behind me, they were wheeling Child down the corridor.
His empty eyes stared fixedly at the softly colored ceiling.
Outside, the snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystal
tears. Sugar from a celestial cake. I tried to come up with
all the pretty metaphors I could, maybe to prove I’m not
so cynical after all.
I slid into the hovercar, tipped the Marine as he slid
out the other side. I drove into the street, taking the small
curb too fast. White clouds whooshed up behind me and
obscured the AC building and everything else I put behind
me.
The book lay at my side, the dust jacket face down
because it had her picture on it. I didn’t want to see
amber hair and smooth lips imitating a bow. It was a
picture that disgusted me. And intrigued me. I couldn’t
understand the latter, so I pretended to more of the
former than I felt.
I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the
newscaster casting his tidbits on the airwave waters with a
voice uniformly pleasant whether the topic was a cure for
cancer or the death of hundreds in a plane crash. “Peking
announced late today that it had developed a weapon
equal to the Spheres of Plague launched yesterday by the
Western Alliance …” (Pa-changa, changa, sissss, sisss
pa-changa, the Latin music of another station added in
unconscious sardonic wit) “… According to Asian sources,
the Chinese weapon is a series of platforms . . .” (Sa-baba,
sa-baba, po-po-pachanga) “. . . above Earth’s atmosphere,
capable of launching rockets containing a virulent mutant
strain of leprosy which can be distributed across seventeen-
mile-wide swaths of territory …” (Hemorrhoids really can
be dealt with in less than an hour at the Painless Clinic on
the West Side, another station assured me, though it faded
out before it would tell me how much less than an hour and
just how painless.) “. .. Members of the New Maoism said
today that they had assurances from . . .”
I turned it off.
No news is good news. Or, as the general populace of
that glorious year was wont to say: All news is bad news.
It seemed like that. The threat of war was so heavy on the
world that Atlas must certainly have had a terrible back-
ache. The 1980s and 1990s, with their general climate of
peace and good will made these last fourteen years of
tense brinksmanship all the more agonizing by compari-
son. That was why the young peace criers were so mili-
tant. They had never really known the years of peace, and
they lived with the conviction that those in power had
always been men of guns and destruction. Perhaps, if they
had been old enough to have experienced peace before the
cold war, their fiery idealism might have been metamor-
phosed into despair, as with the rest of us. I was very
young in the last of the pre-war years, but I had been
reading since before I was two and spoke four languages
by the age of four. I was aware even then. It makes the
present chaos more maddening.
Besides the threat of plague, there was the super-nuclear
accident in Arizona which had claimed thirty-seven thou-
sand lives, a number too large to carry emotion with it.
And there were the Anderson Spoors which had riddled
half a state with disease before the Bio-Chem Warfare
people had been able to check their own stray experiment.
And, of course, there were the twisted things the AC labs
produced (their failures), which were sent away to rot in
unlighted rooms under the glossy heading of “perpetual
professional care.” Anyway, I turned the radio off.
And thought about Child.
And knew I should never have taken the job.
And knew that I wouldn’t quit
IV
At home, in the warmth of the den, with my books and
my paintings to protect me, I took the dust jacket off the
book so I wouldn’t accidentally see her face, and I began
reading Lily. It was a mystery novel, and a mystery of a
novel. The prose was not spectacular, actually intended