Dayworld (15 page)

“We’ll take care of that.”

“I don’t like working in the dark,” Tingle said. “Anyway, you really need me for the interrogation.”

Paz sighed. After a pause, he said, “Very well. As soon as the situation’s stable, I’ll notify you.”

He sounded as if his mouth was full of food. He had probably stuffed it as soon as he realized that Tingle was going to argue about his orders.

After being told to stay in his apartment until he heard from Paz, Tingle went upstairs. He called the Department of Repairs and Plumbing and ordered a new code-lock installed. He was told that that could not be done until tomorrow. That is, next Wednesday. Tingle canceled the order. He called Paz, who was beginning to sound cross and harassed. Paz said that he would send someone to install a new lock within the hour. It was not wise to bring DORAP in. It might investigate the matter, and how could he explain the damage? The corpspersons would realize that only a charged-particle weapon could have burned through the lock. Tingle said that he knew that, but most corpspeople he had met were not inquisitive about the cause of the damage. They were required by law to record the cause, but that was usually as far as the matter went. Unless some high official got nosey.

“This is getting worse and worse,” Paz said. “I hope you don’t have any more difficulties.”

“I don’t make them,” Tingle said, and he cut Paz off. Paz was beginning to sound as if he were at the cracking point or perilously close. Perhaps the immer council should be told to watch Paz closely for signs of emotional instability. The trouble with that was that he would have to send the suggestion through Paz. No. He could do that through his Thursday superior, who would see to it that Thursday’s council got word. It would then transmit the suggestion to Wednesday’s. But that council would not know about it until it was destoned on Wednesday.

Tingle shrugged. He was not so calm and relaxed and in control of himself. Who was he to throw stones at Paz?

He went into the bathroom and turned up the power on his watch so that he could hear it above the shower water. The bathroom door was locked, and his weapon lay on a rack to one side of the shower. Though he did not think that Castor would return, he was not going to be careless.

Then he heard a shrilling and saw orange flashing. He swore. The sound and light came, not from his watch, but from the strip on the wall opposite the shower cubicle. The soap slipped out of his hands. He started to pick it up, changed his mind, turned the water off, and pulled the shower door back. Who could it be? Nokomis? If she came home early for some reason, he would have a hard time getting away from her to call Paz.

He felt the soap under his foot, and he fell backward.

When he awoke, he was in a hospital bed. Nokomis’ broad but beautiful face hung above him.

“No, I’m not going to be careless,” he muttered.

Nokomis said, “What did you say, dear?”

His mind felt jellied, though not so much that he could not understand her when she told him what had happened. She had been called from the stage during a crucial point in the rehearsal. But he was not to worry about it. He was far more important to her than her career. The producer and most of the cast were furious with her, but he was not to be disturbed by that. To hell with them. The hospital had called her, and she had rushed down in a taxi. And she was so happy that he had not been killed.

However, she was puzzled because, so the hospital said, it had gotten an anonymous call. The anonym had spoken through a strainer, which removed all possibility of identifying the caller by a voiceprint. After saying that Tingle was unconscious in his shower, the caller gave the address and turned off the strip. When the paramedics got to the apartment, they found the door unlocked—she said nothing about the lock mechanism—and Tingle was lying senseless in the shower. The whole thing was so strange.

By the time she was through, Nokomis looked more suspicious than concerned. Tingle said that all he knew was that he had slipped on a bar of soap.

The attendants brought up a machine and subjected him to various tests. After a while, a doctor came in and read the results. He told Tingle that he had no serious injury and that he could go home as soon as he felt strong enough. However, a few minutes later two organics came to question him. Tingle repeated what he had told Nokomis. They looked grave, and one said that he would see Tingle again next Wednesday.

After they had left, Tingle groaned. When Wednesday rolled around, he would be questioned again. If he did not have an explanation to satisfy the organics, and he probably would not, he would be given the ultimate inquisition. Truth mist would be sprayed at him, and, after he had breathed that, he could not lie. He would tell the organics all that they asked.

And he and the other immers would humpty-dumpty into utter ruin.

