This Perfect Day

1

OLD CITIES were demolished; new cities were built. The new cities had taller buildings, broader plazas, larger parks, monorails whose cars flew faster though less frequently.

Two more starships were launched, toward Sirius B and 61 Cygni. The Mars colonies, repopulated and safeguarded now against the devastation of 152, were expanding daily; so too were the colonies on Venus and the Moon, the outposts on Titan and Mercury.

The free hour was extended by five minutes. Voice-input telecomps began to replace key-input ones, and totalcakes came in a pleasant second flavor. Life expectancy increased to 62.4.

Members worked and ate, watched TV and slept. They sang and went to museums and walked in amusement gardens.

On the two-hundredth anniversary of Wei’s birth, in the parade in a new city, a huge portrait banner of smiling Wei was carried at one of its poles by a member of thirty or so who was ordinary in every respect except that his right eye was green instead of brown. Once long ago this member had been sick, but now he was well. He had his assignment and his room, his girlfriend and his adviser. He was relaxed and content.

A strange thing happened during the parade. As this member marched along, smiling, holding the banner pole, he began to hear a nameber saying itself over and over in his head:

Anna SG, thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three; Anna SG, thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three. It kept repeating itself to him, in time with his marching. He wondered who the nameber belonged to, and why it should be repeating itself in his head that way.

Suddenly he remembered: it was from his sickness! It was the nameber of one of the other sick ones, the one called “Lovely”—no, “Lilac.” Why, after so long, had her nameber come back to him? He stamped his feet down harder, trying not to hear it, and was glad when the signal to sing was given.

He told his adviser. “It’s nothing to think about,” she said. “You probably saw something that reminded you of her. Maybe you even saw her. There’s nothing to be afraid of in remembering—unless, of course, it becomes bothersome. Let me know if it happens again.”

But it didn’t happen again. He was well, thank Uni.

One Christmas Day, when he had another assignment, was living in another city, he bicycled with his girlfriend and four other members to the outlying parkland. They brought cakes and cokes with them, and lunched on the ground near a grove of trees.

He had set his coke container on an almost-level stone and, reaching for it while talking, knocked it over. The other members refilled his container from theirs.

A few minutes later, while folding his cake wrapper, he noticed a flat leaf lying on the wet stone, drops of coke shining on its back, its stem curled upward like a handle. He took the stem and lifted the leaf, and the stone underneath it was dry in the leaf’s oval shape. The rest of the stone was wet-black, but where the leaf had been it was dry-gray. Something about the moment seemed significant to him, and he sat silently, looking at the leaf in his one hand, the folded cake wrapper in his other, and the dry leaf shape on the stone. His girlfriend said something to him and he took himself away from the moment, put the leaf and the wrapper together and gave them to the member who had the litter bag.

The image of the dry leaf shape on the stone came into his mind several times that day, and on the next day too. Then he had his treatment and he forgot about it. In a few weeks, though, it came into his mind again. He wondered why. Had he lifted a leaf from a wet stone that way sometime before? If he had, he didn’t remember it…

Every now and then, while he was walking in a park or, oddly enough, waiting on line for his treatment, the image of the dry leaf shape came into his mind and made him frown.

There was an earthquake. (His chair flung him off it; glass broke in the microscope and the loudest sound he had ever heard roared from the depths of the lab.) A seismovalve half the continent away had jammed and gone undetected, TV explained a few nights later. It hadn’t happened before and it wouldn’t happen again. Members must mourn, of course, but it was nothing to think about in the future.

Dozens of buildings had collapsed, hundreds of members had died. Every medicenter in the city was overloaded with the injured, and more than half the treatment units were damaged; treatments were delayed up to ten days.

A few days after he was to have had his, he thought of Lilac and how he had loved her differently and more—more excitingly—than he loved everyone else. He had wanted to tell her something. What was it? Oh yes, about the islands. The islands he had found hidden on the pre-U map. The islands of incurables…

His adviser called him. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I don’t think so, Karl,” he said. “I need my treatment.”

“Hold on a minute,” his adviser said, and turned away and spoke softly to his telecomp. After a moment he turned back. “You can get it tonight at seven-thirty,” he said, “but you’ll have to go to the medicenter in T24.”

He stood on a long line at seven-thirty, thinking about Lilac, trying to remember exactly what she looked like. When he got near the treatment units, the image of a dry leaf shape on a stone came into his mind.

Lilac called him (she was right there in the same building) and he went to her room, which was the storeroom in the pre-U. Green jewels hung from her earlobes and glittered around her rose-brown throat; she was wearing a gown of gleaming green cloth that exposed her pink-tipped soft-cone breasts. “Bon soir, Chip,” she said, smiling. “Comment vastu? Je m’ennuyais tellement de toi.” He went to her and took her in his arms and kissed her—her lips were warm and soft, her mouth opening—and he awoke to darkness and disappointment; it was a dream, it had only been a dream.

But strangely, frighteningly, everything was in him: the smell of her perfume (parfum) and the taste of tobacco and the sound of Sparrow’s songs, and desire for Lilac and anger at King and resentment of Uni and sorrow for the Family and happiness in feeling, in being alive and awake.

And in the morning he would have a treatment and it would all be gone. At eight o’clock. He tapped on the light, squinted at the clock: 4:54. In a little more than three hours…

He tapped the light off again and lay open-eyed in the dark. He didn’t want to lose it. Sick or not, he wanted to keep his memories and the capacity to explore and enjoy them. He didn’t want to think about the islands—no, never; that was real sickness—but he wanted to think about Lilac, and the meetings of the group in the relic-filled storeroom, and once in a while, maybe, to have another dream.

But the treatment would come in three hours and everything would be gone. There was nothing he could do—except hope for another earthquake, and what chance was there of that? The seismovalves had worked perfectly in the years since and they would go on working perfectly in the years ahead. And what short of an earthquake could postpone his treatment? Nothing. Nothing at all. Not with Uni knowing that he had lied for a postponement once before.

A dry leaf shape on stone came into his mind but he chased it away to think of Lilac, to see her as he had seen her in the dream, not to waste his three short hours of aliveness. He had forgotten how large her eyes were, how lovely her smile and her rose-brown skin, how moving her earnestness. He had forgotten so fighting much: the pleasure of smoking, the excitement of deciphering Français…

The dry leaf shape came back, and he thought about it, irritated, to find out why his mind hung on to it, to get rid of it once and for all. He thought back to the ridiculously meaningless moment; saw again the leaf, with the drops of coke shining on it; saw his fingers lifting it by its stem, and his other hand holding the folded foil cake wrapper, and the dry gray oval on the black coke-wet stone. He had spilled the coke, and the leaf had been lying there, and the stone underneath it had—

He sat up in bed and clasped his hand to his pajamaed right arm. “Christ and Wei,” he said, frightened.

He got up before the first chime and dressed and made the bed.

He was the first one in the dining room; ate and drank, and went back to his room with a cake wrapper folded loosely in his pocket.

He opened the wrapper, put it on the desk, and smoothed it down flat with his hand. He folded the square of foil neatly in half, and the half into thirds. He pressed the packet flat and held it; it was thin despite its six layers. Too thin? He put it down again.

He went into the bathroom and, from the cabinet’s first-aid kit, got cotton and the cartridge of tape. He brought them back to the desk.

He put a layer of cotton on the foil packet—a layer smaller than the packet itself—and began covering the cotton and the packet with long overlapping strips of skin-colored tape. He stuck the tape ends lightly to the desktop.

The door opened and he turned, hiding what he was doing and putting the tape cartridge into his pocket. It was Karl TK from next door. “Ready to eat?” he asked.

“I already have,” he said.

“Oh,” Karl said. “See you later.”

“Right,” he said, and smiled.

Karl closed the door.

He finished the taping and then peeled the tape ends from the desk and carried the bandage he had made into the bathroom. He laid it foil-side up on the edge of the sink and pushed up his sleeve.

He took the bandage and put the foil carefully against the inner surface of his arm, where the infusion disc would touch him. He clasped the bandage and pressed its tape border tightly to his skin.

A leaf. A shield. Would it work?

If it did, he would think only of Lilac, not of the islands. If he found himself thinking of the islands, he would tell his adviser.

He drew down his sleeve.

At eight o’clock he joined the line in the treatment room. He stood with his arms folded and his hand over the sleeve-covered bandage—to warm it in case the infusion disc was temperature-sensitive.

I’m sick, he thought. I’ll get all the diseases: cancer, smallpox, cholera, everything. Hair will grow on my face!

He would do it just this once. At the first sign of anything wrong he would tell his adviser.

Maybe it wouldn’t work.

His turn came. He pushed his sleeve to his elbow, put his hand wrist-deep into the unit’s rubber-rimmed opening, and then pushed his sleeve to his shoulder and in the same moment slid his arm all the way in.

He felt the scanner finding his bracelet, and the infusion disc’s slight pressure against the cotton-packed bandage… Nothing happened.

“You’re done,” a member said behind him.

The unit’s blue light was on.

“Oh,” he said, and pushed down his sleeve as he drew out his arm.

He had to go right to his assignment.

After lunch he went back to his room and, in the bathroom, pushed up his sleeve and pulled the bandage from his arm. The foil was unbroken, but so was skin after a treatment. He tore the foil packet from the tape.

The cotton was grayish and matted. He squeezed the bandage over the sink, and a trickle of waterlike liquid ran from it.

Awareness came, more of it each day. Memory came, in sharper, more anguishing detail.

Feeling came. Resentment of Uni grew into hatred; desire for Lilac grew into hopeless hunger.

Again he played the old deceptions; was normal at his assignment, normal with his adviser; normal with his girlfriend. But day by day the deceptions grew more irritating to maintain, more infuriating.

On his next treatment day he made another bandage of cake wrapper, cotton, and tape; and squeezed from it another trickle of waterlike liquid.

Black specks appeared on his chin and cheeks and upper lip—the beginnings of hair. He took apart his clippers, wired the cutter blade to one of the handles, and before the first chime each morning, rubbed soap on his face and shaved the specks away.

He dreamed every night. Sometimes the dreams brought orgasms.

More and more maddening it became, to pretend relaxation and contentment, humility, goodness. On Marxmas Day, at a beach, he trotted along the shore and then ran, ran from the members trotting with him, ran from the sunbathing, cake-eating Family. He ran till the beach narrowed into tumbled stone, and ran on through surf and over slippery ancient abutments. Then he stopped, and alone and naked between ocean and soaring cliffs, clenched his hands into fists and hit at the cliffs; cried “Fight it!” at the clear blue sky and wrenched and tore at the untearable chain of his bracelet.

It was 169, the fifth of May. Six and a half years he had lost. Six and a half years! He was thirty-four. He was in USA90058.

And where was she? Still in Ind, or was she somewhere else? Was she on Earth or on a starship?

And was she alive, as he was, or was she dead, like everyone else in the Family?

2

IT WAS EASIER NOW, now that he had bruised his hands and shouted; easier to walk slowly with a contented smile, to watch TV and the screen of his microscope, to sit with his girlfriend at amphitheater concerts. Thinking all the while of what to do…

“Any friction?” his adviser asked.

“Well, a little,” he said.

“I thought you didn’t look right. What is it?”

“Well, you know, I was pretty sick a few years ago—”

“I know.”

“And now one of the members I was sick with, the one who got me sick, in fact, is right here in the building. Could I possibly be moved somewhere else?”

His adviser looked doubtfully at him. “I’m a little surprised,” he said, “that UniComp’s put the two of you together again.”

“So am I,” Chip said. “But she’s here. I saw her in the dining hall last night and again this morning.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“No.”

“I’ll look into it,” his adviser said. “If she is here and it makes you uncomfortable, of course we’ll get you moved. Or get her moved. What’s her nameber?”

“I don’t remember all of it,” Chip said. “Anna ST38P.”

His adviser called him early the next morning. “You were mistaken, Li,” he said. “It wasn’t that member you saw. And by the way, she’s Anna SG, not ST.”

“Are you sure she’s not here?”

“Positive. She’s in Afr.”

“That’s a relief,” Chip said.

“And Li, instead of having your treatment Thursday, you’re going to have it today.”

“I am?”

“Yes. At one-thirty.”

“All right,” he said. “Thank you, Jesus.”

“Thank Uni.”

He had three cake wrappers folded and hidden in the back of his desk drawer. He took one out, went into the bathroom, and began making a bandage.

She was in Afr. It was nearer than Ind but still an ocean away. And the width of Usa besides.

His parents were there, in ’71334; he would wait a few weeks and then claim a visit. It was a little under two years since he had seen them last; there was a fair chance that the claim would be granted. Once in Afr he could call her—pretend to have an injured arm, get a child to touch the plate of an outdoor phone for him—and find out her exact location. Hello, Anna SG. I hope you’re as well as I am. What city are you in?

And then what? Walk there? Claim a car ride to someplace near, an installation involved with genetics in one way or another? Would Uni realize what he was up to?

But even if it all happened, even if he got to her, what would he do then? It was too much to hope that she too had lifted a leaf from a wet stone one day. No, fight it, she would be a normal member, as normal as he himself had been until a few months ago. And at his first abnormal word she would have him in a medicenter. Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei, what could he do?

He could forget about her, that was one answer; strike out on his own, now, for the nearest free island. There would be women there, probably a lot of them, and some of them would probably have rose-brown skin and large less-slanted-than-normal eyes and soft-looking conical breasts. Was it worth risking his own aliveness on the slim chance of awakening hers?

Though she had awakened his, crouching before him with her hands on his knees…

Not at the risk of her own, though. Or at least not at as great a risk.

He went to the Pre-U Museum; went the old way, at night, without touching scanners. It was the same as the one in IND26110. Some of the exhibits were slightly different, standing in different places.

He found another pre-U map, this one made in 1937, with the same eight blue rectangles pasted to it. Its backing had been cut and crudely taped; someone else had been at it before him. The thought was exciting; someone else had found the islands, was maybe on the way to one at that very moment.

In another storeroom—this one with only a table and a few cartons and a curtained boothlike machine with rows of small levers—he again held a map to the light, again saw the hidden islands. He traced on paper the nearest one, “Cuba,” off Usa’s southeast tip. And in case he decided to risk seeing Lilac, he traced the shape of Afr and the two islands near it, “Madagascar” to the east and little “Majorca” to the north.

One of the cartons held books; he found one in Français, Spinoza et ses contemporains. Spinoza and his contemporaries. He looked through it and took it.

He put the reframed map in its place and browsed through the museum. He took a wrist-strap compass that still seemed to be working, and a bone-handled “razor” and the stone for sharpening it.

“We’re going to be reassigned soon,” his section head said at lunch one day. “GL4 is taking over our work.”

“I hope I go to Afr,” he said. “My parents are there.”

It was a risky thing to say, slightly unmemberlike, but maybe the section head had an indirect influence on who went where.

His girlfriend was transferred and he went with her to the airport to see her off—and to see whether it was possible to get aboard a plane without Uni’s permission. It didn’t seem to be; the close single line of boarding members would allow no false touching of the scanner, and by the time the last member in the line was touching, a member in orange coveralls was at his side ready to stop the escalator and sink it in its pit. Getting off a plane presented the same difficulty: the last member out touched the scanner while orange-coveralled members looked on; they reversed the escalator, touched, and went aboard with steel containers for the cake and drink dispensers. He might manage to get on a plane waiting in the hangar area—and hide in it, although he didn’t recall any hiding place in planes—but how could he know where it would eventually go?

Flying was impossible, till Uni said he could fly.

He claimed the visit to his parents. It was denied.

New assignments were posted for his section. Two 663’s were sent to Afr, but not he; he was sent to USA36104. During the flight he studied the plane. There was no hiding place. There was only the long seat-filled hull, the bathroom at the front, the cake and drink dispensers at the back, and the TV screens, with an actor playing Marx on all of them.

