To Live Again Read online

  A couple of sandaled monks had slipped into the room. Roditis heard the soft chanting of the great mantra: “Om mani padme hum.” Beside him Noyes’ voice took it up. Roditis, too, unselfconsciously began to repeat the catchphrase. They said it was the essence of all happiness, prosperity, and knowledge, and the great means of liberation. Om. The liberation they talked about was one Roditis did not seek: nirvana, oblivion. Mani. No one sought that, really, except possibly in places like India, where rebirth meant yet another breaking on the wheel of karma. Padme. Hum. Om. Who wanted liberation from existence? First a man wanted nourishment, and then strength, and then power, and then long life. And then rebirth so he could savor the cycle once more. Om mani padme hum. Roditis participated in the chant but not in any wish that the chant be fulfilled, and he suspected that of those about him only Noyes might seriously feel otherwise. Om.

  The religious interlude was over.

  It was time to talk business.

  His voice tougher, less ethereal now, the guru said, “I’m glad you took the trouble to visit us, Mr. Roditis. Some men a whole lot less important than you can’t be bothered to pay a personal call even on their own philanthropies.”

  Roditis shrugged. “I’ve been curious about this place for a long time. And since I had to be in San Francisco anyway—”

  “Was it a successful trip?”

  “Very. We closed the contracts for the entire Telegraph Hill redevelopment. Five years from now there’ll be a hundred-story tower on top of that hill, the biggest thing that’s been put up anywhere since ’96. It’ll be the Pacific headquarters of Roditis Securities.”

  “I look forward to blessing the site,” said the guru.

  “Naturally. Naturally.”

  “In our humble way we have our own building program here, Mr. Roditis. Would you care to view our grounds?”

  They stepped through an irising gate of burnished beryllium steel and entered a broad spade-shaped garden several hundred yards deep. The rear was planted in blue flowers, delphinium, lupine, convolvulus, several others of varying heights, surmounted by a massive wistaria whose tentacles reached in all directions. Cascades of flowers dangled from the many limbs of the wistaria. Closer by were humbler flowers, and it dawned slowly on Roditis that the entire garden was laid out in the shape of some vast mandala, circles within circles, an esoteric significance of the highest degree of solemn phoniness. The thought came from Kozak; Roditis himself had not perceived the pattern. Beyond the garden lay rocky, uncleared land sloping down the hillside.

  “There is to be our refectory,” said the guru. “Here, the library. On the far side, overlooking the bridge, we anticipate building a guidance center for the uninformed. And just here to our left we will establish a soul bank.”

  “Your own soul bank?”

  “For storing the personae of the chapter members. Obviously we can’t allow our own people’s personae to be thrown into the general bank. We must remain in control of each incarnation. So we propose to establish a complete Scheffing-process installation here and carry out every stage of rebirth.”

  “That’ll cost you a fortune!” Roditis said.

  “Exactly.”

  Noyes said, “When do you expect to build it?”

  “Within the next several years. It depends on our receipt of funds, of course. We have the basic equipment for a pilot plant now. We’ve already had a fine contribution from the estate of Paul Kaufmann. And I understand his young nephew Mark is planning to match it.”

  “Mark. Yes.” Roditis sucked his belly in sharply at the painful mention of his enemy. “He would. A very generous man, Mark Kaufmann.”

  “A generous family,” said the guru.

  “Quite. Quite. They all recognize the obligation of the wealthy to repay the society that has treated them so well. As do I,” Roditis said a moment later. “As do I.” Noyes looked pained. Roditis kicked pebbles at his ankle. A rich man does not need to be subtle, he told himself, except where subtlety pays.

  They received the full tour. They were handed rare Tibetan manuscripts, prayer wheels, and associated sacred artifacts. They visited the young lamas in their chambers. They received samples of the lamasery’s publications, its painstaking theological substructure for the modern materialistic cult of rebirth. Noyes fidgeted, but Roditis calmly followed the guru about, asking questions, nodding in frequent response, showing utter concentration and complete patience. The shadows lengthened. Twilight was creeping across the continent. The guru made no request for a contribution; Roditis offered none. At the end, they were back in the guru’s own chamber for farewells.

