This Perfect Day

Chip drew a breath and held it, then let it go. "Every mem-ber 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 the 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 Francais 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.

"What amazes me," Chip said, "is how many non-productive members there were. These share-traders and lawmakers; the soldiers and policemen, bankers, tax-gatherers..."

"They weren't non-productive," she said. "They didn't produce things but they made it possible for members to live the way they did. They produced the freedom, or at least they maintained it."

"Yes," he said. "I suppose you're right."

"I am," she said, and moved restlessly from the table.

He thought for a moment. "Pre-U members," he said, "gave up efficiency—in exchange for freedom. And we've done the reverse."

"We haven't done it," Lilac said. "It was done for us." She turned and faced him, and said, "Do you think it's possible that the incurables are still alive?" He looked at her.

"That their descendants have survived somehow," she said, "and have a—a society somewhere? On an island or in some area that the Family isn't using?"

"Wow," he said, and rubbed his forehead. "Sure it's possible," he said. "Members survived on islands before the Unification; why not after?"

"That's what I think," she said, coming back to him. "There have been five generations since the last ones—"

"Battered by disease and hardship—"

"But reproducing at will!"

"I don't know about a society" he said, "but there might be a colony—"

"A city," she said. "They were the smart ones, the strong ones."