by Tod Davies
“Yes,” the man’s face pleaded with the children, as his eyes darted nervously to where Field Commander Riggs impatiently waited. “Please say ‘yes.’”
That was when Lily knew what she had to do. She knew it suddenly, and very clearly, as if Maud was bending down beside her and whispering into her ear.
“No,” she said out loud. And Rex nudged her under her arm.
“What?” the man said, startled.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t agree.”
There was a pause.
“No,” Colin’s voice said from the back. “No, I don’t agree either. I mean, I agree with Lily. No.”
“No,” a girl said from the other side of the room. And then some girls from Ventis took up the cry. “No, no, no!” they trilled like a flock of birds. And a family of children from Amana: “NO!” And Paloma spoke. And Wrykyn. And Mumford and Amaurote, too. All the children, of all the villages, in all of Arcadia, shouted out, “NO!”
“DON’T YOU AGREE,” the man shouted back, in a panic now, seeing his job disappear into the angry crease on the Field Commander’s forehead. “DON’T YOU AGREE THAT TOMORROW IS BETTER THAN TODAY?”
“NO!” Lily said, jumping to her feet and stamping her right one hard. “NO more tomorrows! Today! Today! Today!”
And all the children jumped up, too, and shouted along with her: “NO MORE TOMORROWS! TODAY! TODAY! TODAY!”
A siren rang, and the double doors at the back swung open. A trio of grim-faced men dressed in pressed chinos and polo shirts rushed inside in a wedge. Susan pointed at Lily, and they came and took her away.
“NO!” Colin bawled, and he ran out behind. Rex dodged between the children’s feet and followed, managing to get through the double doors just before they slammed shut.
The room was silent. The children were rigid now, and pale with fear. Susan strode to the front of the room, indicating with one gesture that the man in the center was to get out of her way.
“Now, children,” she said in her briskest voice. “I know that none of you want to be sent to the Children’s Mine, not like that poor little girl we were just forced to take away. I know you are all good children. And the Children’s Mine is a very bad place to be. Not a good place for good children AT ALL.” At this she gave them a piercing and meaningful look.
The children shook, looked at each other, and slowly, under the penetrating quality of her eye, sat back down.
“Now,” she said firmly, “we are going to learn today’s lesson: ‘Why Tomorrow is Always Better Than Today.’”
“No more Tomorrows.” Every child there knew that was what Susan really said. She was telling them there would be no more tomorrows for them, ever again. Every child thought that thought. But every child, now, was still.
As still as Conor Barr was later, standing transfixed at the sight of Lily and Colin and Rex being driven away to the Children’s Mine. So still was he, and so still did the scene around him seem, that the General had to speak quite sharply to make him attend. It was time for Conor to go back to Megalopolis and bring the report of the occupying force to the council of the Highest in the Land, and the General wanted to make sure that his own role would be properly represented. It would make a big difference to his pension when he retired if it was.
Nine
I met Susan Riggs much later, during my own time in Megalopolis, and she remembered my mother well. “I knew I’d have trouble with that one, the minute I saw her,” Susan told me. She was as rangy and elegant as ever, though her worldview had necessarily undergone a sea change. “Became a queen, did she? And you her daughter. Well. Doesn’t surprise me. You’ve got the look of her. And your grandmother.”
By which she meant my grandmother Livia, who was as tall as I am, and as red-haired.
It was my grandmother who had, curiously enough, started the vogue for Children’s Mines in Megalopolis. “All these children, just hanging about doing nothing, we should put them to use, shouldn’t we?” she said—I’ve seen it in the Archives. They interviewed her about it, the way they were always interviewing everyone in her family: her husband, the wealthy businessman. Her son, the handsome Conor Barr. Her son’s fiancée, the glamorous Rowena Pomfret. They are all over the Megalopolitan history books, and why not, since they paid for most of them?
