A Creed for the Third Millennium (3 page)

Mary, his nearest, and his only sister. A
spinster still at thirty-one years of age. So very like Mama to look at, and yet
— not beautiful at all. She's out of whack, thought Dr Christian. She has always
been out of whack. Maybe having a genuinely beautiful mother does that to a
girl? Look at Mama and then look at Mary, and it's like gazing at Mama's
reflection in a subtly warped mirror. A sour sharp enclosed girl, Mary. Always
had been, probably always would be too. And yet with his patients (she acted as
the clinic secretary) she was wonderfully kind and gentle, nothing was too much
trouble.

James was properly the middle child,
since Mary was the only girl, and therefore had the distinction of her sex to
free her from this handicap. He too looked like Mama, but in Mary's way, blurred
and indistinct and neutral. His wife Miriam was a strapping zestful girl stuffed
with energy and brisk, cheery pragmatism; the group's occupational therapist,
she was a tower of strength in the clinic and a happy match for James, all
considered.

Andrew was the beauty, fitting in the
youngest. Mama in a masculine mould, fair as an angel and hard as a rock. Why
then was he so self-effacing? His wife Martha, the clinic psychological testing
technician, was seven years younger than he, and such a mouse that Mouse was her
nickname. Coloured like a mouse, sweetly pretty like a mouse, timid like a
mouse, twitchy like a mouse. Sometimes in one of his more whimsical moods Joshua Christian would
imagine himself not a cat but a gigantic pair of hands, poised to deliver the
clap that would stun the girl dead on the spot.

'Lamb shanks, Mama? How absolutely
super!' Miriam was English, very upper-crust in speech and manner. She rather
awed the Christians, for not only was she accredited the best occupational
therapist in the world, she was also a very gifted linguist. Her most
oft-repeated jest was to the effect that she spoke not only French, German,
Italian, Spanish, Russian and Greek, but American as well, and so much did the
Christians love and esteem her that they never had the heart to tell her how
thin that particular joke had worn.

Mama had done it all, of course. Mama had
tailor-made this remarkably efficient and self-sufficient little group to
complement him, her eldest and her most beloved. Whatever he might have chosen
to do for his life's work, he knew Mama would have driven James and Andrew and
Mary to espouse it as well, so that they might help him. The measure of her
success in brainwashing her younger children to this end could best be seen in
James's and Andrew's choice of wives; they had both married women superlatively
qualified to join the family business and family group. The clinic had lacked an
occupational therapist, therefore James married one. The clinic had needed a
psychological testing technician, so Andrew married one. By nature both women
were genuinely content to take a back seat to Mama and content that their
husbands took a back seat to Joshua. And Mary his sister had never once fought
against her rather menial office destiny, even after Joshua had gone to her many
years ago and offered to fight the battle with Mama on her behalf.

Had any symptoms of discontent ever shown
themselves, Dr Christian would have ridden roughshod over Mama for the sake of these people he
always felt more as his children than his siblings; much though he loved and
admired Mama, he knew her shortcomings well enough to recognize that she was not
wise, not farsighted. But his family had defeated him without a battle; neither
friction nor faction had ever marred the unmistakably joyous satisfaction the
Christians got out of their work and each other. So, bewildered but grateful,
Joshua Christian had accepted the position Mama cut out of his eminently
suitable cloth, of family head and family-business head.

They sat down to eat in the dining room,
Mama at the foot of the elliptical lacquer table and therefore closest to the
kitchen door, Joshua at the head of the table gazing at her, Mary and James and
Miriam down one side, and Andrew and Martha down the other. Mama had long ago
issued the dictum that no shop might be talked until the coffee and cognac were
served after the meal itself was concluded, a rule they all respected
scrupulously; but it did tend to leave large chunks of silence hovering while
the food was consumed, for everyone save Mama worked next door in the clinic and
saw little of any environment beyond 1045 and 1047 Oak Street. Positivity was
the keynote of their code, which meant that for most of the time any discussion
of world or national or state or urban affairs was impossible, too depressing
unless the day had seen some happy milestone reached on the long road back to
World Human Population Energy Equilibrium, always referred to as
whoopee.

