Bright Segment (20 page)

He crossed the walkway, went to the phone banks and dialed Valerie’s number after a glance at his watch. She should be back at work from noonrest by now.

She was. As soon as she saw his face, she said, “Roan Walsh, if you’re calling up to palm that visit to Granny off on
me
, you have another think coming. I do my duty by the family and I’m blessed
if I can see why I should do any more than my duty or why you should do any less, so don’t even say a word about it.” He opened his mouth, but before anything came out of it, she said, “And don’t be late either. And especially, don’t be early.”

Roan opened his mouth again, but the screen went blank.

Out in the filtered sunlight again, he let the chagrin fade and the amusement grow. It grew into something rare in Roan—an increasing glow of heady resentment and conscious command. How did these magnificent human beings get so magnificent in the first place? Why, by asking if everything was all right, or if it weren’t—and, if it weren’t, then they changed things until it was. Now everything was all right with him, except this Granny business. Then ask the question—why should he go see Granny? Because someone always had to. That was no answer. Put it another way, then—what would happen if he just didn’t go?

He strode buoyantly down the walkway, beaming fiercely at the passersby, and the wonderful thought defeated him in exactly seven minutes, twenty seconds. Because the answer to ‘What if he just didn’t go?’ was:

From Mam, that hurt look and then an avalanche of “understanding.”

From Val, a silent, holier-than-thou waspishness, day after day.

And from the Private, thunder and lightning. And no partnership. Well, buds with the partnership!

At this point, he stopped walking. What did you do when you walked out on your family’s business?

He’d never known anyone who had. Where did you go? What did you do?

His other, inner self said, banteringly,
Aw, come off it. Are you going to kick over the Cosmos to save yourself sixty minutes with the old woman?

Roan said nothing to that. So the voice added,
What have you got against Granny, anyway?

“She bothers me,” Roan said aloud. He turned and went into a decorator.

What for?
demanded the inner Roan.

“To buy something for Granny,” he replied. And the inner voice, damn its stinking stamens, chuckled and said,
Know what, Roan? You’re a crawling coward
.

“Why can’t you be on my side for once?” he demanded, but its only answer was a snigger so smug that even his sister Valerie might have envied it.

The decorator was an old bachelor with a fierce countenance. Roan bought roses and hybrid jonquils, paid for them and started out. Suddenly he went back, prodded by his weird questioning mood, and said, “What did they call a place where you buy roses before they called it a decorator?”

The man uttered a soprano nickering which, Roan deduced, was laughter. He leaned across the counter and, looking over each of his shoulders in turn, said in a shrill whisper, “Flower shop.” He clung to the counter and twisted up his face until the tears spurted.

Roan waited patiently until the man calmed down and then asked, “Well, then, why do they call the you-know-what a flower shop?”

This seemed to sober the man. He scratched his pale, cropped head. “I don’t know. I guess because, whatever they called it before, people used to make jokes and cuss-words about it. Like now with—with Flower Shops.”

Roan shuddered. Its motivation was beyond definition for him, but with it came a feeling of having taken a ludicrous path to a great truth, and somehow he knew he would never joke or swear about flower shops again. Or, for that matter, about whatever new name they gave the plumbing after they got through with muddying up this one. For this much he could say aloud, “There ought to be something else to curse and make jokes about.”

The man’s fierce face yielded for a moment to puzzlement, and then he shrugged. To Roan, it was a disgusting gesture and an alarming one, the one his father had made years ago, when Roan’s tongue was a little more firmly attached to his curiosity than it had been of late. It was transplat this and transplat that, until he had suddenly asked his father how the thing worked. The Private had stopped
dead, hesitated, then shrugged just that way. It was a gesture which said, “That’s how things are, that’s all.”

On the way to the transplats, Roan stopped where people clustered. There was a shop there dealing in, according to its sign, FAD AND FASHION. Having passed through a number of engrossing fads in his life—Whirlstick and Chase and Warp and, once, a little hand loom on which he had woven a completely useless strip of material twice his length and two fingers wide—he stopped to see what people were buying.

