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Tread Softly

Esther Friesner

It is a truth, universally acknowledged in the fetid hellhole of a post-Apocalyptic Brooklyn, that a single man in possession of a good fortune and several robotic enhancements must be in want of a wife.

As to what the wife might be in want of . . . 


“My dear, you will never in a thousand seconds guess what has happened! We have new neighbors and some of them might even be male. Huzzah!”

Mzzus Dorothea Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz (of the Williamsburg Ladyfingers) swooped in upon her husband as he attempted to ingest the morning news in peace. He closed his eyes, feigning slumber or a minor system crash, but it was no use. A mother’s preoccupation with seeing her daughters well-settled in life recognizes no obstacles nor anyone else’s right to some scant moments of domestic tranquility.

Meest Fiorello Rabinowitz sighed and detached himself from the system. “What would you have me do, Dorothea?” he asked wearily.

“Why, pay them a visit, of course!” came the somewhat impatient reply. “It is the very least we should do, to welcome them to the neighborhood. They have taken over Mannbunne Manor, which has gone begging lo, these many years.”

“As well it should, at least until the authorities make any progress whatsoever in mitigating the quantity of toxins in the estate grounds,” Meest Rabinowitz observed. “I presume you have your sights set on marrying one of our girls into that landed sump? Ah well, why should we be the only couple hereabouts whose grandchildren do not have tentacles?”

His bride bridled. “O fie, Fifi! Do not dismiss my ambitions for our children. At least I am taking an interest in their futures!”

“Indeed, indeed.” Meest Rabinowitz nodded slowly, resigned to the reality of his home life: if he wished to have any peace whatsoever, it was a truth, unilaterally acknowledged, that the best and only course for him was to give his wife carte blanche in these matters. “You are an exemplary mother and I shall see to this.”

Joy illuminated many of Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz’s eyes. She licked Meest Rabinowitz’s face. “I knew I could rely on you, my dear.”


“New neighbors!” little Mary exclaimed as the family met over breakfast. “Fancy that!”

“New male neighbors,” her mother clarified. “Who knows how many? This well may be the making of your fortunes, my darlings. Pappa has promised me that he will pay a call at Mannbunne Manor this very morning and ascertain the specifics of the situation.”

Jane, the eldest, shook her head. “Even if there are sufficient males on offer for breeding purposes, what are the chances that any of them prefer to make carnal whoopee-times with females of our sort?” She was a born pessimist and had steeled her beliefs by joining the Chapel of Divine Doom, despite her parents’ wishes and the family’s heritage as Retrofitted Episcopalians.

The twins, Sarah and Dreadnought, giggled. “Oh, Jane, you are such a caution,” they said in chorus. In this they had little choice, sharing a communal larynx as they did. “Mamma will have her way in this, no matter what. Why, we are completely convinced that she shall have all of us well matched and well married by the end of this Season!”

“Oh yes,” said Jane dolefully. “Especially should she find a suitor who would view you two as the ultimate buy-one-get-one-free bargain.”

Her sisters shrieked their outrage and attempted to climb across the breakfast table to exact a hideous revenge, armed as they were with the remnants of that morning’s assortment of pastries. (Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz’s lingonberry-scrapple scones were to die for. Many had.)

Their mother rose to put a stop to such socially unacceptable hijinks, but before she could spray her daughters with the No-No water bottle, the fifth Rabinowitz sister reached out a battle-hardened hand, seized the twins by their mutual collar, and jerked them back into their place at the table.

“That will do,” said Lizzie. Her eyes were fire, her tone was iron, and her preferred method of dealing with all sororal insurrections was a figurative combination of bleach and ammonia. Her gaze scythed across the table. “You shall on this subject put your trust in Mamma and Pappa and Aunt Esstee.”

“Aunt who?” Jane was so intrigued that she dropped her morose mien like a hot toasting fork.

“Esstee,” Lizzie replied with a hard grin. “Family name, Effyu.” While her elder sister wrestled for comprehension of this refined jape, Lizzie went on to say: “Mamma’s plan has my full and considerable support, for the sooner the lot of you are respectably paired off, the sooner I shall be able to pursue my own aspirations, particularly if your mates are of the moneyed sort and not unwilling to aid your dearest sister in realizing the as-yet-unspoken hope of her—by which I mean my, because I fear you are too dense to follow my narrative—heart.”

