“We may not open Maison Long until after you have this baby; we can’t set this up overnight. We must sell or lease this place—which means finding buyers who can keep it out of the red; it’s always expensive to have to take a place back.
“We must find a suitable property in the right neighborhood, for sale or lease with option to buy. I may buy it and rent it to the corporation, so as not to tie up too much of the corporation’s capital in senior financing. Find the place, remodel it probably, redecorate it certainly. Money for fixtures. Not much for squeeze; I know where the bodies are buried in this burg, and I won’t hold still for excessive squeeze.
“But, my dear, you will not be on the cashbox; we’ll hire help, and I’ll set it up so that they can’t steal. You will be moving around, looking pretty, smiling at people—and keeping your eye on everything. But you’ll do this only at lunch and dinner. Call it six hours a day.”
Joe looked startled; Llita blurted out, “But, Aaron, we always open up as soon as we’re back from market and stay open late. Otherwise you lose so much trade.”
“I’m sure you work that hard; this draft proves it. And that’s why you think getting pregnant ‘doesn’t take long.’ But it should ‘take long,’ dear. Work is not an end in itself; there must always be time enough for love. Tell me—When you caught J.A. in the ‘Libby’, were you rushed? Or did did you have time to enjoy it?”
“Oh, goodness!” Her nipples suddenly crinkled. “Those were wonderful days!”
“There will be wonderful days again. Gather ye rosebuds, time is still a-flying. Or have you lost interest?”
She looked indignant. “Captain, you know me better than that.”
“Joe? Slowing down, son?”
“Well . . we do work long hours. Sometimes I’m pretty tired.”
“Let’s change that. This will not be a lunchroom; this is going to be a high-priced gourmet restaurant of a quality this planet has never seen. Remember that place I took you kids for dinner just before we lifted from Valhalla? That sort. Soft lights and soft music and wonderful food and high prices. A wine cellar but no hard liquor; our patrons must not have their tastebuds numbed.
“Joe, you will still go to market each morning; selecting top-quality food is something you can’t delegate. But don’t take Llita and do take J.A. if he’s going to learn the profession.”
“I sometimes take him now.”
“Good. Then come home and go to bed again; you’re through until you cook dinner. Not lunch.”
“Huh?”
“That’s right. Your number two chef handles lunch, then helps with dinner, your big moneymaking meal. Llita is hostess both for lunch and dinner but keeps an especially sharp eye on quality at lunch, Joe, since you won’t be in the kitchen. But she never goes to market and should still be in bed when you get back from market—did I say that your quarters will be attached, just as now? You’ll both be off duty two or three hours in the afternoon—just right for the sort of siesta you used to grab in the ‘Libby.’ In fact, if you two can’t find time under that regime both for sleep and plenty of happy play—But you can.”
“It sounds grand,” Llita conceded, “if we can make a living with those hours—”
“You can. A better living. But instead of trying to get every buck, Llita, your object will be to maintain top quality while not losing money . . and enjoy life.”
“We will. Aaron, our beloved . . captain and friend, since I must not say that ‘dirty’ word, we enjoyed life even as children when I had to wear that horrid virgin’s basket—because it was so sweet to snuggle together all the long nights. When you bought us—and freed us—and I didn’t have to wear it, life was perfect. I didn’t think it could be better—though it will be, when we don’t have to choose between sleep and trying to stay awake for loving. Uh, you may not believe this since you know what a rutty wench I am—but lots of times sleep won.”
“I believe it. Let’s change it.”
“But—No breakfast trade at all? Aaron, some of our breakfast customers have been coming to us the whole time we’ve been on Landfall.”
“Net profit?”
“Well . . not much. People won’t pay as much for breakfast even though materials sometimes cost as much. I’ve been satisfied with a very small net on breakfast. Advertising. I’d hate to tell our regulars that we won’t serve them any longer.”
“Details, dear. You can have a breakfast bar in one corner and not open the main dining room—but Joe won’t cook breakfasts, and neither will you. You’ll be in bed with Joe at that hour—so that your eyes will sparkle at lunch.”
