hurts.” He looked at Dr. Brizzi with bewilderment.

“You were in love, and she wasn’t.” Brizzi said quietly. Aaron winced. “Surely you knew the risks, after all these years.”

“I’d forgotten,” Aaron said.

oOo

When he went home that night Mariclaire was cooking. A faint steam of onions and stock hung in the air. Mariclaire looked up from the cutting board, smiled, tossed her head to shake the hair from her eyes. “You look exhausted.”

“I am exhausted.” He wanted to tell her about Nina, Cate, everything, but the words would not come, and he was not sure she needed to know about any of it. Finally he said, “I think I’ve had my last session at the clinic for a while.”

She thought about it for a moment. Then: “All better?”

“No worse than when I started.” He managed to smile at her, cocked his head toward the covered easel. “How’s the painting coming?”

“Coming. There’s something about it…but I don’t know yet. It needs more work.” She reached for a spoon. “Feel like eating in ten minutes?”

“Sounds good.” Aaron looked at her, drinking in the plane of high cheekbones and square jaw, her long eyes and full mouth, her familiarity. “Sounds great.”

Sometime in the night, Aaron rose from their bed. He felt weak but calm, as if a storm had gone through him and passed away, leaving a clean, empty shoreline. Mariclaire slept with her face buried in the pillow, arms over her head, surrendered to sleep. His feelings newly tender, it was easy to remember that he loved her, to feel that love as he looked at her. After a moment he left the bedroom.

In the kitchen he poured himself some juice and started to read the papers again. After a while curiosity began to tease him, drawing his attention away. He gave in, rose, and pulled the cloth from the new painting. He looked at it for a few minutes, carefully, then Aaron went to Mariclaire’s storage area, rummaged through the canvases and boards there until he found the one he wanted. Blue Hell. He examined it, the structure of it, the long stretches of paint, the heavy mass in the upper corner, brilliant crimson shadows, the radii of blues and grays. Then, carefully, so that Mariclaire should not know that he had been there, he returned the canvas to its place and went back to look at the new painting.

It was all there, the structure, the same shapes and shadows, a story told with new words. Some things, he thought, must be stated and restated, discovered and rediscovered, each time imperfectly, each time closer to the truth.

Aaron stared at the painting for a while longer, then recovered it and went back to his work.

Copyright © 1990 by Madeleine E. Robins

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction