Contemporary Gay Romances (10 page)

But right now it was his job to find out who he was, since that also remained alarmingly unfilled and in fact mostly blank.

His desk had six drawers. Two locked, one with a touch-print, the other with a key and vocal recognition. He had the key, and while the drawer’s primitive system hesitated at first, it must have been voice-keyed because it did open upon the second utterance of a simple sentence, “Open up for me. Go on, open!”

In the first were leather billfolds filled with cheques and cash cards. Confirming that he was quite well off in business. The other drawer held six files that had still been “open” at the time that he was so seriously injured.

He began reading them.

Looking for a stylus to take notes with, he rummaged in a bottom drawer and there Blue came upon a small leather woman’s purse. Inside it, no ID but the expected articles: lipstick, compact and powder, breath mints, eye shadow, etc. Presumably, he thought, it belonged to the fiancée who had been mentioned in the Heal-All Center twice, but who had made no attempt to see Blue while he’d been there.

No surprise. He probably wouldn’t have seen her if she had tried to contact him. The reason being, he didn’t remember her at all. Didn’t remember any kind of close sexual or affectionate relationship with a woman. He could bring up no face, voice, nor perfume that was at all familiar.

Some other faces did come up as he remained awake and pensive, if very slowly: his mother’s (after four days) and just barely, and actually just before he accepted a Vid-screen phone call from her, confirming that’s who she was. She rather looked like a much more refined version of himself, at least from the neck up, with a porcelain complexion and a darker version of his light hair. She also had a familiar-sounding voice, but Blue didn’t truly recognize her, and he didn’t hide that fact, and she was sweet and accepting about that fact, saying twice how she’d been certain he’d never awaken and certainly not with a full memory, not after what the medicals had told her when he’d first entered the Heal-All Center.

Once Blue had seen some Vids of her, his former secretary also seemed somewhat if again not deeply familiar. She’d been fairly new anyway, he’d been told, having only worked for him for four months before his shooting, so there was no big surprise there.

In what little there was of Blue’s memory beyond the cognitive, the practical—i.e., what the brain surgeon-bots had hurriedly worked on getting reconnected before sticking him into the Heal-All cocoon a year before, there had been traces of memory of a male his own age, or thereabouts, nice-looking, darker-haired, slender, named Bern or Burn, something like that.

A relatively strong trace memory of affection was connected with him. Perhaps they had been boyhood pals who’d remained friendly after they’d grown up. That would be okay. He would probably be trustworthy—if anyone could be considered so in a life that had nearly ended, violently, explosively, like his almost had. No word from this friend, of course, and frankly Blue hadn’t trusted his “mother” or his own memory sense of her well enough to ask her who this male friend might be.

But he had no trace memory of any woman. So whom did this purse and this make up belong to?

“Face it, Blue,” he said to his bathroom mirror, shaving before leaving the Heal-All Center, “She could be anyone. You’re a hot and handsome man.” Medical Number Three had slipped in while he was napping on Awake Day number two and made her own investigations of certain lower body areas of his physiological condition. When he’d joked about it to Medical Number One, she’d asked, “Would you like that to stop? Or continue?” He’d said “continue, please” and she had replaced the lower-status doctor with herself. This also had not been surprising. As far as he could figure, his personality structure was undoubtedly that of a person who’d had great looks and who’d used them to get what he wanted and needed. Except…

Odd, this memory business.

Now Blue recognized that he had the most difficult job of all: finding out which case had come so close to doing him in. He’d need to know that. He hadn’t decided whether to avoid anyone and anything connected with it in the future or not. Maybe, some little mental itch suggested somewhere in the periphery of his mind, maybe he might also figure out why he’d been targeted.

*

It was later that afternoon that the downstairs auto-desk called and told him he had a visitor. A Vid showed her to be a woman in her mid forties, made up rather severely, dressed carefully, and surprisingly ethnic looking, perhaps from off-world? He knew from the Vid-channels he’d been watching that very few people chose to highlight their ethnic origins by retaining inborn characteristics. Especially when it was so easy to lose them. The name given for her was Dusk Martila, with no matronymic or patronymic supplied, and which meant nothing to him.

