The Outpost (11 page)

“You haven’t seen her for 43 years,” noted Max. “Her hair might be gray or white, and she could have gained or lost 30 or 40 pounds, and she’s sure as hell not wearing the same clothes now. So tell us things about her that aren’t likely to change. Like, for starters, how tall is she?”

Jones frowned and ran a hand through his thick, shaggy, unkempt white hair. “I don’t know.” He touched his nose with a forefinger. “I think she came up to about here.”

“All right. What about her name?”

“Penelope,” said Faraway Jones. “A beautiful name, Penelope. It’s a poem all by itself.”

“What’s her last name?”

Jones shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Just a minute,” said Max. “You’ve been searching for her for 43 years and you don’t even know her name?”

“Wouldn’t a rose by any other name smell as sweet?” replied Jones defensively.

“Yeah, but it’d be a lot easier to find if you could tell people you were looking for a rose,” said Max irritably. “All right—just what
do
you remember about her?”

“I don’t have to remember anything,” said Jones. “I know everything I need to know about her.”

“Except her name and her whereabouts,” said Max. “Where did you meet her? On what world did you last see her?”

Jones looked very uncomfortable. “I never met her,” he said at last.

“You’ve spent 43 years searching for a woman you never met?” said Max incredulously.

“You’re making it sound ludicrous, and it’s not!”

“Perish the thought,” said Max. He decided to try one more time. “She must have been a woman of remarkable accomplishments for you to spend your entire adult life trying to find her.”

“I really couldn’t say,” answered Jones.

“Uh … I don’t want to seem unfeeling, but I think an explanation is in order.”

“There was this poem.”

“A poem?”

Jones closed his eyes. “The last few lines went like this:

Out there somewhere, beyond the sea,

I’ll find my sweet Penelope,

With burning kisses on her lips, and flowers in her hair
.” He paused. “The instant I read it, I knew that there was a Penelope waiting out there for me, and all I had to do was find her.”

“How do you know her name wasn’t Gertrude or Beatrice?” asked Max.

“The poem says it’s Penelope.”

“The poem also says that the
poet
will find her.”

“The poet’s been dead for seven millennia. I looked him up. He never married anyone called Penelope.”

“So based on three lines, you’ve wasted 43 years searching for a woman who either never existed or who died seven thousand years ago?”

“There were a
lot
of lines! I only quoted three. And she’s out there somewhere. If there’s a woman for every man, then she’s the woman for me. The
only
woman.”

“How will you know her when you see her?” asked Sinderella.

“I’ll know her,” said Jones with absolute, almost devout, certainty.

“I wish you luck, Faraway Jones,” said Sinderella, walking over to him. “But just in case you don’t find her, I’d hate to think of you going to your grave without ever having kissed a real, flesh-and-blood woman.”

She put her arms around his neck and leaned over to kiss him, and he almost fell off his chair avoiding her.

“I’m sorry, and I don’t mean any insult,” he said, getting to his feet, “but I’ve got to keep myself pure for her, just as I know she’s keeping herself pure for me.”

“You’ve got a funny notion of pure,” offered Max.

“That’s okay,” said Jones, walking to the door. “As far as I’m concerned, all of you have a funny notion of love.” He paused. “I’ve wasted a whole day here. It’s time to go off looking for her again.”

“Be careful,” warned Achmed of Alphard. “There’s a war going on out there.”

Jones smiled. “If Men and aliens and meteor showers and supernovas couldn’t keep me from searching for my Penelope, you don’t really think a little thing like a war can stop me, do you?”

“Wars have stopped people from more important quests,” said Achmed.

Jones smiled. “You don’t know Faraway Jones,” he said, opening the door. “And there
are
no more important quests.”

And with that, he was gone.

There was a long silence. Finally Bet-a-World O’Grady pulled out a wad of banknotes. “Anyone want to start a pool?”

“On whether he finds her, or on whether she exists?” asked Baker.

O’Grady shrugged. “Either one,” he said with a smile.

Nicodemus Mayflower sighed and shook his head. “He’s not exactly the brightest being traveling the spaceways, is he?”

“If he’s got a pet, he may not even be the brightest thing in his ship,” chimed in Three-Gun Max with a chuckle.

“Well,
I
thought he was sweet,” said Sinderella.

“So’s a bag of sugar,” said Max. “But you wouldn’t want to go off and live with it.”

“You’re too cynical by half,” she shot back. “I wish someone like Faraway Jones was looking for me.”

“No you don’t,” said Max.

“And why not?” demanded Sinderella.

Max laughed. “He might find you.”

“He’s a lot better than
you
!”!"!” she snapped.

“Hell, we’re all a lot better than Max,” said Baker. “But that don’t mean Faraway Jones is Mister Right.”

“I
created
Mister Right,” said Sinderella. “I’ll settle for Faraway Jones any old day.”

“You mean you
met
Mister Right,” Max corrected her.

“I meant what I said.”

“You know we ain’t letting you get away without telling us the details,” said Max.

“Why not?” she replied after some consideration. “Who knows? You might even learn something, though I doubt it.”

Building Mister Right

I was raised to be a courtesan (said Sinderella). I was schooled in the tantric arts, I was taught to move and dress seductively, I was instructed in all the many ways a woman can please a man and I was warned what attitudes and behaviors to avoid.

When I was sixteen I went to work on Xanadu, the pleasure planet in the Belial Cluster. My clientele included some of the greatest names in the galaxy. I was even given to ***Lance Sterling*** for a week after he set the people of Hacienda III free.

