Dayworld (23 page)

Charlie shut the strip off, put the cube in a deep dish and the dish in the destoner, and turned a switch. After opening the door, he took the dish out, poured the ground coffee into a filter, and turned on the coffee-maker. While waiting, he went to the curved window and looked out at Womanway. The sky was clear. Another hot day. The street was filled with men and women in brightly colored kilts, floppy shirts with wide thick neck-ruffs, and wide-brimmed hats bearing plastic or real flowers. There were many pedestrians, most trying to walk under the shade of the huge oaks or palm trees lining, both sides of the street. Many of the cyclists had big teddy bears in their baskets, and many walkers were carrying teddy bears. The faces of these had been modified to look half-ursine, half like those of beloved relatives, spouses, lovers, or, for the more narcissistic, like their owners.

Charlie shook his head—he had resisted the fad—and poured out a large mugful of coffee. Slouching to the table, he dropped into a chair, spilling some of the liquid on the table. Staring moodily at the coffee, the only decent way to stare early in the morning (almost 10:00 A.M.), he tried to remember the shank of yesterday evening. He had come home quite late, had trouble inserting the disc tip into the hole, had voided much beer, and then had fallen into bed.

Here he was now, unshowered, unshaven, and hung over. His head felt as if it had been cut off and was being used for a bowling ball. Every other beat of blood through his brain was a strike, and the pins flew through in all directions, slamming into the walls of his brain. How had he gotten that headache which no one, not even the sinfullest of sinners, deserved? Oh yes
...
After tending bar, he had not gone home, which he should have done, but had swilled all evening with his cronies at the tavern.

Never again! The wailing cry of the repentant rose from his lips. Never again! And he sat back, startled at the violence of his vow. He had actually spoken aloud.

He got more coffee. What was that dream that had upset him so much? He could not remember it any more than he could remember the specifics of last night’s revel. Wait. Out of the dark fog some dim figures were emerging. He tried to grasp them, only to see them slink back into the fog.

It did not matter. He would drink some more coffee, eat a very light breakfast, and exercise on the gym set in the living room. Then, after shaving and showering, he would take his fencing foil and equipment down to the block gymnasium. After a vigorous hour, he would come back to the apartment, shower again, and then dress for work.

Thinking of dress, what was he doing sitting here naked? He thought that he had not taken his clothes off after he had stumbled into the apartment. He must have, though it was strange that he had not seen them on the floor. Surely, he had just dropped them before falling into bed. Perhaps, some time in the night, he had gone to the bathroom. Coming out, he had picked them up and put them in the PP closet. Even weedies, dirty and unresponsible, antisocial, and slobbish, were so conditioned that they automatically did certain things that went against their nature.

“I really must cut down on the booze,” Charlie muttered. He rose to get more coffee but stopped, cup in hand. The strip on the wall behind him had buzzed loudly. He turned and saw it flashing orange. When he had spoken the words to clear it, he saw the man standing before the apartment door. The strip showed a tall and well-muscled man of about thirty subyears. He wore a mauve hat with yellow roses, a yellow loose blouse with lace cuffs and a green neck-ruff, and a black-and-yellow-checked kilt. His shoulderbag was made of alligator leather, the skin for which was grown in a factory in Brooklyn. The teddy bear held under one arm was mauve. Its face vaguely resembled its owner.

Charlie Ohm said, “What the ... ?”He suddenly recognized the man with the narrow foxlike face. During the past few subyears, Charlie had served him drinks, which the man nursed as if they were dying birds. Three drinks of bourbon, and the evening was spent for Hetman Janos Ananda Mudge.

“...
hell is he doing here?”

He told the audio of the entrance-door monitor strip to turn on and said, more loudly than was necessary, “Just a minute!”

He hurried from the kitchen, groaning as each step jarred loose pain in his head. He went down the narrow hall, the light coming on as he entered, and inserted the tip of his disc-star into the hole below the SATURDAY plaque. A few seconds later, clad only in a kilt, he walked quickly, wincing, to the front door. He paused. What was Janos Mudge doing here? Had he, Charlie Ohm, insulted Mudge sometime last night and was Mudge here to demand an apology? Or was Mudge an organic and here to arrest him for something that he had done last night? Something antisocial? That last speculation did not seem likely, since the hall monitor strip showed that Mudge was the only one in the hall.

