looked fright-enedly at him and he took hold of her jaw and kissed her mouth; clamped her head in both his hands and pushed his tongue against her shut teeth. She pressed at his chest and wrenched her head. He thought she would stop, give in and take the kiss, but she didn't; she kept struggling with increasing vigor, and finally he let go and she pushed away from him.
'That's-that's terrible!' she said. 'Forcing me! That's-I've never been held that way!'
'I love you,' he said.
'Look at me, I'm shaking,' she said. 'Wei Li Chun, is that how you love, by becoming an animal? That's awful!'
'A human,' he said, 'like you.'
'No,' she said. 'I wouldn't hurt anyone, hold anyone that way!' She held her jaw and moved it.
'How do you think incurables kiss?' he said.
'Like humans, not like animals.'
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I love you.'
'Good,' she said. 'I love you too—the way I love Leopard and Snowflake and Sparrow.'
'That's not what I mean,' he said.
'But it's what I mean,' she said, looking at him. She went sideways to the doorway and said, 'Don't do that again.
That's terrible!'
'Do you want the lists?' he asked.
She looked as if she was going to say no, hesitated, and then said, 'Yes. That's what I came for.'
He turned and gathered the lists on the table, folded them together, and took Pere Goriot from the stack of books. She came over and he gave them to her.
'I didn't mean to hurt you,' he said.
'All right,' she said. 'Just don't do it again.'
'I'll look for places the Family isn't using,' he said. 'I'll go over the maps at the MFA and see if—'
'I've done that,' she said.
'Carefully?'
'As carefully as I could.'
'I'll do it again,' he said. 'It's the only way to begin. Millimeter by millimeter.'
'All right,' she said.
'Wait a second, I'm going now too.'
She waited while he put away his smoking things and got the room back the way it belonged, and then they went out together through the exhibit hall and down the escalator.
'A city of incurables,' he said.
'It's possible,' she said.
'It's worth looking for anyway,' he said.
They went out onto the walkway.
'Which way do you go?' he asked.
'West,' she said.
'I'll go a few blocks with you.'
'No,' she said. 'Really, the longer you're out, the more chances there are for someone to see you not touching.'
'I touch the rim of the scanner and block it with my body. Very tricky.'
'No,' she said. 'Please, go your own way.'
'All right,' he said. 'Good night.'
'Good night.'
He put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her cheek She didn't move away; she was tense and waiting under his hand.
He kissed her lips. They were warm and soft, slightly parted, and she turned and walked away.
'Lilac,' he said, and went after her.
She turned and said, 'No. Please, Chip, go,' and turned and walked away again.
He stood uncertainly. Another member was in the distance, coming toward them.
He watched her go, hating her, loving her.
Chapter 5
Evening after evening he ate quickly (but not too quickly), then railed to the Museum of the Family's Achievements and studied its maze of ceiling-high illuminated maps until the ten-of-TV closing. One night he went there after the last chime—an hour-and-a-half walk—but found that the maps were unreadable by flashlight, their markings lost in glare; and he hesitated to put on their internal lights, which, tied in as they seemed to be with the lighting of the entire hall, might have produced a Uni-alerting overdraft of power. On Sunday he took Mary KK there, sent her off to see the Universe of Tomorrow exhibit, and studied the maps for three hours straight.
He found nothing: no island without its city or industrial installation; no mountaintop that wasn't spacewatch or climatonomy center; no square kilometer of land—or of ocean floor, for that matter—that wasn't being mined or harvested or used for factories or houses or airports or parkland by the Family's eight billion. The gold-lettered legend suspended at the entrance of the map area—The Earth Is Our Heritage; We Use It Wisely and Without Waste—seemed true, so true that there was no place left for even the smallest non-Family community.
Leopard died and Sparrow sang. King sat silently, picking at the gears of a pre-U gadget, and Snowflake wanted more sex.
Chip said to Lilac, 'Nothing. Nothing at all.'
'There must have been hundreds of little colonies to begin with,' she said. 'One of them must have survived.'
'Then it's half a dozen members in a cave somewhere,' he said. 'Please, keep looking,' she said. 'You can't have checked every island.'
He thought about it, sitting in the dark in the twentieth-century car, holding its steering wheel, moving its different knobs and levers; and the more he thought about it, the less possible a city or even a colony of incurables came to seem.
Even if he had overlooked an unused area on the maps, could a community exist without Uni learning of it? People made marks on their environment; a thousand people, even a hundred, would raise an area's temperature, soil its streams with their wastes, and its air perhaps with their primitive fires. The land or sea for kilometers around would be affected by their presence in a dozen detectable ways.
So Uni would have long since known of the theoretical city's existence, and having known, would have—done what?
Dispatched doctors and advisers and portable treatment units; would have 'cured' the incurables and made them into 'healthy' members.
Unless, of course, they had defended themselves... Their ancestors had fled the Family soon after the Unification, when treatments were optional, or later, when they were compulsory but not yet at present-day effectiveness; surely some of those incurables must have defended their retreats by force, with deadly weapons. Wouldn't they have handed on the practice, and the weapons too, to succeeding generations? What would Uni do today, in 162, facing an armed, defensive community with an unarmed, unaggressive Family? What would it have done five or twenty-five years ago, detecting the signs of it? Let it be? Leave its inhabitants to their 'sickness' and their few square kilometers of the world? Spray the city with LPK? But what if the city's weapons could bring down planes? Would Uni decide in its cold steel blocks that the cost of the 'cure' outweighed its usefulness?
He was two days from a treatment, his mind as active as it ever got. He wished it could get still more active. He felt that there was something he wasn't thinking of, just beyond the rim of his awareness.
If Uni let the city be, rather than sacrifice members and time and technology to the 'helping' of it—then what? There was something else, a next idea to be picked and pried out of that one.
