This Perfect Day

Or maybe he had compensated too much or too little for the eastward drift of the sea. Maybe they had passed Majorca and were heading toward Eur. Or maybe Majorca didn't exist—had been blanked from pre-U maps because pre-U members had "bombed" it to nothing and why should the Family be reminded again of folly and barbarism?

He kept the boat headed a hairline west of north, but slowed it down a little.

The sky grew lighter and still there was no island, no Majorca. They scanned the horizon silently, avoiding each other's eyes.

One final star glimmered above the water in the northeast. No, glimmered on the water. No—"There's a light over there," he said.

She looked where he pointed, held his arm.

The light moved in an arc from side to side, then up and down as if beckoning. It was a kilometer or so away.

"Christ and Wei," Chip said softly, and steered toward it.

"Be careful," Lilac said. "Maybe it's-"

He changed hands on the steering lever and got the knife from his pocket, laid it in his lap.

The light went out and a small boat was there. Someone sat waving in it, waving a pale thing that he put on his head—a hat—and then waving his empty hand and arm. "One member," Lilac said.

"One person" Chip said. He kept steering toward the boat—a rowboat, it looked like—with one hand on the lever and the other on the speed-control knob. "Look at him!" Lilac said.

The waving man was small and white-bearded, with a ruddy face below his broad-brimmed yellow hat. He was wearing a blue-topped white-legged garment.

Chip slowed the boat, steered it near the rowboat, and switched all three rotors off.

The man—old past sixty-two and blue-eyed, fantastically blue-eyed—smiled with brown teeth and gaps where teeth were missing and said, "Running from the dummies, are you? Looking for liberty?" His boat bobbed in their sidewaves. Poles and nets shifted in it—fish-catching equipment. "Yes," Chip said. "Yes, we are! We're trying to find Majorca."

"Majorca?" the man said. He laughed and scratched his beard. "Myorca," he said. "Not Majorca, Myorca! But Liberty is what it's called now. It hasn't been called Myorca for—God knows, a hundred years, I guess! Liberty, it is."

"Are we near it?" Lilac asked, and Chip said, "We're friends. We haven't come to—interfere in any way, to try to 'cure' you or anything."

"We're incurables ourselves," Lilac said.

"You wouldn't be coming this way if you wasn't," the man said. "That's what I'm here for, to watch for folks like you and help them into port. Yes, you're near it. That's it over there." He pointed to the north.

And now on the horizon a dark green bar lay low and clear. Pink streaks glowed above its western half—mountains lit by the sun's first rays.

Chip and Lilac looked at it, and looked at each other, and looked again at Majorca-Myorca-Liberty. "Hold fast," the man said, "and I'll tie onto your stern and come aboard."

They turned in their seats and faced each other. Chip took the knife from his lap, smiled, and tossed it to the floor. He took Lilac's hands. They smiled at each other. "I thought we'd gone past it," she said. "So did I," he said. "Or that it didn't even exist any more." They smiled at each other, and leaned forward and kissed each other.

"Hey, give me a hand here, will you?" the man said, looking at them over the back of the boat, clinging with dirty-nailed fingers.

They got up quickly and went to him. Chip kneeled on the back seat and helped him over. His clothes were made of cloth, his hat woven of flat strips of yellow fiber. He was half a head shorter than they and smelled strangely and strongly. Chip grasped his hard-skinned hand and shook it. "I'm Chip," he said, "and this is Lilac."

"Glad to meet you," the bearded blue-eyed old man said, smiling his ugly-toothed smile. "I'm Darren Costanza." He shook Lilac's hand. "Darren Costanza?" Chip said. "That's the name."

"It's beautiful!" Lilac said.

"You've got a good boat here," Darren Costanza said, looking about. "It doesn't lift," Chip said, and Lilac said, "But it got us here. We were lucky to find it." Darren Costanza smiled at them. "And your pockets are filled with cameras and things?" he said. "No," Chip said, "we decided not to take anything. The tide was in and—"

"Oh, that was a mistake," Darren Costanza said. "Didn't you take anything?"

"A gun without a generator," Chip said, taking it from his pocket. "And a few books and a razor in the bundle there."

"Well, this is worth something," Darren Costanza said, taking the gun and looking at it, thumbing its handle. "We'll have the boat to trade," Lilac said.