CHAPTER II
It was late afternoon by the time I got out of the Marriage Administration Building. The sun, red and swollen from the spring dust storms, was just disappearing behind the distant elevators of the plankton conversion plant, and the sky was beginning to lose its coppery haze. I hailed a rickshaw, leaned back in the plastic chair and let the June wind cool my face.
The street murmured with the whir of rickshaw wheels and the rhythmic pounding of runners' feet. The Marriage Administration Building faded into the lengthening shadows. The Cathedral drifted grayly by, the tiny windows of its serried chapels glinting red in the final rays of the sun. Then the massive pile of the Coliseum, silent and somber and brooding. In the distance, the hives towered darkly into the sky.
The Coliseum gave way to the parsonage apartments. Prim façades frowned down on me with narrow-windowed righteousness. I shifted uneasily in my rickshaw seat. If my surreptitious reading of the forbidden books had given me a new perspective on the Age of Repentance, it had also given me a troubled conscience.
Just the same, I knew that as soon as the next book "collection" got under way, I would offer my services to the Literature Police just as I'd done a dozen times before. And if my luck held, and I was assigned to sentry duty in the book dump, I would read just as many forbidden volumes as I could every time I got the chance. Moreover, this time I would risk Purgatory and try to save a few of them from the flames.
The parsonage apartments petered out and the noisome market area took their place. Rickshaw traffic densened, competed with hurrying pedestrians. Plastic heels clacked and ankle-length skirts swished in the gloom. The hives occulted the sky now, and the stench of cramped humanity rode the night wind.
I dropped a steelpiece into the runner's hand when he pulled up before my hive. I tipped him a plastic quarter when he handed me my change. I could feel the loneliness already, the crushing loneliness that comes to all men who live in faceless crowds.
But I didn't regret having come to the hives to live. They were no lonelier than the YMCA had been. And three rooms, no matter how small, were certainly preferable to the cramped little cubicle I had occupied during the years immediately following my parents' suicide.
A long time ago—a century perhaps, maybe more—the hives bore the more euphemistic name of "apartment houses." But they had corridors then instead of yard-wide passageways, elevators instead of narrow stairways, rooms instead of roomettes. Those were the years before the metal crisis, before the population upsurge; the years that constituted the Age of Wanton Waste.
Deploring the appetites of one's ancestors is a frustrating pastime. I did not indulge in it now. Climbing the four flights of stairs to my apartment, I thought instead of my imminent marriage, hoping to take the edge off my loneliness.
I concentrated on my wife-to-be. A wife, according to the pamphlet that had accompanied my marriage summons, guaranteed to be my ideal mate, emotionally, intellectually, and physically. A wife who would personify my unconscious conception of a goddess, who would fulfill my unconscious standards of feminine beauty, who would administer faithfully to my unconscious emotional needs. In short, just exactly the kind of woman I had unconsciously wanted all my miserable lonely life.
I tried to picture her. I threw everything out of my mind and left my mental retina blank. It did not remain blank for long. Gradually, the twentieth century landscape came into focus—the river flowing in the foreground, bluer than before, the green sea of the meadow spreading out to the exquisite forested hills, the impeccable cumulus mountain, and finally, the solitary bird soaring in the vast sky....
I prepared and ate a frugal meal in the kitchenette, then I shaved, went into the bedroomette and changed into my sentry suit. I was combing my shoulder-length hair when the knock on the door sounded.
I waited, listening for the knock to sound again. I knew practically no one in the city, save the members of my own guard detail, and it was unlikely that any of them would visit me. They saw enough of me on the graveyard shift.
Who, then?
The knock sounded again, rising unmistakably above the background noises of the hive—the dull clatter of plastic pots and pans and dishes, the nagging voices of wives, the strident ones of husbands, and the whining of children. I laid down my comb, left the bedroomette, stepped across the parlorette, opened the door—and stepped back involuntarily.
The MEP captain had been seated when I had seen him at Marriage Administration Headquarters, and I hadn't been particularly impressed by his size. Standing, he was an arresting sight. The top of his high, wide-brimmed hat touched the ceiling of the passageway; the charcoal coat that hung so loosely on his shoulders could not conceal their striking width; large bony wrists with huge arthritic hands protruded from their cuffs. He looked like a giant who had never had enough to eat.
As I stood staring, he removed his hat and, reaching into an inside pocket of his coat, produced a stained plastic badge. He waved it briefly before my eyes, then replaced it. "Captain Taigue," he said in a voice as thin and unpleasant as his face. "I have a few questions to ask you, Mr. Bartlett."
The shock of finding him on my doorstep had left me numb. But I remembered my rights. "You've no right to ask me questions," I said. "I'm a single man."
"I was invested with the right today when you applied for a wife. A husband-to-be is as securely bound to the laws of matrimony as an actual husband is."
He began to move through the doorway. I either had to get out of the way or be pushed aside. I got out of the way. Taigue shut the door behind him and sat down in the parlorette chair. He fixed me with his brooding eyes.
"Tell me, Mr. Bartlett, do you accept the basic tenets embraced by the marriage amendment?"
I still wasn't sure whether he had jurisdiction over me or not, but I decided to cooperate. I was curious to know the reason for his visit.
"Naturally I accept them," I said.
