The Householder

In my defense, let me say this: I was provoked. And if that isn't enough for you, let me offer the idea that it was Fate. Pick any reason you want, if you need a reason. For my part, reasons interest me less all the time. Reasons are pretty, and frail, and made of spun sugar. They nicen up everything that you do because you were going to do those things anyway -- that's all there is to it.

How to untangle this tale, what distant root to trace it to? Well, let's start with this: My aunt died. Myasha was my great-aunt, if you want to be technical about it, my Namma's youngest sister. Namma lived to a ripe old age -- almost 70 -- and when she died, Aunt Myasha took sole ownership of the house they owned together. Namma had been married for forty years to Grandpa Pike when he died, nine years before her, but Namma and Aunt Mysasha had bought the house together before Namma got married; she was in her early twenties.

Where they got the money for the place remains vague, with many different stories circulating among the family. Cousin Jeb says that Namma is the one who secured the house. His take is that she was dating a rich man before she met and married Grandpa Pike, who eventually became a Naval Admiral, and could have bought her that house himself, instead of living in a home his wife had paid for. The rich man, for some reason, bought Namma the house -- Cousin Jeb calls it whoring, but he's a crude cobscobber -- and she put her sister's name on the deed as co-owner as much out of spite toward the rich man as devotion to her sister. Then Namma dumped the rich guy and kept the place, which is what women do, according to Cousin Jeb. He would know, I guess. Despite his born-again Bible thumping, he's been divorced three times, and pretty much lost everything he owned with each marital dissolution.

The story is given to change. Sometimes Cousin Jeb identifies Aunt Myasha, instead of Namma, as the "whore" who dated the putative rich guy. Sometimes he even comes out with an even more scandalous version of the tale, and claims that, yes, it was Namma who got the house, but she bought it using her own money. In this version of the tale, Namma was a lawyer who made a nice salary not only before she married Grandpa Pike, but even after their nuptials. That was before the gender laws put married women back into the home.

But the gender laws were decades ago, when there was still something left of the middle class. Some people say that the gender laws never really existed, or if they did, they didn't exist the way liberal streamcast chat-heads describe. I always have to wonder: If that's true, why is it the case that only liberal chat-heads talk about the gender laws? You never hear the conservative chat-heads even mention them. It's like, in conservative history, the gender laws never even existed. Just like the harshback against gays never existed, except in the liberal universe. The liberal chat-heads talk all the time about the harshback and the camps and the forced "cures" that crippled and maimed gays. Come to think of it, though, the conservatives never talk much about history at all. They do make an awful lot of predictions for the future, and no one seems to notice when those predictions don't come true. That makes it easy for the conservatives to make the same predictions over and over again. Why shouldn't they, since those prognostications never come true?

But the interesting thing about history is that it exerts a real force over the present day, even if you ignore it in favor of fake futures that never arrive. I know something about it. I've seen it up close.

Jeb and his fancy lawyers didn't lose a femtosecond. When Aunt Myasha died, they were on the spot to take the keys to her house. My status didn't matter a bit to Cousin Jeb. I was just the no-account worker who had spend six years as Aunt Myasha's caretaker, seeing to both her and to the house, which wasn't easy. By the time I came on the job they had both been years in decline. When Jeb swept in, the day after Aunt Myasha's death, it was with visions of a future in which the house would sit on his roster of properties, divided into tiny one-occupant cells. It made me sick and furious to see him parading through the house with his lawyer -- the brother of his wife, by the way -- and also with a contractor the lawyer had brought in. They were making all sorts of plans about what walls to move, how many modules they could fit into the grand space of the living room, how they were going to demolish Aunt Myasha's beloved kitchen, how there was just enough room in the back to extend the building to enclose a whole new three-story rank of mods. Jeb was tapping on his mathpad, totting up payouts and profits. He never stopped... not until the reading of the will, which named me as sole heir. Then, Jeb stopped tapping. He stopped just long enough to turn to his lawyer brother-in-law and ask, "Is this going to be a problem?"

