This Perfect Day (16 page)

And looking at maps was therefore useless. There could be cities of incurables here, there, everywhere. Or—there could be none at all. The maps proved or disproved nothing.

Was this the great revelation he had racked his brain for— that his map-examining had been stupidity from the beginning? That there was no way at all of finding the city, except possibly by walking everywhere on Earth?

Fight Lilac, with her maddening ideas!

No, not really.

Fight
Uni.

For half an hour he drove his mind against the problem—how do you find a theoretical city in an untravelable world?— and finally he gave up and went to bed.

He thought then of Lilac, of the kiss she had resisted and the kiss she had allowed, and of the strange arousal he had felt when she showed him her soft-looking conical breasts . . .

On Friday he was tense and on edge. Acting normal was unendurable; he held his breath all day long at the Center, and through dinner, TV, and Photography Club. After the last chime he walked to Snowflake’s building—“Ow,” she said, “I’m not going to be able to
move
tomorrow!”—and then to the Pre-U. He circled the halls by flashlight, unable to put the idea aside. The city might exist, it might even be somewhere near. He looked at the money display and the prisoner in his cell
(The two of us, brother)
and the locks and the flat-picture cameras.

There was
one
answer that he could see, but it involved getting dozens of members into the group. Each could then check out the maps according to his own limited knowledge. He himself, for instance, could verify the genetics labs and research centers and the cities he had seen or heard spoken of by other members. Lilac could verify the advisory establishments and other cities . . . But it would take forever, and an army of undertreated accomplices. He could hear King raging.

He looked at the 1951 map, and marveled as he always did at the strange names and the intricate networks of borders. Yet members then could go where they wanted, more or less! Thin shadows moved in response to his light at the edges of the map’s neat patches, cut to fit precisely into the crosslines of the grid. If not for the moving flashlight the blue rectangles would have been corn—

Blue rectangles . . .

If the city were an island it wouldn’t be shown; blue ocean would replace it.

And would have to replace it on pre-U maps as well.

He didn’t let himself get excited. He moved the flashlight slowly back and forth over the glass-covered map and counted the shadow-moving patches. There were eight of them, all blue. All in the oceans, evenly distributed. Five of them covered single rectangles of the grid, and three covered pairs of rectangles. One of the one-rectangle patches was right there off Ind, in “Bay of Bengal”—Stability Bay.

He put the flashlight on a display case and took hold of the wide map by both sides of its frame. He lifted it free of its hook, lowered it to the floor, leaned its glassed face against his knee, and took up the flashlight again.

The frame was old, but its gray-paper backing looked relatively new. The letters
EV
were stamped at the bottom of it.

He carried the map by its wire across the hall, down the escalator, across the second-floor hall, and into the storeroom. Tapping on the light, he brought the map to the table and laid it carefully face-down.

With the corner of a fingernail he tore the taut paper backing along the bottom and sides of the frame, pulled it out from under the wire, and pressed it back so that it stayed. White cardboard lay in the frame, pinned down by ranks of short brads.

He searched in the cartons of smaller relics until he found a rusted pair of pincers with a yellow sticker around one handle. He used the pincers to pull the brads from the frame, then lifted out the cardboard and another piece of cardboard that lay beneath it.

The back of the map was brown-blotched but untorn, with no holes that would have justified the patching. A line of brown writing was faintly visible:
Wyndham, MU 7-2161
—some kind of early nameber.

He picked at the map’s edges and lifted it from the glass, turned it over and raised it sagging above his head against the white light of the ceiling. Islands showed through all the patches: here a large one, “Madagascar”; here a cluster of small ones, “Azores.” The patch in Stability Bay showed a line of four small ones, “Andaman Islands.” He remembered none of the patch-covered islands from the maps at the MFA.

He put the map back down in the frame, face-up, and leaned his hands on the table and looked at it, grinned at its pre-U oddity, its eight blue almost-invisible rectangles.
Lilac!
he thought.
Wait till I tell you!

