by Ira Levin
“What amazes me,” Chip said, “is how many non-productive members there were. These share-traders and lawmakers; the soldiers and policemen, bankers, tax-gatherers . . .”
“They weren’t non-productive,” she said. “They didn’t produce things but they made it possible for members to live the way they did. They produced the freedom, or at least they maintained it.”
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I am,” she said, and moved restlessly from the table.
He thought for a moment. “Pre-U members,” he said, “gave up efficiency—in exchange for freedom. And we’ve done the reverse.”
“We haven’t done it,” Lilac said. “It was done for us.” She turned and faced him, and said, “Do you think it’s possible that the incurables are still alive?”
He looked at her.
“That their descendants have survived somehow,” she said, “and have a—a society somewhere? On an island or in some area that the Family isn’t using?”
“Wow,” he said, and rubbed his forehead. “Sure it’s possible,” he said. “Members survived on islands before the Unification; why not after?”
“That’s what I think,” she said, coming back to him. “There have been five generations since the last ones—”
“Battered by disease and hardship—”
“But reproducing at will!”
“I don’t know about a society,” he said, “but there might be a colony—”
“A city,” she said. “They were the smart ones, the strong ones.”
“What an idea,” he said.
“It’s possible, isn’t it?” She was leaning toward him, hands on the table, her large eyes questioning, her cheeks flushed to a rosier darkness.
He looked at her. “What does King think?” he asked. She drew back a bit and he said, “As if I can’t guess.”
She was angry suddenly, fierce-eyed. “You were terrible to him last night!” she said.
“Terrible? I was? To him?”
“Yes!” She whirled from the table. “You questioned him as if you were— How could you even think he would know about Uni killing us and not tell us?”
“I still think he knew.”
She faced him angrily. “He didn’t!” she said. “He doesn’t keep secrets from me!”
“What are you, his adviser?”
“Yes!” she said. “That’s exactly what I am, in case you want to know.”
“You’re not,” he said.
“I am.”
“Christ and Wei,” he said. “You really are? You’re an adviser? That’s the last classification I would have thought of. How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“And you’re his?”
She nodded.
He laughed. “I decided that you worked in the gardens,” he said. “You smell of flowers, do you know that? You really do.”
“I wear perfume,” she said.
“You wear it?”
“The perfume of flowers, in a liquid. King made it for me.”
He stared at her. “Parfum!” he said, slapping the open book before him. “I thought it was some kind of germicide; she put it in her bath. Of course!” He groped among the lists, took up his pen, crossed out and wrote. “Stupid,” he said. “Parfum equals perfume. Flowers in a liquid. How did he do that?”
“Don’t accuse him of deceiving us.”
“All right, I won’t.” He put the pen down.
“Everything we’ve got,” she said, “we owe to him.”
“What is it though?” he said. “Nothing—unless we use it to try for more. And he doesn’t seem to want us to.”
“He’s more sensible than we are.”
He looked at her, standing a few meters away from him before the mass of relics. “What would you do,” he asked, “if we somehow found that there is a city of incurables?”
Her eyes stayed on his. “Get to it,” she said.
“And live on plants and animals?”
“If necessary.” She glanced at the book, moved her head toward it. “Victor and Caroline seem to have enjoyed their dinner.”
He smiled and said, “You really are a pre-U woman, aren’t you?”
She said nothing.
“Would you let me see your breasts?” he asked.
“What for?” she said.
“I’m curious, that’s all.”
She pulled open the top of her coveralls and held the two sides apart. Her breasts were rose-brown soft-looking cones that stirred with her breathing, taut on their upper surfaces and rounded below. Their tips, blunt and pink, seemed to contract and grow darker as he looked at them. He felt oddly aroused, as if he were being caressed.
“They’re nice,” he said.
“I know they are,” she said, closing her coveralls and pressing the closure. “That’s something else I owe King. I used to think I was the ugliest member in the entire Family.”
“You?”
“Until he convinced me I wasn’t.”
“All right,” he said, “you owe King very much. We all do. What have you come to me for?”
“I told you,” she said. “To learn that language.”
“Cloth,” he said, getting up. “You want me to start looking for places the Family isn’t using, for signs that your ‘city’ exists. Because I’ll do it and he won’t; because I’m not ‘sensible,’ or old, or content to make fun of TV.”
She started for the door but he caught her by the shoulder and pushed her around. “Stay here!” he said. She looked frightenedly at him and he took hold of her jaw and kissed her mouth; clamped her head in both his hands and pushed his tongue against her shut teeth. She pressed at his chest and wrenched her head. He thought she would stop, give in and take the kiss, but she didn’t; she kept struggling with increasing vigor, and finally he let go and she pushed away from him.
“That’s—that’s terrible!” she said. “Forcing me! That’s— I’ve never been held that way!”
“I love you,” he said.
“Look at me, I’m shaking,” she said. “Wei Li Chun, is that how you love, by becoming an animal? That’s awful!”
“A human,” he said, “like you.”