"Not much," the lawyer said.

Jeb shrugged and went right back to his mathpad. His cool, entitled confidence was infuriating, especially since it was so inevitably correct: There was nothing Jordan and I could do, really, to hold on to the place once he sicced his lawyer on us. We didn't have the money to fight their legal challenge, and they knew it. When Cousin Jeb was blindsided by another cousin, Janine, who had money and lawyers of her own, Jordan and I stood back and laughed at his indignant air of righteous hurt. Jeb had drawn up swift, detailed plans for how Aunt Myasha's house was going to serve his interests and make him money... well, it didn't happen that way. It was one more fake future. What really happened was Janine and Jeb fought each other to a standstill and then, once the cost of the fight exceeded profitability, they donated the house to a right-wing think tank and each of them wrote the market value off their tax bills. No legal determination had been made as to the house's ownership, but they were both members of the prime class, and so they could pretty much do anything they liked. They were Owners -- and the word or whim of any Owner was pretty much law.

That's what it's like in the year Jordan and I come from a future as fake as any other in terms of its rationalizations and its assumptions. But it's also a future of hunger, and overwork, and poverty for anyone who isn't of the Owner class. That makes the misery of the future all too concrete.

You know those gender laws I was talking about? They were contrived to preserved... or rather, to force... some vision of a nuclear family, a one-man and one-women household with two or three or six children and effortless success -- or at least the appearance of it. Those laws disappeared right along with the family unit once the Owners decided families were contrary to profits. That's why single-occupant dormods have become the dominant housing model: Every man and women is a lone wolf, with no need or opportunity to have a home together in which to raise offspring. Skeptics among the elite class refuse to believe that families in the working class have all but vanished; they call it a lie perpetrated by malcontents to justify fresh efforts at "wealth confiscation" and "income redistribution." They also insist that human nature would never allow for it -- that the status of society's working class majority will find a natural and sustainable floor to rest on, a natural lower limit. But those who live in the mods know the truth of it.

And it's not like the rule of law was going to be any help. Once the federal government was too weak to enforce laws over and above the minimal essentials (don't kill; don't commit arson; don't steal from Owners), we were left with the law of the street, and the law on the street became a matter of how much protection and how many rights you could afford. The realities of the Age of Ownership pushed shiny little fictions like Equality and Right to Life and Pursuit of Happiness to the margins.

And yet somehow the machine, corrupt as it is, keeps churning. Owners never seem to think about where, exactly, the next generation of workers is going to come from, and they make no exception or allowances for children in maximizing their exploitations. But once again, their cool lack of concern for anyone other than themselves seems to be automatically justified, because there are still kids, somehow. In a world of 12 billion human beings -- all but about a million of them facing grim prospects -- there are still kids. The fake futures keep on coming.

But the past is real enough... real, and cool, and spacious. And cheap! My gods, it's amazing how well we live on Jordan's salary, a sum of money that, in the future, would barely cover a single man's rent and two carefully skimpy meals per day. We have a house, which I maintain. When Jordan gets everything ready that we'll need -- he has access to SolNet and modern computers, after all -- he will, I hope, step through the Portcullis one last time and forsake the future forever. Then he can become a librarian at a university or a curator at a museum somewhere, and I will see about getting myself a teaching job here, doing what I used to do when we still had schools in the future.
Giving up his commute will be a relief in itslf. Other fellows living in our suburb have to take a train in to New York City each morning. So does Jordan, but he has an extra leg to his daily journey: He has to step through the Portcullis, a doorway through time that connects our adopted home era of 1947 with the year we've come from, a century and a half from now. The circuitry in his semiop activates the Portcullis in both time periods -- how, I don't really know. It's a matter of course in 2198 to step through an electromagnetic vortex that cuts through space (and, as it turns out, time), but I worry that someone in 1947 will catch sight of Jordan stepping into or emerging out of the Portcullis some day, and won't that be a headache.

