The sight of Central Park cleansed him of such thoughts. Amazingly, the storm had passed and was now only low black clouds in the west. The air was exhilarating; the wind, a mere five miles an hour. The world looked as it always does after a good rain. It seemed to have been remade by God to His better liking. A male cardinal’s Toowheert—Toowheert—Toowheert—Twock—Twock—Twock—Twock rang from an oak branch. A squirrel was scold-barking from an Osage orange tree branch at a big black cat that had braved the wet grass.
The clear sky also meant that the satellites had their eyes o Central Park.
This did not bother Caird. He walked along a winding, up-and-down flower-lined path past bushes and trees, past statue of Frodo and Smaug, Lenin, the Cowardly Lion and Dorothy, Gandhi, Don Quixote, Spinoza, Rip van Winkle, Woody Allen and John Henry. He went by a few people who had taken shelter from the storm and were out again. So far, no rangers or organics, but they would be somewhere near.
After going for several hundred feet on a path covered by interlocking tree branches, he left it. He plunged into an are that was not off-limits to the public but was seldom venture into. It stood out like a green thumb, a patch of bright an poisonous-looking vegetation. The stone statues of the animal crouching in the very thick ranks of fronds and huge elephant’s-ear plants looked slightly misshapen. He was walking in a landscaper’s reproduction of an Amazon jungle by the ancient French painter Henri Rousseau. Yellow eyes framed in spotted faces gleamed from behind heavy nightmarish bushes. A proboscis monkey, resembling a politician whom the landscaper disliked, stared down foolishly from a branch.
Caird pushed through the forbidding growth, struggled uphill, skirted a black-painted granite god, squat, massive, crouching on frog legs, its half-human, half-jaguar face snarling, and came to the ridge of the hill. He crossed into the vegetation on the other side, descending abruptly into a land c pines and birches. The statues here were of folk-tale monsters of the far north, baba-yagas, cernobogs, chudo-yudos, hiisis, koshcheis, lyeshies, and veshtitzes. At the bottom of the hill, he walked, ankle-deep in mud, around a swamp from which protruded the heads of rusalkas, female water-spirits with long wavy green hair.
This was a fenced area the public could visit only during guided tours. Between the fence and a creek flowing under into the swamp was a gap of two feet. He got down on his knee in the water, pushed the fence up, and, bent over, went beneath the fence. Trees growing thickly along the creek banks shielded him from the sky-eyes.
Another half-mile would get him to a small cave well-hidden by bushes near the foot of a hill.
After wading for several hundred yards in the winding stream, he came to a bridge. All had gone well so far. He needed only a few more minutes to get to his haven.
He froze.
There, like a troll under a bridge, was an organic.
She was standing, half-hidden behind a bush, on the right bank. The only good thing about the situation was that she was facing away from him.
(“Hide!” Ohm said.)
(“Go for it!” Repp said fiercely. “Take her! Don’t pay any attention to that cowardly coyote!”)
(“You don’t know that she’s looking for you,” Tingle said. “Maybe she’s waiting there for her lover.”)
(“True,” Dunski said. “She could be here for any of a dozen reasons. Maybe she just took a pee.”)
Caird paid as little attention as possible to the voices whispering inside him. He turned and slowly climbed onto the bank and pushed gently through the bushes and high grasses on the slope. Once, he startled a dragonfly. He became motionless until it was long gone, then went on. He came up on the walk that led to the bridge. For a moment, he would be exposed to the sky-eyes, but he would cross the path quickly into the dense vegetation on the other side. Unless the organic had by now come up from under the bridge, he would be safe.
Before leaving the bushes, he looked both ways down the path. No one was in sight.
He started to walk across the path.
A voice rang out, “Hold it!”
He whirled around to his right. A male organic with a holstered gun had just come around the bend in the path. The weapon told him that the two officers were looking for a fugitive and that the fugitive was probably Isharashvili.
Not wanting to lead the organic into the woods and straight to his hiding place, desperate, panicky, he turned and ran down the path. He crossed the bridge, hearing the man shouting to his partner to come up and help him. A glance behind showed Caird that the organic had not yet drawn his weapon. But he soon would.
He passed something lying in the path, a reminder of what seemed to be the far distant past. The name associated with it flashed through his mind and was forgotten.
Just as he had decided to leap into the bushes, he heard another shout behind him. It was not the stern command or warning he had expected. It was a yell of surprise. He turned just in time to see the organic stretched out a few feet above and parallel with the ground. His legs were spread wide; his arms were flailing. Then he struck the path hard on his back, and he was silent and unmoving.
Just beyond the man’s head was a banana peel.
“Rootenbeak!”
That was the name that had darted across his mind.
The peel had probably not been dropped by Rootenbeak—what would he be doing so far north of Washington Square?—but it had certainly been dropped by someone like him.
And that inconsiderate slobbishness was helping him escape.
