Dayworld (24 page)

He felt the weight of the gun in his handbag. Though he had fallen so completely into today’s persona, he had automatically transferred the weapon to Ohm’s bag. Its presence reassured him, though not much. If Mudge had something bad in mind for him, he would have taken the gun from the bag. But then Mudge did not know much about him, and whoever had sent Mudge would not have told him to disarm Ohm. That would have warned Ohm that the councillors did not want him just to talk to.

I’m really getting suspicious, he told himself. However, I have good reason to be so. I may be a very grave danger to the family.

“Don’t get out from under the tree,” Mudge said. “Stay out of the clear area.”

Charlie had been about to step into the sunshine between the oak trees along the curb and the buildings on the east side of the sidewalk. He said, “Sorry.”

Eventually, though, they would have to leave the leafy roof and venture out where the sky-eyes could see them. These would record that two men in such-and-such colors and shapes of hats and of kilts had gone under the shield of the trees at such-and-such a point and had emerged at such-and-such a point. This would mean nothing, of course, unless the organics had a reason to track the two men.

Mudge halted when they got to the corner of Womanway and Waverly Place. He looked around—for what, Ohm did not know—and then said, “Wait a minute, then follow me.” Ohm watched him pull a short plastic-wrapped stick from his bag. He pressed on its butt, and a parasol expanded. Holding it above his head, Mudge walked across the sidewalk and into the GI food store at the corner. Mudge should have brought along a parasol large enough to shield both of them. Then, if they escaped the side-angle sky-eye, the vertical one would have recorded only a parasol under which walked one or two men or women or a mixed couple.

Of course, if the organics were to study the recording, they would observe that a parasol had emerged from under cover where no parasol had entered. No, they could not be sure. At least a dozen parasol bearers had gone under the branches or were standing around. Four of these parasols were the same yellow as Mudge’s. And so was the folded parasol slapped into Ohm’s hand by a woman who walked on casually as if she were not part of some relay. She, too, held a yellow parasol over her head.

Charlie unfolded the parasol and started toward the store but had to stop when a man stepped in front of him. The man thrust his teddy bear at Ohm, said, “Take it!” and strolled on. He stopped, however, a few paces away and leaned against a news-strip post. Charlie noted that the man had the same shape and color of hat and color of kilt as his. A man his build and with similar clothes and minus a teddy bear would walk out from under the cover of the leaves. Unless the organics computer-analyzed the man’s gait, they would think that he was the same as the teddy-bearless man who had gone under the trees.

In two minutes, he had seen more immers than at any one time previous.

Charlie Ohm went into the store and folded the parasol. Mudge, standing near the rear of the store, turned and went into the P & S. Besides Mudge and himself, there were five men and two women there. A medium-sized man with very broad shoulders handed Mudge and Ohm a ball of plastic clothing. He hurried out. Mudge said, softly, “Go into a stall and change.”

A few minutes later, Mudge and Ohm strolled out of the store. Mudge wore a big-brimmed scarlet hat and a green kilt. Ohm, a few paces behind Mudge, wore a black sombrero with crimson feathers and a green kilt. He followed Mudge up the escalator to the pedestrian bridge across Womanway, went across the bridge, and down the escalator to Waverly Place. They walked west until they came to Fifth Avenue, where they turned north. Ohm scanned Washington Square, which was to his left, but he did not see Yankev Gril. The man could be playing chess somewhere deeper in the square. He could have stayed home because of the heat. Most probably, he had been picked up by the organics. Ohm was curious about the man’s motives for daybreaking, though not as curious as Jeff Caird would have been.

Mudge crossed the bridge in front of the square building called the Washington Mews (the Mews had long been gone). Ohm followed him to the west side of Fifth. As he did so, he recalled that Panthea Snick now had an apartment in the Mews building. She must be out in this area now, looking for him. Perhaps. The Friday organics might have had time to run Repp’s ID through the data bank and then have passed on the findings to Saturday. If Friday had not done this, Saturday would have.

