This Perfect Day: A Novel Page 2

  Papa Jan was odd. Odd-looking, naturally; all grandparents had their marked peculiarities—a few centimeters too much or too little of height, skin that was too light or too dark, big ears, a bent nose. Papa Jan was both taller and darker than normal, his eyes were big and bulging, and there were two reddish patches in his graying hair. But he wasn’t only odd-looking, he was odd-talking; that was the real oddness about him. He was always saying things vigorously and with enthusiasm and yet giving Chip the feeling that he didn’t mean them at all, that he meant in fact their exact opposites. On that subject of names, for instance: “Marvelous! Wonderful!” he said. “Four names for boys, four names for girls! What could be more friction-free, more everyone-the-same? Everybody would name boys after Christ, Marx, Wood, or Wei anyway, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes,” Chip said.

  “Of course!” Papa Jan said. “And if Uni gives out four names for boys it has to give out four names for girls too, right? Obviously! Listen.” He stopped Chip and, crouching down, spoke face to face with him, his bulging eyes dancing as if he was about to laugh. It was a holiday and they were on their way to the parade, Unification Day or Wei’s Birthday or whatever; Chip was seven. “Listen, Li RM35M26J449988WXYZ,” Papa Jan said. “Listen, I’m going to tell you something fantastic, incredible. In my day—are you listening?—in my day there were over twenty different names for boys alone! Would you believe it? Love of Family, it’s the truth. There was ‘Jan,’ and ‘John,’ and ‘Amu,’ and ‘Lev.’ ‘Higa’ and ‘Mike’! ‘Tonio’! And in my father’s time there were even more, maybe forty or fifty! Isn’t that ridiculous? All those different names when members themselves are exactly the same and interchangeable? Isn’t that the silliest thing you ever heard of?”

  And Chip nodded, confused, feeling that Papa Jan meant the opposite, that somehow it wasn’t silly and ridiculous to have forty or fifty different names for boys alone.

  “Look at them!” Papa Jan said, taking Chip’s hand and walking on with him—through Unity Park to the Wei’s Birthday parade. “Exactly the same! Isn’t it marvelous? Hair the same, eyes the same, skin the same, shape the same; boys, girls, all the same. Like peas in a pod. Isn’t it fine? Isn’t it top speed?”

  Chip, flushing (not his green eye, not the same as anybody’s), said, “What does ‘peezinapod’ mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Papa Jan said. “Things members used to eat before totalcakes. Sharya used to say it.”

  He was a construction supervisor in EUR55131, twenty kilometers from ’55128, where Chip and his family lived. On Sundays and holidays he rode over and visited them. His wife, Sharya, had drowned in a sightseeing-boat disaster in 135, the same year Chip was born; he hadn’t remarried.

  Chip’s other grandparents, his father’s mother and father, lived in MEX10405, and the only time he saw them was when they phoned on birthdays. They were odd, but not nearly as odd as Papa Jan.

  School was pleasant and play was pleasant. The Pre-U Museum was pleasant although some of the exhibits were a bit scary—the “spears” and “guns,” for instance, and the “prison cell” with its striped-suited “convict” sitting on the cot and clutching his head in motionless month-after-month woe. Chip always looked at him—he would slip away from the rest of the class if he had to—and having looked, he always walked quickly away.

  Ice cream and toys and comic books were pleasant too. Once when Chip put his bracelet and a toy’s sticker to a supply-center scanner, its indicator red-winked no and he had to put the toy, a construction set, in the turnback bin. He couldn’t understand why Uni had refused him; it was the right day and the toy was in the right category. “There must be a reason, dear,” the member behind him said. “You go call your adviser and find out.”

  He did, and it turned out that the toy was only being withheld for a few days, not denied completely; he had been teasing a scanner somewhere, putting his bracelet to it again and again, and he was being taught not to. That winking red no was the first in his life for a claim that mattered to him, not just for starting into the wrong classroom or coming to the medicenter on the wrong day; it hurt him and saddened him.