“What do you want?” Charlie said.

The strip showed ... exasperation?
...
flitting over Mudge’s face.

“I want to talk to you, Ohm.”

“What about?”

Mudge glanced down both sides of the hall. That there was no one else there did not mean that he was not being monitored. Some weedie might be watching him on his hall strip.

Mudge reached into a pocket on the side of his kilt and pulled out a thin square black plate. Holding it with two fingers, he spoke into it so softly that Ohm could not hear him. Then he held it up cupped in one hand. The strip showed one word flashing orange against the black.

IMMER.

After three flashes, the word disappeared.

“Oh, Lord!” Charlie said.

23.

Between seeing the calling card and opening the door, Ohm’s hangover vanished. It did not explode. It imploded, burst inward. The hangover fragments, like shrapnel, tore holes in the persona of Charlie Ohm, and what had been shut out stormed into the breaches. He had been “remembering” the events of last Saturday night, though they had been vague. And the hangover he had been suffering this morning was, in a sense, the hangover of a hangover. The original had been endured and finally gotten rid of on last Sunday, when he had been Father Tom Zurvan. Father Tom, who never drank alcohol but nevertheless had to suffer from Charlie Ohm’s roisterings. Father Tom, who accepted the head pain as part of the bad karma from his previous life.

The hangover had passed five days ago. Yet, when he, as Charlie Ohm, had awakened this morning, he had cocooned himself. All the events and dangers gone through by the four predecessors had been arrested, as it were, and put in a dungeon. Or stoned and put in the psychic cylinders somewhere within him. He, stoned in more than one sense, stoned Charlie Ohm, had remembered nothing. He had been no one but Ohm, the part-time bartender, the lush, the weedie. The days between last Saturday and this had bounced off him as if he were a nonimmer, a phemer. Even the hangover that no longer existed had come back to life. It was last Saturday’s hand squeezing him to get all the juice of the other clays out.

That sudden revelation had been the first shock. The second was that, if an immer was here, he was bringing very bad news. Nothing else would have made the councillors send a messenger.

Mudge entered, looked around as if he expected to be in a pig sty and then looked surprised that he was not. He said, “Get dressed, and be quick about it. We have to get out of here in five minutes. Sooner if possible.”

“The organics ... they’re coming?” Ohm said. He swallowed audibly.

“Yes,” Mudge said, “but not for you. Not specifically, that is. It’s a sanitary check raid.”

Ohm felt relieved. “Oh,” he said, “then ... ?”

“I’m to conduct you to
...
someone,” Mudge said. “Get going, man!”

The urgency and authority of Mudge’s voice spun Ohm around and sent him running for the PP closet. When he came out, he found Mudge standing in front of Zurvan’s stoner. The man turned on hearing him and ran his eyes up and down Ohm. “OK.” But he turned again and pointed at Zurvan’s face. “This is really a dummy?”

“Yes,” Ohm said. Then, “How do you know that?”

“I had orders to get rid of it if it didn’t look realistic.”

“Why? Is the situation that bad?”

“Bad enough, I guess. I don’t know the details, of course. Don’t want to know.”

Mudge glanced at the clock strip. “Good. Two minutes ahead of schedule. You don’t have any recordings that should be erased? Or anything you wouldn’t want the organics to find?”

“Damn it, no!” Ohm said. “I may be a weedie, but I’m not sloppy.”

Mudge had turned both his kilt and his hat inside out. He was now wearing a brown hat with a long orange feather and a cerise kilt. Mudge was reaching inside his handbag, which he had put into a brown shopping bag. For a second, Ohm thought that Mudge would bring Out a gun. He could feel the blood draining from his head. At the same time, he crouched, ready to spring. But Mudge removed a hat, a wide-brimmed, high-crowned brown hat with an orange feather.

He held it out to Ohm. “This is reversible, too. Put it on.”

Ohm took his hat off and tossed it on the floor. Mudge raised his eyebrows and looked sternly at Ohm.

“I’ll put it away later,” Ohm said. “You said we don’t have much time. Besides, if the organics come in, they have to find some untidiness. They might get suspicious if they don’t.”

