V

 

 

Almost within sight of Lakonia, the Banshee caught up with a shower of rain, quite likely the same one that had provided Danty with that puddle where he had found mud for his face. At the first drops the wipers churred into action and the windows attempted to close. But Danty, lost in thought, was sitting with his elbow on the passenger door, and the automatics uttered a whine of complaint.

Rollins snapped at him. With a murmured apology he moved his arm. The glass socketed home in the spongy seal around the roof, and Rollins breathed an audible sigh of relief.

“You wear lead, hm?” Danty suggested, and gave a pointed scowl at the counter on the dash next to the gun. Its needle was well down in the white sector. By reflex Rollins also glanced at it, and then flushed, indicating the road ahead slick with wet as far as could be seen.

“You want to get soaked, get out and walk!”

He looked and sounded as though he fully expected the counter to zoom into the red any moment.

Danty shrugged. So it wasn’t rational to be that afraid of rain; there was Sr-90 and C-14 in everything you ate and drank, and unless you wore lead underwear you were constantly at risk from the long-life gamma-emitters like Cs-137. But, as he reminded himself wryly, Rollins was far from the only person in the world who did irrational things.

Maybe he did wear Koenig’s, at that. He wasn’t apt to admit it to a stranger, though.

Then the superway rounded the shoulder of a hill, and he caught his breath. Still in bright sunshine, by a freak of the rainstorm’s course, there was Lakonia laid out before them.

 

Symptom of a terrible disease, like the “hectic flush” of tuberculosis, conveying the illusion of vigorous health, or like the frenzied mental brilliance of terminal syphilis? Some authorities regarded it that way. They claimed that Lakonia was an ersatz, a surrogate; this city built around an artificial sea, they said, was a palliative to dull the guilt suffered by those who had poisoned first the Great Lakes, then the rivers, and ultimately the inshore waters of the oceans past the point at which a man could swim in them.

Yet in its way—and seeing it now Danty was the last person who could have denied it—it was a place of mad magnificence, a rival to the Pyramids and Babylon.

Its towers rose, white, purple, green, and gold, to meet the sun: towers like stalagmites, like poplar-trees; towers like stacks of coins, each offset on the one below; towers like spun sugar-candy, glittering, and towers like frozen waterspouts. High delicate bridges linked them here and there, slung on ropes of spun carbon-fibres seeming weak and thin as spider webs yet capable of carrying cars nose to tail in both directions, and the thicker, ivory-coloured single rail of the hoverline swerved and swooped from one to the next. And all these pinnacles admired their reflections in pure crystal water—moats around the towers’ roots, canals planned to a scale beside which Venice paled.

In any case, Venice had collapsed.

Uniting all these waterways, the New Lake: man-made, spanning eight miles shore to shore, which gave Lakonia the first syllable of its name.

It was early yet, and there was no way of telling whether the nearby rain might not drift in that direction, but the bright mirror of water was alive—with swimmers, with sailboats, with powered launches towing water-skiers and man-carrying kites. At least, the nearside of the lake was swarming with them. Some mile, or mile and a half, from the shore, they seemed by tacit consent to turn back, to face again towards the high lovely towers and the artificial beach of white imported sand. It was as though on the farther shore there was something they were afraid to approach. Yet, looking in that direction, an uninstructed stranger would have seen nothing more foreboding than a stand of tall dark trees, force-grown redwoods two hundred feet high, above which curled a faint wreath of smoke.

 

“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 hoverline—of the Energetics General Building, four city blocks by five.

In the centre 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 centre 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 fulfil.

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 flavour of hydroponic food, life in Lakonia lacked something. A spice. A savour. “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 Cowville, to the littered streets and the stores crammed with over-priced knick-knacks and the pre-Lakonia 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 recognise 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.

You could follow these signs if you chose. They led to another city altogether. They led to the city Danty lived in.

 

He left the hovercar at a halt on the roof of one of the city’s oldest surviving buildings, a good sixty years old. It had seemed like a logical idea, when they extended the line around the lake, to use existing roofs for halts, but they had had to straitjacket the building with concrete beams when the recurrent vibration threatened to shake it down. Now the beams served a double purpose, acting also as supporters for an exterior staircase and for landings on three sides of the building. The interior stairways and the elevator shaft had been turned into shower-rooms and kitchenettes. There had been two apartments on the top floor of this building; now there were eight, entered by doors that had been regular windows.

In the remaining window of the apartment nearest the stairs, dimly legible through the wire-reinforced glass, a card said simply CONSULTATIONS. It was into this one that Danty let himself, with a key that he wore on a steel chain around his neck. It was a precious key; there were only two like it. It was risky to use a stock type of lock in modern Cowville, because so many people had complete collections of the American Lock and Vault Corporation’s range. If you could afford it, you had one hand-made.

The apartment trembled a little as the hovercar he’d arrived on accelerated towards its next destination.

“Magda!” Danty called as he shut the door. There was no answer. He hadn’t really expected one, unless she was in the toilet.

The apartment consisted of one large room, along two walls of which couches that doubled as divans had been built in, plus an alcove cut off with a curtain, a shower-cabinet, and a kitchen made of fire-proof board. As always, it was untidy, with a dozen books lying around open, a stack of sheets torn from a notepad in the middle of the one large low table. He glanced at the latter to make sure none bore a message for him, but they were covered in indecipherable technicalities.

He swore under his breath. Of course, she did have many other calls on her time, but you’d have thought that today …

His resentment died. Maybe it was better this way. Maybe he needed a chance to think over what he had done. Until he was in sight of Lakonia, he’d been able to mute knowledge of his own actions in his mind, making them distant and dream-like. Now they were throbbing and pounding in his memory.

More to distract himself than because he was hungry, he brought a soyburger and a carton of milk out of the freezer, switched on the TV, and sat down to eat in front of it. He caught the tail-end of the weather forecast, and then followed the day’s counts: pollen, RA—high beta, low gamma—KC’s, Known Carcinogens, SO₂, and the rest. But he wasn’t paying attention. He was thinking about the man from the sea.

Images came to his mind: He pictured the disturbance the stranger would cause, like a small, very hard pebble dropped into a loose-journalled complex of machinery. Slack would be taken up here and there in its bearings. Bit by bit it would become possible to deduce who he was, why he had come, what he hoped to achieve.

And then, perhaps, something would have to be done.

“Do thou therefore perform right and obligatory actions,” he quoted to himself under his breath, “for action is superior to inaction.”

 

With a sudden violent gesture he thrust away his plate. He linked his brown thin fingers together so tightly the knuckles paled. His teeth threatened to chatter, so that he had to knot his jaw-muscles to hold them still.

Magda! For pity’s sake hurry back!

I’m scared!