The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  “Aw, pups!”

  “E didn’t mean to be hitting me all the time, you know. Daddy said it was just because e was sick. E said until e got better we mustn’t tell anybody about it, because they’d take um away from us—”

  “Aw.”

  “But then e—Then e took the bottle and—” Maris swallowed. “Anyway, e died, so it wasn’t a secret any more, but I never told anybody, Gwenanda, honest.” She paused, while Gwenanda strained the child wordlessly to her chest, and then added, “If—if you got sick sometime, Gwenanda, and had to do something like that—I wouldn’t tell on you, either.”

  Gwenanda found herself muttering something hoarsely. It wasn’t in words. It wasn’t even an “aw!” It seemed to satisfy Maris, though. The child allowed herself to be held tightly for a moment, then gently tugged herself free. “You prob’ly want to get cleaned up, muddy,” she said practically, “and I promised to help the nurse.” She kissed Gwenanda gravely on the cheek, and then left to do her duty.

  Gwenanda, rubbing her eyes, sat for a moment, then sighed and got up to start the repairs on herself. It was a sad, wistful little sigh, but when she had breathed it out of her she had breathed out all the sadness she felt, and what was left was feeling good. She had had a scary and exhausting two days, with no more than a handful of hours of interrupted sleep; but in the shower she was singing and lathering up a storm, letting the hot water pour down on her healthy, fine body, when the curtain was snatched aside and Kriss leaned in, bleary-eyed and excited. He yelled, “It’s the UTM, Gwennie! It’s on!”

  “Oh, dog,” Gwenanda cried, conscience-stricken—how could they have forgotten that?

  “So get out of the damn shower! They’ve started random selection for quanta—you have to be ready if they call you!”

  VI

  They should have postponed the UTM! New York City wasn’t ready! Those ten million people under the dome and in the underground warrens across the river and out in the suburbs—they had had other things on their minds these past few days than what to do about some damn rivers in Alaska! Gwenanda was tsking with vexation as she tried to dry herself, against Kriss’s urgent hurry-up noises.

  But, of course, this wasn’t one of your little local meetings about some damn dome or transportation scheme or zoning change. This was the Big Time, continent-wide, tropics-to-Pole high! All of the United States, all of Canada, a big wedge of northwestern Mexico were all affected, one way or another, and all the quarter-billion people who lived there had an equal right to be heard.

  The fact that you had a right as good as anybody else’s didn’t mean you had a very good chance. Not when the universe of this particular Universal Town Meeting added up to the population of a whole continent. The odds were terrible. The permissible Quantum of Debate for each person selected by the random-access computers was thirty seconds. The time allotted for all the vox-populi quanta put together was only six hours—twelve segments of half an hour each, spaced over the twenty-four-hour span given to deciding the fate of NARRO. That meant that precisely seven hundred and twenty persons could be heard. Subtract from the total population the twenty per cent or so who were too young to participate. Subtract again the sixty per cent, more or less, who had nothing to say on the matter, or at least had failed to put their names in for the draw.

  What was left was some fifty million people, all of whom wanted to be heard. 50,000,000/720 = barely one chance in seventy thousand that any one name would come up in the draw, so that its owner’s cogent or significant or rambling or even demented quanta could be heard.

  And, actually, the odds were far worse now, because they had slept through most of the UTM. It was prime time now—eighteen hundred hours in New York, fifteen in California—they were coming up on the last half-hour segment for vox-populi soundings, and the last rounds of voting would take place within the next two hours. Most of the continent had been following the debate for hours. So Kriss rushed Gwenanda out of the shower and into a robe. No time to do her hair properly. Hardly time to turban a towel around it. There were still drops of moisture running trickling down her forehead and over her nose as she sat herself down beside Dorothy and Maris, already glued to the screen in fascination. “This one’s from Miami Beach,” Dorothy announced, “and I don’t think he’s for it.”

