The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  She looked up, then ground out her roach and stood up. “This is the place you saw here before, right? So let’s get out.”

  And sure enough, there the fool person was, marching back and forth on the promenade in front of the clinic, wearing a sandwich board—a sandwich board!—for dog’s sake!—that said, I Beg for the Life of Your Baby. An E.S. was watching her numbly, only remonstrating with her when she darted across the walk lanes to catch an entering clinic customer by the elbow. Jocelyn Feigerman had learned something about how things operated, it was clear. The big-character wall behind her glittered with another of her messages:

  MURDER

  is a sin

  ABORTION

  is murder

  Dorothy stopped short. “I can’t handle this,” she said.

  “Come on, pup! I’m with you. E won’t do anything.”

  “No, Gwenanda, please. I just can’t. I—I’ll see you later.”

  Shaking her head, Gwenanda walked slowly past the woman with the sandwich board, half hoping she would try one of her arm-clutches. But she was busy complaining about something to the E.S. Catch her later, maybe, thought Gwenanda; entered the clinic, slipped her O-G card into a reader, was assigned a cubicle, took off as much of her clothing as necessary and settled in.

  Actually, Gwenanda rather enjoyed her monthly pucky-flush. It didn’t take long—twenty minutes or less, unless you had conceived. Then it might go twenty-five. The temperature of the liquids was warm, the force gentle, and besides there was a mild analgesic and a pepper-upper in with the hormone solutions and the refreshers. Most women spent the time reading or making talk-only phone calls—that was the only kind of phones the cubicles had, due to some prudishness in the management. Gwenanda simply let herself feel good. She lay back and allowed the shed cells to wash themselves away, already loosened by the pre-flush pills. Didn’t worry about Maris. Didn’t worry about Kriss. Didn’t worry, least of all worried, about the Court’s upcoming cases, or even about what she wanted to eat for dinner that night. She finished with a shower and clean biks out of her shoulder bag and, very cheerful, signed out…and there was Dorothy sitting in the waiting room.

  “Thought you went home?”

  “I decided to keep an eye on Jocelyn,” with a little toss of the head. “There’s no reason for me to run away from her. I have as much right as she does.”

  “More maybe,” Gwenanda encouraged. “That fool person still here?”

  “Go look.”

  Oh, yes, the fool person was still there, and foolisher and nastier than ever. She was shrieking at a young bearded man, who was yelling back. “I’ve got a right!” he cried, waving at the big character board, which now said:

  Geoffrey,

  I Love You!

  “I demand,” Jocelyn screamed, while the Emergency Services person whispered into her radio for instructions, “that you remove that obscene, perverted message!”

  “Obscene!” shouted the youth. “Perverted! It’s uz birthday, for dog’s sake! What’s perverted when you love somebody to wish um a happy birthday?”

  “What a barf case,” sighed Gwenanda, and introduced herself to the E.S. “You want me to take care of this?” she asked. The E.S. was delighted at the prospect. “Kay,” she said, turning to Jocelyn. “Now look, you. You’re new here so you can be excused, a little bit. But e’s right, it’s uz turn and if you want to put something on the board again you just have to wait.”

  “Never! Not for such indecency! And that’s not the point anyway,” said Jocelyn, shifting position so that the half-dozen passersby could hear her better. “The point is that helpless innocent unborn children are being murdered in this place.”

  “Well,” said Gwenanda reasonably, “not usually. Anyway, this is the way we do it.”

  “A sinful, vile way!”

  “Aw, dog,” sighed Gwenanda. “Look. One, it saves us female ans a hell of a lot of mess and trouble, you know, and, two, it means if you want to have a baby you have to decide to. What’s wrong with that?”

  “If God wanted women to decide to have babies He would have made us different!”

  Gwenanda was getting irritated in spite of herself and the recent relaxing flush. “See, you even called God a hemale! What’s hemale got to do with female business?”

  Jocelyn pursed her lips into a thin line. “I could ask you the same question. What have you got to do with my business?”

  “I’m a justice of the United States Supreme Court, is what, pups.”

  “And I’m doing nothing wrong! Never mind. I see it does no good talking to you,” she announced, gauging the crowd with her eye, and took a deep breath.