The first of the family to wield a mental machete successfully and hack through Lizzie’s verbiage was little Mary. “Oh, but dearest Lizzie, surely your aims are our own, as well as Mamma’s? It is a truth universally acknowledged that marriage is a necessity. The fate awaiting those of us without partners to stand beside us, march boldly before us to meet the future, and be ever-vigilant at our backs to guard us must be—”

“—a matter of trilocation, at the very least,” Lizzie finished for her with a smirk. “You need not worry, little Mary. I shall have my partner.”

Here Lizzie placed two fingers in her mouth and filled the breakfast room with a shrill whistle. From outside the Rabinowitz abode came the roar of a mighty engine and the rumble of aggressively approaching machinery. The other Rabinowitz sisters squealed with delight, even Jane, and flocked to the window just in time to see the bulk of a massive tank rumble across the landscape, crushing two of the driveway poplars, a portion of the front garden, one corner of the ruins of P.S. 269, and an anomalous sheep. It stopped short of the house and remained with motor running, awaiting further orders.

“Elizabeth Rabinowitz, you dreadful hoyden!” Lizzie’s mother exclaimed. “What have we said about tanks?”

“But Mamma—!” Lizzie’s protest was stymied under her mother’s glare.

What have we said?

Lizzie bowed her head and muttered, “Tanks are an occasional entertainment, not a way of life suitable for a young lady of good family. They are a privilege, not a right. Return them to the library by the due date. Our family cannot bear the financial burden of any more late fees.”

“Precisely!” Mzzus Rabinowitz was smugly satisfied. “I will return it myself, this very day. I fear I cannot trust you to do so. Thank goodness they are all so AI-enhanced that even I, with my laughable graduate degree in software hacking from Yale, can maneuver them!”

“But Mamma—!” Lizzie exclaimed a second time, and for a second time was thwarted by her mother.

“Do not prevaricate with me, young lady. You claimed you had returned that thing two days ago. Where have you been hiding it? I searched your room!”

Lizzie’s brow darkened. “Hiding him, Mamma.”

“Tchah! What nonsense is this? That tank has all the gender of a bologna sandwich and only half the charm. It is a rental, subject to the destructive misadventures and toffee-stained fingers of any child with a subdermally embedded library chip. Why you must insist on terming it he and him and Sir Frederic Montesquieu, late of His Excellency’s Fourth Company of Light Horse and Middleweight Boxers and whatnot, I cannot begin to imagine.”

Lizzie shot to her feet, fists clenched. “So I would expect,” she declared. “You simply do not get it, do you?”

“Nor do I want it,” her mother countered. “I concede that I will trust you to return that thing directly after breakfast and you will not renew it nor borrow another for a fortnight.”

“But—!”

“Listen to your mother, Lizzie,” Meest Rabinowitz said wearily. “She only wants what is best for you.”

A bitter laugh flew from Lizzie’s lips, but she replied, “If you say so, Pappa.” She sat down again, looking the very picture of a dutiful daughter. Only her soft-boiled egg suffered for her pent-up emotions, perishing under an obscene assault of ketchup and marmalade.


“A ball, a ball, hooray!” cried the twins, pirouetting around the sisters’ barracks.

“Wheeeee!” little Mary agreed. She flew to the armoire to contemplate her choice of garments. Head cocked prettily to one side she added, “What do you think, Jane? Lace or latex?”

The eldest Rabinowitz sister grunted by way of reply. “You are too young for lace, Mary. You ought to know that.”

“Oh, let her wear whatever she fancies, Jane,” Lizzie cut in impatiently. “As long as her boots match her riding crop, she will be fine.”

“And what will you wear, dear Lizzie?” Dreadnought and Sarah asked pertly, only to answer their own question with, “Don’t be silly; you know she’s just going to show up in uniform, the way she always does.”

Jane was adept at sighing, and did so. “Why, Lizzie? Why must you insist on such an outmoded fashion choice? Have you not heard? We are a post-Apocalyptic society now. The war is over. The zombies have been destroyed. The aliens have been ousted. The sacrificial teenagers have been given the vote. The mutant capybaras have been successfully reeducated. The Allied Confederation of Mimes, Jugglers, Clowns, and Buskers has agreed to—”

“Oh, very well, Jane.” Lizzie’s put-upon sigh gave her elder sister’s a run for the money when it came to volume, chestiness, and timbre. “I had no idea that you cared so much for fashion above honor. If it makes you happy I will smother my combat record beneath a landslide of frills and furbelows.”

What combat record? You worked in a field canteen serving donuts to the troops,” said little Mary.

