“Why not?” Chip asked. “Maybe I’ll have better luck.”
“And suppose you do?” King said. “Suppose you decipher a language and read a few books in it and find out that we are taught things that are untrue. Maybe everything’s untrue. Maybe life in 2000 A.D. was one endless orgasm, with everyone choosing the right classification and helping his brothers and loaded to the ears with love and health and life’s necessities. So what? You’ll still be right here, in 162 Y.U., with a bracelet and an adviser and a monthly treatment. You’ll only be unhappier. We’ll all be unhappier.”
Chip frowned and looked at Lilac. She was packing books into the carton, not looking at him. He looked back at King and sought words. “It would still be worth knowing,” he said. “Being happy or unhappy—is that really the most important thing? Knowing the truth would be a different kind of happiness—a more satisfying kind, I think, even if it turned out to be a sad kind.”
“A sad kind of happiness?” King said, smiling. “I don’t see that at all.” Leopard looked thoughtful.
Snowflake, gesturing to Chip to get up, said, “Come on, there’s something I want to show you.”
He climbed to his feet. “But we’d probably only find that things have been exaggerated,” he said; “that there was hunger but not so much hunger, aggressiveness but not so much aggressiveness. Maybe some of the minor things have been made up, like the foreskin-cutting and the flag-worship.”
“If you feel that way, then there’s certainly no point in bothering,” King said. “Do you have any idea what a job it would be? It would be staggering.”
Chip shrugged. “It would be good to know, that’s all,” he said. He looked at Lilac; she was putting the last few books into the carton.
“Come on,” Snowflake said, and took his arm. “Save us some tobacco, you mems.”
They went out and into the dark of the exhibit hall. Snowflake’s flashlight lit their way. “What is it?” Chip asked. “What do you want to show me?”
“What do you think?” she said. “A bed. Certainly not more books.”
They generally met two nights a week, Sundays and Woodsdays or Thursdays. They smoked and talked and idled with relics and exhibits. Sometimes Sparrow sang songs that she wrote, accompanying herself on a lap-held instrument whose strings at her fingers made pleasing antique music. The songs were short and sad, about children who lived and died on starships, lovers who were transferred, the eternal sea. Sometimes King reenacted the evening’s TV, comically mocking a lecturer on climate control or a fifty-member chorus singing “My Bracelet.” Chip and Snowflake made use of the seventeenth-century bed and the nineteenth-century sofa, the early pre-U farm wagon and the late pre-U plastic rug. On nights between meetings they sometimes went to one or the other’s room. The nameber on Snowflake’s door was Anna PY24A9155; the 24, which Chip couldn’t resist working out, made her thirty-eight, older than he had thought her to be.
Day by day his senses sharpened and his mind grew more alert and restless. His treatment caught him back and dulled him, but only for a week or so; then he was awake again, alive again. He went to work on the language Lilac had tried to decipher. She showed him the books she had worked from and the lists she had made. Momento was moment; silenzio, silence. She had several pages of easily recognized translations; but there were words in the books’ every sentence that could only be guessed at and the guesses tried elsewhere. Was allora “then” or “already”? What were quale and sporse and rimanesse? He worked with the books for an hour or so at every meeting. Sometimes she leaned over his shoulder and looked at what he was doing—said “Oh, of course!” or “Couldn’t that be one of the days of the week?”—but most of the time she stayed near King, filling his pipe for him and listening while he talked. King watched Chip working and, reflected in glass panes of pre-U furniture, smiled at the others and raised his eyebrows.
Chip saw Mary KK on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. He acted normal with her, smiled through the Amusement Gardens and fucked her simply and without passion. He acted normal at his assignment, slowly following the established procedures. Acting normal began to irritate him, more and more as week followed week.
In July, Hush died. Sparrow wrote a song about her, and when Chip returned to his room after the meeting at which she had sung it, she and Karl (Why hadn’t he thought of him sooner?) suddenly came together in his mind. Sparrow was large and awkward but lovely when she sang, twenty-five or so and lonely. Karl presumably had been “cured” when Chip “helped” him, but might he not have had the strength or the genetic capacity or the whatever-it-was to resist the cure, at least to a degree? Like Chip he was a 663; there was a chance that he was right there at the Institute somewhere, an ideal prospect for being led into the group and an ideal match for Sparrow. It was certainly worth a try. What a pleasure it would be to really help Karl! Undertreated, he would draw—well what wouldn’t he draw?—pictures such as no one had ever imagined! As soon as he got up the next morning he got his last nameber book out of his take-along kit, touched the phone, and read out Karl’s nameber. But the screen stayed blank and the phone voice apologized; the member he had called was out of reach.
Bob RO asked him about it a few days later, just as he was getting up from the chair. “Oh, say,” Bob said, “I meant to ask you; how come you wanted to call this Karl WL?”
“Oh,” Chip said, standing by the chair. “I wanted to see how he was. Now that I’m all right, I guess I want to be sure that everyone else is.”
“Of course he is,” Bob said. “It’s an odd thing to do, after so many years.”
“I just happened to think of him,” Chip said.
He acted normal from the first chime to the last and met with the group twice a week. He kept working at the language—Italiano, it was called—although he suspected that King was right and there was no point in it. It was something to do, though, and seemed more worthwhile than playing with mechanical toys. And once in a while it brought Lilac to him, leaning over to look, with one hand on the leather-topped table he worked at and the other on the back of his chair. He could smell her—it wasn’t his imagination; she actually smelled of flowers—and he could look at her dark cheek and neck and the chest of her coveralls pushed taut by two mobile round protrusions. They were breasts. They were definitely breasts.
4
ONE NIGHT LATE IN AUGUST, while looking for more books in Italiano, he found one in a different language whose title, Vers I’avenir, was similar to the Italiano words verso and avvenire and apparently meant Toward the Future. He opened the book and thumbed its pages, and Wei Li Chun caught his eye, printed at the tops of twenty or thirty of them. Other names were at the tops of other clusters of pages, Mario Sofik, A. F. Liebman. The book, he realized, was a collection of short pieces by various writers, and two of the pieces were indeed by Wei. The title of one of them, Le pas prochain en avant, he recognized (pas would be passo; avant, avanti) as “The Next Step Forward,” in Part One of Wei’s Living Wisdom.