Love Conquers All Read online

  Art had a sudden realization of the obvious: a midwifer was illegal and therefore must be expensive. Rita hadn’t had much money with her. Might she have fallen into the hands of some cut-rate quack?

  “George, are you paying for—Rita?”

  “I’m contributing something.”

  “Then why must we run all over the city to find out where she is? Don’t you know?”

  George calmly shook his head.

  For a while they rode through the warm afternoon without talking. The whispering rush of the express walk, shaded beneath its plastic awning, bore them at highway speed through kilometer after kilometer of the great city. They passed industrial blockhouses, and older manufacturing parks surrounded by grim fences, where machines labored night and day for Man, the master, repairing and sometimes redesigning themselves, only occasionally requiring any human supervision. They passed street after street of the two- and three-apartment dwellings in which the bulk of the city’s people seemed to live. Here dwelt the great respectable mass. Here the head of the household might work two or three days a week, here the family owned stocks and bonds enough to bring some usable income, here they had success from time to time in winning prizes. Not really full-time jobholders, most of them, but that was how they saw themselves. Vending centers flowed past, public computing terminals, streets and parking lots. A school. A park, with a young couple naked on the grass, bodies locked and working toward orgasm. A Church of Eros, whose twin towers stood like the raised knees of a supine woman, flanking the main entrance. A superhighway interchange for private surface vehicles, fallen into disrepair, with half its lanes closed by barricades, grass growing through the cracked concrete. Nearby, a terminal of the underground long-distance tube complex. More two-and three-family dwellings, row on row on row. And scattered everywhere throughout the clean and sunlit city, the fortified stone walls of blockhouses springing up.

  Now Art noticed with part of his mind that the buildings rushing past were becoming noticeably shabbier; they must be approaching the western border of the city. Thinking aloud, he said: “Suppose she actually does have a child, produces a living child out of this. What will we do then? I tell myself that if it comes to that we’ll just ignore what people say, or the looks we get from them. I’ll do all I can to keep the third one from feeling unwanted. But I suppose he will.”

  “I just don’t know how that would work,” said George.

  “And Rita. I don’t know if going to jail would bother her as much as being sterilized.”

  After another little silence George said: “I know the thought of having that done has scared her in the past. Maybe now, though, it won’t seem so terrible. She’d never have another baby to worry about, once this one is taken care of.”

  “If it ever is a baby.” Art felt a surge of pity and grief for the unwanted third-to-be, un-needed and detested by a World already jammed. Fetus, why do you thrust with such a mad, blind drive to reach the light? Shrink back to nothing. Go away. There’s nothing here in the world for you, that you should fight to reach it. But of course the seed could only grow where it had been planted.

  “George, the Family Planning man implied that when some women go through this new method of extracting the fetus and freezing it, then they’re content to have the resulting child brought up in an orphanage. I wonder if that’s what Rita has in mind. To me it would be worse than having a third child with us, to purity with what the neighbors say. Do you know what she intends? She must have discussed some plan with you.”

  George shook his head gloomily, staring off into the distance.

  “We’d adopt the kid, or something. We’d hang onto him. But it would be pretty grim, and I don’t want that kid to ever come into this world. You can see how I feel, can’t you?”

  “I can see how you feel, and how Rita feels, too. Maybe that’s my trouble, I see everybody’s point of view. Even the kid who isn’t born yet.” His eyes flicked at Art and off again. “If abortion’s not killing, what is it then?”

  Being well rested and in good control of himself, Art could now have brought out the arguments with which to demolish this simplistic point of view. But he had no wish to argue with George, and anyway arguments were no good for changing someone’s mind until that mind was ready for change.