It was Livia who suggested that since most of the lower classes had nothing to do all day but play games that flashed lights and made loud sounds, that their play should somehow benefit the country at large. So an experimental Children’s Mine was organized by a Megalopolitan women’s group, the one that also endowed the opera, and equipped the Mine with every modern convenience. The original, set into the Megalopolitan side of the Donatees, was something of a showplace—still in use by the time I arrived. It was painted brightly, and the treadmills the children walked on all day, playing their games and pulling the levers that helped power the night lights of Megalopolis, were coated with a special substance that made you feel like you were walking on grass.
Except of course you weren’t walking on grass. The one thing rigorously excluded from even the original Children’s Mine was Nature. It was found that Nature, in any form, was just too distracting to the work at hand. Or, at least, even if that hadn’t actually been found to be true, that was still the founders’ theory. (“And that was good enough,” the General told me later, during my own later travels. The conversation I had with him was one I have never forgotten for its sheer smug stupidity and meanness. No wonder his sons loathed him.)
But by the time the Children’s Mine Lily and Colin were sent to was built, funding had become scarcer. I think this was because of the impending environmental disasters that only the ruling class was truly aware of, and the vast sums being transferred to the making of a satellite orbiting the planet that could hold them all in case of trouble. Also, there were more and more children who were sent to the mines, as there were fewer and fewer jobs at home for their parents to support them with. Most families were happy to send their kids away to so patriotic a project, especially one that provided three meals a day (even if depressingly healthful and boring ones), along with a safe place to sleep. The end result, of course, was a skimping on funds for the mines that were less in the public eye. So the Children’s Mine Lily and Colin and Rex went to was farther up the cold slopes of the Donatees, was left unpainted, was cold, uncomfortable, and dull.
That was the worst of it, my mother always said. The dullness.
It reminded her of her childhood, she said. There was always an exclamation at this; how could an Arcadian childhood have been anything like the Megalopolitan Children’s Mine System? Lily was silent when asked this. Of course, I know what she meant now. She didn’t mean her childhood in Arcadia. She meant her childhood in Megalopolis, the one that no one but she, and now I, can really face ever happened at all.
No one in Arcadia wants to know where we came from. They’re not ready. So my mother’s story, for them, the story of Lily and Megalopolis, really starts here.
“Eh, she was that pretty, Soph, your mam. We all loved her, we really did, it was like havin’ a princess on the treadmill next to yer, and then she had that dog. She was like you, Soph, that good with animals, like she really talked to ’em and all, do you really talk to ’em, Soph? Always wondered. You’ve always been like that, too.”
My nurse, Kim the Kind. She was a working-class girl from an abandoned neighborhood in the Great City at the edge of the Marsh, shuttered when the plant at its heart suffered an unfortunate explosion, which killed most of the inhabitants and made their homes unlivable for anyone else. “I was away, lucky me, eh, Soph? Away that day trying to get a job in the posh part of town. Me ma wanted me outta there, and yer see how right she was. She went up that day, too—never found her, no, but the social women came and got me and took me up the Children’s Mine. That wasn’t me first choice, but you know me, Soph, lemons from lemonade. And it was where I met your ma.”
Lily used to tell the o
ther children stories, Kim said, “so’s when we were on the treadmills, sometimes we wouldn’t even look at the screens and the colored lights, it was so int’restin’ the stories about where she and that little boy came from.” She would tell them about Arcadian summer days, about late afternoons when the sun was still high (there was no real sunlight in the Mine, although the lamps inside were considered of the highest technical grade possible, an almost perfect imitation), about hearing the distant hollow thumping sounds woodpeckers made in the trees, about smelling the strawberry scent of the cedar trees in the sun.
“An’ I’ll never forget, Soph, she’d tell us about the food they et there”: cold tomato soup with little bits of chili and green cucumber floating in it, all of it from the garden. Bread that a neighbor made that day, sour and white and spread with butter from the goats grazing on the Commons at the foot of the hill. Summer food.