He ran into the woods. Looking to one side, he saw the conical helmet and auburn hair of the female organic who had been under the bridge. Then the heavy bushes and trees screened her. He slowed down, not wanting her to hear him, until he was several hundred feet from the path. Zigzagging through the growth, he headed for the creek. When he was close to it, he got down on all fours and looked from behind a bush that grew close to the bank of the stream. At first, he could hear loud voices but could see no one. Then a man appeared in a break between two trees. He was an organic and had a large green pack on his back. A thick wire ran from the pack to a small square plate he held in one hand. Another wire ran to a long tube with a disc at its end that he held in the other hand. This was being moved from side to side and then up and down.
Caird groaned quietly. The tube held equipment that would probe for the heat of his body, sniff for his odor, and listen for his breathing and the beating of his heart.
If only he could have crossed the stream and gotten to the cave. If only he could have gotten here before the rain.
(“If only, hell!” Repp said. “You got two guns! Fight, man, fight! Go down with guns blazing!”)
(“No! No!” Isharashvili said.)
Light suddenly appeared in him and swept across, followed by a shadow. The light seemed to spill out of his eyes, blinding him, and then the blindness was made even darker by the shadow. He shook. What was happening? Was he at last falling apart, taking refuge in disintegration?
(“I am back,” a voice said.)
Caird bit his lip to keep quiet.
(“You?” Ohm said.)
(“I was taken up by God, and He weighed me in the balance and found me wanting.”)
(“Father Tom!” Dunski said.)
(“How in hell can a fictional God reject a fictional soul?” Ohm said.)
(“He told me to go back to my maker,” Zurvan said. His voice was as deep and muffled as the bell of a sunken ship swayed by a current. “He hurled me out of the kingdom of glory back into the nothingness from which I came.”)
Caird wanted to yell at the voices. If he did so, he would be located immediately, and he would be done for. But what difference did it make if he was silent, or screamed? He was going to be caught. The only question just now was whether he would surrender quietly or shoot to kill until he was killed.
(“Killing is not the right path,” Isharashvili said. “You… I…we, I mean, have taken many wrong paths. Don’t take this most evil of all.”)
(“Hypocrite!” Ohm screamed. “Hypocrite! Hypocrites all! But just this once, Isharashvili, you’re right!”)
The voices babbled on while he lay prone, his chin on his arm. The blindness had passed, but he seemed to be seeing through a veil of heat. The tall grass before him wavered.
A grasshopper ended its leap upon the stem of a weed. It swayed back and forth with the weed, clinging to it. It was a brightly colored metronome, back and forth, back and forth.
And in and out. His eyes focused, then unfocused. The insect became clear, then fuzzy. But he could make out the purple-painted antennae, the Kelly-green head, the golden eyes, the orange legs, and the green-and-black-checked body.
He groaned, “Ozma!”
He began weeping, and the grasshopper dissolved in the tears.
He had turned into a river of tears shaken by an earthquake. He could not control himself even if he had wanted to. He sobbed and stretched his arms out and clawed at the earth.
He had betrayed the state, the immers, his lovers, his friends, and himself.
The voices within him screamed, roared, and tore at him. He rolled over to look up into the trees. He was dimly aware that two men were looking down at him.
Tuesday-World
FREEDOM, Seventh Month of the Year
D6-W4 (Day-Six, Week-Four)
34.
Today was Tuesday’s Christmas.
Jeff Caird looked out the window down at the huge yard surrounding the institution. It was on West 121st Street, near the junction of Frederick Douglass and St. Nicholas avenues. A light snow, which was quickly melting, formed patches of white and green. It was the first of the winter and might be the last. There were no holiday decorations in the yard or on the trees, but many of the windows of the apartment building across the street displayed holly or figures of Santa Claus and his reindeer.
“Saint Nicholas,” Caird said. “The great giver of gifts. The state.”
He turned and walked across the large room past the desk of the psychicist and sat down in an easy chair.
“Frederick Douglass, the slave who led his people out of bondage. Me.”
“Your people are dead,” the psychicist said.
“The immers?” Caird said, looking startled.
“No,” the psychicist said, smiling. “I didn’t mean the immers, and you know it. I referred to the others. Your personae.”
Caird was silent. The psychicist said, “You still feel a sense of great loss?”
Caird nodded and said, “The big wringout. The grasshopper was the key, the stimulus, the trigger, the catalyst.”
“The funny thing, the peculiar phenomenon, I mean,” the psychicist said, “is that you grew new nerve paths when you grew your personae. They should be dying, you know, since you no longer use them. There’s no sign of shrinkage in the neural circuits. Yet, you’ve been cured. Cured, I mean, of your multiple personality disorder.”
“You know that for sure?”
“Don’t you? Of course, you do. Just as we know. That is, unless you’ve found some way of cheating the truth mist. if you have, you’re the first, and I’m one hundred percent sure that you haven’t.”
“You even know that I haven’t once, not once, thought of an escape plan.”
The psychicist frowned. She said, “That’s an even more puzzling phenomenon, I don’t mind telling you. Even though you had no desire to escape, you still should think about it now and then. You should at least fantasize about it. Fantasizing is part of your nature. I don’t understand it.”
“Maybe I’m completely cured. The state finally has its perfect citizen.”
