Barrier World

…

Chapter One

You’re kidding! Owen exclaimed.

No, I mean it. I wish I could break an arm and sit things out for a couple months, like you.

You wouldn’t say that if you’d been through it, like I have.

Technician Cory did not answer. He knew Owen had hated being sidelined, and it was not fair to make light of what he had been through. Still, the plain truth was that Cory would have regarded the accident as a kind of escape. That did not make much sense—saying it had caused Owen to stare at him in puzzled concern—but there it was.

The daily comsesh was a simple fact of life, as routine and unquestioned as eating or sleeping. Like everyone else under the sky—which, as far as Technician Cory was concerned, meant everyone who had ever lived—he had punctually endured the compulsory exercise periods twice a day ever since he was old enough to walk. But unlike everyone else—or so he assumed—he had stopped enjoying them.

No, that did not say it. He had come to hate them. To dread them. If it weren’t for the proximity of Citizen Zona during Mixed Exercise, there were evenings, like this one, when he could hardly force himself to go, no matter what the consequences.

It was unthinkable, but that was the way he was thinking.

Technician Owen could not understand him, though the two young men were close friends and had had adjoining bunks in the same sleeproom for over three years, Clocktime. The difference was that Owen had retained a child’s zest for athletic games and drills, and he was uncommonly good at them. He had won the Bar Exercise Award two years running, and Cory was sure he would again when he got himself completely back in shape, even with one arm shortened. The accident had not discouraged him at all.

Listen, Owen said, I’m going to pass the test this time with one arm tied … He stopped, uncomfortable. The phrase had been an awkward choice, popping into his mind because the injured arm was on his mind—and because he might not be as confident as he claimed, Cory thought. It’ll be a breeze. And when I get back in the gym with you, you’re going to shape up in a hurry!

His infectious grin made Cory feel foolish about his reluctance over comsesh. The fact was that he had found the sessions less burdensome and boring when Owen was on hand to goad or jeer his efforts. It would be good to have him back.

The injury to Owen’s arm had come as a direct result of his unusual athletic prowess. He was always trying to outdo himself—and everyone else. He had been working out past the specified time, and he was probably more tired then he knew. He had tried a somersault and one-hand stand on the high bar. Either his hand had been slippery from sweat or the bar had been wet. Owen lost his grip and fell. Even then Owen would normally have recovered in mid fall because he was so agile, but he had struck the bar as he flipped, a glancing but painful blow across the small of his back. Thrown clear of the mat, he had landed heavily in a clumsy dead fall, his left arm twisted under his body.

The arm snapped in two places, and his collarbone was fractured.

The trouble was that the breaks were slow to mend, and when the arm eventually healed it was both shorter and weaker than the right arm—over an inch shorter and almost thirty percent weaker in the fitness tests. He had been sent back to the reconditioning center for another thirty days.

Now he was up before the Board of Instructors again, and his eagerness was in sharp contrast to Cory’s increasingly sour view of comsesh. Owen had worked hard, both in compulsory gym and in the privacy of the sleeproom the two men shared. He really was dedicated about exercise, and he wanted to come all the way back. He was sure now that his left arm was at least as strong as the right, possibly even stronger. The fact that it remained slightly shorter was no handicap at all, he had assured Cory earnestly—and perhaps more often than necessary.

He could crush Cory’s grip with either hand, as he had demonstrated. Even with one arm Owen could whip Cory. Neither man doubted that.

You just show those Instructors what you can do, and pass that test, Cory said. You know me, I’m just sounding off.

I’ll pass, Owen said with a frown that was both determined and concerned. But don’t go around talking like that. It’s all right with me, but you know what would happen if anybody else heard you. You’d be up before the Psychoanalyzer.

Cory said nothing, but Owen’s warning stuck in his mind. Maybe that was what he needed.

But he was not sure exactly what going before the Psychoanalyzer meant, and he was a little afraid.

Chapter Two

Leaving the dorm, Cory hopped onto the sidewalk and rode across the parklike greenscape, giving no thought to the incongruity of riding rather than walking to an exercise ritual. He was lucky enough to find a place. Coming back would not be so easy with everyone jamming the walks, the well-muscled exercisers shouldering the food faddists out of the way if necessary. No one walked late if he could help it. Everyone was too damned exhausted from comsesh, Cory thought.

Catching the drift of his musings, habitual lately, Cory thought: It’s a phase. Something you’re going through. You’ll come out of it and go on building muscles until the day you disappear, like all the others.

He shivered, suddenly cold under the pale luminescence of the night sky. Sometimes it was not good to look too far ahead. It was like a painting he had seen once which had caught the illusion or sighting along an empty walkway toward a bleak horizon, with nothing visible anywhere, no sign of life. Even the art panels flanking the walk were blank expanses of gray. He had felt a chill, looking at that painting, the same cold foreboding he felt now.

It had happened gradually, his weariness, the feeling of stultification, of slowly, with an infinite patience of repetition, being smothered to death in the monotony of-overdeveloped muscles or the tastelessness of some new health food program. His awareness of it, on the other hand, had been recent and abrupt, like waking one morning to find that you were an adult, twenty-five years old and with more than half your life behind you, without knowing how you had got there from childhood.

