by Ira Levin
“A lot of them are odd,” Leopard said.
“The ones of Christ,” Hush said, “show him with a light around his head, and he doesn’t look human at all.”
“I’ve seen those,” Chip said, looking at the boulder, “but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s fascinating; real and unreal at the same time.”
“You can’t take it,” Snowflake said. “We can’t take anything that might be missed.”
Chip said, “There’s no place I could put it anyway.”
“How do you like being undertreated?” Sparrow asked.
Chip turned. Sparrow looked away, at her hands holding a roll of leaves and a knife. Hush was at the same task, chopping rapidly at a roll of leaves, cutting it into thin shreds that piled before her knife. Snowflake was sitting with a pipe in her mouth; Leopard was holding the heat coil in the bowl of it. “It’s wonderful,” Chip said. “Literally. Full of wonders. More of them every day. I’m grateful to all of you.”
“We only did what we’re told to,” Leopard said, smiling. “We helped a brother.”
“Not exactly in the approved way,” Chip said.
Snowflake offered him her pipe. “Are you ready to try a puff?” she asked.
He went to her and took it. The bowl of it was warm, the tobacco in it gray and smoking. He hesitated for a moment, smiled at them watching him, and put the stem to his lips. He sucked briefly at it and blew out smoke. The taste was strong but pleasant, surprisingly so. “Not bad,” he said. He did it again with more assurance. Some of the smoke went into his throat and he coughed.
Leopard, going smiling to the doorway, said, “I’ll get you one of your own,” and went out.
Chip returned the pipe to Snowflake and, clearing his throat, sat down on a bench of dark worn wood. He watched Hush and Sparrow cutting the tobacco. Hush smiled at him. He said, “Where do you get the seeds?”
“From the plants themselves,” she said.
“Where did you get the ones you started with?”
“King had them.”
“What did I have?” King asked, coming in, tall and lean and bright-eyed, a gold medallion chain-hung on his coveralled chest. He had Lilac behind him, his hand holding hers. Chip stood up. She looked at him, unusual, dark, beautiful, young.
“The tobacco seeds,” Hush said.
King offered his hand to Chip, smiling warmly. “It’s good to see you here,” he said. Chip shook his hand; its grip was firm and hearty. “Really good to see a new face in the group,” King said. “Especially a male one, to help me keep these pre-U women in their proper place!”
“Huh,” Snowflake said.
“It’s good to be here,” Chip said, pleased by King’s friendliness. His coldness when Chip left his office must have been only a pretense, for the sake, of course, of the onlooking doctors. “Thank you,” Chip said. “For everything. Both of you.”
Lilac said, “I’m very glad, Chip.” Her hand was still held by King’s. She was darker than normal, a lovely near-brown touched with rose. Her eyes were large and almost level, her lips pink and soft-looking. She turned away and said, “Hello, Snowflake.” She drew her hand from King’s and went to Snowflake and kissed her cheek.
She was twenty or twenty-one, no more. The upper pockets of her coveralls had something in them, giving her the breasted look of the women Karl had drawn. It was a strange, mysteriously alluring look.
“Are you beginning to feel different now, Chip?” King asked. He was at the table, bending and putting tobacco into the bowl of a pipe.
“Yes, enormously,” Chip said. “It’s everything you said it would be.”
Leopard came in and said, “Here you are, Chip.” He gave him a yellow thick-bowled pipe with an amber stem. Chip thanked him and tried the feel of it; it was comfortable in his hand and comfortable to his lips. He took it to the table, and King, his gold medallion swinging, showed him the right way to fill it.
Leopard took him through the staff section of the museum, showing him other storerooms, the conference room, and various offices and workrooms. “It’s a good idea,” he said, “for someone to keep rough track of who goes where during these get-togethers, and then check around later and make sure nothing is conspicuously out of place. The girls could be a little more careful than they are. I generally do it, and when I’m gone perhaps you’ll take over the job. Normals aren’t quite as unobservant as we’d like them to be.”
“Are you being transferred?” Chip asked.