“One bad thing after another, each worse than the one before it!” he muttered.

“What, dear?” Nokomis said.

“Nothing important.”

Fortunately, Nokomis had to go to the toilet. While she was gone, he called Paz again, and Paz cursed again.

“Quit it!” Tingle said sharply. “My wife’ll be back in a minute! What happened to me?”

Paz settled down and rapped out an explanation. The agent who had come to repair the doorlock had found him in the shower. He had put the weapon in his own shoulderbag and had then called the hospital. Tingle quickly told Paz about the organics and the inevitable interrogation. Paz said, “That can be avoided, I think. I’ll pass on the message. What a mess!”

He paused, then said, his voice very low and soft, “Bob, I’ve got even more bad news.”

Tingle said, “Wait! I hear my wife!”

He listened for a few seconds, then said, “Tell it quick. She’s stopped in the hall to talk to somebody.”

“I got a recording,” Paz said. “From yesterday. It said I should tell you that Ozma Wang
is
dead. I don’t know what that means, but ...”

“God!” Tingle said. Then, “I think my wife’s about to come in. I’ll talk to you later.”

He cut off the transmission and put his arm down by his side. He felt something quiver inside him, a thing struggling to get loose and ravage him. It was, he knew, grief, but it was deep within him, far away. It had to be Jeff Caird’s grief for the death of his wife.

Nokomis entered the room, stopped, and said, “Were you talking to somebody?”

“No. Why?” he said. The thing that was struggling in him was quieting down now.

“I saw your watch close to your mouth. You must ...”

“No, I wasn’t talking to anybody. I just happened to be wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. For God’s sake, Nokomis! If people were classified grammatically, you’d be in the accusative case!”

She stiffened, glared, and said, “You needn’t be so touchy!”

“I’m sorry, dear. It must be the injury to my head.”

On the way home in a taxi, Nokomis said, “The whole thing does look peculiar, doesn’t it? What could we have that anyone else doesn’t have? Is there somebody you haven’t told me about, somebody who hates you and is crazy enough to revenge himself? Or ... herself? You never told me about anyone who might hate you that much, but ...”

Tingle told her that he needed silence until he felt better. Would she mind not talking? Any noise hurt his head. Nokomis stiffened and moved away from him. He was too upset to worry about offending her. His doubts and anxieties were whirling him around like Dorothy’s house in the tornado. He had to talk to Paz again and find out if measures had been taken to deal with his scheduled interrogation on the coming Wednesday.

After a few minutes, he calmed down, and he tried to talk his wife into going back to work. She refused to leave him until she was sure that he was entirely recovered from his fall. She would not listen to his argument that the hospital examination had showed without a doubt that he was not dangerously injured.

He gave up on her and spent a more or less quiet evening (no evening with her was really quiet) until she said that she was going to bed. Knowing that she would not sleep until he was beside her, he said that he did feel tired. He planned to sneak out into another room and call Paz as soon as she started snoring. However, while waiting for her to do so, he fell asleep.

He woke up with the alarm strip whistling. For a moment, he was confused because of the vividness of a dream. Snick had been calling for help from somewhere in a fog, but he could never find her. Though he had several times seen vague dark figures in the mists that might be her, he could not get close to them.

Helpless, he raged inside himself against himself. A man who was a different persona every day should not be married. Though he had known that well, he had allowed his strong need for the domestic life to overcome his reason. Only the Father Tom Zurvan persona had never married, and he had had to be very disciplined and stern with himself when he had built that role.

Just before they went into their cylinders, Nokomis kissed him good night, though not as passionately as she usually did. She had not fully accepted his excuse for not trying to get coercion data on her colleagues. He stepped into the cylinder, turned around, and waved at her. In the dim light through the window he saw her face petrify. He looked at his watch to check that the power had been applied to her cylinder. A delay circuit that he had installed behind the wall gave him enough time to get out of the cylinder and inflate his dummy.

Two minutes later, he ran out of the apartment building. His dash toward the building across the southwest corner of Washington Square was accompanied by the wailing of sirens and the flashing of orange lights from the public strips.

