The city had a population, per day, of 35,000 and consisted mainly of a half-a-mile-square building four stories high and the docks. Though in the New Jersey Forest, the area was under the jurisdiction of Manhattan State. The plans were to expand the city horizontally so that it could house 300,000 citizens. These would be Thursday’s occupants of Manhattan State, that day being chosen by lottery. But the immigration was a long way off.
While in one of the gigantic warehouses, Caird noticed a number of other groups being conducted through the many rows of the stoned. His leader took them along the center aisle past the greyish bodies standing side by side like naked soldiers on review. In the center of the assemblage was a great square, and here his group encountered a second group. The two leaders called a break and talked to each other for a while. Caird was standing, somewhat bored, to one side and was looking at the members of the other party. A woman’s face zoomed out of the crowd. He quivered as if he had been struck with a dart. She was short and dark and lovely-faced, and had sleek dark hair cut in a dutchboy-bob. Numbly, he walked over to her.
“Pardon me,” he said. “Aren’t you Panthea Pao Snick?”
She gasped.
“Jeff Caird!”
“Baker No Wiley, really,” he said. “But officially I’m Caird.”
“Yes, I know. You took me by surprise.”
“I don’t remember you, not from direct contact,” he said. “I’ve seen you on tapes. I don’t know if I should’ve come over. I haven’t the slightest idea how you feel about me. But…”
She surprised him by reaching up and pulling down his head and kissing him on the mouth. When she released him, she said, “I thought I’d never see you again.”
“You’re an adjustment counsellor, too?”
“Yes.”
They were silent for a few seconds. What did they have to talk about? He did not share with her their many adventures except at second-hand, as it were. But he felt very attracted to her. If he were capable of a schoolboy’s sudden passion, he would think he was falling in love. That was nonsense, however. Still, he was drawn to her as a salmon was pulled upriver to its spawning place by instinct.
He was thinking, reacting, rather, like an adolescent.
Why not? He was, in a sense, only three subyears old.
How was she reacting? What had been, really, their relationship? Had they been lovers?
He asked her where she was stationed. She said that she was in Sector No. 3.
“Coincidence!” he said, smiling. “I’m in the same sector! What’s your triangle?”
“Number Six.”
“I’m Number Eight, only two over.”
He paused, then said, “Could we get together?”
She cocked her head to the left and said, “You want to talk about us? You’re curious to find out just what happened?”
“Among other things.”
“You look…seem…different,” she said. “Face, voice, gestures, the same. But your tone, your expressions…they are softer. And something else…what is it?”
He did not reply at once. As if a thick curtain in a midnight-dark room had been raised, revealing bright noon outside, he was dazzled. Time seemed to thicken. It was the chronons suddenly accumulating on him, he thought. Chronons? The wave-particles of time, analogous to photons and gravitons. What a strange concept. Everything is going to go faster from now on. What was a shapeless mass, seemingly shapeless, has been hammered out into a sharp spearhead. He heard footsteps, and now they were running where a moment ago they had been walking.
He rallied, and he fought his way out from the heaviness, which was at the same time a lightness. Water was heavy but brought weightlessness, picking up houses and rushing them away as if they were bubbles. He was simultaneously heavy and light.
“I’m not the same person,” he said.
“Who is?”
“Nobody changes like I have.”
Snick said, “You were in love with me or seemed to be. You never said so. I suppose you felt that I did not love you. I came close to it, I would have, only…”
“Only?”
“You… I admired you for your courage and your determination and your trickiness. You slipped through like hot butter every time they tried to squeeze you. You were also open and congenial and sensitive…under the circumstances…likable. But there were too many times when I sensed that you were not quite with it…with me, I mean. I think most people would never have noticed it. I’m rather quick to notice such things. But every time I began to believe that that had gone away, it returned. The remoteness, the wall. At first, I thought maybe it was shallowness. That, I found out, wasn’t it. It was…you were elsewhere. You probably didn’t know it yourself. But I certainly did. And that made a great difference. I don’t want a man who’s always circling me and sometimes comes near but never closes in.”
“I think I can close in, grapple, now,” he said. “But I really don’t know. Why don’t you give me a chance?”
“I will. But it may be too late. If not too late, well, two ships locked together sometimes go down into the sea together. Anyway, it sounds too much like combat.”
“It was only a metaphor,” he said.
“That’s what life is made of. We are metaphors.”
“What does that mean?”
She laughed, and she said, “I’m not sure.”
“We get through life by making everything similes and metaphors. We never actually touch reality itself.”
“How would you know?” she said. “You haven’t been here long enough.”
“That’s true. Maybe.”
He heard music from an open door. Someone was running a tape of an example of what the ancients called rock-and-roll. Though the original tape had been found in an excavation and was dated at N.E. 1220, it was the end result of what must have been many retapings. The historians said that the first recording had been made about A.D. 1988. The song was called “Jettison” and had been made by a group called Naked Raygun. Its type of music had been unknown until lately, but the twenty specimens found had been retaped and distributed. Weedies and teenagers liked its hard drive and the anti-establishment lyrics, even if some of them were no longer appropriate. The respectable citizen was made uneasy, if not outright repulsed, by the music.
