Dayworld

Author’s Preface

The basis or springboard for this novel is my short story The-Sliced-Crosswise-Only-On-Tuesday-World. This took place in A.D. 2214 (old style) or N.E. 130 (new style): N.E. stands for New Era, and N.E. 130 indicates the one hundred and thirtieth year after the official beginning of the stoner society.

The events of Dayworld occur in A.D. 3414 or N.E. 1330. Thirteen hundred and thirty years have passed since the start of the New Era, N.E. 1.

Though there are twelve hundred years between the events of the short story and the novel, only seven and a half generations (arithmetically speaking) have been born. The reason for this will become apparent during the course of the novel.

In the future, the U.S.A. will have to adopt the metric and twenty-four-hour time systems. I use the present systems for the convenience of the American reader.

Some contemporary English words have different meanings in the New Era culture. These changes should be obvious.

Do not be confused because some of the male characters have female names and some females have male names. Times change; customs die.

The protagonist of Dayworld is an outlaw, a daybreaker. He lives by the horizontal calendar.

For an explanation of the horizontal and vertical calendars, refer to the illustration on the next page.

The calendar is vertical, not our present-day horizontal calendar. Our calendars present the seven days of the week as if we moved through time horizontally. Sunday precedes Monday, and Monday precedes Tuesday, and by the time we have reached next Sunday, we have stepped off onto another horizontal chronological path.

NEW ERA (VERTICAL) CALENDAR N.E. 1330 (OLD STYLE A.D. 3414)

D1-W1 means Day-One of Week-One or the fast day of the first week of the year. D3-W4 stands for the third day of the fourth vertical week, etc.

The New Era or stoner society uses a vertical calendar. Reason: One-seventh of the world’s population lives on only one day of the week. To put it another way, six-sevenths of the world’s population is in a stoned or suspended-animation state for six days of each week. Sunday’s people live on Sunday only; Monday’s, on Monday, and so forth.

At the end of one passage of Earth around the sun, a Sunday citizen has lived only fifty-two days. If born in, say, N.E. 100, that person has been on Earth two hundred years by N.E. 300. But that person is not quite twenty-nine years old in physiological development. If that person has been on Earth for six hundred years, he or she is hot quite eighty-six years old in terms of aging.

The stoner culture greatly reduces the demand for food and goods, amount of pollution, and living space required. If the global population is, say, ten billion, then, on each day, only a little over one billion, four hundred and twenty-eight million, five hundred thousand people are eating food, drinking, using space, and adding trash, junk, and waste matter for disposal.

The New Era government decreed a new calendar for two reasons. One, it wanted to make a clean break with the past. Two, it made sure that each day’s population would not be cheated out of its full quota of days per year because of the different days of the months as set by the Gregorian calendar. The summer solstice, which occurs on or near June 21, arbitrarily became the first day of the year, and that day was designated as Sunday.

The year was divided into thirteen months of four seven-day weeks. The end of the year was followed by a zero or lost day to ensure that there were three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. During leap years, an extra zero or lost day was added. Everybody except a minimum number of firefighters, police, administrators, and so on was kept in the stoned state.

The citizens would, of course, refer to two different types of time. Objective time, that is, time as measured by the annual circling of the Earth around the sun and Earth’s spinning, would be termed obyears, obmonths, and obweeks. Subjective time, that is, the actual number of days, weeks, months, and years a person has lived, would be subdays, subweeks, submonths and subyears.

The names of the months are, in order of succession, Unity, Variety, Joy, Hope, Comradeship, Love, Freedom, Plenty, Peace, Knowledge, Wisdom, Serenity, and Fulfillment. These are also the Thirteen Principles upon which the New Era society is supposedly based.

Tuesday-World

Organic Commonwealth of Earth

North American Ministering Organ

Manhattan State

Manhattan total population: 2,100,000

Manhattan daily population: 300,000

Greenwich Village District

House on corner of Bleecker Street and Kropotkin Canal (formerly the Avenue of the Americas)

VARIETY, Second Month of N.E. 1330

D5-W1 (Day-Five, Week-One)

Time Zone 5, 12:15 A.M.

1.

When the hounds bay, the fox and the hare are brothers.

Today, Jeff Caird, the fox, would hear the hounds.

At the moment, he could not hear anything because he was standing in a soundproof cylinder. If he had been outside it, he still would have heard nothing. Except for himself and a few organics, firefighters, and technicians, he was the only living person in the city.

A few minutes before entering the cylinder and closing its door, he had slid back a small panel in the wall. Behind the control panel in the wall recess was a tiny device he had long ago connected to the power circuits. He had voice-activated the device, thus ensuring that destoning power would not be applied to the cylinder he now occupied.

Though power was absent, the city monitoring computer would receive false data that power had been turned on in his cylinder.

His cylinder or stoner was like those of all other healthy adults. It stood on one end, had a round window a foot in diameter in the door, and was made of gray paper. The paper, however, was permanently stoned, and thus was indestructible and always cool.

Nude, his feet planted on a thick disc set in the middle of the cylinder, he waited. The inflated facsimile of himself had been deflated and was in the shoulderbag on the cylinder floor.