Naturally Blue asked the auto-desk if she’d been to his office before, and it named the date he’d been told he had been killed. Negative. Several weeks before then and once since, the auto desk said, so Blue let her come up. The auto lift CT scanned her for metal and other types of weapons or powders or explosives. Negative.

“What can I do for you?” he greeted her at the door. Close up, Martila was taller, and more prepossessing. Her voice was somewhat guttural, too, with a slight and difficult to place accent, so she’d not had vocal cord reparation either. On purpose, it must be, as she dressed well-to-do to be able afford the simple operation.

“Blue Andresson?” she asked, slightly surprised.

“We’ve not met?” he asked. Then added, “You heard of my Heal-All experience?”

“We have met, yes, but you are—changed,” she said.

“Only physically,” he assured her. “You didn’t take Davis’s suggestion to go to my colleague, Mr. Chango Blocksson?”

“I did. We met. I didn’t trust him. Not like you,” Martila said, not looking to be all that trusting in Blue either; at least not at the moment.

They sat and his work screens brought up her case and the work done so far, and in seconds they were discussing the business she’d come for: which had apparently been held in abeyance for almost a year. It was a Missing Person: and both a Difficult Interpersonal Relation with a Potentially Criminal Conflict. Her first husband had vanished three years previously, mysteriously, from his place of business, which he shared with his wife. Through Blue’s earlier efforts, she had already received permits to continue operating the family business in full sole authority, and even sell and or lease it out. But now she had met a countryman, she said, and he wanted her to get a more permanent declaration so they could unite their businesses and “other matters,” which Blue took to be interpersonal and probably marriage. “Also,” she added, “before you ended up in a Heal-All, you left a message saying you thought you had an idea where my husband might have gone to. I took it you were looking into that idea.”

Blue didn’t recall that at all, of course. And if he had, he had left no clue to himself among these screen files on the case.

Martila renewed the bank number where money could be deposited into his agency’s account and left. For the next half hour, Blue listened to his many notes on the case as the auto-Vid played them back to him. To his surprise, he made a mental connection that the pre-Heal-All Blue had never made before, concerning a bank account and an important client.

He caught Martila by pad-phone in her private vehicle, not very far away from his office, and checked the information. The minute Blue mentioned it, she grew excited.

“Yes,” she said, darkly, “this I can well believe of this person,” and she used some kind of foreign obscenity. Blue said he would need as much information as she had on the new suspect, and he would delve into it more deeply.

Feeling renewed, and suddenly comfortable in his new skin now that he had proved to himself that he was useful, he strode over to the floor-high windows and stared out through the triple-paned, multiply tinted glass. The blue-white sun was setting, quickly falling behind the artificial-looking skyscraper scrim of the city’s far horizon. Only the dull orange sun still hung in the crepuscular sky, casting a warm evening glow.

*

“It was a lovely funeral, Blue,” Andre Clarksdotter gushed. “I spared no expenses. After all, you’re my only child. Our life insurance was all paid up and it had accrued so well; it’s been decades since anyone has died and I decided to do it up full scale. Everyone came. Family, of course, they flew in from all over. Many of your school friends, and even some of your clients.”

She’d pre-fed the Vid-screen before arriving at his flat and it now showed moving Vids of the ceremony—sound turned down—and afterward at the celebratory feast. He could clearly see sitting next to his mother the very same young man who’d popped into his memory upon awakening, and who appeared at least as upset as she was. Then the Med Center people arrived and Blue’s inert and by then fully cocooned body was ceremonially placed in the Heal-All, people said their good-byes, and it was floated out.

Andre already knew of Blue’s memory loss and couldn’t have been sweeter or more explanatory as he asked who each person shown was. When he reached the bereft, handsome young man with the dark curling hair, she said, “Bruno. Of course.”