Caird liked Naked Raygun’s version of ancient rock. It throbbed like the compacted heart of the cosmos just before it big-banged, destroying itself so that it could be created again.
Now, rehearing “Jettison,” he felt that the chronons were, barnacle-like, piling on even thicker. Through them pierced the thought that his personae had been flotsam and jetsam thrown up from the storms that thundered and boiled deep down in him. Or that he supposed were there.
He was in an incomplete cycle, himself the cycle, in which the curves were just about to meet.
Perhaps this was a wish brought up from the abyss by running into Snick. He had no objective data to confirm his feelings.
By then, the two touring parties had merged into one and the supervisors were taking turns in lecturing.
The group had by now entered the rear section of the warehouse.
“As you know from experience,” a supervisor said, “you start with the latest arrivals and work back to the earliest. There are fifty thousand stoned in this building, of whom five thousand have been selected as potential candidates for reconstruction workers.”
The woman droned on, telling them what they already knew but were required officially to hear. Caird was near the back of the group, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other, looking around, half-listening. To one side and a little behind him was a row of stone pedestals on which were placed carved bassinets. In each was the body of an infant, and these seemed to range from newborn to six months old. He was somewhat curious because infant mortality was so rare. Yet these innocents had had the hard luck to die when not long out of the womb. This row, which extended as far as he could see through the warehouse, was reser
ved for babies only. The other children he had seen were old enough to be stood up for viewing.
He edged toward the nearest baby, a pink bonnet on its head, its eyes closed, its pale gray color covered with flesh tones, seemingly sleeping.
From that baby, he passed on to the next. Its head was covered with a frilly blue cap, and it, too, looked as if it would awake soon and demand milk or a change of diapers.
He wondered what had caused its death. He bent down to look at the ID plaque sealed into the pedestal top.
He read the name.
Light seemed to fill the warehouse. He was blind from the searing dazzle. He cried out, and then darkness roared in, soundlessly, and he felt, vaguely, that he was falling. But it was as if he were a feather zigzagging downwards in a breeze. He was almost weightless.
The name of the dead and stoned infant was BAKER NO WILEY.
35
He was vaguely aware for a while of the ceiling far far above him and of faces looking down at him and voices coming through a thick filter. He could not hear the words, but he could detect the questioning and concerned tones. These faded. The cycle had joined ends, a positive and a negative wire touching each other. The shock had gone through him and jolted him out of the world of present time and location. He fell swiftly away from the sights and sounds of now. Then they were gone and with them any consciousness of them and of the present.
Now he was terrified and screaming, though he could hear no sound. Now, he was falling. No. He was descending so swiftly that he seemed to be falling. But he felt the…muscles? slippery flesh?…of a gigantic throat enclosing him. He was being swallowed.
Now he was being chewed up, and this was somehow after he had been digested. He was not only going downwards, he was going backwards. Then he was no longer being chewed. He was in pieces, but these were exploding. They flared as they disintegrated with a light blacker than the blackness through which he was hurtling.
The silence and the darkness became part of him. He was ingested, no longer a separate being, a discrete thing. He was part of the silence and darkness, and they were part of him. But something huge and monstrous was pushing the object composed of himself and his immediate surroundings toward a cliff he sensed but could not see. Then sound and light slew the silence and darkness, and he was now himself, no longer contained in something he thought of as globular.
He was seeing himself on a floor-to-ceiling screen.
There in bed, below him and ahead of him, was Jefferson Cervantes Caird. Five subyears old, the only child of Doctor Hogan Rondeau Caird, biochemist and M.D., whatever those titles meant, and of Doctor Alice Gan Cervantes, molecular biologist, whatever that meant.
According to the wall-display glowing in the darkness of his bedroom, he had awakened at 3:12, Tuesday morning. Last Tuesday evening, he had gone to sleep and been carried to his stoner and gorgonized. Then, this morning, he had been destoned and, still sleeping, put to bed. At this hour, his father and mother would also be sleeping. But he had to get out of bed. He was thirsty and must urinate.
He got out of bed, touching at the same time the top of the head of the big teddy bear on the other pillow to reassure it that he would soon be back. And to reassure himself. He left the bedroom by the twilight illumination coming from the hallway. The hallway became somewhat brighter when he stepped into it. After emptying his bladder, he flushed the noiseless toilet, filled a glass with water, and drank part of it. He was in the hall on his way back to the bedroom when he heard Baker No Wiley calling softly to him from behind the half-open door of the stoner room.
Jeff went to the doorway but did not enter the room. He was frightened by the rigid figures inside the cylinders, people who were dead yet somehow not dead. He seldom went into that kingdom of the cold and the rigid in the daytime, and he had never gone into it after dark except when his father or mother had carried him, sleeping, into it. Sometimes he had very bad dreams in which he awakened in that coffinlike box and could not get out, and the half-dead crowded around the stoner and looked down at him through the window and mouthed silent threats and made gestures showing how they were going to eat him if he came out of the box.
He was horrified because he could not get out of the box, and, if he could, would be torn apart by the stone fingers of the adults and ground to bits in their stone teeth.