  She swung her handbag at the glass louvers of the front of the clinic. The glass didn’t break. Jocelyn grunted angrily and kicked at them with her foot, several times. That was more satisfactory; she broke one loose from its hinges.

  “Aw, dog, what did you do that for?” Gwenanda said in annoyance as the E.S. squeaked. “Now I got to arrest you. Day after tomorrow, Supreme Court, ten A.M.—ask anybody how to get there. You want the E.S. to write it out for you?”

  “No!” cried Jocelyn in ringing tones. “In fact, I welcome it! I want to make my case public!”

  “That’s fine,” said Gwenanda, “if you do it there. But if you keep on doing it here the E.S. will probably have to take you into the hostel for the night, because that’s, uh, that’s probably contempt of court, I think. Come on, pups,” she added over her shoulder to Dorothy.

  “You dealt with her pretty well,” said Dorothy in the van.

  “Hope so,” muttered Gwenanda.

  “What will you do to her?” asked Dorothy, studying Gwenanda curiously. She was not used to such sudden changes of mood, could not reconcile them with her image of what a Justice of the Supreme Court should be.

  “Do to um? Dog, pups,” cried Gwenanda, “I’ve just put another case onto the calendar, when old Sammy’s been complaining about overload already. Question is, what will Sammy do to me?”

  IV

  By the time they reached the condo-commune Gwenanda had other worries, for there was an Emergency Services van at the elevator and half a dozen medic bicycles scattered before the entryway. “Oh, jeezie! Where’s Maris!” Gwenanda cried, and ran into the common rooms.

  It wasn’t Maris, though, or not particularly. It was everybody. Five E.S. people with red-cross armbands were shepherding the two dozen inmates of the condo into some sort of order so that they could give them spray-shots in the wrist and take germ-samples from their mouths. “Maris!” Gwenanda shouted, and then saw that Maris was sitting quietly enough, and on Kriss’s lap, at that. “E’s all right,” grinned Kriss, half embarrassed and half proud of himself. “We just have to get splashed a little, that’s all.”

  “Splashed for what?” demanded Gwenanda, trying to decide whether to yield to her newfound maternal urge to grab Maris up out of Kriss’s arms or allow body-chemistry to do its work on him. Consequently she only heard part of what he was answering. When he took Harl to the hospital the place had been a madhouse; they couldn’t say exactly what it was that Harl had, but whatever it was a lot of people had it. They kept Harl. They sent Kriss home, and sent along with him a medic E.S. van, calling in some roving E.S. personnel to help out. Everybody who had been near Harl in the previous twenty-four hours had to get a broad-spectrum anti-bug splash from the sprayers.

  “It won’t hurt, pups,” murmured Gwenanda, making up her mind to leave Maris where she was on Kriss’s lap, but leaning over to pat her. “Won’t even tickle, hardly. Then you take a sip out of that little bottle, it’s just distilled water, won’t even taste like anything, and you don’t swallow it. You just—”

  “Goodness, Gwenanda,” said Maris, “I know how to give a mouth sample. We do it all the time in school.”

  “But I don’t,” said Dorothy humbly from beside her. “So would you please finish explaining?” It was Gwenanda’s first impulse to say no, because all her attent
ion was on Maris, but that looked like something that might get Kriss busy explaining to Dorothy instead of paying attention to the little girl. So Gwenanda gave her the pitch. The little yellow bottles held sterile water; you swished it around your mouth and spat it back, and then they analyzed it in the clinic to see if you were sick. About to be sick. Exposed to someone who was real sick. And, although Gwenanda could see nothing in Maris’s looks or behavior that suggested she might have been infected, she was cursing herself out for having brought the child to this sinkhole of pestilence without making everybody take a physical first.

  Kriss was holding the child out to her, explaining that he had to cook. “No, no,” said Gwenanda hastily, realizing that everybody had now spat and been sprayed, “I’ll take your turn, pups, because you two look so comfortable just the way you are. Dorothy, you come help.”

  Wingbean pâté with prawns, a krill stew thick with cream and butter, bacon bread with a puree of vegetables—Gwenanda cooked up a storm when she felt like it. All the condo people complimented her, but Maris sighed at each course, a chore to be got through. “You don’t have to eat anything you don’t like—” faint smile of unconvinced thanks—“no, truly, piglet dear. Tell you what? Is there something special you’d like? For dessert, maybe?”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Maris judiciously, dipping bacon bread into her stew, and Kriss said,

  “Aw, leave the kid alone, sweets.” And patted Maris soothingly on the head.