It was a motion-picture of white-gloved hands manipulating two thick needles and a sort of heavy thread. No one would have dared to do such a thing in the open, but the picture was acceptable, though giggle-making.

On a shelf at waist height were many samples of the fabric which seemed to be the product of this exercise. He stepped forward until his cape covered enough of the shelf for him to pick up a piece of the material.

It was loosely woven, with a paradoxical texture, very rough, yet very soft.

It fell on and around his hand and draped away like—like …

“What is it? What’s this called?” he blurted.

A woman next to him said, “They call it knitting.”

III

He skipped to the laFarge yards and Kimberley, Danbury Marble and Krasniak, checking inventories and consulting accountants. He did it all without notes, which he had left in his office when he charged out at noon. He did it efficiently and he did it, without at first knowing why or even how, in the most superb cross-spoor fashion, so that, by quitting time, it would take far more trouble than it was worth for the office to discover he had used the first two hours of the afternoon for his own purposes.

This small dishonesty troubled him more than a little. Honor was part of the decency-privacy-perfection complex, and yet, to a degree, it seemed to be on the side of good business and high efficiency to operate without it. Did this mean that he was not and could not be
what his father called a gentleman? If not, how much did it matter?

He decided it didn’t matter, cursed silently and jovially at the inner voice which sneered at him, and went to see his grandmother.

There was very little difference between one transplat court and another. A business might have a receptionist and homes might have a larger or smaller facility, but with the notable exception of the blonde’s apartment in his dream—surely it
was
a dream—when he first found walls covered with drapes, he had never noticed much difference between courts.

Granny’s, however, always gave him a special feeling of awe. If it could be found anywhere on Earth, here, right here in this court, was the sum and symbol of their entire culture—neat, decent,
correct
.

He stepped off the transplat and went to the dialpost to check the time, and was pleased. He could hardly have been any more punctual.

There was a soft sound and a panel stood open. It was the same one as always and he wondered, as he had many times before, about the other rooms in Granny’s house. He would not have been surprised if they all proved to be empty. What could she need but her rectitude, her solitude and a single room?

He entered and stood reverently. Granny, all ivory and white wax, made a slight motion with her hooded eyes and he sat opposite her. Between them was a low, bare table.

“Great Mam,” he said formally, “good Stasis to you.”

“Hi,” she said quaintly. “How you doing, boy?” For all his patient irritation with Granny, as always he felt the charm of her precise, archaic speech. Her voice was loud enough, clear enough, but always had the quality of a distant wind. “You look like you hoed a hard row.”

Roan understood, but only because of many years of experience with her odd phrasing. “It’s not too bad. Business.”

Tell me about it.” The old woman lived in some hazy, silent world of her own, separated incalculably in time and space from the here and now, and yet she never failed to ask this question.

He said, “Just the usual … I’ve brought you something.” From
the pocket under his cape, he took the decorations he had bought, twisted the tube which confined them and handed the explosion of roses and daffodils to her. The other package clattered to the table.

There was the demure flash of a snowy glove and she had the stems. She put her face down into the fragrant mass and he heard her breath whisper. “That was very kind,” she said. “And what’s this?” She popped the wrapping and peeped down between the edge of the table and the hem of her cape to see. “
Knitting!
I didn’t know anyone remembered knitting. Used to be just the thing for the old folk, when I was a sprout like you. Sit in the sun and rock and knit, waiting for the end.”

“I thought you’d like it.” He caught the slight movement of her shoulders and heard the snap of the wrappings as she closed the package again and slid it to the undershelf.

They beamed at each other and she asked him, “Aren’t you working too hard? You look—well, you were going to tell me about the business.”

He said, “It’s about the same. Oh, I had an idea this morning and told the Private about it. I think he’s going to use it. He was pleased. He talked about the partnership.”

“That’s fine, boy. What was the idea?”