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t hurt anyone, hold anyone that way!” She held her jaw and moved it.
“How do you think incurables kiss?” he said.
“Like humans, not like animals.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you.”
“Good,” she said. “I love you too—the way I love Leopard and Snowflake and Sparrow.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said.
“But it’s what I mean,” she said, looking at him. She went sideways to the doorway and said, “Don’t do that again. That’s terrible!”
“Do you want the lists?” he asked.
She looked as if she was going to say no, hesitated, and then said, “Yes. That’s what I came for.”
He turned and gathered the lists on the table, folded them together, and took Père Goriot from the stack of books. She came over and he gave them to her.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “Just don’t do it again.”
“I’ll look for places the Family isn’t using,” he said. “I’ll go over the maps at the MFA and see if—”
“I’ve done that,” she said.
“Carefully?”
“As carefully as I could.”
“I’ll do it again,” he said. “It’s the only way to begin. Millimeter by millimeter.”
“All right,” she said.
“Wait a second, I’m going now too.”
She waited while he put away his smoking things and got the room back the way it belonged, and then they went out together through the exhibit hall and down the escalator.
“A city of incurables,” he said.
“It’s possible,” she said.
“It’s worth looking for a
nyway,” he said.
They went out onto the walkway.
“Which way do you go?” he asked.
“West,” she said.
“I’ll go a few blocks with you.”
“No,” she said. “Really, the longer you’re out, the more chances there are for someone to see you not touching.”
“I touch the rim of the scanner and block it with my body. Very tricky.”
“No,” she said. “Please, go your own way.”
“All right,” he said. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
He put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her cheek.
She didn’t move away; she was tense and waiting under his hand.
He kissed her lips. They were warm and soft, slightly parted, and she turned and walked away.
“Lilac,” he said, and went after her.
She turned and said, “No. Please, Chip, go,” and turned and walked away again.
He stood uncertainly. Another member was in the distance, coming toward them.
He watched her go, hating her, loving her.
5
EVENING AFTER EVENING he ate quickly (but not too quickly), then railed to the Museum of the Family’s Achievements and studied its maze of ceiling-high illuminated maps until the ten-of-TV closing. One night he went there after the last chime—an hour-and-a-half walk—but found that the maps were unreadable by flashlight, their markings lost in glare; and he hesitated to put on their internal lights, which, tied in as they seemed to be with the lighting of the entire hall, might have produced a Uni-alerting overdraft of power. On Sunday he took Mary KK there, sent her off to see the Universe of Tomorrow exhibit, and studied the maps for three hours straight.
He found nothing: no island without its city or industrial installation; no mountaintop that wasn’t spacewatch or climatonomy center; no square kilometer of land—or of ocean floor, for that matter—that wasn’t being mined or harvested or used for factories or houses or airports or parkland by the Family’s eight billion. The gold-lettered legend suspended at the entrance of the map area—The Earth Is Our Heritage; We Use It Wisely and Without Waste—seemed true, so true that there was no place left for even the smallest non-Family community.
Leopard died and Sparrow sang. King sat silently, picking at the gears of a pre-U gadget, and Snowflake wanted more sex.
Chip said to Lilac, “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“There must have been hundreds of little colonies to begin with,” she said. “One of them must have survived.”
“Then it’s half a dozen members in a cave somewhere,” he said.
“Please, keep looking,” she said. “You can’t have checked every island.”
He thought about it, sitting in the dark in the twentieth-century car, holding its steering wheel, moving its different knobs and levers; and the more he thought about it, the less possible a city or even a colony of incurables came to seem. Even if he had overlooked an unused area on the maps, could a community exist without Uni learning of it? People made marks on their environment; a thousand people, even a hundred, would raise an area’s temperature, soil its streams with their wastes, and its air perhaps with their primitive fires. The land or sea for kilometers around would be affected by their presence in a dozen detectable ways.
So Uni would have long since known of the theoretical city’s existence, and having known, would have—done what? Dispatched doctors and advisers and portable treatment units; would have “cured” the incurables and made them into “healthy” members.
Unless, of course, they had defended themselves . . . Their ancestors had fled the Family soon after the Unification, when treatments were optional, or later, when they were compulsory but not yet at present-day effectiveness; surely some of those incurables must have defended their retreats by force, with deadly weapons. Wouldn’t they have handed on the practice, and the weapons too, to succeeding generations? What would Uni do today, in 162, facing an armed, defensive community with an unarmed, unaggressive Family? What would it have done five or twenty-five years ago, detecting the signs of it? Let it be? Leave its inhabitants to their “sickness” and their few square kilometers of the world? Spray the city with LPK? But what if the city’s weapons could bring down planes? Would Uni decide in its cold steel blocks that the cost of the “cure” outweighed its usefulness?
He was two days from a treatment, his mind as active as it ever got. He wished it could get still more active. He felt that there was something he wasn’t thinking of, just beyond the rim of his awareness.
