This Perfect Day

"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 ninetiesl"

"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.