She wouldn’t understand. But he told her anyway, choosing his words carefully, about his plan to eliminate the transplat operators. She nodded gravely as he spoke, and at one point he had a mad impulse to start making up nonsense technological terms out of his head, just to see if she’d keep nodding. She would; it was all the same to her. She was just being polite.

He restrained himself and concluded, “So, if it works out, it will be a real economy. There just wouldn’t be any way for a shipment to go astray the way—” he almost blurted out the story of the arrival of the passenger van at the monastery, and caught himself just in time; the old lady would have been shocked to death—“the way some have in the past.”

“I reckon they couldn’t,” she agreed, nodding as if she understood.
He ought to return her courtesy, he thought, and said, “And what has occupied you, Great Mam?”

“I do wish you’d keep calling me Granny,” she said, a shade of petulance creeping into the weary whisper. “What have I been doing? What might I be doing at my age? Know how old I am, Roan?”

He nodded.

“A hundred and eighty-three come spring,” she said, ignoring him. “I’ve seen a lot in my time. The stories I could tell you … Did you know I was born in the Africa Colony?”

He nodded again, and again she ignored him. “Yes indeedy, I was about your age when all this started, when the transplat broke the bubble we lived in and scattered us all over the world.”

Yes, you saw it happen!
he thought, for the first time fully realizing something he had merely known statistically before.
You saw folk dancing chest to chest and having food together and no one thinking a thing about it. You knew the culture before there was any real privacy or decency—you, who are the most private and decent of people today. The stories you could tell? Oh, yes—couldn’t you, though! What did they call them before they called them ‘flower shops’?

Certain she couldn’t conceivably divine his motivations, he asked, “What did people
do
then, Granny? I mean—today, if you could name one single job all of us had to do, it would be keeping the perfection we have. Could you say that you folks had any one thing like that?”

Her eyes lighted. Granny had the brightest eyes and the whitest, soundest teeth of anyone he knew. “Sure we had.” She closed her eyes. “Can’t say we thought much about perfection—not in the early days. I think the main job was the next step up.” “The next step up,” she repeated, savoring the phrase. “You know, Roan, what we have today—well, we’re the first people in human history that wasn’t working on that, one way or another. They’d ought to teach human history nowadays. Yes, they should. But I guess most folks wouldn’t like it. Anyway, folks always wanted to be a bit better in those days.

“Sometimes they stopped dead a couple hundred years and tried to make their souls better, and sometimes they forgot all about their souls and went ahead gettin’ bigger and faster and tougher and noisier.
Sometimes they were real wrong and sometimes they did right just by accident; but all the time they worked and worked on that next step up. Not now,” she finished abruptly.

“Of course not. What would we do with a step up? What would we step up to?”

She said, “Used to be when nobody believed you could stop progress. A grass seed can bust a piece of granite half in two, you know. So can a cup o’ water if you freeze it in the right place.”

“We’re different,” he said smugly. “Maybe that’s the real difference between us and other kinds of life. We can stop.”

“You can say that again.” He did not understand her inflection. Before he could wonder about it, she said, “What do you know about psi, Roan?”

“Psi?” He had to search his mind. “Oh—I remember it. Fad and Fashion was selling it a couple of years ago. I thought it was pretty silly.”

“That!”
she said, with as much scorn as her fragile, distant-wind voice could carry. “That was a weejee-board. That thing’s older’n anyone knows about. It didn’t deserve the name of psi. Well, look here—for ten thousand years, there’ve been folks who believed that there was a whole world of powers of the mind—telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance, clairaudience … lots more. Never mind, I’m not going to give you a lecture,” she said, her eyes suddenly sparkling.

He realized that he had essayed a yawn—just a small one—with his mouth closed, and that she had caught him at it. He flushed hotly. But she went right on.

“All I’m saying is this—there’s plenty of proof of this power if you know where to look. One mind talks to another, a person moves in a blink from place to place without a transplat, a mind moves material things, someone knows in advance what’s going to happen—all this by mind power. Been going on for thousands of years. All that time, nobody understood it—and now nobody needs to. But it’s still around.”