Dayworld Breakup

by Philip José Farmer

  He supposed that Ariel had been thoroughly investigated and put under TM because she was his daughter. She would have been proved innocent of any participation or knowledge of his criminal activities. But she knew that the authorities would not like it if she renewed contact with him.

  What could he do for her? Very little. He would like to help her ease her sorrow at his loss—he was, in a sense, dead to her—but he could only be a friend and a sympathizer.

  He destoned a half-quart of lemonade and some ice cubes. While he drank in the living room, he watched the news. His interview by Szuchen was shown, and he tended to agree with her conclusion that he was a bit of a shit.

  At the bottom of the screen: THE OPINIONS OF THE REPORTER ARE NOT NECESSARILY OFFICIAL OR THOSE OF THE MANAGEMENT UNLESS SO STATED.

  There followed something about nearing the end of the construction of an artificial river system in South Arabia. He started paying attention when there was a newsbreak. The newshead announced that the World Council had received the results of the referendum vote by the population of the commonwealth on the issue of abandoning the New Era system. Contrary to expectations influenced by an unofficial poll, those in favor of breaking up the present system were in the majority. The world population number had been revised, officially stated, “accuratized,” to two billion. Of the one billion authorized to vote, fifty million had failed to do so. Those voting for the breakup numbered more than six hundred and thirty-three million, a two-thirds majority.

  “The voice of the people has spoken!” the newshead said with more excitement than a professional should project. “Of course, this referendum is only a nonbinding notice to the World Council of what the populace desires. Questioned by the higher representatives of the newsmedia, the chief liaison secretaries of the seven Councillors said that it is too early for comments from that august body.”

  There was more, but he half-heard it. The revolution had taken a step forward. Despite the campaign by the government to convince the citizens that a changeover was impossible, the majority had refused to accept that conclusion.

  The screen lit up with orange, a buzzer sounded, and Ariel’s image appeared in a section of the wallscreen reserved for the door monitor display. Caird opened the door for her. Ariel hugged him and wet his chest with her tears. He cried, too, because he sorrowed for her. After she released him, she dried her eyes and face, accepted a glass of lemonade, and sat down.

  “This is, unfortunately, a one-way tie,” she said. “I realize that the old relationship can’t be continued. But you are my father, even if you’re a stranger. If we could get to know each other well, we won’t at least be strangers.”

  “I’d very much like that. But a one-way tie is no bond at all. What tied us together originally is forever gone.”

  “I know that.”

  More tears trickled down.

  They talked for a while, telling each other details of their recent lives. Ariel had married an official in the Department of Physical Services and was very much in love with him. They had petitioned the Department of Reproduction and Child Care for permission to have a baby and expected to get it.

  “You may be a grandfather.”

  “I am delighted,” he said. “The baby and I can start off on an equal footing, both brand new.”

  That caused her to weep again because she and Caird might not be able to do that. But he said that they would be able—perhaps. What she knew about him would help her. She loved the old Caird and he hoped that love would ease gradually into a love for him as he now was.

  After a while, they got less tense. They talked of other things, especially of the news about the referendum.

  “I didn’t expect it’d turn out that way,” he said.

  “You can take much of the credit for it,” she said, smiling. “Just think. My father, the great revolutionist.”

  “The new me doesn’t seem to have any radical enthusiasm for change or any conservative zeal to keep things the way they are. Still, I’m interested in what’s going on.”

  “You should be. You were the catalyst for the revolutionary events. Anyway, as a historian, I study current trends and events and try to extrapolate into possible futures. It could be that the World Council is not now as resistant to a changeover as their official stand indicates. From its viewpoint, certain aspects of the change-over might be desirable. Especially those concerned with the consumption of electrical power.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “The changeover will result in a need for six times the present need.”

  “Think about it. The power needed for heat, light, and fuel is small compared to that required for stoning and destoning. The electrical power required for stoning and destoning eats up ninety percent of the power available. The electrical power gotten from solar panels, tidal, deep-sea, and magnetohydrodynamic sources is used for only ten percent of our needs. The stoning power is provided by tapping the heat of the Earth’s core.

  “But if the world reverts to pre-New Era living, if the stoning-destoning of all the world’s citizens is done away with, we’ll be up to our ass in excess power. It’ll be exceedingly cheap. In fact, the savings should be more than enough to pay for the cost of clearing all that land and building new cities and farms and roads and so on.”

  “It’s a big plus item,” he said. “The people should like that. But the other aspects…the changeover is still going to involve much hardship, uprooting, sacrifice, a lot of unfairness, confusion, and chaos.”

  “When the people fully realize just what’s going to be required of them,” Ariel said, “they’ll rebel. If the government overrides them, it’ll be swept out of power or, at least, the citizens will try to overthrow it. There may be much bloodshed.

