This Perfect Day

  The value of what he had found, as he began to perceive it, held him motionless. Here in this small brown book, its cover clinging by threads, were twelve or fifteen pre-U-language pages of which he had an exact translation waiting in his night-table drawer. Thousands of words, of verbs in their bafflingly changing forms; instead of guessing and groping as he had done for his near-useless fragments of Italiano, he could gain a solid footing in this second language in a matter of hours!

  He said nothing to the others; slipped the book into his pocket and joined them; filled his pipe as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Le pas-whatever-it-was-avant might not be “The Next Step Forward” after all. But it was, it had to be.

  It was; he saw it as soon as he compared the first few sentences. He sat up in his room all that night, carefully reading and comparing, with one finger at the lines in the pre-U language and another at the lines translated. He worked his way two times through the fourteen-page essay, and then began making alphabetical word lists.

  The next night he was tired and slept, but the following night, after a visit from Snowflake, he stayed up and worked again.

  He began going to the museum on nights between meetings. There he could smoke while he worked, could look for other Français books—Français was the language’s name; the hook below the C was a mystery—and could roam the halls by flashlight. On the third floor he found a map from 1951, artfully patched in several places, where Eur was “Europe,” with the division called “France” where Français had been used, and all its strangely and appealingly named cities: “Paris” and “Nantes” and “Lyon” and “Marseille.”

  Still he said nothing to the others. He wanted to confound King with a language fully mastered, and delight Lilac. At meetings he no longer worked at Italiano. One night Lilac asked him about it, and he said, truthfully, that he had given up trying to unravel it. She turned away, looking disappointed, and he was happy, knowing the surprise he was preparing for her.

  Saturday nights were wasted, lying by Mary KK, and meeting nights were wasted too; although now, with Hush dead, Leopard sometimes didn’t come, and when he didn’t, Chip stayed on at the museum to straighten up and stayed still later to work.

  In three weeks he could read Français rapidly, with only a word here and there that was indecipherable. He found several Français books. He read one whose title, translated, was The Purple Sickle Murders; and another, The Pygmies of the Equatorial Forest; and another, Father Goriot.

  He waited until a night when Leopard wasn’t there, and then he told them. King looked as if he had heard bad news. His eyes measured Chip and his face was still and controlled, suddenly older and more gaunt. Lilac looked as if she had been given a longed-for gift. “You’ve read books in it?” she said. Her eyes were wide and shining and her lips stayed parted. But neither one’s reaction could give Chip the pleasure he had looked forward to. He was grave with the weight of what he now knew.

  “Three of them,” he said to Lilac. “And I’m halfway through a fourth.”

  “That’s marvelous, Chip!” Snowflake said. “What did you keep it a secret for?” And Sparrow said, “I didn’t think it was possible.”

  “Congratulations, Chip,” King said, taking out his pipe. “It’s an achievement, even with the help of the essay. You’ve really put me in my place.” He looked at his pipe, working the stem of it to get it straight. “What have you found out so far?” he asked. “Anything interesting?”

  Chip looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “A lot of what we’re told is true. There was crime and violence and stupidity and hunger. There was a lock on every door. Flags were important, and the borders of territories. Children waited for their parents to die so they could inherit their money. The waste of labor and material was fantastic.”

  He looked at Lilac and smiled consolingly at her; her longed-for gift was breaking. “But with it all,” he said, “members seem to have felt stronger and happier than we do. Going where they wanted, doing what they wanted, ‘earning’ things, ‘owning’ things, choosing, always choosing—it made them somehow more alive than members today.”

  King reached for tobacco. “Well that’s pretty much what you expected to find, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes, pretty much,” Chip said. “And there’s one thing more.”

  “What’s that?” Snowflake asked.

  Looking at King, Chip said, “Hush didn’t have to die.”

  King looked at him. The others did too. “What are you talking about?” King said, his fingers stopped in pipe-filling.

  “Don’t you know?” Chip asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

  “What do you mean?” Lilac asked.

  “Don’t you know, King?” Chip said.

  “No,” King said. “What are— I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re getting at. How could pre-U books tell you anything about Hush? And why should I be expected to know what it is if they could?”

  “Living to the age of sixty-two,” Chip said, “is no marvel of chemistry and breeding and totalcakes. Pygmies of the equatorial forests, whose life was hard even by pre-U standards, lived to be fifty-five and sixty. A member named Goriot lived to seventy-three and nobody thought it was terribly unusual, and that was in the early nineteenth century. Members lived to their eighties, even to their nineties!”

  “That’s impossible,” King said. “The body wouldn’t last that long; the heart, the lungs—”

  “The book I’m reading now,” Chip said, “is about some members who lived in 1991. One of them has an artificial heart. He gave money to doctors and they put it into him in place of his own.”

  “Oh for—” King said. “Are you sure you really understand that Frandaze?”

  “Francais,” Chip said. “Yes, I’m positive. Sixty-two isn’t a long life; it’s a relatively short one.”

  “But that’s when we die” Sparrow said. “Why do we, if it isn’t—when we have to?”