  “That’s two in a row,” Kriss groaned. The man from Miami was a construction worker who wore a hard-hat tipped forward over a scowl. His jaw was aggressive, his voice hoarse with resentment as he said, “—somebody else’s turn at the trough! The Gulf Stream Power Takeoff is proved technology. Dollar for dollar, it would be a better investment than NARRO, and I say California is—”

  But his thirty seconds were up. He disappeared from the screen, and whatever he was going to tell the continent that California was went unheard beyond the room he was in.

  “Bunch of bullshit,” Kriss said, diagnostically unkind. “Are you ready in case they call?”

  “Dog,” groaned Gwenanda, “how can I be ready, haven’t even had any coffee, didn’t brush my hair—”

  “I’ll get you some coffee,” Dorothy said, and Maris snuggled up against Gwenanda.

  “You look fine in the hat,” she announced, and gratefully Gwenanda hugged the child to her. Kriss was leaning forward, dividing his time between the small screen next to the telly, where he had displayed the text of his quantum, just in case, and the main screen, where a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania was exercising his rights.

  “Oh, wow,” Kriss grumbled in dismay. “Listen to this prunt!” The schoolteacher was telling the continent that Pennsylvania didn’t always get enough rainfall, either, but the good people of Allentown weren’t going around trying to steal other people’s rivers. “Dog!” snarled Kriss, “that’s the third in a row against the whole project! You think the computer’s screwing up?”

  Swift chance of that! Gwenanda eagerly accepted her coffee from Dorothy, and made reassuring noises for Kriss’s sake. The computers for the UTM used algorithms almost identical with the ones for Selective Service. Every applicant was tagged as to age, gender, occupation, sexual preferences, education, IQ and AQ—all the qualities that distinguished one segment of the population from another. If eleven per cent of the population were left-handed, then of the 720 selectees some eighty, more or less, would also be southpaws; if three per cent had doctoral degrees, then so would twenty or twenty-one of the faces on the screen. The computer took no note of preferences on the issue. It was meant to randomize opinions, and it did. Always. Even if, as now, three people in a row turned up dead set against NARRO.

  For the first time Gwenanda felt a thrill of wicked hope. Dog, what if it got beaten? What if there wasn’t any NARRO, so Kriss had no reason to skylark off to Seattle for the next dozen years, so that he might stay right here where they could all be so happy? What if the sampling had been right on, and the good people of the continent in their wisdom were going to reject this hare-brained scheme?

  Of course, the good Gwenanda whispered in the real Gwenanda’s ear, drowning out the voice of the temptress Gwenanda, NARRO really was a good thing. You get a big job like that done, and in the long run it’s good for everybody…“What’s going on?” she demanded.

  “They’ve recessed for a vote,” Kriss snapped. “That prunt from Miami Beach did it!”

  He had. The town-meeting computers had taken note of his remarks about the Gulf Stream project—great slow turbines sucking energy out of the flow of the world’s hugest river to make electricity for the land—and had tallied the volunteer call-ins in favor of it, weighting them for where they came from and what kind of people made them, and decided that there was enough sentiment for the Gulf Stream to warrant calling a question. So there was a vote. The acting chair of the congressional supervisory commission, looking chipper if sleepy, announced the question: “Yes or no, folks. The idea is, if NARRO passes, we start engineering studies for the Gulf jobber and follow it up if they look good. Say whether you think that’s a goo
d idea,” and she gave instructions on how to dial to cast a vote either way.

  Sounded like a good idea to Gwenanda—as good as anything that would take Kriss away, anyway. She punched in her vote for the rider; so did Kriss; then the two of them headed for the kitchen to replenish their coffee cups, leaving Dorothy, delighted to be taking part for the first time in so huge a decision, carefully keying her ID number and aye vote.

  The count was fast, but there were still a couple of minutes to wait for the result. “E didn’t sound in favor of it,” fretted Kriss, “I wonder how many of them feel the same way? Even if they vote for the rider?”

  “It’ll be all right,” Gwenanda soothed, and wondered if it would. Wondered what “all right” meant. Wondered if there was some smart way to get the best of both worlds, have Kriss happy, have herself happy, have a home for Maris.

  “Sure it will,” said Maris from behind her, startling her. “Can I have a glass of milk?”