They all ate well, for the food was as
good on the tongue as it was on the eyes; Mama was a culinary artist, and had
reared her small flock to appreciate what finer things of life were still
readily available. Her hardest battle in this respect had been Joshua, who had
always shown a distressing tendency to indifference about his own bodily needs,
let alone comforts and indulgences. Not that he was masochistic, or even
monastic; he was just not terribly interested.

Coffee and cognac were dispensed in the
living room, a big apartment which communicated with the dining room behind it
through a wide and graceful archway. And it was here, sitting in a three-quarter
circle about a round palest-pink lacquer coffee table, that the full effect of
the first floor of 1047 Oak Street could truly be appreciated.

The walls were satin-white, and of the
window apertures there was no sign beyond the thinnest of dark lines bordering
the sheets of wallboard cunningly inserted over the windows like covers into
manholes; the architraves had been entirely removed, reminders of what lay
sightless between them for half of each year. The floor was tiled in white
plasticeramic, and this was covered in the sitting areas by white synthetic
replicas of sheepskin rugs; everyone agreed that real skins would have been much
nicer, but with all the water that got spilled each Sunday, real sheepskins
would have been too liable to rot. Upholstered in palest pinks and greens, the
sofas and chairs reflected the same colours in the lacquer tables.

And everywhere there were plants, tubs
and pots and baskets of lushly healthy plants, mostly green, but red and pink
too, and purple. They stood on white pedestals of differing heights, trailing
down in foaming cascades, sticking stiffly up like bayonets, branching
delicately sideways and all around. And every leaf, frond, blade, bract and
tendril shimmered in the brilliant white light diffused through a milky
plexiglass ceiling. Ferns, palms, bromeliads, proteas, orchids, shrubs, vines,
cacti, creepers, bulbs and corms and tubers and rhizomes, bonsaied trees. In the
spring much of the growth burst into flower, long spikes of cymbidium orchids
arching between spindles of hyacinth and clusters of daffodils,
twenty different sorts of begonia massed with blooms, cyclamens and gloxinias
and African violets; a mimosa in a tub smothered its entire eight feet of
branching height in tiny powdery golden balls; and the house was redolent with
the perfume of orange blossom, Sweet Alice, stephanotis, jasmine and gardenia.
In the summer the hibiscus began to flower and continued through the autumn into
early winter, joined by a copper-pink bougainvillaea that rioted across a
trellis on the living room's front wall. Only in the depths of winter were the
flowering things quiescent, but then they continued glossy and green amid the
more colourful leaves of the nonflowering plants that seemed to feel they had no
need of further glory.

The air was always sweet. Dr Christian's
plants were half of a symbiotic respiratory relationship, the human beings its
other half; carbon dioxide fed the plants, oxygen the human beings, and each
inhaled what the other exhaled. This bottom floor was always many degrees warmer
than the bedroom floors higher up, for the plants produced heat, as did the
ostensibly cool fluorescent lighting that was never turned off. To this floor
had gone almost all their precious ration of electricity, and literally all
their minute allowance of gas for heating, hoarded for the stretches when it was
so cold only radiant energy could keep the plants alive. On this floor the
family lived all of its waking leisure hours; the two upper floors were used for
actual slumber, nothing else.

Each Sunday the entire Christian clan
devoted its day to the plants, watering and feeding, washing and pruning out
dead growth, anointing wounds and eliminating pests. They all enjoyed this
change of pace enormously, not inclined to call it a chore when the rewards were
there all around them. On Sundays too the hardier plants which had spent a week
in the clinic next door were carried back to the bottom floor of 1047, and other plants were carried to
the clinic for temporary duty.

