This Perfect Day Part 20

He smiled at the members. They smiled back. She nodded at them.

"This is my second transfer this year," he said to her.

They rode down more escalators, and stepped onto the one leading to the lobby. Three members, two with telecomps, stood talking by the scanner at one of the doors. "No tricks now," he said.

They rode down, reflected at a distance in dark-outside gla.s.s. The members kept talking. One of them put his telecomp on the floor.

They stepped off the escalator. "Wait a minute, Anna," he said. She stopped and faced him. "I've got an eyelash in my eye," he said. "Do you have a tissue?"

She reached into her pocket and shook her head.

He found one under the gun and took it out and gave it to her. He stood facing the members and held his eye wide open, his other hand in his pocket again. She held the tissue to his eye. She was still trembling. "It's only an eyelash," he said. "Nothing to be nervous about."

Beyond her the member had picked up his telecomp and the three were shaking hands and kissing. The two with telecomps touched the scanner. Yes, it winked, yes. They went out. The third member came toward them, a man in his twenties.

Chip moved Lilac's hand away. "That's it," he said, blinking. "Thanks, sister."

"Can I be of help?" the member asked. "I'm a 101."

"No, thanks, it was just an eyelash," Chip said. Lilac moved. Chip looked at her. She put the tissue in her pocket.

The member, glancing at the kit, said, "Have a good trip."

"Thanks," Chip said. "Good night."

"Good night," the member said, smiling at them.

"Good night," Lilac said.

They went toward the doors and saw in them the reflection of the member stepping onto an upgoing escalator. "I'm going to lean close to the scanner," Chip said. "Touch the side of it, not the plate."

They went outside. "Please, Li," Lilac said, "for the sake of the Family, let's go back in and go up to the medicenter."

"Be quiet," he said.

They turned into the pa.s.sageway between the building and the next one. The darkness grew deeper and he took out his flashlight.

"What are you going to do to me?" she asked.

"Nothing," he said, "unless you try to trick me again."

"Then what do you want me for?" she asked.

He didn't answer.

There was a scanner at the cross-pa.s.sage behind the buildings. Lilac's hand went up; Chip said, "No!" They pa.s.sed it without touching, and Lilac made a distressed sound and said under her breath, "Terrible!"

The bikes were leaning against the wall where he had left them. His blanket-wrapped kit was in the basket of one, with cakes and drink containers squeezed in with it. A blanket was draped over the basket of the other; he put Lilac's kit down into it and closed the blanket around it, tucking it snugly. "Get on," he said, holding the bike upright for her.

She got on and held the handlebars.

"We'll go straight along between the buildings to the East Road," he said. "Don't turn or stop or gear up unless I tell you to."

He got astride the other bike. He pushed the flashlight down into the side of the basket, with the light shining out through the mesh at the pavement ahead.

"All right, let's go," he said.

They pedaled side by side down the straight pa.s.sage that was all darkness except for columns of lesser darkness between buildings, and far above a narrow strip of stars, and far ahead the pale blue spark of a single walkway light.

"Gear up a little," he said.

They rode faster.

"When are you due for your next treatment?" he asked.

She was silent, and then said, "Marx eighth."

Two weeks, he thought. Christ and Wei, why couldn't it have been tomorrow or the next day? Well, it could have been worse; it could have been four weeks.

"Will I be able to get it?" she asked.

There was no point in disturbing her more than he had already. "Maybe," he said. "We'll see."

He had intended to go a short distance every day, during the free hour when cyclists would attract no attention. They would go from parkland to parkland, pa.s.sing one city or perhaps two, and make their way by small steps to '12082 on Afr's north coast, the city nearest Majorca.

That first day, though, in the parkland north of '14509, he changed his mind. Finding a hiding place was harder than he expected; not until long after sunrise-around eight o'clock, he guessed-were they settled under a rock-ledge canopy fronted by a thicket of saplings whose gaps he had filled with cut branches. Soon after, they heard a copter's hum; it pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed above them while he pointed the gun at Lilac and she sat motionless, watching him, a half-eaten cake in her hands. At midday they heard branches cracking, leaves slashing, and a voice no more than twenty meters away. It spoke unintelligibly, in the slow flat way one addressed a telephone or a voice-input telecomp.

Either Lilac's desk-drawer message had been found or, more likely, Uni had put together his disappearance, her disappearance, and two missing bicycles. So he changed his mind and decided that having been looked for and missed, they would stay where they were all week and ride on Sunday. They would make a sixty- or seventy-kilometer hop-not directly to the north but to the northeast-then settle and hide for another week. Four or five Sundays would bring them in a curving path to '12082, and each Sunday Lilac would be more herself and less Anna SG, more helpful or at least less anxious to see him "helped."

