Facial Justice (10 page)

Chapter Fifteen

AFTERWARD she remembered that he looked puzzled, so far as an Inspector could look puzzled, and drew back to look at her before he took her hand. "You remember me?" he said. Now indeed they would all be looking at her. "Yes," she breathed. His smile came back, but uncertainly and with an intrusion of discomfort in it, like an alien flavor in a well-known taste. But she couldn't really look at him; she had never been able to. "And you're better?" "Quite well," she said. "I'm going out tomorrow." He nodded thoughtfully. "I couldn't come before," he said. "We had all sorts of things to do, top secret, of course." His eyes twinkled. "But I see you got the flower." "So it was from you?" "I thought you'd guess." She tried to speak, but her voice failed her, and for a brief instant she wondered if she had been struck dumb. Finding her voice, she said: "It's wilting, I'm afraid. But I shall have it with me, and take great care of it." He looked at the dark-blue stamens, which had begun to shrivel and turn inward at the edges. "I'll get expert advice on it," he said. "It seems a pity--" "Oh, much more than a pity!" Jael broke in. His troubled look returned; his gaze did not search her face as it once had, but seemed to stop short before it reached her. "But then I should have to part with it," she said, "and I do love it so! It maddens me that all these plastic flowers should last, and mine, which is a real one, shouldn'tl You can do so much: can't you _order__ it to live?" "I wish I could," he said. Something in his tone troubled Jael. Again she tried to look at him, sitting with his helmet on his knees, his white uniform aglow with cords and epaulettes, the silver and gold insignia of his office; without his helmet he looked more youthful, and the sternness in his eyes seemed half assumed. But still there was a glitter coming from him, the prestige of his position and good looks, which dazzled her and made a barrier between them. "Well, promise me," she said, "that if you take it away, you will bring it back yourself. My address is--" "I know what your address is," he said somberly. "We--er--know people's addresses. Besides, you gave it me. But I can't promise you to bring it back myself, because, you see, we never know where we shall be." Jael tried to hide her disappointment. "Oh well," she said, "let me keep it, then. I'll--I'll look after it. It isn't dead. It's natural, isn't it, for flowers to fade? It isn't withered yet, and when the spring comes, or what they used to call the spring, it will flower again, with any luck. But you'll come back sometime, won't you?" He looked down at his helmet. Some strands of the white plume had got tangled, and he smoothed them out with his long fingers. "Of course I'll come," he said. If only words could be the same as deeds! If only his saying he would come could be the same as coming! For a moment she persuaded herself that it was, and her slither down the slope of happiness seemed to be arrested; but she had traveled a long way from the summit. "It was real, wasn't it?" she asked suddenly. "I mean--you are the man who let me off the fine, and then rescued me when I was pinned down in the coach? You are the same man, aren't you?" It seemed strange, almost irreverent, to be calling him a man, but after all he was one. "Yes, I'm the same man," he said. "You never told me your name." "We're not supposed to." His answer chilled her. Had she begun to slip again? "But," he added suddenly, "I'll tell you. It's Michael 21." Could there be other Michaels? But the fact of knowing his name brought him nearer to her. "Well, I'm the same woman," she said. "There's no doubt about that, is there?" He looked at her uncertainly, between pain and doubt, shorn of his self-confidence, his super-policeman look. "You're not quite the same, you know," he brought out, as gently as he could. "Not the same?" She wouldn't let herself take in the meaning of his words, it was too wounding; she tried to think of something else he might mean. "I suppose nobody's quite the same after an accident," she said. "It--it shakes one up so. You're right in a way: I haven't felt the same. I've had to think of a lot of things I never used to think of. Think for myself, I suppose you could say, thou? h we're not supposed to do that. In that way I am different, I'm more serious than I used to be. Once I never took anything seriously; it was all this face-saving business, as it's called, that started me off." He nodded, gravely. Surprised that she could speak freely to him, for hitherto he had imposed himself on her so much that her thoughts could only follow a certain track with him--a lane of light with darkness on both sides--she added, feigning gaiety: "But it's only temporary, my seriousness! I shall go back to being like I was, I hope, if that doesn't sound too conceited! I've won my battle, whatever it was, and I've been punished--at least," she laughed, "an old welfare worker who sometimes comes nosing round here told me I had." Jael gave the Inspector a questioning look, for he must know better than the Visitor what her fate was going to be; but he made no comment. "So having made my sort of protest, which I felt in duty bound to make, both for myself and others, I shall forget about it, and be as carefree as I used to be, for I'm not a natural rebel and people with a grievance are so unattractive, aren't they?