Read This Perfect Day for Free Online Page B

all right?” he asked.
    “Perfect,” Mary said. She smiled reassuringly.
    “I’m sorry I made you come in on a Sunday,” Chip said.
    “Don’t be,” Mary said. “For once in my life I’m going to have my Christmas decorations up before December twenty-fourth.”
    Chip went out of the advisory offices and into the treatment room. Only one unit was working, but there were only three members in line. When his turn came, he plunged his arm as deep as he could into the rubber-rimmed opening, and gratefully felt the scanner’s contact and the infusion disc’s warm nuzzle. He wanted the tickle-buzz-sting to last a long time, curing him completely and forever, but it was even shorter than usual, and he worried that there might have been a break in communication between the unit and Uni or a shortage of chemicals inside the unit itself. On a quiet Sunday morning mightn’t it be carelessly serviced?
    He stopped worrying, though, and riding up the escalators he felt a lot better about everything—himself, Uni, the Family, the world, the universe.
    The first thing he did when he got into the apartment was call Anna VF and thank her.
    At fifteen he was classified 663D—genetic taxonomist, fourth class—and was transferred to RUS41500 and the Academy of the Genetic Sciences. He learned elementary genetics and lab techniques and modulation and transplant theory; he skated and played soccer and went to the Pre-U Museum and the Museum of the Family’s Achievements; he had a girlfriend named Anna from Jap and then another named Peace from Aus. On Thursday, 18 October 151, he and everyone else in the Academy sat up until four in the morning watching the launching of the Altaira, then slept and loafed through a half-day holiday.
    One night his parents called unexpectedly. “We have bad news,” his mother said. “Papa Jan died this morning.”
    A sadness gripped him and must have shown on his face.
    “He was sixty-two, Chip,” his mother said. “He had his life.”
    “Nobody lives forever,” Chip’s father said.
    “Yes,” Chip said. “I’d forgot how old he was. How are you? Has Peace been classified yet?”
    When they were done talking he went out for a walk, even though it was a rain night and almost ten. He went into the park. Everyone was coming out. “Six minutes,” a member said, smiling at him.
    He didn’t care. He wanted to be rained on, to be drenched. He didn’t know why but he wanted to.
    He sat on a bench and waited. The park was empty; everyone else was gone. He thought of Papa Jan saying things that were the opposite of what he meant, and then saying what he really meant down in the inside of Uni, with a blue blanket wrapped around him.
    On the back of the bench across the walk someone had red-chalked a jagged FIGHT UNI. Someone else—or maybe the same sick member, ashamed—had crossed it out with white. The rain began, and started washing it away; white chalk, red chalk, smearing pinkly down the benchback.
    Chip turned his face to the sky and held it steady under the rain, trying to feel as if he were so sad he was crying.

4
    E ARLY IN HIS THIRD and final year at the Academy, Chip took part in a complicated exchange of dormitory cubicles worked out to put everyone involved closer to his or her girlfriend or boyfriend. In his new location he was two cubicles away from one Yin DW; and across the aisle from him was a shorter-than-normal member named Karl WL, who frequently carried a green-covered sketch pad and who, though he replied to comments readily enough, rarely started a conversation on his own.
    This Karl WL had a look of unusual concentration in his eyes, as if he were close on the track of answers to difficult questions. Once Chip noticed him slip out of the lounge after the beginning of the first TV hour and not slip in again till before the end of the second; and one night in the dorm, after the lights had gone out, he saw a dim glow filtering through the blanket of Karl’s bed.
    One