Seven-lights hang still for some while, then merge gradually into one streak, veering away, and little by little vanish into the immensity of the dark.
But in the dark now are growing other lights, many of them: lamps, dots, rows, scintillations: some near at hand, some far. Like the stars, yes, but not stars. It is not the great Existences we are seeing, but only the little lives.
In the morning Simon told me something about the Camp, but not until after he had had me check the apartment for bugs. I thought at first he had been given behavior mod and gone paranoid. We never had been infested. And I’d been living alone for a year and a half; surely they didn’t want to hear me talking to myself? But he said, “They may have been expecting me to come here.”
“But they let you go free!”
He just lay there and laughed at me. So I checked everywhere we could think of. I didn’t find any bugs, but it did look as if somebody had gone through the bureau drawers while I was away in the Wilderness. Simon’s papers were all at Max’s, so that didn’t matter. I made tea on the Primus, and washed and shaved Simon with the extra hot water in the kettle—he had a thick beard and wanted to get rid of it because of the lice he had brought from Camp—and while we were doing that he told me about the Camp. In fact he told me very little, but not much was necessary.
He had lost about twenty pounds. As he only weighted 140 to start with, this left little to go on with. His knees and wrist bones stuck out like rocks under the skin. His feet were all swollen and chewed-looking from the Camp boots; he hadn’t dared take the boots off, the last three days of walking, because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get them back on. When he had to move or sit up so I could wash him, he shut his eyes.
“Am I really here?” he asked. “Am I here?”
“Yes,” I said. “You are here. What I don’t understand is how you got here.”
“Oh, it wasn’t bad so long as I kept moving. All you need is to know where you’re going—to have some place to go. You know, some of the people in Camp, if they’d let them go, they wouldn’t have had that. They couldn’t have gone anywhere. Keeping moving was the main thing. It’s just that my back’s seized up, now.”
When he had to get up to go to the bathroom he moved like a ninety-year-old. He couldn’t stand straight, but was all bent out of shape, and shuffled. I helped him put on clean clothes. When he lay down on the bed again a sound of pain came out of him, like tearing thick paper. I went around the room putting things away. He asked me to come sit by him, and said I was going to drown him if I went on crying. “You’ll submerge the entire North American continent,” he said. I can’t remember what else he said, but he made me laugh finally. It is hard to remember things Simon says, and hard not to laugh when he says them. This is not merely the partiality of affection: he makes everybody laugh. I doubt that he intends to. It is just that a mathematician’s mind works differently from other people’s. Then when they laugh, that pleases him.
It was strange, and it is strange, to be thinking about “him,” the man I have known for ten years, the same man, while “he” lay there changed out of recognition, a different man. It is enough to make you understand why most languages have a word like “soul.” There are various degrees of death, and time spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed.
I said what I had not been able to say for a year and a half: “I was afraid they’d brainwash you.”
He said, “Behavior mod is expensive. Even just with drugs. They save it mostly for the V.I.P.s. But I’m afraid they got a notion I might be important after all. I got questioned a lot the last couple of months. About my ‘foreign' contacts.’ ” He snorted. “The stuff that got published abroad, I suppose. So I want to be careful and make sure it’s just a Camp again next time, and not a Federal Hospital.”
“Simon, were they… are they cruel, or just righteous?”
He did not answer for a while. He did not want to answer. He knew what I was asking. He knew what thread hangs hope, the sword, above our heads.
“Some of them…” he said at last, mumbling.
Some of them had been cruel. Some of them had enjoyed their work. You cannot blame everything on society.
“Prisoners, as well as guards,” he said.
You cannot blame everything on the enemy.
“Some of them, Belle,” he said with energy, touching my hand—“some of them, there were men like gold there—”
The thread is tough; you cannot cut it with one stroke.
“What have you been playing?” he asked.
“Forrest, Schubert.”
“With the quartet?”
“Trio, now. Janet went to Oakland with a new lover.”
“Ah, poor Max.”
“It’s just as well, really. She isn’t a good pianist.”
I make Simon laugh, too, though I don’t intend to. We talked until it was past time for me to go to work. My shift since the Full Employment Act last year is ten to two. I am an inspector in a recycled paper bag factory. I have never rejected a bag yet; the electronic inspector catches all the defective ones first. It is a rather depressing job. But it’s only four hours a day, and it takes more time than that to go through all the lines and physical and mental examinations, and fill out all the forms, and talk to all the welfare counsellors and inspectors every week in order to qualify as Unemployed, and then line up every day for the ration stamps and the dole. Simon thought I ought to go to work as usual. I tried to, but I couldn’t. He had felt very hot to the touch when I kissed him goodbye. I went instead and got a black-market doctor. A girl at the factory had recommended her, for an abortion, if I ever wanted one without going through the regulation two years of sex-depressant drugs the fed-meds make you take after they give you an abortion. She was a jeweler’s assistant in a shop on Alder Street, and the girl said she was convenient because if you didn’t have enough cash you could leave something in pawn at the jeweler’s as payment. Nobody ever does have enough cash, and of course credit cards aren’t worth much on the black market.
The doctor was willing to come at once, so we rode home on the bus together. She gathered very soon that Simon and I were married, and it was funny to see her look at us and smile like a cat. Some people love illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It’s men who make laws, and enforce them, and break them, and think the whole performance is wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore them. You could see that this woman, like a man, actually enjoyed breaking them. That may have been what put her into an illegal business in the first place, a preference for the shady side. But there was more to it that that. No doubt she’d wanted to be a doctor, too; and the Federal Medical Association doesn’t admit women into the medical schools. She probably got her training as some other doctor’s private pupil, under the counter. Very much as Simon learned mathematics, since the universities don’t teach much but Business Administration and Advertising and Media Skills any more. However she learned it, she seemed to know her stuff. She fixed up a kind of homemade traction device for Simon very handily, and informed him that if he did much more walking for two months he’d be crippled the rest of his life, but if he behaved himself he’d just be more or less lame. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to be grateful for being told, but we both were. Leaving, she gave me a bottle of about two hundred plain white pills, unlabelled. “Aspirin,” she said. “He’ll be in a good deal of pain off and on for weeks.”