The psychicist smiled again. “There is no such creature, any more than there is or ever will be a perfect state. Our society is as close to perfection as it can be. It’s a benevolent despotism, but that has to be. You know something of history. You know that no other government has provided plenty of food, good housing, luxuries, free education, free medical treatment…”
“Spare me,” Caird said, lifting his hand. “What I want to hear is that someday I’ll walk out of this place and take my place in society again.”
“That can be. I am confident that you have the potentiality to be cured. But…”
“But…?”
“There are political considerations. I don’t want to upset you. Still, the world councillors are very upset, and the people are demanding punishment.”
Caird sighed, and he said, “So, even in this near-perfect society, politics can override the strict interpretation and practice of the law.”
The psychicist made a face. “There are situations where…never mind. The truth is, Jeff, that you, and all of you immers, were fortunate that you were not immediately stoned after the trial. You were lucky to have a trial.
“Of course, you could have saved the state the expense of a trial if you had killed yourselves before you were arrested. You all had the means. Yet very few of you used them. You all wanted to live too much.”
“Another betrayal,” Caird said.
He did not feel guilt. That had been washed out by the tears along with much else. Water wears out stone.
There was a long silence. Then the psychicist, looking as if she did not want to say what she had to say, spoke.
“I’ve been authorized, ordered, I mean, to tell you that Detective-Major Panthea Snick requested that she be allowed to speak to you personally. She wanted to thank you for having saved her life. The request was denied, of course.”
Caird smiled and said, “Snick? She actually said that?”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“It was just a rhetorical question,” he said. “Well, well! Do you know, for some reason, I have a feeling, a hunch, that I’ll see her again.”
“That seems to make you happy,” the psychicist said, “though I don’t know why. You must know that there is not the remotest possibility that you’ll ever see her again. Hunches…sheer superstition.”
“Perhaps hunches are the output of a sort of biological computer inside a person,” Caird said. “The computer calculates all future probabilities and their chances of happening. And it comes up with a high probability for an event that a human-made computer would rate as low. But the flesh-and-blood computer has more data than the human-made one.”
“The human-made doesn’t have hope in its circuitry,” the psychicist said. “Hope isn’t data. It’s an irrelevant electromagnetic field.”
“Irrelevant? Nothing is irrelevant in this tightly interconnected universe. However…”
He was silent for a few seconds, then said, “I heard, don’t ask me from whom, your efforts to keep me incommunicado have not been completely successful… I heard that the news shows said nothing about the age-slowing bacteria when they reported the trials.”
The psychicist betrayed nothing on her face, but she paled slightly. She said, “How could you have heard anything? And what bacteria are you talking about? Is this some more of your nonsense?”
He smiled and said, “No one told me. I just made that up about hearing it from someone. I wanted to see your reaction. I wanted to find out if what I’ve suspected is true. You might as well tell me the truth. I can’t pass it on to anybody. I know that every immer who was questioned told all about the elixir. That revelation would have to be passed on to the higher-ups. But I believe that it got no further than the interrogators and their superiors, and, of course, the world council. The news about it was suppressed.”
The psychicist, who had become even paler, told the monitoring strip to back up the display. Having stopped it at the point where he had asked her about the bacteria, she erased all of the recording from that point forward. Then she turned the strip off.
“You think you’re so clever!” she said. “You fool! You’re asking to be stoned immediately!”
“What’s the difference?” he said. “I’ve known all along that I will never be released as cured. None of us immers will be. The government will go through the legal proced
ures, keep us long enough to fulfill the law, then announce that we’re incurable, and stone us. We’ll be put away where we’ll never be found.
“The government has to do that. It can’t release us when it knows that we know all about the elixir. At the end of the minimum period for us ‘mentally unbalanced’ to be ‘cured,’ we go into the stoners. I’ve got two more submonths to live, if you can call this near-solitary confinement living. Two more months, unless the government gets uneasy and decides to stone us at once. It could do that. It could easily cover up its illegal action.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Sure, I do. You know I do. You must also know, if you’ve any intelligence, that you’re in almost as much danger as I am. The best way for the government officials who know about this to keep you silent is to offer you the elixir, too. But they must be wondering if you can keep it to yourself. Won’t you want your husband, your children, all whom you love to age as slowly as you will? Won’t you be strongly tempted to get it for them? Won’t you ask for it for them? And what will you do if you’re refused?
“They can’t afford to take a chance with you. They want the elixir for themselves, a very select group, I imagine. They haven’t told the public, and they won’t. The social and political and you-name-it consequences would be too great. No, they’re keeping it a secret, making the same mistake that Immerman did. And you and all those others who interrogated the immers and are now their keepers are dangerous to the elite, the new immers!
“The main difference between the old and the new was that my people, at least, wanted to change the government for the better!”
The psychicist sat down and looked past Caird as if she were trying to see the future. Caird felt sorry for her, but he had had to test her to determine if his suspicions were valid. That they were was evident.
“Maybe we’d better talk about both of us getting out of here,” he said.
The psychicist stood up. Her voice shaking slightly, she said, “I don’t deal with traitors.” She called to a strip, and the door opened at once. Two huge male attendants entered.