USA36104 was in the southeast, close to Usa’s tip and Cuba beyond it. He could go bicycling one Sunday and keep bicycling; go from city to city, sleeping in the parkland between them and going into the cities at night for cakes and drinks; it was twelve hundred kilometers by the MFA map. At ’33037 he could find a boat, or traders coming ashore like the ones in ARG20400 that King had spoken of.

Lilac, he thought, what else can I do?

He claimed the visit to Afr again, and again it was denied.

He began bicycling on Sundays and during the free hour, to ready his legs. He went to the ’36104 Pre-U and found a better compass and a tooth-edged knife he could use for cutting branches in the parkland. He checked the map there; this one’s backing was intact, unopened. He wrote on it, Yes, there are islands where members are free. Fight Uni!

Early one Sunday morning he set out for Cuba, with the compass and a map he had drawn in one of his pockets. In the bike’s basket, Wei’s Living Wisdom lay on a folded blanket along with a container of coke and a cake; within the blanket was his take-along kit, and in that were his razor and its sharpening stone, a bar of soap, his clippers, two cakes, the knife, a flashlight, cotton, a cartridge of tape, a snapshot of his parents and Papa Jan, and an extra set of coveralls. Under his right sleeve there was a bandage on his arm, though if he were taken for treatment it would almost certainly be found. He wore sunglasses and smiled, pedaling southeast among other cyclists on the path toward ’36081. Cars skimmed past in rhythmic sequence over the roadway that paralleled the path. Pebbles kicked by the cars’ airjets pinged now and then against the metal divider.

He stopped every hour or so and rested for a few minutes. He ate half a cake and drank some of the coke. He thought about Cuba, and what he would take from ’33037 to trade there. He thought about the women on Cuba. Probably they would be attracted by a new arrival. They would be completely untreated, passionate beyond imagining, as beautiful as Lilac or even more beautiful…

He rode for five hours, and then he turned around and rode back.

He forced his mind to his assignment. He was the staff 663 in a medicenter’s pediatrics division. It was boring work, endless gene examinations with little variation, and it was the sort of assignment from which one was seldom transferred. He would be there for the rest of his life.

Every four or five weeks he claimed a visit to his parents in Afr.

In February of 170 the claim was granted.

He got off the plane at four in the morning Afr time and went into the waiting room, holding his right elbow and looking uncomfortable, his kit slung on his left shoulder. The member who had got off the plane behind him, and who had helped him up when he had fallen, put her bracelet to a phone for him. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he said, smiling. “Thanks, and enjoy your visit.” To the phone he said, “Anna SG38P2823.” The member went away.

The screen flashed and patterned as the connection was made, and then it went dark and stayed dark. She’s been transferred, he thought; she’s off the continent. He waited for the phone to tell him. But she said, “Just a second, I can’t—” and was there, blurry-close. She sat back down on the edge of her bed, rubbing her eyes, in pajamas. “Who is it?” she asked. Behind her a member turned over. It was Saturday night. Or was she married?

“It’s Li RM,” he said.

“Who?” she asked. She looked at him and leaned closer, blinking. She was more beautiful than he remembered; a little older-looking, beautiful. Were there ever such eyes?

“Li RM,” he said, making himself be only courteous, memberlike. “Don’t you remember? From IND26110, back in 162.”

Her brow contracted uneasily for an instant. “Oh yes, of course,” she said, and smiled. “Of course I remember. How are you, Li?”

“Very well,” he said. “How are you?”

“Fine,” she said, and stopped smiling.

“Married?”

“No,” she said. “I’m glad you called, Li. I want to thank you. You know, for helping me.”

“Thank Uni,” he said.

“No, no,” she said. “Thank you. Belatedly.” She smiled again.

“I’m sorry to call at this hour,” he said. “I’m passing through Afr on a transfer.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m glad you did.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“In ’14509.”

“That’s where my sister lives.”

“Really?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Which building are you in?”

“P51.”

“She’s in A-something.”

The member behind her sat up and she turned and said something to him. He smiled at Chip. She turned and said, “This is Li XE.”

“Hello,” Chip said, thinking ’14509, P51; ’14509, P51.

“Hello, brother,” Li XE’s lips said; his voice didn’t reach the phone.

“Is something wrong with your arm?” Lilac asked.

He was still holding it. He let it go. “No,” he said. “I fell getting off the plane.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. She glanced beyond him. “There’s a member waiting,” she said. “We’d better say good-by now.”

“Yes,” he said. “Good-by. It was nice seeing you. You haven’t changed at all.”

“Neither have you,” she said. “Good-by, Li.” She rose and reached forward and was gone.

He tapped off and gave way to the member behind him.

She was dead; a normal healthy member lying down now beside her boyfriend in ’14509, P51. How could he risk talking to her of anything that wasn’t as normal and healthy as she was? He should spend the day with his parents and fly back to Usa; go bicycling next Sunday and this time not turn back.

He walked around the waiting room. There was an outline map of Afr on one wall, with lights at the major cities and thin orange lines connecting them. Near the north was ’14510, near where she was. Half the continent from ’71330, where he was. An orange line connected the two lights.

He watched the flight-schedule signboard flashing and blinking, revising the Sunday 18 Feb schedule. A plane for ’14510 was leaving at 8:20 in the evening, forty minutes before his own flight for USA33100.

He went to the glass that faced the field and watched members single-filing onto the escalator of the plane he had left. An orange-coveralled member came and waited by the scanner.

He turned back to the waiting room. It was nearly empty. Two members who had been on the plane with him, a woman holding a sleeping infant and a man carrying two kits, put their wrists and the infant’s wrist to the scanner at the door to the carport—yes, it greened three times—and went out. An orange-coveralled member, on his knees by a water fountain, unscrewed a plate at its base; another pushed a floor polisher to the side of the waiting room, touched a scanner—yes—and pushed the polisher out through a swing-door.

He thought for a moment, watching the member working at the fountain, and then he crossed the waiting room, touched the carport-door scanner—yes—and went out. A car for ’71334 was waiting, three members in it. He touched the scanner—yes—and got into the car, apologizing to the members for having kept them waiting. The door closed and the car started. He sat with his kit in his lap, thinking.

When he got to his parents’ apartment he went in quietly, shaved, and then woke them. They were pleased, even happy, to see him.

The three of them talked and ate breakfast and talked more. They claimed a call to Peace, in Eur, and it was granted; they talked with her and her Karl, her ten-year-old Bob and her eight-year-old Yin. Then, at his suggestion, they went to the Museum of the Family’s Achievements.

After lunch he slept for three hours and then they railed to the Amusement Gardens. His father joined a volleyball game, and he and his mother sat on a bench and watched. “Are you sick again?” she asked him.

He looked at her. “No,” he said. “Of course not. I’m fine.”

She looked closely at him. She was fifty-seven now, gray-haired, her tan skin wrinkled. “You’ve been thinking about something,” she said. “All day.”

“I’m well,” he said. “Please. You’re my mother; believe me.”

She looked into his eyes with concern.

“I’m well,” he said.

After a moment she said, “All right, Chip.”

Love for her suddenly filled him; love, and gratitude, and a boylike feeling of oneness with her. He clasped her shoulder and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Suzu,” he said.

She laughed. “Christ and Wei,” she said, “what a memory you have!”

“That’s because I’m healthy,” he said. “Remember that, will you? I’m healthy and happy. I want you to remember that.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said.

He told them that his plane left at eight. “We’ll say good-by at the carport,” he said. “The airport will be too crowded.”

His father wanted to come along anyway, but his mother said no, they would stay in ’334; she was tired.

At seven-thirty he kissed them good-by—his father and then his mother, saying in her ear, “Remember”—and got on line for a car to the ’71330 airport. The scanner, when he touched it, said yes.

The waiting room was even more crowded than he had hoped it would be. Members in white and yellow and pale blue walked and stood and sat and waited in line, some with kits and some without. A few members in orange moved among them.

He looked at the signboard; the 8:20 flight for ’14510 would load from lane two. Members were in line there, and beyond the glass, a plane was swinging into place against a rising escalator. Its door opened and a member came out, another behind him.

Chip made his way through the crowd to the swing-door at the side of the room, false-touched its scanner, and pushed through: into a depot area where crates and cartons stood ranked under white light, like Uni’s memory banks. He un-slung his kit and jammed it between a carton and the wall.

He walked ahead normally. A cart of steel containers crossed his path, pushed by an orange-coveralled member who glanced at him and nodded.

He nodded back, kept walking, and watched the member push the cart out through a large open portal onto the floodlit field.

He went in the direction from which the member had come, into an area where members in orange were putting steel containers on the conveyor of a washing machine and filling other containers with coke and steaming tea from the taps of giant drums. He kept walking.

He false-touched a scanner and went into a room where coveralls, ordinary ones, hung on hooks, and two members were taking off orange ones. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” they both said.

He went to a closet door and slid it open; a floor polisher and bottles of green liquid were inside. “Where are the cuvs?” he asked.

“In there,” one of the members said, nodding at another closet.

He went to it and opened it. Orange coveralls were on shelves; orange toeguards, pairs of heavy orange gloves.

“Where did you come from?” the member asked.

“RUS50937,” he said, taking a pair of coveralls and a pair of toeguards. “We kept the cuvs in there.”

“They’re supposed to be in there,” the member said, closing white coveralls.

“I’ve been in Rus,” the other member, a woman, said. “I had two assignments there; first four years and then three years.”

He took his time putting on the toeguards, finishing as the two members chuted their orange coveralls and went out.

He pulled the orange coveralls on over his white ones and closed them all the way to his throat. They were heavier than ordinary coveralls and had extra pockets.

He looked in other closets, found a wrench and a good-sized piece of yellow paplon.

He went back to where he had left his kit, got it out, and wrapped the paplon around it. The swing-door bumped him. “Sorry,” a member said, coming in. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” he said, holding the wrapped kit.

The orange-coveralled member went on.

He waited for a moment, watching him, and then he tucked the kit under his left arm and got the wrench from his pocket. He gripped it in his right hand, in a way that he hoped looked natural.

He followed after the member, then turned and went to the portal that opened onto the field.

The escalator leaning against the flank of the lane-two plane was empty. A cart, probably the one he had seen pushed out, stood at the foot of it, beside the scanner.

Another escalator was sinking into the ground, and the plane it had served was on its way toward the runways. There was an 8:10 flight to Chi, he recalled.

He crouched on one knee, put his kit and the wrench down on concrete, and pretended to have trouble with his toeguard. Everyone in the waiting room would be watching the plane for Chi when it lifted; that was when he would go onto the escalator. Orange legs rustled past him, a member walking toward the hangars. He took off his toeguard and put it back on, watching the plane pivot…

It raced forward. He gathered his kit and the wrench, stood up, and walked normally. The brightness of the floodlights unnerved him, but he told himself that no one was watching him, everyone was watching the plane. He walked to the escalator, false-touched the scanner—the cart beside it helped, justifying his awkwardness—and stepped onto the upgoing stairs. He clutched his paplon-wrapped kit and the damp-handled wrench as he rose quickly toward the open plane door. He stepped off the escalator and into the plane.

Two members in orange were busy at the dispensers. They looked at him and he nodded. They nodded back. He went down the aisle toward the bathroom.

He went into the bathroom, leaving the door open, and put his kit on the floor. He turned to a sink, worked its faucets, and tapped them with the wrench. He got down on his knees and tapped the drainpipe. He opened the jaws of the wrench and put them around the pipe.

He heard the escalator stop, and then start again. He leaned over and looked out the door. The members were gone.

He put down the wrench, got up, closed the door, and pulled open the orange coveralls. He took them off, folded them lengthwise, and rolled them into as compact a bundle as he could. Kneeling, he unwrapped his kit and opened it. He squeezed in the coveralls, and folded the yellow paplon and put that in too. He took the toeguards off his sandals, nested them together, and tucked them into one of the kit’s corners. He put the wrench in, stretched the cover tight, and pressed it closed.

With the kit slung on his shoulder, he washed his hands and face with cold water. His heart was beating quickly but he felt good, excited, alive. He looked in the mirror at his one-green-eyed self. Fight Uni!

He heard the voices of members coming aboard the plane. He stayed at the sink, wiping his already-dry hands.

The door opened and a boy of ten or so came in.

“Hi,” Chip said, wiping his hands. “Did you have a nice day?”

“Yes,” the boy said.

Chip chuted the towel. “First time you’ve flown?”

“No,” the boy said, opening his coveralls. “I’ve done it lots of times.” He sat down on one of the toilets.

“See you inside,” Chip said, and went out.

The plane was about a third filled, with more members filing in. He took the nearest empty aisle seat, checked his kit to make sure it was securely closed, and stowed it below.

It would be the same at the other end. When everyone was leaving the plane he would go into the bathroom and put on the orange coveralls. He would be working at the sink when the members came aboard with the refill containers, and he would leave after they left. In the depot area, behind a crate or in a closet, he would get rid of the coveralls, the toeguards, and the wrench; and then he would false-touch out of the airport and walk to ’14509. It was eight kilometers east of ’510; he had checked on a map at the MFA that morning. With luck he would be there by midnight or half past.

“Isn’t that odd,” the member next to him said.

He turned to her.

She was looking toward the back of the plane. “There’s no seat for that member,” she said.

A member was walking slowly up the aisle, looking to one side and then the other. All the seats were taken. Members were looking about, trying to be of help to him.

“There must be one,” Chip said, lifting himself in his seat and looking about. “Uni couldn’t have made a mistake.”

“There isn’t,” the member next to him said. “Every seat is filled.”

Conversation rose in the plane. There was indeed no seat for the member. A woman took a child onto her lap and called to him.

The plane began moving and the TV screens went on, with a program about Afr’s geography and resources.

He tried to pay attention to it, thinking there might be information in it that would be useful to him, but he couldn’t. If he were found and treated now, he would never get alive again. This time Uni would make certain that he would see no meaning in even a thousand leaves on a thousand wet stones.

He got to ’14509 at twenty past midnight. He was wide awake, still on Usa time, with afternoon energy.

First he went to the Pre-U, and then to the bike station on the plaza nearest building P51. He made two trips to the bike station, and one to P51’s dining hall and its supply center.

At three o’clock he went into Lilac’s room. He looked at her by flashlight while she slept—looked at her cheek, her neck, her dark hand on the pillow—and then he went to the desk and tapped on the lamp.

“Anna,” he said, standing at the foot of the bed. “Anna, you have to get up now.”

She mumbled something.

“You have to get up now, Anna,” he said. “Come on, get up.”

She raised herself with a hand at her eyes, making little sounds of complaint. Sitting, she drew the hand away and peered at him; recognized him and frowned bewilderedly.

“I want you to come for a ride with me,” he said. “A bike ride. You mustn’t talk loud and you mustn’t call for help.” He reached into his pocket and took out a gun. He held it the way it seemed meant to be held, with his first finger across the trigger, the rest of his hand holding the handle, and the front of it pointed at her face. “I’ll kill you if you don’t do what I tell you,” he said. “Don’t shout now, Anna.”

3

SHE STARED at the gun, and at him.

“The generator’s weak,” he said, “but it made a hole a centimeter deep in the wall of the museum and it’ll make a deeper one in you. So you’d better obey me. I’m sorry to frighten you, but eventually you’ll understand why I’m doing it.”

“This is terrible!” she said. “You’re still sick!”

“Yes,” he said, “and I’ve gotten worse. So do as I say or the Family will lose two valuable members; first you, and then me.”

“How can you do this, Li?” she said. “Can’t you see yourself—with a weapon in your hand, threatening me?”

“Get up and get dressed,” he said.

