Ozma stroked his cheek gently. “Your daughter’s a wonderful woman. What trouble?”
“Lots after her mother died. She got neurotic, too dependent. And she’s very jealous of you, though she has no reason to be.”
“I don’t think so,” Ozma said. “Anyway…trouble? What trouble? Have you been holding out on me?”
“No.”
“We’ll talk about it during breakfast,” she said. “Unless you’d like to talk about it now. You know, I thought for sure that you wanted a child. I had some misgivings myself. I am an artist, and I should give my all to my art, excluding of course what I gladly give to you. But a child? I wasn’t sure. Then—”
“We’ve been through that,” he said. He mimicked her low husky hint-of-gravel-grinding voice. “‘Every woman is an artist in that she can produce a masterpiece, her child. However, not all women are good artists. But I am, I am. Painting is not enough.’”
She hit his arm with a tiny fist. “You make me sound so pompous.”
“Not at all.” He kissed her. “Good night. We’ll talk later.”
“That’s what I said. But…you’ll apply today?”
“I promise.”
Though they could have sent in their application via TV strip, they had a much better chance of acceptance if he used his connections as an organic (a euphemism for policeperson, who represented the force of the “organic” government). He would talk face to face with a superior official of the Reproduction Bureau for whom he had done some favors, and the application would not go through regular channels. Even so, it would be a subyear before the Bureau’s decision came through. Jeff knew that they would be accepted. Meanwhile, he could change his mind and cancel the application.
Ozma would be angry if he did, which meant that he was going to have to think of a good excuse. However, many events could happen before the day of wrath.
Ozma went to sleep quickly. He lay for a while, eyes closed but seeing Ariel’s face. The immer council had already rejected his request to initiate Ozma. He had expected that, but he had thought that Ariel would be accepted. The daughter of immers, she was very intelligent and adaptable, highly qualified to become an immer. Except…she had shown some psychic instability in certain matters. For that reason, the immer council might reject her. He could not deny that the council had to be very cautious. But he was hurt.
Sometimes, he wished that Gilbert Ching Immerman had not discovered the elixir or chemical compound or whatever it was that slowed down aging. He also wished that, since the elixir had been discovered many obcenturies ago, Immerman had made the discovery public. But Immerman, after some agonizing, had decided that the elixir would not be good for humankind as a whole.
As it was, the stoner society eliminated many generations that would have been born if the stoners had not been invented. It took a person one hundred and forty objective years to reach the physiological age of twenty. Thus, six generations were lost every one hundred and forty years. Who knew what geniuses and saints, not to mention the common people, were never born? Who knew how many people who might have led the world in scientific and artistic and political progress were missing?
Immerman had thought that the present situation was bad enough. But if the existing slowing-down of living and of birth was increased by seven, then the loss would be even greater. And this global society, the Organic Commonwealth of Earth, would become even more static and would change even more sluggishly.
Whether Immerman’s decision was ethically right or wrong, he had made it, and its result, the secret immer family, was living today.
Immerman had not, however, been selfish in keeping the secret for himself, his descendants, and those initiated into the family. The immers would be hidden rebels against the government. In a slow and subtle revolution, they would infiltrate the upper and middle echelons of the commonwealth. Once they had enough power, they would not change the basic structure of the government. They did not want as yet to abandon the stoners. But they did want to get rid of the constant and close monitoring of the citizens by the government. It was not just irksome; it was degrading. It also was not necessary, though the government claimed that it was.
“Only by being watched may you become free” was one of the government’s slogans often displayed on the strip shows.
At the age of eighteen subyears, Caird had been told of the immer society by his parents. He had been studied by the council, weighed in the balance and found more than satisfactory. He was asked if he wanted to become an immer. Of course, he did. Who would turn down the opportunity of a much longer life? And what intelligent youth would not want to work for greater freedom and for an eventual position of power?