At the intersection on the northwest corner of the greenscape Cory skipped off the moving walk onto a ramp. There he had to wait for a workgang of grayshirted intellectuals to trudge wearily by at the end of their long day. They were heading for their camp at the northern perimeter of the cityzone.

Look at them, a white-clad exerciser standing beside Cory said, contempt in his tone.

Look? another asked. "You can smell ‘em."

You could. Technician Cory could not deny an automatic and irrational feeling of revulsion. There were ready explanations for the reaction, of course, such as his deeply conditioned respect for personal cleanliness, an attitude shared by the rival food faddists as determinedly as by any exerciser. The unmistakable grayshirt smell was simply offensive. Weekly, it was said, they were forced to disrobe and climb into public pools, where they were hosed down. But that was the nearest they came to bathing, and obviously it was not enough. Their notorious indifference to cleanliness and their carelessness about dress was almost defiantly displayed in matted beards, food-stained gray tunics, and worn and dirty boots.

His restlessness sharpened, Cory was glad when the last of the grayshirts had stumbled past him—this one a thin, sharp-boned old man with hollow cheeks and slumped shoulders. Like the others the old man did not even glance at the watching crowd on the ramp as he passed. With a shrug Cory stepped onto the southbound walk, almost glad to be going to a clean, bright, healthy gym session to join his regular group of radiantly healthy and muscular technicians and citizens.

Almost. Not even the lingering smell of a sweaty grayshirt could hold off his newly discovered boredom for long.

Riding, his thoughts turned idly to Technician Owen and wished him well in the fitness test—surely there was no need to worry! But the image of the slump-shouldered old grayshirt kept intruding. He would not be around long, Cory thought. It was his appearance of age that was unusual, catching attention. He must be close to his time, and he had made no effort to conceal the fact. He must be ready to go.

Where?

This unnatural question, hardly new, taunted Cory as it had for the past year. Where did the old people go? It was a mystery which did not bear much thinking about, for then he would remember his mother too keenly, and the sad resignation in her face (the eyes brimming over, the gentle mouth quivering in a smile that threatened to lose its shape) when she left the dormitory on what turned out to be her last visit.

She had been forty-eight years old, Clock-measure, and there was finally no way to get around that, even though a lot of people tried, like that exerciser on the ramp who had spoken so disgustedly, a man with a visible cake of makeup trying to hide the pouches under his eyes and the folds of his neck. But Cory’s mother had not looked or felt or acted old …

He scowled. It did no good to remember, no good to ask questions the Authority Figures would not answer. That was what Owen always said.

And as far as Owen’s test was concerned, there was nothing to worry about. Owen would be waiting for him when he got back to their sleeproom, grinning from ear to ear, full of how well he had scored and insisting on a celebration.

There it is! someone said eagerly.

Technician Cory jerked erect. Staring ahead, he glimpsed the tall figure of the Statue looming over the edge of the greenbelt, overlooking the moving walk, and in that instant the old man and Owen and Cory’s own restlessness were forgotten.

His heartbeat quickened. Watching the figure grow larger, Cory felt the familiar excitement that never seemed to diminish and heard the normal murmur of talk and motion along the walkway gradually fade until, as Cory and those near him approached the great Statue, there was silence.

There were six of the Statues in the world. In his lifetime Cory had seen five of them, and he hoped one day to see the other one. There were identical, as if created from the same model, yet each was strikingly different, arrested in a different, astonishingly lifelike pose. Made in the image of man, flawlessly accurate in detail, they had been known to exist since the beginning of Clocktime, their origins lost in that mist of history in which the Clockmaker himself had conceived and executed his master work. The Statues were so curiously lifelike that each seemed to have paused in motion, as if he had heard his name called.

The one which Cory passed now had his left arm raised as if reaching for something, the fingers spread and extended. His right arm was relaxed, his body leaning forward slightly. Larger than life, he stood nine feet, six inches tall, and was perfectly proportioned, slender and graceful, clad in the loose one-piece coverall which was the everyday garment for all citizens except grayshirts—but in the white (with blue piping) of an exerciser, rather than the pale blue of a faddist. Cory could remember the eye-stinging pride he had felt in his youth over this identification with the Statue, a pride in what he was that he had somehow lost, even though his awe of the Statue was undiminished. They were like men, he thought, but more than men, as if their creator, the artistic genius who had conceived and wrought them with such exquisite care in the dawn of the world, had meant them to be gods.

The walk cruised past the Statue. For a long moment Cory stared back over his shoulder, reluctant to lose that deeply stirring vision, another man’s dream of what he might become.

With a sigh he turned away. The natural murmur along the walk had resumed the busy rhythm of life. Ahead was the curving dome of the gym, and reality.

Chapter Three

Cory could not believe his luck. The one thing that could predictably have shaken him out of his somber mood had actually happened. He went through the first twenty minutes of Mixed Exercise in a kind of daze, reacting instinctively and, he finally realized, not acquitting himself very well in Citizen Zona’s eyes.