“Please, let me call—”

“Get dressed,” he said. “Quickly!”

“All right,” she said, turning aside the blanket. “All right, I’ll do exactly as you say.” She got up and opened her pajamas.

He backed away, watching her, keeping the gun pointed at her.

She took off her pajamas, let them fall, and turned to the shelf for a set of coveralls. He watched her breasts and the rest of her body, which in subtle ways—a fullness of the buttocks, a roundness of the thighs—was different too from the normal. How beautiful she was!

She stepped into the coveralls and put her arms into the sleeves. “Li, I beg you,” she said, looking at him, “let’s go down to the medicenter and—”

“Don’t talk,” he said.

She closed the coveralls and put her feet into her sandals. “Why do you want to go bicycling?” she said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Pack your kit,” he said.

“My take-along?”

“Yes,” he said. “Put in another set of cuvs and your first-aid kit and your clippers. And anything that’s important to you that you want to keep. Do you have a flashlight?”

“What are you planning to do?” she asked.

“Pack your kit,” he said.

She packed her kit, and when she had closed it he took it and slung it on his shoulder. “We’re going to go around behind the building,” he said. “I’ve got two bikes there. We’re going to walk side by side and I’ll have the gun in my pocket. If we pass a member and you give any indication that anything’s wrong, I’ll kill you and the member, do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do whatever I tell you. If I say stop and fix your sandal, stop and fix your sandal. We’re going to pass scanners without touching them. You’ve done that before; now you’re going to do it again.”

“We’re not coming back here?” she said.

“No. We’re going far away.”

“Then there’s a snapshot I’d like to take.”

“Get it,” he said. “I told you to take whatever you wanted to keep.”

She went to the desk, opened the drawer, and rummaged in it. A snapshot of King? he wondered. No, King was part of her “sickness.” Probably one of her family. “It’s in here somewhere,” she said, sounding nervous, not right.

He hurried to her and pushed her aside. Li RM gun 2 bicy was written on the bottom of the drawer. A pen was in her hand. “I’m trying to help you,” she said.

He felt like hitting her but stopped himself; but stopping was wrong, she would know he wouldn’t hurt her; he hit her face with his open hand, stingingly hard. “Don’t try to trick me!” he said. “Don’t you realize how sick I am? You’ll be dead and maybe a dozen other members will be dead if you do something like this again!”

She stared wide-eyed at him, trembling, her hand at her cheek.

He was trembling too, knowing he had hurt her. He snatched the pen from her hand, made zigzags over what she had written, and covered it with papers and a nameber book. He threw the pen in the drawer and closed it, took her elbow and pushed her toward the door.

They went out of her room and down the hallway, walking side by side. He kept his hand in his pocket, holding the gun. “Stop shaking,” he said. “I won’t hurt you if you do what I tell you.”

They rode down escalators. Two members came toward them, riding up. “You and them,” he said. “And anyone else who comes along.”

She said nothing.

He smiled at the members. They smiled back. She nodded at them.

“This is my second transfer this year,” he said to her.

They rode down more escalators, and stepped onto the one leading to the lobby. Three members, two with telecomps, stood talking by the scanner at one of the doors. “No tricks now,” he said.

They rode down, reflected at a distance in dark-outside glass. The members kept talking. One of them put his telecomp on the floor.

They stepped off the escalator. “Wait a minute, Anna,” he said. She stopped and faced him. “I’ve got an eyelash in my eye,” he said. “Do you have a tissue?”

She reached into her pocket and shook her head.

He found one under the gun and took it out and gave it to her. He stood facing the members and held his eye wide open, his other hand in his pocket again. She held the tissue to his eye. She was still trembling. “It’s only an eyelash,” he said. “Nothing to be nervous about.”

Beyond her the member had picked up his telecomp and the three were shaking hands and kissing. The two with telecomps touched the scanner. Yes, it winked, yes. They went out. The third member came toward them, a man in his twenties.

Chip moved Lilac’s hand away. “That’s it,” he said, blinking. “Thanks, sister.”

“Can I be of help?” the member asked. “I’m a 101.”

“No, thanks, it was just an eyelash,” Chip said. Lilac moved. Chip looked at her. She put the tissue in her pocket.

The member, glancing at the kit, said, “Have a good trip.”

“Thanks,” Chip said. “Good night.”

“Good night,” the member said, smiling at them.

“Good night,” Lilac said.

They went toward the doors and saw in them the reflection of the member stepping onto an upgoing escalator. “I’m going to lean close to the scanner,” Chip said. “Touch the side of it, not the plate.”

They went outside. “Please, Li,” Lilac said, “for the sake of the Family, let’s go back in and go up to the medicenter.”

“Be quiet,” he said.

They turned into the passageway between the building and the next one. The darkness grew deeper and he took out his flashlight.

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, “unless you try to trick me again.”

“Then what do you want me for?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

There was a scanner at the cross-passage behind the buildings. Lilac’s hand went up; Chip said, “No!” They passed it without touching, and Lilac made a distressed sound and said under her breath, “Terrible!”

The bikes were leaning against the wall where he had left them. His blanket-wrapped kit was in the basket of one, with cakes and drink containers squeezed in with it. A blanket was draped over the basket of the other; he put Lilac’s kit down into it and closed the blanket around it, tucking it snugly. “Get on,” he said, holding the bike upright for her.

She got on and held the handlebars.

“We’ll go straight along between the buildings to the East Road,” he said. “Don’t turn or stop or gear up unless I tell you to.”

He got astride the other bike. He pushed the flashlight down into the side of the basket, with the light shining out through the mesh at the pavement ahead.

“All right, let’s go,” he said.

They pedaled side by side down the straight passage that was all darkness except for columns of lesser darkness between buildings, and far above a narrow strip of stars, and far ahead the pale blue spark of a single walkway light.

“Gear up a little,” he said.

They rode faster.

“When are you due for your next treatment?” he asked.

She was silent, and then said, “Marx eighth.”

Two weeks, he thought. Christ and Wei, why couldn’t it have been tomorrow or the next day? Well, it could have been worse; it could have been four weeks.

“Will I be able to get it?” she asked.

There was no point in disturbing her more than he had already. “Maybe,” he said. “We’ll see.”

He had intended to go a short distance every day, during the free hour when cyclists would attract no attention. They would go from parkland to parkland, passing one city or perhaps two, and make their way by small steps to ’12082 on Afr’s north coast, the city nearest Majorca.

That first day, though, in the parkland north of ’14509, he changed his mind. Finding a hiding place was harder than he expected; not until long after sunrise—around eight o’clock, he guessed—were they settled under a rock-ledge canopy fronted by a thicket of saplings whose gaps he had filled with cut branches. Soon after, they heard a copter’s hum; it passed and repassed above them while he pointed the gun at Lilac and she sat motionless, watching him, a half-eaten cake in her hands. At midday they heard branches cracking, leaves slashing, and a voice no more than twenty meters away. It spoke unintelligibly, in the slow flat way one addressed a telephone or a voice-input telecomp.

Either Lilac’s desk-drawer message had been found or, more likely, Uni had put together his disappearance, her disappearance, and two missing bicycles. So he changed his mind and decided that having been looked for and missed, they would stay where they were all week and ride on Sunday. They would make a sixty- or seventy-kilometer hop—not directly to the north but to the northeast—then settle and hide for another week. Four or five Sundays would bring them in a curving path to ’12082, and each Sunday Lilac would be more herself and less Anna SG, more helpful or at least less anxious to see him “helped.”

Now, though, she was Anna SG. He tied and gagged her with blanket strips and slept with the gun at his hand till the sun went down. In the middle of the night he tied and gagged her again, and carried away his bike. He came back in a few hours with cakes and drinks and two more blankets, towels and toilet paper, a “wristwatch” that had already stopped ticking, and two Français books. She was lying awake where he had left her, her eyes anxious and pitying. Held captive by a sick member, she suffered his abuses forgivingly. She was sorry for him.

But in daylight she looked at him with revulsion. He touched his cheek and felt two days’ stubble. Smiling, slightly embarrassed, he said, “I haven’t had a treatment in almost a year.”

She lowered her head and put a hand over her eyes. “You’ve made yourself into an animal,” she said.

“That’s what we are, really,” he said. “Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei made us into something dead and unnatural.”

She turned away when he began to shave, but she glanced over her shoulder, glanced again, and then turned and watched distastefully. “Don’t you cut your skin?” she asked.

“I did in the beginning,” he said, pressing taut his cheek and working the razor easily, watching it in the side of his flashlight propped on a stone. “I had to keep my hand at my face for days.”

“Do you always use tea?” she asked.

He laughed. “No,” he said. “It’s a substitute for water. Tonight I’m going to go looking for a pond or a stream.”

“How often do you—do that?” she asked.

“Every day,” he said. “I missed yesterday. It’s a nuisance, but it’s only for a few more weeks. At least I hope so.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

He said nothing, kept shaving.

She turned away.

He read one of the Français books, about the causes of a war that had lasted thirty years. Lilac slept, and then she sat on a blanket and looked at him and at the trees and at the sky.

“Do you want me to teach you this language?” he asked.

“What for?” she said.

“Once you wanted to learn it,” he said. “Do you remember? I gave you lists of words.”

“Yes,” she said, “I remember. I learned them, but I’ve forgotten them. I’m well now; what would I want to learn it now for?”

He did calisthenics and made her do them too, so that they would be ready for Sunday’s long ride. She followed his directions unprotestingly.

That night he found, not a stream, but a concrete-banked irrigation channel about two meters wide. He bathed in its slow-flowing water, then brought filled drink containers back to the hiding place and woke Lilac and untied her. He led her through the trees and stood and watched while she bathed. Her wet body glistened in the faint light of the quarter moon.

He helped her up onto the bank, handed her a towel, and stayed close to her while she dried herself. “Do you know why I’m doing this?” he asked her.

She looked at him.

“Because I love you,” he said.

“Then let me go,” she said.

He shook his head.

“Then how can you say you love me?”

“I do,” he said.

She bent over and dried her legs. “Do you want me to get sick again?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then you hate me,” she said, “you don’t love me.” She stood up straight.

He took her arm, cool and moist, smooth. “Lilac,” he said.

“Anna.”

He tried to kiss her lips but she turned her head and drew away. He kissed her cheek.

“Now point your gun at me and ‘rape’ me,” she said.

“I won’t do that,” he said. He let go of her arm.

“I don’t know why not,” she said, getting into her coveralls. She closed them fumblingly. “Please, Li,” she said, “let’s go back to the city. I’m sure you can be cured, because if you were really sick, incurably sick, you would ‘rape’ me. You’d be much less kind than you are.”

“Come on,” he said, “let’s get back to the place.”

“Please, Li—” she said.

“Chip,” he said. “My name is Chip. Come on.” He jerked his head and they started through the trees.

Toward the end of the week she took his pen and the book he wasn’t reading and drew pictures on the inside of the book’s cover—near-likenesses of Christ and Wei, groups of buildings, her left hand, and a row of shaded crosses and sickles. He looked to make sure she wasn’t writing messages that she would try to give to someone on Sunday.

Later he drew a building and showed it to her.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A building,” he said.

“No it isn’t.”

“It is,” he said. “They don’t all have to be blank and rectangular.”

“What are the ovals?”

“Windows.”

“I’ve never seen a building like this one,” she said. “Not even in the Pre-U. Where is it?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “I made it up.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then it isn’t a building, not really. How can you draw things that aren’t real?”

“I’m sick, remember?” he said.

She gave the book back to him, not looking at his eyes. “Don’t joke about it,” she said.

He hoped—well, didn’t hope, but thought it might possibly happen—that Saturday night, out of custom or desire or even only memberlike kindness, she would show a willingness for him to come close to her. She didn’t, though. She was the same as she had been every other night, sitting silently in the dusk with her arms around her knees, watching the band of purpling sky between the shifting black treetops and the black rock ledge overhead.

“It’s Saturday night,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

They were silent for a few moments, and then she said, “I’m not going to be able to have my treatment, am I?”

“No,” he said.

“Then I might get pregnant,” she said. “I’m not supposed to have children and neither are you.”

He wanted to tell her that they were going someplace where Uni’s decisions were meaningless, but it was too soon; she might become frightened and unmanageable. “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” he said.

When he had tied her and covered her, he kissed her cheek. She lay in the darkness and said nothing, and he got up from his knees and went to his own blankets.

Sunday’s ride went well. Early in the day a group of young members stopped them, but it was only to ask their help in repairing a broken drive chain, and Lilac sat on the grass away from the group while Chip did the job. By sundown they were in the parkland north of ’14266. They had gone about seventy-five kilometers.

Again it was hard to find a hiding place, but the one Chip finally found—the broken walls of a pre-U or early-U building, roofed with a sagging mass of vines and creepers—was larger and more comfortable than the one they had used the week before. That same night, despite the day’s riding, he went into ’266 and brought back a three-day supply of cakes and drinks.

Lilac grew irritable that week. “I want to clean my teeth,” she said, “and I want to take a shower. How long are we going to go on this way? Forever? You may enjoy living like an animal but I don’t; I’m a human being. And I can’t sleep with my hands and feet tied.”

“You slept all right last week,” he said.

“Well I can’t now!”

“Then lie quietly and let me sleep,” he said.

When she looked at him it was with annoyance, not with pity. She made disapproving sounds when he shaved and when he read; answered curtly or not at all when he spoke. She balked at doing calisthenics, and he had to take out the gun and threaten her.

It was getting close to Marx eighth, her treatment day, he told himself, and this irritability, a natural resentment of captivity and discomfort, was a sign of the healthy Lilac who was buried in Anna SG. It ought to have pleased him, and when he thought about it, it did. But it was much harder to live with than the previous week’s sympathy and memberlike docility.

She complained about insects and boredom. There was a rain night and she complained about the rain.

One night Chip woke and heard her moving. He shone his flashlight at her. She had untied her wrists and was untying her ankles. He retied her and struck her.

That Saturday night they didn’t speak to each other.

On Sunday they rode again. Chip stayed close to her side and watched her carefully when members came toward them. He reminded her to smile, to nod, to answer greetings, to act as if nothing was wrong. She rode in grim silence, and he was afraid that despite the threat of the gun she might call out for help at any moment or stop and refuse to go on. “Not just you,” he said; “everyone in sight. I’ll kill them all, I swear I will.” She kept riding. She smiled and nodded resentfully. Chip’s gearshift jammed and they went only forty kilometers.

Toward the end of the third week her irritation subsided. She sat frowning, picking at blades of grass, looking at her fingertips, turning her bracelet around and around her wrist. She looked at Chip curiously, as if he were someone strange whom she hadn’t seen before. She followed his instructions slowly, mechanically.

He worked on his bike, letting her awaken in her own time.

One evening in the fourth week she said, “Where are we going?”

He looked at her for a moment—they were eating the day’s last cake—and said, “To an island called Majorca. In the Sea of Eternal Peace.”

“‘Majorca’?” she said.

“It’s an island of incurables,” he said. “There are seven others all over the world. More than seven, really, because some of them are groups. I found them on a map in the Pre-U, back in Ind. They were covered over and they’re not shown on MFA maps. I was going to tell you about them the day I was—‘cured.’”

She was silent, and then she said, “Did you tell King?”

It was the first time she had mentioned him. Should he tell her that King hadn’t needed to be told, that he had known all along and withheld it from them? What for? King was dead; why diminish her memory of him? “Yes, I did,” he said. “He was amazed, and very excited. I don’t understand why he—did what he did. You know about it, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know,” she said. She took a small bite of cake and ate it, not looking at him. “How do they live on this island?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “It might be very rough, very primitive. Better than this, though.” He smiled. “Whatever it’s like,” he said, “it’s a free life. It might be highly civilized. The first incurables must have been the most independent and resourceful members.”

