Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

She was wearing, on this humid summer day, a white blouse, a short blue skirt. As she spoke she was unbuttoning herself, tossing one garment after another to the floor. The pale heavy mounds of her breasts rose into view. They were glistening with perspiration. Her nostrils flared; her lips drew back in what apparently was meant as a hungry, seductive smile.

I will be your slave. How could she have known? His very fantasy, of so many years ago!

He was beginning to develop a headache. Save my boy. I beg you. I will be your slave.

Karl-Heinrich didn’t want Barbro Ekelund to be his slave, not any more. He didn’t want Barbro Ekelund at all. He had yearned for her long ago, yes, desperately, when he was sixteen, and he had her, for whatever that had been worth, and that was that; she was history, she was an archival fact in his memory, and nothing else. He was no longer sixteen. He had no desire for ongoing relationships. He wanted no sentimental reunions with figures out of his past. He was content simply to call women up by computer almost at random, new ones all the time; have them come to him, briefly serve him, disappear forever from his life.

All those troublesome human entanglements, those messy little snarls of dependency and whatnot, that any sort of true personal transaction involved: he had tried to avoid them all his life, had kept himself as far above the worldly fray as any Entity, and yet from time to time he seemed to find himself becoming ensnarled in them anyway, this one wanting a favor, that one offering some sort of quid pro quo as though he needed one, people pretending they were his friends, his lovers. He had no friends. There was no one he loved. There was, he knew, no one who loved him. That was satisfactory to him. There was nothing Karl-Heinrich Borgmann needed that he could not simply reach out and take.

Even so, he thought. Be merciful for once. This woman meant something to you for a little while, a long time ago. Give her what she wants, do what needs to be done to save her son, then tell her to put her clothes on and get out of here.

She was naked now. Wriggling provocatively before him, offering herself in a way that would have made him delirious with delight many years ago, but which seemed only absurd to him, now. And in another moment she would step within the security perimeter. “Watch out,” he said. “My desk area is guarded. If you get any closer, you’ll trip the barrier screen. It’ll knock you cold.”

Too late.

“Oh!” she cried, a little gasp. And flung up her arms, and went spinning backward.

She had touched the security field, it seemed—at least the fringe of it—and had had a jolt from it. She recoiled from it dramatically. Karl-Heinrich watched her stagger and lurch and crumple and go tumbling to the floor, landing with a hard thump in the middle of the room. There she pulled herself instantly into a little ball, facedown in a huddled sobbing heap, her forehead grinding into the ancient Persian carpet from the museum. This was the first time Karl-Heinrich had seen anyone encounter the field. Its effect was even more powerful than he had expected. To his dismay she seemed now to be going into hysterics, her whole body jerking convulsively, her breath coming in wild gulping gasps. That was annoying; annoying and yet somehow sad, too. That she should suffer so.

He wondered what to do. He stood over her, staring down at her twitching naked form, seeing her now as he had seen her in that illicit spy-eye view of all those years ago, the fleshy white buttocks, the slim pale back, the delicate tracery of her spine.

For all his earlier indifference, a surprising touch of desire arose in him now, even in the midst of her agony. Because of it, perhaps. Her vulnerability, her misery, her utter pitifulness; but also that smooth taut rump heaving there, the lovely slender legs coiling beneath her. He knelt beside her and let his hand rest lightly on her shoulder. Her skin was hot, as though she was feverish.

“Look, there’s really no problem,” he said gently. “I’ll get you your son back, Barbro. Don’t carry on like that. Don’t.”

Moans came from her. This was almost like a seizure. He knew that he should send for help.

She was trying to say something. He could not make out the words, and leaned closer still. Her long arms were splayed out wide, the left hand drumming in torment on the floor, the other one clutching at the air with quivering fingers. Then, suddenly, she was turning, rolling over to face him, jerking and twitching no longer, and there was a ceramic knife in that outstretched hand, arriving there as though by magic—pulled out of thin air? Out of her pile of discarded garments?—and, utterly calm and poised, she rose toward him in a single smooth movement and thrust the blade with extreme force, with astonishing strength, deep into his lower abdomen.

Pulled it upward. Brought it ripping like an irresistible force through his internal organs until it came clinking up against the cage of his ribs.

He grunted and clasped his hands to the gaping wound. He could barely cover it with his ten outspread fingers. Surprisingly, there was no pain yet, only a dull sense of shock. She rolled backward from him and sprang to her feet, looming over him like a naked avenging demon.

“I have no son,” she said vindictively, biting off the edges of the words, as his eyes began to dim.

Karl-Heinrich nodded. Blood was spouting from him, covering the Persian carpet with a pool of blood. He attempted to tell the servo to send help, but he found himself unable to make a sound. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, in soft furry silence. In any case what good would calling for help do? He could feel himself already dying. His strength was leaving with him with every spurt. Eyesight growing blurry, inner systems shutting down. He was finished, a dead man at twenty-nine. He was surprised how little he cared. Perhaps that was what dying was like. So they had caught up with him at last. How odd that she would be the one. How appropriate. “I’ve dreamed of this for twelve years,” the lovely assassin said. “We all have. What joy it is to see you like this now, Borgmann.” And said again, this time making the name sound like the curse it had become: “Borgmann.”

Yes. Of course. That was borgmann, no capital letter. She had killed him, all right.

But there was consolation all the same, he told himself. He would die famous. His very name was part of the language now; that he knew; that knowledge he hugged lovingly close to himself as his life dwindled away. He would be dead in a few moments more, but his name—ah, his name—that would be immortal, that would march on through human history forever. Borgmann… borgmann… borgmann.

The baby was a girl. Steve and Lisa named her Sabrina Amanda Gannett. Everyone at the ranch came around to go ooh and ahh and kitchy-koo, as the cultural norms demanded.

But there was an enormous amount of muddle and turmoil before things got to that point, of course.

First there was the awkward business of Lisa’s family’s quisling affiliations for Steve to deal with. So far as his uncle Ron was concerned, that was a simple matter. “You have to dump her, boy, that’s all there is to it. Carmichaels just can’t hang out with quislings. They just can’t.—Don’t give me that stricken expression, my friend. Out of all the pussy there is for you to find in California, why did you have to wind up with one of them?”

That, though, was Ron, who was cool and smooth and handsome and who over the years had had any number of girlfriends, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, and at least a couple of wives too, before meeting up with Peggy and deciding to mend his wandering ways. Easy enough for him to say: dump her. What would someone as magnetic and charming as Ron understand, really, about poor pasty-faced Steve Gannett, who didn’t know how to keep his own shirt-tails tucked in and whose entire sex life up till the time he had met Lisa had consisted of serving as an animated dildo for his heartless cousin Jill? Did Ron think that it would really be so easy for him to toss Lisa back into the pool and find himself another girlfriend just like that, half an hour later?