It was not until some subyears later that he realized how anxious his parents must have been when they revealed the secret of the immers. What if, through some perversity, their son had refused to join? The immer council could not allow him to live, even though it was unlikely that he would betray the family. He would have been taken away in the dead of night and stoned, then hidden where no one would ever find him. And that would have grieved his parents.
When Caird had realized that, he had asked his parents what they would have done if he had rejected the offer. Would they have turned against the immers?
“But no one has ever refused,” his father had said.
Caird had not said anything, but he had wondered if there had been people who had turned down the offer and no one except those immediately involved had known of it.
At nineteen, Caird had been approached by his uncle, an organic whom Caird suspected might also be of the Manhattan immer council. Did his nephew wish to become a daybreaker? Not just the ordinary type of daybreaker, a common criminal, but one who would be protected and helped by the immers. He would have a new identity on each day, he could have many professions, and he could carry messages verbally from one day’s council to the next when recorded messages were dangerous.
Entranced, eager, the youthful Caird had said that he certainly would like to be a daybreaker.
2.
Thinking of this, Caird finally fell asleep. And he was in a chapter of a serial dream, though he had never been in this cliff-hanger before. He was sitting in a room that he somehow knew was part of the long-abandoned sewer system buried by the first great earthquake to level Manhattan. This room was just off the middle of a huge horizontal sewage tunnel blocked at both ends but accessible by rungs down a vertical shaft. A single unshaded light bulb, a device not used for a thousand obyears, lit the room in archaic fashion.
Though the light blazed harshly, it could not keep at bay the dark mists rolling in from every side. These advanced, then retreated, then advanced.
He sat in a hard wooden chair by a big round wooden table. He waited for others, the others, to enter. Yet he was also standing in the mists and watching himself seated in the chair.
Presently, Bob Tingle walked in as slowly as if he were moving through waist-high water. In his left hand was a portable computer on top of which was a rotating microwave dish. Tingle nodded at the Caird in the chair, put the computer on the table, and sat down. The dish stopped turning, its concave face steady on Caird’s convex face.
Jim Dunski seemed to float in, a fencing rapier in his left hand. He nodded at the two, placed the rapier so that it pointed at the Caird at the table, and sat dawn. The blunt button on the rapier tip melted away, and the sharp point glittered like an evil eye.
Wyatt Repp, a silvery pistol-shaped TV camera-transmitter in his left hand, strode in. Invisible saloon batwing doors seemed to swing noiselessly behind him. His high-heeled cowboy boots made him taller than the others. His sequined Western outfit glittered as evilly as the rapier tip. His white ten-gallon hat bore on its front a red triangle enclosing a bright blue eye. It winked once at Caird and was thereafter fixed lidlessly on him.
Repp sat down and pointed the machine at Caird. His first finger was curled around the trigger.
Charlie Ohm, we
aring a dirty white apron, stumbled in with a bottle of whiskey in his left hand and a shot glass in the other. After sitting down, he filled the glass and silently offered it to Caird.
The Caird standing in the fog felt a vibration passing up from the floor through the soles of his feet. It was as if an earthquake shock had touched him, or thunder was shaking the floor.
Then Father Tom Zurvan strode into the room as if the Red Sea was parting before him. His waist-long auburn hair waved wildly like a nest of angry vipers. Painted on his forehead was a big orange S, which stood for “Symbol.” Bright blue was daubed on the end of his nose. His lips were painted green, and his moustache was dyed blue. His auburn beard, which fell to his waist, sported many tiny blue butterfly-shaped aluminum Cutouts. His white ankle-length robe was decorated with broad red circles enclosing blue six-pointed stars. His ID disc bore a flattened figure eight lying on its side and slightly open at one end. The symbol for a broken eternity. In his right hand was a long oaken shaft that curled at the upper end.
Father Tom Zurvan stopped, leaned the shepherd’s staff against his shoulder, and formed a flattened oval with the tips of the thumb and first finger of his right hand. He passed the long finger of his left hand three times through the oval.