“I’m not sure that I want to go there,” she said.

“Just think about it,” he said. “In a few days you’ll be sure. You’re the one who had the idea that incurable colonies might exist, do you remember? You asked me to look for them.”

She nodded. “I remember,” she said.

Later in the week she took a new Français book that he had found and tried to read it. He sat beside her and translated it for her.

That Sunday, while they were riding along, a member pedaled up on Chip’s left and stayed even with them. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Chip said.

“I thought all the old bikes had been phased out,” he said.

“So did I,” Chip said, “but these are what was there.”

The member’s bike had a thinner frame and a thumb-knob gear control. “Back in ’935?” he asked.

“No, ’939,” Chip said.

“Oh,” the member said. He looked at their baskets, filled with their blanket-wrapped kits.

“We’d better speed up, Li,” Lilac said. “The others are out of sight.”

“They’ll wait for us,” Chip said. “They have to; we have the cakes and blankets.”

The member smiled.

“No, come on, let’s go faster,” Lilac said. “It’s not fair to make them wait around.”

“All right,” Chip said, and to the member, “Have a good day.”

“You too,” he said.

They pedaled faster and pulled ahead.

“Good for you,” Chip said. “He was just going to ask why we’re carrying so much.”

Lilac said nothing.

They went about eighty kilometers that day and reached the parkland northwest of ’12471, within another day’s ride of ’082. They found a fairly good hiding place, a triangular cleft between high rock spurs overhung with trees. Chip cut branches to close off the front of it.

“You don’t have to tie me any more,” Lilac said. “I won’t run away and I won’t try to attract anyone. You can put the gun in your kit.”

“You want to go?” Chip said. “To Majorca?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m anxious to. It’s what I’ve always wanted—when I’ve been myself, I mean.”

“All right,” he said. He put the gun in his kit and that night he didn’t tie her.

Her casual matter-of-factness didn’t seem right to him. Shouldn’t she have shown more enthusiasm? Yes, and gratitude too; that was what he had expected, he admitted to himself: gratitude, expressions of love. He lay awake listening to her soft slow breathing. Was she really asleep or was she only pretending? Could she be tricking him in some unimaginable way? He shone his flashlight at her. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted, her arms together under the blanket as if she were still tied.

It was only Marx twentieth, he told himself. In another week or two she would show more feeling. He closed his eyes. When he woke she was picking stones and twigs from the ground. “Good morning,” she said pleasantly.

They found a narrow trickle of stream nearby, and a green-fruited tree that he thought was an “olivier.” The fruit was bitter and strange-tasting. They both preferred cakes.

She asked him how he had avoided his treatments, and he told her about the leaf and the wet stone and the bandages he had made. She was impressed. It was clever of him, she said.

They went into ’12471 one night for cakes and drinks, towels, toilet paper, coveralls, new sandals; and to study, as well as they could by flashlight, the MFA map of the area.

“What will we do when we get to ’082?” she asked the next morning.

“Hide by the shore,” he said, “and watch every night for traders.”

“Would they do that?” she asked. “Risk coming ashore?”

“Yes,” he said, “I think they would, away from the city.”

“But wouldn’t they be more likely to go to Eur? It’s nearer.”

“We’ll just have to hope they come to Afr too,” he said. “And I want to get some things from the city for us to trade when we get there, things that they’re likely to put a value on. We’ll have to think about that.”

“Is there any chance that we can find a boat?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “There aren’t any offshore islands, so there aren’t likely to be any powerboats around. Of course, there are always amusement-garden rowboats, but I can’t see us rowing two hundred and eighty kilometers; can you?”

“It’s not impossible,” she said.

“No,” he said, “if worse comes to worst. But I’m counting on traders, or maybe even some kind of organized rescue operation. Majorca has to defend itself, you see, because Uni knows about it; it knows about all the islands. So the members there might keep a lookout for newcomers, to increase their population, increase their strength.”

“I suppose they might,” she said.

There was another rain night, and they sat together with a blanket around them in the inmost narrow corner of their place, tight between the high rock spurs. He kissed her and tried to work open the top of her coveralls, but she stopped his hand with hers. “I know it doesn’t make sense,” she said, “but I still have a little of that only-on-Saturday-night feeling. Please? Could we wait till then?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“I know,” she said, “but please? Could we wait?”

After a moment he said, “Sure, if you want to.”

“I do, Chip,” she said.

They read, and decided on the best things to take from ’082 for trading. He checked over the bikes and she did calisthenics, did them longer and more purposefully than he did.

On Saturday night he came back from the stream and she stood holding the gun, pointing it at him, her eyes narrowed hatingly. “He called me before he did it,” she said.

He said, “What are you—” and “King!” she cried. “He called me! You lying, hating—” She squeezed the gun’s trigger. She squeezed it again, harder. She looked at the gun and looked at him.

“There’s no generator,” he said.

She looked at the gun and looked at him, drawing a deep breath through flaring nostrils.

“Why the hate do you—” he said, and she swept back the gun and threw it at him; he raised his hands and it hit him in the chest, making pain and no air in him.

“Go with you?” she said. “Fuck with you? After you killed him? Are you—are you fou, you green-eyed cochon, chien, batard!”

He held his chest, found breath. “Didn’t kill him!” he said. “He killed himself, Lilac! Christ and—”

“Because you lied to him! Lied about us! Told him we’d been—”

“That was his idea; I told him it wasn’t true! I told him and he wouldn’t believe me!”

“You admitted it,” she said. “He said he didn’t care, we deserved each other, and then he tapped off and—”

“Lilac,” he said, “I swear by my love of the Family, I told him it wasn’t true!”

“Then why did he kill himself?”

“Because he knew!”

“Because you told him!” she said, and turned and grabbed up her bike—its basket was packed—and rammed it against the branches piled at the place’s front.

He ran and caught the back of the bike, held it with both hands. “You stay here!” he said.

“Let go of it!” she said, turning.

He took the bike at its middle, wrenched it away from her, and flung it aside. He grabbed her arm. She hit at him but he held her. “He knew about the islands!” he said. “The islands! He’d been near one, traded with the members! That’s how I know they come ashore!”

She stared at him. “What are you talking about?” she said.

“He’d had an assignment near one of the islands,” he said. “The Falklands, off Arg. And he’d met the members and traded with them. He hadn’t told us because he knew we would want to go, and he didn’t want to! That’s why he killed himself! He knew you were going to find out, from me, and he was ashamed of himself, and tired, and he wasn’t going to be ‘King’ any more.”

“You’re lying to me the way you lied to him,” she said, and tore her arm free, her coveralls splitting at the shoulder.

“That’s how he got the perfume and tobacco seeds,” he said.

“I don’t want to hear you,” she said. “Or see you. I’m going by myself.” She went to her bike, picked up her kit and the blanket trailing from it.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said.

She righted the bike, dumped the kit in the basket, and jammed the blanket in on top of it. He went to her and held the bike’s seat and handlebar. “You’re not going alone,” he said.

“Oh yes I am,” she said, her voice quavering. They held the bike between them. Her face was blurred in the growing darkness.

“I’m not going to let you,” he said.

“I’ll do what he did before I go with you.”

“You listen to me, you—” he said. “I could have been on one of the islands half a year ago! I was on my way and I turned back, because I didn’t want to leave you dead and brainless!” He put his hand on her chest and pushed her hard, sent her back flat against rock wall and slung the bike rolling and bumping away. He went to her and held her arms against the rock. “I came all the way from Usa,” he said, “and I haven’t enjoyed this animal life any more than you have. I don’t give a fight whether you love me or hate me”—“I hate you,” she said—“you’re going to stay with me! The gun doesn’t work but other things do, like rocks and hands. You won’t have to kill yourself because—” Pain burst in his groin—her knee—and she was away from him and at the branches, a pale yellow shape, thrashing, pushing.

He went and caught her by the arm, swung her around, and threw her shrieking to the ground. “Batard!” she shrieked. “You sick aggressive—” and he dived onto her and clapped his hand over her mouth, clamped it down as tight as he could. Her teeth caught the skin of his palm and bit it, bit it harder. Her legs kicked and her fisted hands hit his head. He got a knee on her thigh, a foot on her other ankle; caught her wrist, let her other hand hit him, her teeth go on biting. “Someone might be here!” he said. “It’s Saturday night! Do you want to get us both treated, you stupid garce?” She kept hitting him, biting his palm.

The hitting slowed and stopped; her teeth parted, let go.

She lay panting, watching him. “Garce!” he said. She tried to move the leg under his foot, but he bore down harder against it. He kept holding her wrist and covering her mouth. His palm felt as if she had bitten flesh out of it.

Having her under him, having her subdued, with her legs held apart, suddenly excited him. He thought of tearing off her coveralls and “raping” her. Hadn’t she said they should wait till Saturday night? And maybe it would stop all the cloth about King, and her hating him; stop the fighting—that was what they had been doing, fighting—and the Français hate-names.

She looked at him.

He let go of her wrist and took her coveralls where they were split at the shoulder. He tore them down across her chest and she began hitting him again and straining her legs and biting his palm.

He tore the coveralls away in stretching splitting pieces until her whole front was open, and then he felt her; felt her soft fluid breasts and her stomach’s smoothness, her mound with a few close-lying hairs on it, the moist lips below. Her hands hit his head and clutched at his hair; her teeth bit his palm. He kept feeling her with his other hand—breasts, stomach, mound, lips; stroking, rubbing, fingering, growing more excited—and then he opened his coveralls. Her leg wrenched out from under his foot and kicked. She rolled, trying to throw him off her, but he pressed her back down, held her thigh, and threw his leg over hers. He mounted squarely atop her, his feet on her ankles locking her legs bent outward around his knees. He ducked his loins and thrust himself at her; caught one of her hands and fingers of the other. “Stop,” he said, “stop,” and kept thrusting. She bucked and squirmed, bit deeper into his palm. He found himself partway inside her; pushed, and was all the way in. “Stop,” he said, “stop.” He moved his length slowly; let go of her hands and found her breasts beneath him. He caressed their softness, the stiffening nipples. She bit his hand and squirmed. “Stop,” he said, “stop it, Lilac.” He moved himself slowly in her, then faster and harder.

He got up onto his knees and looked at her. She lay with one arm over her eyes and the other thrown back, her breasts rising and falling.

He stood up and found one of his blankets, shook it out and spread it over her up to her arms. “Are you all right?” he asked, crouching beside her.

She didn’t say anything.

He found his flashlight and looked at his palm. Blood was running from an oval of bright wounds. “Christ and Wei,” he said. He poured water over it, washed it with soap, and dried it. He looked for the first-aid kit and couldn’t find it. “Did you take the first-aid kit?” he asked.

She didn’t say anything.

Holding his hand up, he found her kit on the ground and opened it and got out the first-aid kit. He sat on a stone and put the kit in his lap and the flashlight on another stone alongside.

“Animal,” she said.

“I don’t bite,” he said. “And I also don’t try to kill. Christ and Wei, you thought the gun was working.” He sprayed healer on his palm; a thin coat and then a thicker one.

“Cochon,” she said.

“Oh come on,” he said, “don’t start that again.”

He unwrapped a bandage and heard her getting up, heard her coveralls rustling as she took them off. She came over nude and took the flashlight and went to her kit; took out soap, a towel, and coveralls, and went to the back of the place, where he had piled stones between the spurs, making steps leading out toward the stream.

He put the bandage on in the dark and then found her flashlight on the ground near her bike. He put the bike with his, gathered blankets and made the two usual sleeping places, put her kit by hers, and picked up the gun and the pieces of her coveralls. He put the gun in his kit.

The moon slid over one of the spurs behind leaves that were black and motionless.

She didn’t come back and he began to worry that she had gone away on foot.

Finally, though, she came. She put the soap and towel into her kit and switched off the flashlight and got between her blankets.

“I got excited having you under me that way,” he said. “I’ve always wanted you, and these last few weeks have been just about unbearable. You know I love you, don’t you?”

“I’m going alone,” she said.

“When we get to Majorca,” he said, “if we get there, you can do what you want; but until we get there we’re staying together. That’s it, Lilac.”

She didn’t say anything.

He woke hearing strange sounds, squeals and pained whimpers. He sat up and shone the light on her; her hand was over her mouth, and tears were running down her temple from her closed eyes.

He hurried to her and crouched beside her, touching her head. “Oh Lilac, don’t,” he said. “Don’t cry, Lilac, please don’t.” She was doing it, he thought, because he had hurt her, maybe internally.

She kept crying.

“Oh Lilac, I’m sorry!” he said. “I’m sorry, love! Oh Christ and Wei, I wish the gun had been working!”

She shook her head, holding her mouth.

“Isn’t that why you’re crying?” he said. “Because I hurt you? Then why? If you don’t want to go with me, you don’t really have to.”

She shook her head again and kept crying.

He didn’t know what to do. He stayed beside her, caressing her head and asking her why she was crying and telling her not to, and then he got his blankets, spread them alongside her, and lay down and turned her to him and held her. She kept crying, and he woke up and she was looking at him, lying on her side with her head propped on her hand. “It doesn’t make sense for us to go separately,” she said, “so we’ll stay together.”

He tried to recall what they had said before sleeping. As far as he could remember, nothing; she had been crying. “All right,” he said, confused.

“I feel awful about the gun,” she said. “How could I have done that? I was sure you had lied to King.”

“I feel awful about what I did,” he said.

“Don’t,” she said. “I don’t blame you. It was perfectly natural. How’s your hand?”

He took it out from under the blanket and flexed it; it hurt badly. “Not bad,” he said.

She took it in her hand and looked at the bandage. “Did you spray it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

She looked at him, still holding his hand. Her eyes were large and brown and morning-bright. “Did you really start for one of the islands and turn back?” she asked.

He nodded.

She smiled. “You’re tres fou,” she said.

“No I’m not,” he said.

“You are,” she said, and looked at his hand again. She took it to her lips and kissed his fingertips one by one.

4

THEY DIDN’T GET STARTED until mid-morning, and then they rode quickly for a long while to make up for their laxness. It was an odd day, hazy and heavy-aired, the sky greenish gray and the sun a white disc that could be looked at with fully opened eyes. It was a freak of climate control; Lilac remembered a similar day in Chi when she was twelve or thirteen. (“Is that where you were born?” “No, I was born in Mex.” “You were? I was too!”) There were no shadows, and bikes coming toward them seemed to ride above the ground like cars. Members glanced at the sky apprehensively, and coming nearer, nodded without smiling.

When they were sitting on grass, sharing a container of coke, Chip said, “We’d better go slowly from now on. There are liable to be scanners in the path and we want to be able to pick the right moment for passing them.”

“Scanners because of us?” she said.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “Just because it’s the city nearest to one of the islands. Wouldn’t you set up extra safeguards if you were Uni?”

He wasn’t as much afraid of scanners as he was that a medical team might be waiting ahead.

“What if there are members watching for us?” she said. “Advisers or doctors, with pictures of us.”

“It’s not very likely after all this time,” he said. “We’ll have to take our chances. I’ve got the gun, and the knife too.” He touched his pocket.

After a moment she said, “Would you use it?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

“I hope we don’t have to,” she said.

“So do I.”

“You’d better put your sunglasses on,” she said.

“Today?” He looked at the sky.

“Because of your eye.”

“Oh,” he said. “Of course.” He took his glasses out and put them on, looked at her and smiled. “There’s not much that you can do,” he said, “except exhale.”

“What do you mean?” she said, then flushed and said, “They’re not noticeable when I’m dressed.”

“First thing I saw when I looked at you,” he said. “First things I saw.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re lying. You are. Aren’t you?”

He laughed and poked her on the chin.

They rode slowly. There were no scanners in the path. No medical team stopped them.