Not that 2198 doesn't have its share of ongoing headaches. They're still looking for me -- or so Jordan says. He comes home at least twice a week with tales of how one muttonchop in particular, a guy named Jonas, corners him with news about leads in the case of my disappearance. I surprises me, because it's not like the vestiges of the city police department -- what's left of it after the so-called "patriots" gutted government at all levels -- has got the resources to permit a chop to spend a lot of time looking into one missing persons case. I think it's less a case of Lt. Inspector Jonas doggedly doing what he must to get his man than it's a matter of he likes my man. I'm not jealous about it, but that's what I think.

Muttonchops. They're a pain in the ass no matter where you might be in time. A couple of weeks ago we received a visit from a couple of local chops, Johnson and Richards. They stopped by in a strictly unofficial capacity, after someone tipped them off about two men living together in what's evidently called a "domestic arrangement." That's what the two chops call it, among other things. Johnson went so far to refer to us as "nancies." He and his shrimpy little sidekick made no secret of their attitude about guys like us. "This is a nice neighborhood," that scob Johnson said. "We don't like you here." As if we aren't two perfectly nice guys.

Jordan was a wreck after their first visit. Retreating to 1947 had been a stroke of brilliance, though it involved some complex planning -- especially around the issue of how to transfer and use electronic money from 2198 in this cash-based economy, in an epoch before the widespread use of computers. That's the sort of thing Jordan is good at, and I let him handle it. This new wrinkle, this gay-hating thing and the frowning, hard-faced enforcers of ridiculous prejudices... this falls into my purview. I'm the one who lives here full time and has got a sense for how 1947 actually works, and I'm also the one who finds himself relishing, rather than fearing, the challenge Johnson and Richards present.

Not that I'm too keen on the way those two chops... or, cops in the parlance of the day... lord their authority over us. This kind of prejudice is the storm cloud inside the silver lining of Jordan's bright idea. A simpler time, he'd called 1947. A better time. People were kinder, he'd said. And with the resources of the future still available to us, Jordan felt sure he'd have no problem creating the papers we would need. After all, the SolWeb is a deep datawell, and Jordan has access to (and the means to reproduce) birth certificates, driving licenses, military records, school transcripts, and any other identity-related documentation we need. The well-heeled private library where Jordan works has all sorts of modern-day equipment and specially reproduced vintage paper stock. The other day, Jordan even smuggled home a pair of fake passports for us.

In this pre-computer age, the facts of anyone's life are really just as deep as the thickness of a sheet of paper. But if the datawell here is shallow, why, so are people's minds and their ethical sense. Everything in black and white, and I mean that literally. It never occurred to me before, but Jordan and I are both white men. Had we been black or brown or some other hue, I doubt the gods themselves could have protected us from the locals. Bad enough that we are two men who love men.

We had known, in a textbook sort of way, that people of the mid-20th century were hostile to gays, as well as non-Caucasians and non-Protestants. We weren't quite sure what they might be apt to do about it, but a visit from the chops wasn't something we'd have expected.

After the visit from the lawmen, Jordan worried about it all night. He finally got to sleep, but I lay awake, making a mental inventory. What did those self-righteous scobs have that made them think they were better than us? Authority? A Bible? The law? All the things that helped drive planet Earth from a green and clement Garden to a parched and ravaged toxic wasteland. No. To hell with all of that. All that people like those two have is the assumption, and illusion, of moral superiority. It's not like their magic sky daddy is actually going to descend, breathing fire and brimstone, to smite us. But it's in his name that they give themselves license to harass and harm others. It burns me up.

Where Jordan was fearful and anxious, I was plain mad. I ran through a mental list of the weapons I might have available to me here, or might have Jordan import from the future. I soon realized that was futile; living in the past was already something a risk. Not that the future is worth saving, really, but what if we did something that erased Jordan from existence? Or me? Or led to some other catastrophe we'd regret? -- if, that is, we even knew about it? Plus, kill two lawmen and forty-two come sniffing around.