Lily missed home very much. Even aside from the worry about her family and friends, even aside from the anxiety about the future, and about Colin, who seemed to grow paler and quieter every day, she missed her home.
“We never got that, the rest of us,” Kim told me much later. “Homesick? None of us ever heard of it. Yer had yer place, and yer had yer three a day, and yer had a bit of a laugh, and that was enough, ye know, Soph? That was how we were. It was all right.”
Lily missed her home, and she missed something else even more, without even knowing quite what it was or how it had happened. What was it? She wondered to herself as she walked the dreary miles on her treadmill, with Rex at her side, for the overseers had nothing against pets in the Children’s Mine. Some early good publicity about the latter in some tabloid or other had made sure of that.
It was the tabloids, in fact, that made her finally understand what it was that made her heart ache in her chest, as if it were trying to move toward something—but what? Not home. Something unnamed. Unnamed but important, the destination, she felt, of her private life.
They had been in the Children’s Mine for two months or more, although it was hard to tell time, Kim says, so far away from the sun. “Ye knew when it was by the tabloids,” she explained. “They came regular, every week. Those were the ones we got, anyways, not the dailies like the rich kids—have to keep our minds on our work!” Christmas had come and gone, some philanthropists had sent along the usual pudding and oranges, and a photographer had dutifully recorded the children’s enjoyment. It was probably that shoot that brought Lily to the publicity department’s attention. I know these kinds of departments well, now, and it is with some amusement that I reconstruct what must have happened.
There was probably the usual crisis of funding, not just for the children’s needs, but for the salaries of all the administration associated with the Mine. There would have been many such crises at this time, right before the Great Flood. And probably the need for energy supplied by child power was beginning to decrease. The publicity department would have been the first line of defense against any funding cuts. And they would have been absolutely delighted to see Lily and Rex, in comparison to the snotty, rawboned, podgy-faced malnourished lower-class children of Megalopolis (completely unphotogenic, now as then). Lily and Rex must have seemed like a publicist’s gift.
“Oh, they’ll love that, won’t they?” the publicist must have said. She was, I am sure, an energetic blonde woman with the straight hair and teeth of Susan B. Riggs. (“We all looked like that, then,” Susan said to me dryly much later. “And the breasts. We all had them done with the same guy. We all wanted to look like Rowena Pomfret.”) “People love a dog story! We’ve got to get a shot of her and the cute pooch for the Press. This could be crucial for our funding.”
As Lily was to learn (and Goddess knows, as any queen, anywhere, in any time, knows too), the words ‘crucial for your funding’ must have acted like a magic formula whenever it was uttered around any Great City functionary. Lily had probably not yet learned to use the phrase to her own advantage, but she would. It was only a matter of time.
Of course, the publicist would have had her way. And Lily’s long black tangled hair would have been combed out before she was brought, with Rex, into one of the administrative offices out on the slopes of the Donatees, the ones where the Press was welcomed, the room where the liquor and food were kept.
“Well, if this isn’t a pretty lady! And that adorable dog! Where are they from?”
“Arcadia. One of those little towns they’ve got down there.”
“Oh yeah. Our new allies in the Fight Against Want.” The journalist would have been properly sardonic: as with all journalists in all times and places, cynicism substituted nicely for any desire to change the current situation.
Lily did describe the scene to me, a little-—at least, I think she did. It may have been that she and Devindra later laughed about it (“Because you know, I was like these women at one time in my ‘career,’ Sophy, and your mother thought that was a very funny idea, me with blond hair!” Devindra would say), and I heard about it that way. But anyway, I know all the Megalopolitans there, the publicist, the consultants, the journalists, were tall, really tall, and slender, really slender, with flat stomachs, and oddly straight teeth. And of course, the women with those enormous breasts the Megalopolitans favor. “Aren’t you proud of helping us gather what resources we need to feed the hungry and help the needy of the world?” one of these said to my mother, since that, of course, was the official line of what went on in the Children’s Mine.
“No,” Lily said. “I’m not.”
To her surprise, the women burst out laughing.