“They were good donuts,” Lizzie countered fiercely. “And the coffee was scalding!” She jabbed a finger to the bosom of her singlet, indicating the medal thereto attached. “My sacrifice was recognized by my superiors, if not by my own family. I was splattered in the line of duty!”

“Ugh,” replied little Mary with an expressive roll of her eyes. “Whatsoever.” She went back to searching the armoire.

Jane patted Lizzie’s back. “Never mind,” she said. “Wear what you like. It is only for a single evening and certainly not the beginning of a complicated series of social and personal misapprehensions.”


“What an unbearable man,” Lizzie whispered hotly to Jane as they sat along the wall of the ballroom at Mannbunne Manor. “He is proud beyond bearing. One can tell that he fancies himself quite the catch on the marriage market, but I pity the person who ends by linking their fate and future to his.”

“Of whom do you speak?” Jane asked from behind the discretion of her fan. It was little more than a polite murmur, something that she said for the sake of saying something to placate her sister. She had paid scant heed to any aspect of the dance since her family’s arrival, instead focusing her attention on the program presently streaming on the screen built into the aforementioned fan. As Jane herself would have remarked, had she cared to do so, “Celebrity Housewives Deathmatch Bakeoff is not going to watch itself!”

“Jane, if you do not put down that fan and look me in the eye this instant, then ’pon rep I will snatch it from your hand and reposition it in such a way that you will be hard-pressed to view it at all, unless you possess heretofore hidden talents as a contortionist!”

Jane lowered her fan and regarded her younger sister with some hauteur. “My dearest Lizzie, why are you incapable of making more verbally economical threats? One might almost imagine you are being paid by the word, like some lowly, vulgar, and disreputable ink-stained wretch. If you wish to say you intend to stick my fan where the sun fails to—”

At this very moment, a shadow fell upon the sisters and they looked up into the face of their host, Meest Charles “Chucky” 78-A.net, the new master of Mannbunne Manor. He was reputed to be a single man in possession of a good fortune, and the Rabinowitz sisters knew what that meant.

“Might I beg the favor of the next dance?” he asked Jane, offering his hand.

Jane’s face was so immediately transformed with joy as to render her unrecognizable. “It would be my pleasure, sir,” she replied, rising. She paused for moment and added, “May I?”

Meest 78-A.net nodded affably and permitted her to adjust the display on his face-screen so that she might both dance the Sir Roger de l’Isle de Coney and continue watching her favorite program at the same time.

Left to herself, Lizzie dearly wished she had also been left to her own devices, but those were at home. Pensive, she abandoned her chair and strolled out onto the terrace. Despite her father’s low opinion of the estate, the prospect of Mannbunne Manor was a delight, even in the hours of darkness. Stands of larch and alder loomed against the starlit sky. Genetically altered owls alternately giggled and sang snatches of sea shanties from the branches. A herd of fallow deer, glowing with idyllic levels of residual radiation, calmly cropped the grass until the spine-chilling howls of a hunting pack of cybernetically enhanced dachshunds set them in flight. One doe was not nimble enough, and the ensuing kill was so breathtaking that Lizzie could not help but clap her hands.

“Oh, well done!” she cried. “Well done!”

“You are a remarkably bloodthirsty young woman, are you not?” came a deep voice from the shadows.

Lizzie whirled to face the speaker, who stepped into a streak of light from the ballroom. Her lips pursed. She recognized the object of her recent ire, Meest 78-A.net’s guest and companion, FitzWilliam FitzDarcyfitz.

Remarkably bloodthirsty, sir?” Drawing back her shoulders, she spoke with enough ice behind her words to be a hazard to North Atlantic shipping: “I am remarkable in more ways than that, sir, although your opinion of my appearance as being beneath your notice or consideration as a partner in the dance gives me to understand that you shall never trouble yourself to attempt more intimate knowledge of my character. Sir.”

FitzDarcyfitz took a step backward. “I beg your pardon?”

“Well you might. Whether or not I shall grant it to you—”

FitzDarcyfitz took two steps forward. His voice rose. “I did not say that as a request that you forgive me for my words earlier; I meant what the bloody hell were you trying to say with all that damned word-salad you just spewed?”

