Context is everything. Breastfeeding is beneficial for all newborns—but for the elderly male cardiac patients it can be fatal.
—Neil O'Heret Brain, Tits for Tots
Rafalli paused. "You might think it an artistic error, starting big like this. Like a playwright putting his best song in Act One. But I find that if I demoralize you completely at the start, everything thereafter has a delicious sense of despair to it, even the comparatively minor indignities. Perhaps I'll ask you if you agree, when it's time to work on your tongue." Suddenly he giggled like a little girl, a sound much more shocking than his usual jovial chuckles and chortles. "Poor man. You've spent your life as a private dick. And you're going to die with no privates, and no dick." He laughed until the tears came.
I had long since set my face in cement, too angry to give him any satisfaction it was still within my power to withhold. But to my dismay tears leaked silently and unbidden from my own eyes. I did not cry or sob, but my eyes ran. And the sick son of a bitch drank my tears like fine wine with his eyes.
"Enjoy your thoughts," he said, and started his knife arm forward, and pushed the watchstem, and turned to smiling stone.
The first thing that struck me was the change in the light. The fact that it had a strong reddish color didn't surprise me. That had been in the MacDonald book, which I had so stupidly allowed to mislead me about the way a time-slowing watchstem is used. Something about light red-shifting, the visual equivalent of the roar on Mary's tapes that turned out to be hiss at half speed, I guess. What I hadn't been expecting was that the light would have texture to it. It was as though the air were full of some shimmering translucent red gas, which could just be seen to boil and swirl, much faster than dust dances on air currents. Like a space-filling swarm of almost invisibly tiny red gnats. It was hard to focus on any particular chunk of it, but in the aggregate it glowed in a shifting random pattern. It reminded me of a special effect meant to indicate an energy creature on Star Trek. It seemed to me that even in a drastically slowed world, this did not make sense. If Raffalli's watch slowed time enough to make photons visible, we should not have been able to capture him on tape. And photons as I understood it did not behave like gnats.
But what did I know about physics? Screw the swarming red light; what else was there to see, to occupy my thoughts for the next ten dreadful minutes?
Except for the light, not much. Everything was utterly still. If I tried I could see, at least nearby, the motionless dust motes the gnats were slipping between. A leather sling dangling from the ceiling, which Raffalli had brushed a few moments ago, was frozen about five degrees from vertical. I managed to kill a good thirty seconds thinking about interesting and amusing optical effects you could produce with a watch like this.
Nine minutes and twenty-five seconds to go.
I remembered, and burned for, my boast to lady Sally earlier today that I would land like a great express train on the testicles of Christian Raffalli this night. Just backwards, Hump old boy. As usual.
Nine minutes and twenty seconds, I reckoned.
I mentally photographed everything within my field of vision, using several different focuses and lens stops, applied fixative, and filed all the pix carefully in a folder that was scheduled to be burned before sunrise.
Nine minutes and ten seconds, at a guess.
I remembered for the first time that I could move, as much as my bonds allowed. It was harder than usual to move my head or fingers, but not onerously so. Like being in molasses. So I rotated my head through its full traverse and did a further photo study of the entire room from as many angles as I could, and added it all to the file. I would have loved to do a video series, but unfortunately nothing in the room would move . . .
No, that wasn't quite true. One thing was moving.
Raffalli's right arm. In ultraslow motion. I noticed it when the blade moved far enough for a swarm of glowing red gnats to take up temporary residence on it as reflected highlight. It visibly moved along the blade as I watched.
I had discovered during my photo shoot that it was possible to torque my head out far enough forward to get a look at the three-digit readout on the damned watch on my forearm. He'd known it would be. Eight minutes and forty-five seconds.
Was it time yet to think of Arethusa, and how achingly close I had come to having it all? Or save that for near the end? Better perhaps to total up all my life's other regrets first. That ought to fill four minutes handily, even in this hypercharged state. Then another four minutes on what I'd do to Raffalli if I could. Try to avoid the subject of what he was going to do after I was dead: it wasn't my problem any more. Let's see: start with Uncle Louie?