  “Of course,” beamed Gwenanda, delighted at the way things were going. Well, the way some things were going. She still had not got over being revolted at the itch’s behavior in front of the flush palace, and there was a creepy sort of false jocularity in the room. Nobody mentioned Harl. Everybody thought about him. Sickness! Godlies, thought Gwenanda, when was the last time they had an outbreak of sickness? It was like the Dark Ages!

  As chief cook of the day Gwenanda had decreed a buffet-style dinner, to make sure that she and Maris and Kriss had a cozy little spot of their own. They had pillows to sit on, strewn around a coffee table for the food; and when you looked at them from across the room, as Gwenanda was in her imagination delighted to do, they looked exactly like a family. How strange it was, she thought, that she had not realized years earlier that that was what she wanted! “Would you like more stew, Kriss? Maris? Some salad?” The little girl sighed and put her spoon down.

  “I think you’re pushing too hard,” Kriss observed.

  “E’s got to eat, doesn’t e? Look, pups, you just tell me what you like and I’ll get it. What did your muddies feed you, then?”

  There was a moment’s dogged chewing and swallowing of what was left in Maris’s mouth before she answered. “Different things.”

  “Meat? I could’ve given you meat. Hate the stuff myself, but,” Gwenanda said charitably, “lots of good people like it, so at home I keep it in the free—” Oh, wait a minute!—“I keep it around.”

  “You can say the word,” the girl remarked. “I know my muddy’s in the freezer.”

  “Ahhh—” Gwenanda kept up the spacing-out noise for a moment, looking at Kriss for help, trying to decide if this was heart-to-heart time. It was. “I’m sorry about um, pups,” she said tenderly.

  “For what?” The little girl shrugged. “E certainly asked for it, didn’t e?”

  Kriss finished his stew and smiled at the girl. “Do you want to tell us about it?” he asked, and Gwenanda flared:

  “Course e doesn’t. Leave um alone!”

  She got a perplexed look from Kriss, and from Maris a forgiving one. “Mits Gwenanda,” she said, “I don’t mind talking about it, or um, or em, but, honest, it’s boring. The shrinkers and the kid-keepers have been talking to me about it now for weeks, ever since it happened.” She paused, thinking hard, and Gwenanda got ready for the dramatic breakthrough. Then, “I decided,” she announced. “What I want for dessert is ice cream!”

  The leftovers away, the waste separated, the table tidied, the two of them were on their way. Just the two of them. Kriss had work to do. Gwenanda had work to do, too, but when she proposed they do it together at her place he shook his head. Gwenanda gritted her teeth. Damn that damn Kriss, he was just digging his feet in! So it was only Maris and Gwenanda who went down the el, out across the Rainbow Bridge in a slung-under car, up again to the high-rent, high-rise that was Gwenanda’s courtesy home. “To bed, pups,” she caroled gaily, “or, no, wait a minute. Toothbrushing first! Bath before toothbrushing! Make the bed before the bath!” What a lot of work it was to get a little girl into bed at night! But it was all done at last, and Gwenanda looked sentimentally in at the warm, quiet little lump in the middle of the big white jelly-bed, her heart filled with love.

  Then the tests for the cadet justices were still to be written and Gwenanda conscientiously bent over them.

  Kriss…Maris…quizzes…that itch Jocelyn—there was too much on Gwenanda’s mind, and right in front of her were the incomplete lists she had begun that afternoon. She swore softly to herself. Too much! She switched on the newschannel, heading for music, but stopped when she caught the word emergency. “—emergency,” the newscaster was saying, “was declared at twenty-two hundred hours tonight by the Mayor and Council. Full immunization. So what you have to do, folks, is get your asses over to a clinic if you haven’t been sprayed already. This means you, no shit! Do it, you hear?”

