The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  The woman stood her ground long enough to say, “I will see you again too, young lady, and if you don’t mend your manners it may well be in court!”

  “That is a lot more likely than you think, chotz,” grinned Gwenanda. She closed the door behind the woman and beamed at the others. “You can go to bed now, Dorothy. It’s all over.”

  Kriss chuckled. “Honey, you were great. What’s that People versus Gargiano stuff you were saying?”

  “No idea,” said Gwenanda, taking his arm. “That kind of stuff, I just make it up as I go along.”

  III

  By the special mercy of Providence the next day’s calendar was a sweet pup. There were only seven cases scheduled, none of them serious, and for a wonder all eight of the other justices were willing to spend the day in court. “So can I have the day off for personal business, C.J.?” Gwenanda wheedled over the phone, and the Chief Justice shrugged.

  “As far as I’m concerned. If it looks like we’re going to deadlock on anything I’m going to call you back, though.”

  “So don’t deadlock,” she said, switching him off with pleasure; by phone was the best way to talk to Samelweiss, since if he did you a favor on the phone he couldn’t pinch you for payment.

  She took the uptown tube to Fordham Road and was astonished, coming out of the station in the undomed far north of the city, to find snow drifting across the road. “Wow,” she said, pleased, and then less pleased as the cold reached her. Coming from Tucson, Arizona, Gwenanda was not used to an outside-the-dome climate like this. Domes were meant to keep out heat. Outside temperatures never got cold enough to freeze rain into snow—even assuming there was such a thing as rain—and of course she wasn’t dressed for it. Fortunately, there was a van loitering at the tube station, and in two minutes she was at the freezatorium.

  She nerved herself up to go in, prepared for a bad scene. She was spared. The first thing she learned was that Donna Maris Delius was already at fifty degrees below zero Celsius, all functions stopped, her internal body temperature dropping steadily toward the liquid-hydrogen levels where she would remain until some optimist decided to give her another chance. “The kid?” Gwenanda asked, and the reception clerk pointed to a little waiting room.

  The little girl was contentedly reading a book. Gwenanda peered in without speaking, then pulled herself together. “Maris, honey? I’m Gwenanda. Your new muddy.”

  The little girl looked up politely. In person she was, if anything, cuter and prettier than in the picture; she was a year older, and a year more civilized. “Hello,” she said. Too late, Gwenanda wished she had slicked down her hair, taken off some rings, tried to find a simple slack suit or maybe even a dress in her wardrobe. The contrast between the mousy murderess and the trendy Supreme Court justice was bound to give the child culture shock—to add to all the other shocks she had experienced! But the child showed no sign of shock. She read one more page to finish the story she was looking at, and then closed the book. “Kay,” she said, getting up and taking Gwenanda’s hand. “That’s my suitcase.”

  The apartment, which was Gwenanda’s until her hitch on the Supreme Court ran out or the Court moved elsewhere, was certainly large enough to house a child. It was large enough for six of them and maybe a husband or two as well, for there were eight rooms and three baths. “Guest room,” said Gwenanda, checking them off as she led Maris through the tour, “my study, junk room, kitchen, that’s my room, that’s my bath, this is your bath, sun porch—and here,” she said, bringing the child to a halt, “I thought this one could be yours, loves. We’ll fix it up for you real pretty. I’ve got a friend who’s an artist, and e’ll make you bunnies or clowns, or anything you like on the walls.”

  “It’s very big,” said Maris politely. She looked up at Gwenanda for permission, then carefully pulled open one of the six big drawers in the smallest of the chests in the room. It was empty. The reason it was empty was that Gwenanda had been up at six to move all the dashikis and ski clothes and no-longer-worn blouses into closets and boxes. “Can this drawer be mine?” Maris asked.

  “Honey, they’re all yours!”

  Maris looked at the drawers, then at her suitcase, but did not comment on the overkill. “It’s time for my lunch now, I think,” she said politely.

