“Name?” says the Immigration official.
“Stone. “
“That’s all?”
“That’s all anyone calls me.” (Unbearable white-hot pain when they dug out the eyes of the little urchin they caught watching them carve up the corpse. But he never cried, oh, no; and so: Stone.)
“Place of birth?”
“This shitheap, right here. Where else?”
“Parents?”
“What’re they?”
“Age?”
A shrug.
“That can be fixed later with a cellscan. I suppose we have enough to issue your card. Hold still now.”
Stone feels multiple pencils of warmth scroll over his face; seconds later, a chuntering sound from the desk.
“This is your proof of citizenship and access to the system. Don’t lose it.”
Stone extends a hand in the direction of the voice, receives a plastic rectangle. He goes to shove it into a pocket, finds them both ripped away in the scuffle, and continues to hold the plastic awkwardly, as if it is a brick of gold about to be snatched away.
“Now my question.” The woman’s voice is like a distant memory Stone has of love. “Do you want a job?”
Stone’s trip wire has been brushed. A job they can’t even announce in public? It must so fracking bad that it’s off the common corporate scale.
“No thanks, miz. My life ain’t much, but it’s all I got.” He turns to leave.
“Although I can’t give you details until you accept, we’ll register a contract right now that stipulates it’s a Rating-1 job.”
Stone stops dead. It has to be a sick joke. But what if it’s true?
“A contract?”
“Officer,” the woman commands.
A key is tapped, and the desk recites a contract. To Stone’s untutored ears, it sounds straightforward and without traps. A Rating-1 job for an unspecified period, either party able to terminate the contract, job description to be appended later.
Stone hesitates only seconds. Memories of all the frightful nights and painful days in the Bungle swarm in his head, along with the hot central pleasure of having survived. Irrationally, he feels a moment’s regret at leaving behind the secret city spring he so cleverly found. But it passes.
“I guess you need this to O.K. it,” Stone says, offering up his newly won card.
“I guess we do,” the woman says with a laugh.
* * * *
The quiet, sealed car moves through busy streets. Despite the lack of outside noise, the chauffeur’s comments on the traffic and their frequent halts are enough to convey a sense of the bustling city around them.
“Where are we now?” Stone asks for the tenth time. Besides wanting the information, he loves to hear this woman speak. Her voice, he thinks—its’s like a spring rain when you’re safe inside.
“Madison-Park FEZ, traveling crosstown.”
Stone nods appreciatively. She may as well have said, “In orbit, blasting for the moon,” for all the fuzzy mental image he gets.
Before they would let Stone leave, Immigration did several things to him. Shaved all his body hair off; deloused him; made him shower for ten minutes with a mildly abrasive soap; disinfected him; ran several instant tests; pumped six shots into him; and issued him underwear, clean coveralls, and shoes (shoes!)
The alien smell of himself only makes the woman’s perfume more at tractive. In the close confines of the backseat, Stone swims in it. Finally he can contain himself no longer.
“Uh, that perfume—what kind is it?”
“Lily of the valley.”
The mellifluous phrase makes Stone feel as if he is in another, kinder century. He swears he will always remember it. And he will.
“Hey!” Consternation. “I don’t even know your name.”
“June. June Tannhauser.”
June. Stone. June and Stone and lilies of the valley. June in June with Stone in the valley with the lilies. It’s like a song that won’t cease in his head.
“Where are we going?” he asks over the silent song in his head.
“To a doctor,” says June.
“I thought that was all taken care of.”
“This man’s a specialist. An eyespecialist.”
This is the final jolt, atop so many, knocking even the happy song out of Stone’s head. He sits tense for the rest of the ride, unthinking.
* * * *
“This is a lifesized model of what we’re going to implant in you,” the doctor says, putting a cool ball in Stone’s hand.
Stone squeezes it in disbelief
“The heart of this eye system is CCD’s—charge-coupled devices. Every bit of light—each photon—that hits them triggers one or more electrons. These electrons are collected as a continuous signal, which is fed through an interpreter chip to your optic nerves. The result: perfect sight.”
Stone grips the model so hard his palm bruises.
“Cosmetically, they’re a bit shocking. In a young man like yourself, I’d recommend organic implants. However, I have orders from the person footing the bill that these are what you get. And of course, there are several advantages to them.”
When Stone does not ask what they are, the doctor continues anyway.
“By thinking mnemonic keywords that the chip is programmed for, you can perform several functions.
“One: You can store digitalized copies of a particular sight in the chip’s RAM, for later display. When you reinvoke it with the keyword, it will seem as if you are seeing the sight again directly, no matter what you are actually looking at. Resumption of realtime vision is another keyword.
“Two: By stepping down the ratio of photons to electrons, you can do such things as stare directly at the sun or at a welder’s flame without damage.
“Three: By upping the ratio, you can achieve a fair degree of normal sight in conditions such as a starry, moonless night.
“Four: For enhancement purposes, you can generate false-color images. Black becomes white to your brain, the old rose-colored glasses, whatever.
“And I think that about covers it.”
“What’s the time frame on this, Doctor?” June asks.
The doctor assumes an academic tone, obviously eager to show professional acumen. “A day for the actual operation, two days, accelerated recovery, a week of training and further healing—say, two weeks, max.”
‘Very good,” June says.
Stone feels her rise from the couch beside him, but remains seated.
“Stone,” she says, a hand on his shoulder, “time to go.”
But Stone can’t get up, because the tears won’t stop.
* * * *
The steel and glass canyons of New York—that proud and flourishing union of Free Enterprise Zones—are a dozen shades of cool blue, stretching away to the north. The streets that run with geometric precision like distant rivers on the canyon floors are an arterial red. To the west and east, snatches of the Hudson River and the East