The figures in the other cylinders in the room were nonliving things whose molecules had been electromagnetically commanded to slow down. Result: a hardening throughout the body, which became unbreakable and unburnable, though a diamond could scratch it. Result: a lowering of body temperature, though it was not so low that it caused moisture to precipitate in the ambient air.

Suddenly, in one cylinder in the room and in hundreds of thousands of others in the silent city, automatically applied power surged from the discs and through the statuelike bodies. Like a cue stick slamming into a group of billiard balls, the power struck the lazy molecules of the body. The balls scattered and kept on moving at the rate determined by Nature. The heart of the destoned person, unaware that it had been stopped, completed the beat. Exactly fifteen minutes after midnight, the people of Tuesday’s Manhattan were no longer uneatable and unrottable pumpkins. For the next twenty-three hours and thirty minutes, they could be easily wounded or killed.

He pushed the door open and stepped into a large basement room. He bent slightly from the waist, causing the ID badge hung from a chain around his neck to swing out. As he straightened up, the green disc surrounded by a seven-pointed star settled back against his solar plexus.

The sourceless light had come on when destoning power had been applied. As he did every Tuesday morning, he saw the shadowless light-green walls, the four-foot-wide TV strips running from ceiling to floor, the thick brown carpet with a swirling green pattern, the clock strip, and twenty-three cylinders and coffin-shaped boxes, the stoners. Twenty frozen faces were framed by the round windows. Twelve seniors (adults) in the vertical cylinders. Eight juniors, young children, lying horizontally in the boxes and facing the ceiling.

A few seconds after he had left his stoner, a woman stepped out of hers. Ozma Fillmore Wang was short, slender, full-breasted, and long-legged. Her cheekbones were broad and high on her heart-shaped face. Her large black eyes had slight epicanthic folds. Her long hair was straight, black, and glossy. Large white teeth shone when she flashed a wide-lipped smile.

She wore nothing except her ID disc-star, lipstick, eye shadow, and a great green grasshopper painted on her body. It was standing up on its back legs, and her black-painted nipples formed the centers of the black staring eyes. Sometimes, when Jeff was making love to his wife, he had the feeling that he was coupled with an insect.

She came to him, and they kissed. Good morning, Jeff.

Good morning, Ozma.

She turned and led him into the next room. He reached out to pat her egg-shaped buttock, then withdrew his hand. The slightest encouragement would inflame her. She would want to make love on the carpet in front of the unseeing witnesses in the cylinders. He thought that it was childish to do this, but she was, in some ways, childish. She preferred to call herself childlike. OK. All good artists were childlike. To them every second birthed a new world, each more astonishing and awesome than the previous. However … was Ozma a good artist?

What did he care? He loved her for herself, whatever that meant.

The other room contained chairs, sofas, tables, a Ping-Pong table, an exercising machine, a pool table, TV wall strips, a door to a bathroom, and a door to the utility room. Ozma turned just outside this door and went up the steps to a hall. On their left was the kitchen. They turned right, went down a short hall, and turned right to the steps. The upstairs held four bedrooms, each with a bathroom. Ozma preceded him into the nearest bedroom, which lit up as they entered.

At one end of the large room, by some shuttered windows, was a king-size bed. At another wall, by a large round window, was a table with a large mirror. Nearby were shelves holding big plastic boxes containing brushes, combs, and cosmetics. Each box bore the name of its owner.

Along one wall was a series of doors with name-plaques. Jeff inserted a point of his ID star into a hole in the door bearing his name and Ozma’s. It slid open, and a light came on, revealing shelves holding their personal-property clothing. From a shelf at eye level, he picked out a crumpled ball of cloth, turned, placed a section between his thumb and first finger, and snapped the ball. It unrolled with a crack of electrical sparks from its hem and became a long, smooth Kelly-green robe. He put it on and tied a belt around his waist. From another shelf he took two socks and a pair of shoes. After putting these on, he sealed the tops of the shoes with a firm pressure of fingers.

Ozma straightened up from her inspection of the bedclothes.

Clean and done according to specifications, she said.

Monday’s always been good about house duties. We’re luckier than some I know. I only hope Monday doesn’t move to another house.

She spoke a codeword. A wall sprang into light and life, a three-dimensional view of a jungle composed of gigantic grass blades. Presently, some blades bent, and a thing with bulging black insect eyes looked at the two humans. Its antennae quivered. A hind leg raised and rubbed against a protruding vein. Grasshopper stridulations rang through the room.

For God’s sake, Jeff said. Tone it down.

It soothes me to sleep, she said. Not that I feel like sleeping just now.

I’d like to wait until we’ve had a good rest. It’s always better then.

Oh, I don’t know, Ozma said. Why don’t we give it a scientific test? Do it before sleep and after and then compare notes?

That’s the difference between forty and twenty-five. Believe me, I know.

She laughed and said, We’re not a December–April match, darling.

She lay down on the bed, her arms and legs spread out.

The Castle Ecstatic is undefended, and its drawbridge is down. Charge on in, Sir Galahad, with your trusty lance.