  THE city proper was suddenly left behind. No official boundary or sharp line of demarcation was visible, but within the space of a few blocks the view changed, as what was unmistakably a slumburb came rising about the slidewalk like a dirty wave. Art was a stranger to this part of the Chicago area, but it did not look much different from some sections of Los Angeles. Here were the endless curved rows of small houses cheaply built, falling apart at the age of twenty or thirty, but still occupied. Not only occupied, but cut and partitioned. There would be no steady jobholders living here, and not many who owned shares of stock or won more than an occasional prize. This was Basic Income territory.

  A small vending district clustered around the terminus of the high speed slidewalk. Here all the other pedestrian walks were stat, as rigid and unmoving as the streets. Among the automated vendors a couple of human-attended establishments survived. One of these, a small and dingy tavern at the dead end of a block, proved to be George’s destination.

  The tavern did not look old, but was already rundown in appearance, sharing the neighborhood’s general air of defeat. Daylight was shut out from the interior, and the artificial lighting inside was dim but violently colored. As Art’s eyes adjusted he could see obscene words scrawled here and there on the shabby walls, and concealing garments, opaque hip boots and overcoats, crudely drawn. All in all, Art supposed, a typical BI barroom; not that he had seen many such, except in television stories. Four or five apathetic male customers perched on bar stools. Above and behind the bar, the legally required police TV eye roosted like a robotic vulture, now and then turning its glass eye on its scrawny metal neck.

  The bartender raised his head, sizing up his two new customers, and fixed eyes blank as the vulture’s lens on George, as if deciding he was the one who had to be dealt with.

  “Couple of short ones,” George ordered, resting an elbow on the bar. When two small glasses of beer had been poured, he asked: “Is Alfie around?”

  “Maybe shootin’ pool,” the bartender grated. There was a back room. POOLHALL $1.00 ADM.

  George strolled that way. “I’ll just see if he’s there.”

  “That’ll be one dollar, see the sign?”

  George just glanced back as he strolled. “I won’t touch a cue.” He went on into the Pool Hall.

  The bartender hesitated briefly, then picked up the coins George had left on the bar and slouched sway to tend another customer.

  Art sipped his beer, which for some reason tasted quite good. He wished he knew how to talk to these people and act with them: George’s and Rita’s background was as middle-class as his own, but George had picked up the knack somewhere. Maybe in karate, though he had mentioned once that most of the students and practitioners were not the tough-guy type. Couple of short ones. Get tough with me and I can break your ribs—this last was only implied, of course, never verbalized or even bluntly stated in so many body-language words. He was just this somewhat undersized fellow who was not at all intimidated. What others read into that was what intimidated them.

  There was a stir in a rear booth and a pair of B-girls materialized out of the dimness there and come flowing forward to the bar. Art felt a mild twinge of alarm. The girls license buttons were prominently displayed on their kimonos, but the garments were probably longer and thicker and more shapeless than the letter of the law allowed. The women approached the bar and stood there, closer to Art than to anyone else. Not that they looked at him. Their pale-painted faces were averted slightly, their mouths pinched in professional haughtiness and cool reserve. Art uncomfortably shifted his stance.

  George stuck his head out of the back room. “Not today, girls,” he called. “Art, get a beer for Alfie, and g
et us a booth. We’ll be out in a minute.”

  The girls faces relaxed into more natural scowls and they moved away, resuming some private conversation in bored voices. One pulled off her kimono to scratch beneath her bikini straps. Art bought three more short ones, and carried the filled glasses to an empty booth.

  FROM the booth he had a good view of the tavern’s huge television stage. For some reason the ball game was not being shown; maybe the game was already over, or there could be rioting at the stadium. The barrel-sized image of an announcer’s head was reading a news story:

  “This afternoon in the General Assembly, chief Chinese delegate Lu Ti-Ping accused a neighboring government, Southern Pan-Asia, of using biological weapons.against its own—the Southern Pan-Asian—people.

  “Lu quoted statistics from UNIMED which indicate that deaths from uncertain causes have reduced the SPA population by nearly ten per cent during the last three months. According to the UNIMED report, most of those dying have been the elderly and the chronically ill. According to the Chinese accusation, disproportionately few of the deaths have occurred among members of the Patriots Party, now the ruling group of Southern Pan-Asia.

