The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  Good smells came from the common rooms as Gwenanda let herself in. The video monitors were carrying the current UTM discussion—dome repairs, for or against luminescent panels to make the night bright—and the cooks of the day were half watching while they got the food ready. She collared one of them and asked, “Seen Kriss?”

  “Swimming,” he said over his shoulder, concentrating on mincing cucumbers, parsley, garlic and shallots together for the gazpacho. It looked so good that Gwenanda decided to stay for dinner, no matter what. So she punched in on the work roster—dishes, cleanup, food storage—for that night before she shucked her clothes in Kriss’s room. She glanced at the mirror for reassurance, and was reassured: foxy female from the bicentennial past, her hair feathered out two feet wide, each nail on her ten fingers and thumbs a different iridescent shrieking color, her eyebrows narrow enough to inflict a wound. Gwenanda liked to dress to be seen. And succeeded; but she didn’t need clothes to look good. Confident of her appearance at least—a lot less than confident about the success of her plan—she let herself out on the pool balcony.

  The architect who designed the condo-commune had not intended it for people to live in. Offices, it was supposed to be, for doctors, dentists, lawyers and psychiatrists. The enclosed square of garden and pool was planned as a touch of charm to remind the afflicted patients that better times would come again. Since there weren’t enough practitioners of the sad professions left to need all the space that had been built for them, most such suites had been converted to suit other needs. Like living. Like living well, as Kriss was obviously doing, playing water volleyball with a dozen others, mostly kids. She stood and admired him for a minute. Pencil-slim figure, brown down on his chest, and those darling, round, firm chubs that you wanted to pat and squeeze and hang onto. “Hey, Kriss!” she yelled. “Here I come!”

  She launched herself off the balcony into the deep end, a little extra optimism lacing her mood as she saw how much fun Kriss was having with the kids. A good sign! She parted the water neatly, swam under the surface to where Kriss’s long, lean legs were thrashing, tweaked him a friendly hello and rose to take a breath.

  He gave her a wet kiss while the ball was in the other court. “They voting yet?” he asked.

  “Uh-uh. Hey, Kriss? I want to ask you a favor. Big favor. I want it very much.” He only had time for a quick questioning look at her before batting the ball back across the pool. The return from the other side went far and wide. While one of the children was clambering out of the pool to retrieve the ball, his expression was running the spectrum from surprise through uncertainty to affection. He promised, “I’ll be through in five minutes. Go get us some drinks.”

  Gwenanda climbed out, shook herself semi-dry and settled down at a poolside table with the bottle of wine and two glasses. She watched the game for a bit. One of the players was a stranger—female, youngish, very pale and, apparently, not very well. She missed easy shots and coughed from exertion, and the most interesting thing about her was that Kriss was helping her out. Cheerful, encouraging, kind Kriss, thought Gwenanda, and derived optimism from the thought. She switched on the poolside monitor and watched the dome debate on the UTM until Kriss came out of the pool. What a beautiful man! Sideburns straight down to the jawline, then flaring out in a waxed curl, with crystal drops from the pool flying off them as his head shook from laughter.

  To Gwenanda’s surprise, he brought the stranger with him.

  “Hello,” she said, discouragingly.

  Kriss was oblivious. “This is Dorothy,” he said. “E just got here. E’s eighty-seven years old.”

  Well, she obviously wasn’t eighty-seven, or half that, but she wasn’t as young as she looked at a distance, either. She was stumbly, fumbly young, like a newborn calf trying to figure out what its legs are for, but she was not young in the face. “What I wanted to talk to you about,” said Gwenanda, cat’s-eye look of keep off! to Dorothy, “was private. Important. Personal.”

  “I’ll go away,” the woman said at once, but Kriss stayed her.

  “Pay no attention to um,” he advised. “E’s just out of the freezer, doesn’t know a thing. You can talk in front of um.”