If Uni let the city be, rather than sacrifice members and time and technology to the “helping” of it—then what? There was something else, a next idea to be picked and pried out of that one.
He called the medicenter on Thursday, the day before his treatment, and complained of a toothache. He was offered a Friday-morning appointment, but he said that he was coming in on Saturday morning for his treatment and couldn’t he catch two birds with one net? It wasn’t a severe toothache, just a slight throb.
He was given an appointment for Saturday morning at 8:15.
Then he called Bob RO and told him that he had a dental appointment at 8:15 on Saturday. Did he think it would be a good idea if he got his treatment then too? Catch two birds with one net.
“I guess you might as well,” Bob said. “Hold on”—and switched on his telecomp. “You’re Li RM—”
“Thirty-fiveM4419.”
“Right,” Bob said, tapping keys.
Chip sat and watched unconcernedly.
“Saturday morning at 8:05,” Bob said.
“Fine,” Chip said. “Thanks.”
“Thank Uni,” Bob said.
Which gave him a day longer between treatments than he’d had before.
That night, Thursday, was a rain night, and he stayed in his room. He sat at his desk with his forehead on his fists, thinking, wishing he were in the museum and able to smoke.
If a city of incurables existed, and Uni knew about it and was leaving it to its armed defenders—then—then—
Then Uni wasn’t letting the Family know—and be troubled or in some instances tempted—and it was feeding concealing data to the mapmaking equipment.
Of course! How could supposedly unused areas be shown on beautiful Family maps? “But look at that place there, Daddy!” a child visiting the MFA exclaims. “Why aren’t we Using Our Heritage Wisely and Without Waste?” And Daddy replies, “Yes that is odd . . .” So the city would be labeled IND99999 or Enormous Desk Lamp Factory, and no one would ever be passed within five kilometers of it. If it were an island it wouldn’t be shown at all; blue ocean would replace it.
And looking at maps was therefore useless. There could be cities of incurables here, there, everywhere. Or—there could be none at all. The maps proved or disproved nothing.
Was this the great revelation he had racked his brain for— that his map-examining had been stupidity from the beginning? That there was no way at all of finding the city, except possibly by walking everywhere on Earth?
Fight Lilac, with her maddening ideas!
No, not really.
Fight Uni.
For half an hour he drove his mind against the problem—how do you find a theoretical city in an untravelable world?— and finally he gave up and went to bed.
He thought then of Lilac, of the kiss she had resisted and the kiss she had allowed, and of the strange arousal he had felt when she showed him her soft-looking conical breasts . . .
On Friday he was tense and on edge. Acting normal was unendurable; he held his breath all day long at the Center, and through dinner, TV, and Photography Club. After the last chime he walked to Snowflake’s building—“Ow,” she said, “I’m not going to be able to move tomorrow!”—and then to the Pre-U. He circled the halls by flashlight, unable to put the idea aside. The city might exist, it might even be somewhere near. He looked at the money display and the prisoner in his cell (The two of us, brother) and the
locks and the flat-picture cameras.
There was one answer that he could see, but it involved getting dozens of members into the group. Each could then check out the maps according to his own limited knowledge. He himself, for instance, could verify the genetics labs and research centers and the cities he had seen or heard spoken of by other members. Lilac could verify the advisory establishments and other cities . . . But it would take forever, and an army of undertreated accomplices. He could hear King raging.
He looked at the 1951 map, and marveled as he always did at the strange names and the intricate networks of borders. Yet members then could go where they wanted, more or less! Thin shadows moved in response to his light at the edges of the map’s neat patches, cut to fit precisely into the crosslines of the grid. If not for the moving flashlight the blue rectangles would have been corn—
Blue rectangles . . .
If the city were an island it wouldn’t be shown; blue ocean would replace it.
And would have to replace it on pre-U maps as well.
He didn’t let himself get excited. He moved the flashlight slowly back and forth over the glass-covered map and counted the shadow-moving patches. There were eight of them, all blue. All in the oceans, evenly distributed. Five of them covered single rectangles of the grid, and three covered pairs of rectangles. One of the one-rectangle patches was right there off Ind, in “Bay of Bengal”—Stability Bay.
He put the flashlight on a display case and took hold of the wide map by both sides of its frame. He lifted it free of its hook, lowered it to the floor, leaned its glassed face against his knee, and took up the flashlight again.
The frame was old, but its gray-paper backing looked relatively new. The letters EV were stamped at the bottom of it.
He carried the map by its wire across the hall, down the escalator, across the second-floor hall, and into the storeroom. Tapping on the light, he brought the map to the table and laid it carefully face-down.
With the corner of a fingernail he tore the taut paper backing along the bottom and sides of the frame, pulled it out from under the wire, and pressed it back so that it stayed. White cardboard lay in the frame, pinned down by ranks of short brads.
He searched in the cartons of smaller relics until he found a rusted pair of pincers with a yellow sticker around one handle. He used the pincers to pull the brads from the frame, then lifted out the cardboard and another piece of cardboard that lay beneath it.