There was no aspect of pleasure that was unknown to me, and no sexual art, no matter how strange or painful or alien, in which I was not an acknowledged expert. And because of this, I was in great demand. Even the Earth Mother tried to buy my contract and move me to her establishment on Praesepe XIII, but of course my employer would not part with me.

Then, one day, when I was twenty years old, I found myself walking down the long corridor to meet my next assignment. As I passed the multitude of rooms, I heard the moans and sighs of rapture—but only from masculine throats. And a thought occurred to me that should have been obvious the day I arrived there: that Xanadu was a pleasure planet for only half the race, that the women
provided
pleasure but did not
receive
it.

So I decided to take my savings—and of course, being a woman I’d had no place to spend all that money on Xanadu—and start an industry that would do for women what so many industries did for men.

I realized that I would need men who were as skilled in the giving of pleasure as I was, and I spent the next year auditioning perhaps a thousand of those with the best resumes—and while I will freely confess that it was not an unenjoyable year, I nevertheless found some major or minor fault with each of them.

It was then that I decided the only way I could be sure of providing the perfect lover was to
build
him. I queried a number of women, asking them to describe in detail all the physical features and behavioral characteristics of their ideal man, and then hired Bellini, the Monarchy’s greatest designer of androids, and set him to work.

The women had been unsure of the perfect eye color, so we decided that they would appear blue in certain light, gray in others, brown in still others.

It didn’t work. The women I invited to inspect our prototype found a changing eye color very disconcerting.

There was the same problem with the length of his hair. We tried short hair, long hair, even no hair, but there was no consensus.

Things became even worse as we got to the more important features. Since this was to be the ideal man, far superior to all others, we gave him a fifteen-inch phallus. The first three women to see it ran screaming from the room; the fourth kidnapped him at gunpoint and neither she nor the android were ever seen again.

Musculature was another problem. Should it be Herculean or Apollonian? We tried the heavily-muscled Herculean model first; it broke the ribcages of the first five women it hugged. So we went for the slender, delicate Apollonian; two of its first three sexual partners broke
its
ribs in the throes of passion.

When it came to speech, we ran into still more problems. Fully half the women we questioned stated that men had nothing interesting to say, that all they really wanted to do was talk about themselves. But the other half insisted that our prototype be capable of speech, because they wanted to be complimented and flattered to preserve the illusion of romance before they climbed into bed.

So we took this into account, and everything seemed to be going well for a day or two. Then the complaints began: a few sweet nothings whispered before a roaring fire was fine, but couldn’t it think of anything
else
to say? Forty-eight hours of nonstop flattery tended to sound, well, if not insincere, at least
programmed
, and nothing is a greater hindrance to romance than a lack of spontaneity.

So we went back to the drawing board and gave our prototype the equivalent of fifteen post-graduate degrees. He was able to converse thoughtfully on any subject, and we removed all trace of ego so that he would have no urge to speak about himself.

I should have known better. The typical comment was: “If I’d wanted to go to bed with my college professor, I would have.” One I particularly remember was: “Do you know how quickly an analysis of the annual fiscal expenditure on Sirius V can quell the fire within?”

There were the same problems with the prototype’s taste in art, in music, even in women. Each woman wanted to think she was the only one for him, but that meant reprogramming him each time, so that at noon he loved slender blondes and at two he loved pudgy redheads and at four he loved drunken brunettes.

I had run through most of my money without a single one of my female volunteers agreeing that I’d created Mister Right. Then, when ***Lance Sterling*** sent word that he’d like to spend another week with me, I gave the android to the first woman who asked for him (she later dismembered him with a butcher knife) and went back to my former life, convinced that Mister Right was as much an unattainable dream as the Perfect Woman.

So don’t you denigrate Faraway Jones. A love like that means a lot more to a woman than most of the things I built into Mister Right.

“Actually, there are nineteen perfect women in the universe,” said Catastrophe Baker to the room at large. “I’ve been with thirteen of them, and I’ve got almost half my life left to hunt up the other six.”

“So you really knew ***Lance Sterling***?” said Little Mike Picasso.

“Yes, I did,” answered Sinderella.

“He’s one of my heroes,” said Little Mike wistfully. “I always wanted to paint his portrait.”

“I wouldn’t have minded meeting up with him myself,” chimed in Gravedigger Gaines. “Heroes like him are few and far between.”

“I heard all kinds of stories about how he died,” said Three-Gun Max. “I wonder if anyone knows what really happened?”

“One of us does,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

“You heard it?” asked Max.

“I
lived
it. I was there.”

“Sure you were,” scoffed Max.

“It’s true!” said Mayflower heatedly, and skinny as he was, I again was struck by how much his lean, angular face looked like my notion of Satan. “I spent ten years with him, fighting villains and evildoers!”

“I don’t believe it,” said Max. “There are heroes so big they blot out the stars for parsecs. He was one of them. Why would he bother with
you
?”

“I can find out if he knew him,” offered Sinderella. Everyone turned to her. “He had a scar on his shoulder. Describe it.”

“A scar?” repeated Mayflower. “I always thought it was a tattoo. It looked like a big, bloody L.”

“Is he right?” asked Max.

Sinderella nodded her head. “He’s right.”

“Not everyone’s a freelance hero or soldier of fortune,” said Mayflower with just a touch of bitterness. “Some of us function better in structured situations.”

“I can’t imagine why,” said Baker.

“Save the arguments for some other time,” said Max. He turned to Mayflower. “Okay, you knew him. So let’s hear how he died, and how many of the enemy he took with him.”

“From everything I’ve heard about him,” said Little Mike Picasso, “he’d have sold his life so dearly that they’d have needed one hell of a mass grave for the men who finally took him down.”

“Do you want to hear about it, or do you want to tell
me
about it?” demanded Mayflower irritably.