With the head of the frame propped on piles of books and his flashlight standing under the glass, he traced on a sheet of paper the four small “Andaman Islands” and the shoreline of “Bay of Bengal.” He copied down the names and locations of the other islands and traced the map’s scale, which was in “miles” rather than kilometers.

One pair of medium-size islands, “Falkland Islands,” was off the coast of Arg (“Argentina”) opposite “Santa Cruz,” which seemed to be ARG20400. Something teased his memory in that, but he couldn’t think what.

He measured the Andaman Islands; the three that were closest together were about a hundred and twenty “miles” in overall length—somewhere around two hundred kilometers, if he remembered correctly; big enough for several cities! The shortest approach to them would be from the other side of Stability Bay, SEA77122, if he and Lilac (and King? Snowflake? Sparrow?) were to go there.
If
they were to go? Of course they would go, now that he had found the islands. They’d manage it somehow; they
had
to.

He turned the map face-down in the frame, put back the pieces of cardboard, and pushed the brads back into their holes with a handle-end of the pincers—wondering as he did so why ARG20400 and the “Falkland Islands” kept poking at his memory.

He slipped the frame’s backing in under the wire—Sunday night he would bring tape and make a better job of it—and carried the map back up to the third floor. He hung it on its hook and made sure the loose backing didn’t show from the sides.

ARG20400... A new zinc mine being cut underneath it had been shown recently on TV; was that why it seemed significant? He’d certainly never been there . . .

He went down to the basement and got three tobacco leaves from behind the hot-water tank. He brought them up to the storeroom, got his smoking things from the carton he kept them in, and sat down at the table and began cutting the leaves.

Could there possibly be another reason why the islands were covered and unmapped? And who did the covering?

Enough. He was tired of thinking. He let his mind go—to the knife’s shiny blade, to Hush and Sparrow cutting tobacco the first time he’d seen them. He had asked Hush where the seeds had come from, and she’d said that King had had them.

And he remembered where he had seen
ARG20400
—the nameber, not the city itself.

A screaming woman in torn coveralls was being led into Medicenter Main by red-cross-coveralled members on either side of her. They held her arms and seemed to be talking to her, but she kept on screaming—short sharp screams, each the same as the others, that screamed again from building walls and screamed again from farther in the night. The woman kept on screaming and the walls and the night kept screaming with her.

He waited until the woman and the members leading her had gone into the building, waited longer while the far-off screams lessened to silence, and then he slowly crossed the walkway and went in. He lurched against the admission scanner as if off balance, clicking his bracelet below the plate on metal, and went slowly and normally to an up-gliding escalator. He stepped onto it and rode with his hand on the rail. Somewhere in the building the woman still screamed, but then she stopped.

The second floor was lighted. A member passing in the hallway with a tray of glasses nodded to him. He nodded back.

The third and fourth floors were lighted too, but the escalator to the fifth floor wasn’t moving and there was darkness above. He walked up the steps, to the fifth floor and the sixth.

He walked by flashlight down the sixth-floor hallway— quickly now, not slowly—past the doors he had gone through with the two doctors, the woman who had called him “young brother” and the scar-cheeked man who had watched him. He walked to the end of the hallway, shining his light on the door marked
600A
and
Chief, Chemotherapeutics Division.

He went through the anteroom and into King’s office. The large desk was neater than before: the scuffed telecomp, a pile of folders, the container of pens—and the two paperweights, the unusual square one and the ordinary round one. He picked up the round one—
ARG20400
was inscribed on it—and held its cool plated-metal weight on his palm for a moment. Then he put it down, next to King’s young smiling snapshot at Uni’s dome.

He went around behind the desk, opened the center drawer, and searched in it until he found a plastic-coated section roster. He scanned the half column of Jesuses and found Jesus HL09E6290. His classification was 080A; his residence, G35, room 1744.

He paused outside the door for a moment, suddenly realizing that Lilac might be there too, dozing next to King under his outstretched possessing arm.
Good!
he thought.
Let her hear it at first hand!
He opened the door, went in, and closed it softly behind him. He aimed his flashlight toward the bed and switched it on.

