This Perfect Day (13 page)

“Yes, it would,” she said, “but I think they were screened before they were sent here and that’s why we can’t.”

“You think they were screened?”

“There ought to be lots of them in the language,” she said. “How could it have
become
the language if it wasn’t the one most widely used?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “You’re right.”

“I keep hoping, though,” she said, “that there was a slip in the screening.” She frowned at a book and put it on a pile.

Her filled pockets stirred with her movements, and suddenly they looked to Chip like empty pockets lying against round breasts, breasts like the ones Karl had drawn; the breasts, almost, of a pre-U woman. It was possible, considering her abnormal darkness and the various physical abnormalities of the lot of them. He looked at her face again, so as not to embarrass her if she really had them.

“I thought I was double-checking this carton,” she said, “but I have a funny feeling I’m triple-checking it.”

“But
why
should the books have been screened?” he asked her.

She paused, with her dark hands hanging empty and her elbows on her knees, looking at him gravely with her large, level eyes. “I think we’ve been taught things that aren’t true,” she said. “About the way life was before the Unification. In the
late
pre-U, I mean, not the early.”

“What things?”

“The violence, the aggressiveness, the greed, the hostility. There was some of it, I suppose, but I can’t believe there was nothing else, and that’s what we’re taught, really. And the ‘bosses’ punishing the ‘workers,’ and all the sickness and alcohol-drinking and starvation and self-destruction. Do
you
believe it?”

He looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t thought much about it.”

“I’ll tell you what
I
don’t believe,” Snowflake said. She had risen from the bench, the game with King evidently finished.
“I
don’t believe that they cut off the baby boys’ foreskins,” she said. “In the early pre-U, maybe—in the early,
early
pre-U—but not in the late; it’s just too incredible. I mean, they had
some
kind of intelligence, didn’t they?”

“It’s incredible, all right,” King said, hitting his pipe against his palm, “but I’ve seen photographs. Alleged photographs, anyway.”

Chip shifted around and sat on the floor. “What do you mean?” he said. “Can photographs be—not genuine?”

“Of course they can,” Lilac said. ‘Take a close look at some of the ones inside. Parts of them have been drawn in. And parts have been drawn out.” She began putting books back into the carton.

“I had no idea that was possible,” Chip said.

“It is with the flat ones,” King said.

“What we’re probably given,” Leopard said—he was sitting in a gilded chair, toying with the orange plume of the hat he had worn—“is a mixture of truth and untruth. It’s anybody’s guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each.”

“Couldn’t we study these books and learn the languages?” Chip asked. “One would be all we’d really need.”

“For what?” Snowflake asked.

“To find out,” he said. “What’s true and what isn’t.”

“I tried it,” Lilac said.

“She certainly did,” King said to Chip, smiling. “A while back she wasted more nights than I care to remember beating her pretty head against one of those nonsensical jumbles. Don’t
you
do it, Chip; I beg you.”

“Why not?” Chip asked. “Maybe I’ll have better luck.”

“And suppose you do?” King said. “Suppose you decipher a language and read a few books in it and find out that we
are
taught things that are untrue. Maybe
everything’s
untrue. Maybe life in 2000
A.D.
was one endless orgasm, with everyone choosing the right classification and helping his brothers and loaded to the ears with love and health and life’s necessities. So what? You’ll still be right here, in 162
Y.U.,
with a bracelet and an adviser and a monthly treatment. You’ll only be unhappier. We’ll
all
be unhappier.”

Chip frowned and looked at Lilac. She was packing books into the carton, not looking at him. He looked back at King and sought words. “It would still be worth knowing,” he said. “Being happy or unhappy—is that really the most important thing? Knowing the truth would be a different kind of happiness—a more satisfying kind, I think, even if it turned out to be a sad kind.”

“A sad kind of happiness?” King said, smiling. “I don’t see that at all.” Leopard looked thoughtful.

Snowflake, gesturing to Chip to get up, said, “Come on, there’s something I want to show you.”

