by Larry Niven
“I did.”
“Oh?”
“You know how complicated the exits are. They have to be, to keep anyone from getting in through an exit with like a shotgun.” Ron ran both hands through his hair, without making it any more or less neat. “Well, all the exits have stopped working. They must be on the same circuits as the copseyes. I wasn’t expecting, that.”
“Then we’re locked in,” I said. That was irritating. But underneath the irritation was a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. “How long do you think—?”
“No telling. They’ll have to get new copseyes in somehow. And repair the beamed power system, and figure out how I bollixed it, and fix it so it doesn’t happen again. I suppose someone must have kicked my rigged copseye to pieces by now, but the police don’t know that.”
“Oh, they’ll just send in some cops,” said Jill.
“Look around you.”
There were pieces of copseyes in all directions. Not one remained whole. A cop would have to be out of his mind to enter a Free Park.
Not to mention the damage to the spirit of the park.
“I wish I’d brought a bag lunch,” said Ron.
I saw the cloak off to my right: a ribbon of glowing blue velvet hovering at five feet, like a carpeted path in the air. I didn’t yell or point or anything. For Ron it might be pushing the wrong buttons.
Ron didn’t see it. “Actually I’m kind of glad this happened,” he said animatedly. “I’ve always thought that anarchy ought to be a viable form of society.”
Jill made polite sounds of encouragement.
“After all, anarchy is only the last word in free enterprise. What can a government do for people that people can’t do for themselves? Protection from other countries? If all the other countries are anarchies too, you don’t need armies. Police, maybe; but what’s wrong with privately owned police?”
“Fire departments used to work that way,” Jill remembered. “They were hired by the insurance companies. They only protected houses that belonged to their own clients.”
“Right! So you buy theft and murder insurance, and the insurance companies hire a police force. The client carries a credit card—”
“Suppose the robber steals the card too?”
“He can’t use it. He doesn’t have the right retina prints.”
“But if the client doesn’t have the credit card, he can’t sic the cops on the thief.”
“Oh.” A noticeable pause. “Well—”
Half-listening, for I had heard it all before, I looked for the end points of the cloak. I found empty space at one end and a lovely red-haired girl at the other. She was talking to two men as outré as herself.
One can get the impression that a Free Park is one gigantic costume party. It isn’t. Not one person in ten wears anything but street clothes, but the costumes are what get noticed.
These guys were part bird.
Their eyebrows and eyelashes were tiny feathers, green on one, golden on the other. Larger feathers covered their heads, blue and green and gold, and ran in a crest down their spines. They were bare to the waist, showing physiques Jill would find acceptable.
Ron was lecturing. “What does a government do for anyone except the people who run the government? Once there were private post offices, and they were cheaper than what we’ve got now. Anything the government takes over gets more expensive, immediately. There’s no reason why private enterprise can’t do anything a government—”
Jill gasped. She said, “Ooh! How lovely.”
Ron turned to look.
As if on cue, the girl in the cloak slapped one of the feathered men hard across the mouth. She tried to hit the other one, but he caught her wrist. Then all three froze.
I said, “See? Nobody wins. She doesn’t even like standing still. She—” And I realized why they weren’t moving.
In a Free Park it’s easy for a girl to turn down an offer. If the guy won’t take no for an answer, he gets slapped. The stun beam gets him and the girl. When she wakes up, she walks away.
Simple.
The girl recovered first. She gasped and jerked her wrist loose and turned to run. One of the feathered men didn’t bother to chase her; he simply took a double handful of the cloak.
This was getting serious.
The cloak jerked her sharply backward. She didn’t hesitate. She reached for the big gold disks at her shoulders, ripped them loose and ran on. The feathered men chased her, laughing.
The redhead wasn’t laughing. She was running all out. Two drops of blood ran down her shoulders. I thought of trying to stop the feathered men, decided in favor of it—but they were already past.
The cloak hung like a carpeted path in the air, empty at both ends.