  “May you attain your heart’s desire,” said the guru, “whatever it may be. I’m right to assume that a man of your station has some unfulfilled desires, even now?”

  Roditis laughed. “Many.”

  “I have no doubt that some of them will be gratified shortly.”

  “That’s kind of you,” said Roditis. “I’m grateful for your sparing us so much of your time today. The visit was fascinating.”

  “Our pleasure,” said the guru.

  A youthful lama with a bony face took them to the room where they had left their clothing. They dressed and departed from the lamasery in silence. Noyes seemed to have a powerful headache. Probably good old Jim Kravchenko was hammering on the inside of Noyes’ skull again.

  They got into the car.

  “In the morning,” said Roditis, “transfer a million dollars fissionable to their account.”

  “That much?”

  “Kaufmann gave them a million and then some, didn’t he? Can I afford to do less?”

  “You’re not Kaufmann,” Noyes pointed out.

  “Not yet,” said Roditis.

  2

  Risa Kaufmann was sixteen years old: old enough for her first persona transplant. She had come of age, so far as the Scheffing process was concerned, three months earlier, in January. But that had been the time of old Paul’s death, and it was bad taste for her to bring up the matter of the transplant just then. Now things were quieter. The black armbands had gone into the drawer; the rabbis had stopped bothering them; family life had reverted to normal. Talk of transplants was very much in the air. Everybody in the family was worried about who was going to get old Paul. They didn’t speak about it much in front of her, because they still assumed she was a child, but she knew what was up. Her father was sizzling with fear that John Roditis would get Paul. That would be a funny one, Risa thought. It would serve everybody right for being so rude to the little Greek. But of course Risa knew that her father would fight like a demon to keep Paul Kaufmann’s persona from finding its way into Roditis’ mind.

  She giggled at the thought. Touching a shoulder stud, she caused her gown to drop away, and, naked, she stepped out on the terrace of the apartment.

  A thousand feet below, traffic madly swirled and bustled. But up here on the ninety-fifth floor everything was serene. The April air was cool, fresh, pure. The slanting sunlight of midmorning glanced across her body. She stretched, extended her arms, sucked breath deep. The view down to the street did not dizzy her even when she leaned far out. She wondered how some passerby would react if he stared up and saw the face and bare breasts of Risa Kaufmann hovering over the edge of a terrace. But no one ever did look up, and anyway they couldn’t see anything from down there. Nor was there any other building in the area tall enough so that she was visible from it. She could stand out here nude as much as she liked, in perfect privacy. She half hoped someone would see her, though. A passing copter pilot, cruising low, doing a loop-the-loop as he spied the slinky naked girl on the balcony.

  Risa laughed. This building belonged to the Paul Kaufmann estate. Once they got the will straightened out, title would pass to her father, Paul’s nephew and chief heir. And one day, Risa thought, this building will be mine.

  She let her unbound hair stream free in the morning breeze.

  She was a tall girl, close to six feet tall, with a slim, agile body,
dark hair, dark, sparkling eyes, and what she liked to think of as a Semitic nose. It pleased her to pretend she was a Yemenite Jew, a lively daughter of the desert, descendant in a straight line from the stock of Abraham and Sarah. Certainly she looked like some Bedouin princess; but the sad genetic truth was that the Kaufmann line could be traced back to twentieth-century London, to nineteenth-century Stuttgart, to eighteenth-century Kiev, and then became lost in nameless Russian peasantry. She clung to her tribal fantasy anyway. She began to touch her toes, rapidly, not bending her knees. Hup. Hup. Hup. She could do it a hundred times, if she had to. Her small breasts bobbled and jiggled as she moved down, up, down, up. Risa was profoundly glad she hadn’t sprouted a pair of meaty udders, even though bosoms were becoming fashionable again lately. She went in a good deal for nudity in her costume, and small girlish breasts were more pleasing to the eye, she thought, than full heavy ones. Of course, she might get bigger later on, but she didn’t think so. She hadn’t grown much, in height or bust or anything else, since she had turned fourteen. Hup. Hup. She lay down on the terrace, cool tile against her back and buttocks, and lashed her heels through the air.

  It might be interesting, she thought, to find out what it was like to be bosomy. To know what it is to carry all that meat below your clavicles. Risa made a mental note to request some top-heavy breasty wench when she applied for her first persona transplant. By checking through the memories she inherited, she’d get a notion of what voluptuousness was like without the bother of gaining all that nasty weight.

  When will I get the transplant, though?

  That was the frustrating part. At sixteen she was medically old enough for the Scheffing process, but not legally competent to apply for it. She needed her father’s consent. It had been simpler last year when Risa decided it was time for her to part with her virginity; she merely took the next rocket to Cannes, picked out a likely stud, and surrendered. But they’d throw her out of the soul bank, Kaufmann or not, if she walked in without the proper consent form.

  She looked over her shoulder and saw figures moving on the far side of the sliding glass door between the living room and the terrace. Risa got to her feet. Her father was coming toward her. His girl friend, the Italian bitch, Elena Volterra, was with him. Smiling, Risa lounged against the wall of the terrace and waited for them to come out to her.

  Her father was wearing some sort of sprayon business suit, very chic, very shiny. His long black hair was slicked down across his skull in a style that highlighted the savage cragginess of his features, the hard thrust of the cheekbones, the vulpine chin, the corvine nose. Somehow he managed to be handsome, Mark did, despite the collection of outcroppings and bladed planes that was his face. Risa was desperately in love with him, and they both knew it, of course. And hid the fact, as they must. His eyes barely flickered over his daughter’s angular nakedness.

  “Looking to visit the hospital?” he asked. “April’s too early in the season for sunbathing in this latitude.”

  “It’s warm enough out here, Mark,” she said sullenly.

  “Put something on.”

  “Why should I if I’m not cold?”

  “All right,” Mark said. “Don’t. But I don’t have to talk to you, either. Not while you’re bare.”

  “How bourgeois of you, Mark. Since when have you enforced the nudity taboo?”

  “This has nothing to do with taboos, Risa. Simply with your health. Now and then I have to take some sort of interest in your physical welfare, don’t I? And—”

  “Very well,” Risa said. “We’ll talk inside.”

  Defiantly naked, she sauntered past them, through the glass door, and slung herself down in the abstract webfoam cradle near the great screen-window, wrapping her hands about an upraised knee. Her eyes passed from her father to Elena, who was clearly annoyed by the interchange. Good. Let her stew. Elena had the sort of body Risa had been thinking about a short while back. Fleshy. Indeed. Full hips, solid thighs, high, bulky breasts. And always dressed to display her assets. Risa didn’t envy her father’s mistress her figure. Usually Elena kept herself cosseted with stays and braces so that the flesh made its intended effect; but it was easy for Risa to summon the memory of that beach party last year when they had all been swimming naked, and poor Elena had jiggled and bounced so dreadfully. A body like that was designed for the nakedness of the bed, or the semibareness of formal dress, but not for casual outdoor nudity. Risa asked herself if, should Elena die tomorrow, she would request her persona on a transplant. She doubted it. It would be a pleasantly spiteful thing to do to Elena, but Risa didn’t think she cared to have the woman in her mind, even as a temporary.

  Mark and Elena came in from the terrace. Risa chuckled. She had won that round by a dozen points. Her father had come up here with Elena because he knew it annoyed her to see the two of them together, but he had found her nude, which annoyed him because it awakened the nasty Electra thing in him and humiliated him before Elena, so he had made a fuss about her catching pneumonia in the cold outdoors. Whereupon she had come obediently inside, but remained nude, compounding the effect of rebellion and provocation. Mark was smiling too; he knew that he’d been beaten by an expert, and he couldn’t help being proud of her.

  His apartment was a floor below hers. She had left a message for him, asking that he come up and see her when he came home for lunch.

  She said, “I wanted this to be a private conference, Mark.”

  “You can talk in front of Elena. She’s practically a member of the family.”