“Oh no,” Leopard said. “I’ll be dying soon. I’m over sixty-two now, by almost three months. So is Hush.”
“I’m sorry,” Chip said.
“So are we,” Leopard said, “but nobody lives forever. Tobacco ashes are a danger, of course, but everyone’s good about that. You don’t have to worry about the smell; the air conditioning goes on at seven-forty and whips it right out; I stayed one morning and made sure. Sparrow’s going to take over the tobacco growing. We dry the leaves right here, in back of the hot-water tank; I’ll show you.”
When they got back to the storeroom, King and Snowflake were sitting opposite each other astride a bench, playing intently at a mechanical game of some kind that lay between them. Hush was dozing in her chair and Lilac was crouched at the verge of the mass of relics, taking books one at a time from a carton, looking at them, and putting them in a pile on the floor. Sparrow wasn’t there.
“What’s that?” Leopard asked.
“New game that came in,” Snowflake said, not looking up.
There were levers that they pressed and released, one for each hand, making little paddles hit a rusted ball back and forth on a rimmed metal board. The paddles, some of them broken, squeaked as they swung. The ball bounded this way and that and came to a stop in a depression at King’s end of the board. “Five!” Snowflake cried. “There you are, brother!”
Hush opened her eyes, looked at them, and closed them again.
“Losing’s the same as winning,” King said, lighting his pipe with a metal lighter.
“Like hate it is,” Snowflake said. “Chip? Come on, you’re next.”
“No, I’ll watch,” he said, smiling.
Leopard declined to play too, and King and Snowflake began another match. At a break in the play, when King had scored a point against Snowflake, Chip said, “May I see the lighter?” and King gave it to him. A bird in flight was painted on the side of it; a duck, Chip thought. He had seen lighters in museums but had never worked one. He opened the hinged top and pushed his thumb against the ridged wheel. On the second try the wick flamed. He closed the lighter, looked at it all over, and at the next break handed it back to King.
He watched them play for another few moments and then moved away. He went over to the mass of relics and looked at it, and then moved nearer to Lilac. She looked up at him and smiled, putting a book on one of several piles beside her. “I keep hoping to find one in the language,” she said, “but they’re always in the old ones.”
He crouched and picked up the book she had just put down. On the spine of it were small letters: Bädda för död. “Hmm,” he said, shaking his head. He glanced through the old brown pages, at strange words and phrases: allvarlig, lögnerska, dök ner på brickorna. The double dots and little circles were over many of the letters.
“Some of them are enough like the language so that you can understand a word or two,” she said, “but some of them are—well look at this one.” She showed him a book on which backward N’s and rectangular open-bottomed characters were mixed in with ordinary P’s and E’s and O’s. “Now what does that mean?” she said, putting it down.
“It would be interesting to find one we could read,” he said, looking at her cheek’s rose-brown smoothness.
“Yes, it would,” she said, “but I think they were screened before they were sent here and that’s why we can’t.”
“You think they were screened?”
“There ought to be lots of them in the language,” she said. “How
could it have become the language if it wasn’t the one most widely used?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “You’re right.”
“I keep hoping, though,” she said, “that there was a slip in the screening.” She frowned at a book and put it on a pile.
Her filled pockets stirred with her movements, and suddenly they looked to Chip like empty pockets lying against round breasts, breasts like the ones Karl had drawn; the breasts, almost, of a pre-U woman. It was possible, considering her abnormal darkness and the various physical abnormalities of the lot of them. He looked at her face again, so as not to embarrass her if she really had them.
“I thought I was double-checking this carton,” she said, “but I have a funny feeling I’m triple-checking it.”
“But why should the books have been screened?” he asked her.
She paused, with her dark hands hanging empty and her elbows on her knees, looking at him gravely with her large, level eyes. “I think we’ve been taught things that aren’t true,” she said. “About the way life was before the Unification. In the late pre-U, I mean, not the early.”
“What things?”