He climbed to his feet. “But we’d probably only find that things have been exaggerated,” he said; “that there was hunger but not so
much
hunger, aggressiveness but not so
much
aggressiveness. Maybe some of the minor things have been made up, like the foreskin-cutting and the flag-worship.”

“If you feel that way, then there’s
certainly
no point in bothering,” King said. “Do you have any idea what a job it would be? It would be staggering.”

Chip shrugged. “It would be good to
know,
that’s all,” he said. He looked at Lilac; she was putting the last few books into the carton.

“Come on,” Snowflake said, and took his arm. “Save us some tobacco, you mems.”

They went out and into the dark of the exhibit hall. Snowflake’s flashlight lit their way. “What is it?” Chip asked. “What do you want to show me?”

“What do you think?” she said. “A bed. Certainly not more books.”

They generally met two nights a week, Sundays and Woodsdays or Thursdays. They smoked and talked and idled with relics and exhibits. Sometimes Sparrow sang songs that she wrote, accompanying herself on a lap-held instrument whose strings at her fingers made pleasing antique music. The songs were short and sad, about children who lived and died on starships, lovers who were transferred, the eternal sea. Sometimes King reenacted the evening’s TV, comically mocking a lecturer on climate control or a fifty-member chorus singing “My Bracelet.” Chip and Snowflake made use of the seventeenth-century bed and the nineteenth-century sofa, the early pre-U farm wagon and the late pre-U plastic rug. On nights between meetings they sometimes went to one or the other’s room. The nameber on Snowflake’s door was Anna PY24A9155; the 24, which Chip couldn’t resist working out, made her thirty-eight, older than he had thought her to be.

Day by day his senses sharpened and his mind grew more alert and restless. His treatment caught him back and dulled him, but only for a week or so; then he was awake again, alive again. He went to work on the language Lilac had tried to decipher. She showed him the books she had worked from and the lists she had made.
Momento
was moment;
silenzio,
silence. She had several pages of easily recognized translations; but there were words in the books’ every sentence that could only be guessed at and the guesses tried elsewhere. Was
allora
“then” or “already”? What were
quale
and
sporse
and
rimanesse?
He worked with the books for an hour or so at every meeting. Sometimes she leaned over his shoulder and looked at what he was doing—said “Oh, of course!” or “Couldn’t that be one of the days of the week?”—but most of the time she stayed near King, filling his pipe for him and listening while he talked. King watched Chip working and, reflected in glass panes of pre-U furniture, smiled at the others and raised his eyebrows.

Chip saw Mary KK on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. He acted normal with her, smiled through the Amusement Gardens and fucked her simply and without passion. He acted normal at his assignment, slowly following the established procedures. Acting normal began to irritate him, more and more as week followed week.

In July, Hush died. Sparrow wrote a song about her, and when Chip returned to his room after the meeting at which she had sung it, she and Karl (Why hadn’t he thought of him sooner?) suddenly came together in his mind. Sparrow was large and awkward but lovely when she sang, twenty-five or so and lonely. Karl presumably had been “cured” when Chip “helped” him, but might he not have had the strength or the genetic capacity or the whatever-it-was to resist the cure, at least to a degree? Like Chip he was a 663; there was a chance that he was right there at the Institute somewhere, an ideal prospect for being led into the group and an ideal match for Sparrow. It was certainly worth a try. What a pleasure it would be to
really
help Karl! Undertreated, he would draw—well what
wouldn’t
he draw?—pictures such as no one had ever imagined! As soon as he got up the next morning he got his last nameber book out of his take-along kit, touched the phone, and read out Karl’s nameber. But the screen stayed blank and the phone voice apologized; the member he had called was out of reach.

Bob RO asked him about it a few days later, just as he was getting up from the chair. “Oh, say,” Bob said, “I meant to ask you; how come you wanted to call this Karl WL?”

“Oh,” Chip said, standing by the chair. “I wanted to see how he was. Now that
I’m
all right, I guess I want to be sure that everyone else is.”