  Birthdays were pleasant, and Christmas and Marxmas and Unification Day and Wood’s and Wei’s Birthdays. Even more pleasant, because they came less frequently, were his linkdays. The new link would be shinier than the others, and would stay shiny for days and days and days; and then one day he would remember and look and there would be only old links, all of them the same and indistinguishable. Like peezinapod.

  In the spring of 145, when Chip was ten, he and his parents and Peace were granted the trip to EUR00001 to see UniComp. It was over an hour’s ride from carport to carport and the longest trip Chip remembered making, although according to his parents he had flown from Mex to Eur when he was one and a half, and from EUR20140 to ’55128 a few months later. They made the UniComp trip on a Sunday in April, riding with a couple in their fifties (someone’s odd-looking grandparents, both of them lighter than normal, she with her hair unevenly clipped) and another family, the boy and girl of which were a year older than Chip and Peace. The other father drove the car from the EUR00001 turnoff to the carport near UniComp. Chip watched with interest as the man worked the car’s lever and buttons. It felt funny to be riding slowly on wheels again after shooting along on air.

  They took snapshots outside UniComp’s white marble dome—whiter and more beautiful than it was in pictures or on TV, as the snow-tipped mountains beyond it were more stately, the Lake of Universal Brotherhood more blue and far-reaching—and then they joined the line at the entrance, touched the admission scanner, and went into the blue-white curving lobby. A smiling member in pale blue showed them toward the elevator line. They joined it, and Papa Jan came up to them, grinning with delight at their astonishment.

  “What are you doing here?” Chip’s father asked as Papa Jan kissed Chip’s mother. They had told him they had been granted the trip and he had said nothing at all about claiming it himself.

  Papa Jan kissed Chip’s father. “Oh, I just decided to surprise you, that’s all,” he said. “I wanted to tell my friend here”—he laid a large hand across Chip’s shoulder—“a little more about Uni than the earpiece will. Hello, Chip.” He bent and kissed Chip’s cheek, and Chip, surprised to be the reason for Papa Jan’s being there, kissed him in return and said, “Hello, Papa Jan.”

  “Hello, Peace KD37T5002,” Papa Jan said gravely, and kissed Peace. She kissed him and said hello.

  “When did you claim the trip?” Chip’s father asked.

  “A few days after you did,” Papa Jan said, keeping his hand on Chip’s shoulder. The line moved up a few meters and they all moved with it.

  Chip’s mother said, “But you were here only five or six years ago, weren’t you?”

  “Uni knows who put it together,” Papa Jan said, smiling. “We get special favors.”

  “That’s not so,” Chip’s father said. “No one gets special favors.”

  “Well, here I am, anyway,” Papa Jan said, and turned his smile down toward Chip. “Right?”

  “Right,” Chip said, and smiled back up at him.

  Papa Jan had helped build UniComp when he was a young man. It had been his first assignment.

  The elevator held about thirty members, and instead of music it had a man’s voice—“Good day, brothers and sisters; welcome to the site of UniComp”—a warm, friendly voice that Chip recognized from TV. “As you can tell, we’ve started to move,” it said, “and now we’re descending at a speed of twenty-two meters per second. It will take us just over three and a half minutes to reach Uni’s five-kilometer depth. This shaft down which we’re traveling…” The voice gave statistics about the size of UniComp’s housing and the thickness of its walls, and told of its safety from all natural and man-made disturbances. Chip had heard this information before, in school and on TV, but hearing it now, while entering that housing and passing through those walls, while on the very verge of seeing UniCo
mp, made it seem new and exciting. He listened attentively, watching the speaker disc over the elevator door. Papa Jan’s hand still held his shoulder, as if to restrain him. “We’re slowing now,” the voice said. “Enjoy your visit, won’t you?”—and the elevator sank to a cushiony stop and the door divided and slid to both sides.

  There was another lobby, smaller than the one at ground level, another smiling member in pale blue, and another line, this one extending two by two to double doors that opened on a dimly lit hallway.

  “Here we are!” Chip called, and Papa Jan said to him, “We don’t all have to be together.” They had become separated from Chip’s parents and Peace, who were farther ahead in the line and looking back at them questioningly—Chip’s parents; Peace was too short to be seen. The member in front of Chip turned and offered to let them move up, but Papa Jan said, “No, this is all right. Thank you, brother.” He waved a hand at Chip’s parents and smiled, and Chip did the same. Chip’s parents smiled back, then turned around and moved forward.

