This Perfect Day

He watched them play for another few moments and then moved away. He went over to the mass of relics and looked at it, and then moved nearer to Lilac. She looked up at him and smiled, putting a book on one of several piles beside her. "I keep hoping to find one in the language," she said, "but they're always in the old ones." He crouched and picked up the book she had just put down. On the spine of it were small letters: Bddda for dod. "Hmm," he said, shaking his head. He glanced through the old brown pages, at strange words and phrases: allvarlig, logmrska, dok tier pd brickorna. The double dots and little circles were over many of the letters. "Some of them are enough like the language so that you can understand a word or two," she said, "but some of them are-well look at this one." She showed him a book on which backward N's and rectangular open-bottomed characters were mixed in with ordinary P's and E's and O's. "Now what does that mean?" she said, putting it down. "It would be interesting to find one we could read," he said, looking at her cheek's rose-brown smoothness. "Yes, it would," she said, "but I think they were screened before they were sent here and that's why we can't."

"You think they were screened?"

"There ought to be lots of them in the language," she said. "How could it have become the language if it wasn't the one most widely used?"

"Yes, of course," he said. "You're right."

"I keep hoping, though," she said, "that there was a slip in the screening." She frowned at a book and put it on a pile. Her filled pockets stirred with her movements, and suddenly they looked to Chip like empty pockets lying against round breasts, breasts like the ones Karl had drawn; the breasts, almost, of a pre-U woman. It was possible, considering her abnormal darkness and the various physical abnormalities of the lot of them. He looked at her face again, so as not to embarrass her if she really had them.

"I thought I was double-checking this carton," she said, "but I have a funny feeling I'm triple-checking it."

"But why should the books have been screened?" he asked her.

She paused, with her dark hands hanging empty and her elbows on her knees, looking at him gravely with her large, level eyes. "I think we've been taught things that aren't true," she said. "About the way life was before the Unification. In the late pre-U, I mean, not the early."

"What things?"

"The violence, the aggressiveness, the greed, the hostility. There was some of it, I suppose, but I can't believe there was nothing else, and that's what we're taught, really. And the 'bosses' punishing the 'workers,' and all the sickness and alcohol-drinking and starvation and self-destruction. Do you believe it?" He looked at her. "I don't know," he said. "I haven't thought much about it."

"I'll tell you what I don't believe," Snowflake said. She had risen from the bench, the game with King evidently finished. "I don't believe that they cut off the baby boys' foreskins," she said. "In the early pre-U, maybe—in the early, early pre-U—but not in the late; it's just too incredible. I mean, they had some kind of intelligence, didn't they?"

"It's incredible, all right," King said, hitting his pipe against his palm, "but I've seen photographs. Alleged photographs, anyway." Chip shifted around and sat on the floor. "What do you mean?" he said. "Can photographs be—not genuine?"

"Of course they can," Lilac said. "Take a close look at some of the ones inside. Parts of them have been drawn in. And parts have been drawn out." She began putting books back into the carton.

"I had no idea that was possible," Chip said.

"It is with the flat ones," King said.

"What we're probably given," Leopard said—he was sitting in a gilded chair, toying with the orange plume of the hat he had worn—"is a mixture of truth and untruth. It's anybody's guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each."

"Couldn't we study these books and learn the languages?" Chip asked. "One would be all we'd really need."

"For what?" Snowflake asked.

"To find out," he said. "What's true and what isn't."

"I tried it," Lilac said.

"She certainly did," King said to Chip, smiling. "A while back she wasted more nights than I care to remember beating her pretty head against one of those nonsensical jumbles. Don't you do it, Chip; I beg you."

"Why not?" Chip asked. "Maybe I'll have better luck."

"And suppose you do?" King said. "Suppose you decipher a language and read a few books in it and find out that we are taught things that are untrue. Maybe everything's untrue. Maybe life in 2000 A.D. was one endless orgasm, with everyone choosing the right classification and helping his brothers and loaded to the ears with love and health and life's necessities. So what? You'll still be right here, in 162 Y.U., with a bracelet and an adviser and a monthly treatment.

You'll only be un-happier. We'll all be unhappier."