Habu. James B. Johnson
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Are you all right?” Alex was looking with concern into his eyes.
She touched his arm and he had to restrain himself from jerking away and hurting them both. A few more moments, just a few more.
She watched the struggle going on within him and grimaced in sympathy. “It passes.” Her voice was reassuring.
She’d mistaken his symptoms. She thought he was going through the mind-bending mental torture which occurs when you haven’t had a Change in too long. When you were overdue for the Change, the pressure built and built and ripped your brain apart with excruciating pain. It was why people suicided.
“Sss—okay,” he managed to get out.
“I’ll comm a medic for a painkiller,” she said and moved to a wall comm unit.
“No, pleasse. I’ll be all right in a minute.” He moved slowly to dissipate some of the accumulated energy.
Ironically, he realized that pressure, in fact, was building within his mind, reinforcing the point that he was overdue for the Change. But it wasn’t bad. Yet.
When he recovered, he went to the recreation deck and ran for two hours on the treadmill. He set the machine on the maximum resistance and at a forty-five degree angle. It was the equivalent of running uphill with twice your own body weight.
As he ran, Alex sat and watched him.
Occasionally, people would come over and observe, marveling at the almost impossible physical feat. Reubin ignored them. The more he ran, the more energy he burned. Sweat rained from his body and with each drop he was more and more free of Habu. He was purging himself of adrenaline inspired energy and at the same time of Habu.
Alex got tired of watching him and worked out on weight training machines while he finished up.
“I need a beer,” he said when he was done.
“You need to replace fluids,” she told him.
“Make it protein beer, hold the alcohol, then.” While emotionally and physically drained, he felt like his old self.
“I’ve read of therapeutic effects of inordinate physical exertion,” Alex said, “but that’s more than I can handle. Did it really work to relieve the pressure?”
“Yess,” he said.
The romance progressed.
Being Original Earthers brought Reubin and Alex closer together. Reubin overheard the purser calling them “very conspirational.”
Reubin decided that Alex Sovereign was hiding something. Or didn’t want to address something. No matter how much she discussed the past, it was her current life to which she referred. Nothing about her previous lives, if any, prior to her last Change and other Changes before that. It was common courtesy and protocol not to inquire too deeply into previous lives.
Also, there were little things. Alex was highly intelligent. Reubin detected a hint of dissatisfaction with her work; he thought that some problems had occurred lately in her job. But he didn’t ascribe too much importance to these thoughts because she was a government minister, and in any government—especially in a high position—there is bureaucratic infighting, political pressure, cliques, cronyism. Reubin always thought that governments should be run as businesses under the free enterprise system.
On the other hand, he liked and respected her. Her values were similar to his, her judgment faultless. Reubin respected her privacy. After all, he was hiding something and did not wish her to pry into his past—and she hadn’t.
All of which made Reubin sad—for once—that he was changing lives again. Another giant step from his past. While there were ways you could trick the Long Life Institute, when they gave you the Change, they arranged your passage to new or even soon-to-be pioneered planets. This was their basic charter, and one of the reasons governments seldom tried to interfere in LLI business.
But no matter what he did or where he went, he could never, ever lose Habu.
Reubin had no answers. He had arranged passage to the sector capital, Webster’s, where the liner was heading. He had business (mostly financial arrangements) to take care of before he took the Change. Alex would transship back to Snister.
The passion of their affair surprised Reubin. He was happier than he’d been in centuries. Not only was Alex Sovereign compatible with him sexually, but they shared an intellectual niche which made him comfortable and frightened him at the same time.
Frightened him because he didn’t want to lose her. And he was due to take the Change.
He was busily scheming how to outwit the LLI again when Alex surprised him as he’d never been surprised before.
One shipboard day, they were floating in his cabin at zero gravity shooting rubber bands at a reading disk floating in the middle of the room.
“And they say the ancients were the best writers,” Alex said.
Reubin’s next shot scored and the disk spun aside.
“The Last of the Mohicans. Too bad that didn’t occur one generation earlier.”
“Don’t blame the Mohicans, Rube—”
“Reubin.”
“—it’s the writer.” Alex floated around collecting rubber bands.
“How in hell could such trash last so many centuries and remain acclaimed literature?” Reubin scratched his head. “Trumped up plot, illogical choreography, major characters with the brains of dinosaurs. And I still don’t understand that business about the fog and the bodies and the lake and—”
Alex came back toward him, grasping his knee to steady herself in midair. All that happened was that they both began a slow spin. “The whole thing’s a matter of theme of national definition. See Hawkeye as a messiah, or a legendary mythical persona, such as Audie Murphy, Captain Danjou, Habu.”
He winced and grunted.
Habu mythical? Not when he was alive in this very room. It was always disquieting when people talked about Habu in front of him.
But her next words made him forget. “Reubin?”
He wrapped a rubber band around the base of his thumb and snapped the end on the tip of his pointy finger. “Umm?”
“If I take the Change with you, would you marry me honest and true and could we go out to the frontier together and pioneer and explore and live happily ever after together?”
After a moment of looking into her eyes, he said, “You’d do that?”
“In a Manhattan minute.”
“No questions asked?” he said, face burning.
“I already know what I need to know,” she said contentedly.
“Your daughter? Tique?”
“She’s been taking care of herself for sixty odd years now. It’s the relationship I’d miss.” She paused. “We’ve some friction now. She thinks I’m a corporate mogul who rapes the land. I think she’s an eco-freak. But regardless....”
He let out the breath he realized he’d been holding. He grasped her hand and steadied them by a handhold of the ceiling. “I haven’t felt like this in two or three hundred years.” The more Changes some went through, the more precipitate their decisions. The more they were wont to do offbeat things. Reubin hoped this romance wasn’t a result of too many Changes. He wanted it to be real.
“Me neither. You gonna answer my question?”
“I love you, Silver Girl.” His words surprised even himself.
“Me, too, Mystery Man. I want to spend a lifetime or two with you.”
“I suspect it’ll be an adventure,” he said.
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