They started toward the door. Ohm, a step behind Mudge, said, “Can’t you tell me anything about this?”

“Yes.” Mudge opened the door and went into the hail. When Ohm had joined him, Mudge said, softly, “I was to tell you this only if you asked. The Repp dummy has been discovered. It was found at ten to midnight yesterday. Friday, I suppose.”

“My God! It’s all over!”

Mudge said, “Keep your voice down. And act natural, whatever that is. No more questions.”

“Was Snick behind this?”

“I said
...
no more questions.”

They started down the hall as a door three apartments away from his opened and a loud drunken couple, a man and a woman, staggered out. Mudge steered away from them as if he might get dirty if he got too near. “Hey, Charlie,” the man said. “We’ll see you at The Isobar.”

“Maybe,” Ohm said. “I got urgent personal business to attend to. I don’t know if I’ll make it to work on time.”

“We’ll drink to your happiness and success,” the woman said.

“Do that.”

When they got into the elevator cage, Charlie said, “I know you don’t want me to ask questions. But am J going to get to work? If I don’t, what excuse do I use?”

“That’ll be taken care of, I suppose.”

“Well, maybe it won’t be important by then.”

Mudge stared at him and said, “You’d better get hold of yourself, fellow. Jesus, you don’t act like an immer.”

Just before the elevator stopped, Mudge, unable to control his curiosity and ignoring his own command, said, “Why in hell would an immer live here?”

“No questions, remember.”

How could he tell him that he had built, no, grown, a persona for each day? And that each was based on certain character elements that had coexisted, though not harmoniously, when he had been only Jeff Caird? He had been a conservative and a liberal, a puritan and a flesh-potter, a nonreligionist and a longer for faith, an authoritarian and a rebel, a priss and a slob. Out of the many conflicting elements of character, he had grown seven different ones. He had been able to do many things that would have been denied him if he had lived on only one day. He had contained many in one body, and each man had been given a chance to be what he wanted to be. Charlie Ohm, though, might have been, surely was, the case of going too far.

Just as they stepped out into the underground garage, he flashed the dream that he had tried to recall. He had seen all seven of him in Central Park, riding horses in a fog. They came in from the dimness from different directions and reined in their horses so that the hindquarters formed a seven-pointed star. Or a bouquet of horseflesh.

Jeff Caird had said, “What’re we doing on this bridal path?”

Father Tom Zurvan had said, “Getting married, of course.”

Charlie Ohm had laughed hollowly and said, “We act more like we’ve been divorced. First the divorce, then the marriage. Sure!”

Jim Dunski had pulled a sword from somewhere, held it aloft, and had shouted, “All for one and one for all!”

“The seven musketeers!” Bob Tingle had yelled.

“May the best man win!” Will Isharashvili had said.

“And the devil take the hindmost!” Charlie Ohm had chortled.

They had fallen silent because they heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves approaching in the fog. They waited for they knew not what, and presently the figure of a giant man on a giant horselike figure loomed in the fog. Then the dream had ended.

Ohm did not have time to try to plumb its meaning. He was hustled by Mudge out of the building onto the sidewalk. They walked swiftly down the sidewalk past a yardful of screaming children at play and some adults. Ohm had no doubt that some of the infants had no IDs and that they had not been registered in the data bank. Mudge glanced at his wristwatch and muttered, “One minute to go.” Ohm, looking around, could see no sign of the organics. But when they got to Womanway Boulevard, he saw thirty men and women, all in civilian clothing, standing by several cars. That they were unmarked meant that they were organic. When would the organics learn that everybody knew that?

There would be other raiders collected at other points near the building.

I need a drink, he thought.

But that’s the last thing you need just now, someone said.

Nevertheless, as they walked north on Womanway and passed the big dark window of The Isobar, he felt as if some gyroscope inside him was leaning toward the entrance. Leaning also toward the path of least resistance and of hard-to-change habit.

He was sweating, though that was easily accounted for by the heat. That did not account for all the dryness of his mouth. What were today’s organics doing about the discovery of Repp’s dummy? The first shift would have read the recording left by Friday’s last shift. The organics would have taken action on such a serious matter. What action? He was not going to know until he reached his unknown destination.