  Papa Jan looked about, his bulging eyes bright, his mouth keeping its smile. His nostrils flared and fell with his breathing. “So,” he said, “you’re finally going to see UniComp. Excited?”

  “Yes, very,” Chip said.

  They followed the line forward.

  “I don’t blame you,” Papa Jan said. “Wonderful! Once-in-a-lifetime experience, to see the machine that’s going to classify you and give you your assignments, that’s going to decide where you’ll live and whether or not you’ll marry the girl you want to marry; and if you do, whether or not you’ll have children and what they’ll be named if you have them—of course you’re excited; who wouldn’t be?”

  Chip looked at Papa Jan, disturbed.

  Papa Jan, still smiling, clapped him on the back as they passed in their turn into the hallway. “Go look!” he said. “Look at the displays, look at Uni, look at everything! It’s all here for you; look at it!”

  There was a rack of earpieces, the same as in a museum; Chip took one and put it in. Papa Jan’s strange manner made him nervous, and he was sorry not to be up ahead with his parents and Peace. Papa Jan put in an earpiece too. “I wonder what interesting new facts I’m going to hear!” he said, and laughed to himself. Chip turned away from him.

  His nervousness and feeling of disturbance fell away as he faced a wall that glittered and skittered with a thousand sparkling minilights. The voice of the elevator spoke in his ear, telling him, while the lights showed him, how UniComp received from its round-the-world relay belt the microwave impulses of all the uncountable scanners and telecomps and tele-controlled devices; how it evaluated the impulses and sent back its answering impulses to the relay belt and the sources of inquiry.

  Yes, he was excited. Was anything quicker, more clever, more everywhere than Uni?

  The next span of wall showed how the memory banks worked; a beam of light flicked over a crisscrossed metal square, making parts of it glow and leaving parts of it dark. The voice spoke of electron beams and superconductive grids, of charged and uncharged areas becoming the yes-or-no carriers of different bits of information. When a question was put to UniComp, the voice said, it scanned the relevant bits…

  He didn’t understand it, but that made it more wonderful, that Uni could know all there was to know so magically, so un-understandably!

  And the next span was glass not wall, and there it was, UniComp: a twin row of different-colored metal bulks, like treatment units only lower and smaller, some of them pink, some brown, some orange; and among them in the large, rosily lit room, ten or a dozen members in pale blue coveralls, smiling and chatting with one another as they read meters and dials on the thirty-or-so units and marked what they read on handsome pale blue plastic clipboards. There was a gold cross and sickle on the far wall, and a clock that said 11:08 Sun 12 Apr 145 Y.U. Music crept into Chip’s ear and grew louder: “Outward, Outward,” played by an enormous orchestra, so movingly, so majestically, that tears of pride and happiness came to his eyes.

  He could have stayed there for hours, watching those busy cheerful members and those impressively gleaming memory banks, listening to “Outward, Outward” and then “One Mighty Family” but the music thinned away (as 11:10 became 11:11) and the voice, gently, aware of his feelings, reminded him of other members waiting and asked him to move on please to the next display farther down the hallway. Reluctantly he turned himself from UniComp’s glass wall, with other members who were wiping at the corners of their eyes and smiling and nodding. He smiled at them, and they at him.

  Papa Jan caught his arm and drew him across the hallway to a scanner-posted door. “Well, did you like it?” he asked.

  Chip nodded.

  “That’s not Uni,” Papa Jan said.

  Chip looked at him.

  Papa Jan pulled the earpiece out of Chip’s ear. “That’s not UniComp!” he said in a fierce whisper. “Those aren’t real, those pink and orange boxes in there! Those are toys, for the Family to come look at and feel cozy and warm with!” His eyes bulged close to Chip’s; specks of his spit hit Chip’s nose and cheeks. “It’s down below!” he said. “There are three levels under this one, and that’s where it is! Do you want to see it? Do you want to see the real UniComp?”

  Chip could only stare at him.