He had told his parents and the psychicist about these. He had told only his mother about Baker No Wiley after getting her promise she would tell no one about him. Apparently she had not told the psychicist the name of Baker No Wiley, though it had been impossible, she explained, not to tell the psychicist about his imaginary playmates. Or, as she sometimes called them, mental mirages.
Jeff suspected that she had broken her word and told his father about Wiley’s name. Now and then, his father had dropped some hints that he knew it. But he had never admitted that he did, and his mother had denied telling his father about Wiley.
His mother had suggested that name when Jeff had first confided to her that the playmate had appeared one day, stepping out of the stoner room, and he, Jeff, was now looking for a name for him. At that time, his mother had not been so concerned about his “mirages” or his fantasies. Jeff had never asked her where she got the name or what it meant to her, if anything.
Now, Jeff no longer confided much to his mother. He felt that she had betrayed him.
“Baker’s not real,” his mother had said. “You made him up to compensate for your own excessive shyness and timidity. He’s your twin brother—in your imaginings, I mean—but he’s somehow bigger and stronger and much more brave than you really are. You act out your fantasies using him as your vicarious champion.”
Jeff had not understood what a lot of her words like compensate, excessive, and vicarious, meant. But he had consulted the dictionary tape and learned them. His mother was right about him. He was very shy and timid and easily bullied by the boys in his own class and the older boys and, sometimes, by the girls. When they called him bad names and taunted him and threatened to hit him or actually did hit him, he ran away. He did not like school—in fact, hated it—and he spent all the time he could in his bedroom. There he watched TV to learn his school lessons or for entertainment or playing with his “imaginary” companions.
Like the others, Baker had been rather thin when he first appeared, so thin that the light shone through him. As time went by, Baker became more solid and opaque. He became as real as the children at school but a lot more pleasant. Jeff s other “mirage” companions slowly faded away, and only Baker remained.
Baker was no fantasy. As surely as he knew that he breathed, Jeff knew that Baker was no figment. Jeff could touch Baker’s flesh, feel its solidity, and feel Baker’s breath on his face.
In some ways, Baker was more real than his schoolmates. Play with him was lots of fun, and the fun was especially great when Jeff imagined that the bullies were in his bedroom and Baker was beating the stuffing out of them.
The bullies would have been pummeled bloody by Baker if Jeff had not called him off. Baker was a hell of a fighter and afraid of no one and nothing.
Now, Baker stepped out from behind the door and came into the hall. He seemed to loom above Jeff, and he certainly was far more muscular.
Baker was, for some reason, in street clothes, not the pajamas, just like Jeff’s, that he donned at bedtime. He said, “Let’s play, Jeff. We can do anything we want now. We can even go outdoors. We got the house to ourselves.”
Jeff felt scared. “You mean Dad and Mom are gone?”
“No, silly. I mean our parents are sleeping. We can pretend we own the apartment and we can do what we want to in it.”
Baker put a fingertip to his lips. “But we have to be quiet so we won’t wake Dad and Mom up.”
“I don’t know,” Jeff said slowly, though his heart was beating hard with excitement.
“Well, we might make too much noise,” Baker said. “So let’s sneak outdoors and have adventures. There won’t be
many big people out on the streets now.”
“What about the monitors?” Jeff said.
“Who’s watching them at this time of the night?” Baker said. “The ganks won’t be watching the screens unless they get a call from somebody or an alarm goes off.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Jeff said. “But if we open the front door, Dad and Mom’s alarm will go off.”
“No it won’t. Dad and Mom don’t know we know the codeword to turn it off.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Fraidy cat! Sissy! Pansy! Gutless!”
“Don’t you call me names,” Jeff said. “You’re my friend, my twin brother. You don’t call me names. I don’t like it.”
“Well, I’m doing it,” Baker said, grinning. “I got to get you going, man. I love you, but I ain’t too happy with you sometimes. You got to be more like me. How you going to do that if you don’t practice being like me?”
“All right,” Jeff said. “Only, first, I got to change into street clothes.”
Reluctantly and slowly, he put on the clothes. At the same time that he was shaking with fear, he felt very excited. Maybe, just maybe, he could do this, have a real adventure. The only trouble was…if he got caught, he’d be punished and Baker would not be touched.
They went down the hall after Jeff had commanded the wallscreen to keep the hall light dimmed. One of his parents might wake up and see the light and get up and investigate.
Halfway down the hall, he heard the voices. They made a murmur the words of which he could make out. He stopped, and he whispered to Baker, “They’re awake! We can’t go now.”
“Don’t you wish!” Baker said. “Let’s go anyway.”
They stepped softly down the hall, Jeff thinking that his heart was going to shatter his breastbone with its battering. Before he got to the bedroom door, which was a few inches open, Baker said, “Let’s listen. Maybe we’ll find out something. Adults don’t tell us much, you know. They think they’re so superior and mysterious.”
Jeff followed Baker to the doorway. The bedroom was dark. Dad and Mom were talking so softly that Jeff could hear only a word here and there. Then he caught his name. They were talking about him.