Newmark, and Lilac, Grace Newbridge. Later, when they married—with no application to Uni, but with forms and a fee and vows to 'God'—Lilac's name was changed to Grace Newmark. They still called themselves Chip and Lilac, however. They got used to handling coins and dealing with shopkeepers, and to traveling on Pollensa's rundown overcrowded monorail. They learned how to sidestep natives and avoid offending them; they memorized the Vow of Loyalty and saluted Liberty's red-and-yellow flag. They knocked on doors before opening them, said Wednesday instead of Woodsday, March instead of Marx. They reminded themselves that fight and hate were acceptable words but fuck was a 'dirty' one.
Hassan Newman drank a great deal of whiskey. Soon after coming home from his job—in the island's largest furniture factory—he would be playing loud games with Gigi, his daughter, and fumbling his way through the room's dividing curtain with a bottle clutched in his three-fingered saw-damaged hand. 'Come on, you sad steelies,' he would say, 'where the hate are your glasses? Come on, have a little cheer.' Chip and Lilac drank with him a few times, but they found that whiskey made them confused and clumsy and they usually declined his offer. 'Come on,' he said one evening. 'I know I'm the landlord, but I'm not exactly a lunky, am I? Or what is it? Do you think I'll expect you to receep—to reciprocate? I know you like to watch the pennies.'
'It's not that,' Chip said.
'Then what is it?' Hassan asked. He swayed and steadied himself.
Chip didn't say anything for a moment, and then he said, 'Well, what's the point in getting away from treatments if you're going to dull yourself with whiskey? You might as well be back in the Family.'
'Oh,' Hassan said. 'Oh sure, I get you.' He looked angrily at them, a broad, curly-bearded, bloodshot-eyed man. 'Just wait,' he said. 'Wait till you've been here a little longer. Just wait till you've been here a little longer, that's all.' He turned around and groped his way through the curtain, and they heard him muttering, and his wife, Ria, speaking placatingly.
Almost everyone in the building seemed to drink as much whiskey as Hassan did. Loud voices, happy or angry, sounded through the walls at all hours of the night. The elevator and the hallways smelled of whiskey, and of fish, and of sweet perfumes that people used against the whiskey and fish smells.
Most evenings, after they had finished whatever cleaning had to be done, Chip and Lilac either went up to the roof for some fresh air or sat at their table reading the Immigrant or books they had found on the monorail or borrowed from a small collection at Immigrants' Assistance. Sometimes they watched TV with the Newmans—plays about foolish misunderstandings in native families, with frequent stops for announcements about different makes of cigarettes and disinfectants. Occasionally there were speeches by General Costanza or the head of the Church, Pope Clement— disquieting speeches about shortages of food and space and resources, for which immigrants alone weren't to be blamed. Hassan, belligerent with whiskey, usually switched them off before they were over; Liberty TV, unlike the Family's, could be switched on and off at one's choosing.
One day in the mine, toward the end of the fifteen-minute lunch break, Chip went over to the automatic loader and began examining it, wondering whether it was in fact unrepairable or whether some part of it that couldn't be replaced might not be by-passed or substituted for in some way. The native in charge of the crew came over and asked him what he was doing. Chip told him, taking care to speak respectfully, but the native got angry. 'You fucking steelies all think you're so God-damned smart!' he said, and put his hand on his gun handle. 'Get over there where you belong and stay there!' he said. 'Try to figure out a way to eat less food if you've got to have something to think about!'
All natives weren't quite that bad. The owner of their building took a liking to Chip and Lilac and promised to let them have a room for five dollars a week as soon as one became available. 'You're not like some of these others,' he said.
'Drinking, walking around the hallways stark naked—I'd rather take a few cents less and have your kind.'
Chip, looking at him, said, 'There are reasons why immigrants drink, you know.'
'I know, I know,' the owner said. 'I'm the first one to say it; it's terrible the way we treat you. But still and all, do you drink? Do you walk around stark naked?'
Lilac said, 'Thank you, Mr. Corsham. We'll be grateful if you can get a room for us.'
They caught 'colds' and 'the flu.' Lilac lost her job at the clothing factory but found a better one in the kitchen of a native restaurant within walking distance of the house. Two policemen came to the room one evening, checking identity-cards and looking for weapons. Hassan muttered something as he showed his card and they clubbed him to the floor. They stuck knives into the mattresses and broke some of the dishes.
Lilac didn't have her 'period,' her monthly few days of vaginal bleeding, and that meant she was pregnant.
One night on the roof Chip stood smoking and looking at the sky to the northeast, where there was a dull orange glow from the copper-production complex on EUR91766. Lilac, who had been taking washed clothes from a line where she had hung them to dry, came over to him and put her arm around him. She kissed his cheek and leaned against him.
'It's not so bad,' she said. 'We've got twelve dollars saved, we'll have a room of our own any day now, and before you know it we'll have a baby.'
'A steely,' Chip said. 'No,' Lilac said. 'A baby.'
'It stinks,' Chip said. 'It's rotten. It's inhuman.'
'It's all there is,'
Lilac said. 'We'd better get used to it.' Chip said nothing. He kept looking at the orange glow in the sky.
The Liberty Immigrant carried weekly articles about immigrant singers and athletes, and occasionally scientists, who earned forty or fifty dollars a week and lived in good apartments, who mixed with influential and enlightened natives, and who were hopeful about the chances of a more equitable relationship developing between the two groups. Chip read these articles with scorn—they were meant by the newspaper's native owners to lull and pacify immigrants, he felt—but Lilac accepted them at face value, as evidence that their own lot would ultimately improve.
One week in October, when they had been on Liberty for a little over six months, there was an article about an artist named Morgan Newgate, who had come from Eur eight years before and who lived in a four-room apartment in New Madrid. His paintings, one of which, a scene of the Crucifixion, had just been presented to Pope Clement, brought him as much as a hundred dollars each. He signed them with an A, the article explained, because his nickname was Ashi.
'Christ and Wei,' Chip said.
Lilac said, 'What is it?'
'I was at academy with this 'Morgan Newgate,'' Chip said, showing her the article. 'We were good friends. His name was Karl. You remember that picture of the horse I had back in Ind?'
'No,' she said, reading.
'Well, he drew it,' Chip said. 'He used to sign everything with an A in a circle.' And yes, he thought, 'Ashi' seemed like the name Karl had mentioned. Christ and Wei, so he had got away too!—had 'got away,' if you could call it that, to Liberty, to Uni's isolation ward. At least he was doing what he'd always wanted; for him Liberty really was liberty.
'You ought to call him,' Lilac said, still reading.
'I will,' Chip said.
But maybe he wouldn't. Was there any point, really, in calling 'Morgan Newgate,' who painted Crucifixions for the Pope and assured his fellow immigrants that conditions were getting better every day? But maybe Karl hadn't said that; maybe the Immigrant had lied.
'Don't just say it,' Lilac said. 'He could probably help you get a better job.'
'Yes,' Chip said, 'he probably could.'
She looked at him. 'What's the matter?' she said. 'Don't you want a better job?'
'I'll call him tomorrow, on the way to work,' he said.
But he didn't. He swung his shovel into ore and lifted and heaved, swung and lifted and heaved. Fight them all, he thought: the steelies who drink, the steelies who think things are getting better; the lunkies, the dummies; fight Uni.
On the following Sunday morning Lilac went with him to a building two blocks from theirs where there was a working telephone in the lobby, and she waited while he paged through the tattered directory. Morgan and Newgate
