This Perfect Day

A light-skinned round-breasted woman dived into the pool from the other side. Karl said, "Let's talk some more later on, all right?" He slipped down into the water. "Sure, we've got plenty of time," Chip said. Karl smiled at him and kicked off and swam arm-over-arm away.

The next morning Chip left his room and walked down green-carpeted painting-hung corridor toward a steel door at the end of it. He hadn't gone very far when "Hi, brother," Dover said and came along and walked beside him. "Hi," Chip said. He looked ahead again and, walking, said, "Am I being guarded?"

"Only when you go in this direction," Dover said. Chip said, "I couldn't do anything with my bare hands even if I wanted to."

"I know," Dover said. "The old man's cautious. Pre-U mind." He tapped his temple and smiled. "Only for a few days," he said.

They walked to the end of the corridor and the steel door slid open. White-tiled corridor stretched beyond it; a member in blue touched a scanner and went through a doorway.

They turned and started back. The door whispered behind them. "You'll get to see it," Dover said. "He'll probably give you the tour himself. Want to go to the gym?"

In the afternoon Chip looked in at the offices of the Architectural Council. A small and cheerful old man recognized him and welcomed him—Madhir, the Council's head. He looked to be over a hundred; his hands too—all of him apparently. He introduced Chip to other members of the Council: an old woman named Sylvie, a reddish-haired man of fifty or so whose name Chip didn't catch, and a short but pretty woman called Gri-gri. Chip had coffee with them and ate a piece of pastry with a cream filling. They showed him a set of plans they were discussing, layouts that Uni had made for the rebuilding of "G-3 cities." They talked about whether or not the layouts should be redone to different specifications, asked questions of a telecomp and disagreed on the significance of its answers. The old woman Sylvie gave a point-by-point explanation of why she felt the layouts were needlessly monotonous. Madhir asked Chip if he had an opinion; he said he didn't. The younger woman, Gri-gri, smiled at him invitingly.

There was a party in the main lounge that night—"Happy new year!"

"Happy U year!"—and Karl shouted in Chip's ear, "I'll tell you one thing I don't like about this place! No whiskey! Isn't that a shut-off? If wine is okay, why not whiskey?" Dover was dancing with the woman who looked like Lilac (not really, not half as pretty), and there were people Chip had sat with at meals and met in the gym and the music room, people he had seen in one part of the complex or another, people he hadn't seen in before; there were more than had been there the other night when he and Karl had come in—almost a hundred of them, with white-paploned members channeling trays among them. "Happy U year!" someone said to him, an elderly woman who had been at his lunch table, Hera or Hela. "It's almost 172!" she said. "Yes," he said, "half an hour."

"Oh, there he is!" she said, and moved forward. Wei was in the doorway, in white, with people crowding around him. He shook their hands and kissed their cheeks, his shriveled yellow face grin-split and gleaming, his eyes lost in wrinkles. Chip moved back farther into the crowd and turned away. Gri-gri waved, jumping up to see him over people between them. He waved back at her and smiled and kept moving. He spent the next day, Unification Day, in the gym and the library.

He went to a few of Wei's evening discussions. They were held in the garden, a pleasant place to be. The grass and the trees were real, and the stars and the moon were near reality, the moon changing phase but never position. Bird warblings sounded from time to time and a gentle breeze blew. Fifteen or twenty programmers were usually at the discussions, sitting on chairs and on the grass. Wei, in a chair, did most of the talking. He expanded on quotations from the Living Wisdom and deftly traced the particulars of questions to their encompassing generalities. Now and then he deferred to the head of the Educational Council, Gustafsen, or to Boroviev, the head of the Medical Council, or to another of the High Council members.

At first Chip sat at the edge of the group and only listened, but then he began to ask questions—why parts, at least, of treatments couldn't be put back on a voluntary basis; whether human perfection might not include a degree of selfishness and aggressiveness; whether selfishness, in fact, didn't play a considerable part in their own acceptance of alleged "duty" and "responsibility." Some of the programmers near him seemed affronted by his questions, but Wei answered them patiently and fully; seemed even to welcome them, heard his "Wei?" over the askings of the others. He moved a little closer in from the group's edge.

One night he sat up in bed and lit a cigarette and smoked in the dark.