“Perfect,” one of them murmured, nodding to another who held a misshapen silver camera. The photographer started snapping silently away at pictures of Lily and Rex.
Lily clutched Rex to her. He growled.
THE CONSULTANTS OF MEGALOPOLIS WERE ALL BLONDE AND
BEAUTIFUL, WITH STRAIGHT HAIR AND TEETH
This only made the women laugh again.
“So where are you from, which one of those cute little towns, and what’s it like, really?” the journalist coaxed. Lily didn’t answer. “Better, better,” the woman said cheerfully, as the photographer made a circle with her fingers and started to pack up her gear. “I can make it all up. And trust me,” she said as she opened the door to go, “my story will be a hell of a lot better than yours.”
So Lily, unknown to her, became the poster child for the Children’s Mine. Megalopolitans are a brutal people, I’ve found, and, like all brutal people, are sentimental as well. The Mine was touted as an ‘educational’ experience for the children who worked there—‘tough love,’ the Empire called it—and the general public was a little in love with this view of themselves as Educators of the Young.
Lily, as a particularly attractive version of “the Young,” was about to be known far and wide, in the same way that some spokesperson for a candy or a famous athlete selling shoes might be. And that was how it came about that she found what it was her heart was yearning for, when her face had become a famous one, without her even knowing of it, in the Great City outside.
But first the dreary days and months went by. Mind you, the administrators took pains to be kindly. But kindness not truly felt, Lily said long afterward, is nothing more than a burden, worse than a burden, a manipulation, and it simply made the time, which might have passed in nothing worse than a haze, that much more intolerable.
Lily had no experience, in her life as Lily, of manufactured kindness.
Neither had Colin, poor boy. Lily watched helplessly as Colin faded away, day after day. Every morning his hair sank back closer on his skull. Every night his eyes looked a little duller.
“You okay, Colin?” Lily would say, and he would nod. But they both knew it wasn’t true. Yet there was nothing to be done about it. Kim saw what was happening. “We all saw it. The lad was that in love with yer ma, and she wasn’t in love with ’im. Nothing to be done about it. And there was nowhere for him to go wit’ it. And nothi
ng to take ’is mind off it, poor lad.”
I think that Kim must have been right. It’s been many years now since I’ve realized that you can, indeed, die for love, and that if you’re to survive, you must be very strong. I can believe that his watching Lily drift farther and farther away from him every day, as her heart turned toward something, toward someone else, that must have been a hard burden to bear. For the boy, who was far away from home and from everyone and everything he loved, this must have been the final hardship. And as the tabloids came in with pictures on their covers of the handsome Conor Barr and his glamorous fiancée Rowena Pomfret, and to see Lily’s expression, one she probably wasn’t even aware had stolen over her face, to know that her heart was with the enemy—that would have been very much, too much, to take.
So one fearfully cold night, as I imagine it, deep in the Mine, Lily would have woken suddenly to a room that was absolutely dark. She could smell Rex, of course, and that was a comfort, and then she could see his eyes glittering as he got up and padded across the floor to the open arch that led out to the dormitory hall. His eyes glittered in the milky approaching light.
Lily sat up. She saw Rex in the doorway, more clearly illuminated now by some light she couldn’t identify. She saw his tail thump. Up and down. Up and down. Wrapping a blanket around herself, hardly knowing what she was doing, she got out of the narrow bed and went to his side.
Looking out, she felt a hand reach out from behind and land on her shoulder. She gasped, and turned to see who it was. It was Death.
Death looked beautiful that night, as she always does, to those who have the eyes to see her.
“She’s come for Colin,” Rex’s eyes said. And Lily, understanding, nodded. She swallowed hard. She and Rex followed Death out of the room, to where Colin slept, and watched Death rouse him gently and help him to his feet. Colin looked at Death’s face and, Lily said later, he smiled. “It was,” she told Devindra later, and Devindra told me, “the first real smile I’d seen from him in weeks.”