Bloody hell? Damned? La! Lizzie gasped. Her heart beat faster. She had not heard a man use such forthright language since her time as a donut-wrangler. Indeed, her fondest memory was of meeting a soldier whose mother tongue was fluent Latrine. His name was Lieutenant Sean Camisaroja. Their mutual attraction was as immediate as it was socially unacceptable. It was he who had broken a considerable assortment of military rules by having her join him in his tank, the Holy Glory, and teaching her how to drive it. Thence had come her passion for tanks and her ambition to join the Corps one day. When peace invaded and dispatched that dream, she remained determined to have a tank of her own, if not to employ in defense of civilization, then to roll all over the countryside and squoosh things.

Alas, the more tender aspect of her post-Apocalyptic fantasies was not to be. Albeit she had no qualms about having an Understanding with a beau whose class, occupation, vocabulary, and expectations were sure to give her mother fits (always a plus), Fate intruded. Lieutenant Camisaroja perished in the aftermath of the last great battle of the Apocalypse—what the capybaras did to their prisoners was hideous to contemplate—but she would always remember him and his magnificent drive sprocket.

It was with some difficulty that Lizzie extracted herself from this dewy reverie. Hardening her gaze, she said, “I inadvertently overheard you tell our host that you thought I was merely tolerable, not handsome enough to tempt you, and, I quote, that you ‘were in no humor to give consequence to young ladies who were slighted by other men.’”

“Oh.” FitzDarcyfitz sucked air between his teeth. “Ah. Hm. Yyyyyyyes? I said that maybe? A little? But that was before I recognized you.”

Recognized me?” Nostrils flaring with poorly reined-in rage, Lizzie stared thunderbolts. “How dare you claim any such social intimacy. I give you my word of honor, sir, that I have not had the displeasure of your acquaintance until this very evening.” She wheeled sharply and flounced back inside, where she spent the remainder of the ball drinking punch and fuming.


Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz was as pleased as a sewer alligator during tourist season by the outcome of the ball at Mannbunne Manor. Not only had Jane managed to cultivate the first fragile tendrils of attraction with their host, but the twins had returned home with full dance cards and a number of duels scheduled to be fought for their individual affections by local swains who did not appreciate the concept of “polycule” nor even grasp that of “share” so easily mastered by the youngest of kindergarteners.

More wondrous still, little Mary had managed to enjoy the company of a number of admirers, despite the paucity of lace in her attire, although her bodysuit would never be quite so glossy again and she had broken her second-best riding crop on a member of the Flatbush Parliament.

All that was wanting to secure Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz’s happiness was for her second daughter to have zeroed in on a soft target matrimonial. Reports from her other girls as to Elizabeth’s activities at the ball led her to believe that this had been accomplished, a snippet of information that filled the maternal bosom with elation.

“Lizzie, my love, what is this I hear about you dallying on the terrace with Meest FitzDarcyfitz?” she inquired over the breakfast kippers. Her tone was intended to feign severity, yet with a soupçon of tacit approval for her girl’s borderline-louche behavior.

“Bah.” Lizzie exercised her hostilities upon a helpless piece of toast that fell to bits under the assault. “Do not speak the name of that person to me, Mamma. I find him odious.”

“Impossible!” cried her mother. “You cannot! He’s rich!”

“In that case, he has used his means to procure and present to the world a higher class of odiousness,” Lizzie riposted. “It makes him no less repugnant to me.”

Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz clucked in a monitory manner and shook her head over her child’s disrespectful attitude toward money. “You always were a fussy child. What fantasized fault have you conjured out of the empty air and laid to his account?”

Lizzie lifted her chin. “He is proud, Mamma; intolerably so.”

“And you, my girl”—her mother lifted her own chin a few degrees higher—“are clearly prejudiced.”

“Well, now that we’ve got that bit of business out of the way, may I please enjoy my breakfast in peace?” the Rabinowitz paterfamilias asked.

The meal continued in silence, which is not always the same as peace. This made little to no nevermind for Meest Rabinowitz, who was thankful for the respite. Meantime the atmosphere of wordless domestic hostility fairly pulsed between mother and second-born daughter with a figurative heat that caused the other sisters to cringe. At last, having chased one final remnant of enchilada around his plate, Meest Rabinowitz bid the ladies a good day and departed.

His departure broke the dam so valiantly struggling to restrain Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz’s wrath. “How could you, Lizzie!” she cried. “How could you turn your nose up at so advantageous a match as Meest FitzWilliam FitzDarcyfitz? You will not find a better offer. You are pushing seventeen!”

“‘Offer,’ Mamma?” Lizzie’s disturbing tranquility almost overtopped her sardonic words. “What offer? He made none, honorable or otherwise. In point of fact, I heard him condescend to dismiss me entirely, as my looks were not handsome enough to tempt him and no other guests at the ball asked me to dance. I am unwanted goods to an overweening popinjay such as he.”

