Part 18 (2/2)

Bart went sullenly into school, under Kichiro's watchful eye.

The regular lesson hadn't gone far before Kichiro interrupted it to make a small impulsive speech. ”Bart, you're about all that we old people have to live for. You and the hope that you represent, that one day there will be more people on the s.h.i.+p, people who will get out from under the yoke of the machines, something we've never been able to manage. 'We have done those things we ought not to have done, and left undone those things we should have done.' ”

Bart didn't know what to say.

”But all our lives make too much of a burden to be put on you, don't they?” Kichiro added with a sigh.

He seemed to be pleading.

”No, it's all right with me if you feel that way.”

And his teacher was happy and gave him a manly hug. But Kichiro had missed the point. Bart no longer cared how any of them felt about any-thing.

Sixty-eight.

The first person he met was Armin, who told him that Chao and Basil had both died, separately and rather suddenly, in the past year.

Bart went to school and found that they had a test programmed into the teaching machine, ready for him to take. Left alone to work, he answered a couple of the questions, and then, feeling that he had something more important to do on this day, he got up and left the school. He looked back once and then walked on. Kichiro looked older and less vigorous than he had two years before, and Bart didn't think any of the others would try to get rough with him. Not any more.

He went to the commissary and punched orders for a small birthday cake into the machine, as he had done for some of those early parties, so long ago. It seemed long to him, now.

Soon he had his cake, and the fourteen small candles he had ordered, and a lighter too. He carried the cake to a refectory table and sat down alone to eat some of it himself. He made a little ceremony of lighting the candles, but would have felt too silly singing himself any songs.

He had ordered the sweet fizzy drink he usually had at parties but soon got up and went to where the wine was already kept and poured himself a cup of that.

Kichiro came in and stared at him a few moments before speaking. ”You're supposed to be in school.”

The old man's voice was half startled and half angry. ”What do you think you're doing?”

”It's my fourteenth birthday today. I'm having my cake.”

Kichiro stared a little longer through his puffy, old man's eyes. ”Well-I'm sorry if we forgot about your birthday, but that doesn't excuse your running out in the middle of a test.” He had left a door open somewhere behind him and all the time he was talking, fretful moaning complaints kept drifting from the direction of the hospital.

Armin and Helsa came into the room. ”What's the matter?”

Kichiro told them, and they started arguing, Helsa for taking a different approach with the boy, as she put it, and Armin in favor of declaring another holiday. This last suggestion angered Kichiro. They were still arguing with one another when Bart finished the little piece of cake on his plate and got up and left, practically unnoticed. This time he located the pool but found it had long been dry and empty.

Sixty-nine.

Bart woke up and left his room as usual, and was surprised when the first set of heavy doors that interrupted his private corridor remained closed when he approached. Then he saw that a new doorway, leading to a new, or newly revealed, pa.s.sageway had been made in the wall at right angles to the doors.

After a moment, Bart took the new way.

”The prime directives under which I operate are very clear,” the s.h.i.+p said in his ear. ”At least one human parent is necessary for children to mature to their full potential.

”We will arrive in less than twenty standard years within a system of planets probably suitable for colonization. From now on you will be awakened increasingly often. You will serve the first generation of colonists as parent. Like them, you have first-rate genetic potential, and perhaps you will remain in some position of leaders.h.i.+p when they mature. Today begins your apprentice-s.h.i.+p in this role; your elementary preparation for it, a course in the basics of human psychology, was completed yesterday.”

With gradual comprehension Bart walked on, guided toward the new nursery by the polyphonic squalling from its full cribs.

RECESSIONAL.

From the window of his high hotel room, sixty dollars a day at convention rates, he could look between other buildings to see a small piece of the ocean. Within the mirror where he looked when shaving there was another window with another square of sea, and an hourly newscast came on that morning just as he was starting to shave. Razor in hand he listened while the voice of the woman announcer went through a few details of what she called the grisly discovery. The thing somehow got to him, enough to keep him from concentrating properly either on shaving or on what he ought to say when he appeared on the panel in a couple of hours. Not only that, it stayed with him after he finished getting ready and left the room.

The radio really hadn't given many facts. The body of a woman of indeterminate age had been washed up on a beach somewhere down in the Keys, which put it, he supposed, almost a hundred miles to the southwest of Miami Beach. An unnamed authority was quoted to the effect that the body might have been in the water as long as several years. He thought at first that the news-caster had probably got that garbled somehow, but then mention was made of pockets of cold, un-circulating water to be found in certain depths, in which unusual preservation action could be expected.

One reason for the grisly discovery remaining with him all morning, he supposed, was that his panel topic was ”Science in Science Fiction,” and he hoped to be able to work that ”unusual pre-servation action”

into what he had to say. He felt a little uncomfortable about this panel, as he really was no scientist, though he read the professional journals fairly often and popularizations a lot, and his stories tended to be thick with scientific jargon. He thought some of the readers liked the jargon better than the stories, and he loved it himself, really, which was why long ago he had begun to use so much of it. For him it had always made a kind of poetry.

Some of the other people on the panel were not only real scientists, but were writers as well. They talked quantum mechanics. They talked epistemo-logy. He wasn't sure at first that he remembered what that meant. He wondered for a little while if he was going to have to sit there like a dummy for long minutes at a time. So as soon as the chance came, he got in a few words that s.h.i.+fted the subject to alternate universes. Anybody could talk about that.

Suppose, he thought to himself, looking out over the heads of the audience in the far last row while some argument between two other panelists droned on, just suppose that body could have been five years in the sea. How far could a body drift in five years? Well, certainly not through the Panama Ca.n.a.l. When, in the early afternoon, he got back to his room, he looked out at what little he could see of the one great ocean that went all the way around the world, and thought about that body again. They hadn't said what, if anything, the woman had been wearing. He couldn't quite shake the subject, it seemed to have set up a resonance of some kind inside his head. Time pa.s.sed, what seemed like a lot of time as he sat waiting in his room, but the phone call from another hotel room that he was expecting failed to come.

So he left the convention earlier than he had planned, left it that very afternoon, driving north through summer Florida. Going to the convention, he told himself, had been more trouble than it was worth. In the old days, the cons ran three days, no more, and were relaxed and friendly. Now each one he went to seemed like some d.a.m.ned big business in itself. Just getting away on his own was something of a relief.

A day and a half later, waking up early in his motel room in Atlanta, he put in a call to his agent in New York. The agent would be back in the office in half an hour, the girl thought, and would call him back then. Waiting for the agent to call back, he took a shower, and when he came out of the shower, dripping, turned on the radio.

Listening, he experienced an inward chill.

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