This day had constituted the most
distasteful day of Dr Joshua Christian's month; it was the day when all the
forms had to be filled out and mailed to Holloman and Hartford and Washington to
satisfy the bureaucratic appetite for paper, paper, ever more paper; the day all
the bills had to be paid and the books brought up to date. Normally he didn't
visit the clinic on what he called his Day of Atonement, but the Pat-Pat crisis
had come deliriously late in it, and now he wanted to see how the others felt
about the events which had occurred in Pat-Pat Five's living room.

Mama gave him his coffee, James his
brandy balloon; food was something Dr Christian could take or leave, even Mama's
food, but there was no doubt, he thought, eyes closed to savour the fumes of
Bisquit Napoleon, that the combination of truly excellent coffee and cognac
warmed a man from belly button clear through to backbone. The best prelude to
bed in these times, which was probably why consumption of strong spirits after
meals had gone up in recent years, where pre-dinner drinking had
declined.

Their great-grandfather and their
grandfather on the paternal side had both been wholesalers in French wines and
brandies, and drinkers of them too, so in those times imposing cellars had been
laid down. Of course with the passing of the years the wines had long perished,
especially after it became impossible to keep bottles at the cool constant
temperature they needed; a cellar that was too cold had just as deleterious
effect as a cupboard that was too hot. But the brandies had survived, and though
the glaciers were creeping down across Canada and Russia and Scandinavia and
Siberia at a heart-chilling rate, France in most years still managed to produce
cognac and armagnac, so the Christian stocks were kept replenished. The family did not drink very much
wine these days; cognac was better value.

'Our Patti Pat-Pat did very well today,'
he said.

'Bloody well!' said Miriam
proudly.

'I discharged her from the
clinic'

'Good! Did she tell you she and her
husband were going to apply for relocation? Apparently Texas A & M has been
after Bob Fane for a long while, but he's hung on at Chubb for the usual reasons
— rats deserting sinking ships, fear of the unknown, once a Chubber always a
Chubber, Yankee mistrust of any part of the country other than New England — and
Patti's horror of being the first Pat-Pat to leave Holloman and thus break up
the group.' This came from Andrew, spoken in measured tones which sat oddly on
his youth and beauty.

'The Pat-Pats fascinate me,' said James.
'It's rare outside of blood ties for an association of women to take precedence
even over marriages. Thank God one of them has finally managed to stand outside
herself successfully enough to see the group for what it is. And permanent
relocation is the perfect way to break free. I'm surprised a husband or two
hasn't thought of relocation as a way out of the Pat-Pat dilemma long
since.'

'Relocation is a very big step,' said
Mary heavily. 'I don't blame anyone for hesitating. And these are all Chubbers,
tenured and entrenched at that'

Dr Christian refused to be sidetracked,
so he ignored James and Mary, homing in on Andrew's news. 'No, Drew, she didn't
tell me they'd applied for relocation. Good for her! It's high time she put the
needs and welfare of her family ahead of the Pat-Pats. Did she admit she'd been
afraid of being the one to break up the Pat-Pats?'

'Yes. Honestly and openly. But she'll be
all right now. I'm glad Margaret Kelly's news about her second-child approval
stripped off a few masks. What Patti saw gave her the courage to make up
her mind — and made her see that the Pat-Pat league should have dissolved
naturally when they all left college, if not high school'

They were only trying to hang on to their
youth,' said Mary. 'It's not much fun these days to be an adult.'

'I
do
like Patti Fane!' said
Martha, contributing an unexpected mite.

Dr Christian leaned forward, smiling into
the wide grey eyes he compelled to meet his; since early childhood he had been
able to marshal his will, bend it upon an unsuspecting person, and literally
force that person to meet his gaze. 'Oh, my Mouse! Don't you like all our
patients?' he asked reproachfully.

Pinned helplessly and hopelessly by his
eyes, she blushed painfully. 'Oh, yes! Of course!' she gasped.

'Stop teasing the Mouse, Josh!' snapped
Mary, always ready to spring to Martha's defence.

'Fancy none of those artificial sisters
admitting to any of the others that she'd been applying to the SCB each year,'
mused James. 'Just goes to show how furtively women approach the whole problem
of the SCB.'