  “We don’t die . . .” Lilac said, and looked from Chip to King.

  “That’s right,” Chip said. “We’re made to die. By Uni. It’s programmed for efficiency, for efficiency first, last, and always. It’s scanned all the data in its memory banks—which aren’t the pretty pink toys you’ve seen if you’ve made the visit; they’re ugly steel monsters—and it’s decided that sixty-two is the optimum dying time, better than sixty-one or sixty-three and better than bothering with artificial hearts. If sixty-two isn’t a new high in longevity that we’re lucky to have reached—and it isn’t, I know it isn’t—then that’s the only answer. Our replacements are trained and waiting, and off we go, a few months early or late so that everything isn’t too suspiciously tidy. Just in case anyone is sick enough to be able to feel suspicion.”

  “Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei,” Snowflake said.

  “Yes,” Chip said. “Especially Wood and Wei.”

  “King?” Lilac said.

  “I’m staggered,” King said. “I see now, Chip, why you thought I’d know.” To Snowflake and Sparrow he said, “Chip knows that I’m in chemotherapy.”

  “And don’t you know?” Chip said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Is there or is there not a poison in the treatment units?” Chip asked. “You must know that.”

  “Gently, brother, I’m an old member,” King said. “There’s no poison as such, no; but almost any compound in the setup could cause death if too much of it were infused.”

  “And you don’t know how much of the compounds are infused when a member hits sixty-two?”

  “No,” King said. “Treatments are formulated by impulses that go directly from Uni to the units, and there’s no way of monitoring them. I can ask Uni, of course, what any particular treatment consisted of or is going to consist of, but if what you’re saying is true”—he smiled—“it’s going to lie to me, isn’t it?”

  Chip drew a breath, and let it go. “Yes,” he said.

  “And when a member
dies,” Lilac said, “the symptoms are the ones of old age?”

  “They’re the ones I was taught are of old age,” King said. “They could very well be the ones of something entirely different.” He looked at Chip. “Have you found any medical books in that language?” he asked.

  “No,” Chip said.

  King took out his lighter and thumbed it open. “It’s possible,” he said. “It’s very possible. It never even crossed my mind. Members live to sixty-two; it used to be less, some day it’ll be more; we have two eyes, two ears, one nose. Established facts.” He lit the lighter and put the flame to his pipe.

  “It must be true,” Lilac said. “It’s the final logical end of Wood’s and Wei’s thinking. Control everyone’s life and you eventually get around to controlling everyone’s death.”

  “It’s awful,” Sparrow said. “I’m glad Leopard’s not here. Can you imagine how he’d feel? Not only Hush, but he himself any day now. We mustn’t say anything to him; let him think it’s going to happen naturally.”

  Snowflake looked bleakly at Chip. “What did you have to tell us for?” she said.

  King said, “So that we can experience a happy kind of sadness. Or was it a sad kind of happiness, Chip?”

  “I thought you would want to know,” he said.

  “Why?” Snowflake said. “What can we do about it? Complain to our advisers?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing we can do,” Chip said. “Start getting more members into this group.”

  “Yes!” Lilac said.

  “And where do we find them?” King said. “We can’t just grab any Karl or Mary off the walkways, you know.”

  Chip said, “Do you mean to say that in your assignment you can’t pull a print-out on local members with abnormal tendencies?”

  “Not without giving Uni a good reason, I can’t,” King said. “One fuzzy move, brother, and the doctors will be examining me. Which would also mean, incidentally, that they’d be reexamining you.”

  “Other abnormals are around,” Sparrow said. “Somebody writes ‘Fight Uni’ on the backs of buildings.”

  “We’ve got to figure out a way to get them to find us,” Chip said. “A signal of some kind.”

  “And then what?” King said. “What do we do when we’re twenty or thirty strong? Claim a group visit and blow Uni to pieces?”

  “The idea has occurred to me,” Chip said.

  “Chip!” Snowflake said. Lilac stared at him.

  “First of all,” King said, smiling, “it’s impregnable. And second of all, most of us have already been there, so we wouldn’t be granted another visit. Or would we walk from here to Eur? And what would we do with the world once everything was uncontrolled—once the factories were clogged and the cars had crashed and the chimes had all stopped chiming—get really pre-U and say a prayer for it?”

  “If we could find members who know computer and microwave theory,” Chip said, “members who know Uni, maybe we could work out a way to change its programming.”

  “If we could find those members,” King said. “If we could get them with us. If we could get to EUR-zip-one. Don’t you see what you’re asking for? The impossible, that’s all. This is why I told you not to waste time with those books. There’s nothing we can do about anything. This is Uni’s world, will you get that through your head? It was handed over to it fifty years ago, and it’s going to do its assignment—spread the fighting Family through the fighting universe—and we’re going to do our assignments, including dying at sixty-two and not missing TV. This is it right here, brother: all the freedom we can hope for—a pipe and a few jokes and some extra fucking. Let’s not lose what we’ve got, all right?”

