The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  Maris nodded, her eyes now on the endless circle of mottos and adages that illuminated the court’s deliberations. This one said:

  “The skill of making, and maintaining commonwealths, consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry, not as tennis-play, on practice only.”—Thomas Hobbes.

  “I don’t know if I agree with that one,” said Gwenanda doubtfully, following the child’s eyes, but Maris had already given up on the hard words.

  “Is it a lot of work, what you do?” she asked.

  “Aw, naw. There’s two kinds of things we do. One is when people come up to the Court because they can’t agree on something. That’s kind of dim, because they only get here when they won’t take on-the-spot arbitration or something, so they’re usually stubborn people and, personally, I’d just as soon they fit it out with bicycle chains instead of bothering us. But the criminal stuff, that’s good. I feel good when there’s some really wicked an that we can stick in the freezer or—aw, damn.” She stopped, conscience-stricken.

  “It’s all right, Gwenanda,” said the little girl. “I know you had to ice muddy.”

  “I didn’t mean to say that. It just slipped out.”

  “I know.” The courtroom was filling now, not with audience but with lawyers and litigants, and Maris was busy looking at everything that could be looked at. Even the latest circling maxim. “Oh, I can read that one!” she cried, gazing up at the glow-letters:

  “If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it.”—Marcus Aurelius.

  While Gwenanda led her pridefully up to greet the other justices, Maris was spelling out the words. She was still rehearsing them to herself when summoned to meet the Tin Twins. Gwenanda’s introduction was nervous—damn, what if the kid said something? Those two weren’t what you met every day. What if she tried, like, to shake hands? When neither one of them had any?

  But Maris was too polite to do anything like that. She gave each of the mechanicals a polite smile, and she said, making polite conversation, “I liked that, what e said, that Mark-us Orrel-us.”

  Of course neither of the Tin Twins could smile back. You could tell when Ai-Max was feeling genial, though, or at least when he was approving. When he was bored and paying only fractional attention his voice was flat and thin. When all his circuits were engaged it was majestic. “Marcus Aurelius,” he corrected, voice rich and filled with harmonics. “A great human philosopher, 121-180 A.D. E was adopted by the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius and so e became emperor too, but is best known for uz Stoic philosophy. This was moral and often admirable, as you can tell by the quotation just given.”

  “Was Catholic, too,” cried Angel, his lights flashing, “like my momma. E said the same thing always, ‘Don’t do bad, don’t tell lies—’ Oh, I should have listened.”

  Gwenanda beamed, hoping Maris had noted that adopted kids really could do well in the world, and hardly noticed the quick argument between the Tin Twins that broke out when Ai-Max tried to tell Angel he was probably confusing Marcus Aurelius with Constantine. What she noticed was Mary Joan Whittier calling her name fretfully: “Now, honestly, Gwenanda! We’re all waiting for you!”

  Gwenanda gave Mary Joan a poisonous look tinged with concern—dog, what had she been doing to herself? looked like shit!—and to Maris an anxious one. “Will you be all right sitting here by yourself, pups?” she demanded.

  “I’ll be fine, muddy,” the child replied. “You go ahead and do your work.”

  Muddy. Gwenanda made her way to her bench in a haze of joy.

  This day the Court had set aside to hear arguments, which, in the case of this particular Court, meant arguments. The dozen lawyers were trying to get some justice to listen to them, Samelweiss was doing his best to get a bet down on the two o’clock race with anybody in the room, Mary Joan was stammering with anger as she quarreled with Pak Il Myun over whether a bank embezzler should get frozen or just lose his credit identity for a few years, the Tin Twins, having given up on Marcus Aurelius, were now squabbling about some crossover interference in their circuits. The cheerfulest one in the room was Gwenanda. The other justices looked at her uneasily, but she beamed on because her heart was singing. Muddy. “Are you tranked out?” Myra Haik demanded. “I’ve been asking you the same question ten times!”