Thursday-World

VARIETY
, Second Month of the Year

D5-W1 (Day-Five, Week-One)

15.

James Swart Dunski, professional fencing instructor, stepped out of his stoner. At the same time, Rupert von Hentzau, his wife, walked from her stoner. They embraced warmly and said, “Good morning.” Rupert was nude, golden-coppery, willowy, kinky-haired, and beautiful. The genes of her American mulatto, Afrikaans, and Samoan ancestors had produced a striking woman, one whose body and face made a magnetic field that clamped on to the attention of males wherever she went. Sometimes, she was an artist’s model; more often, a fencing instructor.

Having greeted one wife, Dunski embraced the other two, Malia Maljetoa Smit and Jannie Simeona White. He also embraced the other husbands and three children, none of whom he was sure was his, though he could have established his fatherhood by genetic-blood tests. All chattering except Dunski, who felt Tingle struggling to keep his persona, they trooped from the basement room to the ground-level community room. Any other day, Dunski would have enjoyed the verbal byplay, the ass-slapping and breast-rubbing. This Thursday, he was being invaded by a partial recall of the last two days. It angered him, though he also admitted to himself that the intrusion was necessary. Jim Dunski could not live for Thursday only. He could be hurt badly at any moment by Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s bad events.

One benefit from his present situation was that Rupert was an immer. She, however, was a citizen of this day only. He was desperate to tell her their dangerous situation at once, but he had no acceptable excuse to get her aside. They would have to go through the rituals and conventions all had long ago agreed upon.

First, the sleepy children were put to bed.

Second, they massed in the huge bathroom, brushed their teeth, washed whatever needed washing and urinated, if need be.

Third, they went to the kitchen and drank milk and, if hungry, ate some berries and cereal with milk. By then the joshing, touching, stroking, and rubbing had swelled the penises and nipples and started the natural lubrications.

Fourth, they went into the living room, sat down in chairs arranged in a circle, and spun a milk bottle. This was an antique, which might have been used by children a thousand or more years ago at parties. Its purpose was rather more serious now, a democratic pure-chance procedure designed to avoid jealousy and favoritism.

Dunski hoped that he would get Rupert first so that he could inform her of what she deeply needed to know. However, the bottle he spun pointed at Malia when it stopped. Sighing, though not noticeably, he went with her into a bedroom and did what he would at another time have thoroughly enjoyed, though not as much as if she had been Rupert. Afterward, Malia said, “Your heart, not to mention other things, didn’t seem to be in it.”

“It’s no reflection on my love for you,” he said. He kissed her dusky cheek. “Every man has his down days and his up days.”

“I’m not complaining, mind you,” Malia said. “I love you, too. But I think, if you don’t mind my saying so, today’s one of your down days.”

“You were faking your orgasms?”

“Never! I don’t fake!”

“Well, I’m sorry. I must be off my feed or my biorhythm or something.”

“I forgive you, although there’s really nothing I have to forgive,” Malia said. “Don’t worry about it.”

They went to the bathroom, Dunski thinking that she should not have complained if she thought it unimportant. They found Jan Markus Wells and Rupert there. While washing, Dunski tried to catch Rupert’s eye so that he could sign to her that he wanted to speak privately to her. She was too occupied in douching to see him.

They returned to the living room, where they had to wait four minutes for the other couple. This time, chance did its best for Dunski. When he spun the bottle, it stopped with its opened end pointing at Rupert. Sighing quietly with relief, he went hand in hand with her to another bedroom. It reeked of sexual scents, and the bedclothes were sweat-soaked. He, Dunski, was accustomed to this, but Tingle, looking over his shoulder, and Caird, looking over Tingle’s shoulder, might have caused his slight revulsion.

Rupert lay down on the bed and stretched out, her hands behind her head, her back arched, her perfectly conical breasts staring nipplewise at the ceiling. He sat down by her, took her hand, and said, “Let’s skip the lovemaking, Rupert. I ... we’re in trouble. We have to talk about it.”