“Bruno?” He tried it out and it sounded right.

“Bruno Thomasson, your adoring fiancé. He hasn’t found anyone else, you know, in all the months since. In fact, Blue, from what he was saying the other day when I called to tell him of you, I do believe he wants to try to see you again.”

“Bruno?” Blue now asked, stunned. “Then I was…”

“A woman. Yes, Blue. Didn’t anyone explain it to you at the Med Center? We seldom come back the second time as the same gender. Your aunt / uncle Clay Clarkson? the one who died in that fall, climbing the Capsilian Mountains? She once explained all the complex genetics of it to me, but you know how dense I can be about scientific matters.”

“So that’s Bruno!” Blue now said, not Burn, of course, and looked at the Vid-screen as the compelling figure was highlighted and zoomed in on, the large dark, misty eyes, the downturned full lips and picturesquely sunken cheeks.

“You don’t have to see him, you know, if it makes you—nervous,” Andre settled on, and changed the subject back to those in the family she would never speak to again because they simply never even acknowledged Blue’s death, never mind Andre’s grief.

It all began to make sense now: the purses in the office and at Blue’s flat with no ID in them. The scarcity of male clothing in the closets: two suits—both new looking. Scarcely anything in the way of male accessories. Only the most basic toiletries in the bath. It also explained the rare photos: all of them of other family members, not one of them showing Blue.

He had to ask, “Mother? What kind of woman was I?”

Andre only wavered a second. “Frankly, Blue, you were a complete pain in the ass. You were a physically tough, emotionally cold, adventure-loving, overconfident, thoughtless, hard-living, self-absorbed egomaniac to almost everyone but Bruno. You drove me crazy as an adolescent. I needed most of the family and sometimes City Services, too, to help raise you. In truth, you were such a bitch to most of us that it was a constant wonder that someone didn’t kill you years ago.”

As Blue absorbed that, Andre added, with a nervous little laugh, “We’re all hoping that those qualities will fit you better—now that you’re a male.”

When Blue chuckled, Andre added, “You know, Blue, while it’s a difficult adjustment for many, some people only begin to really find themselves when they’re second-born.”

*

Chango Blocksson’s Vid-screen image was of an older man, but his voice was older than his appearance and Blue was forced to conclude that he’d done at least one expensive voluntarily short period in a Heal-All age-proofing himself. Blue’s mother had done two of those herself and looked almost Blue’s age.

Two of the cases Blocksson had taken from Blue’s six had been solved. Cases closed. Two of the clients, Dusk Martila and another woman, had chosen to not to accept Blocksson’s services. And two cases remained in progress: one a long-term private investigation by two wealthy brothers of their industrialist father’s concerns: “Very straightforward and utterly paranoid,” according to Chango. “They think he’s hiding their eventual heritage.” Another, an equally long-term search for an amateur pilot, a playboy, lost over Oceania, whom his family needed declared dead—or alive, and non-compos mentis, they almost didn’t care which.

“I don’t buy anyone involved in these two cases as even possessing a weapon, never mind using one on you,” Chango Blocksson declared. “Their motives aren’t impelling enough,” he added, even before Blue could ask his opinion. But it confirmed Blue’s own surprisingly strong investigative intuition.

“This Martila woman, however…well, her I just don’t know. They’re off-worlders, you know: Albergrivians, and whatever those people do is weird and mixed up with that cockamamie religion they’ve got.”

“The sixth case?” Blue asked. “Did you look at that long enough to see if it was more than a simple potential female infidelity?”

“It looked like a simple female love triangle. By the way, you look terrific,” Chango added. “And I’ve got to thank you. I met my fourth wife at your funeral. A second or third cousin of yours who came along with others. We’re married five months: So we’re now distantly related. She says you should come to dinner. Bring that guy Bruno, too, if you’re still seeing him?”