There had to be a smarter way to handle the situation. But what did I have that could fend off those plainclothes cretins?

It wasn't even 4 a.m. when I had my answer and had worked out a strategy. I actually smiled as I drifted off to sleep.

***

"You think this is going to work?" Jordan asked.

He was just home from work. He was standing in the front hall, with a box of papers under his arm -- newspapers, that is, archival stuff from the library, the kind of cultural stuff only a big institution like the Kehishian can afford to collect and maintain. The world's wealthy Armenians give generously to the Kehishian. They love having an institution dedicated to preserving their heritage.

"It'll work. Especially if you have the pin drive I asked for," I told him.

Jordan passed over a pin-pouch. Opening it, I extracted the pin drive and inserted it into my DataGlas. The library's focus on genealogy, plus a century's worth of now-declassified NSA hyperdata available to any Joe Neckbone with access to the SolWeb, meant that Richards and Johnson, and all their descendants for the next century and a half, were open books. Scanning the information Jordan had secured, I saw that I had more than enough dirt on the both of them. Compared to this, us being gay -- and their distaste for us -- was easily managed.

They thought they could drive us out of our home? We could drive them both out of their cozy, corrupt little lives. We could do the same to the police chief, the town's board of selectmen, the governor, the state's senators and representatives, or anyone else these two bozos might try to sic on us.

***

Johnson and Richards didn't come calling that night, but I knew it would be soon. They had been stepping up their campaign of intimidation, parking their car cross the street, stopping by for a friendly chat every few days, phoning us -- just the "check up on our safety," as they put it. They seriously wanted us to up and leave, and I had the sense that if we didn't budge soon, we were in for some real fireworks.

But we weren't going to budge. We were going to shove back.

We watched for their car and listened for their steps. Anticipation had replaced dread. All was more than ready when, a couple of evenings later, the familiar peremptory rap came at our front door. Johnson eyed me with loathing as I opened the door to him and Richards. "Why, Officer Johnson," I cooed, not bothering to stifle my smile of delight. "And Officer Richards. Won't you come in, gents?"

Their stone-hard expressions of hate flickered with confusion, and they glanced at each other. Johnson pushed his way in, aggressively, as though he'd not been invited. "This ain't a social call, pansy," he said.

"No, of course not," I said. "You're here to make loose with some more threats and insults. It's a mission of expulsion. Am I right?"

Johnson actually fidgeted a little, standing there in the front hall and glaring at me. Richards was about to put in his two cents when I rounded on him.

"At least I get why your partner here doesn't care for us. It strikes a little too close to home when two -- what's that word? Nancies? When two nancies move into the neighborhood."

Again, the pair looked confused, and a glance flickered between them.

"Or does the name Orren Lakehulse not ring a bell?" I asked.

It was instantly clear that it did. Johnson went pale and Richards, his mouth tightening, threw a suspicious, angry glance toward him.

"Seventeen, but not so green," I sang. "Oh, the evidence isn't here, gents, so don't bother looking. But very soon now it's going to find its way directly into the hands of the police chief, not to mention the local media and the district attorney, unless I make arrangements for it not to. So if -- " I raised my voice at this point, turning back to Johnson, whose hand was staying toward his shoulder holster. "If you were contemplating rash and stupid actions, you really might want to reconsider."

Richards clearly had entertained doubts about his partner, because he was glaring daggers at the man. But whatever he had to say to Johnson, he decided to leave for later. He swung on me, his face red.

"While you, my dear Richards, you must hate gays just because someone told you that you have to," I chirped, short-circuiting his imminent show of bravado. "No, you don't mess around with high school basketball stars. You like beauty queens. In their early twenties, so they're really more like college girls, but still..." I shook my head. "That Luanne Phillips certainly is a dainty dish, isn't she? The sort who could raise three healthy children and still keep her man wrapped around her little finger... or keep his arm wrapped behind his back. From what I understand, she only looks delicate. But she's strong as an ox, and won't back down." I smile sweetly at his expression of sudden, flustered fear. "I wonder what your sweet Marcia would have to say about it? Or her father, the alderman?"

