This Perfect Day (36 page)

They swam in the pool. Dover went to swim with a tall and beautiful woman Chip had noticed applauding the night before, and he and Karl sat on the edge of the pool and watched them. “How do you feel?” Chip asked.

“I don’t know,” Karl said. “I’m pleased, of course, and Dover says it’s all necessary and it’s our duty to help, but—I don’t know. Even if they’re running Uni, it’s Uni anyway, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Chip said. “That’s how I feel.”

“There would have been a mess up above if we’d done what we planned,” Karl said, “but it would have been straightened out eventually, more or less.” He shook his head. “I honestly don’t know, Chip,” he said. “Any system the Family set up on its own would certainly be a lot less
efficient
than Uni is, than these people are; you can’t deny that.”

“No, you can’t,” Chip said.

“Isn’t it fantastic how long they live?” Karl said. “I still can’t get over the fact that—look at those breasts, will you? Christ and Wei.”

A light-skinned round-breasted woman dived into the pool from the other side.

Karl said, “Let’s talk some more later on, all right?” He slipped down into the water.

“Sure, we’ve got plenty of time,” Chip said.

Karl smiled at him and kicked off and swam arm-over-arm away.

The next morning Chip left his room and walked down green-carpeted painting-hung corridor toward a steel door at the end of it. He hadn’t gone very far when “Hi, brother,” Dover said and came along and walked beside him. “Hi,” Chip said. He looked ahead again and, walking, said, “Am I being guarded?”

“Only when you go in this direction,” Dover said.

Chip said, “I couldn’t do anything with my bare hands even if I wanted to.”

“I know,” Dover said. “The old man’s cautious. Pre-U mind.” He tapped his temple and smiled. “Only for a few days,” he said.

They walked to the end of the corridor and the steel door slid open. White-tiled corridor stretched beyond it; a member in blue touched a scanner and went through a doorway.

They turned and started back. The door whispered behind them. “You’ll get to see it,” Dover said. “He’ll probably give you the tour himself. Want to go to the gym?”

In the afternoon Chip looked in at the offices of the Architectural Council. A small and cheerful old man recognized him and welcomed him—Madhir, the Council’s head. He looked to be over a hundred; his hands too—all of him apparently. He introduced Chip to other members of the Council: an old woman named Sylvie, a reddish-haired man of fifty or so whose name Chip didn’t catch, and a short but pretty woman called Gri-gri. Chip had coffee with them and ate a piece of pastry with a cream filling. They showed him a set of plans they were discussing, layouts that Uni had made for the rebuilding of “G-3 cities.” They talked about whether or not the layouts should be redone to different specifications, asked questions of a telecomp and disagreed on the significance of its answers. The old woman Sylvie gave a point-by-point explanation of why she felt the layouts were needlessly monotonous. Madhir asked Chip if he had an opinion; he said he didn’t. The younger woman, Gri-gri, smiled at him invitingly.

There was a party in the main lounge that night—“Happy new year!” “Happy U year!”—and Karl shouted in Chip’s ear, “I’ll tell you one thing I don’t like about this place! No whiskey! Isn’t that a shut-off? If wine is okay, why not whiskey?” Dover was dancing with the woman who looked like Lilac (not really, not half as pretty), and there were people Chip had sat with at meals and met in the gym and the music room, people he had seen in one part of the complex or another, people he hadn’t seen in before; there were more than had been there the other night when he and Karl had come in— almost a hundred of them, with white-paploned members channeling trays among them. “Happy U year!” someone said to him, an elderly woman who had been at his lunch table, Hera or Hela. “It’s almost 172!” she said. “Yes,” he said, “half an hour.” “Oh, there he is!” she said, and moved forward. Wei was in the doorway, in white, with people crowding around him. He shook their hands and kissed their cheeks, his shriveled yellow face grin-split and gleaming, his eyes lost in wrinkles. Chip moved back farther into the crowd and turned away. Gri-gri waved, jumping up to see him over people between them. He waved back at her and smiled and kept moving.

He spent the next day, Unification Day, in the gym and the library.

