You approached the dirigible by means of a small propeller-driven aircraft that drifted up to match trajectories and docked alongside. A clerk took our baggage and we checked our weapons with the purser, then went outside.
Just about everybody on the flight was standing out on the promenade deck, watching Manhattan creep toward the horizon. It was an eerie sight. The day was very still, so the bottom thirty or forty stories of the buildings were buried in smog. It looked like a city built on a cloud, a thunderhead floating. We watched it for a while and then went inside to eat.
The meal was elegantly served and simple: filet of beef, two vegetables, wine. Cheese and fruit and more wine for dessert. No fiddling with ration tickets; a loophole in the rationing laws implied that they were not required for meals consumed en route, on intercontinental transport.
We spent a lazy, comfortable three days crossing the Atlantic. The dirigibles had been a new thing when we first left Earth, and now they had turned out to be one of the few successful new financial ventures of the late twentieth century … the company that built them had bought up a few obsolete nuclear weapons; one bomb-sized hunk of plutonium would keep the whole fleet in the air for years. And, once launched, they never did come down. Floating hotels, supplied and maintained by regular shuttles, they were one last vestige of luxury in a world where nine billion people had something to eat, and almost nobody had enough.
London was not as dismal from the air as New York City had been; the air was clean even if the Thames was poison. We packed our handbags, claimed our weapons, and landed on a VTO pad atop the London Hilton. We rented a couple of tricycles at the hotel and, maps in hand, set off for Regent Street, planning on dinner at the venerable Cafe Royal.
The tricycles were little armored vehicles, stabilized gyroscopically so they couldn't be tipped over. Seemed overly cautious for the part of London we traveled through, but I suppose there were probably sections as rough as Washington.
I got a dish of marinated venison and Marygay got salmon; both very good but astoundingly expensive. At first I was a bit overawed by the huge room, filled with plush and mirrors and faded gilding, very quiet even with a dozen tables occupied, and we talked in whispers until we realized that was foolish.
Over coffee I asked Marygay what the deal was with her parents.
'Oh, it happens often enough,' she said. 'Dad got mixed up in some ration ticket thing. He'd gotten some black market tickets that turned out to be counterfeit. Cost him his job and he probably would have gone to jail, but while he was waiting for trial a bodysnatcher got him.'
'Bodysnatcher?'
'That's right. All the commune organizations have them. They've got to get reliable farm labor, people who aren't eligible for relief … people who can't just lay down their tools and walk off when it gets rough. Almost everybody can get enough assistance to stay alive, though; everyone who isn't on the government's fecal roster.'
'So he skipped out before his trial came up?'
She nodded. 'It was a case of choosing between commune life, which he knew wasn't easy, and going on the dole after a few years' working on a prison farm; ex-convicts can't get legitimate jobs. They had to forfeit their condominium, which they'd put up for bail, but the government would've gotten that anyhow, once he was in jail.
'So the bodysnatcher offered him and Mother new identities, transportation to the commune, a cottage, and a plot of land. They took it.'
'And what did the bodysnatcher get?'
'He himself probably didn't get anything. The commune got their ration tickets; they were allowed to keep their money, although they didn't have very much–'
'What happens if they get caught?'
Not a chance.' She laughed. 'The communes provide over half the country's produce – they're really just an unofficial arm of the government. I'm sure the CBI knows exactly where they are … Dad grumbles that it's just a fancy way of being in jail anyhow.'
'What a weird setup.'
'Well, it keeps the land farmed.' She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her. 'And they're eating better than most people, better than they ever had in the city. Mom knows a hundred ways to fix chicken and potatoes.'
After dinner we went to a musical show. The hotel had gotten us tickets to a 'cultural translation' of the old rock opera Hair. The program explained that they had taken some liberties with the original choreography because back in those days they didn't allow actual coition on stage. The music was pleasantly old-fashioned, but neither of us was quite old enough to work up any blurry-eyed nostalgia over it. Still, it was much more enjoyable than the movies I'd seen, and some of the physical feats performed were quite inspiring. We slept late the next morning.
We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn't get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon.
It was about 2 A.M. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun-pistol over their heads.
It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground.
The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared.
The girl looked dazedly around, saw the mutilated body of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should have tried to stop her, but I couldn't find my voice and my feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me.
'What hap–' She gasped, seeing the dead man. 'Wh-what was he doing?'
I just stood there stupefied. I'd certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing … there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy … but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give freely.
Marygay was pulling my arm. 'We've got to get out of here. They'll brainwipe you!'
She was right. I turned and took one step and fell to the concrete. I looked down at the leg that had betrayed me and bright red blood was pulsing out of a small hole in my calf. Marygay tore a strip of cloth from her blouse and started to bind it. I remember thinking it wasn't a big enough wound to go into shock over, but my ears started to ring and I got lightheaded and everything went red and fuzzy. Before I went under, I heard a siren wailing in the distance.
Fortunately, the police also picked up the girl, who was wandering down the street a few blocks away. They compared her version of the thing with mine, both of us under hypnosis. They let me go with a stern admonition to leave law enforcement up to professional law enforcers.
I wanted to get out of the cities: just put a pack on my back and wander through the woods for a while, get my mind straightened out. So did Marygay. But we tried to make arrangements and found that the country was worse than the cities. Farms were practically armed camps, the areas between ruled by nomad gangs who survived by making lightning raids into villages and farms, murdering and plundering for a few minutes, and then fading back into the forest, before help could arrive.
Still, Britishers called their island 'the most civilized country in Europe.' From what we'd heard
about France and Spain and Germany, especially Germany, they were probably right.
I talked it over with Marygay, and we decided to cut short our tour and go back to the States. We could finish the tour after we'd become acclimated to the twenty-first century. It was just too much foreignness to take in one dose.