A very small group of red gnats winked at me softly, like a distant firefly. The knife was not the only thing moving in the room. There was one other thing.
The doorknob. It was turning . . .
A kind of sick joy swept over me. My friends were risking everything to attempt a desperate last-minute rescue. Either they had pieced together enough clues to guess it was a good shot, or they were placing their trust in God and getting partly lucky. They weren't going to be in time—I knew my gonads were history, waiting only for publishing delay lag—but just maybe Raffalli would find mutilating me engrossing enough to distract his attention for just long enough for Priscilla to tear his spine out. I might even live to bleed on his corpse. The choice between live eunuch and dead stud is a hard but simple one. These days, maybe a man could even live long enough to see testicle regeneration put on Medicare. I was in the mood for any sort of consolation prize at all.
So it was crucial to gauge just how good Pricilla's timing was going to be, how good her odds of taking him successfully. I tried to cross my eyes, put one on the blade and the other on the doorknob, and estimate relative speeds and distances.
The doorknob was turning awfully damned slow. But so was the knife moving toward me slowly. The doorknob had much less distance to cover than the knife. But the knife only had to reach me. The doorknob had to turn, then get out of the way, and then Pris had to cover a distance much greater than the knife did. But suppose Pris were holding? Say she had a knife herself: could she throw it across a room faster than a man could stab, with accuracy? If she had a gun, could she get a vital spot faster than he could retrieve his watch? So many variables. I spread the fingers of my left hand as far apart as I could, in the hope of preventing him from simply slipping the loosely bound watch off over my hand for faster retrieval. A watchband fastening can be awfully recalcitrant for a man in a hurry. On the other hand he could always duck behind me and use me for cover while he worked on it.
My hopes kept rising and falling like a kangaroo on a trampoline. Minutes ticked slowly by while I oscillated between elation and despair. With every minute my data got better. By the time I had good long baselines for knife and doorknob, the doorknob had stopped turning and was coming toward me. I started to hope that Raffalli's aim was good. It would be a shame if he missed slightly, got my femoral artery, and I never got to learn how it turned out. I couldn't be sure, but my best guesstimate was that Priscilla was going to lose the race by a hair's breadth. And all the rest of us, too—
All at once my heart turned to stone as hard and unmoving as the room.
All I could see by that point through the slowly widening crack at the door was a female fist, clenched and moving, oddly further away from the doorway than seemed right. But almost the instant I recognized it as a fist, I recognized whose it was. I can't tell you how, but I was utterly certain. It was, of course, the last person on Earth I wanted to see come through that door first.
Arethusa . . .
I had a real bad twenty or thirty seconds of subjective time there—especially when her face began to come visible.
And then it began to dawn on me just how unbelievably fast she was coming.
Don't get me wrong: it was a snail's pace. But a snail's pace was a hell of a lot faster than the door was moving. Or the knife. As I watched and marveled, she hit the door with her shoulder, and within only seconds had convinced it to start getting the fuck out of her way.
I had lots of time for mental calculations. I did the math in my head three times, using varying assumptions. It seemed to me that she was moving just a little more than twice as fast as humanly possible. That gave me a broad enough hint to figure it out.
For all of her life, Arethusa had been, as far as she was concerned, using one mind to run two bodies and two brains simultaneously. Both bodies were her, and she had plenty of energy and attention for both. But suppose she abandoned one?
If she poured all her mental energy into a single body, could she not turbo charge it into prodigious feats of strength and speed?
She had backed off to the far side of the hallway, signaled the second-quickest person in the building, Pris, to open the door, and gone into warp drive. At this point she was a cannon ball in flight.
I tried not to wonder whether her other body could survive, even briefly, as a derelict. Was medulla alone enough to keep its machinery going for the extent of a firefight? And could the supercharged body take that kind of load without burning out? There was all too much time to consider both questions. And no way to answer them . . .
She was running flat out, head down, in great slow leaping strides. She probably could not have interpreted very well what her eyes were seeing at that speed, so she wasn't trying. She had planned her move in detail before the door ever opened, and was now utterly committed to whatever it was.
