Leopard took him through the staff section of the museum, showing him other storerooms, the conference room, and various offices and workrooms. “It’s a good idea,” he said, “for someone to keep rough track of who goes where during these get-togethers, and then check around later and make sure nothing is conspicuously out of place. The girls could be a little more careful than they are. I generally do it, and when I’m gone perhaps you’ll take over the job. Normals aren’t quite as unobservant as we’d like them to be.”
“Are you being transferred?” Chip asked.
“Oh no,” Leopard said. “I’ll be dying soon. I’m over sixty-two now, by almost three months. So is Hush.”
“I’m sorry,” Chip said.
“So are we,” Leopard said, “but nobody lives forever. Tobacco ashes are a danger, of course, but everyone’s good about that. You don’t have to worry about the smell; the air conditioning goes on at seven-forty and whips it right out; I stayed one morning and made sure. Sparrow’s going to take over the tobacco growing. We dry the leaves right here, in back of the hot-water tank; I’ll show you.”
When they got back to the storeroom, King and Snowflake were sitting opposite each other astride a bench, playing intently at a mechanical game of some kind that lay between them. Hush was dozing in her chair and Lilac was crouched at the verge of the mass of relics, taking books one at a time from a carton, looking at them, and putting them in a pile on the floor. Sparrow wasn’t there.
“What’s that?” Leopard asked.
“New game that came in,” Snowflake said, not looking up.
There were levers that they pressed and released, one for each hand, making little paddles hit a rusted ball back and forth on a rimmed metal board. The paddles, some of them broken, squeaked as they swung. The ball bounded this way and that and came to a stop in a depression at King’s end of the board. “Five!” Snowflake cried. “There you are, brother!”
Hush opened her eyes, looked at them, and closed them again.
“Losing’s the same as winning,” King said, lighting his pipe with a metal lighter.
“Like hate it is,” Snowflake said. “Chip? Come on, you’re next.”
“No, I’ll watch,” he said, smiling.
Leopard declined to play too, and King and Snowflake began another match. At a break in the play, when King had scored a point against Snowflake, Chip said, “May I see the lighter?” and King gave it to him. A bird in flight was painted on the side of it; a duck, Chip thought. He had seen lighters in museums but had never worked one. He opened the hinged top and pushed his thumb against the ridged wheel. On the second try the wick flamed. He closed the lighter, looked at it all over, and at the next break handed it back to King.
He watched them play for another few moments and then moved away. He went over to the mass of relics and looked at it, and then moved nearer to Lilac. She looked up at him and smiled, putting a book on one of several piles beside her. “I keep hoping to find one in the language,” she said, “but they’re always in the old ones.”
He crouched and picked up the book she had just put down. On the spine of it were small letters: Bädda för död. “Hmm,” he said, shaking his head. He glanced through the old brown pages, at strange words and phrases: allvarlig, lögnerska, dök ner på brickorna. The double dots and little circles were over many of the letters.
“Some of them are enough like the language so that you can understand a word or two,” she said, “but some of them are—well look at this one.” She showed him a book on which backward N’s and rectangular open-bottomed characters were mixed in with ordinary P’s and E’s and O’s. “Now what does that mean?” she said, putting it down.
“It would be interesting to find one we could read,” he said, looking at her cheek’s rose-brown smoothness.
“Yes, it would,” she said, “but I think they were screened before they were sent here and that’s why we can’t.”
“You think they were screened?”
“There ought to be lots of them in the language,” she said. “How could it have become the language if it wasn’t the one most widely used?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “You’re right.”
“I keep hoping, though,” she said, “that there was a slip in the screening.” She frowned at a book and put it on a pile.
Her filled pockets stirred with her movements, and suddenly they looked to Chip like empty pockets lying against round breasts, breasts like the ones Karl had drawn; the breasts, almost, of a pre-U woman. It was possible, considering her abnormal darkness and the various physical abnormalities of the lot of them. He looked at her face again, so as not to embarrass her if she really had them.
“I thought I was double-checking this carton,” she said, “but I have a funny feeling I’m triple-checking it.”
“But why should the books have been screened?” he asked her.
She paused, with her dark hands hanging empty and her elbows on her knees, looking at him gravely with her large, level eyes. “I think we’ve been taught things that aren’t true,” she said. “About the way life was before the Unification. In the late pre-U, I mean, not the early.”
“What things?”
“The violence, the aggressiveness, the greed, the hostility. There was some of it, I suppose, but I can’t believe there was nothing else, and that’s what we’re taught, really. And the ‘bosses’ punishing the ‘workers,’ and all the sickness and alcohol-drinking and starvation and self-destruction. Do you believe it?”
He looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t thought much about it.”
“I’ll tell you what I don’t believe,” Snowflake said. She had risen from the bench, the game with King evidently finished. “I don’t believe that they cut off the baby boys’ foreskins,” she said. “In the early pre-U, maybe—in the early, early pre-U—but not in the late; it’s just too incredible. I mean, they had some kind of intelligence, didn’t they?”
“It’s incredible, all right,” King said, hitting his pipe against his palm, “but I’ve seen photographs. Alleged photographs, anyway.”
Chip shifted around and sat on the floor. “What do you mean?” he said. “Can photographs be—not genuine?”
“Of course they can,” Lilac said. ‘Take a close look at some of the ones inside. Parts of them have been drawn in. And parts have been drawn out.” She began putting books back into the carton.
“I had no idea that was possible,” Chip said.
“It is with the flat ones,” King said.
“What we’re probably given,” Leopard said—he was sitting in a gilded chair, toying with the orange plume of the hat he had worn—“is a mixture of truth and untruth. It’s anybody’s guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each.”
“Couldn’t we study these books and learn the languages?” Chip asked. “One would be all we’d really need.”
“For what?” Snowflake asked.
“To find out,” he said. “What’s true and what isn’t.”
“I tried it,” Lilac said.
“She certainly did,” King said to Chip, smiling. “A while back she wasted more nights than I care to remember beating her pretty head against one of those nonsensical jumbles. Don’t you do it, Chip; I beg you.”