A strange thing happened during the parade. As this member marched along, smiling, holding the banner pole, he began to hear a nameber saying itself over and over in his head: Anna SG, thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three; Anna SG, thirty-eight P, twenty-eight twenty-three. It kept repeating itself to him, in time with his marching. He wondered who the nameber belonged to, and why it should be repeating itself in his head that way.
Suddenly he remembered: it was from his sickness! It was the nameber of one of the other sick ones, the one called "Lovely"—no, "Lilac." Why, after so long, had her nameber come back to him? He stamped his feet down harder, trying not to hear it, and was glad when the signal to sing was given.
He told his adviser. "It's nothing to think about," she said. "You probably saw something that reminded you of her.
Maybe you even saw her. There's nothing to be afraid of in remembering—unless, of course, it becomes bothersome.
Let me know if it happens again."
But it didn't happen again. He was well, thank Uni One Christmas Day, when he had another assignment, was living in another city, he bicycled with his girlfriend and four other members to the outlying parkland. They brought cakes and cokes with them, and lunched on the ground near a grove of trees.
He had set his coke container on an almost-level stone and, reaching for it while talking, knocked it over. The other members refilled his container from theirs.
A few minutes later, while folding his cake wrapper, he noticed a flat leaf lying on the wet stone, drops of coke shining on its back, its stem curled upward like a handle. He took the stem and lifted the leaf, and the stone underneath it was dry in the leafs oval shape. The rest of the stone was wet-black, but where the leaf had been it was dry-gray.
Something about the moment seemed significant to him, and he sat silently, looking at the leaf in his one hand, the folded cake wrapper in his other, and the dry leaf shape on the stone. His girlfriend said something to him and he took himself away from the moment, put the leaf and the wrapper together and gave them to the member who had the litter bag.
The image of the dry leaf shape on the stone came into his mind several times that day, and on the next day too. Then he had his treatment and he forgot about it. In a few weeks, though, it came into his mind again. He wondered why.
Had he lifted a leaf from a wet stone that way sometime before? If he had, he didn't remember it...
Every now and then, while he was walking in a park or, oddly enough, waiting on line for his treatment, the image of the dry leaf shape came into his mind and made him frown.
There was an earthquake. (His chair flung him off it; glass broke in the microscope and the loudest sound he had ever heard roared from the depths of the lab.) A seismovalve half the continent away had jammed and gone undetected, TV explained a few nights later. It hadn't happened before and it wouldn't happen again. Members must mourn, of course, but it was nothing to think about in the future.
Dozens of buildings had collapsed, hundreds of members had died. Every medicenter in the city was overloaded with the injured, and more than half the treatment units were damaged; treatments were delayed up to ten days.
A few days after he was to have had his, he thought of Lilac and how he had loved her differently and more—more excitingly—than he loved everyone else. He had wanted to tell her something. What was it? Oh yes, about the islands.
The islands he had found hidden on the pre-U map. The islands of incurables...
His adviser called him. "Are you all right?" he asked.
"I don't think so, Karl," he said. "I need my treatment."
"Hold on a minute," his adviser said, and turned away and spoke softly to his telecomp. After a moment he turned back. "You can get it tonight at seven-thirty," he said, "but you'll have to go to the medicenter in T24." He stood on a long line at seven-thirty, thinking about Lilac, trying to remember exactly what she looked like. When he got near the treatment units, the image of a dry leaf shape on a stone came into his mind.
Lilac called him (she was right there in the same building) and he went to her room, which was the storeroom in the pre-U. Green jewels hung from her earlobes and glittered around her rose-brown throat; she was wearing a gown of gleaming green cloth that exposed her pink-tipped soft-cone breasts. "Bon soir, Chip/' she said, smiling. "Comment vastu? Je m'ennuyais tellement de toi." He went to her and took her in his arms and kissed her—her lips were warm and soft, her mouth opening—and he awoke to darkness and disappointment; it was a dream, it had only been a dream.
But strangely, frighteningly, everything was in him: the smell of her perfume (parfum) and the taste of tobacco and the sound of Sparrow's songs, and desire for Lilac and anger at King and resentment of Uni and sorrow for the Family and happiness in feeling, in being alive and awake.