  “Take Hoboken, for instance. Manhattan’s Wednesday people are slated to move to that area. They’ll be living in tents and quonsets while they build the city. For an undetermined time, they’ll be, in a sense, dispossessed people and suffering from the physical and psychological traumas the dispossessed can’t avoid. You think they’ll like leaving their nice orderly lives to go to a wilderness which is below sea level—the dikes’re the only thing keeping the sea from drowning them—and be construction workers? It’ll be a long hard time before they can dwell in good houses and return to their normal routine and professions. When they fully realize what they’re in for, they’re going to erupt. It’ll be the French Revolution plus the Russian Revolution all over again.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Most citizens are so conditioned against violence for obedience.”

  “The Old Stone Age savage still lives deep in most people. He bides his time, waits for a chance to break out.”

  Caird’s eyes opened wide as if sprung by a mechanism behind them.

  Ariel said, “I can almost see the bulb over your head lighting up.”

  “What if somebody comes up with a viable plan for making the changeover much more smoothly and without unendurable hardships for the citizens who have to relocate? What if…?” His voice petered out.

  She laughed and said, “Wouldn’t that be something? I can’t imagine what this rabbit out of the hat could be, though. Or do you have an idea?”

  “No,” he said. “Not quite. But something almost clicked in my head. I don’t know what. Maybe it’ll come back.”

  They talked about other things for a while and then came long silences. Finally, Ariel said that she had to go. She cried a little when saying goodnight.

  He felt some grief after the door had closed behind her, but he did not know exactly why. After all, they would be seeing each other again. If it was impossible to renew their old relationship since he remembered nothing of it, a new one could be built up. If both of them desired that… The question was, would they?

  Before going to bed, he called up the instruction tape he was supposed to view before reporting for work to the hospital. Having mastered it, he was ready for his duties, simple ones, at first. He would be accompanied for the
first subweek by a veteran orderly who would teach him all he should know.

  31

  At nine o’clock he tidied up the apartment and then lowered the bed. He told the screen to wake him up at a quarter to twelve so that he could enter the stoner, and he passed almost immediately into slumber. He had several dreams, only one of which he remembered on awakening. He lay for a few minutes in bed after the gonging alarm and his own voice had sounded from the wall. He told the wall that he was awake and to shut up.

  The dream was a puzzle in meaning, though its origins were evident. While in the rehabilitation institution, he had seen Zombies Have Nightmares, Too, a horror-drama about the psychological problems of the living dead of ancient Haiti. It was supposed to be a satire on civil servants, but most viewers had missed that point. The tomb out of which the horde of zombies burst to eat their witch-doctor master stood for bureaucracy, another symbol few people had understood. Caird had dreamed of the final scene and been terrified, but the zombies had been mixed with elements from another show. That was Babes In Toyland, a recent remake, one in a long line going back to a pre-New Era classic. The giant toy robot soldiers, accidentally made by the two inept comic-relief characters, merged with the zombies, became them, and they marched out to destroy the Bogeymen led by the evil Barnaby. Caird actually heard the music of March Of The Wooden Soldiers while the robots were defeating the evil monsters invading Toyland.

  While he was surging up to consciousness, he was aware that he was moaning with terror. One of the horned and furry Bogeymen had escaped the bayonets of the soldiers and was about to seize him in its sharp-clawed paws.

  Be got out of bed, drank a glass of water, and went into the stoner room. Passing Wednesday’s cylinder, he muttered, “Good morning.” The diamond-hard face beyond the round transparent window did not, of course, respond.

  Just as he closed his cylinder door, he caught something thrown up by the churning lightning-ridden ocean of his mind. He thought, I hope I remember that!

  He did. He had no awareness of the six days’ oblivion between the moment stoning power came on and the moment that destoning power gave full movement back to the molecules of his body. He was not at all conscious of any interlude. But, though he knew better, he identified stoning with sleep. Hence, his concern that he might not remember the idea that had burst in his brain like a nova.

  “I really got something!” he said as he pushed the door open and stepped out. “No one else has thought of it—as far as I know!”

  He immediately recorded the idea and then went to bed again. Awakening at six, he exercised for half an hour, after which he prepared and ate his morning meal. A section on the wall in each room glowed orange and emitted a low buzzing while he ate. After his session in the bathroom, from which he emerged clean inside and out, he turned the recorder-alarm off. He was not going to forget its message. The next step was to call up a directory and note the name and number of the civil servant he wanted to talk to. Having done that, he placed his message to the man in the data bank. Sometime today, Robert Hamadhani Munyigumba should read the printout of Caird’s idea in his office. Whether he would act on it quickly depended upon the character of Munyigumba and the amount of priority work he had. If Caird did not hear from him this Tuesday, there was next Tuesday.

  As he had half-expected, he did not get a callback from Munyigumba at the hospital or his apartment that day. He was busy learning some of the tasks an orderly must master. These included changing sheets, bringing in flowers for the patients, storing supplies, and moving the patients into the stoners in the evening and out in the morning. One of the more interesting and pleasant duties was the ten-minute conversation he was supposed to have with his quota of patients who wanted to talk, and most of them did. He also helped bring in the new admittees and destone them. These had been gorgonized in nearby emergency cylinders when they had gotten sick or been injured.

