This Perfect Day (26 page)

Lilac sank against Chip, coughing water. He ducked his shoulder under her arm and supported her.

The boat came skimming to full-size white closeness—
I.A.
was painted large and green on its hull; it had one rotor—and splatted to a stop with a wave that washed over them. “Hang on!” a member cried, and something flew in the air and splashed beside them: a floating white ring with a rope. Chip grabbed it and the rope sprang taut, pulled by a member, young, yellow-haired. He drew them through the water. “I’m all right,” Lilac said in Chip’s arm. “I’m all right.”

The side of the boat had rungs going up it. Chip pulled Lilac’s coveralls from her hand, bent her fingers around a rung, and put her other hand to the rung above. She climbed. The member, leaning over and stretching, caught her hand and helped her. Chip guided her feet and climbed up after her.

They lay on their backs on warm firm floor under scratchy blankets, hand in hand, panting. Their heads were lifted in turn and a small metal container was pressed to their lips. The liquid in it smelled like Darren Costanza. It burned in their throats, but once it was down it warmed their stomachs surprisingly.

“Alcohol?” Chip said.

“Don’t worry,” the young yellow-haired man said, smiling down at them with normal teeth as he screwed the container onto a flask, “one sip won’t rot your brain.” He was about twenty-five, with a short beard that was yellow too, and normal eyes and skin. A brown belt at his hips held a gun in a brown pocket; he wore a white cloth shirt without sleeves and tan cloth trousers patched with blue that ended at his knees. Putting the flask on a seat, he unfastened the front of his belt. “I’ll get your coveralls,” he said. “Catch your breath.” He put the gun-belt with the flask and climbed over the side of the boat. A splash sounded and the boat swayed.

“At least they’re not all like that other one,” Chip said.

“He has a gun,” Lilac said.

“But he left it here,” Chip said. “If he were—sick, he would have been afraid to.”

They lay silently hand in hand under the scratchy blankets, breathing deeply, looking at the clear blue sky.

The boat tilted and the young man climbed back aboard with their dripping coveralls. His hair, which hadn’t been clipped in a long time, clung to his head in wet rings. “Feeling better?” he asked, smiling at them.

“Yes,” they both said.

He shook the coveralls over the side of the boat. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here in time to keep that lunky away from you,” he said. “Most immigrants come from Eur, so I generally stay to the north. What we need are
two
boats, not one. Or a longer-range spotter.”

“Are you a—policeman?” Chip asked.

“Me?”
The young man smiled. “No,” he said, “I’m with Immigrants’ Assistance. That’s an agency we’ve been generously allowed to set up, to help new immigrants get oriented. And get ashore without being drowned.” He hung the coveralls over the boat’s railing and pulled apart their clinging folds.

Chip raised himself on his elbows. “Does this happen often?” he asked.

“Stealing immigrants’ boats is a popular local pastime,” the young man said. “There are others that are even more fun.”

Chip sat up, and Lilac sat up beside him. The young man faced them, pink sunlight gleaming on his side.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but you haven’t come to any paradise. Four fifths of the island’s population is descended from the families who were here before the Unification or who came here right after; they’re inbred, ignorant, mean, self-satisfied—and they despise immigrants. ‘Steelies,’ they call us. Because of the bracelets. Even after we take them off.”

He took his gun-belt from the seat and put it around his hips.
“We
call
them ‘
lunkies,’” he said, fastening the belt’s buckle. “Only don’t ever say it out loud or you’ll find five or six of them stamping on your ribs. That’s another of their pastimes.”

He looked at them again. “The island is run by a General Costanza,” he said, “with the—”

“That’s who took the boat!” they said. “Darren Costanza!”

“I doubt it,” the young man said, smiling. “The General doesn’t get up this early. Your lunky must have been pulling your leg.”

Chip said, “The
brother-
hater!”

“General Costanza,” the young man said, “has the Church and the Army behind him. There’s very little freedom even for lunkies, and for us there’s virtually none. We have to live in specified areas, ‘Steelytowns,’ and we can’t step outside them without a good reason. We have to show identity cards to every lunky cop, and the only jobs we can get are the lowest, most back-breaking ones.” He took up the flask. “Do you want some more of this?” he asked. “It’s called ‘whiskey.’”

Chip and Lilac shook their heads.