“Then what were the two of you doing out on the terrace?”

Lizzie’s lithe shoulders rose and fell expressively. “Discovering further reasons to scorn one another’s company. I will admit that there was a moment when he did attempt to excuse his earlier disdain for my looks and lack of popularity—”

“Ah!”

“—but his words made it clear that he was so top-full of the product offered by the south-facing end of a north-facing appaloosa that—”

“Uh?”

“—I could not for an instant give credence to his sincerity.”

At this point, Jane gave her mother a brief Lizzie-to-Normal-People translation.

“Ohhh! But my child, you must bear in mind that he did make an effort.”

“To what purpose? I have no wish for further intercourse with him.” She paused, waiting for at least one of her sisters to snicker and was disappointed. “What? Nothing? Really, girls, nothing?”

“Nope,” said little Mary with a wicked grin. “Not a sausage!” Which remark, Britishism though it was, elicited the ribald glee previously wanting, plus a fish-knife-and-jam-spoon rimshot off the teapot and toast rack by Jane.

Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz was quick to reclaim sovereignty of the conversation. “Do not be such a fool, Lizzie. Only consider what your life might be like as his bride. Your fondest dream would be realized!”

“Is that so?” Lizzie cocked an eyebrow and spoke lightly, without rancor. Much as she loved her mother, she deemed the woman the most flibberty of jibbets. She could not remain out of temper with her, and so asked, half in jest, “I was unaware that you knew anything of my dreams. And what might you call my fondest one?”

To Lizzie’s astonishment, the answer was immediate and unequivocal.

Tanks,” said Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz. “But not merely to continue your pitiable borrowing of our library’s down-at-treads machines, but to have free and clear ownership of your very own!”

“What?” exclaimed Lizzie. Her fascination for those mighty machines was common knowledge en famille, but she never spoken of this madly ambitious facet of her obsession, lest she be laughed to scorn. “You know?”

“Oh, piffle.” Her mother brushed away Lizzie’s astonishment. “Dead people know. At least those who had the common courtesy to remain dead and keep their ridiculous appetites to themselves. ‘Brains, brains, brains,’ sundown to sunup; I ask you! They completely lowered the tone of our Apocalypse most dreadfully and ignored all noise-abatement laws. But really, Lizzie, how was I not to know? You have done nothing since returning from the front save rent tanks, borrow tanks, attempt to lease a tank with your pin money, and sneak off to TankCon at the Javits Center. Your father and sisters might not have thought your behavior to be more than a passing fancy—they took it at face value—but I knew there was more to it than that. A mother’s heart extrapolates! And now you have before you the distinct possibility of marriage to a man with the wherewithal to buy you a tank of your very own—perhaps two, with one for holiday use—yet you stubbornly refuse to consider him as a match. You will not set your cap for him. You snub the notion of accepting his apology and playing upon his manly weaknesses with your feminine wiles. You are behaving most unreasonably and I insist you tell me why.”

“Mamma . . . ” Lizzie took a deep breath. The breakfast room hushed. Jane ceased to masticate her blueberry muffin. Little Mary froze with her mimosa halfway to her lips. The twins clutched their mutual porridge bowl. All eyes were fixed upon her, tense, waiting. She spoke.

“ . . . I am just not that into him.”


The door of Meest Rabinowitz’s library-cum-man-cave burst open and his wife rushed in, a human avalanche of wild hysterics. “Husband, you must do something!” she cried, distraught and panic-stricken. “O, we are ruined!”

“Compose yourself, Dorothea,” he replied, setting aside his retro-chic, dead-trees copy of The Nude Yorker. “We have been over this: If Lizzie is not interested in young FitzWilliam FitzDarcyfitz, we must respect her economic improvidence and file her future under Lost Causes. At least our Jane has two functioning brain cells to rub together. Can you not let Lizzie be and instead be contented by how swiftly and elegantly our eldest has reached an Understanding with Meest 78-A.net?”

“An Understanding that will soon fall to pieces,” his wife said bitterly. “Thanks entirely to your ninny of a daughter! We must perforce kiss all future society at Mannbunne Manor farewell.”