All the bicycles in the area were new ones, but nobody remarked on their old ones.

By late afternoon they were in ’12082. They rode to the west of the city, smelling the sea, watching the path ahead carefully.

They left their bikes in parkland and walked back to a canteen where there were steps leading down to the beach. The sea was far below them, spreading away smooth and blue, away and away into greenish-gray haze.

“Those members didn’t touch,” a child said.

Lilac’s hand tightened on Chip’s. “Keep going,” he said. They walked down concrete steps jutting from rough cliff-face.

“Say, you there!” a member called, a man. “You two members!”

Chip squeezed Lilac’s hand and they turned around. The member was standing behind the scanner at the top of the steps, holding the hand of a naked girl of five or six. She scratched her head with a red shovel, looking at them.

“Did you touch just now?” the member asked.

They looked at each other and at the member. “Of course we did,” Chip said. “Yes, of course,” Lilac said.

“It didn’t say yes,” the girl said.

“It did, sister,” Chip said gravely. “If it hadn’t we wouldn’t have gone on, would we?” He looked at the member and let a smile show. The member bent and said something to the girl.

“No I didn’t,” she said.

“Come on,” Chip said to Lilac, and they turned and walked downward again.

“Little hater,” Lilac said, and Chip said, “Just keep going.”

They went all the way down and stopped at the bottom to take off their sandals. Chip, bending, looked up: the member and the girl were gone; other members were coming down.

The beach was half empty under the strange hazy sky. Members sat and lay on blankets, many of them in their coveralls. They were silent or talked softly, and the music of the speakers—“Sunday, Fun Day”—sounded loud and unnatural. A group of children jumped rope by the water’s edge: “Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei, led us to this perfect day; Marx, Wood, Wei, and Christ—”

They walked westward, holding hands and holding their sandals. The narrow beach grew narrower, emptier. Ahead a scanner stood flanked by cliff and sea. Chip said, “I’ve never seen one on a beach before.”

“Neither have I,” Lilac said.

They looked at each other.

“This is the way we’ll go,” he said. “Later.”

She nodded and they walked closer to the scanner.

“I’ve got a fou impulse to touch it,” he said. “‘Fight you, Uni; here I am.’”

“Don’t you dare,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t.”

They turned around and walked back to the center of the beach. They took their coveralls off, went into the water, and swam far out. Treading with their backs to the sea, they studied the shore beyond the scanner, the gray cliffs lessening away into greenish-gray haze. A bird flew from the cliffs, circled, and flew back. It disappeared, gone in a hairline cranny.

“There are probably caves where we can stay,” Chip said.

A lifeguard whistled and waved at them. They swam back to the beach.

“It’s five of five, members,” the speakers said. “Litter and towels in the baskets, please. Be mindful of the members around you when you shake out your blankets.”

They dressed, went back up the steps, and walked to the grove of trees where they had left their bikes. They carried them farther in and sat down to wait. Chip cleaned the compass and the flashlights and the knife, and Lilac packed the other things they had into a single bundle.

An hour or so after dark they went to the canteen and gathered a carton of cakes and drinks and went down to the beach again. They walked to the scanner and beyond it. The night was moonless and starless; the haze of the day was still above. In the water’s lapping edge phosphorescent sparks glittered now and then; otherwise there was only darkness. Chip held the carton of cakes and drinks under his arm and shone his flashlight ahead of them every few moments. Lilac carried the blanket-bundle.

“Traders won’t come ashore on a night like this,” she said.

“Nobody else will be on the beach either,” Chip said. “No sex-wild twelve-year-olds. It’s a good thing.”

But it wasn’t, he thought; it was a bad thing. What if the haze remained for days, for nights, blocking them at the very brink of freedom? Was it possible that Uni had created it, intentionally, for just that purpose? He smiled at himself. He was tres fou, exactly as Lilac had said.

They walked until they guessed themselves to be midway between ’082 and the next city to the west, and then they put down the carton and the bundle and searched the cliff face for a usable cave. They found one within minutes; a low-roofed sand-floored burrow littered with cake wrappers and, intriguingly, two pieces—a green “Egypt,” a pink “Ethiop”—torn from a pre-U map. They brought the carton and the bundle into the cave, spread their blankets, ate, and lay down together.

“Can you?” Lilac said. “After this morning and last night?”

“Without treatments,” Chip said, “all things are possible.”

“It’s fantastic,” Lilac said.

Later Chip said, “Even if we don’t get any farther than this, even if we’re caught and treated five minutes from now, it’ll have been worth it. We’ve been ourselves, alive, for a few hours at least.”

“I want all of my life, not just a little of it,” Lilac said.

“You’ll have it,” Chip said. “I promise you.” He kissed her lips, caressing her cheek in the darkness. “Will you stay with me?” he asked. “On Majorca?”

“Of course,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“You weren’t going to,” he said. “Remember? You weren’t even going to come this far with me.”

“Christ and Wei, that was last night,” she said, and kissed him. “Of course I’m going to stay,” she said. “You woke me up and now you’re stuck with me.”

They lay holding each other and kissing each other.

“Chip!” she cried—in reality, not in his dream.

She wasn’t beside him. He sat up and banged his head on stone, groped for the knife he had left stuck in the sand. “Chip! Look!”—as he found it and threw himself over onto knees and one hand. She was a dark shape crouched at the cave’s blinding blue opening. He raised the knife, ready to slash whoever was coming.

“No, no,” she said, laughing. “Come look! Come on! You won’t believe it!”

Squinting at the brilliance of sky and sea, he crawled over to her. “Look,” she said happily, pointing up the beach.

A boat sat on the sand about fifty meters away, a small two-rotor launch, old, with a white hull and a red skirting. It sat just clear of the water, tipped slightly forward. There were white splatters on the skirting and the windscreen, part of which seemed to be missing.

“Let’s see if it’s good!” Lilac said. With her hand on Chip’s shoulder she started to rise from the cave; he dropped the knife, caught her arm, and pulled her back. “Wait a minute,” he said.

“What for?” She looked at him.

He rubbed his head where he had bumped it, and frowned at the boat—so white and red and empty and convenient in the bright morning haze-free sun. “It’s a trick of some kind,” he said. “A trap. It’s too convenient. We go to sleep and wake up and a boat’s been delivered for us. You’re right, I don’t believe it.”

“It wasn’t ‘delivered’ for us,” she said. “It’s been here for weeks. Look at the bird stuff on it, and how deep in the sand the front of it is.”

“Where did it come from?” he asked. “There are no islands nearby.”

“Maybe traders brought it from Majorca and got caught on shore,” she said. “Or maybe they left it behind on purpose, for members like us. You said there might be a rescue operation.”

“And nobody’s seen it and reported it in the time it’s been here?”

“Uni hasn’t let anyone onto this part of the beach.”

“Let’s wait,” he said. “Let’s just watch and wait a while.”

Reluctantly she said, “All right.”

“It’s too convenient,” he said.

“Why must everything be inconvenient?”

They stayed in the cave. They ate and rebundled the blankets, always watching the boat. They took turns crawling to the back of the cave, and buried their wastes in sand.

Wave edges slipped under the back of the boat’s skirting, then fell away toward low tide. Birds circled and landed on the windscreen and handrail, four that were sea gulls and two smaller brown ones.

“It’s getting filthier every minute,” Lilac said. “And what if it’s been reported and today’s the day it’s going to be taken away?”

“Whisper, will you?” Chip said. “Christ and Wei, I wish I’d brought a telescope.”

He tried to improvise one from the compass lens, a flashlight lens, and a rolled flap of the food carton, but he couldn’t make it work.

“How long are we going to wait?” she asked.

“Till after dark,” he said.

No one passed on the beach, and the only sounds were the waves’ lapping and the wingbeats and cries of the birds.

He went to the boat alone, slowly and cautiously. It was older than it had looked from the cave; the hull’s flaking white paint showed repair scars, and the skirting was dented and cracked. He walked around it without touching it, looking with his flashlight for signs—he didn’t know what form they would take—of deception, of danger. He didn’t see any; he saw only an old boat that had been inexplicably abandoned, its center seats gone, a third of its windscreen broken away, and all of it spattered with dried white birdwaste. He switched his light off and looked at the cliff—touched the boat’s handrail and waited for an alarm. The cliff stayed dark and deserted in pale moonlight

He stepped onto the skirting, climbed into the boat, and shone his light on its controls. They seemed simple enough: on-off switches for the propulsion rotors and the lift rotor, a speed-control knob calibrated to 100 KPH, a steering lever, a few gauges and indicators, and a switch marked Controlled and Independent that was set in the independent position. He found the battery housing on the floor between the front seats and unlatched its cover; the battery’s fade-out date was April 171, a year away.

He shone his light at the rotor housings. Twigs were piled in one of them. He brushed them out, picked them all out, and shone the light on the rotor within; it was new, shiny. The other rotor was old, its blades nicked and one missing.

He sat down at the controls and found the switch that lighted them. A miniature clock said 5:11 Fri 27 Aug 169. He switched on one propulsion rotor and then the other; they scraped but then hummed smoothly. He switched them off, looked at the gauges and indicators, and switched the control lights off.

The cliff was the same as before. No members had sprung from hiding. He turned to the sea behind him; it was empty and flat, silvered in a narrowing path that ended under the nearly full moon. No boats were flying toward him.

He sat in the boat for a few minutes, and then he climbed out of it and walked back to the cave.

Lilac was standing outside it. “Is it all right?” she asked.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “It wasn’t left by traders because there’s no message or anything in it. The clock stopped last year but it has a new rotor. I didn’t try the lift rotor because of the sand, but even if it works, the skirting is cracked in two places and it may just wallow and get nowhere. On the other hand it may take us directly into ’082—to a little seaside medicenter—even though it’s supposed to be off telecontrol.”

Lilac stood looking at him.

“We might as well try it though,” he said. “If traders didn’t leave it, they’re not going to come ashore while it’s sitting here. Maybe we’re just two very lucky members.” He gave the flashlight to her.

He got the carton and the blanket-bundle from the cave and held one under each arm. They started walking toward the boat. “What about the things to trade?” she said.

“We’ll have it,” he said. “A boat must be worth a hundred times more than cameras and first-aid kits.” He looked toward the cliff. “All right, doctors!” he called. “You can come out now!”

“Shh, don’t!” she said.

“We forgot the sandals,” he said.

“They’re in the carton.”

He put the carton and the bundle into the boat and they scraped the birdwaste from the broken windscreen with pieces of shell. They lifted the front of the boat and hauled it around toward the sea, then lifted the back and hauled again.

They kept lifting and hauling at either end and finally they had the boat down in the surf, bobbing and veering clumsily. Chip held it while Lilac climbed aboard, and then he pushed it farther out and climbed in with her.

He sat down at the controls and switched on their lights. She sat in the seat beside him, watching. He glanced at her—she looked anxiously at him—and he switched on the propulsion rotors and then the lift rotor. The boat shook violently, flinging them from side to side. Loud clankings banged from beneath it. He caught the steering lever, held it, and turned the speed-control knob. The boat splashed forward and the shaking and clanging lessened. He turned the speed higher, to twenty, twenty-five. The clanking stopped and the shaking subsided to a steady vibration. The boat scuffed along on the water’s surface.

“It’s not lifting,” he said.

“But it’s moving,” she said.

“For how long though? It’s not built to hit the water this way and the skirting’s cracked already.” He turned the speed higher and the boat splashed through the crests of swells. He tried the steering lever; the boat responded. He steered north, got out his compass, and compared its reading with the direction indicator’s. “It’s not taking us into ’082,” he said. “At least not yet.”

She looked behind them, and up at the sky. “No one’s coming,” she said.

He turned the speed higher and got a little more lift, but the impact when they scraped the swells was greater. He turned the speed back down. The knob was at fifty-six. “I don’t think we’re doing more than forty,” he said. “It’ll be light when we get there, if we get there. It’s just as well, I suppose; I won’t get us onto the wrong island. I don’t know how much this is throwing us off course.”

Two other islands were near Majorca: EUR91766, forty kilometers to the northeast, the site of a copper-production complex; and EUR91603, eighty-five kilometers to the southwest, where there was an algae-processing complex and a climatonomy sub-center.

Lilac leaned close to Chip, avoiding the wind and spray from the broken part of the windscreen. Chip held the steering lever. He watched the direction indicator and the moonlit sea ahead and the stars that shone above the horizon.

The stars dissolved, the sky began to lighten, and there was no Majorca. There was only the sea, placid and endless all around them.

“If we’re doing forty,” Lilac said, “it should have taken seven hours. It’s been more than that, hasn’t it?”

“Maybe we haven’t been doing forty,” Chip said.

Or maybe he had compensated too much or too little for the eastward drift of the sea. Maybe they had passed Majorca and were heading toward Eur. Or maybe Majorca didn’t exist—had been blanked from pre-U maps because pre-U members had “bombed” it to nothing and why should the Family be reminded again of folly and barbarism?

He kept the boat headed a hairline west of north, but slowed it down a little.

The sky grew lighter and still there was no island, no Majorca. They scanned the horizon silently, avoiding each other’s eyes.

One final star glimmered above the water in the northeast. No, glimmered on the water. No—“There’s a light over there,” he said.

She looked where he pointed, held his arm.

The light moved in an arc from side to side, then up and down as if beckoning. It was a kilometer or so away.

“Christ and Wei,” Chip said softly, and steered toward it.

“Be careful,” Lilac said. “Maybe it’s—”

He changed hands on the steering lever and got the knife from his pocket, laid it in his lap.

The light went out and a small boat was there. Someone sat waving in it, waving a pale thing that he put on his head—a hat—and then waving his empty hand and arm.

“One member,” Lilac said.

“One person,” Chip said. He kept steering toward the boat—a rowboat, it looked like—with one hand on the lever and the other on the speed-control knob.

“Look at him!” Lilac said.

The waving man was small and white-bearded, with a ruddy face below his broad-brimmed yellow hat. He was wearing a blue-topped white-legged garment.

Chip slowed the boat, steered it near the rowboat, and switched all three rotors off.

The man—old past sixty-two and blue-eyed, fantastically blue-eyed—smiled with brown teeth and gaps where teeth were missing and said, “Running from the dummies, are you? Looking for liberty?” His boat bobbed in their sidewaves. Poles and nets shifted in it—fish-catching equipment.

“Yes,” Chip said. “Yes, we are! We’re trying to find Majorca.”

“Majorca?” the man said. He laughed and scratched his beard. “Myorca,” he said. “Not Majorca, Myorca! But Liberty is what it’s called now. It hasn’t been called Myorca for—God knows, a hundred years, I guess! Liberty, it is.”

“Are we near it?” Lilac asked, and Chip said, “We’re friends. We haven’t come to—interfere in any way, to try to ‘cure’ you or anything.”

“We’re incurables ourselves,” Lilac said.

“You wouldn’t be coming this way if you wasn’t,” the man said. “That’s what I’m here for, to watch for folks like you and help them into port. Yes, you’re near it. That’s it over there.” He pointed to the north.

And now on the horizon a dark green bar lay low and clear. Pink streaks glowed above its western half—mountains lit by the sun’s first rays.

Chip and Lilac looked at it, and looked at each other, and looked again at Majorca-Myorca-Liberty.

“Hold fast,” the man said, “and I’ll tie onto your stern and come aboard.”

They turned in their seats and faced each other. Chip took the knife from his lap, smiled, and tossed it to the floor. He took Lilac’s hands.

They smiled at each other.

“I thought we’d gone past it,” she said.

“So did I,” he said. “Or that it didn’t even exist any more.”

They smiled at each other, and leaned forward and kissed each other.

“Hey, give me a hand here, will you?” the man said, looking at them over the back of the boat, clinging with dirty-nailed fingers.