He said loudly, “May you speak the truth and only the truth.”
Grasping the staff again, he walked to a chair and sat down. He placed the staff on the table so that its curling end was directed toward Caird.
“Father, forgive me!” the Caird sitting at the table said.
Father Tom, smiling, made the sign again. The first time, it had been obscene. Now, it was a blessing. It was also a command to unloose verbally all pent-up wild beasts, to spill your guts.
The last to enter was Will Isharashvili. He wore a green robe slashed with brown and the Smokey Bear hat, the uniform of the Central Park ranger. Isharashvili took a chair and stared at Jeff. All were staring at the Caird at the table. All their faces were his.
A chorus, they said, “Well, what do we do now?”
Caird woke up.
Though the air-conditioner was on, he was sweating, and his heart was beating faster than it should.
“Maybe I made the wrong decision,” he muttered. “Maybe I should have stayed in one day, maybe I should have been only Jeff Caird.”
Presently, the faint noises of street-sweeping machines lulled him back to sleep.
Sitting at the breakfast-room table, Caird could see the picket-fenced backyard through the window. In one corner was a utility shed; in another, the garage; in a third, the garden. A small one-room building of transparent plastic, a studio, was in the center. Thirty feet to its east was a large apple tree. It bore fruit, but bypassers who had not heard of Ozma might have wondered what kind of a tree it was. Ozma had painted every apple with a different design, though viewed together the designs made an esthetically pleasing whole. The paint would not wash off easily, but it was edible, and a bowl full of the fruit was on the table now.
Ozma had agreed with Jeff that he could decorate the kitchen. He had arranged the walls so they glowed with four paintings by T’ang Dynasty artists. He liked the Chinese quality, the quiet and eternal look with the human figures always far off, small but important, not the masters but an integrated part of the mountains, the forests, the cataracts.
Though Ozma had more Chinese ancestry than he, she did not particularly care for them. She was an outré and outrageous Westerner.
She had turned on the recorder in the corner to find out if Wednesday had left any messages. There were none, so it could be assumed that Wednesday had no complaints about the cleanliness or order of the house.
Their breakfast was interrupted by the front doorbell. Ozma, clad in a knee-length robe so thin that she might as well not have worn it, answered the bell. The callers were, as expected, Corporal Hiatt and Private First Class Sangalli. They wore green caps with long black visors, green robes on which were the insignia of the Manhattan State Cleaning Corps and their rank-stripes and good conduct medals, brown sandals, and yellow gloves.
Ozma greeted them, made a face at their boozy breaths, asked them in, and offered them coffee. They refused, and they plunged into the dusting, washing, waxing, and vacuuming. Ozma returned to the table.
“Why can’t they come later, while we’re gone?”
“Because they have a quota, and because that’s the way the bureaucracy set it up.”
Jeff went upstairs, brushed his teeth, and rubbed on the whisker-removing cream. The face in the mirror was dark, the long dark hair in a Psyche knot. The hazel eyes brooded under heavy brows. The nose was long and slightly hooked, and the nostrils flared. The jaw was heavy. The chin was round and cleft and stuck out.
“I look like a cop,” he muttered. “And I am. But not most of the time.”
He also looked like a big dark worrybird. What’s to worry about? Besides being caught? Besides Ariel?
He showered, put underarm deodorant on, went into the bedroom, and donned a blue robe decorated with black trefoil figures. Clubs, the same symbol used on a pack of cards. He was the joker or perhaps the knave of clubs. Or both. He did not know who was responsible for this organic symbol, but it probably had been some bureaucrat who thought he was being subtle. The organics, the cops, had the real power, clubs.
He picked up his over-the-shoulder bag and walked downstairs. A strip by the front door glowed with a message. Ozma wanted him to stop by her studio before he left.
