Four for Tomorrow Part 12

"Replaced, naturally."

"Naturally. And the big old pumps . . ."

"Shiny and new."

Moore brightened. The sun, which he had not seen for several days/years, felt good on his back, but the air conditioning felt even better as they entered the first building. There was something of beauty in the pure 97.functional compactness of everything about them, some- thing Unger might have called by a different name, he realized, but it was beauty to Moore. He ran his hand along the sides of the units he did not have time to study. He tapped the conduits and peered into the kilns which processed the by-product ceramicware; he nodded approval and paused to relight his pipe whenever the 72 man at his side asked his opinion of something too tech- nically remote for him to have any opinion, They crossed catwalks, moved through the temple- like innards of shut-down tanks, traversed alley-ways where the silent, blinking panels indicated that unseen operations were in progress. Occasionally, they met a worker, seated before a sleeping trouble-board, watching a broadcast entertainment or reading something over his portable threelie. Moore shook hands and forgot names.

Processing Director Teng could not help but be partly hypnotized-both by Moore's youthful appearance and the knowledge that he had developed a key process at some past dateas well as by his apparent understand- ing of present operations)-into believing that he was an engineer of his own breed, and up-to-date in his education. Actually, Mary Mullen's prediction that his profession would some day move beyond the range of his comprehension had not yet come to pa.s.s-but he could see that it was the direction in which he was headed.

Appropriately, he had noticed his photo gathering dust in a small lobby, amid those of Teng's other dead and retired predecessors.

Sensing his feeling, Moore asked, "Say, do you think I could have my old job back?"

The man's head jerked about Moore remained ex- pressionless.

"Well-I suppose-something-could be worked . . ."

he ended lamely as Moore broke into a grin and twisted the question back into casual conversation. It was some- 98.how amusing to have produced that sudden, strange look of realization on the man's bored face, as he actu- ally saw Moore for the first time. Frightening, too.

"Yes, seeing all this progress-is inspiring." Moore pro- nounced. "It's almost enough to make a man want to work again. -Glad I don't have.to, of course. But there's a bit of nostalgia involved in coming back after all these years and seeing how this place grew out of the shoe- string operation it seemed then-grew into more build- ings than I could walk through in a week, and all of them packed with new hardware and working away to beat the band. Smooth. Efficient. I like it. I suppose you like working here?"

"Yes," sighed Teng, "as much as a man can like work- ing. Say, were you planning on staying overnight? There a weekly employees' luau and you'd be very welcome."

He glanced at the wafer of a watchface clinging to his wrist. "In fact, it's already started," he added.

"Thanks," said Moore, "but I have a date and I have to be going. I just wanted to reaffirm my faith in prog- 73 ress. Thanks for the tour, and thanks for your time."

"Any time," Teng steered him toward a lush Break Boom. "You won't be wanting to Dart back for awhile yet, will you?" he said. "So while we're having a bite to eat in here I wonder if I could ask you some questions about the Set. Its entrance requirements in particu- lar. ..."

All the way around the world to Bermuda, getting happily drunk in the belly of Dart Nine, in the year of Our Lord twenty seventy-eight, Moore felt that Time had been put aright.

"So you want to have it./?" said/asked Mary Maude, uncoiling carefully from the caverns of her shawl.

"Yes."

99."Why?" she asked.

"Because I do not destroy that which belongs to me. I possess so very little as it is."

The Doyenne snorted gently, perhaps in amus.e.m.e.nt.

She tapped her favorite dog, as though seeking a reply from it.

"Though it sails upon a bottomless sea toward some fabulous orient," she mused, "the ship will still attempt to lower an anchor. I do not know why. Can you tell me?

Is it simply carelessness on the part of the captain? Or the second mate?"

The dog did not answer. Neither did anything else.

"Or is it a mutineer's desire to turn around and go back?" she inquired. "To return home?"

There was a brief stillness. Finally: "I live in a succession of homes. They are called hours.

Each is lovely."

"But not lovely enough, and never to be revisited, eh? Permit me to antic.i.p.ate your next words: T do not intend to marry. I do not intend to leave the Set. I shall have my child-' By the way, what will it be, a boy or a girl?"