Now, though, she was Anna SG. He tied and gagged her with blanket strips and slept with the gun at his hand till the sun went down. In the middle of the night he tied and gagged her again, and carried away his bike. He came back in a few hours with cakes and drinks and two more blankets, towels and toilet paper, a "wrist.w.a.tch" that had already stopped ticking, and two Francais books. She was lying awake where he had left her, her eyes anxious and pitying. Held captive by a sick member, she suffered his abuses forgivingly. She was sorry for him.

But in daylight she looked at him with revulsion. He touched his cheek and felt two days' stubble. Smiling, slightly embarra.s.sed, he said, "I haven't had a treatment in almost a year."

She lowered her head and put a hand over her eyes. "You've made yourself into an animal," she said.

"That's what we are, really," he said. "Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei made us into something dead and unnatural."

She turned away when he began to shave, but she glanced over her shoulder, glanced again, and then turned and watched distastefully. "Don't you cut your skin?" she asked.

"I did in the beginning," he said, pressing taut his cheek and working the razor easily, watching it in the side of his flashlight propped on a stone. "I had to keep my hand at my face for days."

"Do you always use tea?" she asked.

He laughed. "No," he said. "It's a subst.i.tute for water. Tonight I'm going to go looking for a pond or a stream."

"How often do you-do that?" she asked.

"Every day," he said. "I missed yesterday. It's a nuisance, but it's only for a few more weeks. At least I hope so."

"What do you mean?" she said.

He said nothing, kept shaving.

She turned away.

He read one of the Francais books, about the causes of a war that had lasted thirty years. Lilac slept, and then she sat on a blanket and looked at him and at the trees and at the sky.

"Do you want me to teach you this language?" he asked.

"What for?" she said.

"Once you wanted to learn it," he said. "Do you remember? I gave you lists of words."

"Yes," she said, "I remember. I learned them, but I've forgotten them. I'm well now; what would I want to learn it now for?"

He did calisthenics and made her do them too, so that they would be ready for Sunday's long ride. She followed his directions unprotestingly.

That night he found, not a stream, but a concrete-banked irrigation channel about two meters wide. He bathed in its slow-flowing water, then brought filled drink containers back to the hiding place and woke Lilac and untied her. He led her through the trees and stood and watched while she bathed. Her wet body glistened in the faint light of the quarter moon.

He helped her up onto the bank, handed her a towel, and stayed close to her while she dried herself. "Do you know why I'm doing this?" he asked her.

She looked at him.

"Because I love you," he said.

"Then let me go," she said.

He shook his head.

"Then how can you say you love me?"

"I do," he said.

She bent over and dried her legs. "Do you want me to get sick again?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Then you hate me," she said, "you don't love me." She stood up straight.

He took her arm, cool and moist, smooth. "Lilac," he said.

"Anna."

He tried to kiss her lips but she turned her head and drew away. He kissed her cheek.

"Now point your gun at me and 'rape' me," she said.

"I won't do that," he said. He let go of her arm.

"I don't know why not," she said, getting into her coveralls. She closed them fumblingly. "Please, Li," she said, "let's go back to the city. I'm sure you can be cured, because if you were really sick, incurably sick, you would 'rape' me. You'd be much less kind than you are."

"Come on," he said, "let's get back to the place."

"Please, Li-" she said.

"Chip," he said. "My name is Chip. Come on." He jerked his head and they started through the trees.

Toward the end of the week she took his pen and the book he wasn't reading and drew pictures on the inside of the book's cover-near-likenesses of Christ and Wei, groups of buildings, her left hand, and a row of shaded crosses and sickles. He looked to make sure she wasn't writing messages that she would try to give to someone on Sunday.

Later he drew a building and showed it to her.

"What is it?" she asked.

"A building," he said.

"No it isn't."

"It is," he said. "They don't all have to be blank and rectangular."

"What are the ovals?"

"Windows."

"I've never seen a building like this one," she said. "Not even in the Pre-U. Where is it?"

"Nowhere," he said. "I made it up."

"Oh," she said. "Then it isn't a building, not really. How can you draw things that aren't real?"

"I'm sick, remember?" he said.

She gave the book back to him, not looking at his eyes. "Don't joke about it," she said.

He hoped-well, didn't hope, but thought it might possibly happen-that Sat.u.r.day night, out of custom or desire or even only memberlike kindness, she would show a willingness for him to come close to her. She didn't, though. She was the same as she had been every other night, sitting silently in the dusk with her arms around her knees, watching the band of purpling sky between the shifting black treetops and the black rock ledge overhead.

"It's Sat.u.r.day night," he said.

"I know," she said.

They were silent for a few moments, and then she said, "I'm not going to be able to have my treatment, am I?"

"No," he said.

"Then I might get pregnant," she said. "I'm not supposed to have children and neither are you."

He wanted to tell her that they were going someplace where Uni's decisions were meaningless, but it was too soon; she might become frightened and unmanageable. "Yes, I suppose you're right," he said.

When he had tied her and covered her, he kissed her cheek. She lay in the darkness and said nothing, and he got up from his knees and went to his own blankets.