King was alone, his gray head encircled by his arms.

He was glad and sorry. More glad, though. He would tell her later, come to her triumphantly and tell her all he had found.

He tapped on the light, switched off the flashlight, and put it in his pocket. “King,” he said.

The head and the pajamaed arms stayed unmoving.

“King,” he said, and went and stood beside the bed. “Wake up, Jesus HL,” he said.

King rolled onto his back and laid a hand over his eyes. Fingers chinked and an eye squinted between them.

“I want to speak to you,” Chip said.

“What are you doing here?” King asked. “What time is it?”

Chip glanced at the clock. “Four-fifty,” he said.

King sat up, palming at his eyes. “What the hate’s going on?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Chip got the desk chair and put it near the foot of the bed and sat down. The room was untidy, coveralls caught in the chute, tea stains on the floor.

King coughed into the side of a fist, and coughed again. He kept the fist at his mouth, looking red-eyed at Chip, his hair pressed to his scalp in patches.

Chip said, “I want to know what it’s like on the Falkland Islands.”

King lowered his hand. “On what islands?” he said.

“Falkland,” Chip said. “Where you got the tobacco seeds. And the perfume you gave Lilac.”

“I made the perfume,” King said.

“And the tobacco seeds? Did you make them?”

King said, “Someone gave them to me.”

“In ARG20400?”

After a moment King nodded.

“Where did
he
get them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“No,” King said, “I didn’t. Why don’t you get back where you’re supposed to be? We can talk about this tomorrow night.”

“I’m staying,” Chip said. “I’m staying here until I hear the truth. I’m due for a treatment at 8:05. If I don’t take it on time, everything’s going to be finished—me, you, the group. You’re not going to be king of anything.”

“You brother-fighter,” King said, “get out of here.”

“I’m staying,” Chip said.

“I’ve
told
you the truth.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Then go fight yourself,” King said, and lay down and turned over onto his stomach.

Chip stayed as he was. He sat looking at King and waiting.

After a few minutes King turned over again and sat up. He threw aside the blanket, swung his legs around, and sat with his bare feet on the floor. He scratched with both hands at his pajamaed thighs. “’Americanueva,’” he said, “not ‘Falkland.’ They come ashore and trade. Hairy-faced creatures in cloth and leather.” He looked at Chip. “Diseased, disgusting savages,” he said, “who speak in a way that’s barely understandable.”

“They exist, they’ve survived.”

“That’s
all
they’ve done. Their hands are like wood from working. They steal from one another and go hungry.”

“But they haven’t come back to the Family.”

“They’d be better off if they did,” King said. “They’ve still got religion going. And alcohol-drinking.”

“How long do they live?” Chip asked.

King said nothing.

“Past sixty-two?” Chip asked.

King’s eyes narrowed coldly. “What’s so magnificent about living,” he said, “that it has to be prolonged indefinitely? What’s so fantastically beautiful about life here or life there that makes sixty-two not enough of it instead of too fighting much? Yes, they live past sixty-two. One of them claimed to be eighty, and looking at him, I believed it. But they die
younger
too, in their thirties, even in their twenties—from work and filth and defending their ‘money.’”

“That’s only one group of islands,” Chip said. “There are seven others.”

“They’ll all be the same,” King said. “They’ll all be the same.”

“How do you know?”

“How can they
not
be?” King asked. “Christ and Wei, if I’d thought a halfway-human life was possible I’d have said something!”

“You should have said something anyway,” Chip said. “There are islands right here in Stability Bay. Leopard and Hush might have got to them and still be living.”

“They’d be dead.”

“Then you should have let them choose where they died,” Chip said. “You’re not Uni.”

He got up and put the chair back by the desk. He looked at the phone screen, reached over the desk, and took the adviser’s-nameber card from under the rim of it:
Anna SG38P2823.

“You mean you don’t know her nameber?” King said. “What do you do, meet in the dark? Or haven’t you worked your way out to her extremities yet?”