"A girl."

"'-I shall have my daughter. I shall place her in a fine home, arrange her a glorious future, and be back in time for the Spring Festival.'" She rubbed her glazed dog as though it were a crystal and pretended to peer through its greenish opacity. "Am I not a veritable gypsy?" she asked.

"Indeed."

74 "And you think this will work out?"

"I fail to see why it should not"

"Tell me which her proud father will do," she inquired, "compose her a sonnet sequence, or design her me- chanical toys?"

100."Neither. He shall never know. He'll be asleep until spring, and I will not. She must never know either."

"So much the worse."

"Why/pray tell?"

"Because she will become a woman in less than two months, by the clocks of the Set-and a lovely woman, I daresay-because she will be able to afford loveliness."

"Of course."

"And, as the daughter of a member, she will be emi- nently eligible for Set candidacy."

"She may not want it."

"Only those who cannot achieve it allude to having those sentiments. No, she'll want it. Everyone does. - And, if her beauty should be surgically obtained, I be- lieve that I shall, in this instance, alter a rule of mine. I shall pa.s.s on her and admit her to the Set. She will then meet many interesting people-poets, engineers, her mother. . . ."

"No! I'd tell her, before I'd permit that to happen!"

"Ahal Tell me, is your fear of incest predicated upon your fear of compet.i.tion, or is it really the other way around?"

"Please! Why are you saying these horrible things?"

"Because, unfortunately, you are something I can no longer afford to keep around. You have been an excellent symbol for a long time, but now your pleasures have ceased to be Olympian. Yours is a lapse into the mun- dane. You show that the G.o.ds are less sophisticated than schoolchildren-that they can be victimized by bi- ology, despite the oceans of medical allies at our com- mand. Princess, in the eyes of the world you are my daughter, for I am the Set. So take some motherly advice and retire. Do not attempt to renew your option. Get married first, and then to sleep for a few months-till spring, when your option is up. Sleep intermittently in the bunker, so that a year or so will pa.s.s. We'll play up 101.

the romantic aspects of your retirement. Wait a year or two to bear your child. The cold sleep won't do her any harm; there have been other cases such as yours. If 75 you fail to agree to this, our motherly admonition is that you face present expulsion."

"You can't!"

"Read your contract."

"But no one need ever "know!"

"You silly little dollface!" The acetylene blazed forth.

"Your glimpses of the outside have been fragmentary and extremely selective-for at least sixty years. Every news medium in the world watches almost every move every Setman makes, from the time he sits up in his bunker until he retires, exhausted, after the latest Party.

Snoopers and newshounds today have more gimmicks and gadgets in their a.r.s.enals than your head has colorful hairs. We cant hide your daughter all her life, so we won't even try. We'd have trouble enough concealing matters if you decided not to have her-but I think we could outbribe and outdrug our own employees.

"Therefore, I call upon you for a decision."

"I am sorry."

"So am I," said the Doyenne.

The girl stood.

From somewhere, as she left, she seemed to hear the whimpering of a china dog.

Beyond the neat hedgerows of the garden and down a purposfully irregular slope ran the unpaved pathway which wandered, like an impulsive river, through neck- tickling stiaits of unkempt foisythia, past high islands of mobbed sumac, and by the shivering branches, like waves, of an occasional ginkgo, wagging at the overhead gulls, while dreaming of the high-flying Archaeopteryx about to break through its heart in a dive, and perhaps a thousand feet of twistings are requiied to negotiate the 102.