  “But if we get other—”

  “Sing a song, Sparrow,” King said.

  “I don’t want to,” she said.

  “Sing a song!”

  “All right, I will.”

  Chip glared at King and got up and strode from the room. He strode into the dark exhibit hall, banged his hip against hardness, and strode on, cursing. He went far from the passageway and the storeroom; stood rubbing his forehead and rocking on the balls of his feet before the jewel-glinting kings and queens, mute darker-than-darkness watchers. “King,” he said. “Thinks he really is, the brother-fighting . . .”

  Sparrow’s singing came faintly, and the string-tinkle of her pre-U instrument. And footsteps, coming closer. “Chip?” It was Snowflake. He didn’t turn. His arm was touched. “Come on back,” she said.

  “Leave me alone, will you?” he said. “Just leave me alone for a couple of minutes.”

  “Come on,” she said. “You’re being childish.”

  “Look,” he said, turning to her. “Go listen to Sparrow, will you? Go smoke your pipe.”

  She was silent, and then said, “All right,” and went away.

  He turned back to the kings and queens, breathing deeply. His hip hurt and he rubbed it. It was infuriating the way King cut off his every idea, made everyone do exactly as he–

  She was coming back. He started to tell her to get the hate away but checked himself. He took a clenched-teeth breath and turned around.

  It was King coming toward him, his gray hair and coveralls catching the dim glow from the passageway. He came close and stopped. They looked at each other, and King said, “I didn’t intend to speak quite that sharply.”

  “How come you haven’t taken one of these crowns?” Chip asked. “And a robe. Just that medallion—hate, that’s not enough for a real pre-U king.”

  King stayed silent for a moment, and then said, “My apologies.”

  Chip drew a breath and held it, then let it go. “Every member we can get to join us,” he said, “would mean new ideas, new information we can draw on, possibilities that maybe we haven’t thought of.”

  “New risks too,” King said. “Try to see it from my viewpoint.”

  “I can’t,” Chip said. “I’d rather go back to full treatments than settle for just this.”

  “ ‘Just this’ seems very nice to a member my age.”

  “You’re twenty or thirty years closer to sixty-two than I am; you should be the one who wants to change things.”

  “If change were possible, maybe I would be,” King said. “But chemotherapy plus computerization equals no change.”

  “Not necessarily,” Chip said.

  “It does,” King said, “and I don’t want to see ‘just this’ go down the drain. Even your coming here on off nights is an added risk. But don’t take offense”—he raised a hand—“I’m not telling you to stay away.”

  “I’m not going to,” Chip said; and then, “Don’t worry, I’m careful.”

  “Good,” King said. “And we’ll go on carefully looking for abnormals. Without signals.” He held out his hand.

  After a moment Chip shook it.

  “Come on back in now,” King said. “The girls are upset.”

  Chip went with him toward the passageway.

  “What was that you said before, about the memory banks being ‘steel monsters’?” King asked.

  “That’s what they are,” Chip said. “Enormous frozen blocks, thousands of them. My grandfather showed them to me when I was a boy. He helped build Uni.”

  “The brother-fighter.”

  “No, he was sorry. He wished he hadn’t. Christ and Wei, if he were alive he’d be a marvelous member to have with us.”

  The following night Chip was sitting in the storeroom reading and smoking when “Hello, Chip,” Lilac said, and was standing in the doorway with a flashlight at her side.

  Chip stood up, looking at her.

  “Do you mind my interrupting you?” she asked.

  “Of course not, I’m glad to see you,” he said. “Is King here?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  She stayed in the doorway. “I want you to teach me that language,” she said.

  “I’d like to,” he said. “I was going to ask you if you wanted t
he lists. Come on in.”

  He watched her come in, then found his pipe in his hand, put it down, and went to the mass of relics. Catching the legs of one of the chairs they used, he tossed it right side up and brought it back to the table. She had pocketed her flashlight and was looking at the open pages of the book he had been reading. He put the chair down, moved his chair to the side, and put the second chair next to it.

  She turned up the front part of the book and looked at its cover.

  “It means A Motive for Passion,” he said. “Which is fairly obvious. Most of it isn’t.”

  She looked at the open pages again. “Some of it looks like Italiano,” she said.

  “That’s how I got onto it,” he said. He held the back of the chair he had brought for her.

  “I’ve been sitting all day,” she said. “You sit down. Go ahead.”

  He sat and got his folded lists out from under the stacked Français books. “You can keep these as long as you want,” he said, opening them and spreading them out on the table. “I know it all pretty well by heart now.”

  He showed her the way the verbs fell into groups, following different patterns of change to express time and subject, and the way the adjectives took one form or another depending on the nouns they were applied to. “It’s complicated,” he said, “but once you get the hang of it, translation’s fairly easy.” He translated a page of A Motive for Passion for her. Victor, a trader in shares of various industrial companies—the member who had had the artificial heart put into him—was rebuking his wife, Caroline, for having been unfriendly to an influential lawmaker.

  “It’s fascinating,” Lilac said.