“You live in Lakonia?” Danty asked as the road slanted down.
“Yes,” Rollins snapped, more of his attention on his driving now than at any time since Danty stopped him.
Here the traffic was thickening like milk soured by lemon juice. “And you don’t. So where do you want to be put off?”
“Any hoverhalt will do.”
“Sure you don’t want to be run all the way home?” Rollins countered sarcastically. “If you have a home, that is.”
“I get by,” Danty said.
Rollins spotted ‘a vacant parking bay and pulled over. The car stopped. rocking. Ahead was a hoverhalt sign, a blue illuminated arrow pointing up.
“Thanks,” Danty murmured. opening the door. Rollins didn’t answer. In another few seconds he was lost to sight in the river of traffic. and Danty was dropping coins in the turnstile of the hoverhalt.
Five minutes, and the luxury and beauty of Lakonia lay behind him. He was beyond the forced redwoods and in the shadow-for a few seconds. literally. because it was as tall as the underlying rock would bear and loomed far above the forty-foot level of the of-of the Energetics General Building. four city blocks by five.
In the center of Cowville, that huge squat bulk brooded like a queen-bee in her hive. It was the headquarters of the biggest single employer in the country, except government, and of course without government it could not survive. Sometimes Danty thought of it as a temple, the fane of the priests who served the god Defense.
Cowville was old. Some said it was the oldest city in the state. The insertion of that hulking building into its center had deformed it in a curious fashion, like the pressure of a wedge being hammered home in a block of wood. People and the buildings they lived and worked in-seemed not so much to cluster around this focus of vast wealth, as to have been compressed by it, like garbage compacted for disposal. They were prevented from expanding outside the original city limits by strictly-enforced ordinances, because nothing must interfere with the beautiful setting of Lakonia. Not all of them had come to seek work, or to take advantage of the money flowing freely around Energetics General at a time when half the states of the Union were depressed; some had come merely in order to live close to Lakonia, for the privilege of
walking to the lakeshore and staring at its towers, focus of indescribable ambitions that they would never fulfill.
Even so there was ‘little resentment of its existence. Lakonia had salvaged a beloved scrap of the American dream. At a time when people were losing faith in their older god, Business, because it had fouled the air and ruined the countryside and made the rivers stink, one corporation had created a new and lovely lake, whose water was purer than a mountain creek.
After that, over ten years, came the city-the most desirable place to live on the continent.
Meantime they shut away, behind trees, the original city of Cowville, and-apart from what unavoidable maintenance was called for to keep it habitable-let it rot. They were content to say, “You don’t grow a rose without manure.”
Yet, like the nearly-but-not-quite flavor of hydroponic food, life in Lakonia lacked something. A spice. A savor. “I remember it from the old days!” people claimed-then when challenged to describe it, confessed they couldn’t. “Nonetheless,” they maintained stoutly, “it was real! It can’t have vanished completely!”
Therefore, now and then, they set off in search of it, and for want of anywhere better to start looking they came to Cowvdle, to the littered streets and the stores crammed with over-priced knick-knacks and the preLakonia apartment blocks that had been sub-divided and sub-divided again. It was hard to find living-space in Cowville now. One could foresee an end like the ancient Chinese system of land-tenure, the ancestral holding split up among successive generations until a family was compelled to share a broom-closet.
If they looked in the wrong places they got robbed, or raped, or slashed with a bottle in a bar. But if they were lucky, or someone had given them the right advice beforehand, they learned to recognize landmarks – signposts, clues. A message on a wall, chalked up at midnight, at 4 A.M. washed away by rain. In a store, a handwritten notice: MEETING, followed by a date, a time, an address. In the window of an apartment, a cheap printed card: THINGS FOUND. Nature of the things not specified. TRACING AGENTS. PROBLEMS SERVICE. CASES UNDERTAKEN.