This Perfect Day (22 page)

“Be quiet,” he said.

They turned into the passageway 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-passage behind the buildings. Lilac’s hand went up; Chip said, “No!” They passed 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 passage 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, passing 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 passed and repassed 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 “wristwatch” that had already stopped ticking, and two Français 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 embarrassed, 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 substitute 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 Français 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 Saturday 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 Saturday 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.

Sunday’s ride went well. Early in the day a group of young members stopped them, but it was only to ask their help in repairing a broken drive chain, and Lilac sat on the grass away from the group while Chip did the job. By sundown they were in the parkland north of ’14266. They had gone about seventy-five kilometers.

Again it was hard to find a hiding place, but the one Chip finally found—the broken walls of a pre-U or early-U building, roofed with a sagging mass of vines and creepers—was larger and more comfortable than the one they had used the week before. That same night, despite the day’s riding, he went into ’266 and brought back a three-day supply of cakes and drinks.

Lilac grew irritable that week. “I want to clean my
teeth,”
she said, “and I want to take a shower. How long are we going to go on this way? Forever? You may enjoy living like an animal but
I
don’t; I’m a human being. And I can’t sleep with my hands and feet tied.”

“You slept all right last week,” he said.

“Well I can’t now!”

“Then lie quietly and let
me
sleep,” he said.

When she looked at him it was with annoyance, not with pity. She made disapproving sounds when he shaved and when he read; answered curtly or not at all when he spoke. She balked at doing calisthenics, and he had to take out the gun and threaten her.

It was getting close to Marx eighth, her treatment day, he told himself, and this irritability, a natural resentment of captivity and discomfort, was a sign of the healthy Lilac who was buried in Anna SG. It ought to have pleased him, and when he thought about it, it did. But it was much harder to live with than the previous week’s sympathy and memberlike docility.

She complained about insects and boredom. There was a rain night and she complained about the rain.

One night Chip woke and heard her moving. He shone his flashlight at her. She had untied her wrists and was untying her ankles. He retied her and struck her.

That Saturday night they didn’t speak to each other.

On Sunday they rode again. Chip stayed close to her side and watched her carefully when members came toward them. He reminded her to smile, to nod, to answer greetings, to act as if nothing was wrong. She rode in grim silence, and he was afraid that despite the threat of the gun she might call out for help at any moment or stop and refuse to go on. “Not just you,” he said; “everyone in sight. I’ll kill them all, I swear I will.” She kept riding. She smiled and nodded resentfully. Chip’s gearshift jammed and they went only forty kilometers.

Toward the end of the third week her irritation subsided. She sat frowning, picking at blades of grass, looking at her fingertips, turning her bracelet around and around her wrist. She looked at Chip curiously, as if he were someone strange whom she hadn’t seen before. She followed his instructions slowly, mechanically.

He worked on his bike, letting her awaken in her own time.

One evening in the fourth week she said, “Where are we going?”

He looked at her for a moment—they were eating the day’s last cake—and said, “To an island called Majorca. In the Sea of Eternal Peace.”

“‘Majorca’?” she said.

“It’s an island of incurables,” he said. “There are seven others all over the world. More than seven, really, because some of them are groups. I found them on a map in the Pre-U, back in Ind. They were covered over and they’re not shown on MFA maps. I was going to tell you about them the day I was— ‘cured.’”

She was silent, and then she said, “Did you tell King?”

It was the first time she had mentioned him. Should he tell her that King hadn’t needed to be told, that he had known all along and withheld it from them? What for? King was dead; why diminish her memory of him? “Yes, I did,” he said. “He was amazed, and very excited. I don’t understand why he—did what he did. You know about it, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know,” she said. She took a small bite of cake and ate it, not looking at him. “How do they live on this island?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he said. “It might be very rough, very primitive. Better than this, though.” He smiled. “Whatever it’s like,” he said, “it’s a free life. It might be highly civilized. The first incurables must have been the most independent and resourceful members.”

“I’m not sure that I want to go there,” she said.

“Just think about it,” he said. “In a few days you’ll be sure. You’re the one who had the idea that incurable colonies might exist, do you remember? You asked me to look for them.”