“The violence, the aggressiveness, the greed, the hostility. There was some of it, I suppose, but I can’t believe there was nothing else, and that’s what we’re taught, really. And the ‘bosses’ punishing the ‘workers,’ and all the sickness and alcohol-drinking and starvation and self-destruction. Do you believe it?”
He looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t thought much about it.”
“I’ll tell you what I don’t believe,” Snowflake said. She had risen from the bench, the game with King evidently finished. “I don’t believe that they cut off the baby boys’ foreskins,” she said. “In the early pre-U, maybe—in the early, early pre-U—but not in the late; it’s just too incredible. I mean, they had some kind of intelligence, didn’t they?”
“It’s incredible, all right,” King said, hitting his pipe against his palm, “but I’ve seen photographs. Alleged photographs, anyway.”
Chip shifted around and sat on the floor. “What do you mean?” he said. “Can photographs be—not genuine?”
“Of course they can,” Lilac said. ‘Take a close look at some of the ones inside. Parts of them have been drawn in. And parts have been drawn out.” She began putting books back into the carton.
“I had no idea that was possible,” Chip said.
“It is with the flat ones,” King said.
“What we’re probably given,” Leopard said—he was sitting in a gilded chair, toying with the orange plume of the hat he had worn—“is a mixture of truth and untruth. It’s anybody’s guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each.”
“Couldn’t we study these books and learn the languages?” Chip asked. “One would be all we’d really need.”
“For what?” Snowflake asked.
“To find out,” he said. “What’s true and what isn’t.”
“I tried it,” Lilac said.
“She certainly did,” King said to Chip, smiling. “A while back she wasted more nights than I care to remember beating her pretty head against one of those nonsensical jumbles. Don’t you do it, Chip; I beg you.”
“Why not?” Chip asked. “Maybe I’ll have better luck.”
“And suppose you do?” King said. “Suppose you decipher a language and read a few books in it and find out that we are taught things that are untrue. Maybe everything’s untrue. Maybe life in 2000 A.D. was one endless orgasm, with everyone choosing the right classification and helping his brothers and loaded to the ears with love and health and life’s necessities. So what? You’ll still be right here, in 162 Y.U., with a bracelet and an adviser and a monthly treatment. You’ll only be unhappier. We’ll all be unhappier.”
Chip frowned and looked at Lilac. She was packing books into the carton, not looking at him. He looked back at King and sought words. “It would still be worth knowing,” he said. “Being happy or unhappy—is that really the most important thing? Knowing the truth would be a different kind of happiness—a more satisfying kind, I think, even if it turned out to be a sad kind.”
“A sad kind of happiness?” King said, smiling. “I don’t see that at all.” Leopard looked thoughtful.
Snowflake, gesturing to Chip to get up, said, “Come on, there’s something I want to show you.”
He climbed to his feet. “But we’d probably only find that things have been exaggerated,” he said; “that there was hunger but not so much hunger, aggressiveness but not so much aggressiveness. Maybe some of the minor things have been made up, like the foreskin-cutting and the flag-worship.”
“If you feel that way, then there’s certainly no point in bothering,” King said. “Do you have any idea what a job it would be? It would be staggering.”
Chip shrugged. “It would be good to know, that’s all,” he said. He looked at Lilac; she was putting the last few books into the carton.
“Come on,” Snowflake said, and took his arm. “Save us some tobacco, you mems.”
They went out and into the dark of the exhibit hall. Snowflake’s flashlight lit their way. “What is it?” Chip asked. “What do you want to show me?”
“What do you think?” she said. “A bed. Certainly not more books.”
They generally met two nights a week, Sundays and Woodsdays or Thursdays. They smoked and talked and idled with relics and exhibits. Sometimes Sparrow sang songs that she wrote, accompanying herself on a lap-held instrument whose strings at her fingers made pleasing antique music. The songs were short and sad, about children who lived and died on starships, lovers who were transferred, the eternal sea. Sometimes King reenacted the evening’s TV, comically mocking a lecturer on climate control or a fifty-member chorus singing “My Bracelet.” Chip and Snowflake made use of the seventeenth-century bed and the nineteenth-century sofa, the early pre-U farm wagon and the late pre-U plastic rug. On nights between meetings they sometimes went to one or the other’s room. The nameber on Snowflake’s door was Anna PY24A9155; the 24, which Chip couldn’t resist working out, made her thirty-eight, older than he had thought her to be.