  “Finally the Chinese delegate expressed regret that, in his words, the SPA government has chosen such an inhumane method of trying to strengthen itself economically. Is this, Lu asked, to be the first step on a road of dangerous economic aggression?”

  As if on cue the announcer’s head was abruptly replaced by that of another, equally big, who with a tryannosaur’s smile read hastily through a perhaps ill-timed commercial for a Chicago vending chain. The presentation was so inept that Art assumed this was some small local station, maybe the very one George had auditioned for. Probably there were a hundred of them, though.

  Art sipped his beer. The newsmonger was soon back on stage, saying: “Then it was the turn of Cao Din That, chief SPA delegate, to reply.”

  The enlarged head of Cao Din That now appeared on the stage of the tavern in the Chicago slumburb, where nobody but Art seemed to be paying the least attention, and his translated words were heard, categorically denying all the charges leveled against the leaders of his suffering country. Possibly some foreign government was really to blame for the surplus deaths. If so, let the aggressors beware, they would be found out shortly. In any case, UNIMED was overstepping its authority by interfering in SPA internal affairs.

  The tone of the speech became milder. Possibly the deaths were the unforeseen side-effect of a new insecticide, employed in the desperate struggle to increase food production. Also to be considered were the airborne viruses that had been accidentally freed during the recent UN police action against the Nile Republic; no one knew where those viruses might have landed, nor would anyone even admit to knowing exactly what they were. The UN was to be applauded for its prompt action along the Nile, which had liquidated some planners of biological war, but still some of the consequences had been unfortunate.

  “Ah, th’ world’s gone t’ repression,” said a colorless little old man who must be Alfie, for he arrived at that moment with George. Art slid over to make room.

  Alfie seized a beer, drank most of it, and went on talking. “The whole world’s crazy. You know what happened the other night? Somebody bombed Vic Rizzo’s townhouse. It musta been just vandals. They couldn’ta known it was his.”

  “That so?” George asked, indifferently. Art wondered who Vic Rizzo might be. After a few more social noises had been made, and Alfie further supplied with beer, George got to the point.

  “Alf, you know the city pretty well.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Then tell me something.” George dropped his low voice even lower. “Who might a nice girl go to see, if she got kind of carried away and emotional, and wanted to finish an extra baby? She’s got two kids now.”

  Alfie gave facial demonstrations of thought. “Married?” he asked, as if being married or single made any difference in the number of children a woman was allowed to bear.

  “Yes,” said George.

  Alfie glanced at Art, wordlessly identified him as the worried husband, and winked at him. Then obviously pleased to be consulted, Alfie assumed an air of wisdom and began to talk. He seldom quite finished a sentence, however, and his speech was thick with allusions to people and places that Art had never heard of. Also Alf used a number of slang words strange to Art, or maybe Art was only mis-hearing them, because Alf s whisper was almost too low to be made out. All in all, the dissertation was perfectly unintelligible. George, though, kept on listening with apparent satisfaction, now and again encouraging Alfie with grunts and nods, and ordering more beer.

  “SOME characters you know,” Art reflected aloud, as he and George rode the express slidewalk into the east again. Twenty kilometers or so ahead, near the shore of invisible Lake Michigan and farther east than Art had been as yet, the unbelievable towers of the central city rose.

  George grinned. “Alfie has his uses.”

  “I hope you found out something from him. I didn’t. Do you think Rita is with one of those people he mentioned?”

  George turned to look back into slumburb country, a desolate sea of rooftops beneath the mid-afternoon sun. “I think Alfie may be on the phone to Family Planning right now, trying to sell them the information that you and I were asking about midwifers. The man I talked to at the ball park may be doing the same thing. Family Planning knows what Rita’s trying to do, but I want’em to think she doesn’t have a midwifer yet. They can’t arrest us for asking general questions. All I’ve been trying to do so far today is put’em off the trail a little.”