Johnson gave Richards a look of contempt. Richards looked like he was about to burst a vein or something. Unable to contain himself, he blurted out, "She don't have no children!"

"Maybe not yet," I chuckled. "But a man's a man, isn't he? And he doesn't always make use of his... what's it called? His French letter? We call them condoms where I'm from, but to each his own."

"That's all over," Richards snarled.

"Really? I don't think she knows that. And anyway, I don't think it would matter to Marcia. But what's a little adultery among the boys in blue? What's an open secret about where a man gets his satisfactions? No one will say anything. A wink, a nod... sure. But not a public condemnation from the pulpit or from the front page. And not a blemish on your service record, assuming it didn't get you fired. But even if it came to light, she's of age and it's not like your adventures in her jungle will get you sent up the river. Nope, for jail time one needs to turn one's attention to matters pecuniary -- such as your looting of police union funds. We have a word for that where I'm from, too. A nice word that rolls off the tongue: Embezzlement."

I let the syllables drift through the air.

"Now, gentlemen, I trust you understand that for me to know these things, I must have found some evidence. And what evidence! The devil, they say, is in the details, and there's just about no detail I don't know. If I know all these details of your misdeeds, then it stands to reason I am prepared to provide my compelling evidence to others, if I need to -- either to secure my safety or take my postmortem revenge. You can see all of that for yourselves, can't you? Because I really don't want to have to go through it step by step for your benefit."

They stared at me, motionless, barely breathing. In shock, I think.

"I trust I am not going to have to press my case with you?" I added. "I do have other things to take care of tonight. Meanwhile, murderous housebreakers, thieving rent boys, fires, car crashes... any or all of these ideas might seem like attractive options to you keepers of the law, but let me assure you how scalding your own bath is going to be in very short order if anything happens to me, or Jordan, or our home. In fact, if I were you, I think I might start being very watchful after our health because the arrangements I have made for the delivery of some juicy bits of evidence to some very interested parties aren't contingent on foul play. If I drop dead of a heart attack or get hit by lightning, the result will be the same as if Johnson here followed up on his first instinct to draw his gun and plug me. I know it's unfair, but that's life, my good men."

The two of them look stunned as they exited the house. I figured they might gather up some nerve and try something in a day or two; for that reason, I had dropped two envelopes in the mail that afternoon. Richards would be at work when he got a high-res photo showing him in a clench with his slice on the side -- a photo that was entered into evidence, or I should say will be entered into evidence a few years from now, by his wife during their divorce trial. I could imagine him prying open the envelope at his desk, careless, probably distracted with some other business as he sorts through his mail, and then startling at the sight... crumpling the photo, maybe, or stuffing it into a desk drawer.

Would he be bewildered as it the photo's origin? It has not been snapped yet, but a private detective named Ernest Haversham will take it next year, after he's hired by a suspicious Marcia. She'll go full-bore wild woman on him. The local newspapers are going to be full of it. Or... maybe not. Maybe Richards will see this as a shot across his bow by Fate, and think his way out of oncoming disgrace. He's going to need to do something, because Luanne was never going to let him go. At least according to the SolWeb records, Luanne Phillips and Alan Richards were wed in August of 1949, six days after his divorce from Marcia. Luanne is going to give him three children. They are going to move to another state, a Southern state, where he will work as a deputy sheriff for almost thirty years before dying drunk behind the wheel one afternoon.

As for the embezzlement... No one ever found out about that, not until 2198, when Jordan ran some cutting-edge forensic accounting software on Richards, the local police union, and the police department in this town in 1947. A pattern indicating theft of funds came to the program's attention. A quick cross-check confirmed that Richards was the treasurer for the local chapter of the police union. It made for wonderful ammunition.