Meest Rabinowitz calmly did another preprandial line of cocaine. It was ever a help in any dealings with his wife concerning their children. Otherwise he simply could not be arsed. “My dear, give over. It is—beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt cast by the unfading light of our terrestrial existence—what it is. I cannot blame Lizzie for taking this stance. It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a single girl in possession of a good measure of self-awareness must not be coerced into becoming the wife of a man into whom she just is not. Moreover, she has confided in me certain details of which you might be uninformed regarding her unhappy interview with young FitzDarcyfitz. She tells me that he made bold to claim a prior acquaintance with her, an acquaintance that does not exist! Will you continue to berate her in the face of this outrage?”

“I will not,” his wife said grimly. “Such atrocious behavior is not to be borne. However, I must for the moment fail to give a rat’s ass about Lizzie. It is our little Mary of whom I rant! Husband, whatever shall we do? She has fled our home! She has absconded! Absquatulated! Skedaddled! In short—”

“Not in this book,” her husband muttered.

“—she has eloped with . . . with—!”

“Alacrity? Expeditiousness? Precipitency? Our money?”

A capybara!


Lizzie stepped onto the selfsame terrace of Mannbunne Manor where she had experienced that vexing interview with Meest FitzWilliam FitzDarcyfitz not so long ago. She could hear the sound of many voices drifting from the open windows of the manor house’s second-best parlor. Her parents and eldest sister were within, conferring with Meest 78-A.net. Unasked, Jane had brought the shame of the Rabinowitzes to the notice of her beau. It was a bold and gallant move that ran the risk of causing an unmendable rift between the young lovers.

As she paced the terrace, Lizzie meditated on her sister’s startling display of gumption. It was by good hap alone that Meest 78-A.net became even more deeply enamored of Jane for her bravery as well as for her familial loyalty. Whatever little Mary’s fate might be, Jane’s future connubial bliss was assured. Her beloved loved her regardless of this scandal. She had gambled and won!

Won the point, Lizzie thought sadly, but she well may lose the game. There can be no wedding for Jane if she lacks a living bridegroom. Not since we got rid of the zombies. My poor, dear, generous-souled sister! If I ever see little Mary again, I will give her such a zetz im kopf—!

She shifted her gaze to the warmly glowing window from which Meest 78-A.net’s voice reached her. He was speaking of the plans being laid under his sympathetic auspices for an expedition to find little Mary. “We shall depart before dawn tomorrow,” he declared, his words underscored by Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz’s deafening sobs. “Be of good cheer, dear lady. We shall find your daughter even if it means venturing into the lowest of low resorts, a fleshpot of unmitigated squalor and moral corruption. I will have Cook pack a lunch.”

Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz’s weeping was not loud enough to drown her husband’s reply: “We are in your debt, sir, and pray have Cook cut the crusts off my sandwiches. At least we have some solid notion of where to direct our search. We have all read her farewell note including her intentions and destination. Very well then”—his sigh was steeped deep in fatalism—“on the morrow we are off to Newark.”

Lizzie’s blood turned to frost in her veins. Newark! Could it be? Was her father so blinded by affection for his wanton child that he failed to recall the life-threatening perils of such a journey? There were scarcely any usable roads to the shore and, once there, to cross the river between Brooklyn and Manhattan meant braving whirlpools, sharkdingos, sea dragons, sirens, and at least six insufficiently charted portals to hell. (It had been a very thorough Apocalypse.) The passage over the river between Manhattan and NeoJoisey was not so bad, but the bridge tolls were exorbitant.

She did what she could to maintain a stiff upper lip, but she could not keep her lower lip from quivering. Meest 78-A.net had already sworn to accompany Pappa on what might be a futile mission at best, suicide at worst. Tears filled her eyes at the thought of how heartbroken Jane would be to lose her intended. She wept for her, and for Mamma and the twins, should ill befall Pappa. Most of all, she wept for herself, as she knew exactly who in the family would have sole responsibility for cleaning up the ensuing emotional and financial mess.

“Why do I have to be the reliable one?” she wailed softly as she dabbed her eyes with a lace mouchoir.

“Perhaps it is for the simple reason that you are,” came the answer.

Lizzie darted glances all about, but could not for the life of her discover the speaker. Her pulse raced. The voice was deep, resonant, and somehow familiar, yet she could not assign it to anyone with whom she had spoken of late.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Where are you? Show yourself at once!”

“It would be my pleasure,” the voice replied. “But it might not be yours. You are not disposed to favor my company, at present. Hear me out, I entreat you, so that I might have the opportunity to mend the misunderstanding between us.”

“I do not have time for this,” Lizzie snapped. “My dear father is on the point of flinging his life away because—”

“I know. I was informed of the situation and offered to act alone in retrieving your sister. It was my sincere desire to spare your father and my good friend all risk. They would not hear of it.”