The dirigible line refunded most of our money and we took a conventional suborbital flight back home. The high altitude made my leg throb, though it was nearly healed. They'd made great strides in the treatment of gunshot wounds, in the past twenty years. Lots of practice.
We split up at Ellis. Her description of commune life appealed to me more than the city; I made arrangements to join her after a week or so, and went back to Washington.
10
I rang the bell and a strange woman answered the door, opening it a couple of centimeters and peering through.
'Pardon me,' I said, 'isn't this Mrs Mandella's residence?'
'Oh, you must be William!' She closed the door and unfastened the chains and opened it wide. 'Beth, look who's here!'
My mother came into the living room from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. 'Willy … what are you doing back so soon?'
'Well, it's – it's a long story.'
'Sit down, sit down,' the other woman said. 'Let me get you a drink, don't start till I get back.'
'Wait,' my mother said. 'I haven't even introduced you two. William, this is Rhonda Wilder. Rhonda, William.'
'I've been so looking forward to meeting you,' she said. 'Beth has told me all about you – one cold beer, right?'
'Right.' She was likable enough, a trim middle-aged woman. I wondered why I hadn't met her before. I asked my mother whether she was a neighbor.
'Uh … really more than that, William. She's been my roommate for a couple of years. That's why I had an extra room when you came home – a single person isn't allowed two bedrooms.'
'But why–'
'I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to feel that you were putting her out of her room while you stayed here. And you weren't, actually; she has–'
'That's right,' Rhonda came in with the beer. 'I've got relatives in Pennsylvania, out in the country. I can stay with them any time.'
'Thanks.' I took the beer. 'Actually, I won't be here long. I'm kind of en route to South Dakota. I could find another place to flop.'
'Oh, no,' Rhonda said. 'I can take the couch.' I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed it for a minute and I wound up with the couch.
I filled Rhonda in on who Marygay was and told them about our. disturbing experiences in England, how we came back to get our bearings. I had expected my mother to be horrified that I had killed a man, but she accepted it without comment. Rhonda clucked a little bit about our being out in a city after midnight, especially without a bodyguard.
We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work.
Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone.
'Rhonda–' I settled down in the chair across from her.
I didn't know exactly how to put it. 'What, uh, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?'
She took a long drink. 'Good friends.' She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. 'Very good friends. Sometimes lovers.'
I felt very hollow and lost. My mother?
'Listen,' she continued. 'You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you're stuck with it.'
She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me. Her voice was softer. 'William … look, I'm only two years older than you are – that is, I was born two years before – what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B – your mother understands too. It, our … relationship, wouldn't be a secret to anybody else. It's perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You've got to change too.'
I didn't say anything.
She stood up and said firmly, 'You think, because your mother is sixty, she's outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now.'
Accusation in her eyes. 'Especially now with you coming back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How – old I am, twenty years younger.' Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room.
I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.
A whining, ozone-leaking, battered old bus let me out at the intersection of a bad road and a worse one. It had taken me an hour to go the 2000 kilometers to Sioux Falls, two hours to get a chopper to Geddes, 150 kilometers away, and three hours waiting and jouncing on the dilapidated bus to go the last 12 kilometers to Freehold, an organization of communes where the Potters had their acreage. I wondered if the progression was going to continue and I would be four hours walking down this dirt road to the farm.
It was a half-hour before I even came to a building. My bag was getting intolerably heavy and the bulky pistol was chafing my hip. I walked up a stone path to the door of a simple plastic dome and pulled a string that caused a bell to tinkle inside. A peephole darkened.
'Who is it?' Voice muffled by thick wood.
'Stranger asking directions.'
'Ask.' I couldn't tell whether it was a woman or a child.
'I'm looking for the Potters' farm.'
'Just a second.' Footsteps went away and came back. 'Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You'll probably smell the chickens.'
'Thanks.'
'If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can't let you in without my husband's at home.'
'I understand. Thank you.' The water was metallic-tasting but wonderfully cool.
I wouldn't know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 and take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.
At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn't strong.
Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.
'Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn't want to put them out. Suppose I should have called.'
'Indeed you should have … save you a long dusty walk – but we've got plenty of room, don't worry about that.'
She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.
Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we'd had on the dirigible and in London.
Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.
'Will,' Mr Potter said, 'I don't mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We've got five acres that are just sitting out there, fallow, because we don't have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time.'
'More potatoes, Daddy?' Marygay asked.
'No, no … not this season. Soybeans – cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping.' He took a big slurp of coffee. 'Now, what else…'
'Richard,' Mrs Potter said, 'tell him about the gree
nhouse.'
'That's right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a two-acre greenhouse down about a click from here, by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.
'Why don't you children go down there tonight … show Will the night life in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going.'
'Oh, Daddy. It's not that bad.'
'Actually, it isn't. They've got a fair library and a coin-op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you're a reader. That's good.'
'Sounds fascinating.' It did. 'But what about guard?'
'No problem. Mrs Potter – April – and I'll take the first four hours – oh,' he said, standing, 'let me show you the setup.'
We went out back to 'the tower,' a sandbag hut on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.
'A little crowded in here, with two,' Richard said. 'Have a seat.' There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. 'It's handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don't keep turning in the same direction all the time.'
He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. 'Recognize this?'
'Sure.' I'd had to sleep with one in basic training. 'Army standard issue T-sixteen. Semi-automatic, twelve-caliber tumblers – where the hell did you get it?'
'Commune went to a government auction. It's an antique now, son.' He handed it to me and I snapped it apart. Clean, too clean.
'Has it ever been used?'
'Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works.'
I turned on the scope and just got a washed out bright green. Set for nighttime. Clicked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.