“J.A. knows breakfast dishes,” put in Joe. “I started him on breakfasts.”
“Details again. Maybe we’ll work out a deal with my godson whereby he makes money of his own, if the breakfast bar makes money—”
(Omitted)
“—sum it up. Take notes, Llita. I agree to accept this draft while you two—especially you, Llita—agree that it settles forever any debt between us. Maison Long to be a closely held corporation, fifty-one per cent to you two, forty-nine percent to me, all three of us directors, and we can’t sell stock save to each other—except that I retain option to change all or part of my share to nonvoting stock, in which case I can assign it.
“My share of the initial financing is this draft. Your share is what we get for this lunchroom—”
“Hold it,” said Llita. “We might not be able to sell for that much.”
“Details, dear. Stick in a paragraph to let you pay the corporation any discrepancy out of your net—and there will indeed be a net; I don’t stick with a business that doesn’t make money, I always cut my losses. Let’s have another paragraph that permits me to supply more capital, if needed, by buying nonvoting stock—and we’ll use something like that to hang onto our top help, too. Not have Joe train a chef and then have him walk out. Never mind, let’s get the outlines straight. You two are the bosses; I’m silent partner. Salaries for you two on the scale we discussed, escalating with rise in net, as discussed.
“I don’t get a salary, just dividends. But we all will be working our tails off to get this rolling. I’ll come in from Skyhaven as necessary; there’s nothing going on there now that my overseer can’t handle. But once it’s rolling, I do nothing; I sit back and let you two make us rich. But—listen carefully—once it’s rolling, you two must stop working your tails off, too. More time in bed. More time for fun out of bed. You won’t make us rich working lunchroom hours. Have we reached a meeting of minds?”
“I think so,” agreed Joe. “Sis?”
“Yes. I’m not certain New Canaveral will support a gourmet restaurant like those lovely ones on Valhalla—but we’ll try! I still think our starting salaries are too high, but I’ll wait until I’ve struck a trial balance on our first quarter before I argue the matter. Just one thing, Captain—”
“My name’s ‘Aaron.’ ”
“‘Captain’ is safer than that ‘dirty word.’ I’ve agreed to the whole thing—and I’m durned well going to make it work!—as you always say. But if you think this makes me forget a night you dragged me out of your bed and bounced me on my bum on a hard steel deck, you can think again! Because it hasn’t!”
I sighed, Minerva, and said to her husband, “Joe, how do you cope with her?”
He shrugged and grinned. “I don’t, I just get along. Besides, I see her side of it. If I were you, I’d take her to bed and make her forget it.”
I shook my head. “But I’m not you, that’s the point. Joe, I learned long before you were born that free tail is invariably the most expensive sort. Worse than that, we three are business partners now—and I can see six possible outcomes if I accept your notion of a solution—and any of the six could cause Maison Long, Ltd., never to lift off.
(Omitted)
—just as I knew it would, Minerva; I’ve never had a nonspeculative investment pay off so well. They tried to imitate us—but they couldn’t imitate Joe’s cooking
or Llita’s management. I made a bundlel
IX
Conversation Before Dawn
The computer said, “Lazarus, aren’t you sleepy?”
“Don’t nag me, dear. I’ve had thousands of white nights, and I’m still here. A man never cuts his throat from a sleepless night if he has company to see him through it. You’re good company, Minerva.”
“Thank you, Lazarus.”
“The simple truth, girl. If I fall asleep—fine. If I don’t, then no need to tell Ishtar. No. that won’t work; she’ll have graphs and charts on me, won’t she?”
“I’m afraid so, Lazarus.”
“You durn well know so. A good reason for me to be a little angel and wash behind my ears and get this rejuvenation over is to get my privacy back. Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving him of either. That was another thing I accomplished by setting up Maison Long; I got my kids privacy they didn’t know they needed.”