“Your—your good friend?” Lizzie inquired. There was only one person who could be termed Meest 78-A.net’s “good friend.” He had been introduced as such specifically during the ball at Mannbunne Manor; Lizzie had heard Jane’s suitor do so many times that evening. That “good friend” could only be the despised, the odious, the nonetheless possessed of a titillating dollop of what the French termed le grand hawtness . . . FitzWilliam FitzDarcyfitz!

OMG!

She shook her head. This could not be. The voice was not his voice, and yet the narrative context could mean it was no other.

“Who are you?” she repeated, her words low and trembling.

“I am he who regrets sincerely the offense I gave you by denigrating the attractiveness of your person. I lack . . . people skills.”

She forced a brittle laugh. “That is not possible,” she maintained, fending off the inevitable. “I have never heard your voice in my life, and I would recognize his.”

“As I recognized you.”

A shudder of gooseflesh ran up Lizzie’s arms. She began to edge back toward the safety of the house as she said, “That is beyond impossible, whether for him or for you, whoever you are. I never—”

“Hear me.”

A low rumbling like the growl of a panther came from behind the hedges to the left of the terrace. It struck an alien, long-dormant chord deep in Lizzie’s bosom. Her feet moved of their own volition, carrying her toward the sound like a somnambulist. She took step after step, enraptured—a bird hypnotized by the serpent’s eye, a rat led in its last dance by a piper clad in motley, a woman in love with love itself. If any of her family had been present to stand witness, they might have attempted to stop her. She knew this; knew it as certainly as she knew that she would have struck away their staying hands and continued on her path to meet her destiny.

Her recalcitrant mind could no longer deny the remembrance of her heart—she knew that sound. She knew what it portended. She knew what awaited her beyond the Hydrangea quercifolia.

She knew a lot of things, not least of which was a great and plot-advancing truth: FitzWilliam FitzDarcyfitz had recognized her on the night of the ball, nor had he lied when he laid claim to prior acquaintance.

No, he had not lied. However, neither had he spoken the whole truth. And whose fault was that? Lizzie demanded of herself. You did not give him the opportunity to say more!

Oh, be still, Me! she responded. I am sure as hell going to give him plenty of opportunity now! With that, she stepped through the shrubbery and into her destiny.

He was waiting. Had separation wrought such changes in his appearance or had he always been possessed of such a presence, an air as masterful as it was handsome? The moon poured silver light over his burnished turret. His gun stood high and proud, but not in the obnoxious way. His hatch was tilted open just enough to speak of invitation rather than command. She gasped for breath and when she caught one said softly, disbelieving the evidence of her eyes, “Holy Glory, is it you?”

“My lady.” The tank’s gun dipped in salutation.

She did not pause to consider the social niceties. She rushed forward to fling herself against his armored side. Her tears of joy bedewed his caterpillar treads. “Oh, Holy Glory, I have missed you!” she sobbed.

“As I have missed you,” the tank replied. “I have never forgotten your gentle touch on my throttle. I envied my combat partner, for at that time he was the only one who had the necessary humanity to seek your love. When happy circumstance permitted me to find you again, even though I did not appear in the form that you knew—”

He bit off his speech abruptly, then spoke again in less wistful, more fiercely urgent tones: “Never mind all that. More crucial matters are at hand. It wants but a few hours of dawn. If we do not leave at once, your father and my good friend Chucky will be off and away. We must forestall their departure by our own!” He tilted back his hatch even farther. “I will tell you all on our way to save your sister; that is”—his voice grew strangely shy—“if you will ride with me once more?”

She was up the ladder and down the hatch with such grace and alacrity that his audio sensors almost missed her cry of “Yippie-ki-yay, mothra foggers! Let’s squoosh us some capybaras!”

As she closed the hatch firmly, she rejoiced in the new knowledge of her heart. She was into him after all!


Their return from NeoJoisey well before dawn the next day was greeted with a salmagundi of different reactions. Chief among these was Mzzus Ladyfinger-Rabinowitz’s collapse in a dead faint when she saw the rumbling bulk of Holy Glory disgorge two of her daughters onto the lawn of Mannbunne Manor before going through a complicated series of bulk shifts, deflations, and assorted physical clickety-clacks as the massive tank re-formed itself into the elegant, gentlemanly form of Meest FitzWilliam FitzDarcyfitz.