Now, Johnson -- poor Johnson. He wasn't going to have enough time to make life seriously tough for us. As it happened, Orren Lakehulse's father was already onto him. The way it happened, according to SolWeb records, was Johnson and Lakehulse the younger met at a hotel one evening, just as they had been doing for over a year at that point. But Mr. Lakehulse the elder -- and the well-armed -- surprised them, bursting into the room and sending a shotgun blast into Johnson's chest. I figure that the time and place will be the same -- Sunset Lodge, this coming Thursday night at about 7:30 -- but the mood will be different. Johnson will want to interrogate the teen and find out if he's been telling about their secret relationship. He'll want to coax and cajole and threaten the boy to get details about who the kid has told, and then he'll want to impress on the teenager that silence is golden. Loose lips sink ships, after all. But old man Lakehulse is going to interrupt that lesson plan.

In other words, those two muttonchops have enough to worry about. A gay scandal involving an underage boy and a marital crisis that brings public shame and professional ruin in its wake! That's some juicy business! And two gay guys have moved into town? So what? Who has the time to think about that?

As soon as Johnson and Richards were gone, Jordan stepped into the room. He was holding a voltrod, which he'd intended to use on either or both of the muttonchops if they got rough. I had told him they wouldn't, but he needed to be sure.

"You have backups at your office, right?" I asked.

"All the dirt on every policeman, preacher, and politician in this town," Jordan said. "And while I was doing the accounting research I found out something else interesting."

I looked the question at him.

"Some real estate transactions, and the same kind of banking stuff I have to do to use my pay here in this time. I'm afraid it wasn't just busybody neighbor who ratted us out," he said.

"Then - who?" I asked him.

Jordan's mouth turned down hard at the corners.

***

"Mein Gott," Benni said, staring at us, horror-struck. He'd opened his door expecting an encyclopedia salesman, maybe, or some desperate guy shilling vacuum cleaners. Anyone, I'm sure, except his old friend from the Kehishian Cultural Library and his male mate.

"Hiya, Benni." Jordan was starting to pick up some of the vernacular of the time. It was sort of nice. I wondered how people in 2198 would react, or if they'd even notice.

"What are you doing here?"

"Cut it, old man," I said, stepping forward and shoving him away from the door. I stepped in, Jordan behind me, and Jordan shut the front door.

"What are you going to do?" Benni asked, his German accent combining with fear to give the words a pinched, squeaky tone.

I held up an autoinjector. "You," I said, "are supposed to be on the Moon, in a prison for terrorists."

"Yes, if they catch me they would send me there. But please don't."

"You send the chops after us," Jordan said, sounding angrier than I'd ever heard him.

"Yes, when I saw you here... I knew you had put together the story I was telling you about the time Portcullis..."

"And what? You didn't wanna share 1947 with an old friend?"

Benni was trembling and his watery old eyes were getting wetter. "They search after me. They offer money. Only here I am safe. But maybe not, if you... I wasn't sure if you..."

"Aw, shut it, you miserable old fucker," Jordan said. "Just so you know, we fixed those chops so neither they, and nor anyone else in this town, can do a fucking thing to us."

Two F-bombs in one breath? I'd married a fireball and never known it until now.

"I'm sorry," Benni quavered. "I am an old man, I am frightened. Don't... don't..."

Don't what? Did he think we were going to smash his garden gnomes or something?

"Come on," Jordan said to me. I shoved the autoinjector into my pocket, and we left.

But I was back the next day. I watched the old men drinking tea in his garden and then pottering around. When he went into his house through the kitchen door I followed, quietly, swiftly.

Benni turned and saw me. He didn't way a word, and I could tell he knew this was the end of the line. There was no use wasting words. "Remember this?" I asked Benni, showing him the autoinjector. "Your pal Jordan thought it was a sedative just in case we needed to calm you down. The truth is, it's BJ."

Benni looked blank.