  “Do you, Chip?” Papa Jan said. “Do you want to see it? I can show it to you!”

  Chip nodded.

  Papa Jan let go of his arm and stood up straight. He looked around and smiled. “All right,” he said, “let’s go this way,” and taking Chip’s shoulder he steered him back the way they had come, past the glass wall thronged with members looking in, and the flicking light-beam of the memory banks, and the skittering wall of minilights, and—“Excuse us, please”—through the line of incoming members and down to another part of the hallway that was darker and empty, where a monster telecomp lolled broken away from its wall display and two blue stretchers lay side by side with pillows and folded blankets on them.

  There was a door in the corner with a scanner beside it, but as they got near it Papa Jan pushed down Chip’s arm.

  “The scanner,” Chip said.

  “No,” Papa Jan said.

  “Isn’t this where we’re—”

  “Yes.”

  Chip looked at Papa Jan, and Papa Jan pushed him past the scanner, pulled open the door, thrust him inside, and came in after him, dragging the door shut against its hissing slow-closer.

  Chip stared at him, quivering.

  “It’s all right,” Papa Jan said sharply; and then, not sharply, kindly, he took Chip’s head in both his hands and said, “It’s all right, Chip. Nothing will happen to you. I’ve done it lots of times.”

  “We didn’t ask,” Chip said, still quivering.

  “It’s all right,” Papa Jan said. “Look: who does UniComp belong to?”

  “Belong to?”

  “Whose is it? Whose computer?”

  “It’s—it’s the whole Family’s.”

  “And you’re a member of the Family, aren’t you?”

  “Yes…”

  “Well then, it’s partly your computer, isn’t it? It belongs to you, not the other way around; you don’t belong to it.”

  “No, we’re supposed to ask for things!” Chip said.

  “Chip, please, trust me,” Papa Jan said. “We’re not going to take anything, we’re not even going to touch anything. We’re only going to look. That’s the reason I came here today, to show you the real UniComp. You want to see it, don’t you?”

  Chip, after a moment, said, “Yes.”

  “Then don’t worry; it’s all right.” Papa Jan looked reassuringly into his eyes, and then let go of his head and took his hand.

  They were on a landing, with stairs going down. They went down four or five of them—into coolness—and Papa Jan stopped, and stopped Chip. “Stay right here,” he said. “I’ll be back in two seconds. Don’t move.”

  Chip watched anxiously as Papa Jan went
back up to the landing, opened the door to look, and then went quickly out. The door swung back toward closing.

  Chip began to quiver again. He had passed a scanner without touching it, and now he was alone on a chilly silent stairway—and Uni didn’t know where he was!

  The door opened again and Papa Jan came back in with blue blankets over his arm. “It’s very cold,” he said.

  They walked together, wrapped in blankets, down the just-wide-enough aisle between two steel walls that stretched ahead of them convergingly to a faraway cross-wall and reared up above their heads to within half a meter of a glowing white ceiling—not walls, really, but rows of mammoth steel blocks set each against the next and hazed with cold, numbered on their fronts in eye-level black stencil-figures: H46, H48 on this side of the aisle; H49, H51 on that. The aisle was one of twenty or more; narrow parallel crevasses between back-to-back rows of steel blocks, the rows broken evenly by the intersecting crevasses of four slightly wider cross-aisles.

  They came up the aisle, their breath clouding from their nostrils, blurs of near-shadow staying beneath their feet. The sounds they made—the paplon rustle of their coveralls, the slapping of their sandals—were the only sounds there were, edged with echoes.

  “Well?” Papa Jan said, looking at Chip.

  Chip hugged his blanket more tightly around him. “It’s not as nice as upstairs,” he said.

  “No,” Papa Jan said. “No pretty young members with pens and clipboards down here. No warm lights and friendly pink machines. It’s empty down here from one year to the next. Empty and cold and lifeless. Ugly.”

  They stood at the intersection of two aisles, crevasses of steel stretching away in one direction and another, in a third direction and a fourth. Papa Jan shook his head and scowled. “It’s wrong,” he said. “I don’t know why or how, but it’s wrong. Dead plans of dead members. Dead ideas, dead decisions.”