Castle War

Fourteen City

There was little to orientation. He was not subjected to political indoctrination or any long harangues; there was no orientation per se. He was simply issued clothing — an all-weather coat with baggy trousers — and a sheet of paper with some instructions on it. The instructions said to report to a certain address, his new residence. He was to remain there until he was issued new instructions, which he would receive via his apartment communication screen. That, along with more slogans, was all there was.

Banners with slogans draped every building facade, hung from every cornice. He walked the streets reading posters in storefront windows and on kiosks. He could not get a sense of who was running things. There were no giant blowups of some dictatorial face, no direct references to a political party or revolutionary cabal.

The people he passed were all smiling, hurrying to some duty or another. It was a strange smile, somehow detached from or irrelevant to any real sense of well-being. It was not forced, yet not quite real.

He stopped to ask directions of a traffic director — not a policeman; the man wore only a white brassard and was unarmed. The man told him to take an omnibus with a certain number and to get off at Complex 502 on the Boulevard of Social Concern.

“Put a smile on your face,” the man told him.

Ignoring the order, he walked on.

It was not long before the first pangs of nausea began. He forced a smile, and his stomach rumbled, then quieted. He felt better instantly. Justice was that speedy. His own body was judge and jury, and its verdict was not open to appeal.

There were few stores or shops. Most storefronts were boarded up or had their windows used as billboards. Here and there a door was open, no sign above saying what was going on inside. He stopped at one such place and found a store with a few undifferentiated shoes in bins. Another store offered socks and underwear. There wasn’t much stock in any store he visited. The places looked ransacked, and no salespeople were about. He continued walking.

Traffic was limited to trucks, buses, and official-looking vehicles. No bicycles or powered two-wheeled conveyances. The sidewalks were crowded, as they would be on any workday in any universe. This was downtown, the area between the rivers that he knew as the Golden Triangle. There were hundreds of office buildings and thousands of workers. Everyone was dressed pretty much as he was, in the same utilitarian outfit.

He passed what looked like a restaurant. He went back and looked in the window. The place was actually a cafeteria. His stomach had calmed down and he was hungry. Very hungry. His instructions had not told him about food or about getting it, and he had no money.

Yet he went in. It was midmorning and there were no lines. He watched a woman at the counter load her tray and walk to a table. He could see no checkout station, no cashier. He decided to take a chance. He took a tray and slid it along the runner.

Nothing looked very good. He passed green gelatin and wilted salads. Farther along an attendant was ladling what looked like chicken stew into a container. He asked for some of that, and got a small bowlful. He took slices of bread and a cup of what appeared to be custard or vanilla pudding. There was little else to choose from. He got himself coffee but no cream, as that commodity was not in evidence. No sugar, either. He found a seat.

The stew, if that’s what it was, was awful, tasting of flour paste and unidentifiable flavorings. The vegetables were tasteless, and the “meat” was not chicken but something like bean curd, and just as unappetizing. He forced it down. The bread had the flavor of cardboard. He spat out the first mouthfuls of ersatz custard and sipped the coffee surrogate, which carried the faint aftertaste of detergent.

He looked on the wall above the counter.

Of course; a simple way out, and one the authorities probably had a hard time thwarting.

He wondered if it was the only way out.

He left half the coffee in the cup and went out to the street. He now knew why the stores needed no salespeople. Citizens simply walked in and took what was needed. They took exactly as much as they needed and no more, or InnerVoice would punish. Dandy way to run a distribution system. No money necessary. It was the age-old utopian dream: a moneyless economy immune from the laws of supply and demand, based on mutual cooperation and individual restraint. Unfortunately there were chronic shortages, but who would complain?

Who could complain?

He caught the bulky omnibus on Conscience Avenue, a thoroughfare that ran to the river and crossed a bridge. On the other shore the bus turned left and entered a section of the city that Gene knew as the South Side. In this universe it was nameless and consisted mostly of high rises and little parks.

The Boulevard of Social Concern was the main street, leading past numerous groups of buildings, signs designating each complex by number. He saw 501 go by, and made his way to the front of the bus.

The driver beamed at him. “We’re getting happier every day, citizen.”

“Aren’t we, though?”

He paid for the irony with a twinge or two of gastric pain.

Building C of Complex 502 looked increasingly shabbier the closer he got to it. Intended to be lean and functional, it looked only weathered and threadbare. The bare concrete was cracked and streaked with water stains, and the tiny windows made the place look more like a prison than an apartment building. The surrounding grounds were clear of trash but looked desolate. The grass was stunted and looked dead, gone brown and dry.

He passed through a cracked glass door and entered the lobby. It was empty except for a few stacked fiberglass chairs and an underused bulletin board. He waited for the elevator.

The elevator never came. His apartment number, so the instruction sheet said, was 502-C-346. He found a stairwell and went up to the third floor.