  Well, Gwenanda didn’t want to talk in front of her, but she realized that under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have minded. That was one of the reasons she and Kriss got along so well together. Kriss was a gentle, kindly, outgoing person, and so was she, by dog! “I’ll get another glass,” she sighed, rising, and detoured by way of the toilet. Yes, the test-tab said she was coming up on time for a flush, which accounted for the little irritability. Although Gwenanda disliked taking pills she swallowed a trank, as well as the regular pre-flush capsule, washed her hands, found a third glass and went back to the pool. “Pups,” she said sunnily, “what I want is for us to shack.” Kriss shrugged amiably and started to speak, but she forestalled him. “I’ve got a kid coming,” she said.

  He gave her his full attention then—surprised but not, Gwenanda was pleased to see, hostile. “What did you do that for?” he asked, eyebrows high in astonishment.

  “I don’t mean pregnant,” she explained. “Adoption. There was this beast in the court today, killed uz marry, has a little kid. Well, we have to freeze um, but then there’s the kid to think about. I want to adopt um.”

  “Why not do it, then?”

  “No. No, you don’t follow. I want us to adopt um.”

  “Ah,” said Kriss, nodding. “Oh, I see what you mean.” He pursed his lips, then remembered to fill Gwenanda’s wine glass. “Here’s to the kid,” he said, “but look, honey, what happens when I go to the West Coast?”

  “That might not happen,” she pointed out. The river redirection program had been on the back burner for decades already, she knew; it might easily stay there for the rest of their lives.

  “I think it will happen,” he said, chewing the idea over thoughtfully. “The Ob-Yenisei project is working out just fine, isn’t it? So why shouldn’t America do the same thing?” He took a sip of his wine before asking, “Nice kid?”

  “I haven’t met um yet,” Gwenanda admitted, “but e looks pretty nice in the picture. E’s a shemale. Four years old.”

  He looked at her with amusement and doubt. “Well, hell,” he said, “just bring the kid here.”

  “I thought of that,” she said, “but that’s a bummer for um if we don’t do it then, don’t you see? I mean, e’s just lost one parent, I don’t want um to think e’s got a new one and then lose that one too.”

  “I promise,” Kriss said solemnly, “that I won’t act like a parent, at least until we figure out how to handle this.”

  “But—” began Gwenanda, and didn’t finish because the other woman’s glass slipped out of her hand and crunched on the floor. Claret splashed all up along Gwenanda’s bare calf.

  “Oh, hell,” Dorothy said dismally. “Look, I’m really sorry about that.”

  “Not to worry,” Kriss said comfortingly, patting her shoulder. “I’ll clean it up and, listen, anyway, they’re getting ready to vote on the dome. So we’ll talk about this later, all right, honey?” And whether it was all right with Gwenanda or not, it was the way it was, because Kriss was already gone to fetch something to clean the mess up with.

  The voting took half an hour, because there was a lot of emotion on both sides of the question, especially on Kriss’s part—large-scale engineering projects were what he loved best, and he was downcast because the random selection hadn’t given him a chance to be heard in the debate. And then there was dinner, and then it was Kriss’s job to vacuum the pool while Gwenanda took her turn at cleanup as promised. The woman out of the freezer was on the same job, and it was continually surprising to Gwenanda, although she tried not to stare, to see how clumsy Dorothy was. “Watch it!” Gwenanda cried, as a stack of dessert plates began to teeter on its way to the washer. The woman grabbed just in time.

  “My fault,” she apologized. “See, they unfroze me eight months ago, and I’m n
ot quite used—I mean, I don’t know how—The thing is,” she said, “I was phocomelic.”

  “Say what?” asked Gwenanda, astonished.

  “Phocomelic is the word. I was born that way, you know. No arms or legs, just little flippers? So when they unfroze me there was a lot of work to do, opened up my bones, stuck me full of hormones—here I am. But I need practice with these things.” She levered her arms out in front of her like canes to look at them.

  “Wow,” said Gwenanda, suddenly all sympathy. “Did it hurt?”

  “Hurt?” Dorothy demanded. “Who cares if it hurt?” She grinned at Kriss, just coming in the door. “Compared to what I used to be, listen, this is paradise…Although I surely do wish that old woman would leave me alone.”

  “A real prunt, that one,” Kriss nodded, leaning against the sterile food cabinet and licking a juice banana. “You ought to see um, Gwennie.”