While a penitent little Mary alternately chafed her mother’s wrists, held a vial of smelling salts under her nose, and received full many a zetz im kopf from her irate father and the twins, Jane hastened to draw Lizzie aside.

“My dear, what have we just seen?” she demanded, eyeing the reconstituted FitzDarcyfitz askance. “Who—what is he—it—they? And however did something so huge”—she spread her arms wide—“dwindle to something so relatively small?” She brought the fingertips of both hands to within an inch’s proximity.

It took Lizzie some time to reply, partly because she was assembling her thoughts, partly to obliterate the puerile desire to make some irrelevant allusion to Jane’s anticipated wedding night. After a brief bit of backstory touching on her pre–post-Apocalyptic history and first acquaintance with the armament of her heart, she said, “When his friend and comrade Lieutenant Camisaroja died, he had a total breakdown. They bond deeply with their drivers, you know.”

“Deeply? Indeed, so I see.” Jane cast a wry glance over Lizzie’s rumpled dress and added, “You have some transmission fluid on your nose, darling.”

Blushing hotly, Lizzie wiped it away and went on. “He was mustered out with honors, a pension, a maintenance allowance, and given the option of full shutdown or a new life in what he and his fellow-AI weapons call, er, meat-drag.”

“I can see the results of that choice plainly enough,” said Jane, “but you have yet to explain satisfactorily the transformation we have all witnessed.”

“Oh, that?” Lizzie waved her hands expressively. “It is all thanks to nanotransformative pseudodermic retro-elastification”—she waved her hands some more—“coupled with submicro-compartmentalization affecting and reallocating all factors of Serizawa’s Conjecture—”

“Which one?” Jane interrupted.

“The third edition,” Lizzie supplied. “Fifth chapter, second section, fourteenth paragraph.”

“Oh, that,” said Jane. “The one concerning the conservation of mass across multiple parallel dimensions?” She waved her hands even more vigorously than her sister had done. “Silly me. I ought to have thought of that myself. Well, that explains everything.”

“Everything except why Pappa has suddenly stopped giving little Mary what-ho for eloping with a filthy capybara!” the twins piped up, intruding upon their elder sisters’ scientifically sound and technologically accurate conversation. “Lizzie’s beau spoiled the fun. He whispered something to Pappa, who immediately ordered us to cease troubling our dear and precious sister. His very words!”

Lizzie smiled. “So she is, now. You see, girls, there was a small misunderstanding based on Mary’s farewell message. She has abominable handwriting, her texting skills are worse, and so when we read of her running off with a capybara—”

“A filthy capybara,” the twins chorused.

“—she had actually written that she was eloping with Capitán Ibarra, the hero who broke the Siege of Gowanus and drove the zombies out of their Poughkeepsie stronghold! We shall be returning her to him promptly.”

“He is filthy, though,” Jane put in. “Filthy rich!” The sisters all enjoyed a good laugh over this.

When at last their shared merriment died away, Jane said, “What a relief to Mamma it must be knowing that little Mary is married well, as will I be, soon enough.”

“As will we be, dear Jane,” Lizzie said quietly. “FitzWilliam is even now asking Pappa for his consent. I hope our father has no, er, prejudices against anthrotechnic unions.”

“Is your beau rich, Lizzie?” the twins asked.

“Oh yes! Enormously so. He is the sole heir of his former driver, poor Lieutenant Camisaroja, and has used his interwebz connections and time since leaving the service to multiply that bequest a gajillionfold.” She waved her hand again. “As one does.”

“In that case, Pappa will object to your union only if he wishes to be dealt sudden, bloody death by Mamma,” Jane said, putting one arm around Lizzie’s shoulders. “I take it you have forgiven him for his initial remarks that so affronted you?”

“Completely,” Lizzie replied. “He entreated my pardon so eloquently during our journey to NeoJoisey that I could not do otherwise. He admitted he had spoken those hurtful words about me even while knowing them to be untrue, uttered only because he was posturing before his friend like the most disagreeable of dudebros.”

“What a tool!” the twins exclaimed.

“As are all weapons, essentially,” Lizzie said primly.

“Then let us rejoice for our socially and economically fortuitous future,” Jane declared. “For it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of every advantage of mind, body, and spirit must nonetheless be in want of a husband to affirm her worth as a somewhat human being.”

She let her sisters’ cold stares and silence bide but a moment before she hastened to offer: “Or . . . not?”

The acknowledgment of which truth was agreeably immediate and indeed quite universal.


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