With infinite slowness, I became ever more certain that she would succeed. She might actually even reach him before he gelded me!
Damn: ten minutes of boring suspense, and then a photo finish! I hoped she'd planned wisely. There was no visible margin for error. The knife was no more than a foot or two away—and the ten minutes had to be nearly up . . .
Halfway to him she gathered herself and left the floor. Her body began rotating slowly, her head and upper body falling behind and her feet coming up.
Her plan became apparent. She had long since reached the highest possible speed any amount of running could give her. Now she planned to send all that awesome kinetic energy down those strong legs and deliver it with both feet to his kidneys. It is the kind of blow that will cause any man to pull his elbows back sharply, instantly, and quite involuntarily. She knew the layout of the room well, and knew his height, and had made an excellent guess as to where he would probably be standing.
The only part she had gotten wrong was the one that only a lot of prior rehearsal could have helped. She fractionally misjudged how long it would take her to get her feet up high enough.
Even then it might have been all right. Her piledriving feet might just have caught him behind the knees, making his torso jerk backwards violently enough to make the knife miss me. Or at least fall short of its intent.
But somehow she sensed her problem in midflight—faster than she should have been able to, and by pure acrobat's intuition—and used the last ten seconds of her trajectory to tuck her feet. It was her knees that caught him in the kidneys, just as no-time ran out on the watch, and flung him into me like a body-checking hockey player.
Suddenly everything was happening at once.
I had a tiny increment of time—how long it was, on what scale, I cannot say—in which to exult. Then I looked down and saw the knife. Or rather the hilt of the knife, sunk flush into the meat between ribs and hip, on my left side. Oh hell, I thought, that's not a problem. It'll be at least five great long seconds before it even starts to hurt. But as I thought that, I was simultaneously interpreting a loud dull noise I'd heard at the instant of Time-Start as the front of Arethusa's head impacting against the back of Raffalli's. I recalled that the chances of producing unconsciousness are slightly higher for an impact from the front than one from behind. Sure enough, there was Arethusa coming to rest on the floor, bouncing slightly, out cold—and there was Raffalli, still on his feet, ignoring his shock and the agony he must have been in, and snatching the watch from my forearm with damnably nimble fingers. I could not prevent him.
I saw Priscilla crouched in the open doorway, pointing a gun at him. But the fucking door itself was just bouncing closed again from that initial titanic shove. I saw her decide to hold fire rather than fire wild. Mike or someone would surely kick the door out of her way again for her—but Raffalli had the watch now. He slapped it against his wrist to set the connection, held it there, and reached with one finger for the stud. The door rebounded open and Pris came into view again, but I understood with terrifying certainty that he could reach and press that stud before even a high-velocity slug could reach him.
I still think I was right. But the question never came up. Priscilla's gun did not throw slugs. A red wire, incredibly vivid and bright, suddenly ran arrowstraight from her fist to his head, through it, and past my ear. His head exploded, spraying boiling meat and juice, and the incandescent red wire vanished. A second one grew between Pris and the watch, which was in mid-air, spinning end over end, and it exploded too.
I don't care who else is in the race, or what their stats are. The laser wins, every time. Lightspeed, you know.
My God, I thought, I've shit myself. And I don't even care. Glad I skipped dinner, I suppose, but I wouldn't mind if I needed a ladder to climb down off the pile. What a tough guy. Wait'll the boys find out.
I blinked down at Arethusa. And silently said to a God I didn't believe in even then, Lord, if you've only got enough blessing for two bodies, give it to her. Doctor Kate was at her side, that was nice. And good ol' Mike was just finishing the unstrapping of my wrists. It's about time, I thought, and giggled at the pun. I tried dopily to remove that annoying knife, for cosmetic reasons. He did not have to stop me: my hands were useless. I gave up, and collapsed into Lady Sally's strong, comforting arms.
"You done good, Joe," Mike's booming voice said in my ear. I wasn't sure I believed him, but it was a pleasant thought to take with me into darkness . . .