  “Oh?” said Gwenanda, suddenly less sympathy again. “You know this old an?”

  “Well, sure. E waits table where I eat sometimes,” he said, nodding toward Dorothy, “and e had to go for a flush and didn’t know exactly where to go. So I walked um over to the clinic.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Gwenanda, aware the washer was signaling the dishes were clean, aware also that it was Dorothy’s job to empty it, not at all inclined to help her out.

  Dorothy was paying more attention to Gwenanda than to the washer. “We met because I live here now,” she explained. Gwenanda nodded judiciously. “Well, I went to where you have the—flush?”

  “Pucky-flush, yes,” Gwenanda supplied.

  “And she was there. Outside the place. Yelling and screaming. Her name is Jocelyn Feigerman. I knew who she was, right away, and I figured she was up to her old tricks, so I tried to stay out of her sight. She was trying to persuade some of the women not to have a flush.”

  Gwenanda was getting interested in the subject more than in the relationship now, hovering between astonishment and annoyance. “That’s dumb,” she said. “If a female an doesn’t have that each month, it is very messy, and also I think there is a lot of discomfort.”

  “God, don’t I know that! But it wasn’t the discomfort. Jocelyn said they would abort any pregnancies they might have.”

  “Well, of course they would.”

  “And she thinks that’s immoral. You see, that’s how I knew her, in the old days. She used to be on television a lot when I was a child, campaigning for a constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal—”

  “Illegal!” Gwenanda cried, now slipping over into full shock and outrage, and Kriss grinned as a person does who is seeing the reaction he expected.

  “—illegal, and I was kind of her example to point to. I was born deformed, but I had a pretty face. So Jocelyn took pictures of me, and she would get me on the network news and say, ‘Aren’t you glad you’re alive, honey?’ Well, what did I know? I’d say, ‘Oh, yes, Mrs. Feigerman, I surely am,’ and then she’d pat my cheek and turn me over to the woman who took care of me. Her group paid the woman’s salary, so I got something out of it, anyway. But I wish she’d leave me alone now.”

  Gwenanda said indignantly, “You can make um leave you alone. That’s the Thirty-First Amendment!”

  Dorothy sighed. “I don’t want trouble,” she complained, “so the best thing is for me just to stay out of her way.” And that reminded her of nearer concerns, so she added, “Are we finished cleaning up? I think I’ll go to my room and lie down.”

  “Tactful, anyway,” Gwenanda commented, looking after her. “Well, pups? Have you thought about it?”

  “About the kid, you mean. Sure I have, Gwennie. But I really would like to see um…and even then…”

  Gwenanda nodded. The kid would be the best card she could play. “We could go see um tonight if you wanted,” she said, “but it’s uz last night with uz muddy. How about tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely! But there’s NARRO to think about, don’t forget—and honestly, Gwen, I care about you a whole hell of a lot, but that’s where my work is.”

  “If it happens,” said Gwenanda, clutching at straws.

  “If it happens,” he agreed, and grinned, and said, “How about us going to our room to lie down, too?”

  Since Gwenanda had lived most of her life under the thermal dome of Tucson, Arizona, she was not against the Yukon project at all. In fact, it was one of the things that had made her and Kriss take an interest in each other in the beginning. He was full of stories about the work he’d done in Siberia, finishing the diversion of the Ob and Yenisei rivers so that they flowed south to the arid tundra instead of north to waste themselves in the Arctic Ocean. Gwenanda had heard of the North American River Redirection Option, of course, for a full-scale continent-wide Universal Town Meeting on the subject had been announced for the future. But it had not been one of her major concerns, until she met this man with his satchel of plans for diverting far-north water all the way from the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers all the way south to the salty fields of Mexico. She was thrilled with the idea of actual rivers flowing past Tucson and Phoenix.