“Of course he is,” Bob said. “It’s an odd thing to do, after so many years.”

“I just happened to think of him,” Chip said.

He acted normal from the first chime to the last and met with the group twice a week. He kept working at the language —Italiano, it was called—although he suspected that King was right and there was no point in it. It was something to do, though, and seemed more worthwhile than playing with mechanical toys. And once in a while it brought Lilac to him, leaning over to look, with one hand on the leather-topped table he worked at and the other on the back of his chair. He could smell her—it wasn’t his imagination; she actually smelled of flowers—and he could look at her dark cheek and neck and the chest of her coveralls pushed taut by two mobile round protrusions. They were breasts. They were definitely breasts.

O
NE NIGHT LATE IN
A
UGUST,
while looking for more books in Italiano, he found one in a different language whose title,
Vers I’avenir,
was similar to the Italiano words
verso
and
avvenire
and apparently meant
Toward the Future.
He opened the book and thumbed its pages, and
Wei Li Chun
caught his eye, printed at the tops of twenty or thirty of them. Other names were at the tops of other clusters of pages,
Mario Sofik, A. F. Liebman.
The book, he realized, was a collection of short pieces by various writers, and two of the pieces were indeed by Wei. The title of one of them,
Le pas prochain en avant,
he recognized
(pas
would be
passo; avant, avanti)
as “The Next Step Forward,” in Part One of Wei’s
Living Wisdom.

The value of what he had found, as he began to perceive it, held him motionless. Here in this small brown book, its cover clinging by threads, were twelve or fifteen pre-U-language pages of which he had an exact translation waiting in his night-table drawer. Thousands of words, of verbs in their bafflingly changing forms; instead of guessing and groping as he had done for his near-useless fragments of Italiano, he could gain a solid footing in this second language in a matter of hours!

He said nothing to the others; slipped the book into his pocket and joined them; filled his pipe as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
Le pas-
whatever-it
-
wa
s-avant
might not be “The Next Step Forward” after all. But it
was,
it had to be.

It was; he saw it as soon as he compared the first few sentences. He sat up in his room all that night, carefully reading and comparing, with one finger at the lines in the pre-U language and another at the lines translated. He worked his way two times through the fourteen-page essay, and then began making alphabetical word lists.

The next night he was tired and slept, but the following night, after a visit from Snowflake, he stayed up and worked again.

He began going to the museum on nights between meetings. There he could smoke while he worked, could look for other Français books—Français was the language’s name; the hook below the
C
was a mystery—and could roam the halls by flashlight. On the third floor he found a map from 1951, artfully patched in several places, where Eur was “Europe,” with the division called “France” where Français had been used, and all its strangely and appealingly named cities: “Paris” and “Nantes” and “Lyon” and “Marseille.”

Still he said nothing to the others. He wanted to confound King with a language fully mastered, and delight Lilac. At meetings he no longer worked at Italiano. One night Lilac asked him about it, and he said, truthfully, that he had given up trying to unravel it. She turned away, looking disappointed, and he was happy, knowing the surprise he was preparing for her.

Saturday nights were wasted, lying by Mary KK, and meeting nights were wasted too; although now, with Hush dead, Leopard sometimes didn’t come, and when he didn’t, Chip stayed on at the museum to straighten up and stayed still later to work.

In three weeks he could read Français rapidly, with only a word here and there that was indecipherable. He found several Français books. He read one whose title, translated, was
The Purple Sickle Murders;
and another,
The Pygmies of the Equatorial Forest;
and another,
Father Goriot.

He waited until a night when Leopard wasn’t there, and then he told them. King looked as if he had heard bad news. His eyes measured Chip and his face was still and controlled, suddenly older and more gaunt. Lilac looked as if she had been given a longed-for gift. “You’ve read
books
in it?” she said. Her eyes were wide and shining and her lips stayed parted. But neither one’s reaction could give Chip the pleasure he had looked forward to. He was grave with the weight of what he now knew.

“Three of them,” he said to Lilac. “And I’m halfway through a fourth.”