Jill hugged herself uneasily. “Ron, just how does one go about hiring your private police force?”
“Well, you can’t expect it to form spontaneously—”
“Let’s try the entrances. Maybe we can get out.”
It was slow to build. Everyone knew what a copseye did. Nobody thought it through. Two feathered men chasing a lovely nude? A pretty sight; and why interfere? If she didn’t want to be chased, she need only—what? And nothing else had changed. The costumes, the people with causes, the people looking for causes, the peoplewatchers, and pranksters…
Blank Sign had joined the POPULATION BY COPULATION faction. His grass-stained pink street tunic jarred strangely with their conservative suits, but he showed no sign of mockery; his face was as preternaturally solemn as theirs. Nonetheless they did not seem glad of his company.
It was crowded near the Wilshire entrance. I saw enough bewildered and frustrated faces to guess that they were closed. The little vestibule area was so packed that we didn’t even try to find out what was wrong with the doors.
“I don’t think we ought to stay here,” Jill said uneasily.
I noticed the way she was hugging herself. “Are you cold?”
“No.” She shivered. “But I wish I were dressed.”
“How about a strip of that velvet cloak?”
“Good!”
We were too late. The cloak was gone.
It was a warm September day, near sunset. Clad only in paper slacks, I was not cold in the least. I said, “Take my slacks.”
“No, hon, I’m the nudist.” But Jill hugged herself with both arms.
“Here,” said Ron, and handed her his sweater. She flashed him a grateful look, then, clearly embarrassed, she wrapped the sweater around her waist and knotted the sleeves.
Ron didn’t get it at all. I asked him, “Do you know the difference between nude and naked?”
He shook his head.
“Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.”
Nudity was popular in a Free Park. That night, nakedness was not. There must have been pieces of that cloak all over King’s Free Park. I saw at least four that night: one worn as a kilt, two being used as crude sarongs, and one as a bandage.
On a normal day, the entrances to King’s Free Park close at six. Those who want to stay, stay as long as they like. Usually they are not many, because there are no lights to be broken in a Free Park; but light does seep in from the city beyond. The copseyes float about, guided by infrared, but most of them are not manned.
Tonight would be different.
It was after sunset, but still light. A small and ancient lady came stumping toward us with a look of murder on her lined face. At first I thought it was meant for us, but that wasn’t it. She was so mad she couldn’t see straight.
She saw my feet and looked up. “Oh, it’s you. The one who helped break the lawn mower,” she said; which was unjust. “A Free Park, is it? A Free Park! Two men just took away my dinner!”
I spread my hands. “I’m sorry. I really am. If you still had it, we could try to talk you into sharing it.”
She lost some of her mad; which brought her embarrassingly close to tears. “Then we’re all hungry together. I brought it in a plastic bag. Next
time I’ll use something that isn’t transparent, by d-damn!” She noticed Jill and her improvised sweater-skirt, and added, “I’m sorry, dear, I gave my towel to a girl who needed it even more.”
“Thank you anyway.”
“Please, may I stay with you people until the copseyes start working again? I don’t feel safe, somehow. I’m Glenda Hawthorne.”
We introduced ourselves. Glenda Hawthorne shook our hands. By now it was quite dark. We couldn’t see the city beyond the high green hedges, but the change was startling when the lights of Westwood and Santa Monica flashed on.
The police were taking their own good time getting us some copseyes.
We reached the grassy field sometimes used by the Society for Creative Anachronism for their tournaments. They fight on foot with weighted and padded weapons designed to behave like sword, broadaxes, morningstars, etc. The weapons are bugged so that they won’t fall into the wrong hands. The field is big and flat and bare of trees, sloping upward at the edges.
On one of the slopes, something moved.
I stopped. It didn’t move again, but it showed clearly in light reflected down from the white clouds. I made out something man-shaped and faintly pink, and a pale rectangle nearby.
I spoke low. “Stay here.”