“I missed that, Lazarus. I noted that they had more time for ‘Eros’—and I saw that that was good. Should I have inferred something else from the data?”
“No, because I didn’t give you all the data. Not a tenth. Just the outline of some forty years I knew them, and some —not all—of the critical points. For instance, did I mention the time Joe decapitated a man?”
“No.”
“Not much to it and it wasn’t important to the story. This young blood tried to share the wealth one night by sticking them up. Llita had J.A. in her right arm, nursing him or about to, and couldn’t reach the gun she kept at the cashbox; she couldn’t fight and was bright enough not to try against those odds. I suppose this dude didn’t know that Joe had simply stepped out of sight.
“Just as this free-lance socialist was gathering up their day’s receipts, Joe lets him have it, with a cleaver. Curtain. The only notable thing about it was that Joe acted so quickly and correctly in the crunch, for I feel sure that the only fighting that he bad ever tried was that which I forced on him in the ‘Libby.’ Joe did everything else properly, too—finished taking the head off, threw the body into the street for his friends to take away if he had any, for the scavengers to remove if not—then displayed the head in front of the shop on a spike meant for such purpose. Then he closed his shutters and cleaned up the mess—then may have taken time to throw up; Joe was a gentle soul. But it’s seven to two that Llita did not throw up.
“The city’s committee for public safety voted Joe the usual reward, and the street committee passed the hat and added to it; a cleaver against a gun rated special notice. Good advertising for Estelle’s Kitchen but not important otherwise, save that the kids could use that money—helped pay the mortgage, no doubt, and wound up in my pocket. But I wouldn’t have heard of this minor dustup had I not been in New Canaveral and happened to stop by Estelle’s Kitchen when the real head was removed—flies, you know—and the plastic trophy head custom required Joe to display was substituted for it by the street committee. But I was speaking of privacy.
“When I picked the property for Maison Long, I made sure that it included space for a growing family, that’s all, since they had three bucking and one in the chute the night we planned it. Rearranging hours gave them privacy from each other, too. Happy as it is to snuggle and make love, nevertheless, when you are really tired, it is often good to have the bed to yourself—and the new routine not only allowed this but necessitated it, part of each day, through staggering their working hours.
“But I also planned room to give them privacy from their children—and to cope with another problem Llita did not have straight and Joe may not have thought about. Minerva, can you define ‘incest’?”
The computer replied, “ ‘Incest’ is a legal term, not a biological one. It designates sexual union between persons forbidden by law to marry. The act itself is forbidden; whether such union results in progeny is irrelevant. The prohibitions vary widely among cultures and are usually, but not always, based on degrees of consanguinity.”
“Y‘r durn tootin’ it’s ‘not always.’ There are cultures which permit first cousins to marry—genetically risky—but forbid a man to marry his brother’s widow, which involves no more risk than it did for the first union. When I was a youngster, you could find one rule in one state, then cross an invisible line and find exactly opposite laws fifty feet away. Or some times and places both unions might be mandatory. Or forbidden. Endless rules, endless definitions for incest, and rarely any logic to them. Minerva, so far as I recall, the Howard Families are the first group in history to reject the legalistic approach and to define ‘incest’ solely in terms of genetic hazard.”
“That accords with the records in me,” Minerva agreed. “A Howard geneticist might advise against a union between two persons with no known common ancestry but place no objection to marriage of siblings. In each case analysis of genetic charts would control.”
“Yeah, sure. Now let’s drop genetics and talk about taboo. The incest taboo, although it can be anything, most commonly means sisters and brothers, parents and offspring. Llita and Joe were a unique case, brother and sister by cultural rules, totally unrelated by genetic rules—or at least no more so than two strangers.
“Now comes a second-generation problem. Since Landfall had this taboo against union between siblings, I had impressed on Llita and Joe that they must never let anyone know that they thought of each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister.’