  Floundering well off the trail himself, Art could find nothing to say.

  VI

  ART maintained a somewhat surly silence through several slidewalk interchanges. He and George were deep in the city again, moving on a fairly crowded walk that angled to the southeast, before he spoke again to ask: “Where are we going now?”

  “The dojo. Fred’s supposed to be there at three-thirty so I can watch him work out. And then I have a private lesson to give. Come along and watch.”

  “Look, George, are you going to help me find Rita or aren’t you? If you can’t or won’t, just say so. Don’t keep stalling me along.”

  George was unperturbed. “Just come along to the dojo. I said I’d help you and I will.”

  Art puffed out his breath. But he went along; somehow George’s words carried conviction.

  Under a sign that read PARR’S KARATE DOJO Fred Lohmann was waiting for them, holding up the front of a modest building in a small middle-class vending district. Under one arm Fred was carrying a whitish roll of what appeared to be clothing.

  “Art, you and Fred remember each other, hey?” George unlocked the ground-floor door and stepped inside, waving on the lights with a passage of his hand over the switchplate on the wall.

  Art’s hand was squeezed. “Sure we do,” said Fred, clearing his throat nervously. He towered over the two older men. “Art, how’s your wife and kids?”

  ”Oh, fine. I guess you met Rita yesterday? Over at George’s place?”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s right.”

  It seemed obvious that Fred wasn’t in on the midwifery conspiracy, but still some clue to Rita’s whereabouts might possibly be gotten out of him. Later. Right now Fred was all nervous anticipation of whatever test he had been brought here for, and George was present, raising his window blinds, checking his printout for messages, and in general opening up his shop.

  The interior of the dojo was mostly one big room, about twenty meters square, and two stories high, so you could have fitted a very small house inside it. The floor was of polished wood. In the front, beside the street entrance, an area separated by a low partition from the big room contained a desk, with phoneplate and computer terminal, and a few chairs, some of them arranged as for spectators. An open doorway in the rear led to some lockers and, Art supposed, a shower. Large flags of the United States, the United Nations, and Japa
n were formally and correctly displayed together on one wall. The general impression was of functional orderliness.

  George and Fred each bowed, not deeply or very ceremoniously, toward the flags. Then they slipped off their sandals and padded back toward the locker room, bare feet seeming to grip the floor familiarly. “Make yourself at home, Art,” George called back.

  Art put his own sandals into the convenient rack by the front door, then wandered about looking the place over. The smooth floor was not slippery to bare feet.

  Something here reminded him of chess. He wondered if it was the square arena of polished wood, or some faint scent of conflict lingering in the conditioned air. Glancing up, he saw four android fighting machines hanging like felons near the high ceiling, above the center of the open floor. He looked about and spotted their control console standing near the desk. Feeling a technician’s curiosity, Art walked over and looked at the controls.

  George and Fred soon emerged from the locker room, clad in loose whitish trousers and jackets, only moderately translucent, and wearing athletes codpieces of hard protective plastic. “I guess I just lost my own belt someplace,” Fred was saying, meanwhile accepting a brown belt, an overlong strip of tough-looking cloth, from George’s hand.

  GEORGE looped a black belt twice around his own waist and knotted it in front, and the two of them began to limber up, swinging their legs like ballet dancers, crouching and twisting and stretching their bodies to unlikely extremes, shaking wrists and ankles as if their hands and feet had fallen asleep. Art stood watching with some interest.

  “Ready?” George asked, after a few minutes of this. “Let’s go five-time sparring, then.” With nearly the full length of the floor clear behind him, he drew himself up facing Fred and they exchanged bows. Then they stood, each with arms slightly bent, hanging down in front of his body, fists loosely closed. “You first,” George directed.