"Then you devoutly believe that enforced monogamy is the final answer to the deplorable serialized polygamy that characterized the sexual relationships of the twentieth century and brought on the conjugal chaos of the twenty-first; that strict adherence to the monogamous ideal is mandatory if it is to be perpetuated; that the marital unions computed by the Marriage Integrator can never be questioned because they are the ultimate in emotional, physical, and intellectual rapport—"
"I said I accepted the tenets," I said. "What more do you want?"
"That adultery," Taigue went on implacably, "is the most despicable crime a citizen can commit against his society; that adultery has many subtle phases, among the subtlest being the proclivity on the part of some husbands and husbands-to-be to look at women other than their wives or wives-to-be—and lust! You do devoutly believe these things, do you not, Mr. Bartlett?"
"Look, Captain," I said. "I spent the whole afternoon being cross-examined by a reverend psychiatrist. He knows more about my sexual nature now than I do myself. If you doubt my marital fitness, why don't you read his report?"
"Psychiatrists are fools," Taigue said. "I investigate applicants in my own way. Now, for the last time, Mr. Bartlett, do you devoutly believe the tenets I have just enumerated?"
"Yes!" I shouted.
"Then why did you look at the girl who took your application this morning—and lust?"
The question staggered me. It betrayed a fantastic overzealousness in his pursuit of his duty—an overzealousness so consuming that it had warped his perspective, had made him see sin where no sin existed. Julia Prentice was one woman whom you could not look at and lust. It was that particular quality, I realized now, that had attracted me to her in the first place.
I knew my face was burning; and I knew that Taigue was just the kind of a man who would deliberately interpret a manifestation of anger as a manifestation of guilt if it suited his predilections. The knowledge infuriated me all the more. In his eyes I was guilty, and nothing I could do would prove I wasn't.
I waited until I was sure I could control my voice. Then I said: "I think you've been fasting too long, Captain. Your hallucinations are getting the best of you."
He took no offense. In fact, he smiled as he got slowly to his feet. But his eyes burned with a sort of crazed satisfaction that was either the essence of dedication or the flickering of incipient insanity.
"I did not expect you to answer my question, Mr. Bartlett," he said. "I merely wished to apprise you of the alertness of the MEP, and to warn you that any further attention you may bestow on Julia Prentice will not go unobserved—or unpunished."
"You can leave any time," I said, opening the door.
"I can also return any time. Remember that, Mr. Bartlett. And remember the new commandment—Thou shalt not look at a woman and lust!"
His tall starved body swayed slightly as he moved through the doorway. It was all I could do to keep my fists at my sides, all I could do to hold back the violent words and phrases that swirled in my mind. When the door swung shut, eclipsing the charcoal shoulders, I collapsed against it.
I had heard tales of the zealots who guarded the matrimonial sanctity of society; I had even visited the Coliseum when a stoning was taking place and seen the battered bloody bodies of the victims lying in the dirt of the arena. But somehow neither the tales nor the bodies had driven home the truth that overwhelmed me now.
When the inevitable metal crisis followed the production-consumption orgy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the material world began to fall apart, the people turned to religion for succor. The subsequent merging of the two main churches was a milestone in religious progress. But then the trend went so far that the people elected church officials to represent them and began to stress outward manifestations of virtue by regressing to Puritanical dress and by voluntarily limiting their literary fare to the Bible, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrims' Progress, The Scarlet Letter, and The Divine Comedy.
The first clergy-congress was as zealous as the first ordained president in the drafting and the passing of the marriage amendment. And the frugal way of life already adopted by the people was ideal for a world down to its last inch of topsoil. The Marriage Integrator fitted into the new scheme of things nicely, for it justified the stern enforcement of the new marriage laws. And so marriage became a duty rather than a privilege.
I'd been profoundly distrustful of machine-made marriages ever since my parents' suicide, and the surreptitious reading I'd done on the various occasions when I had access to the book dump had increased that distrust. Marriage, according to all the old literature I'd read on it, was a pretty complex undertaking, so replete with subtleties that it was difficult to imagine a computing machine, no matter how intricate it might be, capable of dealing with them.
There was another aspect about Big Cupid that didn't quite add up. Logically, compatible marriages should result in many children. But most of the married couples in the apartments around me had only one child, and many of them were childless. The condition held true throughout the rest of the city, probably throughout the entire country.
A possible explanation lay in the popular conviction that sex was sin. But it was far from being a satisfactory explanation. The original Puritans identified sex with sin too, but they still raised large families.
No, there was something about Big Cupid that didn't make sense. Moreover, there was something about the Age of Repentance itself that didn't make sense either—when you used books other than the sacred Five for criteria.
The sex orgies which climaxed the Age of Wanton Waste and were influential in bringing about the mass regression to Puritanism, were unquestionably a blot on the scarred escutcheon of civilization. However, they only represented one extreme: the monogamous fanaticism of the Age of Repentance represented the other, which was just as remote from normalcy. Both were wrong.
The society in which I lived and moved was an inconsistent and a rigid society; I had known this for years. But, until now, the knowledge had never bothered me, for I had created the illusion of being a free man by avoiding personal relationships, especially marriage. Now that I could no longer do that, I realized my true status.
I was a prisoner—and Taigue was my keeper.