Dayworld Read Free Page B

muttered. “Maybe I should have stayed in one day, maybe I should have been only Jeff Caird.”
    Presently, the faint noises of street-sweeping machines lulled him back to sleep.
    Sitting at the breakfast-room table, Caird could see the picket-fenced backyard through the window. In one corner was a utility shed; in another, the garage; in a third, the garden. A small one-room building of transparent plastic, a studio, was in the center. Thirty feet to its east was a large apple tree. It bore fruit, but bypassers who had not heard of Ozma might have wondered what kind of a tree it was. Ozma had painted every apple with a different design, though viewed together the designs made an esthetically pleasing whole. The paint would not wash off easily, but it was edible, and a bowl full of the fruit was on the table now.
    Ozma had agreed with Jeff that he could decorate the kitchen. He had arranged the walls so they glowed with four paintings by T’ang Dynasty artists. He liked the Chinese quality, the quiet and eternal look with the human figures always far off, small but important, not the masters but an integrated part of the mountains, the forests, the cataracts.
    Though Ozma had more Chinese ancestry than he, she did not particularly care for them. She was an outré and outrageous Westerner.
    She had turned on the recorder in the corner to find out if Wednesday had left any messages. There were none, so it could be assumed that Wednesday had no complaints about the cleanliness or order of the house.
    Their breakfast was interrupted by the front doorbell. Ozma, clad in a knee-length robe so thin that she might as well not have worn it, answered the bell. The callers were, as expected, Corporal Hiatt and Private First Class Sangalli. They wore green caps with long black visors, green robes on which were the insignia of the Manhattan State Cleaning Corps and their rank-stripes and good conduct medals, brown sandals, and yellow gloves.
    Ozma greeted them, made a face at their boozy breaths, asked them in, and offered them coffee. They refused, and they plunged into the dusting, washing, waxing, and vacuuming. Ozma returned to the table.
    “Why can’t they come later, while we’re gone?”
    “Because they have a quota, and because that’s the way the bureaucracy set it up.”
    Jeff went upstairs, brushed his teeth, and rubbed on the whisker-removing cream. The face in the mirror was dark, the long dark hair in a Psyche knot. The hazel eyes brooded under heavy brows. The nose was long and slightly hooked, and the nostrils flared. The jaw was heavy. The chin was round and cleft and stuck out.
    “I look like a cop,” he muttered. “And I am. But not most of the time.”
    He also looked like a big dark worrybird. What’s to worry about? Besides being caught? Besides Ariel?
    He showered, put underarm deodorant on, went into the bedroom, and donned a blue robe decorated with black trefoil figures. Clubs, the same symbol used on a pack of cards. He was the joker or perhaps the knave of clubs. Or both. He did not know who was responsible for this organic symbol, but it probably had been some bureaucrat who thought he was being subtle. The organics, the cops, had the real power, clubs.
    He picked up his over-the-shoulder bag and walked downstairs. A strip by the front door glowed with a message. Ozma wanted him to stop by her studio before he left.
    She was inside the transparent one-room building and sitting on a high stool. She put her magnifying glass down on the table when she heard him enter. The grasshopper she had been looking at had been stoned to keep it immobile while she applied paint to it. Its antennae were yellow; its head, pale orange; its body, bright purple with yellow crux ansatas; its legs, jet black. A mauve paint, which had the properties of one-way glass, covered its eyes.
    “Jeff, I wanted you to see my latest. How do you like it?”
    “The colors don’t clash. Not by modern standards, anyway.”
    “Is