Tomorrow’s World (26 page)

“Won't I be more conflicted than ever when I get back?” Paula said.

“You'll have a better idea of who you are.”

“Maybe the whole problem is that I'm afraid to find out.”

“How can you be comfortable with yourself if you don't really know who and what you are?” I said. “You make it sound like you're scared there's some sort of monster lurking inside you, when in fact it's the opposite.”

“You mean the monster's on the outside.”

“No, I mean there's something even more beautiful inside than outside. I mean you're only half the person you can be. Occasionally I've glimpsed the other half: in the fleeting moments of doubt and uncertainty that sometimes cloud your eyes; in the flashes of longing or sadness that are gone almost before I can recognize them for what they were—gone so quickly I used to wonder if I'd imagined them, until we were in the library and I saw them for long enough to know for sure what they were. I saw the real you for the first time in the library, Paula, and there's so much more to you than the person I see every day in this place—” I gestured to the spartan logica gray surroundings.

“I don't know what to say,” Paula told me.

“You don't need to say anything, just be at the jetport at quarter to six tomorrow morning.”

The jetport is built into the lower slopes of the hill, near the long, low factories the freightliners supply with raw materials. I meant to arrive there nice and early, but decided at the last moment to shave off my designer stubble.

There were seven people in the small passenger terminal by the time I finally got there.

Including Paula. She was standing in the middle of the terminal, looking lost and alone.

Two Paretos sat in the seats that lined the left-hand wall. They were dressed in gray coveralls with gold wings. Not big wings as in angels, but little ones of the kind that are embroidered on flight uniforms. They were toying with logic puzzles, not making any attempt at conversation with each other, let alone anyone else.

The other four people stood at the small, toughened glass windows at the far end of the terminal. The variety of their hairstyles, height and build told me they were Names. Their body language confirmed it: the smaller man, whose hair was bleached blond, had his arm around the shoulders of the woman beside him. The other man, who was taller and had dark hair, held his partner's hand.

Paula was watching the four Names. The man with bleached hair said something, and the others laughed. I wondered if Paula would have laughed if she'd been part of the group. I wondered which group she felt closer to, the pair of Paretos or the four Names. Maybe she wasn't sure about that herself. I hoped she'd have a better idea by the time the day was out.

“Paula,” I said, as I walked toward her. She was startled by my approach, as if she'd been miles away.

Then it was my turn to be startled. For once, Perfect Paula was wearing a hint of makeup: no lipstick—she probably figured it would get grotesquely smeared on her filtermasks—but a touch of eyeliner.

Taking in the fact I was clean-shaven, Paula said, “You look ten years younger, Travis. You should have shaved your beard off years ago.”

“That would have made me look about twelve,” I said.

I didn't get the laugh I'd hoped for, but at least I got a smile.

The sexless Voice of Reason came through the loudspeakers:

“Niagara flight crew, report to craft. Passengers be advised, take-off is in fifteen minutes.”

“Excited?” I asked Paula.

She nodded, and there was a sparkle in her eyes I'd never seen before.

“We should introduce ourselves,” I said, glancing at our fellow day-trippers.

Paula hesitated, like this was something she'd been dreading, then nodded.

The four Names heard us coming and turned from the windows, no doubt curious about who they'd be sharing their big day with. I barely merited a glance—all eyes focused on Paula. The laughter stopped and the smiles died away. There was no overt hostility in their expressions, just a draining away of the warmth.

With my usual tact and diplomacy I broke the ice by saying, “Okay, which two schmucks paid ten thousand points for their seats?”

Paula rolled her lovely silvery-blue eyes. “The two of us aren't friends or anything,” she said apologetically to the new buddies I'd just made. “We just work together.”

That got her a smile from Mr. Bleached Blond—a small, carefree-looking guy in his twenties; and a “Have you ever thought about looking for another job?” from the dark-haired older man—a serious type who looked like Michael Rennie in
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
He followed his little witticism by turning from Paula to me and saying, “Incidentally,
we
all won our tickets on the lottery, so we thought
you
were the schmucks.” The tone of his voice and coldness of his eyes made me think he had some Numbered blood. It would be unusual, but not unheard of; for some reason unions spanning the genetic divide almost never result in conception. I suspect Paula detected Numerical traits in him, too, because I sensed some of the tension going out of her. Relaxed isn't a word I'd use in connection with my partner, but at least she was looking a little less uptight.

Just as I like comparing people to Olden Days actors, so I have a habit of judging their personalities by their appearance. My LogiPol training told me not to do it, but experience has shown my instincts are usually right. I had the young bleached-blond guy, who turned out to be a Community General surgeon called Jonny Adams—pegged as someone you'd have to work hard to dislike. He'd enjoy a good practical joke and wouldn't take anything short of a triple-bypass too seriously—and even then, only if his patient died on the table. Come to think of it, I could picture him shrugging his shoulders after a botched operation, saying, “Oh well, you win some, you lose some,” then restoring the morale of his theatre assistants by pinging a bloodied rubber glove at them across the lifeless corpse.

His wife was small and slight, with dark brown, bob-cut hair and the look of someone who was never short of an opinion or hesitant about expressing it. She introduced herself as “Dr Heather Adams—a researcher at Community General,” while giving me a handshake that was a lot firmer than her husband's. I'd no trouble figuring out who wore the trousers in that relationship. Jonny appeared blissfully content, though. I've heard that some men enjoy being bossed around by their partners.