He went to a few of Wei’s evening discussions. They were held in the garden, a pleasant place to be. The grass and the trees were real, and the stars and the moon were near reality, the moon changing phase but never position. Bird warblings sounded from time to time and a gentle breeze blew. Fifteen or twenty programmers were usually at the discussions, sitting on chairs and on the grass. Wei, in a chair, did most of the talking. He expanded on quotations from the
Living Wisdom
and deftly traced the particulars of questions to their encompassing generalities. Now and then he deferred to the head of the Educational Council, Gustafsen, or to Boroviev, the head of the Medical Council, or to another of the High Council members.

At first Chip sat at the edge of the group and only listened, but then he began to ask questions—why parts, at least, of treatments couldn’t be put back on a voluntary basis; whether human perfection might not include a degree of selfishness and aggressiveness; whether selfishness, in fact, didn’t play a considerable part in their own acceptance of alleged “duty” and “responsibility.” Some of the programmers near him seemed affronted by his questions, but Wei answered them patiently and fully; seemed even to welcome them, heard his “Wei?” over the askings of the others. He moved a little closer in from the group’s edge.

One night he sat up in bed and lit a cigarette and smoked in the dark.

The woman lying beside him stroked his back. “It’s right, Chip,” she said. “It’s what’s best for everyone.”

“You read minds?” he said.

“Sometimes,” she said. Her name was Deirdre and she was on the Colonial Council. She was thirty-eight, light-skinned, and not especially pretty, but sensible, shapely, and good company.

“I’m beginning to think it
is
what’s best,” Chip said, “and I don’t know whether I’m being convinced by Wei’s logic or by lobsters and Mozart and you. Not to mention the prospect of eternal life.”

“That scares me,” Deirdre said.

“Me too,” Chip said.

She kept stroking his back. “It took me two months to cool down,” she said.

“Is that how you thought of it?” he said. “Cooling down?”

“Yes,” she said. “And growing up. Facing reality.”

“So why does it feel like giving in?” Chip said.

“Lie down,” Deirdre said.

He put out his cigarette, put the ashtray on the night table, and turned to her, lying down. They held each other and kissed. “Truly,” she said. “It’s best for everybody, in the long run. We’ll improve things gradually, working in our own councils.”

They kissed and caressed each other, and then they kicked down the sheet and she threw her leg over Chip’s hip and his hardness slipped easily into her.

He was sitting in the library one morning when a hand took his shoulder. He looked around, startled, and Wei was there. He bent, pushing Chip aside, and put his face down to the viewer hood.

After a moment he said, “Well, you’ve gone to the right man.” He kept his face at the hood another moment, and then stood up and let go of Chip’s shoulder and smiled at him. “Read Liebman too,” he said. “And Okida and Marcuse. I’ll make a list of titles and give it to you in the garden this evening. Will you be there?”

Chip nodded.

His days fell into a routine: mornings at the library, afternoons at the Council. He studied construction methods and environment planning; examined factory flow charts and circulation patterns of residential buildings. Madhir and Sylvie showed him drawings of buildings under construction and buildings planned for the future, of cities as they existed and (plastic overlay) cities as they might some day be modified. He was the eighth member of the Council; of the other seven, three were inclined to challenge Uni’s designs and change them, and four, including Madhir, were inclined to accept them without question. Formal meetings were held on Friday afternoons; at other times seldom more than four or five of the members were in the offices. Once only Chip and Gri-gri were there, and they wound up locked together on Madhir’s sofa.

After Council, Chip used the gym and the pool. He ate with Deirdre and Dover and Dover’s woman-of-the-day and whoever else joined them—sometimes Karl, on the Transportation Council and resigned to wine.

One day in February, Chip asked Dover if it was possible to get in touch with whoever had replaced him on Liberty and find out if Lilac and Jan were all right and whether Julia was providing for them as she had said she would.

“Sure,” Dover said. “No problem at all.”

“Would you do it then?” Chip said. “I’d appreciate it.”

A few days later Dover found Chip in the library. “All’s well,” he said. “Lilac is staying home and buying food and paying rent, so Julia must be coming through.”

“Thanks, Dover,” Chip said. “I was worried.”

“The man there’ll keep an eye on her,” Dover said. “If she needs anything, money can come in the mail.”

“That’s fine,” Chip said. “Wei told me.” He smiled. “Poor Julia,” he said, “supporting all those families when it isn’t really necessary. If she knew she’d have a fit.”

Dover smiled. “She would,” he said. “Of course, everyone who set out didn’t get here, so in some cases it
is
necessary.”