  Lunch! Lunch was fine. Lunch was not a department that Gwenanda was worried about. Maybe it was the only department she wasn’t worried about. She had set out biscuits from the freezer and picked papayas from the porch and put them in to chill, and it was as pretty and tasty and nutritious a lunch as any kid ever got, Gwenanda was certain. The little girl ate politely, solemn-eyed, not inquisitive, not volunteering for anything, though when Gwenanda gave her a cut papaya and a big spoon Maris was diligent about getting the seeds out. “E had a temperature,” she announced as they were putting the dishes in the cleaner.

  “What say, puppy?”

  “My muddy had a temperature. They almost didn’t ice um, because e was sick.”

  “When they take um out again,” Gwenanda promised, “that’s the first thing they’ll do, fix up anything that was wrong with um.” And what better way to bring a temperature down than the liquid-nitrogen coolers? But change the subject! Sure the kid had to talk about it, how else would she get it out? But not now! “What we’re going to do this afternoon,” she said quickly, “is get you some stuff, and then I want you to meet a friend of mine. E’s an engineer, loves. You know what Long Island Sound is? It’s all like part of the ocean, and what e’s doing is closing it up so it will fill up with fresh water and then it will be a pretty lake for us to drink out of.”

  “What stuff?” Maris asked.

  “To get you? Well—clothes, you know?” There had not been much in the suitcase. “We’ll buy you whatever you need.”

  “I’ve got clothes. They’re where I live—Knickerbocker Hostel eighteen, apartment forty-eight, only now they’re in the storerooms in a big trunk.”

  “You live here now, pups,” Gwenanda sighed, and then corrected herself. “Anyway, you will if you want to. Give me a chance, will you?”

  “Sure,” said Maris D. Lemper. “I think it’s time for my nap now.”

  What Gwenanda should have been doing while the little girl was sleeping was preparing progress tests for the next batch of Supreme Court candidates. That was one of the assigned duties for second-term justices, but she couldn’t keep her mind on it. She kept listening for sounds from Maris’s room. When she wasn’t doing that she was feverishly making lists of things she needed to get and do, coffeemaker on one side of her desk, ash tray on the other, three joints in a row burned up to calm her nerves. A nursery school. An afternoon play group for the days when Gwenanda couldn’t get out of court. A playground ID—for Gwenanda to get in and out, not for the little girl. A quick trip to the stores for extra underwear and pajamas and socks—dog, what else did a child need? A child needed everything! A pediatrician. A children’s dentist. A dancing class? Piano lessons? Some friends—Gwenanda sat back, dismayed. You could order up almost anything, but how did you go about ordering up friends?

  Of course! She punched out commands on her memo plate, and in a moment it displayed every household within six floors up or down in the building which had young children. She found six such families and only stopped herself in time from dialing the first on the list to audition the child. Maybe three joints had been too many?

  But there was still so much to do. Maris would need trips to the zoo, new shoes, swimming lessons (or could she swim already?), probably more books, probably more dolls, probably ribbons for her hair…and, oh, yes, a father.

  So when Maris woke up from her nap and was toileted and fed, Gwenanda dressed her bait in the best she had bought for her that morning, brushed her hair, wiped the crumbs of toast off her face and took her downtown to dangle her before Kriss.

  The only thing wrong with the plan was that they couldn’t find Kriss. Gwenanda left Maris in one of the common rooms, where some tenant’s infan
t slept in a crib before the big Christmas tree, and went hunting for him. At the pool she found Dorothy, not swimming, diligently studying something on the data screen. “Oh, Kriss?” she said, looking up. “He took that other fellow to the hospital. I guess he’ll be back pretty soon; he didn’t say.”

  “Uh,” said Gwenanda. “Ah. I wanted um to meet somebody.”

  Dorothy sighed and stretched and clicked off the screen. “It’s all so complicated,” she complained. “I’m trying to get caught up on what a person is supposed to do, you know, like the Universal Town Meeting and the Cafeteria Income Tax.”

  “Don’t let me keep you, Dorothy.”

  “No—No, actually, is it the little girl you’re talking about? The one whose mother killed her father?” She saw Gwenanda’s look and said quickly, “Kriss said something about her this morning before he took off for the hospital. She sounds really nice.”

  Gwenanda, mollified, flashed thirty-two proud teeth. “Come and see for yourself,” she said, and led the way.

  Maris was polite to the new grown-up, but it was clear that she was getting along just fine by herself. She had appointed herself guardian to baby Don, who had waked up and was watching her cheerfully as she shook his word-rattle. “Hel-lo,” it said. “Good kid. Mud-dy.”

  “She’s very sweet,” said Dorothy wistfully, pouring coffee for Gwenanda and herself.

  “Sure e is,” said Gwenanda, recognizing Dorothy’s good critical judgment. “Aren’t you working now?”

  “Only for lunch today,” said Dorothy, watching the children. “I guess I lost count. Is it really Christmas?”

  “You mean because of the tree? No. It’s February. They just decided to leave it up for pretty.” And it was pretty. The tree had been coaxed to grow in seven lush green tiers, with a spike of pure white needles at the top. Gwenanda waved the room lights down, and as they dimmed cold gold and silver flames licked at the branches. “Pups?” she called. “You like the tree?”

  “It’s very pretty, Gwenanda,” said Maris, stroking a cat behind the ears. It began to purr, its yellow eyes looking at her with appetite. Baby Don hung on the bars of his crib to watch. Gwenanda studied the scene thoughtfully.

  “I wonder,” she said out loud, “if I’m going about this thing the wrong way? What have they got here now, three kids?”

  “I think it’s three. There’s a five-year-old boy, I know, and I think another one—although,” Dorothy added, “it’s not always easy to tell who lives here and who’s just visiting. Where do you live, Gwenanda?”

  “Government housing, uptown. It’s what they give you when you’re a Supreme Court justice, but I could move if I wanted to…what’s the matter?”

  Dorothy was staring at her. “Did you say Supreme Court? You mean of the whole United States?”

  “Sure, Dorothy,” she said suspiciously, returning the uncertainty on Dorothy’s face with a scowl from her own. “Anything wrong with that?”

  “Good heavens! Nothing wrong. It’s just that I’m—well, impressed. Where I come from—when I come from, that’s so important it’s scary. I mean, you have to watch yourself with big shots.”

  “Nobody said you don’t have to watch yourself with me,” said Gwenanda darkly, and then, reaching out for her, “Aw. I keep forgetting you’re just new here.” She hugged the other woman before sitting back on the couch. “Listen,” she said, “until a couple years ago what I was was a securities analyst in Tucson, Arizona, about to get fired because I thought the dumb job was stupid. Then my number came up, you know?”

  “But I don’t know,” said Dorothy. “Is that what they call the selective service?”

  “Exactly it is. ‘Greetings. You have been selected for a term of national service as—’ Fill in blank—‘report for orientation so and so, your salary will be so and so, good luck, don’t try to get out of it, get your ass over there.’ It could have been worse. I got on the judicial panel, see, and I qualified for major judiciary, and so here I am. The pay’s good and the work’s easy.”

  “Really?” Dorothy hunted for the inoffensive way to say what she wanted to say. “I thought that to be on the Supreme Court you had to have, I don’t know, anyway a law degree.”

  “Hell, pup, we get basic training!” Gwenanda was uncomprehending. “That’s mostly to teach us how to get the law out of the datastores when we’re not sure. We don’t even need that, much, because we get clerks to help us with the hard stuff. Samelweiss, e’s the C.J., has six of them, and e’s trying to get two more so e can have uz own baseball team. When you come right down to it, it’s mostly common sense. That’s what the Second American Revolution was all about, right?”

  But Dorothy was still impressed, tickling Gwenanda very much. “Do you see the other VIPs? Like the President?”

  “Sally Kamperstein? No. I mean, I’ve met um, but e’s in Washington right now.”

  “Is there still government in Washington?” asked Dorothy, surprised. “I thought it decentralized all over.”

  “Sure it did. Still does—we won’t stay here forever. Sally, e just took uz family there to see the sights. It’s all fixed up like an amusement park now.” She leaned over and patted Maris, who had adjusted herself at Gwenanda’s feet to play with the cat. She dangled a tangle of silver-silk from the tree before the cat, which batted at it, making Maris giggle with pleasure. Then, as the cat’s long claws raked across her arm, giggled again. That was pleasure, too, but a different and pleasingly scary kind. Those soft and blunt claws could never scratch flesh, but they looked as though they could. “We could buy you one, pups,” said Gwenanda, and the little girl’s look changed and deadened as she looked up.

