Songs of Love & Death

Ivan did. Ivan said, “Wow, man, that is a good story.” He slapped Martin’s shoulder enthusiastically. “That’s like Niven writing Bradbury. I didn’t know you were into that stuff. You got any others?”

Martin did not waste time protesting the complete truthfulness of his account. He said, “Well, I’m not a writer, you know that—I’m just fooling around. You think I ought to change anything? I mean, if you were writing it?”

Ivan considered. “One thing, I’d find a way for them to meet up. Not rocket ships, no Buck Rogers shit like that, I’m thinking transporters or some such. I mean, that’s exciting, man—that’s risky. Yeah, he’s seen her picture, he’s seen somebody’s picture, but what if she turns out to have a tail and horns and six-inch teeth? Mail-order brides, you know?”

“Well, I don’t think the guy’s thinking about getting together with her. I mean, she’s sort of famous on her world, and he’s married, and he could be a lot older—”

“Or she could. He don’t know how long it takes her planet to get around the sun, or anything about the biology. She could be seven hundred or something, you never know.” Ivan patted Martin’s shoulder again. “Tell you one thing, I’d sure like to have a laptop like the one you thought up. Dell ever makes that puppy, I’m first in line.”

Martin spent a good deal of time looking at the computer himself, even when the link to Kaskia was not open. His growing sense of the laptop’s true potential had, paradoxically, begun to distance him from the machine that he still believed loved and cared for him. “You scare me,” he said aloud to it more than once. “You’re with the wrong guy, we both know that.” To his mind, the One Key, employed skillfully by someone who knew what he was doing, could probably open channels quite likely beyond the reach of the Hubble Telescope. “But that’s just not me,” Martin said sadly. “I wish it were. I really do.”

He did finally get in touch with Barry, who, as expected, claimed absolute ignorance of the laptop’s provenance, and could offer no clues toward tracing its history. “I told you everything I know the day I put it in your hands, kid.” He gave Martin the warm, confiding smile that not only attracted new victims every day, but continued to reseduce the old ones, who knew better. “I told you, you belonged together. Was I wrong? Tell me I was wrong.”

Martin sighed. “It’s like the time you sold me the motorcycle.”

Barry’s grin widened. “The Triumph. The Bonneville T100. You looked great on it.”

“I almost killed myself on it. It was way too much power for me. I sold it two weeks later and only got half what I paid you for it.” Martin rubbed his left shoulder reflectively. “This computer’s the same way.”

“I can’t take it back,” Barry said quickly. He looked alarmed, which was exceedingly rare for him, and it was Martin’s turn to smile reassuringly.

“I don’t want to sell it. I just wish I could live up to it.” He sighed again. “I wish we really did belong together.”

Lorraine came home from work then, and Barry promptly disappeared without a further word. Martin thought, Those two understand each other better than I understand either one of them. He wondered whether Lorraine had heard the last thing he said to his cousin. He wondered whether he cared.

The link, or channel, or the hailing frequency, or whatever it actually was, seemed to be open to wherever Kaskia was every five days, sometimes in the afternoon, like that first time, but most often at one or two in the morning. He often asked Kaskia what time it was there, but she seemed to have no concept of measuring time that Martin could translate into his mind. They usually spoke, through the good offices of the laptop screen, until nearly dawn, when Martin would slip quietly into bed beside Lorraine and try to catch at least two or three hours of sleep before heading off to work. It was a wearying regime, but generally manageable.

Kaskia’s English had improved further each time they communicated. When Martin questioned how she could be learning the language so fast, since she had not known of its existence until a few weeks before, she replied lightly, Must be good teacher you. Asked whether Martin could possibly learn her language in the same way, her answer was a somewhat puzzled How could you. She had not yet mastered question marks, or else there was a translation issue involved that he did not understand.

Which did not mean that she did not ask questions. She asked constantly and charmingly—if sometimes startlingly—about the smallest details of Martin’s life, from when and where and how he slept, to the names of every fruit and vegetable he handled in his work, and whether there were nildrys on his planet. Martin never found out what nildrys were, but retained the distinct impression that a planet—or did she mean a house?—without nildrys was beneath contempt.