  “Oh sure,” said Gwenanda, but Kriss was already getting it out for the child. Aw, thought Gwenanda to herself, building fairy castles in her mind of the two of them parenting Maris together, just this way, forever…well, until the kid got big, anyway…

  “Gwenanda?” called Dorothy from the other room. “What does it mean when your name comes on at the bottom of the screen, like red letters crossing along—”

  Gwenanda’s jaw dropped. “Dog!” yelled Kriss, slamming the milk down in front of Maris, jumping for the door. In a moment he shouted back:

  “It’s you, Gwennie! They’ve called you! You’re on in two minutes!”

  Called! Two minutes! “Dog shit,” Gwenanda moaned, and shook her head. And felt the turbaned towel loosen at the back of her head. She clutched at it. “It isn’t fair!” she bawled, meaning having to go on the telly looking the way she did, meaning having to do anything when she was prunty exhausted, meaning the world.

  “What’s the matter, Gwennie?” asked Maris.

  “Aw, pups, what am I going to do? Kriss wants this so much—but he’ll have to go off to damn Seattle—but—Aw, damn.”

  “It’s just what e says,” said Maris, putting down her milk to take Gwenanda’s hand. “That Mark-us Orrel-us.”

  “The which?”

  “What e said where your job is. If it’s true say it, if it’s not don’t. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Aw,” said Gwenanda, nuzzling the child’s hair, her heartbeat fluttering with love. “Aw.”

  She held Maris’s hand as the two of them went back into the big room looking out over the park, with the opal curtain of the dome far away. Kriss was all nerves. “Careful you don’t run over your time,” he fidgeted, and, “You can use my quantum if you don’t know what to say,” and, “Dog, Gwennie, are you ready?”

  “I’m ready,” she said, as the red light pulsed off the seconds till her turn. At the last moment she pulled Maris onto her lap, and the two of them faced the telly as the ready light told her she was on.

  “I think,” she said steadily, “that we should say yes to NARRO. The water doesn’t do anybody any good going north, and it will do a lot of people a lot of good going south. It’s a big, expensive job, but we can afford it, and then it’s good for a couple hundred years. The other thing I think is we shouldn’t load it down with a lot of promises for other projects in other places, otherwise we’ll tie ourselves up in knots we maybe will want to get out of. And the last thing I think—” watching the timer with one eye—“is we should be glad to have a chance to do so much good so easily.” And she closed her lips into a faint smile just as the ready light winked off—seconds before she turned her head and flopped the soggy towel down over her eyes.

  “You were great!” Kriss cried adoringly.

  “Sure I was,” said Gwenanda through the toweling, but not altogether happily, because she was wondering just what she had done.

  What she had done, probably, was not all that much. Gwenanda’s quantum of debate was only one out of seven hundred and twenty—thirty seconds total out of all the long hours of argument and polling and mediation. Certainly the handsome dark Supreme Court justice with the fair, pretty child in her lap made an appealing picture. Certainly what she had said made sense. But could one person, really, influence the decision of a quarter billion?

  Maybe not. But one person could surely be part of it.

  There were six more phone-in votes on changes in the closing hours of the Meeting. Every time the question was phrased a little differently, and after each vote the mediators gamed variations through their computers to find a better formula.

  But after the second phone-in, the issue was no longer in doubt. If the Canadians could be satisfied on the payments for their rivers—If the people of Alaska and the Northwest Territory and the Yukon were assured of an adequate minimum retention of flow—If the Mexicans were promised a low enough salinity in the residual waters for their crops—If the Midwest got a share of the hydropower, and the East a priority on the Gulf Stream project—if all those interests could be reconciled, then the necessary sixty per cent aye vote would come…

  And it did.

  By the time the UMT got to its final vote Gwenanda and Kriss were sitting side by side in front of the telly, Maris half asleep between them, Dorothy with her clumsy legs in the lotus position on the floor by their side. The apartment was quiet. All the flu victims were long gone. In breaks of the debate all four of them had stacked folding beds, dumped linen into a pickup basket, moved furniture back to where it belonged. By the time the continent had expressed its will and the final tallies were coming in the apartment looked once more as it always had. It was stately, it was elegant, and it was much, much too vast to be a home for a Supreme Court justice whose lover was far away.