Jill said, “Don’t be silly. There’s nothing for anyone to hide under. Come on.”
The blank sign was bent and marked with shoe prints. The man who had been carrying it looked up at us with pain in his eyes. Drying blood ran from his nose. With effort he whispered, “I think they dislocated my shoulder.”
“Let me look.” Jill bent over him. She probed him a bit, then set herself and pulled hard and steadily on his arm. Blank Sign yelled in pain and despair.
“That’ll do it.” Jill sounded satisfied. “How does it feel?”
“It doesn’t hurt as much.” He smiled, almost.
“What happened?”
“They started pushing me and kicking me to make me go away. I was doing it, I was walking away, I was. Then one of the sons of bitches snatched away my sign—” He stopped for a moment, then went off at a tangent. “I wasn’t hurting anyone with my sign. I’m a psych major. I’m writing a thesis on what people read into a blank sign. Like the blank sheets in the Rorschach tests.”
“What kind of reactions do you get?”
“Usually hostile. But nothing like that.” Blank Sign sounded bewildered. “Wouldn’t you think a Free Park is the one place you’d find freedom of speech?”
Jill wiped at his face with a tissue from Glenda Hawthorne’s purse. She said, “Especially when you’re not saying anything. Hey, Ron, tell us more about your government by anarchy.”
Ron cleared his throat. “I hope you’re not judging it by this. King’s Free Park hasn’t been an anarchy for more than a couple of hours. It needs time to develop.”
Glenda Hawthorne and Blank Sign must have wondered what the hell he was talking about. I wished him joy in explaining it to them, and wondered if he would explain who had knocked down the copseyes.
This field would be a good place to spend the night. It was open, with no cover and no shadows, no way for anyone to sneak up on us.
We lay on wet grass, sometimes dozing, sometimes talking. Two other groups no bigger than ours occupied the jousting field. They kept their distance, we kept ours. Now and then we heard voices, and knew that they were not asleep; not all at once, anyway.
Blank Sign dozed restlessly. His ribs were giving him trouble, though Jill said none of them were broken. Every so often he whimpered and tried to move and woke himself up. Then he had to hold himself still until he fell asleep again.
“Money,” said Jill. “It takes a government to print money.”
“But you could get I.O.U.’s printed. Standard denominations, printed for a fee and notarized. Backed by your good name.”
Jill laughed softly. “Thought of everything, haven’t you? You couldn’t travel very far that way.”
“Credit cards, then.”
I had stopped believing in Ron’s anarchy. I said, “Ron, remember the girl in the long blue cloak?”
A little gap of silence. “Yah?”
“Pretty, wasn’t she? Fun to watch.”
“Granted.”
“If there weren’t any laws to stop you from raping her, she’d be muffled to the ears in a long dress and carrying a tear gas pen. What fun would that be? I like the nude look. Look how fast it disappeared after the copseyes fell.”
“Mmm,” said Ron.
The night was turning cold. Faraway voices, occasional distant shouts, came like thin gray threads in a black tapestry of silence. Mrs. Hawthorne spoke into that silence.
“What was that boy really saying with his blank sign?”
“He wasn’t saying anything,” said Jill.
“Now, just a minute, dear. I think he was, even if he didn’t know it.” Mrs. Hawthorne talked slowly, using the words to shape her thoughts. “Once there was an organization to protest the forced contraception bill. I was one of them. We carried signs for hours at a time. We printed leaflets. We stopped people passing so that we could talk to them. We gave up our time, we went to considerable trouble and expense, because we wanted to get our ideas across.
“Now, if a man had joined us with a blank sign, he would have been saying something. His sign says that he has no opinion. If he joins us he says that we have no opinion either. He’s saying our opinions aren’t worth anything.”
I said, “Tell him when he wakes up. He can put it in his notebook.”
“But his notebook is wrong. He wouldn’t push his blank sign in among people he agreed with, would he?”