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  “Why not, lovie? They don’t make any mess or anything.”

  “Because I had a cat once and my muddy broke it. Excuse me,” she said politely, and got up again to watch baby Don being changed and fed by his father on the far side of the room.

  Gwenanda sighed. “Keep an eye on um for a minute,” she asked, and headed for the toilet. There was no use rushing things, she told herself, because when the kid was ready to show affection she would. And maybe not that far from now because, look, hadn’t she just curled right up at her feet a minute ago? She was a nice kid, and like any kid she would come to love the person who took care of her, only—Only why didn’t it happen right away? And then she checked her tab, and came back scowling at the results. “Dorothy,” she said, “I have to get my pucky-flush today or tomorrow, but I took all day today off so I’d better be in court tomorrow.”

  “Yes?” Dorothy asked politely.

  “So I think I’ll go down there now. What I was wondering was whether you wanted to come with me.”

  The woman looked embarrassed. “What for?”

  “Well, in case your corpsicle’s still there.”

  “I don’t want to see the woman!”

  “E might want to see you,” Gwenanda pointed out, “and maybe it’s better if I’m with you.”

  Dorothy looked rebellious. She was quiet for a minute, then she stood up. “Oh, hell,” she said, and Gwenanda understood it as intended to mean agreement.

  Don’s father had agreed to keep an eye on Maris, and Maris was more than willing to stay in the condo-commune for an hour or two; they took the elevator up and a cross-bridge van to the clinic. Dorothy wasn’t a bad person, Gwenanda thought, at least not when you got to know her. It was even sort of fun showing her around and explaining things.

  The city had changed immensely while Dorothy lay frozen. It was easy for her to recognize the new buildings—not because she remembered the old, for she had seen little enough of the city from her wheelchair, but because the new buildings were different in kind. They were thin-walled and sometimes almost wall-less; they had less glass and more thin-strip screening, with terraces inset for planting. “So much to get used to,” Dorothy sighed, looking around.

  “It’s not so bad, is it?” Gwenanda probed, not because
she was in any doubt—dog, when had the world ever been better?—but because she wanted Dorothy to understand how lucky she was.

  “It scares me, though. I mean, suppose they draw the numbers again and I get drafted for something?”

  “Why not? We’ve got Angel on the Court, e’s been around as long as you have.”

  “The one that’s half machine? Oh, sure, but he’s been living the whole time. So he’s had a chance to get used to all this, but I don’t know what I’d do if I got drafted to Congress or something.”

  “Congress isn’t bad,” Gwenanda said reflectively, lighting a joint and passing it to Dorothy, who shook her head. “No? Anyway, that’s okay. You really feel like you’re doing incrementals there, unpassing laws all the time.”

  “Unpassing laws?”

  “Sure. There’s too many, you know, so the big job is getting rid of them.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to do it,” Dorothy said decisively.

  “Nothing to it! You can only do so much at a time or it’s all boxed—haste makes waste, right? So each year your congressun gets a piss-off list—” Dorothy’s eyebrows went up—“a list,” Gwenanda explained, “of the laws that people think dump on them. And the staff people compute how much trouble it would cause to change each one. They figure it a dozen different ways. So then the congressuns get together in committee, maybe six or eight at a time, and they talk it over. And each one gets a hit list—”

  “A hit list?”

  “A list, see, of the people who sent in a quantum about that particular thing—a quantum’s a short statement, like no more than twenty-five words, see?—and then e calls up the ones that sound like they have something to say. Then they meet again. Then the whole Congress chews it over for a while. Then they vote.”

  “And that’s all they do, and then the law’s unpassed?”

  “Dog, no! Who’d let them do that all by themselves? No, then it goes to Universal Town Meeting, see. If there’s a good consensus they pass it. If there isn’t, well, then it’s back to the drawing board and you can’t win them all. But mostly by the time it gets to Meeting it’s all pretty clear.”