"Bliss jism?" I prompted. He still looked blank. He must not have been familiar with the drug's street name. "It's a highly potent opium derivative from genetically engineered orchids. I have a bunch in my sunroom. Jordan has no idea. He just thinks they're pretty. I was going to be a medical chemist once, before I got sidetracked into a career of being a property manager and night nurse. I didn't mind. And I learned a thing or two, like how to refine BJ, and what the safe doses are for old coots like you. The other thing I learned is what BJ does to an old coot if you give him too much. Not that I ever did... but I have an advantage here. There are hidden places on the SolWeb where you can find out about people in facilities like the Lunar Detainment Stronghold. That's where you are, Benni. Jordan confirmed it. You're there, practically mindless, drooling in a cell. Now, how can that be? Unless it's already happened that you got a big bolus of BJ, and then found your way with a little help to the Portcullis. They picked you up not far from the Portcullis, you know, on July 19 of the year 2196, thanks to streetcams and defense-grade watchware. Funny how the government has been so starved and so stripped down, and yet there's always money and resources for keeping watch -- and locking people up."

I was calibrating the autoinjector as I spoke, muscle memory making it easy to carry on my monologue while I made the adjustments. Now I stepped forward.

"Nein," Benni whimpered, forgetting his Germanic stoicism and half raising an arm as though to ward me off. It was as good as an offering. I took hold of his arm and pulled him toward me roughly.

"I guess," I told him, "that having evidently done this once already, I have to do it again. I guess it's karma. Even if it isn't karma, if it's just me being mean to a little old man..." I smiled at him and put a little twinkle into it. "I'm really not sorry. After what you did? You think I'm going to let you stay here? Jordan is willing to let it slide, but I'm not. You've already shown your true colors..." I got his sleeve pushed up and, leaning into his frail body, pinning him against the wall, I pressed the tip of the autoinjector to his skin. "And I guess I'm now discovering mine."

The drug took effect quickly. The old man slid to the floor. I gave him half an hour, and then helped him to his feet. He was somnambulant, offering no resistance, his eyes dazed. He sighed a little from time to time, but said nothing. He'd grow a little more functional over the next couple of hours, but he'd never be lucid again.

I steered Benni toward the door. I had the car today, as I did every Friday. I'd timed it so that I could shove the old man through the Portcullis to the predetermined day and year, and moments later I'd be ready for Jordan when he arrived. I'd drive Jordan home, I'd feed him brisket and mashed potatoes with fresh, real butter. Later on, I'd serve him a little ice cream. We still had words for these things, but my gods, we didn't have the things themselves. Not like they were in 1947.

I got Benni settled in the car and then crossed over the get in the driver's side. I took a minute to check myself in the rear view mirror: Hair neatly combed, suit and tie, friendly expression. I had just essentially murdered a man, killed his mind while leaving his body intact, and now I was sending him to captors who would exile him to near space for the rest of his hollowed-out life. Knowing I must have done these things before -- because if I hadn't, who had? -- was a justification, and so was the thought that this man had attacked my family and remained a threat that had to be neutralized. But I was realizing that I didn't really need those justifications. Benni had gone to war against us, and we'd prevailed. This was the price he was going to have to pay. And Jordan and I, the victors, had a sweet life to look forward to -- a life of opportunity, and of freedom, the freedom to work and prosper.

Not that Jordan had to know about today's little exercise. All I had to do was say nothing and he'd be content, thinking that we were safe from muttonchops and treacherous old men. Well, we were... because I was vicious and cold when it came to my enemies, and I didn't know how to pull a punch. Who would have guessed? Certainly not me, but I guess the proof is in the pudding. In another life, I might have made for a fighter, or a secret agent, or an assassin. In this life, I'm a householder. But, motherfucker, let me tell you this: Don't provoke the householder. He will defend his house.

I spared another second for the mirror. "Gregor Randall," I murmured to my reflection, "sometimes you still surprise me."