As for Michael Rennie, he turned out to be a professor by the name of Frank Faraday, and was an astrophysics lecturer in the learning zone. Somehow I hadn't pictured him being a scriptwriter for a comedy show, although I have to admit his crack to Paula about looking for another job wasn't bad. At least, not bad for someone who had very little sense of humor and took himself way too seriously. His wife was a sweet blonde who obviously adored him. They were as apparently mismatched as Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. But since no one had told them they were incompatible they hadn't realized it, and seemed to get along fine. She introduced herself as Margot, and said she was a homemaker.

Michael Rennie asked what
we
did, but fortunately the loudspeakers crackled into life again, signaling an announcement was imminent and saving me from disclosing my vocation. I'm not ashamed of what I do, it's just that people—well, Names—tend to get edgy when they discover you're with LogiPol, even if they've done nothing wrong and you're not doing anything to make them think you suspect they have. And these four would be edgy enough around Paula as it was. At least until they saw she wasn't like other Numbers. The crackle of the loudspeakers also saved me from inventing a title for myself so I wouldn't feel out of my depth, what with a couple of doctors on one side of me and a professor on the other. I think ‘Commander Travis' has quite a nice ring to it, but I'm not sure anyone except Margot would have bought it.

“Passengers for Niagara Falls, be advised that boarding takes place in ten minutes,” the Voice of Reason informed us. “On insertion of your ID card in the reader to the left of the airlock doors you will each be allocated eight filters from the adjacent dispenser. There is no need to use them during the flight as the passenger cabin is a sealed unit. Flight time is two hours and twenty three minutes, and you will have four hours at Niagara.”

“I hope they give us a barrel to go over the falls in,” I said.

Paula gave me an ‘I can't take you anywhere look.'

I gave her my best boyish smile.

Her heart melted and she smiled back.

Well, okay, that's not exactly true. What she actually did was roll her eyes again. I leaned forward and whispered, “If you keep doing that, one of these days your eyes'll go all the way around, and then where'll you be?”

Her heart might not have melted, but at least she smiled. Actually, she was fighting back a laugh. I didn't think my crack about her eyes rolling backward was all
that
funny. Then I realized she was looking over my shoulder at Frank Faraday. I half turned and saw the professor had hauled a pipe out of the pocket of his coveralls. There was no tobacco in it, of course—smoking was outlawed from day one in the communities. At first there were lots of conduct violations and penalty points levied on people who'd scavenged cigarettes and tins of tobacco from the old cities, but the problem sorted itself out when there was no more tobacco left to scavenge. However there was no law against shoving an antique pipe in your mouth. Which was a pity, because I found it intensely irritating watching the professor chew on his. I wondered if he found it an aid to concentration, or if it was pure affectation. Or maybe it was something deeper, a subconscious way of denying the Numbered blood I was sure ran through his veins. Then again, he might just like to have something other than some teeth and a tongue in his mouth.

I could imagine him taking it out in class—the pipe, that is, not his tongue—and tapping the empty bowl in the palm of his hand while he pondered something profound, or conducting an imaginary orchestra with it in the privacy of his apartment.

I was going to ask if he wanted a light, but Paula dragged me away before I had a chance. She can't have known what I was about to say, but she knew I was about to say something and no doubt guessed it would be better if Professor Faraday was out of earshot when I said it.

“Behave, Travis!” she scolded as she led me over to the seats vacated by the Paretos.

“I'm just excited,” I told her. “I've always wanted to see somewhere like this.”

After a few moments Paula said, “Is it the sort of thing you're thinking about when you look without seeing?”

“I'm sorry?”

“When you daydream, I've always wondered what sort of things you dream about.”

“I dream about lots of things.”

“Tell me about some of them, Travis.”

“Only if you call me Ben—for today, at least.”

“I could bring you up on charges for blackmailing a superior officer.”

I offered her my hands and said, “Go on, cuff me.”

“Why do I get the feeling I'd be acting out some sort of fantasy for you if I did?”

“Looks like you already know what I dream about.”

She laughed. But when the laughter died away her expression was more thoughtful than if she'd only been thinking about my handcuff fantasy. “What do you really daydream about, Ben?” she asked.

So I told her: “Blue skies and far horizons; breaking waves and tall grass blowing in the wind.

“Places with names that sound like they come from lines of poetry: Shanghai, Samarkand and Marrakech; Timbuktu and Kathmandu. Traveling to them on steam trains, sailing ships and propeller-driven planes; by gypsy wagon or caravan of camels.

“Seeing the sights that lined the Silk Route, Salt Road and Frankincense Trail; the Way of a Thousand Kasbahs, the Royal Road of the Incas… Following in the wake of Columbus, the footsteps of Marco Polo, Livingstone and Stanley, Lewis and Clarke. I dream of seeing the world the way it was when Calum Tait saw it.”

“I've heard of the others but not of him,” Paula said.

“He was a travel writer near the end of the Old Days. I analyze his articles—that's my contribution to The Search for Meaning—then I use the pleasure points I earn to go on timesphere trips to the times and places he wrote about. Somehow those trips never capture my imagination the way his words do, though. In the timesphere I can see the big things he wrote about: the castles and cathedrals, palaces and bridges, mountains and beaches—”

“What's missing then?”

“The little delights he said make life come alive.”

“Such as?”

“Unexpected things that are different in each place, that he'd never read about in guidebooks. Things like a butterfly with brilliant blue wings as big as his hand in a rainforest in Brazil; two dragonflies doing a mid-air dance around a 1000-year-old scholar tree near the Forbidden City in Beijing; seahorses drifting with their tails entwined like lovers in the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town…