  “What question is that, love?” Gwenanda inquired gently. Forgivingly. Myra couldn’t help being a prunt, because everybody knew she was having trouble in the love department. Not with her husband, the textile chemist, not even with her lover, who was one of the pages, big, coffee-cream fellow who almost made it in pro football, but with her girl friend. But even the Digital Colleague didn’t know who the girl friend was, except that it might be one of the groupies who followed the Court around from city to city, and if the Digital Colleague didn’t know, considering what he could do with other people’s telephone calls when he wanted to, then nobody would know—“What?”

  “I said what’s this damn case you stuck on the docket?” Myra screamed.

  Gwenanda gazed at her sweetly while she got her head back to present time. Then she remembered. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “That Jocelyn an. Hey, C.J.,” she called across the Court to Samelweiss. “I forgot to talk to you about that one. Uz name’s Jocelyn Feigerman. E thinks every time a female an conceives e should go ahead and have the kid.”

  Her voice cut through the babble, because she had put her microphone on override, and produced incredulous snickers from all over the courtroom. But the Chief Justice was shaking his head. “E’s a prunt, all right,” he agreed, “but e has a right to think whatever e wants. Thinking isn’t against the law.”

  “Breaking windows is, though. Also e’s bugging a friend of mine really bad—keeps following um around and yelling at um.” And Gwenanda, conscious of Maris’s grave eyes observing her, punched out commands for the glow-screen, so that the next words to circle the dome were:

  “Nobody has any right to dump on anybody else.”—The 30th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

  “Dog, Gwenanda! I know what the Constitution says,” the C.J. complained. “You know what else I know? I know we’ve got a full calendar for the next two weeks, and Mary Joan here walking around like she’s stoned—” Mary Joan, chin on her hands, quivered but didn’t look up—“and some of the other justices busy with their private fights—” faint protesting beeps from the Tin Twins—“and taking days off whenever they feel like it—”

  Gwenanda refused to come down from her high. “Sweety-bumps,” she said sunnily, “e’s already summonsed.”

  “Damn!”

  “Anyway, e’ll be kind of fun, I think, like that chotz that wanted to sue us. Besides, I won’t take any more days off,” she promised. “Now, come on, pups! All of you. Let’s hit the docket so I can get out of here and buy my kid some ice cream!”

  For a wonder, they all did—even half-asleep Mary Joan, even Angel, whose voice was flat when he voted because he was using big chunks of his circuits to display pictures of his great-great-great grandchildren to Maris, in the front row. They cleaned up a couple of dozen motions in half an hour. For the cases they couldn’t resolve on the spot, they split up research and investigation chores fairly—more or less fairly—Mary Joan was hardly answering to her name when the C.J. tried to give her the job of checking out the facts on Justice Horatio Margov, the loony with the billion-dollar suit, so Samelweiss gave up and turned it over to Ai-Max. Samelweiss himself seemed to be spending as much of his time watching Gwenanda as he did on ramrodding the other seven and the score of attending lawyers and litigants. When at last he slapped the tape systems off and crowed, “Court’s adjourned,” he crooked a finger at Gwenanda. She was halfway down the dais to where Maris was sitting already, but she gave the child a wink and sidled over to the C.J.’s bench.

  For a wonder, he didn’t complain about anything. He didn’t even pinch her bottom, just said, “You’re getting to be a real take-charge judge, Gwennie. Have you
ever thought about being C.J.?”

  Gwenanda gave him an open-mouth stare. “Me? You mean me? Dog, Manny, I can make enemies easier ways than that!”

  “Somebody has to do it,” he persisted. “Figure it out for yourself. My hitch runs out in a couple of months, Angel and Myra too, so your class comes up. C.J. doesn’t have to be one of the three senior judges, but e always is, so who’ve you got?” He counted off. “There’s Pak. Not bad, but e doesn’t get along with people. There’s Mary Joan. A real dummy, not counting being spaced out like e is. And there’s you. Which one would you say, sweet-lump?”

  “Pak,” she said firmly, and then reversed herself. “Or Mary Joan. Why not? E just doesn’t feel good today.”