Day by day his senses sharpened and his mind grew more alert and restless. His treatment caught him back and dulled him, but only for a week or so; then he was awake again, alive again. He went to work on the language Lilac had tried to decipher. She showed him the books she had worked from and the lists she had made. Momento was moment; silenzio, silence. She had several pages of easily recognized translations; but there were words in the books’ every sentence that could only be guessed at and the guesses tried elsewhere. Was allora “then” or “already”? What were quale and sporse and rimanesse? He worked with the books for an hour or so at every meeting. Sometimes she leaned over his shoulder and looked at what he was doing—said “Oh, of course!” or “Couldn’t that be one of the days of the week?”—but most of the time she stayed near King, filling his pipe for him and listening while he talked. King watched Chip working and, reflected in glass panes of pre-U furniture, smiled at the others and raised his eyebrows.
Chip saw Mary KK on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. He acted normal with her, smiled through the Amusement Gardens and fucked her simply and without passion. He acted normal at his assignment, slowly following the established procedures. Acting normal began to irritate him, more and more as week followed week.
In July, Hush died. Sparrow wrote a song about her, and when Chip returned to his room after the meeting at which she had sung it, she and Karl (Why hadn’t he thought of him sooner?) suddenly came together in his mind. Sparrow was large and awkward but lovely when she sang, twenty-five or so and lonely. Karl presumably had been “cured” when Chip “helped” him, but might he not have had the strength or the genetic capacity or the whatever-it-was to resist the cure, at least to a degree? Like Chip he was a 663; there was a chance that he was right there at the Institute somewhere, an ideal prospect for being led into th
e group and an ideal match for Sparrow. It was certainly worth a try. What a pleasure it would be to really help Karl! Undertreated, he would draw—well what wouldn’t he draw?—pictures such as no one had ever imagined! As soon as he got up the next morning he got his last nameber book out of his take-along kit, touched the phone, and read out Karl’s nameber. But the screen stayed blank and the phone voice apologized; the member he had called was out of reach.
Bob RO asked him about it a few days later, just as he was getting up from the chair. “Oh, say,” Bob said, “I meant to ask you; how come you wanted to call this Karl WL?”
“Oh,” Chip said, standing by the chair. “I wanted to see how he was. Now that I’m all right, I guess I want to be sure that everyone else is.”
“Of course he is,” Bob said. “It’s an odd thing to do, after so many years.”
“I just happened to think of him,” Chip said.
He acted normal from the first chime to the last and met with the group twice a week. He kept working at the language —Italiano, it was called—although he suspected that King was right and there was no point in it. It was something to do, though, and seemed more worthwhile than playing with mechanical toys. And once in a while it brought Lilac to him, leaning over to look, with one hand on the leather-topped table he worked at and the other on the back of his chair. He could smell her—it wasn’t his imagination; she actually smelled of flowers—and he could look at her dark cheek and neck and the chest of her coveralls pushed taut by two mobile round protrusions. They were breasts. They were definitely breasts.
4
ONE NIGHT LATE IN AUGUST, while looking for more books in Italiano, he found one in a different language whose title, Vers I’avenir, was similar to the Italiano words verso and avvenire and apparently meant Toward the Future. He opened the book and thumbed its pages, and Wei Li Chun caught his eye, printed at the tops of twenty or thirty of them. Other names were at the tops of other clusters of pages, Mario Sofik, A. F. Liebman. The book, he realized, was a collection of short pieces by various writers, and two of the pieces were indeed by Wei. The title of one of them, Le pas prochain en avant, he recognized (pas would be passo; avant, avanti) as “The Next Step Forward,” in Part One of Wei’s Living Wisdom.
