John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

For a while after leaving the apt she didn’t really think very much, but eventually, when they were back at street level, she was able to formulate casual inquiries in a normal friendly tone, and uttered them.

“Matthew Flamen offered you a job, isn’t that right?”

“Yes; apparently he needs someone to cure interon his vushows, and I know a fair amount about electronics.”

“Are you glad to be-ah-out after such a long time?”

“I don’t know. I’ll wait until I find out whether the world has improved in the meantime.”

“It’s got worse,” Lyla said positively. “I mean. Well, I’m still pretty young, I guess, but from what I can remember, even, it seems to have got worse. Dr. Reedeth said they had three LR’s yesterday and that was good according to him because once they had ninein a single night, but there shouldn’t be any at all!”

There was an interlude during which they walked along side by side without talking, Lyla shrouded in her yash and sockasins so that none of her skin showed, and they were able to make it along the sidewalk withtrouble because other people took it for granted she too was knee. There was always a kind of weariness after an outbreak of rioting, a post-tumescent sadness as might be felt by two honest but accidental lovers realizing in the gray dawn that through transient pasthey had risked starting another child on the long journey towards death.

Eventually he took up the questioning and said, “What would you have done if you’d arrived home on your own?”

“I don’t know,” she muttered. “I guess I might have called up your new boss. But I don’t think I’d have got much help out of him. I mean. Oh, this is so hard to explain. I mean I like him on the outside, but I don’t like him on the inside. He talks okay, but you don’t get the feeling he’s a man you can trust. Do you catch me?”

“Very clearly,” Madison said. And: “Is that the resyou’re taking me to, the one ahead?”

They had just rounded a corner and come in sight of a Chinese restaurant called the Forbidden City; purely in order to keep some kind of trade going in spite of modern xenophobia Chinese restaurateurs had notoribeen compelled to put up with whatever clientele offered themselves and customarily accepted mixed parBut the main window of this one had been smashed, and there was a sign on the door, hastily scrawled in red ink: x patrots work!!! And an arrow pointing to the broken glass.

“Dan and I brought some knee friends of ours here once,” Lyla said with forced brightness, and led him across the street. But she didn’t even go up to the door. Behind it there was a tall Asiatic who looked past her at Madison and raised one hand warningly with fingers stiff for a karate chop.

“I guess we’d better try somewhere else tonight,” she said dispiritedly, and turned away. From the corner of her eye she caught the Asiatic’s teeth glinting in a grin.

There was a soul-food restaurant on the next block, but that had a sign up too, neatly printed in bright brown on solid black, denying entry to blanks, and then there was an Indian one proudly assuring the public that they too were Aryans and wanted nothing to do with other races, and a strict-Jewish one and a strict-Muslim one and a Japanese one for whites only outside which was parked a South African Voortrekker, and a Yoruba one which specialized in ground-nut chop and.

Finally Lyla said miserably, “I’m so sorry, but it’s been months since I tried to find somewhere that wasn’t segregated and after the trouble last night I guess that was the final straw for lots of them. Maybe we should break up and eat separately after all.”

“The hotel you recommended me to,” Madison said. “Does that have a restaurant?”

Miserably she looked up at him through the window in the hood of her yash. “For all I know, the hotel may have stopped taking knee clients now and you’ll have to go clear to Harlem after all.”

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