  “E sure doesn’t,” agreed the C.J., watching Mary Joan stumble toward the robing room. “Hope e doesn’t have that damn flu—did you know they found the chotz that started it?”

  “No! Are they going to summons um for it?”

  “Can’t,” chuckled the C.J. “Found um dead. Real dead, you know, like three or four days, and just lousy with diseases, all kinds. One of the lawyers was telling me—anyway, what about it? C.J. for you?”

  “Absolutely no way,” Gwenanda declared. “Positively. I mean it. Anyway, that’s not your worry, you know.”

  “No, you’re wrong about that. Sure, the next Court elects its own Chief Justice, but I want to make sure it’s done right. You’ve got the votes if you want them. I already talked to Pak and the juniors—”

  “Now, damn,” cried Gwenanda, “you had no right to do that!” She was getting really upset, the good mood from the kid calling her “muddy” blown away, ready to rip right into him. The only thing that stopped her was the child’s voice, along with a beep from the Tin Twins.

  “Gwenanda,” Maris called urgently. “Angel says there’s something wrong with that judge—” And Angel’s booming voice, full attention register sounding, confirmed:

  “It’s Mary Joan. E’s in the hall, passed out cold! I’m getting a remote that says e’s really sick!”

  Naturally the C.J. put in a priority call for help. Naturally the Emergency Services van was there in ten minutes, to take away the patient and to splash all the contacts with anti-virals and immunizations. Naturally Gwenanda didn’t wait for any of that, because both she and Maris had already had their splashes and her most urgent thought was to get Maris out of there.

  What she wanted was to take her home, and “home” at that moment sounded like Kriss’s condo-commune. They didn’t take a van or a shuttle. They took a three-wheeled minicab, driver over the electric motor in front, Gwenanda and Maris sharing the passenger seat behind. All the way up from the Court to ground level Gwenanda held the child away from the other passengers crowding the elevator, and when they were in the cab she worried about whether there was any infection still at the commune. Shots were supposed to keep you from getting sick, sure. But who knew if the shots always worked? To conceal her own nervousness she tried to point out interesting sights to the child, but Maris had been seeing them all her little life and anyway what was interesting wasn’t the city, it was what was happening to it now. Gwenanda swore to herself and gave up, flicking on the news plate on the back of the driver’s seat.

  Bad. More than eighty thousand flu cases reported in the city, it said. Hospices overflowing. Clinics swamped. Vaccines running out. All Emergency Services people on twenty-four-hour call, and the next year’s class of in-lieu-of-taxes E.S. workers being summoned up early. Gwenanda spun through the news stories, looking for reassurance and not finding much. The most perplexing thing was that the dead vector had been found, all right, but was officially unidentified. “Now, that’s dumb,” Gwenanda complained out loud. “How can they have the stiff and not know who e is?”

  “Everybody’s somebody,” agreed Maris.

  “Damn true e is. You can tell in two minutes who. All you have to do is get uz fingers or eyeprint or DNA spectrum—what do they mean ‘unidentified’?” she demanded fretfully. “What a chotzy mess.”

  The mess Gwenanda meant was the simple mess of not being able to make an ID on a routine stiff, but what inflamed her irritation was the far bigger mess the city was in. There had not been an epidemic, or even a threat of one, in so long that the city didn’t know how to take it. Laugh it off? Flee the plague spot? But there were too many wretched victims to laugh, and there was an instant quarantine of the whole city that wouldn’t let you run. So, since the city didn’t know how to take it, it took it all wrong. Took it by panicking (a few), or by making sick jokes that no one found funny (more), or by trying to pretend that it didn’t exist (almost everybody—until somebody sneezed nearby, or even looked unwell, at which point the citizens of the third kind immediately switched over to being citizens of the first; no leper was ever shunned with more vigor than any New Yorker who, that day, happened to clear his throat out loud).

  Two hundred meters up from the Court, halfway across the city, pay off the cab, another hundred meters to the commune—and Kriss wasn’t there. He wasn’t at work, either, because when Gwenanda called the municipal Water and Sewage Authority the message machine informed her that the office had been closed for the day. That left a possibility Gwenanda didn’t much like. “Come on, pups,” she said darkly, “I’ll get you the ice cream now.” And all the way to the terraced restaurant where Dorothy worked her jaw was set grimly.