  “That’s odd. I didn’t see her at Uncle Paul’s funeral.”

  Mark winced. Risa chalked up another cluster of points. She was really sharp this morning. Elena was fuming!

  Huskily, Elena said, “If this is a family conference and I’m intruding—”

  “I’d just like to talk to my father a little while,” Risa said. “If it’s all right with the two of you. I hate to come between you, but—”

  Mark shrugged a dismissal. Elena snorted in a way that made the pounds of flesh above her neckline ripple and dance. Wigwagging her hips, she stalked from the apartment.

  “Now will you put something on?” Mark asked.

  “Does my body make you that uncomfortable, Mark?”

  “Risa, it’s been a difficult morning, and—”

  “Yes. Yes, all right.” She knew when it was time to cash in her winnings. She picked up a robe, wrapped it about herself, and politely offered her father a tray of drinks. He chose one capsule and pressed it to his arm. Risa did not hesitate to select a golden liqueur herself, administering it expertly and shivering a little as the ultrasonic spray drove the delicious fluid into her bloodstream. She eyed her father carefully. He was tense, wary; this Roditis thing had him worried, no doubt. Or perhaps it was merely the complexity of unraveling Uncle Paul’s will that keyed him up.

  She said, “I think you know what I want to ask you about.”

  “Summer vacation on Mars?”

  “No.”

  “You need money?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then—”

  “You know.”

  He scowled. “Your transplant?”

  “My transplant,” Risa agreed. “I’m well past sixteen. Uncle Paul’s funeral is out of the way. I’d like to sign up. Can I have your consent?”

  “What’s your hurry, Risa? You’ve got a whole lifetime to add new personae.”

  “I’d like to begin. How old were you when you got your first?”

  “Twenty,” Mark told her. “And it was a mistake. I had to have it erased. We were incompatible. Can you imagine it, Risa, despite all the testing and matching I took on the persona of an ardent anti-Semite? And of course he woke up and found himself in a circumcised body and nearly went berserk.”

  “How did you pick him?”

  “He was a man I had admired. An architect, one of the great builders. I wanted his planning skills. But I had to take his lunacy with his greatness, don’t
you see, and after three months of sheer hell for both of us I had him erased. It was several years before I dared apply for another transplant.”

  “That must have been unfortunate for you,” Risa said. “But it’s getting off the subject. I’m old enough for a transplant. It’s unreasonable of you to deny your consent. It isn’t as if we can’t afford it, or as if I’m unstable, or anything like that. You just don’t want to let me, and I can’t understand why.”

  “Because you’re so young! Look, Risa, sixteen is also the minimum legal age for getting married, but if you came to me and said you wanted to—”

  “But I haven’t. A transplant isn’t a marriage.”

  “It’s far more intimate than a marriage,” Mark said. “Believe me. You won’t merely be sharing a bed. You’ll be sharing your brain, Risa, and you can’t comprehend how intimate that is.”

  “I want to comprehend it,” she said. “That’s the whole point. I’m hungry for it, Mark. It’s time I found out, time I shared my life a little, time I began to experience. And there you stand like Moses saying no.”

  “I honestly think you’re too young.”

  Her eyes flashed. “I’ll translate that for you, dearest. You want me to stay too young, because that way you stay young too. So long as I remain a little girl in your estimation, your whole time scheme stays fixed. If I’m eight years old, you’re thirty-two, and you’d like to be thirty-two. But I’m past sixteen, Mark. And you won’t see forty again. I can’t make you accept the second, but I wish you’d stop denying the first.”

  “All your cruelty is exposed today, Risa.”

  “I feel like going naked today. Physically and emotionally. I won’t hide anything.” Languidly Risa selected a second drink for herself; then, as an afterthought, she offered her father the tray. As she pressed the capsule’s snout to her pale skin she said, “Will you sign my consent form or won’t you?”

  “Let’s put it off till July, shall we? The market’s so unsettled these days—”

  “The market is always unsettled, and in any event it has nothing to do with my getting a transplant. Today is April 11. Unless you give in, I’m going to bear an illegitimate child on or about next January 11.”