  The more she thought about the project, the better she liked it—except for one aspect. Physically it was great. The Ob-Yenisei work had removed fears about damage to the Arctic environment, because there hadn’t been any. The water in the far northern wastes of North America did no human beings any particular good. Large parts of the Midwest were too dry to farm without irrigation; irrigation water was scarce; the salting of the land from irrigation water used too often had poisoned much of California’s rich valleys. Clean, copious flows south would mean more food, more wealth, more of everything for everybody—especially including the Canadians, who were driving sharp bargains for their rivers.

  The only reason Kriss was in New York was that he was working on that small job, no more than a handyman’s afternoon chore to a big-scale engineer like Kriss, of damming the ends of Long Island Sound so that it would fill with water from its rivers, clear itself of brine and begin to be the fresh-water lake, a hundred miles long, that it had been in the geological past. Restored, it would take care of the region’s drinking-water supply for the next century. But that was nearly done. The bad part of NARRO was that if it went through Kriss would move on. While Gwenanda, as long as the Supreme Court was sitting in New York and her six-year stint had not run out, had no choice but to stay. You could always resign, of course. But then you had to take some other selective service job, probably a lot less interesting and important, and who was to say that a Supreme Court justice’s work was not as important as any engineer’s? “So look, honey-he,” she said, as they were sharing a relaxing joint before getting ready to go to sleep, “what about damming the Hudson or something instead of going out to Seattle? I mean if it happens.”

  “Because they won’t let me just do it,” he said, grinning. “They have to vote, and you know as well as I do that the continent’s not going to want to give this area another big project when we just finished Long Island Sound.”

  “E’s a real sweet kid,” she said wistfully, and then sat up. “Hang on,” she said, dialing her special code that was one of the fringe benefits of her job; and in a moment the monitor displayed the solemn little face of Maris D. Lemper.

  “You do keep coming back to the same subject,” sighed Kriss comfortably. “What do you want from me, love? What’s this sudden parenting urge?”

  “It’s an urge normal people get,” she flared. “I—hold on, what’s the matter?”

  There was a hesitant, persistent rapping on the door. “Come on in,” Kriss called, and the door opened. Framed in it was a short, sallow man in a fluffy bathrobe, unshaven, coughing. He said peevishly:

  “Could you see what all the noise is about, Kriss? I can’t sleep, and I really don’t feel good.”

  “You look lousy, Harl,” Kriss corroborated.

  “I feel lousy. Make them stop the racket, will you?”

  Gwenanda reached for her dashiki as Kriss was wrapping
a kilt around his waist. “Wait for me,” she called. Now that the door was open, the noise was very apparent; it was people shouting, and one of the voices was Dorothy’s. “It’s the prunt,” Kriss growled indignantly. “Why doesn’t e leave um alone?” And Dorothy’s voice repeated the same message, loud along the corridor:

  “Won’t you please leave me alone, Mrs. Feigerman? I don’t like what you’re doing and I don’t want any part of it.”

  “But you’re my proof,” said another voice, a controlled, elderly, woman’s-club-speaker voice. The woman glanced at Kriss and Gwenanda as they came into the room but returned immediately to Dorothy. “You prove just by your existence that abortion is wrong, don’t you see that? My dear, your case was as tragic as any in history—not counting stillbirths—and look at you now!”

  “E wants you to get out of here,” said Kriss sternly. “Will you go, please?”

  “Young man,” said the woman clearly, “I don’t like the way you are dressed and I am having a private conversation. You are being rude.” Gwenanda, a step behind, saw Kriss’s shoulders hunch and settle and was amused; the prunt didn’t know what she was getting into! Seemed like a nice, quiet-looking old lady, too. Frosty-faced, used to getting what she was after, you wouldn’t pick her to split a joint or hear your troubles, but still it seemed out of character for her to be making scenes in public. Gwenanda reached out and touched Kriss to slow him down.

  “Feigerman,” said Gwenanda, “get out of here or I make nice scar-lines all down your face.” She held up her ten brightly colored nails. “We live here, you don’t, we don’t want you, we have the right to eject you, People versus Gargiano, 562 Fed. Stat. Rev. 1993. So go!”

  The woman looked shocked, then indignant, then cautious. “I’ll go,” she said, “but Dorothy, I’ll be seeing you again—”

  “Not here,” Gwenanda said firmly.