  Wow, thought Gwenanda. The real stuff! She touched buttons until she found the detailed takeout she wanted. They had found the body of what they called the “primary vector” hours earlier. It wasn’t hard to find it. The body called attention to itself by falling twenty-four stories out of a garden terrace onto a cross-building skyway. Because the immediate cause of death was pretty obvious, the examination of the remains waited until a biotech felt able to take time off from administering spray-shots to look it over. Then, since he didn’t believe the results of his first cultures, it took nearly half a day more.

  Virus flu.

  Virus flu was a killer.

  The great plagues of the past swept through whole cities—through whole countries, even continents—and the dead fell like reaped grain. Of course, this time there was no chance of that. Gwenanda was almost positive there was no chance. The city had not had a real pestilence for nearly two centuries, and it was not about to have one now if it could help it.

  Still, the odds looked worrying. This “primary vector”—they didn’t seem to know who he was, which was just plain unbelievable—appeared to have got sick nearly a week ago. Say six days. Say ten million people in the city and one center of infection. Gwenanda thoughtfully punched out the arithmetic. One center of infection walking around could brush up, close enough to maybe infect them, to probably fifty people an hour. Each of those people would move on. Subtract the eight hours a day each of them presumably spent sleeping—optimistically, alone—and in those six days there was time for 6 × 16 = 96, let’s see, 5096 contacts. Well over enough chances to infect the whole city. Or the world. Or the galaxy.

  Of course, medicine was quite capable of dealing with any infection, even an obsolete one—in small numbers. Large numbers became a problem, because the specific antibiotics did not exist in large numbers. The broad-spectrum sprays were less effective; the specifics had to be found in other cities and hurried in. Or they had to be made. Meanwhile there were life-support systems that would keep almost any flicker alight almost indefinitely (but how many of them? not ten million!) and as a last resort there were the freezers (but nobody had ever tried icing a million people in a week!).

  Wow.

  Gwenanda sighed, dumped all her memos into storage, threw off her clothes and jumped into the shower. What a mess. It would probably screw up a lot of things tomorrow—like nursery school? Certainly like nursery school! She certainly was not going to send Maris off to a nursery school, where half the kids might be carriers already, never mind how many broad-spectrum shots she’d had! She determined to keep Maris with her t
hat day, and fell asleep grateful that this particular problem wasn’t hers.

  Staying alive, though. That was her problem, all right, and now it was a double problem because she had to provide for the protection and survival of two people, not one. Being a muddy wasn’t all fun, was it?

  V

  “This,” Gwenanda told the child, “is where muddy works. How do you like it?”

  “It’s nice,” said Maris politely, looking around the great hemispherical chamber. The circled spectator seats, laid out like a planetarium, were almost empty, because this was an arguments day, not a public hearing day. The nine curved desks were waiting for the other justices to arrive. “Gwenanda? When we took that elevator here, didn’t we go way down in the dirt?”

  “Way down, pups, uh-huh. Two hundred meters. Whatever city we’re in, they dig out an underground chamber for the Court—it’s kind of a tradition, if you know what that means.”

  “No,” said Maris, with a different question on her mind. “Gwenanda? Is this a real good job you’ve got?”

  “You bet, honey-buns.”

  “Can I be one when I grow up?”

  “Well, no, it doesn’t exactly work like you pick the job. It’s more the job picks you. See, first you have to get drafted for government service, right?”

  “What’s ‘drafted’?” The little girl was listening intently, but her eyes were on the justices’ door, where Mary Joan Whittier had just appeared. No judicial robes today; she was wearing a sort of muu-muu and her hair was in curlers, and she was looking wistfully at the child. She waved. Maris blew her a kiss in return, and Gwenanda told herself sternly that she couldn’t go on being jealous of a child’s affectionate gestures just because they were going to someone else. She said:

  “That means they pick out a bunch of people at random. I mean, like they pick the names out of a hat, only actually it’s a computer. Then they assign you to different things, depending on how you do on your tests in basic training. They made me a cadet for the Supreme Court here, and then the computer sorts things out so all kinds of people get represented—and I was one of them picked. So I’ve got six years on the job. I’m just finishing my fourth. Pretty soon the senior class, that’s the C.J. and Myra Haik and Angel—e’s one of the Tin Twins, you’ll see them in a minute—anyway, they’ll retire, and we get three new ones, and then I’ll be one of the three senior members for my last two years. Then I’m through.”