--you must know that better than anyone, since it's your job to keep us all in order." Jael felt very happy saying all this to the Inspector, which she had long had it in her mind to say, and the radio was making such a din, cooing, crooning and sighing, that there was no danger of being overheard. Nor much of being seen; for each patient had a television screen at the end of her bed, and what happened on it was to her more real than what was happening in the ward. She wasn't too much discouraged by Michael's silence, but she began to feel that she had held the floor too long, and said more diffidently: "What I meant was, that I may seem different to--to talk to, but I'm just the same underneath." "I'm sure you are," he said. "But you are changed, none the less." Again the sensation of slipping... Jael struggled to arrest it, and said brightly: "I know you didn't mean to hurt me, but why is it one _minds__ being told one has changed? It might so easily be a change for the better! But people always mean it's a change for the worse! I hope you don't?" "Oh no, of course not," he said mechanically. "Most people would say it _was__ a change for the better. But I, like you were, am a bit of a rebel, although I have to keep the rebels down.... Now, Great Dictator (no don't bother, nobody has heard us), is it really as late as that?" He looked at the ward clock. "I'm afraid it is," she answered sadly. "But I thought that you Inspectors paid no heed to time." "Well, sometimes we can steal a march on it, but that depends on where we're going, and how. Now I want you to be very happy, Jael--" "I am, I am," she murmured. "And will you promise me to go on being very happy?" "How can I promise that?" "Then I'll make it an order.... We Inspectors can, you know. And if you don't obey--" "What will happen?" "Oh, the most thundering fine." "Will you come and collect it?" "Yes, no, I have to be in so many places." "But how can you tell whether I'm happy," Jael asked, "unless you see me?" "Oh, there are ways of telling." "But isn't seeing me the best way?" A look of sadness came behind his eyes and dimmed their brightness. "It's one way," he said, "and used to be the best way. But now I'm not so sure. I might have to ask you, or even use the Contentometer--" "But surely you can tell," cried Jael, "just by looking at me? If you can't, who can?" He didn't answer, but all in one movement he got up and bent over her. In the crook of his arm between his shoulder and his chest, his helmet nestled. Level with his face, the white plume came toward her. Was it his lips that touched hers, or did the horsehair brush them? It was a ravishing moment, a moment not in time or place, the longed-for moment, the moment of moments; and yet she could not, afterward, tell which it was. "Now, Jael 97," said the Sister briskly, "it's time for you to go." Jael was sitting on the chair beside her bed, which had been made up for the next occupant. She had done a little tour of the ward: with some, her farewells had been brief, with others she had sworn eternal friendship; with all she felt on better terms than she had ever thought she would be. How kind they were, and how sorely she would miss them! Nearly everyone had thought of something nice to say to her, something that made her feel they really liked her. Yes, they had accepted her as one of themselves. Many of them she had known only for a short time, for she was almost the _doyenne__ of the patients! Sometimes the ward had seemed like a prison, sometimes like a fortress; which was it now? The outside world pressed heavily against the windows. Beyond the broad border of macadam which formed the garden of the hospital, rose a low wall (all walls in the New State were low: it was forbidden to build a wall too high for the average person to look over), and on the far side you could see torsos moving by with the slightly dragging gait which the regulation speed limit of three miles an hour imposed on pedestrians; sometimes a horse and cart rumbled by; sometimes a ritual dance brought traffic to a standstill. Slow motion, slow motion was the rule, and Jael's thoughts, losing their urgency, began to catch the rhythm and slow down. Thinking at the same pace as the rest, she began to think what they did; she felt the tug, the attraction of a common thought, outside her own and greater than her own; it drew hers like a magnet. She remembered people telling her that under the influence of this telepathy they could think the generalized, universal thought for hours at a stretch: instinct replacing intellect! How comforting it was!