“Maybe not.”
“I…suppose I don’t like people with no opinions.” Mrs. Hawthorne stood up. She had been sitting tailor-fashion for some hours. “Do you know if there’s a pop machine nearby?”
There wasn’t, of course. No private company would risk getting their machines smashed once or twice a day. But she had reminded the rest of us that we were thirsty. Eventually we all got up and trooped away in the direction of the fountain.
All but Blank Sign.
I’d liked that blank sign gag. How odd, how ominous, that so basic a right as freedom of speech could depend on so slight a thing as a floating copseye.
I was thirsty.
The park was bright by city lights, crossed by sharp-edged shadows. In such light it seems that one can see much more than he really can. I could see into every shadow; but, though there were stirrings all around us, I could see nobody until he moved. We four, sitting under an oak with our backs to the tremendous trunk, must be invisible from any distance.
We talked little. The park was quiet except for occasional laughter from the fountain.
I couldn’t forget my thirst. I could feel others being thirsty around me. The fountain was right out there in the open, a solid block of concrete with five men around it.
They were dressed alike in paper shorts with big pockets. They looked alike: like first-string athletes. Maybe they belonged to the same order or frat or R.O.T.C. class.
They had taken over the fountain.
When someone came to get a drink, the tall ash-blond one would step forward with his arm held stiffly out, palm forward. He had a wide mouth and a grin that might otherwise have been infectious, and a deep, echoing voice. He would intone, “Go back. None may pass here but the immortal Cthulhu,” or something equally silly.
Trouble was, they weren’t kidding. Or: they were kidding, but they wouldn’t let anyone have a drink.
When we arrived, a girl dressed in a towel had been trying to talk some sense into them. It hadn’t worked. It might even have boosted their egos: a lovely half-naked girl begging them for water. Eventually she’d given up and gone away.
In that light her hair might have been red. I hoped it was the girl in the cloak. She’d sounded healthy…unhurt.
And a beefy man in a yellow business jumper had made the mistake of de
manding his rights. It was not a night for rights. The blond kid had goaded him into screaming insults, a stream of unimaginative profanity, which ended when he tried to hit the blond kid. Then three of them had swarmed over him. The man had left crawling, moaning of police and lawsuits.
Why hadn’t somebody done something?
I had watched it all from sitting position. I could list my own reasons. One: it was hard to face the fact that a copseye would not zap them both, any second now. Two: I didn’t like the screaming fat man much. He talked dirty. Three: I’d been waiting for someone else to step in.
As with the girl in the cloak. Damn it.
Mrs. Hawthorne said, “Ronald, what time is it?”
Ron may have been the only man in King’s Free Park who knew the time. People generally left their valuables in lockers at the entrances. But years ago, when Ron was flush with money from the sale of the engraved beer bottles, he’d bought an implant-watch. He told time by one red mark and two red lines glowing beneath the skin of his wrist.
We had put the women between us, but I saw the motion as he glanced at his wrist. “Quarter of twelve.”
“Don’t you think they’ll get bored and go away? It’s been twenty minutes since anyone tried to get a drink,” Mrs. Hawthorne said plaintively.
Jill shifted against line in the dark. “They can’t be any more bored than we are. I think they’ll get bored and stay anyway. Besides—” She stopped.
I said, “Besides that, we’re thirsty now.”
“Right.”
“Ron, have you seen any sign of those rock throwers you collected? Especially the one who knocked down the copseye.”
“No.”
I wasn’t surprised. In this darkness? “Do you remember his—” and I didn’t even finish.
“Yes!” Ron said suddenly.
“You’re kidding.”
“No. His name was Bugeyes. You don’t forget a name like that.”
“I take it he had big, bulging eyes?”
“I didn’t notice.”
Well, it was worth a try. I stood and cupped my hands for a megaphone and shouted, “Bugeyes!”
One of the Water Monopoly shouted, “Let’s keep the noise down out there!”