They got up quickly and went to him. Chip kneeled on the back seat and helped him over.

His clothes were made of cloth, his hat woven of flat strips of yellow fiber. He was half a head shorter than they and smelled strangely and strongly. Chip grasped his hard-skinned hand and shook it. “I’m Chip,” he said, “and this is Lilac.”

“Glad to meet you,” the bearded blue-eyed old man said, smiling his ugly-toothed smile. “I’m Darren Costanza.” He shook Lilac’s hand.

“Darren Costanza?” Chip said.

“That’s the name.”

“It’s beautiful!” Lilac said.

“You’ve got a good boat here,” Darren Costanza said, looking about.

“It doesn’t lift,” Chip said, and Lilac said, “But it got us here. We were lucky to find it.”

Darren Costanza smiled at them. “And your pockets are filled with cameras and things?” he said.

“No,” Chip said, “we decided not to take anything. The tide was in and—”

“Oh, that was a mistake,” Darren Costanza said. “Didn’t you take anything?”

“A gun without a generator,” Chip said, taking it from his pocket. “And a few books and a razor in the bundle there.”

“Well, this is worth something,” Darren Costanza said, taking the gun and looking at it, thumbing its handle.

“We’ll have the boat to trade,” Lilac said.

“You should have taken more,” Darren Costanza said, turning from them and moving away. They glanced at each other and looked at him again, about to follow, but he turned, holding a different gun. He pointed it at them and put Chip’s gun into his pocket. “This old thing shoots bullets,” he said, backing farther away to the front seats. “Doesn’t need a generator,” he said. “Bang, bang. Into the water now, real quick. Go on. Into the water.”

They looked at him.

“Get in the water, you dumb steelies!” he shouted. “You want a bullet in your head?” He moved something at the back of the gun and pointed it at Lilac.

Chip pushed her to the side of the boat. She clambered over the rail and onto the skirting—saying “What is he doing this for?”—and slipped down into the water. Chip jumped in after her.

“Away from the boat!” Darren Costanza shouted. “Clear away! Swim!”

They swam a few meters, their coveralls ballooning around them, then turned, treading water.

“What are you doing this for?” Lilac asked.

“Figure it out for yourself, steely!” Darren Costanza said, sitting at the boat’s controls.

“We’ll drown if you leave us!” Chip cried. “We can’t swim that far!”

“Who told you to come here?” Darren Costanza said, and the boat rushed splashing away, the rowboat dragging from its back carving up fins of foam.

“You fighting brother-hater!” Chip shouted. The boat turned toward the eastern tip of the far-off island.

“He’s taking it himself!” Lilac said. “He’s going to trade it!”

“The sick selfish pre-U—” Chip said. “Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei, I had the knife in my hand and I threw it on the floor! ‘Waiting to help us into port’! He’s a pirate, that’s what he is, the fighting—”

“Stop! Don’t!” Lilac said, and looked at him despairingly.

“Oh Christ and Wei,” he said.

They pulled open their coveralls and squirmed themselves out of them. “Keep them!” Chip said. “They’ll hold air if we tie the openings!”

“Another boat!” Lilac said.

A speck of white was speeding from west to east, midway between them and the island.

She waved her coveralls.

“Too far!” Chip said. “We’ve got to start swimming!”

They tied the sleeves of their coveralls around their necks and swam against the chilly water. The island was impossibly far away—twenty or more kilometers.

If they could take short rests against the inflated coveralls, Chip thought, they could get far enough in so that another boat might see them. But who would be on it? Members like Darren Costanza? Foul-smelling pirates and murderers? Had King been right? “I hope you get there,” King said, lying in his bed with his eyes closed. “The two of you. You deserve it.” Fight that brother-hater!

The second boat had got near their pirated one, which was heading farther east as if to avoid it.

Chip swam steadily, glimpsing Lilac swimming beside him. Would they get enough rest to go on, to make it? Or would they drown, choke, slide languidly downward through darkening water… He drove the image from his mind; swam and kept swimming.

The second boat had stopped; their own was farther from it than before. But the second boat seemed bigger now, and bigger still.

He stopped and caught Lilac’s kicking leg. She looked around, gasping, and he pointed.

The boat hadn’t stopped; it had turned and was coming toward them.

They tugged at the coverall sleeves at their throats, loosed them and waved the light blue, the bright yellow.

The boat turned slightly away, then back, then away in the other direction.

“Here!” they cried, “Help! Here! Help!”—waving the coveralls, straining high in the water.

The boat turned back and away again, then sharply back. It stayed pointed at them, enlarging, and a horn sounded—loud, loud, loud, loud, loud.

Lilac sank against Chip, coughing water. He ducked his shoulder under her arm and supported her.

The boat came skimming to full-size white closeness—I.A. was painted large and green on its hull; it had one rotor—and splatted to a stop with a wave that washed over them. “Hang on!” a member cried, and something flew in the air and splashed beside them: a floating white ring with a rope. Chip grabbed it and the rope sprang taut, pulled by a member, young, yellow-haired. He drew them through the water. “I’m all right,” Lilac said in Chip’s arm. “I’m all right.”

The side of the boat had rungs going up it. Chip pulled Lilac’s coveralls from her hand, bent her fingers around a rung, and put her other hand to the rung above. She climbed. The member, leaning over and stretching, caught her hand and helped her. Chip guided her feet and climbed up after her.

They lay on their backs on warm firm floor under scratchy blankets, hand in hand, panting. Their heads were lifted in turn and a small metal container was pressed to their lips. The liquid in it smelled like Darren Costanza. It burned in their throats, but once it was down it warmed their stomachs surprisingly.

“Alcohol?” Chip said.

“Don’t worry,” the young yellow-haired man said, smiling down at them with normal teeth as he screwed the container onto a flask, “one sip won’t rot your brain.” He was about twenty-five, with a short beard that was yellow too, and normal eyes and skin. A brown belt at his hips held a gun in a brown pocket; he wore a white cloth shirt without sleeves and tan cloth trousers patched with blue that ended at his knees. Putting the flask on a seat, he unfastened the front of his belt. “I’ll get your coveralls,” he said. “Catch your breath.” He put the gun-belt with the flask and climbed over the side of the boat. A splash sounded and the boat swayed.

“At least they’re not all like that other one,” Chip said.

“He has a gun,” Lilac said.

“But he left it here,” Chip said. “If he were—sick, he would have been afraid to.”

They lay silently hand in hand under the scratchy blankets, breathing deeply, looking at the clear blue sky.

The boat tilted and the young man climbed back aboard with their dripping coveralls. His hair, which hadn’t been clipped in a long time, clung to his head in wet rings. “Feeling better?” he asked, smiling at them.

“Yes,” they both said.

He shook the coveralls over the side of the boat. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here in time to keep that lunky away from you,” he said. “Most immigrants come from Eur, so I generally stay to the north. What we need are two boats, not one. Or a longer-range spotter.”

“Are you a—policeman?” Chip asked.

“Me?” The young man smiled. “No,” he said, “I’m with Immigrants’ Assistance. That’s an agency we’ve been generously allowed to set up, to help new immigrants get oriented. And get ashore without being drowned.” He hung the coveralls over the boat’s railing and pulled apart their clinging folds.

Chip raised himself on his elbows. “Does this happen often?” he asked.

“Stealing immigrants’ boats is a popular local pastime,” the young man said. “There are others that are even more fun.”

Chip sat up, and Lilac sat up beside him. The young man faced them, pink sunlight gleaming on his side.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but you haven’t come to any paradise. Four fifths of the island’s population is descended from the families who were here before the Unification or who came here right after; they’re inbred, ignorant, mean, self-satisfied—and they despise immigrants. ‘Steelies,’ they call us. Because of the bracelets. Even after we take them off.”

He took his gun-belt from the seat and put it around his hips. “We call them ‘lunkies,’” he said, fastening the belt’s buckle. “Only don’t ever say it out loud or you’ll find five or six of them stamping on your ribs. That’s another of their pastimes.”

He looked at them again. “The island is run by a General Costanza,” he said, “with the—”

“That’s who took the boat!” they said. “Darren Costanza!”

“I doubt it,” the young man said, smiling. “The General doesn’t get up this early. Your lunky must have been pulling your leg.”

Chip said, “The brother-hater!”

“General Costanza,” the young man said, “has the Church and the Army behind him. There’s very little freedom even for lunkies, and for us there’s virtually none. We have to live in specified areas, ‘Steelytowns,’ and we can’t step outside them without a good reason. We have to show identity cards to every lunky cop, and the only jobs we can get are the lowest, most back-breaking ones.” He took up the flask. “Do you want some more of this?” he asked. “It’s called ‘whiskey.’”

Chip and Lilac shook their heads.

The young man unscrewed the container and poured amber liquid into it. “Let’s see, what have I left out?” he said. “We’re not allowed to own land or weapons. I turn in my gun when I set foot on shore.” He raised the container and looked at them. “Welcome to Liberty,” he said, and drank.

They looked disheartenedly at each other, and at the young man.

“That’s what they call it,” he said. “Liberty “

“We thought they would welcome newcomers,” Chip said. “To help keep the Family away.”

The young man, screwing the container back onto the flask, said, “Nobody comes here except two or three immigrants a month. The last time the Family tried to treat the lunkies was back when there were five computers. Since Uni went into operation not one attempt has been made.”

“Why not?” Lilac asked.

The young man looked at them. “Nobody knows,” he said. “There are different theories. The lunkies think that either ‘God’ is protecting them or the Family is afraid of the Army, a bunch of drunken incapable louts. Immigrants think—well, some of them think that the island is so depleted that treating everyone on it simply isn’t worth Uni’s while.”

“And others think—” Chip said.

The young man turned away and put the flask on a shelf below the boat’s controls. He sat down on the seat and turned to face them. “Others,” he said, “and I’m one of them, think that Uni is using the island, and the lunkies, and all the hidden islands all over the world.”

“Using them?” Chip said, and Lilac said, “How?”

“As prisons for us,” the young man said.

They looked at him.

“Why is there always a boat on the beach?” he asked. “Always, in Eur and in Afr—an old boat that’s still good enough to get here. And why are there those handy patched-up maps in museums? Wouldn’t it be easier to make fake ones with the islands really omitted?”

They stared at him.

“What do you do,” he said, looking at them intently, “when you’re programming a computer to maintain a perfectly efficient, perfectly stable, perfectly cooperative society? How do you allow for biological freaks, ‘incurables,’ possible troublemakers?”

They said nothing, staring at him.

He leaned closer to them. “You leave a few ‘un-unified’ islands all around the world,” he said. “You leave maps in museums and boats on beaches. The computer doesn’t have to weed out your bad ones; they do the weeding themselves. They wiggle their way happily into the nearest isolation ward, and lunkies are waiting, with a General Costanza in charge, to take their boats, jam them into Steelytowns, and keep them helpless and harmless—in ways that high-minded disciples of Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei would never dream of stooping to.”

“It can’t be,” Lilac said.

“A lot of us think it can,” the young man said.

Chip said, “Uni let us come here?”

“No,” Lilac said. “It’s too—twisted.”

The young man looked at her, looked at Chip.

Chip said, “I thought I was being so fighting clever!”

“So did I,” the young man said, sitting back. “I know just how you feel.”

“No, it can’t be,” Lilac said.

There was silence for a moment, and then the young man said, “I’ll take you in now. I.A. will take off your bracelets and get your registered and lend you twenty-five bucks to get started.” He smiled. “As bad as it is,” he said, “it’s better than being with the Family. Cloth is more comfortable than paplon—really—and even a rotten fig tastes better than totalcakes. You can have children, a drink, a cigarette—a couple of rooms if you work hard. Some steelies even get rich—entertainers, mostly. If you ‘sir’ the lunkies and stay in Steelytown, it’s all right. No scanners, no advisers, and not one ‘Life of Marx’ in a whole year’s TV.”

Lilac smiled. Chip smiled too.

“Put the coveralls on,” the young man said. “Lunkies are horrified by nakedness. It’s ‘ungodly.’” He turned to the boat’s controls.

They put aside the blankets and got into their moist coveralls, then stood behind the young man as he drove the boat toward the island. It spread out green and gold in the radiance of the just-risen sun, crested with mountains and dotted with bits of white, yellow, pink, pale blue.

“It’s beautiful,” Lilac said determinedly.

Chip, with his arm about her shoulders, looked ahead with narrowed eyes and said nothing.

5

THEY LIVED IN A CITY called Pollensa, in half a room in a cracked and crumbling Steelytown building with intermittent power and brown water. They had a mattress and a table and a chair, and a box for their clothing that they used as a second chair. The people in the other half of the room, the Newmans—a man and woman in their forties with a nine-year-old daughter—let them use their stove and TV and a shelf in the “fridge” where they stored their food. It was the Newmans’ room; Chip and Lilac paid four dollars a week for their half of it.

They earned nine dollars and twenty cents a week between them. Chip worked in an iron mine, loading ore into carts with a crew of other immigrants alongside an automatic loader that stood motionless and dusty, unrepairable. Lilac worked in a clothing factory, attaching fasteners to shirts. There too a machine stood motionless, furred with lint.

Their nine dollars and twenty cents paid for the week’s rent and food and railfare, a few cigarettes, and a newspaper called the Liberty Immigrant. They saved fifty cents toward clothing replacement and emergencies that might arise, and gave fifty cents to Immigrants’ Assistance as partial repayment of the twenty-five-dollar loan they had been given on their arrival. They ate bread and fish and potatoes and figs. At first these foods gave them cramps and constipation, but they soon came to like them, to relish the different tastes and consistencies. They looked forward to meals, although the preparation and the cleaning up afterward became a bother.

Their bodies changed. Lilac’s bled for a few days, which the Newmans assured them was natural in untreated women, and it grew more rounded and supple as her hair grew longer. Chip’s body hardened and strengthened from his work in the mine. His beard grew out black and straight, and he trimmed it once a week with the Newmans’ scissors.

They had been given names by a clerk at the Immigration Bureau. Chip was named Eiko Newmark, and Lilac, Grace Newbridge. Later, when they married—with no application to Uni, but with forms and a fee and vows to “God”—Lilac’s name was changed to Grace Newmark. They still called themselves Chip and Lilac, however.

They got used to handling coins and dealing with shopkeepers, and to traveling on Pollensa’s rundown overcrowded monorail. They learned how to sidestep natives and avoid offending them; they memorized the Vow of Loyalty and saluted Liberty’s red-and-yellow flag. They knocked on doors before opening them, said Wednesday instead of Woodsday, March instead of Marx. They reminded themselves that fight and hate were acceptable words but fuck was a “dirty” one.

Hassan Newman drank a great deal of whiskey. Soon after coming home from his job—in the island’s largest furniture factory—he would be playing loud games with Gigi, his daughter, and fumbling his way through the room’s dividing curtain with a bottle clutched in his three-fingered saw-damaged hand. “Come on, you sad steelies,” he would say, “where the hate are your glasses? Come on, have a little cheer.” Chip and Lilac drank with him a few times, but they found that whiskey made them confused and clumsy and they usually declined his offer. “Come on,” he said one evening. “I know I’m the landlord, but I’m not exactly a lunky, am I? Or what is it? Do you think I’ll expect you to receep—to reciprocate? I know you like to watch the pennies.”

“It’s not that,” Chip said.

“Then what is it?” Hassan asked. He swayed and steadied himself.

Chip didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he said, “Well, what’s the point in getting away from treatments if you’re going to dull yourself with whiskey? You might as well be back in the Family.”

“Oh,” Hassan said. “Oh sure, I get you.” He looked angrily at them, a broad, curly-bearded, bloodshot-eyed man. “Just wait,” he said. “Wait till you’ve been here a little longer. Just wait till you’ve been here a little longer, that’s all.” He turned around and groped his way through the curtain, and they heard him muttering, and his wife, Ria, speaking placatingly.

Almost everyone in the building seemed to drink as much whiskey as Hassan did. Loud voices, happy or angry, sounded through the walls at all hours of the night. The elevator and the hallways smelled of whiskey, and of fish, and of sweet perfumes that people used against the whiskey and fish smells.

Most evenings, after they had finished whatever cleaning had to be done, Chip and Lilac either went up to the roof for some fresh air or sat at their table reading the Immigrant or books they had found on the monorail or borrowed from a small collection at Immigrants’ Assistance. Sometimes they watched TV with the Newmans—plays about foolish misunderstandings in native families, with frequent stops for announcements about different makes of cigarettes and disinfectants. Occasionally there were speeches by General Costanza or the head of the Church, Pope Clement—disquieting speeches about shortages of food and space and resources, for which immigrants alone weren’t to be blamed. Hassan, belligerent with whiskey, usually switched them off before they were over; Liberty TV, unlike the Family’s, could be switched on and off at one’s choosing.

One day in the mine, toward the end of the fifteen-minute lunch break, Chip went over to the automatic loader and began examining it, wondering whether it was in fact unrepairable or whether some part of it that couldn’t be replaced might not be by-passed or substituted for in some way. The native in charge of the crew came over and asked him what he was doing. Chip told him, taking care to speak respectfully, but the native got angry. “You fucking steelies all think you’re so God-damned smart!” he said, and put his hand on his gun handle. “Get over there where you belong and stay there!” he said. “Try to figure out a way to eat less food if you’ve got to have something to think about!”

All natives weren’t quite that bad. The owner of their building took a liking to Chip and Lilac and promised to let them have a room for five dollars a week as soon as one became available. “You’re not like some of these others,” he said. “Drinking, walking around the hallways stark naked—I’d rather take a few cents less and have your kind.”

Chip, looking at him, said, “There are reasons why immigrants drink, you know.”

“I know, I know,” the owner said. “I’m the first one to say it; it’s terrible the way we treat you. But still and all, do you drink? Do you walk around stark naked?”

Lilac said, “Thank you, Mr. Corsham. We’ll be grateful if you can get a room for us.”

They caught “colds” and “the flu.” Lilac lost her job at the clothing factory but found a better one in the kitchen of a native restaurant within walking distance of the house. Two policemen came to the room one evening, checking identity cards and looking for weapons. Hassan muttered something as he showed his card and they clubbed him to the floor. They stuck knives into the mattresses and broke some of the dishes.

Lilac didn’t have her “period,” her monthly few days of vaginal bleeding, and that meant she was pregnant.

One night on the roof Chip stood smoking and looking at the sky to the northeast, where there was a dull orange glow from the copper-production complex on EUR91766. Lilac, who had been taking washed clothes from a line where she had hung them to dry, came over to him and put her arm around him. She kissed his cheek and leaned against him. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “We’ve got twelve dollars saved, we’ll have a room of our own any day now, and before you know it we’ll have a baby.” “A steely,” Chip said. “No,” Lilac said. “A baby.” “It stinks,” Chip said. “It’s rotten. It’s inhuman.” “It’s all there is,” Lilac said. “We’d better get used to it.” Chip said nothing. He kept looking at the orange glow in the sky.

The Liberty Immigrant carried weekly articles about immigrant singers and athletes, and occasionally scientists, who earned forty or fifty dollars a week and lived in good apartments, who mixed with influential and enlightened natives, and who were hopeful about the chances of a more equitable relationship developing between the two groups. Chip read these articles with scorn—they were meant by the newspaper’s native owners to lull and pacify immigrants, he felt—but Lilac accepted them at face value, as evidence that their own lot would ultimately improve.

One week in October, when they had been on Liberty for a little over six months, there was an article about an artist named Morgan Newgate, who had come from Eur eight years before and who lived in a four-room apartment in New Madrid. His paintings, one of which, a scene of the Crucifixion, had just been presented to Pope Clement, brought him as much as a hundred dollars each. He signed them with an A, the article explained, because his nickname was Ashi.

“Christ and Wei,” Chip said.

Lilac said, “What is it?”

“I was at academy with this ‘Morgan Newgate,’” Chip said, showing her the article. “We were good friends. His name was Karl. You remember that picture of the horse I had back in Ind?”

“No,” she said, reading.

“Well, he drew it,” Chip said. “He used to sign everything with an A in a circle.” And yes, he thought, “Ashi” seemed like the name Karl had mentioned. Christ and Wei, so he had got away too!—had “got away,” if you could call it that, to Liberty, to Uni’s isolation ward. At least he was doing what he’d always wanted; for him Liberty really was liberty.

“You ought to call him,” Lilac said, still reading.

“I will,” Chip said.

But maybe he wouldn’t. Was there any point, really, in calling “Morgan Newgate,” who painted Crucifixions for the Pope and assured his fellow immigrants that conditions were getting better every day? But maybe Karl hadn’t said that; maybe the Immigrant had lied.

“Don’t just say it,” Lilac said. “He could probably help you get a better job.”

“Yes,” Chip said, “he probably could.”

She looked at him. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Don’t you want a better job?”

“I’ll call him tomorrow, on the way to work,” he said.

But he didn’t. He swung his shovel into ore and lifted and heaved, swung and lifted and heaved. Fight them all, he thought: the steelies who drink, the steelies who think things are getting better; the lunkies, the dummies; fight Uni.

On the following Sunday morning Lilac went with him to a building two blocks from theirs where there was a working telephone in the lobby, and she waited while he paged through the tattered directory. Morgan and Newgate were names commonly given to immigrants, but few immigrants had phones; there was only one Newgate, Morgan listed, and that one in New Madrid.

Chip put three tokens into the phone and spoke the number. The screen was broken, but it didn’t make any difference since Liberty phones no longer transmitted pictures anyway.

A woman answered, and when Chip asked if Morgan Newgate was there, said he was, and then nothing more. The silence lengthened, and Lilac, a few meters away beside a Sani-Spray poster, waited and then came close. “Isn’t he there?” she asked in a whisper. “Hello?” a man’s voice said.

“Is this Morgan Newgate?” Chip asked.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s Chip,” Chip said. “Li RM, from the Academy of the Genetic Sciences.”

There was silence, and then, “My God,” the voice said, “Li! You got pads and charcoal for me!”

“Yes,” Chip said. “And I told my adviser you were sick and needed help.”

Karl laughed. “That’s right, you did, you bastard!” he said. “This is great! When did you get over?”

“About six months ago,” Chip said.

“Are you in New Madrid?”

“Pollensa.”

“What are you doing?”

“Working in a mine,” Chip said.

“Christ, that’s a shut-off,” Karl said, and after a moment, “It’s hell here, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Chip said, thinking He even uses their words. Hell. My God. I’ll bet he says prayers.

“I wish these phones were working so I could get a look at you,” Karl said.

Suddenly Chip was ashamed of his hostility. He told Karl about Lilac and about her pregnancy; Karl told him that he had been married in the Family but had come over alone. He wouldn’t let Chip congratulate him on his success. “The things I sell are awful,” he said. “Appealing little lunky children. But I manage to do my own work three days a week, so I can’t complain. Listen, Li—no, what is it, Chip? Chip, listen, we’ve got to get together. I’ve got a motorbike; I’ll come down there one evening. No, wait,” he said, “are you doing anything next Sunday, you and your wife?”

Lilac looked anxiously at Chip. He said, “I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

“I’m having some friends over,” Karl said. “You come too, all right? Around six o’clock.”

With Lilac nodding at him, Chip said, “We’ll try. We’ll probably be able to make it.”

“See that you do,” Karl said. He gave Chip his address. “I’m glad you got over,” he said. “It’s better than there anyway, isn’t it?”

“A little,” Chip said.

“I’ll expect you next Sunday,” Karl said. “So long, brother.”

“So long,” Chip said, and tapped off.

Lilac said, “We’re going, aren’t we?”

“Do you have any idea what the railfare’s going to be?” Chip said.

“Oh, Chip…”

“All right,” he said. “All right, we’ll go. But I’m not taking any favors from him. And you’re not asking for any. You remember that.”

Every evening that week Lilac worked on the best of their clothes, taking off the frayed sleeves of a green dress, remending a trouser leg so that the mend was less noticeable.

The building, at the very edge of New Madrid’s Steelytown, was in no worse condition than many native buildings. Its lobby was swept, and smelled only slightly of whiskey and fish and perfume, and the elevator worked well.

A pushbutton was set in new plaster next to Karl’s door: a bell to be rung. Chip pressed it. He stood stiffly, and Lilac held his arm.

“Who is it?” a man’s voice asked.

“Chip Newmark,” Chip said.

The door was unlocked and opened, and Karl—a thirty-five-year-old bearded Karl with the long-ago Karl’s sharp-focused eyes—grinned and grabbed Chip’s hand and said, “Li! I thought you weren’t coming!”

“We ran into some good-natured lunkies,” Chip said.

“Oh Christ,” Karl said, and let them in.

He locked the door and Chip introduced Lilac. She said, “Hello, Mr. Newgate,” and Karl, taking her held-out hand and looking at her face, said, “It’s Ashi. Hello, Lilac.”

“Hello, Ashi,” she said.

To Chip, Karl said, “Did they hurt you?”

“No,” Chip said. “Just ‘recite the Vow’ and that kind of cloth.”

“Bastards,” Karl said. “Come on, I’ll give you a drink and you’ll forget about it.” He took their elbows and led them into a narrow passage walled with frame-to-frame paintings. “You look great, Chip,” he said.

“So do you,” Chip said. “Ashi.”

They smiled at each other.

“Seventeen years, brother,” Karl-Ashi said.

Men and women were sitting in a smoky brown-walled room, ten or twelve of them, talking and holding cigarettes and glasses. They stopped talking and turned expectantly.

“This is Chip and this is Lilac,” Karl said to them. “Chip and I were at academy together; the Family’s two worst genetics students.”

The men and women smiled, and Karl began pointing to them in turn and saying their names. “Vito, Sunny, Ria, Lars…” Most of them were immigrants, bearded men and long-haired women with the Family’s eyes and coloring. Two were natives: a pale erect beak-nosed woman of fifty or so, with a gold cross hanging against her black empty-looking dress (“Julia,” Karl said, and she smiled with closed lips); and an overweight red-haired younger woman in a tight dress glazed with silvery beads. A few of the people could have been either immigrants or natives: a gray-eyed beardless man named Bob, a blond woman, a young blue-eyed man.

“Whiskey or wine?” Karl asked. “Lilac?”

“Wine, please,” Lilac said.

They followed him to a small table set out with bottles and glasses, plates holding a slice or two of cheese and meat, and packets of cigarettes and matches. A souvenir paperweight sat on a pile of napkins. Chip picked it up and looked at it; it was from AUS21989. “Make you homesick?” Karl asked, pouring wine.

Chip showed it to Lilac and she smiled. “Not very,” he said, and put it down.

“Chip?”

“Whiskey.”

The red-haired native woman in the silvery dress came over, smiling and holding an empty glass in a ring-fingered hand. To Lilac she said, “You’re absolutely beautiful. Really,” and to Chip, “I think all you people are beautiful. The Family may not have any freedom but it’s way ahead of us in physical appearance. I’d give anything to be lean and tan and slant-eyed.” She talked on—about the Family’s sensible attitude toward sex—and Chip found himself with a glass in his hand and Karl and Lilac talking to other people and the woman talking to him. Lines of black paint edged and extended her brown eyes. “You people are so much more open than we are,” she said. “Sexually, I mean. You enjoy it more.”

An immigrant woman came over and said, “Isn’t Heinz coming, Marge?”

“He’s in Palma,” the woman said, turning. “A wing of the hotel collapsed.”

“Would you excuse me, please?” Chip said, and sidestepped away. He went to the other end of the room, nodded at people sitting there, and drank some of his whiskey, looking at a painting on the wall—slabs of brown and red on a white background. The whiskey tasted better than Hassan’s. It was less bitter and searing; lighter and more pleasant to drink. The painting with its brown and red slabs was only a flat design, interesting to look at for a moment but with nothing in it connected to life. Karl’s (no, Ashi’s!) A-in-a-circle was in one of its bottom corners. Chip wondered whether it was one of the bad paintings he sold or, since it was hanging there in his living room, part of his “own work” that he had spoken of with satisfaction. Wasn’t he still doing the beautiful unbraceleted men and women he had drawn back at the Academy?

He drank some more of the whiskey and turned to the people sitting near him: three men and a woman, all immigrants. They were talking about furniture. He listened for a few minutes, drinking, and moved away.

Lilac was sitting next to the beak-nosed native woman—Julia. They were smoking and talking, or rather Julia was talking and Lilac was listening.

He went to the table and poured more whiskey into his glass. He lit a cigarette.

A man named Lars introduced himself. He ran a school for immigrant children there in New Madrid. He had been brought to Liberty as a child, and had been there for forty-two years.

Ashi came, holding Lilac by the hand. “Chip, come see my studio,” he said.

He led them from the room into the passage walled with paintings. “Do you know who you were speaking to?” he asked Lilac.

“Julia?” she said.

“Julia Costanza,” he said. “She’s the General’s cousin. Despises him. She was one of the founders of Immigrants’ Assistance.”

His studio was large and brilliantly lighted. A half-finished painting of a native woman holding a kitten stood on an easel; on another easel stood a canvas painted with slabs of blue and green. Other paintings stood against the walls: slabs of brown and orange, blue and purple, purple and black, orange and red.

He explained what he was trying to do, pointing out balances, and opposing thrusts, and subtle shadings of color.

Chip looked away and drank his whiskey.

“Listen, you steelies!” he said, loudly enough so they all could hear him. “Stop talking about furniture for a minute and listen! You know what we’ve got to do? Fight Uni! I’m not being rude, I mean it literally. Fight Uni! Because it’s Uni who’s to blame—for everything! For lunkies, who’re what they are because they don’t have enough food, or space, or connection with any outside world; and for dummies, who’re what they are because they’re LPK’ed that way and tranquilized that way; and for us, who’re what we are because Uni put us here to get rid of us! It’s Uni who’s to blame—it’s frozen the world so there’s no more change—and we’ve got to fight it! We’ve got to get up off our stupid beaten behinds and FIGHT IT!”

Ashi, smiling, slapped at his cheek. “Hey, brother,” he said, “you’ve had a little too much, you know that? Hey, Chip, you hear me?”

Of course he’d had too much; of course, of course, of course. But it hadn’t dulled him, it had freed him. It had opened up everything that had been closed inside him for months and months. Whiskey was good! Whiskey was marvelous!

He stopped Ashi’s slapping hand and held it. “I’m okay, Ashi,” he said. “I know what I’m talking about.” To the others, sitting and swaying and smiling, he said, “We can’t just give up and accept things, adjust ourselves to this prison! Ashi, you used to draw members without bracelets, and they were so beautiful! And now you’re painting color, slabs of color!”

They were trying to get him to sit down, Ashi on one side of him and Lilac on the other, Lilac looking anxious and embarrassed. “You too, love,” he said. “You’re accepting, adjusting.” He let them seat him, because standing hadn’t been easy and sitting was better, more comfortable and sprawly. “We’ve got to fight, not adjust,” he said. “Fight, fight, fight. We’ve got to fight,” he said to the gray-eyed beardless man sitting next to him.

“By God, you’re right!” the man said. “I’m with you all the way! Fight Uni! What’ll we do? Go over in boats and take the Army along for good measure? But maybe the sea is monitored by satellite and doctors’ll be waiting with clouds of LPK. I’ve got a better idea; we’ll get a plane—I hear there’s one on the island that actually flies—and we’ll—”

“Don’t tease him, Bob,” someone said. “He just came over.”

“That’s obvious,” the man said, getting up.

“There’s a way to do it,” Chip said. “There has to be. There’s a way to do it.” He thought about the sea and the island in the middle of it, but he couldn’t think as clearly as he wanted. Lilac sat where the man had been and took his hand. “We’ve got to fight,” he said to her.

“I know, I know,” she said, looking at him sadly.

Ashi came and put a warm cup to his lips. “It’s coffee,” he said. “Drink it.”

It was very hot and strong; he swallowed a mouthful, then pushed the cup away. “The copper complex,” he said. “On ’91766. The copper must get ashore. There must be boats or barges; we could—”

“It’s been done before,” Ashi said.

Chip looked at him, thinking he was tricking him, making fun of him in some way, like the gray-eyed beardless man.

“Everything you’re saying,” Ashi said, “everything you’re thinking—‘fight Uni’—it’s been said before and thought before. And tried before. A dozen times.” He put the cup to Chip’s lips. “Take some more,” he said.

Chip pushed the cup away, staring at him, and shook his head. “It’s not true,” he said.

“It is, brother. Come on, take a—”

“It isn’t!” he said.

“It is,” a woman said across the room. “It’s true.”

Julia. It was Julia, General’s-cousin-Julia, sitting erect and alone in her black dress with her little gold cross.

“Every five or six years,” she said, “a group of people like you—sometimes only two or three, sometimes as many as ten—sets out to destroy UniComp. They go in boats, in submarines that they spend years building; they go on board the barges you just mentioned. They take guns, explosives, gas masks, gas bombs, gadgets; they have plans that they’re sure will work. They never come back. I financed the last two parties and am supporting the families of men who were in them, so I speak with authority. I hope you’re sober enough to understand, and to spare yourself useless anguish. Accepting and adjusting is all that’s possible. Be grateful for what you have: a lovely wife, a child on the way, and a small amount of freedom that we hope in time will grow larger. I might add that in no circumstances whatsoever will I finance another such party. I am not as rich as certain people think I am.”

Chip sat looking at her. She looked back at him with small black eyes above her pale beak of nose.

“They never come back, Chip,” Ashi said.

Chip looked at him.

“Maybe they get to shore,” Ashi said; “maybe they get to ’001. Maybe they even get into the dome. But that’s as far as they get, because they’re gone, every one of them. And Uni is still working.”

Chip looked at Julia. She said, “Men and women exactly like you. As far back as I can remember.”

He looked at Lilac, holding his hand. She squeezed it, looking compassionately at him.

He looked at Ashi, who held the cup of coffee toward him.

He blocked the cup and shook his head. “No, I don’t want coffee,” he said.

He sat motionless, with sudden sweat on his forehead, and then he leaned forward and began vomiting.

He was in bed, and Lilac was lying beside him sleeping. Hassan was snoring on the other side of the curtain. A sour taste was in his mouth, and he remembered vomiting. Christ and Wei! And on carpet—the first he’d seen in half a year!

Then he remembered what had been said to him by that woman, Julia, and by Karl—by Ashi.

He lay still for a while, and then he got up and tiptoed around the curtain and past the sleeping Newmans to the sink. He got a drink of water, and because he didn’t want to go all the way down the hall, urined quietly in the sink and rinsed it out thoroughly.

He got back down beside Lilac and drew the blanket over him. He felt a little drunk again and his head hurt, but he lay on his back with his eyes closed, breathing lightly and slowly, and after a while he felt better.

He kept his eyes closed and thought about things.

After half an hour or so Hassan’s alarm clock jangled. Lilac turned. He stroked her head and she sat up. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes, sort of,” he said.

The light went on and they winced. They heard Hassan grunting and getting up, yawning, farting. “Get up, Ria,” he said. “Gigi? It’s time to get up.”

Chip stayed on his back with his hand on Lilac’s cheek. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “I’ll call him today and apologize.”

She took his hand and turned her lips to it. “You couldn’t help it,” she said. “He understood.”

“I’m going to ask him to help me find a better job,” Chip said.

Lilac looked at him questioningly.

“It’s all out of me,” he said. “Like the whiskey. All out. I’m going to be an industrious, optimistic steely. I’m going to accept and adjust. We’re going to have a bigger apartment than Ashi some day.”

“I don’t want that,” she said. “I would love to have two rooms, though.”

“We will,” he said. “In two years. Two rooms in two years; that’s a promise.”

She smiled at him.

He said, “I think we ought to think about moving to New Madrid where our rich friends are. That man Lars runs a school, did you know that? Maybe you could teach there. And the baby could go there when it’s old enough.”

“What could I teach?” she said.

“Something,” he said. “I don’t know.” He lowered his hand and stroked her breasts. “How to have beautiful breasts, maybe,” he said.

Smiling, she said, “We’ve got to get dressed.”

“Let’s skip breakfast,” he said, drawing her down. He rolled onto her and they embraced and kissed.

“Lilac?” Ria called. “How was it?”

Lilac freed her mouth. “Tell you later!” she called.

While he was walking down the tunnel into the mine he remembered the tunnel into Uni, Papa Jan’s tunnel down which the memory banks had been rolled.

He stopped still.

Down which the real memory banks had been rolled. And above them were the false ones, the pink and orange toys that were reached through the dome and the elevators, and which everyone thought was Uni itself; everyone including—it had to be!—all those men and women who had gone out to fight it in the past. But Uni, the real Uni, was on the levels below, and could be reached through the tunnel, through Papa Jan’s tunnel from behind Mount Love.

It would still be there—closed at its mouth probably, maybe even sealed with a meter of concrete—but it would still be there; because nobody fills in all of a long tunnel, especially not an efficient computer. And there was space cut out below for more memory banks—Papa Jan had said so—so the tunnel would be needed again some day.

It was there, behind Mount Love.

A tunnel into Uni.

With the right maps and charts, someone who knew what he was doing could probably work out its exact location, or very nearly.

“You there! Get moving!” someone shouted.

He walked ahead quickly, thinking about it, thinking about it.

It was there. The tunnel.

6

“IF IT’S MONEY, the answer is no,” Julia Costanza said, walking briskly past clattering looms and immigrant women glancing at her. “If it’s a job,” she said, “I might be able to help you.”

Chip, walking along beside her, said, “Ashi’s already got me a job.”

“Then it’s money,” she said.

“Information first,” Chip said, “then maybe money.” He pushed open a door.

“No,” Julia said, going through. “Why don’t you go to I. A.? That’s what it’s there for. What information? About what?” She glanced at him as they started up a spiral stairway that shifted with their weight.

Chip said, “Can we sit down somewhere for five minutes?”

“If I sit down,” Julia said, “half this island will be naked tomorrow. That’s probably acceptable to you, but it isn’t to me. What information?”

He held in his resentment. Looking at her beak-nosed profile, he said, “Those two attacks on Uni you—”

“No,” she said. She stopped and faced him, one hand holding the stairway’s centerpost. “If it’s about that I really won’t listen,” she said. “I knew it the minute you walked into that living room, the disapproving air you had. No. I’m not interested in any more plans and schemes. Go talk to somebody else.” She went up the stairs.

He went quickly and caught up with her. “Were they planning to use a tunnel?” he asked. “Just tell me that; were they going in through a tunnel from behind Mount Love?”

She pushed open the door at the head of the stairway; he held it and went through after her, into a large loft where a few machine parts lay. Birds rose fluttering to holes in the peaked roof and flew out.

“They were going in with the other people,” she said, walking straight through the loft toward a door at its far end. “The sightseers. At least that was the plan. They were going to go down in the elevators.”

“And then?”

“There’s no point in—”

“Just answer me, will you, please?” he said.

She glanced at him, angrily, and looked ahead. “There’s supposed to be a large observation window,” she said. “They were going to smash it and throw in explosives.”

“Both groups?”

“Yes.”

“They may have succeeded,” he said.

She stopped with her hand on the door and looked at him, puzzled.

“That’s not really Uni,” he said. “It’s a display for the sightseers. And maybe it’s also meant as a false target for attackers. They could have blown it up and nothing would have happened—except that they would have been grabbed and treated.”

She kept looking at him.

“The real thing is farther down,” he said. “On three levels. I was in it once when I was ten or eleven years old.”

She said, “Digging a tunnel is the most ri—”

“It’s there already,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be dug.”

She closed her mouth, looked at him, and turned quickly away and pushed open the door. It led to another loft, brightly lit, where a row of presses stood motionless with layers of cloth on their beds. Water was on the floor, and two men were trying to lift the end of a long pipe that had apparently fallen from the wall and lay across a stopped conveyor belt piled with cut cloth pieces. The wall end of the pipe was still anchored, and the men were trying to lift its other end and get it off the belt and back up against the wall. Another man, an immigrant, waited on a ladder to receive it.

“Help them,” Julia said, and began gathering pieces of cloth from the wet floor.

“If that’s how I spend my time, nothing’s going to be changed,” Chip said. “That’s acceptable to you, but it isn’t to me.”

“Help them!” Julia said. “Go on! We’ll talk later! You’re not going to get anywhere by being cheeky!”

Chip helped the men get the pipe secured against the wall, and then he went out with Julia onto a railed landing on the side of the building. New Madrid stretched away below them, bright in the mid-morning sun. Beyond it lay a strip of blue-green sea dotted with fishing boats.

“Every day it’s something else,” Julia said, reaching into the pocket of her gray apron. She took out cigarettes, offered Chip one, and lit them with ordinary cheap matches.

They smoked, and Chip said, “The tunnel’s there. It was used to bring in the memory banks.”

“Some of the groups I wasn’t involved with may have known about it,” Julia said.

“Can you find out?”

She drew on her cigarette. In the sunlight she was older-looking, the skin of her face and neck netted with wrinkles. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose so. How do you know about it?”

He told her. “I’m sure it’s not filled in,” he said. “It must be fifteen kilometers long. And besides, it’s going to be used again. There’s space cut out for more banks for when the Family gets bigger.”

She looked questioningly at him. “I thought the colonies had their own computers,” she said.

“They do,” he said, not understanding. And then he understood. It was only in the colonies that the Family was growing; on Earth, with two children per couple and not every couple allowed to reproduce, the Family was getting smaller, not bigger. He had never connected that with what Papa Jan had said about the space for more memory banks. “Maybe they’ll be needed for more telecontrolled equipment,” he said.

“Or maybe,” Julia said, “your grandfather wasn’t a reliable source of information.”

“He was the one who had the idea for the tunnel,” Chip said. “It’s there; I know it is. And it may be a way, the only way, that Uni can be gotten at. I’m going to try it, and I want your help, as much of it as you can give me.”

“You want my money, you mean,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “And your help. In finding the right people with the right skills. And in getting information that we’ll need, and equipment. And in finding people who can teach us skills that we don’t have. I want to take this very slowly and carefully. I want to come back.”

She looked at him with her eyes narrowed against her cigarette smoke. “Well, you’re not an absolute imbecile,” she said. “What kind of job has Ashi found for you?”

“Washing dishes at the Casino.”

“God in heaven!” she said. “Come here tomorrow morning at a quarter of eight.”

“The Casino leaves my mornings free,” he said.

“Come here!” she said. “You’ll get the time you need.”

“All right,” he said, and smiled at her. “Thanks,” he said.

She turned away and looked at her cigarette. She crushed it against the railing. “I’m not going to pay for it,” she said. “Not all of it. I can’t. You have no idea how expensive it’s going to be. Explosives, for instance: last time they cost over two thousand dollars, and that was five years ago; God knows what they’ll be today.” She scowled at her cigarette stub and threw it away over the railing. “I’ll pay what I can,” she said, “and I’ll introduce you to people who’ll pay the rest if you flatter them enough.”

“Thank you,” Chip said. “I couldn’t ask for more. Thank you.”

“God in heaven, here I go again,” Julia said. She turned to Chip. “Wait, you’ll find out,” she said: “the older you get, the more you stay the same. I’m an only child who’s used to having her way, that’s my trouble. Come on, I’ve got work to do.”

They went down stairs that led from the landing. “Really,” Julia said. “I have all kinds of noble reasons for spending my time and money on people like you—a Christian urge to help the Family, love of justice, freedom, democracy—but the truth of the matter is, I’m an only child who’s used to having her way. It maddens me, it absolutely maddens me, that I can’t go anywhere I please on this planet! Or off it, for that matter! You have no idea how I resent that damned computer!”

Chip laughed. “I do!” he said. “That’s just the way I feel.”

“It’s a monster straight out of hell,” Julia said.

They walked around the building. “It’s a monster, all right,” Chip said, throwing away his cigarette. “At least the way it is now. One of the things I want to try to find out is whether, if we got the chance, we could change its programming instead of destroying it. If the Family were running it, instead of vice versa, it wouldn’t be so bad. Do you really believe in heaven and hell?”

“Let’s not get into religion,” Julia said, “or you’re going to find yourself washing dishes at the Casino. How much are they paying you?”

“Six-fifty a week.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll give you the same,” Julia said, “but if anyone around here asks, say you’re getting five.”

He waited until Julia had questioned a number of people without learning of any attack party that had known about the tunnel, and then, confirmed in his decision, he told his plans to Lilac.

“You can’t!” she said. “Not after all those other people went!”

“They were aiming at the wrong target,” he said.

She shook her head, held her brow, looked at him. “It’s—I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I thought you were—done with all this. I thought we were settled.” She threw her hands out at the room around them, their New Madrid room, with the walls they had painted, the bookshelf he had made, the bed, the refrigerator, Ashi’s sketch of a laughing child.

Chip said, “Honey, I may be the only person on any of the islands who knows about the tunnel, about the real Uni. I have to make use of that. How can I not do it?”

“All right, make use of it,” she said. “Plan, help organize a party—fine! I’ll help you! But why do you have to go? Other people should do it, people without families.”

“I’ll be here when the baby’s born,” he said. “It’s going to take longer than that to get everything ready. And then I’ll only be gone for—maybe as little as a week.”

She stared at him. “How can you say that?” she said. “How can you say you’ll—you could be gone forever! You could be caught and treated!”

“We’re going to learn how to fight,” he said. “We’re going to have guns and—”

“Others should go!” she said.

“How can I ask them, if I’m not going myself?”

“Ask them, that’s all. Ask them.”

“No,” he said. “I’ve got to go too.”

“You want to go, that’s what it is,” she said. “You don’t have to go; you want to.”

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “All right, I want to. Yes. I can’t think of not being there when Uni is beaten. I want to throw the explosive myself, or pull the switch myself, or do whatever it is that’s finally done—myself.”

“You’re sick,” she said. She picked up the sewing in her lap and found the needle and started to sew. “I mean it,” she said. “You’re sick on the subject of Uni. It didn’t put us here; we’re lucky to have got here. Ashi’s right: it would have killed us the way it kills people at sixty-two; it wouldn’t have wasted boats and islands. We got away from it; it’s already been beaten; and you’re sick to want to go back and beat it again.”

“It put us here,” Chip said, “because the programmers couldn’t justify killing people who were still young.”

“Cloth,” Lilac said. “They justified killing old people, they’d have justified killing infants. We got away. And now you’re going back.”

“What about our parents?” he said. “They’re going to be killed in a few more years. What about Snowflake and Sparrow—the whole Family, in fact?”

She sewed, jabbing the needle into green cloth—the sleeves from her green dress that she was making into a shirt for the baby. “Others should go,” she said. “People without families.”

Later, in bed, he said, “If anything should go wrong, Julia will take care of you. And the baby.”

“That’s a great comfort,” she said. “Thanks. Thanks very much. Thank Julia too.”

It stayed between them from that night on: resentment on her part and refusal to be moved by it on his.