Which meant one of two actions. One, the Saturday organics would be looking for a daybreaker resembling him, an ordinary, run-of-the-assembly-line breaker. Or, two, they might have tried to match Repp’s ID with similar IDs from all of the days. There would have been some delay before the organics could get permission from the North American Superorganic Council for Saturday. But there had been enough time for that. The hounds could know all and be on his scent.

If the latter had happened, what could he do? What had the immer council planned for him?

Mudge walked north on Fifth under the trees. Ohm followed him for a few paces, then stopped. The building on his left was one of the older ones, built before the ship-shape craze. It housed, on Saturday, anyway, Orthodox Jews who used the building gymnasium as a synagogue, worshiping their god amid the odor of sweat socks and sweat shirts. A man was looking out of a second-story window. Yankev Gril.

The strong handsome face appeared only for a minute. Its expression changed subtly, but Ohm could not read it. Was it a sudden but suppressed recognition of him? Not of Charlie Ohm but of Jim Dunski, who had stood for a while by the table in Washington Square and watched Gril play chess? Or was it just suspicion that Ohm might be an organic looking for him?

Whatever it was, Gril was certainly taking chances by being in that building. It would be one of the first places the organics would search. However, Gril might have moved into it after the search. Or he might just be visiting, perhaps to take part in a religious ceremony.

Bob Tingle, the data banker, had ascertained that there were only approximately half a million Orthodox Jews and two million of the Reformed in all of the seven days. The rest had been absorbed, their identity diffused in the Gentile society. Ohm himself had a Jewish great-grandmother, though she was Jewish by courtesy only. She had not practiced the religion.

The government had no public official policy against Jews. It professed toleration of all religions, but it did push a subtle form of persecution of Jews. It was unlawful for parents to arrange marriages of their children or to use any form of coercion to ensure that the children married within the faith. Since it was also forbidden for any group to claim superiority to any other group for religious reasons, the Jews were not allowed to state in words or in writing that they were “the chosen of God.”

That would be antisocial and nonegalitarian. Orthodox males also had to delete from their morning prayer their thanks to God that they were not born as women. That attitude was even more antisocial and nonegalitarian.

All of the sacred or revered writings of the Jews were legally available only in recordings. These had been censored, though not heavily, and interspersed frequently with comments by the officials of the Bureau of Religious Freedom.

For the same reasons, Christians were forbidden to claim that Jesus was the Son of God except in the sense that all Homo sapiens were the children of God. Who, the government said, did not exist. The New Testament was also lightly censored but heavily annotated by the bureau.

24.

The thirteen-story Tower of Evolution looked like a corkscrew. The bright green threadings of its exterior were supposed to suggest the spiraling of life toward higher evolution. Atop the point were the statues of a man and of a woman holding a baby above her head. The baby had its hands raised as if it was trying to grasp something in the sky.

Charlie Ohm followed Mudge into the vast well-lighted lobby and got in line a few people behind him. While waiting, he looked at the outer edge of the circular lobby. Through the plastic walls, he could see the boiling thick-looking liquid and the holograph images of thunder clouds and lightning striking the waters. This was a representation of the primal soup, Earth’s oceans, billions of years ago. Here, the numerous strips said, was where life had begun, conceived in violent intercourse by the lightning and out of carbon compounds floating in the thick “soup.” The first life forms, very basic indeed, had begun in this simple though splendid rape.

Charlie had no idea why Mudge had gotten into the line of sightseers, but he assumed that Mudge knew what he was doing. He moved forward swiftly, though, and was glad of it. Tourists from all over the world jammed the lobby, and the chatter was, if not deafening, annoying.

Charlie finally got to the credit machine standing on a pole at the entrance to an aisle made by posts connected to chains. He inserted the tip of his ID disc-star into the hole, saw the display, ACCEPTED, and passed on into the aisle. He saw Mudge go by the elevator and step onto the stairway to the second floor. Pressed by a man ahead and a woman behind, a close contact Charlie had to endure, he moved slowly up the steps. At the top, he found Mudge waiting for him.