The door to 346 was open. There was no lock.

It was a one-room apartment with two small windows and walls of unpainted concrete block. The floor was bare concrete. The place was perfunctorily furnished: a cot, one table, one chair, and a small settee. A lidless toilet stood in a corner next to a tiny sink. There was a kitchen of sorts — a hot plate and a cabinet. No refrigerator, no kitchen sink. The walls were devoid of decoration and there were no curtains on the windows.

Set in the wall in front of the settee was an oblong screen. It displayed:

He was sorry he had looked at it. It was an order, and if he disobeyed … He managed to put off activating the message until a synthesized voice came out of the speaker below it.

“There is a message waiting for you. Touch the screen to start the message. Touch twice if you want the visual display only and no audio.”

He touched twice. The screen came to life.

He had already familiarized himself with his “living facility.”

He sat down. What would happen if he got on a bus, went to the edge of the city, got off, and kept walking? Perhaps this direct approach would work if he could keep his mind occupied somehow, if he could in some way not dwell on the fact that he was doing something forbidden.

But was that possible? He had his doubts. No, his unconscious reactions would not escape InnerVoice. And there was nothing he could do about his unconscious — or “subconscious,” to use the popular term.

Yet there had to be a way. Somehow the monitoring process would have to be defeated, or at least misled, until he could get to the castle. There, magic could be employed to rectify matters. But could he get as far as the portal? He did not know. That was not the only problem. He had no good reason to believe that the portal was still at the same location. It might have shifted again, or may well have disappeared altogether. He berated himself for being so foolish as to blunder through before checking things out. He should have immediately summoned Tyrene and alerted everybody that something was wrong with the Earth aspect.

But the portal could have stayed put. He had no choice but to assume that it had and proceed from that assumption. So it was a matter of getting to the portal. He had to come up with a way of thwarting InnerVoice for as long as it took to get that far.

He was getting nauseated.

He was dismayed but not surprised. InnerVoice was probably extending and refining its control of his bodily functions. Eventually even stray rebellious thoughts would be punished. It was a powerful system of oppression, self-perfecting and self-perpetuating, more effective than any secret-police force or surveillance system.

The screen brightened and a program came on. He sat and watched, trying to let the banal content — something about happy agricultural workers meeting new higher quotas — occupy the front part of his mind while he continued his scheming in the shadows.

The ploy seemed to work, but he could not come up with any solutions. For the moment he was stuck in this strange world.

When the program ended, something like a panel quiz show came on. Since he was under no compulsion to watch it, he looked for controls on the screen. There were none. He had to let it play.

He didn’t relish the prospect of another cafeteria meal, so he went out to look for a food store.

He walked several blocks before he encountered what passed for a business district. Finding what he took to be a supermarket, he went in.

The place was virtually devoid of stock. The shelves held not much but empty packing cartons. There were a few items. There must have been an adequate potato harvest this year. Even at that, much of the stock was mushy and nearly rotten, alive with sprouting eyes. He found a few that were edible. There were no shopping carts or bags, so he broke off the eyes and stuffed the spuds in his pocket. He found canned goods. Most were vegetables, but he did come up with a lone can of “Beans (Baked).”

That was enough to get him through a day and keep him out of the awful cafeterias. As usual there was no paying for anything, so he walked out of the store.

On his way home he found himself following a woman. She was blond, her hair done in the unflattering pageboy style that was prevalent. Her figure — from what he could make of it through the baggy clothes — was trim and attractive. He drew abreast of her and glanced at her face.

She wore no makeup. Her eyes were pale blue and her lips thin. She had a pronounced chin and an upturned nose. On the whole she was not unattractive.

He wondered how reproduction was handled here. Were there married couples, families? He somehow doubted it. Mating centers, the offspring raised by the state. Worse, insemination centers supplied by mandatory donations. He had seen no children at all. Were they all sequestered in crèches? The thought of tiny children being inoculated with diabolical mind-controlling bacteria made him shiver.

He walked on ahead of her. She followed him when he turned into the complex.

In the lobby he pretended to read the bulletin board while waiting for her. When she passed him on the way to the stairwell he grinned.

“Good evening,” he said.

She gave him a brilliant smile. “Every day we’re getting better and better!”

“It’s great, isn’t it?” he replied.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.”

She entered the stairwell and walked up.

His eyes wandered over the bulletin board. One posting, handwritten in a scrawl, read: troubled citizen w. unsocail thougts wants to join “self-critisism group” help me citizens! Apt.

He wondered how such “thougts” were possible, but obviously they were. InnerVoice’s control might not be as complete as he had surmised. Bugs in the system? Programming errors in the tiny biological computers?

Perhaps there were random glitches, but he doubted that they were anything but rare. How long could he hope to go on thinking such blatantly unsocial thoughts as he was thinking right now?

He would have to do something, and fast.