For someone who looked so wondrously soft and feminine, Zona had deceptively resilient and disciplined muscles. She seemed tirelessly interested in the drills, and she had the faculty of total absorption in what she was doing, a fact which Cory found progressively frustrating. But he knew these details only as a peripheral haze of fact surrounding the fantasy of being assigned to Mixed Exercise with the one girl in all the world who caused him sleepless nights, whose full-color vision he carried around in his head daily (larger than life, like a Statue, stretching high in her gym suit, straining every smoothly contoured muscle and thrusting every well-developed curve into delightful prominence), the one girl who caused him dry-mouthed jitters when he was close to her.

Feeling somewhat bruised and sore, and panting from exertion, Cory said, Uh … maybe we should rest. Isn’t it rest time?

Zona smiled. Of course not. That’s quite funny.

It is?

But you waste your strength in talk.

I guess so. I can think of better ways to … uh … use it.

Ignoring his inept hint, Zona feinted a light jab at his kidneys, fooling him into overcommitting, and flipped him. At the last second, stumbling out of control, Cory saved himself from a humiliating fall onto his back. In the process he severely twisted his right knee and, he was fairly sure, tore a muscle in his right shoulder.

You weren’t expecting that, Zona said calmly. You’re not concentrating.

You’re dead right, Cory admitted, wincing as he tested his shoulder. I was concentrating on you, if you want to know the truth. It’s hard not to.

The comment caused her to look at him closely, blue eyes curious, as if she were really seeing him for the first time. But her smile disappeared, replaced by an expression of faint disapproval, like a mother who has been overly indulgent to a naughty child but is losing patience. You’re forgetting the first rule of Mixed Exercise, she said.

She was not even breathing hard, Cory noted with chagrin. You’re right about that, he said. What is it?

Objectivity.

Oh, yes.

Sexual objectivity.

I assumed that’s what you meant.

I didn’t make up the rule, she said coolly, in direct reference to the Authority’s explication of the General Rules of Conduct as applied to Mixed Exercise.

Restricted World, Cory thought. How could anything constructed like Citizen Zona be anything but warm at all times? In his imaginings she had been melting and timidly complaisant, not at all like this reserved and self-confident exerciser. It was Cory who was burning up, partly because she had given him a real workout for twenty minutes, but mostly from being in such close … uh … contact with her, not only speaking to her, but actually reaching out to grip the smooth firm curve of her upper arm and shoulder in the formal First Position of Mixed Exercise, or sometimes accidentally (and not so accidentally) brushing the long line of her flank or the fine swell of her bosom, so disconcertingly defined by the skintight gym suit. These chance grippings and brushings were inevitable in mixed drills, and for the first time in his memory Cory wanted the compulsory session to go on and on. It was also the first time he could remember when the minutes raced by, as if the Clock had abandoned its own twenty-four schedule and raced to keep up with the shorter light-dark pattern chronicled in the sky.

Citizen Zona was younger than Cory—hardly more than twenty, he guessed—which might have explained her earnest attitude toward exercise. Had he been the same five years ago? Cory could not remember. The years blurred into sameness. She was tall for a girl, perhaps crowding close to the sixty-six inch height limit. (Her mother must have worried when she was growing up, but she had none of the slump-shouldered, flat-footed habits which tall girls often learned to minimize their height.) But Zona would not have to worry about her weight, not for a while at least. She was slender and firm from shoulder to calf, even though she had rather wide shoulders and a long neck (whose graceful line Cory admired past describing). Her features retained the tentativeness of youth, unlined and unmarked, dominated by those huge, steady blue eyes and by full, soft lips which held Cory’s gaze like a magnet. Her hair was dark, setting off the light eyes; it was cut short in the boyish and practical style adopted by all exercisers.

But no one would ever mistake Zona for a boy, Cory thought fervently.

Suddenly anguished, he heard the two-minute warning buzzer, signaling the approaching end of the Mixed Exercise period. He had been exasperatingly dumb for some minutes, unable to think of anything interesting to say to her, and Zona was so intent on her routine that she might have been working out with a set of bars.

Cory slipped into a medium tension armbrace with the girl. He had to blink through the sweat streaming into his eyes. This is fun, he grunted, isn’t it?

Of course.

I mean … more than usual. That is … listen, there’s no rule against aftersesh meeting, is there? We could have a juice or something.

She seemed to hesitate, causing his heartbeat to do the same. No, she said at last. Other than the usual prohibitions about conduct.

Oh, of course, Cory said quickly. How about tonight? Are you busy aftersesh?

I’m not sure.

What do you mean? How can you not be sure? Either you’re busy or you’re not busy, right? He would not give her time to think, Cory thought. She was a great exerciser, but she was not all that bright.

It might depend …

On what?

Zona did not answer. For a moment her blue eyes held his. Then, without warning, she slipped out of the armbrace, caught Cory’s wrist, pulled him forward, dropped her back and flipped him fifteen feet across the mat into the padded wall.

Dazed more painfully than before, Cory sat with his back against the wall, wondering if he had broken anything and trying to sort out the