--and then suddenly she remembered those blissful, agonizing moments with Michael, and the hope that had kept flaming up and dying down in her, setting her heart racing and her thoughts racing, too, hopes she could share with no one, fears that no infusion of collective sympathy could allay. These were to be the companions of her life, not those others. "Now come on, 97! Don't sit there woolgathering! You've something else to do before you leave, remember." "Something else?" asked Jael, startled out of her reverie. "Why yes! You can't go out into the world looking like that! What would people say?" "I don't quite understand," said Jael. "I thought I'd done everything. I was just waiting for--" "Your conveyance? Well, it's at the door, a nice one, too. A white horse, think of that! Buck up, you mustn't keep it waiting!" "But what am I to do?" "Take a look at yourself, silly, and make sure you're tidy." "Oh," exclaimed Jael, "I had quite forgotten my face!" She burst into shouts of uncontrollable laughter--somehow it seemed so funny. "You've changed, I must say," the Sister said. "When you first came around, you were always asking to have a look at yourself." "Well, I do want to now," said Jael, seized by an overwhelming appetite for the sight of her own face. "Where's a looking glass?" "It's here, your own," the Sister said. "Don't you remember we took it from you when you came in? We can't have patients staring at themselves, it isn't good for them. But you're not a patient now, so here you are." She handed Jael her compact, and watched her open it. "Oh!" cried Jael. Her eyes grew round with horror and dismay. She stared transfixed; put the little glass face downward on the bed; picked it up but didn't look at it, picked it up again and looked in it with her mouth open and her breath coming gustily. "Why, what's the matter?" asked the Sister. "You've--you've Betafied me!" Jael gasped. "Well, yes, we did." "But you never asked me!" "How could we ask you?" said the Sister. "You weren't conscious." "But it isn't my face," Jael almost screamed. "It's someone else's." "It's quite a nice face," the Sister said, "and we took some trouble, believe me, to match your coloring and your hair." "But it isn't me," said Jael. "It's someone else." The horror of nightmare overcame her; she seemed to be sinking through layers of realization, each more appalling than the last. "Don't take on so," the Sister said, "or you'll disturb the ward. I tell you it's quite a good face: Dr. Wainewright said it was the best he'd ever made. He fell in love with it, if you ask me. You'll soon get used to it and grow to like it." "I shan't, I shan't," sobbed Jael. "And luckily for you it's tearproof. Now if you had your old Failed Alpha face, you'd be in a frightful mess--you wouldn't be fit to be seen." Jael snatched the looking glass up again. It was true: the tears were running off her face like water off an oilskin; when she wiped them away no trace was left; no puffy eyelids, no streaks and blotches, nothing. No one but herself could have known that she'd been crying. At the thought of this her tears started afresh. "But now nobody will know how I feel!" "But do you want them to?" "Oh yes, oh yes!" Again she wiped the tears away: it was like mopping up water from the floor boards. She rubbed and scrubbed, trying to hurt herself; but all she got was a dead sensation, as though her skin was no real part of her. "Don't do that," said the Sister sharply. "You can't play about like that with a Beta skin. You might rub it off." "I want to rub it off," said Jael. "I want my old face back. Where is it?" she demanded. "Have you got it?" The Sister couldn't help laughing. "No, my dear, it went down the drain long ago." "You mean it's _lost__?" "Well, what do you think? We can't keep pieces of old skin hanging about." Jael went stiff with fury. "But was my--my old face so damaged... that nothing could be done with it?" "Oh, Dr. Wainewright could have patched it up, but the orders are: if in doubt, Betafy." "Whose orders?" demanded Jael. "Well, dear, the Dictator's (no please, don't, when you're so upset)--if you go back far enough." "But how could the Dictator know about me?" The Sister shrugged her shoulders. "I think he knows about us all," she said. "Then he must have known I didn't want to be Betafied." "Perhaps it was a punishment--you hadn't been a good girl, you know." Jael remembered the Visitor's words: "You have been punished already." So that was it. It explained everything; it explained why the other patients had been so chummy with her, a Beta like themselves; it explained why she hadn't felt, or hadn't properly felt, the kisses. It explained--a spasm of hate shot through her, zigzagging like lightning through the darkness in her mind. And the same flash brought another realization: losing her face, she had also lost him, Michael. He had loved her Failed Alpha face; he did not love her Beta face, he had