Telempath by Spider Robinson

Author:Spider Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2015-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

It was the second visitor that surprised me.

I’d just finished a tolerably good Last Meal, and from a strong sense of tradition as much as from prudence I ate heartily. Being upwind of the building’s front door, I didn’t even get spoor warning. I simply looked up and Alia was there.

A giant punched me under the heart with considerable vim, and the overseer part of my brain that wanted to slam the cerebrum into high gear was informed that the cerebrum was not accepting calls at this time. I rummaged desperately in my bag of wisecracks and grabbed the first one I found.

“If Shorty’s had his dessert, would you ask him to come in?” I rolled to my feet.

“Isham, I…”

“Aren’t you the heroine who brings the prisoner a Pfeil with a cake in it? You can’t be the prison chaplain, and Collaci doesn’t wear his grenades under his shirt like that. I know you’re not my lawyer, or they wouldn’t let you see me. What are you here for?”

“I came to hear a babbling idiot do vaudeville routines,” she said dryly.

“Den you in de right place. Fus’ dey gimme ten years in Leavenworth. Den dey gimme ’leven years in Twelveworth. Now I gets five and ten in Woolworth, and do you know how much wool worth these days? Say, why haven’t you asked me to shut up by now? It sure is a hell of a note when you can’t even piss people off any…”

“Isham, please shut up.”

I shut up, and we looked each other over for a hundred years or so. My first conscious thought was that she looked different somehow, the first person I had seen who didn’t look precisely as they had before I’d left home to go shorten Wendell. I couldn’t nail down the difference, and, finally controlling my funk, looked closer.

The hair was the same, soft brown wings falling from a center part, worn just a bit longer than was practical. The line of her jaw was as regally strong as I remembered it. Same almond eyes, with that improbable tiny red splotch next to the left pupil and no eyebrows worth mentioning. Same slender neck, skin the color of coffee extra light disappearing beneath the familiar blue turtleneck. Powerful shoulders, hands callused but surprisingly graceful for a blacksmith’s, with long spatulate fingers. Same generous, low-slung breasts, the right still markedly larger than the left. Same wide hips, soft belly and pouting mound under the very same patched jeans I had last seen pooled at her feet, four months ago…

I ceased my catalog hastily; a breeze was blowing and I was upwind. And as my eyes traveled prudently upward, I saw the little things I had missed, the subtle differences. At the place where waist became hips, two pads of flesh that I didn’t recall distorted the twin curves. The belly and breasts appeared fuller, more padded. The mouth, for which I had never found any adjective but “chewable,” now had firm things happening in the corners—as if it’d done some chewing of its own.

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