The free hour was extended by five minutes. Voice-input telecomps began to replace key-input ones, and totalcakes came in a pleasant second flavor. Life expectancy increased to 62.4.
Members worked and ate, watched TV and slept. They sang and went to museums and walked in amusement gardens.
On the two-hundredth anniversary of Wei’s birth, in the parade in a new city, a huge portrait banner of smiling Wei was carried at one of its poles by a member of thirty or so who was ordinary in every respect except that his right eye was green instead of brown. Once long ago this member had been sick, but now he was well. He had his assignment and his room, his girlfriend and his adviser. He was relaxed and content.
A strange thing happened during the parade. As this member marched along, smiling, holding the banner pole, he began to hear a nameber saying itself over and over in his head:
Anna SG, thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three; Anna SG, thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three. It kept repeating itself to him, in time with his marching. He wondered who the nameber belonged to, and why it should be repeating itself in his head that way.
Suddenly he remembered: it was from his sickness! It was the nameber of one of the other sick ones, the one called “Lovely”—no, “Lilac.” Why, after so long, had her nameber come back to him? He stamped his feet down harder, trying not to hear it, and was glad when the signal to sing was given.
He told his adviser. “It’s nothing to think about,” she said. “You probably saw something that reminded you of her. Maybe you even saw her. There’s nothing to be afraid of in remembering—unless, of course, it becomes bothersome. Let me know if it happens again.”
But it didn’t happen again. He was well, thank Uni.
One Christmas Day, when he had another assignment, was living in another city, he bicycled with his girlfriend and four other members to the outlying parkland. They brought cakes and cokes with them, and lunched on the ground near a grove of trees.
He had set his coke container on an almost-level stone and, reaching for it while talking, knocked it over. The other members refilled his container from theirs.
A few minutes later, while folding his cake wrapper, he noticed a flat leaf lying on the wet stone, drops of coke shining on its back, its stem curled upward like a handle. He took the stem and lifted the leaf, and the stone underneath it was dry in the leaf’s oval shape. The rest of the stone was wet-black, but where the leaf had been it was dry-gray. Something about the moment seemed significant to him, and he sat silently, looking at the leaf in his one hand, the folded cake wrapper in his other, and the dry leaf shape on the stone. His girlfriend said something to him and he took himself away from the moment, put the leaf and the wrapper together and gave them to the member who had the litter bag.
The image of the dry leaf shape on the stone came into his mind several times that day, and on the next day too. Then he had his treatment and he forgot about it. In a few weeks, though, it came into his mind again. He wondered why. Had he lifted a leaf from a wet stone that way sometime before? If he had, he didn’t remember it…
Every now and then, while he was walking in a park or, oddly enough, waiting on line for his treatment, the image of the dry leaf shape came into his mind and made him frown.
There was an earthquake. (His chair flung him off it; glass broke in the microscope and the loudest sound he had ever heard roared from the depths of the lab.) A seismovalve half the continent away had jammed and gone undetected, TV explained a few nights later. It hadn’t happened before and it wouldn’t happen again. Members must mourn, of course, but it was nothing to think about in the future.
Dozens of buildings had collapsed, hundreds of members had died. Every medicenter in the city was overloaded with the injured, and more than half the treatment units were damaged; treatments were delayed up to ten days.
A few days after he was to have had his, he thought of Lilac and how he had loved her differently and more—more excitingly—than he loved everyone else. He had wanted to tell her something. What was it? Oh yes, about the islands. The islands he had found hidden on the pre-U map. The islands of incurables…
His adviser called him. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I don’t think so, Karl,” he said. “I need my treatment.”
“Hold on a minute,” his adviser said, and turned away and spoke softly to his telecomp. After a moment he turned back. “You can get it tonight at seven-thirty,” he said, “but you’ll have to go to the medicenter in T24.”
He stood on a long line at seven-thirty, thinking about Lilac, trying to remember exactly what she looked like. When he got near the treatment units, the image of a dry leaf shape on a stone came into his mind.
Lilac called him (she was right there in the same building) and he went to her room, which was the storeroom in the pre-U. Green jewels hung from her earlobes and glittered around her rose-brown throat; she was wearing a gown of gleaming green cloth that exposed her pink-tipped soft-cone breasts. “Bon soir, Chip,” she said, smiling. “Comment vastu? Je m’ennuyais tellement de toi.” He went to her and took her in his arms and kissed her—her lips were warm and soft, her mouth opening—and he awoke to darkness and disappointment; it was a dream, it had only been a dream.
But strangely, frighteningly, everything was in him: the smell of her perfume (parfum) and the taste of tobacco and the sound of Sparrow’s songs, and desire for Lilac and anger at King and resentment of Uni and sorrow for the Family and happiness in feeling, in being alive and awake.
And in the morning he would have a treatment and it would all be gone. At eight o’clock. He tapped on the light, squinted at the clock: 4:54. In a little more than three hours…
He tapped the light off again and lay open-eyed in the dark. He didn’t want to lose it. Sick or not, he wanted to keep his memories and the capacity to explore and enjoy them. He didn’t want to think about the islands—no, never; that was real sickness—but he wanted to think about Lilac, and the meetings of the group in the relic-filled storeroom, and once in a while, maybe, to have another dream.
But the treatment would come in three hours and everything would be gone. There was nothing he could do—except hope for another earthquake, and what chance was there of that? The seismovalves had worked perfectly in the years since and they would go on working perfectly in the years ahead. And what short of an earthquake could postpone his treatment? Nothing. Nothing at all. Not with Uni knowing that he had lied for a postponement once before.
A dry leaf shape on stone came into his mind but he chased it away to think of Lilac, to see her as he had seen her in the dream, not to waste his three short hours of aliveness. He had forgotten how large her eyes were, how lovely her smile and her rose-brown skin, how moving her earnestness. He had forgotten so fighting much: the pleasure of smoking, the excitement of deciphering Français…
The dry leaf shape came back, and he thought about it, irritated, to find out why his mind hung on to it, to get rid of it once and for all. He thought back to the ridiculously meaningless moment; saw again the leaf, with the drops of coke shining on it; saw his fingers lifting it by its stem, and his other hand holding the folded foil cake wrapper, and the dry gray oval on the black coke-wet stone. He had spilled the coke, and the leaf had been lying there, and the stone underneath it had—