Charlie glanced at the vast and mostly hollow interior rising twelve stories to the top. He had seen this before at least a dozen times, yet he still felt somewhat awed. The exhibits were in tall and wide recesses in the wall in a staggered ascending arrangement. The visitors traveled on winding escalators that went slanting upward around and around the walls past the sea—and landscapes with the figures of fish, birds, insects, animals, and plants appropriate to the particular geological time. Standing on the escalator, their altitude ever increasing, the visitors would travel from Pre-Cambrian time (plants and animals with soft tissues) to the Cambrian (the backboneless ocean creatures of the first stage of the Paleozoic Era). Then, moving upward diagonally, they would go past the Ordovician (the first primitive fishes). They would continue through the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, oohing and aahing at the life-sized animated dinosaur robots, and they would end up near the top where Homo sapiens of the New Era was the prime exhibit. They would get off into a recess there and take elevators down to the lobby. Along the corkscrew way, they could step off for a while into recesses to one side of the exhibits to view the curiosities.

Mudge did not get onto the escalator. He turned and went into a doorway to a hall. Passing the two men stationed there, Mudge nodded his head at them. This must have been a signal to let Ohm also pass into the hall. It was not more than ten feet long, ending in a wide strip displaying a montage of some of the life forms on the upper levels. Mudge said something before Ohm got near enough to hear him. Ohm started slightly as the strip before him slid up into a slot in the ceiling and a hall-wide strip slid down behind him from a ceiling slot. For a moment, the two were in a box three feet wide.

Mudge stepped through the entrance, which had been hidden by the wall strip, into an elevator cage. He turned and beckoned Ohm to follow him. Ohm got into it. Mudge said, “Up.” The doors closed, and the cage rose swiftly. Evidently, since there was no display of floor numbers, the elevator went to one floor only. When it stopped, Mudge got behind Ohm and gently nudged him out. Charlie did not like it that Mudge, who had been in front of him almost all the way, now was behind him. He could do nothing about it and was not sure that he had any reason to try to do something.

They stepped out, facing south, into a large but low-ceilinged room with unactivated wall strips and a thick expensive-looking green carpet. Mudge told him to move on. Charlie went to the only door, which led west. Here was a curving hallway about ten feet wide with another thick carpet and dead-screen strips. As they walked along it, Charlie Ohm saw doors closed on his right. He doubted that these were tenanted. Whoever lived here had plenty of extra rooms and must, therefore, be a very important person indeed.

At the end of a curving three hundred feet, they stopped before a large door. Mudge inserted an ID tip into the code-hole. A few second later, a voice told them to come in. Mudge stepped behind Ohm again and told him to go in. Ohm pulled the door open and went in. He was in a large anteroom with plenty of comfortable-looking chairs and davenports. Obviously, he was to go into the next room. He opened the door to that and entered a very large room. Its windows gave him a view of the Hudson River and of the forest covering the part of New Jersey that he could see. There was a lot of furniture, though not too much for this room. On the wall, spaced among the activated strips, were paintings in the ancient Chinese manner. Ohm wondered if these were originals and not copies. The furnishings and the furniture were certainly Chinese. One of the objets d’art that caught his eye was a big bronze Buddha in a niche.

The man sitting in a chair at the end of the room, near a window, was wearing scarlet pajamas and slippers and a Kelly-green morning robe. He was large and dark-skinned and had prominent epicanthic folds. His nose was large and hawkish; his eyebrows, heavy; his chin, massive. He looked familiar, but it was not until Ohm was a few feet from him that Ohm realized why. Decrease the epicanthic folds by half. Change the blue eyes to brown. He would look much like Jeff Caird ... Father Tom Zurvan
...
himself.

Mudge said, “You may stop here.” Meaning, “You must.” Ohm did so, and Mudge said, “I’ll take your bag.”

Reluctantly, Ohm handed it over. He had intended to see just where Mudge put it, but the man arose from the chair and bowed slightly, shaking hands with himself. That was Tuesday’s greeting, which meant that this man could be that day’s citizen. Or it could mean that he was indicating that he knew Ohm’s primal persona. Or it could mean both.

The man smiled and said, “Welcome, grandson.”

Ohm stared, felt his blood rushing from his head, and said, “Grandson?”