The young man unscrewed the container and poured amber liquid into it. “Let’s see, what have I left out?” he said. “We’re not allowed to own land or weapons. I turn in my gun when I set foot on shore.” He raised the container and looked at them. “Welcome to Liberty,” he said, and drank.

They looked disheartenedly at each other, and at the young man.

“That’s what they call it,” he said. “Liberty “

“We thought they would welcome newcomers,” Chip said. “To help keep the Family away.”

The young man, screwing the container back onto the flask, said, “Nobody comes here except two or three immigrants a month. The last time the Family tried to treat the lunkies was back when there were five computers. Since Uni went into operation not one attempt has been made.”

“Why not?” Lilac asked.

The young man looked at them. “Nobody knows,” he said. “There are different theories. The lunkies think that either ‘God’ is protecting them or the Family is afraid of the Army, a bunch of drunken incapable louts. Immigrants think—well, some of them think that the island is so depleted that treating everyone on it simply isn’t worth Uni’s while.”

“And others think—” Chip said.

The young man turned away and put the flask on a shelf below the boat’s controls. He sat down on the seat and turned to face them. “Others,” he said, “and I’m one of them, think that Uni is
using
the island,
and
the lunkies, and
all
the hidden islands all over the world.”

“
Using
them?” Chip said, and Lilac said, “How?”

“As prisons for
us,”
the young man said.

They looked at him.

“Why is there always a boat on the beach?” he asked. “
Always,
in Eur and in Afr—an old boat that’s still good enough to get here. And why are there those handy patched-up maps in museums? Wouldn’t it be easier to make
fake ones
with the islands
really
omitted?”

They stared at him.

“What do you do,” he said, looking at them intently, “when you’re programming a computer to maintain a perfectly efficient, perfectly stable, perfectly cooperative society? How do you allow for biological freaks, ‘incurables,’ possible troublemakers?”

They said nothing, staring at him.

He leaned closer to them. “You leave a few ‘un-unified’ islands all around the world,” he said. “You leave maps in museums and boats on beaches. The computer doesn’t have to weed out your bad ones;
they do the weeding themselves.
They wiggle their way happily into the nearest isolation ward, and
lunkies
are waiting, with a General Costanza in charge, to take their boats, jam them into Steelytowns, and keep them helpless and harmless—in ways that high-minded disciples of Christ, Marx, Wood, and Wei would never
dream
of stooping to.”

“It can’t
be,”
Lilac said.

“A lot of us think it can,” the young man said.

Chip said, “Uni
let us
come here?”

“No,” Lilac said. “It’s too—twisted.”

The young man looked at her, looked at Chip.

Chip said, “I thought I was being so fighting clever!”

“So did I,” the young man said, sitting back. “I know just how you feel.”

“No, it can’t be,” Lilac said.

There was silence for a moment, and then the young man said, “I’ll take you in now. I.A. will take off your bracelets and get your registered and lend you twenty-five bucks to get started.” He smiled. “As bad as it is,” he said, “it’s better than being with the Family. Cloth is more comfortable than paplon —really—and even a rotten fig tastes better than totalcakes. You can have children, a drink, a cigarette—a couple of rooms if you work hard. Some steelies even get rich—entertainers, mostly. If you ‘sir’ the lunkies and stay in Steelytown, it’s all right. No scanners, no advisers, and not one ‘Life of Marx’ in a whole year’s TV.”

Lilac smiled. Chip smiled too.

“Put the coveralls on,” the young man said. “Lunkies are horrified by nakedness. It’s ‘ungodly.’” He turned to the boat’s controls.

They put aside the blankets and got into their moist coveralls, then stood behind the young man as he drove the boat toward the island. It spread out green and gold in the radiance of the just-risen sun, crested with mountains and dotted with bits of white, yellow, pink, pale blue.

“It’s beautiful,” Lilac said determinedly.

Chip, with his arm about her shoulders, looked ahead with narrowed eyes and said nothing.

T
HEY LIVED IN A CITY
called Pollensa, in half a room in a cracked and crumbling Steelytown building with intermittent power and brown water. They had a mattress and a table and a chair, and a box for their clothing that they used as a second chair. The people in the other half of the room, the Newmans—a man and woman in their forties with a nine-year-old daughter—let them use their stove and TV and a shelf in the “fridge” where they stored their food. It was the Newmans’ room; Chip and Lilac paid four dollars a week for their half of it.