“That’s right,” Chip said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“See you at lunch,” Dover said.

“Right,” Chip said. “Thanks.”

Dover went, and Chip turned to the viewer and bent his face to the hood. He put his finger on the next-page button and, after a moment, pressed it.

He began to speak up at Council meetings and to ask fewer questions at Wei’s discussions. A petition was circulated for the reduction of cake days to one a month; he hesitated but signed it. He went from Deirdre to Blackie to Nina and back to Deirdre; listened in the smaller lounges to sex gossip and jokes about High Council members; followed crazes for paper-airplane making and speaking in pre-U languages (“Français” was pronounced “Fransay,” he learned).

One morning he woke up early and went to the gym. Wei was there, jumping astride and swinging dumbbells, shining with sweat, slab-muscled, slim-hipped; in a black supporter and something white tied around his neck. “Another early bird, good morning,” he said, jumping his legs out and in, out and in, swinging the dumbbells out and together over his white-wisped head.

“Good morning,” Chip said. He went to the side of the gym and took off his robe and hung it on a hook. Another robe, blue, hung a few hooks away.

“You weren’t at the discussion last night,” Wei said.

Chip turned. “There was a party,” he said, toeing off his sandals. “Patya’s birthday.”

“It’s all right,” Wei said, jumping, swinging the dumbbells. “I just mentioned it.”

Chip walked onto a mat and began trotting in place. The white thing around Wei’s neck was a band of silk, tightly knotted.

Wei stopped jumping and tossed down the dumbbells and took a towel from one of the parallel bars. “Madhir’s afraid you’re going to be a radical,” he said, smiling.

“He doesn’t know the half of it,” Chip said.

Wei watched him, still smiling, wiping the towel over his big-muscled shoulders and under his arms.

“Do you work out every morning?” Chip asked.

“No, only once or twice a week,” Wei said. “I’m not athletic by nature.” He rubbed the towel behind him.

Chip stopped trotting. “Wei, there’s something I’d like to speak to you about,” he said.

“Yes?” Wei said. “What is it?”

Chip took a step toward him. “When I first came here,” he said, “and we had lunch together—”

“Yes?” Wei said.

Chip cleared his throat and said, “You said that if I wanted to I could have my eye replaced. Rosen said so too.”

“Yes, of course,” Wei said. “Do you want to have it done?”

Chip looked at him uncertainly. “I don’t know, it seems like such—vanity,” he said. “But I’ve always been aware of it—”

“It’s not vanity to correct a flaw,” Wei said. “It’s negligence not to.”

“Can’t I get a lens put on?” Chip said. “A brown lens?”

“Yes, you can,” Wei said, “if you want to cover it and not correct it.”

Chip looked away and then back at him. “All right,” he said, “I’d like to do it, have it done.”

“Good,” Wei said, and smiled. “I’ve had eye changes twice,” he said. “There’s blurriness for a few days, that’s all. Go down to the medicenter this morning. I’ll tell Rosen to do it himself, as soon as possible.”

‘Thank you,” Chip said.

Wei put his towel around his white-banded neck, turned to the parallel bars, and lifted himself straight-armed onto them. “Keep quiet about it,” he said, hand-walking between the bars, “or the children will start pestering you.”

It was done, and he looked in his mirror and both his eyes were brown. He smiled, and stepped back, and stepped close again. He looked at himself from one side and the other, smiling.

When he had dressed he looked again.

Deirdre, in the lounge, said, “It’s a tremendous improvement! You look wonderful! Karl, Gri-gri, look at Chip’s eye!”

Members helped them into heavy green coats, thickly quilted and hooded. They closed them and put on thick green gloves, and a member pulled open the door. The two of them, Wei and Chip, went in.

They walked together along an aisle between steel walls of memory banks, their breath clouding from their nostrils. Wei spoke of the banks’ internal temperature and of the weight and number of them. They turned into a narrower aisle where the steel walls stretched ahead of them convergingly to a faraway crosswalk

“I was in here when I was a child,” Chip said.

“Dover told me,” Wei said.

“It frightened me then,” Chip said. “But it has a kind of— majesty to it; the order and precision . . .”

Wei nodded, his eyes glinting. “Yes,” he said. “I look for excuses to come in.”