“Fine so far as it went. They did as I told them, and there was never a lifted eyebrow. Now comes the night we planned Maison Long—and my godson is thirteen and interested, and his sister is eleven and beginning to be interesting. Full siblings —both genetically hazardous and contrary to taboo. Anyone who has raised puppies—or a number of children—knows that a boy can get as horny over his sister as over the girl down the street, and his sister is often more accessible.
“And little Libby was a redheaded pixie so endearingly sexy at eleven that even I could feel it. Soon she was going to have every buck in the pasture pawing the ground and snorting.
“If a man pushes a rock, can he ignore an avalanche that follows? Fourteen years earlier I had manumitted two slaves—because a chastity girdle on one of them offended my concept of human dignity. Must I find some way to put a chastity girdle on that slave’s daughter? Around we go in circles! What was my responsibility, Minerva? I pushed the first rock.”
“Lazarus, I am a machine.”
“Humph! Meaning that human concepts of moral responsibility are not machine concepts. Dear, I wish you were a human girl with a spankable bottom long enough for me to spank it—I would! In your memories is far more experience on which to judge than any flesh-and-blood can have. Quit dodging.”
“Lazarus, no human can accept unlimited responsibility lest he go mad from unbearable load of unlimited guilt. You could have advised Libby’s parents. But your responsibility did not extend even to that.”
“Um. You’re right, dear—it’s dismal how regularly you are right. But I am an incurable buttinsky. Fourteen years earlier I had turned my back on two puppies, so to speak—and that the outcome was not tragic was good luck, not good planning. Now here we go again, and the outcome could be tragic. I felt no ‘morals’ about it, dear—just thumb rules for not hurting people unintentionally. I didn’t give a hoot if these children ‘played doctor’ or ‘make a baby’ or whatever the kids there called their experimenting; I simply did not want my godson giving little Libby a defective child.
“So I did butt in and took it up with their parents. Let me add that Llita and Joe knew as much about genetics as a pig knows about politics. Aboard the ‘Libby’ I had kept my worries to myself, and never discussed the matter with them later. Despite their remarkable success in competing as free human beings, in most subjects Llita and Joe were ignorant. How could it be otherwise? I had taught them their Three R’s and a few practical matters. Since arrival on Landfall they had been running under the whip; they hadn’t h
ad time to fill in gaps in their education.
“Perhaps worse yet, being immigrants, they had not grown up exposed to the local incest taboo. They were aware of it because I had warned them—but it wasn’t canalized from childhood. Blessed had somewhat differenct incest taboos—but the taboos there did not apply to domestic animals. Slaves. Slaves bred as they were told to, or as they could get away with—and my two kids had been told by highest authority—their mother and their priest—that they were a ‘breeding pair’ . . so it could not be wrong, or taboo, or sinful.
“It was simply something to keep quiet about on Landfall because Landfellows were fetched in the head on this subject.
“So I should have thought of it earlier. Yeah, sure, sure! Minerva, I plead other obligations. I could not spend those years playing guardian angel to Llita and Joe. I had a wife and kids of my own, employees, a couple of thousand hectares of farmland and twice that much in virgin pinkwood—and I lived a long way off, even by high-orbit jumpbuggy. Ishtar and Hamadryad, and, to some extent, Galahad, all seem to think I am some sort of superman simply because I’ve lived a long time. I’m not; I have the limitations of any flesh-and-blood, and for years I was as busy with my problems as Llita and Joe were with theirs. Skyhaven didn’t come to me gift-wrapped.
“It wasn’t until we put aside restaurant business and I got out presents Laura had sent to their kids, and had admired the latest pictures of their kids and shown them pictures of Laura and my kids and all that ancient ritual, that I thought about it at all. The pix, of course. This tall lad, J.A., all hands and feet, wasn’t the little boy I recalled from my last visit. Libby was about a year younger than Laura’s oldest, and J.A.’s age I knew to the second—which is to say that he was about the age I was when I was almost caught with a girl in the belfry of our church about a thousand years earlier.
“My godson was no longer a child; he was an adolescent whose balls were not just ornaments. If he had not tried them as yet, he was certainly jerking off and thinking about it.