They earned nine dollars and twenty cents a week between them. Chip worked in an iron mine, loading ore into carts with a crew of other immigrants alongside an automatic loader that stood motionless and dusty, unrepairable. Lilac worked in a clothing factory, attaching fasteners to shirts. There too a machine stood motionless, furred with lint.

Their nine dollars and twenty cents paid for the week’s rent and food and railfare, a few cigarettes, and a newspaper called the
Liberty Immigrant.
They saved fifty cents toward clothing replacement and emergencies that might arise, and gave fifty cents to Immigrants’ Assistance as partial repayment of the twenty-five-dollar loan they had been given on their arrival. They ate bread and fish and potatoes and figs. At first these foods gave them cramps and constipation, but they soon came to like them, to relish the different tastes and consistencies. They looked forward to meals, although the preparation and the cleaning up afterward became a bother.

Their bodies changed. Lilac’s bled for a few days, which the Newmans assured them was natural in untreated women, and it grew more rounded and supple as her hair grew longer. Chip’s body hardened and strengthened from his work in the mine. His beard grew out black and straight, and he trimmed it once a week with the Newmans’ scissors.

They had been given names by a clerk at the Immigration Bureau. Chip was named Eiko Newmark, and Lilac, Grace Newbridge. Later, when they married—with no application to Uni, but with forms and a fee and vows to “God”—Lilac’s name was changed to Grace Newmark. They still called themselves Chip and Lilac, however.

They got used to handling coins and dealing with shopkeepers, and to traveling on Pollensa’s rundown overcrowded monorail. They learned how to sidestep natives and avoid offending them; they memorized the Vow of Loyalty and saluted Liberty’s red-and-yellow flag. They knocked on doors before opening them, said
Wednesday
instead of Woodsday,
March
instead of Marx. They reminded themselves that
fight
and
hate
were acceptable words but
fuck
was a “dirty” one.

Hassan Newman drank a great deal of whiskey. Soon after coming home from his job—in the island’s largest furniture factory—he would be playing loud games with Gigi, his daughter, and fumbling his way through the room’s dividing curtain with a bottle clutched in his three-fingered saw-damaged hand. “Come on, you sad steelies,” he would say, “where the hate are your glasses? Come on, have a little cheer.” Chip and Lilac drank with him a few times, but they found that whiskey made them confused and clumsy and they usually declined his offer. “Come on,” he said one evening. “I know I’m the landlord, but I’m not exactly a lunky, am I? Or what is it? Do you think I’ll expect you to receep—to re
cip
rocate? I know you like to watch the pennies.”

“It’s not that,” Chip said.

“Then what is it?” Hassan asked. He swayed and steadied himself.

Chip didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he said, “Well, what’s the point in getting away from treatments if you’re going to dull yourself with whiskey? You might as well be back in the Family.”

“Oh,” Hassan said. “Oh sure, I get you.” He looked angrily at them, a broad, curly-bearded, bloodshot-eyed man. “Just wait,” he said. “Wait till you’ve been here a little longer. Just wait till you’ve been here a little longer, that’s all.” He turned around and groped his way through the curtain, and they heard him muttering, and his wife, Ria, speaking placatingly.

Almost everyone in the building seemed to drink as much whiskey as Hassan did. Loud voices, happy or angry, sounded through the walls at all hours of the night. The elevator and the hallways smelled of whiskey, and of fish, and of sweet perfumes that people used against the whiskey and fish smells.

Most evenings, after they had finished whatever cleaning had to be done, Chip and Lilac either went up to the roof for some fresh air or sat at their table reading the
Immigrant
or books they had found on the monorail or borrowed from a small collection at Immigrants’ Assistance. Sometimes they watched TV with the Newmans—plays about foolish misunderstandings in native families, with frequent stops for announcements about different makes of cigarettes and disinfectants. Occasionally there were speeches by General Costanza or the head of the Church, Pope Clement—disquieting speeches about shortages of food and space and resources, for which immigrants alone weren’t to be blamed. Hassan, belligerent with whiskey, usually switched them off before they were over; Liberty TV, unlike the Family’s, could be switched on and off at one’s choosing.