  Just before quitting time, the supervisor who had been observing and instructing him, said, “You may make it, Caird. You seem to have a knack for this profession. You’re the first one ever got Citizen Grandjean to laugh. And you were a great comfort to Citizen Blatand. She’s really afraid of dying, but she refuses to be stoned and wait until a cure for her kind of cancer is found. Not that she would get it. She’d be too old to destone unless they also discover rejuvenation. Anyway, you were very kind to her. But you don’t really believe all that religious bullshit you gave her, do you?”

  Caird shrugged. “Why not make her feel better?”

  “That’s the way to go. If she wants a rabbit’s foot for luck, give it to her. Man! She’s one hundred and eight subyears old, been on this Earth seven hundred and fifty-six obyears. You’d think she’d be sick of this life. But, no, she wants to hang on until her last sour breath before she goes to heaven.”

  Caird felt reasonably sure that he would pass without trouble through his probation period. It should not be too long before he got the badge, uniform, and rank of private as a permanent orderly. Then he would receive a good salary, and he would be taken off the MWG. Orderlies, like all service personnel, were paid well and were highly esteemed.

  The following Tuesday, he waited until three in the afternoon for Munyigumba’s message. When he tried to get through to him, a display told him that the First Assistant to the First Secretary of the OCSSI, the Office of Citizens’ Suggestions for Social Improvement, was not available for consultation at this moment. Caird’s call would be returned as soon as possible.

  As possible did not happen that day. Nor did it the following Tuesday. Shortly before four, Caird put in another call and got the same reply. He had just turned away from the wallscreen when his supervisor, Quintus Mu Williams, came into the orderly room.

  “Hey, Caird, guess what? I was in the sergeant’s room when I saw a newsbreak. Some guy named Munyigumba, an OCSSI big muckamuck, has submitted an idea for making the changeover possible! It’s gone through channels and is being considered by the World Council! There’s a lot of excitement about it. The newshead practically had an orgasm!”

  Caird grunted as if struck in the solar plexus.

  “This Munyigumba,” he said, slowly. “He proposed that the people now stoned in the warehouses be unstoned and put to work building the new cities?”

  “Yeah!” Williams said, eyes widening, eyebrows rising. “You saw it?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Somebody already told you?”

  “No. Did Munyigumba also propose that the destoned people taken from the warehouses live every day while working? And that they be given pardons for their contribution to the work?”

  “Yeah. But, say, if you didn’t see it and nobody told you…?”

  “That son of a bitch!” Caird said. “He stole my proposal and took all the credit! Only…maybe I’m jumping the gun. My name wasn’t mentioned, was it? Any credit given me?”

  “No way,” Williams said. “You saying it’s your idea?”

  “I certainly am.”

  Williams looked as if he did not believe Caird. That was the attitude of everybody else Caird talked to while trying to prove that he was the originator of the “Munyigumba Concept.”

  The First Assistant to the First Secretary finally answered Caird’s message. He denied having received any communication from Caird. When Caird went through the court to get the records for calls made to Munyigumba, he found that they obviously had been erased. He was not surprised.

  He called a press conference and denounced Munyigumba. This was shown briefly on the news. Szuchen, the chief newshead, was as sarcastic about him as she could be without stepping over the libel limits. He expected that. He had made an enemy of her. But it would have made no difference if he had been a friend. She was evidently under orders to discredit him.

  A few days later, the newsheads announced that Munyigumba was being transferred to Tuesday’s Zurich. He had been given a raise in salary and a new ranking. He would be one of the honored members of the n
ewly formed Think Tank which would plan the disposition of the destoned criminals. It was expected that his contributions to that group would be valuable.

  Even the weedies at the Seven Sages tavern joked about his claim, though they were good-natured about it. For a while, some of them called him Citizen Munyigumba. He licked his wounds, which healed rapidly. It would have been nice if he could have gone down in history as the originator of the idea. But what really mattered was that his idea might solve a very big problem.

  The authorities, however, were not going to let it go. They were after him, though they would not admit it. While he was halfway through his probation period, he was summoned to the office of Captain Ad Sherwin Lennow, the chief orderly supervisor.

  Lennow handed him a printout of a communication from the Manhattan Department of Education. Caird read it, then looked unbelievingly at Lennow.

  “They can’t be serious. They can’t claim I’m unqualified to take orderly training because I don’t have a high school education. They say I don’t have even a grade school education!”

  “There’s no record of it,” Lennow said. “Checked it out myself before calling you.”

  “Of course, there isn’t!” Caird said heatedly. “You know my biodata. How could there be?”

  “I’m sorry. Your work record and geniality index are good, and I hate to lose you. Perhaps that might only be temporary, however. You may not have to go back to school…”

  “Starting with first grade!”

  “…if you can convince the Department of Education to give you examinations for a high-school degree. If I were you, I’d put in a petition immediately.”

  “I’m not a troublemaker,” Caird said, flapping the printout as if it were a flag blown by a hot and wrathful wind. “I only want to be a good citizen and contribute something worthwhile to society.”

  “Weeeel,” Lennow said, steepling his hands and smiling faintly. “There is that claim that Citizen Munyigumba stole that idea from you. It has been hinted—not by me, I assure you—that your claim indicates mental instability. I myself have paid no attention to the talk.”