He was in bed, and Lilac was lying beside him sleeping. Hassan was snoring on the other side of the curtain. A sour taste was in his mouth, and he remembered vomiting. Christ and Wei! And on carpet—the first he’d seen in half a year!
Then he remembered what had been said to him by that woman, Julia, and by Karl—by Ashi.
He lay still for a while, and then he got up and tiptoed around the curtain and past the sleeping Newmans to the sink. He got a drink of water, and because he didn’t want to go all the way down the hall, urined quietly in the sink and rinsed it out thoroughly.
He got back down beside Lilac and drew the blanket over him. He felt a little drunk again and his head hurt, but he lay on his back with his eyes closed, breathing lightly and slowly, and after a while he felt better.
He kept his eyes closed and thought about things.
After half an hour or so Hassan’s alarm clock jangled. Lilac turned. He stroked her head and she sat up. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes, sort of,” he said.
The light went on and they winced. They heard Hassan grunting and getting up, yawning, farting. “Get up, Ria,” he said. “Gigi? It’s time to get up.”
Chip stayed on his back with his hand on Lilac’s cheek. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “I’ll call him today and apologize.”
She took his hand and turned her lips to it. “You couldn’t help it,” she said. “He understood.”
“I’m going to ask him to help me find a better job,” Chip said.
Lilac looked at him questioningly.
“It’s all out of me,” he said. “Like the whiskey. All out. I’m going to be an industrious, optimistic steely. I’m going to accept and adjust. We’re going to have a bigger apartment than Ashi some day.”
“I don’t want that,” she said. “I would love to have two rooms, though.”
“We will,” he said. “In two years. Two rooms in two years; that’s a promise.”
She smiled at him.
He said, “I think we ought to think about moving to New Madrid where our rich friends are. That man Lars runs a school, did you know that? Maybe you could teach there. And the baby could go there when it’s old enough.”
“What could I teach?” she said.
“Something,” he said. “I don’t know.” He lowered his hand and stroked her breasts. “How to have beautiful breasts, maybe,” he said.
Smiling, she said, “We’ve got to get dressed.”
“Let’s skip breakfast,” he said, drawing her down. He rolled onto her and they embraced and kissed.
“Lilac?” Ria called. “How was it?”
Lilac freed her mouth. “Tell you later!” she called.
While he was walking down the tunnel into the mine he remembered the tunnel into Uni, Papa Jan’s tunnel down which the memory banks had been rolled.
He stopped still.
Down which the real memory banks had been rolled. And above them were the false ones, the pink and orange toys that were reached through the dome and the elevators, and which everyone thought was Uni itself; everyone including—it had to be!—all those men and women who had gone out to fight it in the past. But Uni, the real Uni, was on the levels below, and could be reached through the tunnel, through Papa Jan’s tunnel from behind Mount Love.
It would still be there—closed at its mouth probably, maybe even sealed with a meter of concrete—but it would still be there; because nobody fills in all of a long tunnel, especially not an efficient computer. And there was space cut out below for more memory banks—Papa Jan had said so—so the tunnel would be needed again some day.
It was there, behind Mount Love.
A tunnel into Uni.
With the right maps and charts, someone who knew what he was doing could probably work out its exact location, or very nearly.
“You there! Get moving!” someone shouted.
He walked ahead quickly, thinking about it, thinking about it.
It was there. The tunnel.
6
“IF IT’S MONEY, the answer is no,” Julia Costanza said, walking briskly past clattering looms and immigrant women glancing at her. “If it’s a job,” she said, “I might be able to help you.”
Chip, walking along beside her, said, “Ashi’s already got me a job.”
“Then it’s money,” she said.
“Information first,” Chip said, “then maybe money.” He pushed open a door.
“No,” Julia said, going through. “Why don’t you go to I. A.? That’s what it’s there for. What information? About what?” She glanced at him as they started up a spiral stairway that shifted with their weight.
Chip said, “Can we sit down somewhere for five minutes?”
“If I sit down,” Julia said, “half this island will be naked tomorrow. That’s probably acceptable to you, but it isn’t to me. What information?”
He held in his resentment. Looking at her beak-nosed profile, he said, “Those two attacks on Uni you—”
“No,” she said. She stopped and faced him, one hand holding the stairway’s centerpost. “If it’s about that I really won’t listen,” she said. “I knew it the minute you walked into that living room, the disapproving air you had. No. I’m not interested in any more plans and schemes. Go talk to somebody else.” She went up the stairs.
He went quickly and caught up with her. “Were they planning to use a tunnel?” he asked. “Just tell me that; were they going in through a tunnel from behind Mount Love?”
She pushed open the door at the head of the stairway; he held it and went through after her, into a large loft where a few machine parts lay. Birds rose fluttering to holes in the peaked roof and flew out.
“They were going in with the other people,” she said, walking straight through the loft toward a door at its far end. “The sightseers. At least that was the plan. They were going to go down in the elevators.”
“And then?”
“There’s no point in—”
“Just answer me, will you, please?” he said.
She glanced at him, angrily, and looked ahead. “There’s supposed to be a large observation window,” she said. “They were going to smash it and throw in explosives.”
“Both groups?”
“Yes.”
“They may have succeeded,” he said.
She stopped with her hand on the door and looked at him, puzzled.
“That’s not really Uni,” he said. “It’s a display for the sightseers. And maybe it’s also meant as a false target for attackers. They could have blown it up and nothing would have happened—except that they would have been grabbed and treated.”
She kept looking at him.
“The real thing is farther down,” he said. “On three levels. I was in it once when I was ten or eleven years old.”
She said, “Digging a tunnel is the most ri—”
“It’s there already,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be dug.”
She closed her mouth, looked at him, and turned quickly away and pushed open the door. It led to another loft, brightly lit, where a row of presses stood motionless with layers of cloth on their beds. Water was on the floor, and two men were trying to lift the end of a long pipe that had apparently fallen from the wall and lay across a stopped conveyor belt piled with cut cloth pieces. The wall end of the pipe was still anchored, and the men were trying to lift its other end and get it off the belt and back up against the wall. Another man, an immigrant, waited on a ladder to receive it.
“Help them,” Julia said, and began gathering pieces of cloth from the wet floor.
“If that’s how I spend my time, nothing’s going to be changed,” Chip said. “That’s acceptable to you, but it isn’t to me.”