She was inside the transparent one-room building and sitting on a high stool. She put her magnifying glass down on the table when she heard him enter. The grasshopper she had been looking at had been stoned to keep it immobile while she applied paint to it. Its antennae were yellow; its head, pale orange; its body, bright purple with yellow crux ansatas; its legs, jet black. A mauve paint, which had the properties of one-way glass, covered its eyes.
“Jeff, I wanted you to see my latest. How do you like it?”
“The colors don’t clash. Not by modern standards, anyway.”
“Is that all you can say? Don’t you think it’ll make a sensation? Doesn’t it improve on nature? Isn’t it true art?”
“It won’t make a sensation,” he said. “My God, there must be a thousand painted grasshoppers in Manhattan. Everybody’s used to them, and the ecologists are complaining that you’re upsetting the balance of nature. Preying insects and birds won’t eat them because they look poisonous.”
“Art should please or make one think or both,” she said. “Sensation is for inferior artists.”
“Then why’d you ask me if they’d make a sensation?”
“I didn’t mean the sensation of startlement or outrage or just novelty, of course. I meant the sensation of recognition of something esthetic. The feeling that God is in His heaven, but it’s the human on Earth that does God one better. Oh, you know what I mean!”
“Sure,” he said, smiling. He turned her head and kissed her lips. “When are you going to start on cockroaches? They’re so God-ugly. They need beautification.”
“Where would I get one in Manhattan? I’d have to go to Brooklyn for them. Think I should?”
He laughed and said, “I don’t think the authorities would bless you.”
“I could sterilize the roaches before I let them loose again. But, really, are cockroaches ugly? If you adopt another frame of mind, think in a different Category, look at them from the religious point of view, they’re beautiful. Maybe, through my art, people would come to know their true beauty. See them as the living jewels they are.”
“Ephemeral classics,” Caird said. “Short-lived antiques.”
She looked up and smiled. “You think you’re being sarcastic, but you may be telling the truth. I like those phrases. I may use them in my lecture. Anyway, they’re not so ephemeral. I mean, the insects will die, but my name will go on. People are calling them ozmas. Didn’t you see the seven o’clock Art Section of the Times? The great Sam Fang himself calle
d them ozmas. He said…”
“You were sitting there with me when we saw it. I’ll never forget how you giggled and carried on.”
“He’s usually a jerk, but sometimes he’s right. Oh, I was so ecstatic!”
She bent down to apply the near-microscopic end of her brush. The black paint was over the spiracles, the openings in the exoskeleton which passed air to the tracheae, the breathing tubes that went to the insect’s internal organs. A chemist at Columbia University had developed for her the paint that permitted entrance of oxygen to the spiracles.
Caird looked at the stoned praying mantis at one end of the table and said, “Green is quite good enough for it, for God, and for me. Why, as it were, gild the lily?”
Ozma straightened up. Black eyes wide, mouth twisted, she said, “Do you have to spoil it for me? Who gave you a certificate as an art critic, anyway? Can’t you just enjoy my joy and keep your ignorant opinions to yourself?”
“Now, now,” he said hastily, reaching out to touch her shoulder. “You’re the one that says you should always tell the truth, hide nothing, let the emotions be trigger-happy. I am happy because you’re happy in your work—”
“Art, not work!”
“Art. And I’m happy that you’re getting so much public recognition. I apologize. What do I know?”
“Well, let me tell you something, cop! I’ve learned a lot from my study of insects. Do you know that the highest forms of insects, the bees, wasps, and ants, are female societies? The male is used only for fertilization.”
“Yeah?” he said, grinning. “What’s that supposed to signify?”
“You just watch it, buster! We women may decide that entomology has the key to the future!”
She burst into laughter, squeezed him with one arm, the other hand holding the brush attached to a very thin hose attached to a machine on the table. He kissed her—her anger came and went like heat lightning, nothing permanent or hurtful about it—and went to a strip on the wall. He voice-activated it and asked for their schedule. He probably needed a reminder more than anybody in Tuesday.
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