  NARRO won with more than fifteen million votes to spare. Maris flung her arms around Kriss. “Hooray for you!” she cried, and allowed herself to be swung exuberantly nearly to the high ceiling. And in her good-night glass of milk she took a drop of the wine Kriss opened to celebrate.

  When Maris and Dorothy had gone off to sleep, and both Kriss and Gwenanda were beginning to feel the need of the same for themselves, they finished the last of the wine. They were shoulder to shoulder on the lanai that looked out over the Rainbow Bridge, both very silent until Kriss said abruptly, “How much longer have you got to be on the Court?”

  “Four months to the end of this term,” said Gwenanda gloomily, “and then two more years on my hitch.”

  Kriss digested that thoughtfully. “It’ll probably be three or four months before they’re ready for me in Seattle,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But then there’s the other two years.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Gwenanda, who had long since performed the same calculations. They sat silently for a moment, gazing out at the convalescing city.

  “Aw, dog,” said Kriss at last. “Let’s go to bed.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Gwenanda hopelessly.

  Accumulated exhaustion put them dreamlessly out. At daybreak Gwenanda woke, wholly and quickly. Kriss’s heavy arm was across her rib cage and Kriss’s downy beard against her shoulder. She extricated herself gently, pulled on a robe and found Maris already in the kitchen. The child had picked a couple of ripe papayas, and split them and chilled them in the freezer. One empty skin was on the plate in front of her, and swiftly she got up and brought out another half for Gwenanda.

  “Dog,” said Gwenanda, gazing at the melon.

  Maris was concerned. “Didn’t I get all the seeds out?”

  “Aw, sure, it’s just—” It was just that for a moment the damn thing had looked so much like a damn mango. But she couldn’t refuse what her kid had made for her, after all…

  She had squeezed the fresh lime over the fruit and scooped out the first juicy spoonful when she paused, the spoon halfway to her mouth.

  She stared unseeingly before her, her eyes widening. All of a sudden the sun outside had become brighter, the tropical aroma of t
he fruit sweeter, the entire world more kindly.

  “If it isn’t the seeds, then what is wrong?” Maris worried.

  Gwenanda flashed thirty-two strong white teeth at her, enchanted with the wondrous idea that had just come to her. “Aw, pups! Nothing’s wrong,” she cried. “It’s just that everything’s so damn right!”

  VII

  Two hundred meters down in the silvery Manhattan schist, the great hemispherical chamber was cool and quiet, but the people in it were ebulliently warm. Gwenanda paused on the way to her robing room to open the justices’ door a crack. Like any actor, she cased the house. Looked like a good audience. Not cadets this time, but litigants, lawyers and a good number of ordinary citizens come to see justice done—and all of them with that special well-we-beat-the-devil-this-time jolliness that was the aftermath of the epidemic.

  She sang to herself as she dressed, and then admired herself in the mirror. Too bad the robe covered up the spectacular black-and-red dashiki, damn!, but the flower lei around her neck, the forty neatly bobbing dreadlocks—they were fine! Gwenanda stared at the handsome, haughty female in the glass. Then she softened, grinned, blew herself a kiss and whirled out to take her place with the other justices.

  It was Samelweiss’s conceit that when the Supreme Court of the United States entered its hall of justice it should do so with ceremony. Fully robed. In single file. Majestically, and, of course, with the Chief Justice himself coming first. Samelweiss was followed by his two senior colleagues, then Gwenanda and her cohort, last of all the freshmen. As usual, the Tin Twins were grumbling to each other in high-pitched, high-speed beeps, since they were a lot less mobile than the organic colleagues; but they did what was expected of them. Even wore robes—or as close to robes as they could manage, which was to say some sort of doilies of black attached to their upper surfaces. That was Samelweiss’s whim, too.

  Like the gathering audience, the justices were all in a survivors’ mood, laughing and nudging each other into place. When Gwenanda sashayed up, Samelweiss made a swift, jolly grab at her bottom—missed, because she was quicker than he—and said jovially, “Pups, you were grand on the UTM last night!”