two hundred feet of planned wilderness that separates the gardens of the Hall of Sleep from the artificial ruins which occupy a full, hilly acre, dotted here and there by incipient Jungles of lilac and the occasional bell of a great willow-which momentarily conceal, and then guide the eye on toward broken pediments, smashed friezes, half-standing, shred-topped columns, then fallen columns, then faceless, handless statues, and finally, seem- ingly random heaps of rubble which lay amid these things; here, the path over which they moved then forms a delta and promptly loses itself where the tides of Time chafe away the memento mori quality that the ruins first seem to spell, acting as a temporal entasis and in the eye of the beholding. Setman, so that he can look upon it all and say, "I am the older than this," and his companion can reply, "We will pa.s.s again some year and this too, will be gone,"even though she did not 76 say it this time) feeling happier by feeling the less mortal by so doing; and crossing through the rubble, as they did, to a place where barbarously ruined Pan grins from inside the ring of a dry fountain, a new path is to be lo- cated, this time an unplanned and only recently formed way, where the gra.s.s is yellowed underfoot and the walkers must go single file because it leads them through a place of briars, until they reach the old breakwall over which they generally climb like commandos in order to gain access to a quarter mile strand of coved and de- serted beach, where the sand is not quite so clean as the beaches of the town-which are generally sifted every- third day-but where the shade is as intense, in its own way, as the sunlight, and there are flat rocks offsh.o.r.e for meditation.

"You're getting lazy," he commented, kicking off his shoes and digging his toes into the cool sand. "You didn't climb over."

"I'm getting lazy," she agreed.

103.

They threw off their robes and walked to the water's edge.

"Don't push!"

"Come on. I'll race you to the rocks."

For once he won.

Loafing in the lap of the Atlantic, they could have been any two bathers in any place, in any time.

"1 could stay here forever."

"It gets cold nights, and if there's a bad storm you might catch something or get washed away."

"I meant," she amended, "if it could always be like this." - " 'Verweile doch, du hist so schon,'" he reminded.

"Faust lost a bet that way, remember? So would a Sleeper.

Unger's got me reading again-Hey! What's the matter?"

"Nothing!"

"There's something wrong, little girl. Even I can telL"

"So what if there is?"

"So a lot, that's what. Tell me."

Her hand bridged the narrow channel between their rocks and found his. He rolled onto his side and stared -at her satin-wet hair and her stuck-together eyelashes, the dimpled deserts of her cheeks, and the bloodied oasis of her mouth. She squeezed his hand.

"Let's stay here forever-despite the chill, and being washed away."

77 "You are indicating that-?"

"We could get off at this stop."

"I suppose. But-"

"But you like it-now? You like the big charade?"

He looked away.

"I think you were right," she told him, "that night- many years ago."

"What night?"

"The night you said it was all a Joke-that we are the last people alive on Earth, performing before machines 104.

operated by inhuman creatures who watch us for in- comprehensible purposes. What are we but wave-pat- terns of an oscilloscope? I'm sick of being an object of contemplation!" ~ He continued to stare into the sea.

"I'm rather fond of the Set now," he finally responded.

"At first I was ambivalent toward it. But a few weeks- years-ago I visited a place where I used to work. It was-different. Bigger. Better run. But more than that, actually. It wasn't just that it was filled with things I couldn't have guessed at fifty or sixty years ago. I had an odd feeling while I was there. I was with a little chatter- box of a Processing director named Teng, and he was yammering away worse than Unger, and I was just staring at all those tandem-tanks and tiers of machinery that had grown up inside the sh.e.l.l of that first old build- ing-sort of like inside a womb-and I suddenly felt that someday something was going to be born, born out of steel and plastic and dancing electrons, in such a stainless, sunless place-and that something would be so fine that I would want to be there to see it. I couldn't dignify it by calling it a mystical experience or anything like that. It was just sort of a feeling I had. But if that moment could stay forever . . . Anyhow, the Set is my ticket to a performance I'd like to see."

"Darling," she began, "it is antic.i.p.ation and recollection that fill the heart-never the sensation of the moment."

"Perhaps you are right. ..."

His grip tightened on her hand as the tunnel between their eyes shortened. He leaned across the water and kissed the blood from her mouth.

'"Verweile doch ..."

". . . Du bist so schon"

It was the Party to end all Parties. The surprise an- nouncement of Alvin Moore and Leota Mathilde Mason 105.

78 struck the Christmas Eve gathering of the Set as just the thing for the season. After an extensive dinner and the exchange of bright and costly trifles the lights were dimmer. The giant Christmas tree atop the transparent penthouse blazed like a compressed galaxy through the droplets of melted snow on the ceilingpane.

It was nine by all the clocks of London.

"Married on Christmas, divorced on Twelfth Night,"