  When she saw that Kriss wasn’t there her suspicions shamed her. The restaurant was nearly empty, cheery place high over the park and the Rainbow Bridge, and Dorothy saw them at once and came over in that Tin Woodman walk of hers. Gwenanda summoned up a friendly smile for her, but it hardened when Maris ran to Dorothy to be kissed and vanished entirely when Dorothy said, “You just missed Kriss, but he said he’d be back in an hour or so.” The suspicions came back full force. Scowl time. Tooth-grinding time. Was the damn an trying to take both Kriss and the kid away from her? It was not Gwenanda’s best hour, and what was coming over the restaurant’s sound system was beginning to get on her nerves. When it wasn’t high-tech music, it was what sounded like adjurations to the employees: “Now, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so what do we do about it? We try to make it a pleasant one for our guests.”

  “Hello,” said Gwenanda ungraciously. “What’s that damn noise?”

  Dorothy’s sober, unlined face clouded over, but she responded civilly, to the words instead of the tone. “It’s something they do to help train us. We’re mostly just out of the freezer here—though the others,” she said wistfully, “seem to catch on faster than I do.”

  Maris was watching Gwenanda’s face with an expression of—dog, could it be fear? well, sure it could be fear—what else would you expect from a kid whose muddy not only beat the child up but Xed her marry when she got sore? “Aw,” said Gwenanda, realizing she was being unfair, remorsefully trying to put everybody at ease, “I bet you do just fine, pups.”

  Dorothy, absently stroking Maris’s hair, considered the point. “Well, I can do waitressing and I can even do short-order. I don’t panic when a crowd comes in and I don’t mix up the orders. But I do break a lot of dishes.”

  “You’ll do better,” Gwenanda promised.

  “I hope so. Well, what’ll it be—I mean, what may I bring you?” she corrected herself, glancing up at the loud-speakers. And when she had the orders—a mango split for Maris, a bottle of beer from Gwenanda—she was off, stiff-legged, arms swinging awkwardly at her side, but smiling.

  Gwenanda sat back and compelled herself to relax, ignoring the speakers—

  “—as soon as the diner reaches uz table, don’t wait, come right up to um and say, ‘Would you care for some coffee?’ And have the pot in your hand, ready to—”

  “This is a nice place,” she commented brightly as Maris looked around. “Can you see over the park there? That’s our building, see it? The greeny-glass one? Well, we’re about twenty stories higher than this, right above that setback with the palms?”<
br />
  “I see it,” said Maris politely, and excused herself to go to the bathroom.

  She took a while to come back, and worked on the mango split only slowly. By the time Kriss showed up she was still finishing it. “I came back early,” he said genially, “because I thought you pups might be here.” He kissed Gwenanda and moved along to nuzzle his nose in Maris’s hair. He sat down, beckoning to Dorothy to take his order, and said, “It’s getting gritty out there. I was a little worried about you two.”

  “Not half as worried as I was,” Gwenanda snapped, noticing how Kriss winked at Dorothy as he asked for a glass of wine. But she had decided against jealousy, she reminded herself; it wasn’t worthy of her, and besides Kriss wouldn’t put up with it forever. But today he wasn’t taking offense. Probably he understood she was a little on edge because of the sickness in the city, not counting trying to learn a muddy’s role in a hurry, and not doing too well at it.

  “I thought we might all go to the track this afternoon,” he said, one arm on the back of Maris’s neck as the child worked slowly at her ice cream. “Can’t, though. It’s closed down because too many jockeys are sick.”

  “That’s bad news for the C.J.,” said Gwenanda. She waved for another beer, beginning to feel relaxed again. She leaned closer to Kriss, fondly rubbing her ear against the curl of his sideburns; damn, how good just his being around made her feel. “I wish you weren’t going to Seattle,” she said wistfully, while over the sound system: