by Various
The numbers on all eight sides of the maincomputer simultaneously flashed 0800, and the pace of the morning workers picked up a notch. The crowds split off and began disappearing into the wings. Natasha lined up at the Department of the Exterior doors, behind Joe McMahon from the Office of Air and Energy, who greeted her with a nod and who, as a Beta, Natasha knew would be too proud to search her for answers. Natasha took a deep breath and smoothed the front of her shirt; there was a small dot of gravy from yesterday’s dinner, and she licked her finger and absentmindedly rubbed away at the porous material. Despite what she had told the group in the elephant, she was absolutely positive that there had been a sweep; with an unprecedented two Tribes in the area and Jeffrey Montague working the nightshift, she could not imagine otherwise.
While she waited in line, Natasha loosened her thoughts and allowed herself to remember last night. She had fallen asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, full from one of her favorite dinners, roast chicken and peas. But her dreams had begun troubling her almost immediately: the dream of fire and smoke that had haunted her for years, which even the doctors in the Office of Psychotronomy had not been able to stamp out of her. She had just roused herself from the grips of imagined flame, as she had done a hundred times before, when the shrill cry of the alarm came over the speakers. The lights flashed three times quick and then blared on.
Min-he Fang, Natasha’s roommate, cursed and tangled her legs in her sheets and half fell out of her bed. The two lockers containing their emergency biosuits burst open and their wallcomputers lit up with instructions: Min-he Fang, level two, main corridor, Ammunition Support. Natasha Wiley, Dome, outer circle position 270, Wave One Defense. Natasha retrieved her gun, a LUV-3, from its marked locker on the level six hall and boarded the first ride up to ground level. A lifetime of drills made it so that she hardly had to think as she took her assigned position, released the safety on her gun, and began scanning the night-blackened spread of honeycomb windows for movement. Around her, the ghostly figures of the other citizens on Wave One Defense did the same, and all together they made two concentric circles of resolute force around the Dome. During the early hours of the alarm, other citizens streamed through their formation, passing through to stations in various wings. The radio clipped to Natasha’s ear buzzed with commands—“group eleven, fan the Garden,” “rooftop group two, maintain current alignment.” Yet as the night wore on and eventually began to tilt toward morning, all became silent. Natasha’s biosuit clung to the sweat on her back and her LUV-3 grew heavy in her arms. The bodies of the other citizens swayed and seemed almost to sigh, though no one moved a step from their spot.
It came at 0548 hours, the low moan from the speakers that meant, by either success or failure, that the possibility of an attack had ended and all citizens could return to their beds.
What had made that surge of horror break across Natasha’s mind? Suddenly her sight had changed—her imagination overthrowing the facts of the arcing Dome, the sky, the alarm—and the mundane dark had opened itself to her. The abyss where they had sent an entire Tribe of people (she had not doubted the fact of a sweep even then) had yawned at her like an open mouth.
Despite the warmth of morning sun through the glass, Natasha shuddered at the memory of it. “The Wall,” she whispered to herself, as she did whenever she felt a primitive feeling or instinct interfering with her logical thoughts. And after some seconds of concentration, the Wall began rising block by block in her mind.
She took a deep breath and closed the gap that had opened between Joe McMahon and herself. This was no time to think of last night, she scolded herself. Later maybe, when she was alone.
“Climate control off again?” asked Joe McMahon, who had apparently noticed her discomfort. He sniffed the air to test it.
“No,” said Natasha. “I was thinking of something.”
“Now that’s dangerous,” he said with a friendly smile, before turning back toward the doors.
Natasha did not consider herself immune to the tricks of anachronistic emotions. She had to fight off her mind’s irrationalities just like everyone else. Of course she knew that. Each generation was barely waddling around the nursery rooms on two feet before they had learned from their teachers that some of their deepest feelings were not to be trusted: that their fear of the dark, for instance, was a leftover fear from when their ancestors slept in the Outside with jaguars and poisonous spiders; or, likewise, that their greed for food persisted from a time when children did not always have enough to eat, and might have starved if they had not occasionally acted in pure self-interest.
Natasha remembered these lessons well. In the old Epsilon dormitory with its rows of bunk beds (that great room had since been transformed into a dozen couples’ sleeprooms), Teacher Harriet had instructed the children to lie on their mattresses while she stood by the high control box. With the flip of a lever, she had plunged them into utter darkness, a dark so absolute that it made shapes and apparitions jump out before their uselessly opened eyes. During this exercise, in order to combat those shapes and apparitions, they were all to repeat the following mantra: Nothing exists inside the settlement except the good things we have made. All bad things belong to Nature. All bad things live outside the walls. And they cannot come in, ever.
Another time, a different teacher, Teacher Emmanuel, had taken their Epsilon group on a tour of the Farms and the silver kitchens. He had stood at the head of their cluster of child-sized tables and said: “Children, your greed for food is an instinct. It helped your great-great-great-great-great ancestors survive in the Pre-Storm times, and for that reason it became a behavior that is coded for in our genes. But we don’t need that instinct anymore. Now we live in a settlement where everyone has enough to eat. You will never have to compete for food. It doesn’t matter if you are unruly or sick or how many generations (Alpha willing) come after you. You will receive three nutritious meals a day, forever.” And as the lessons continued, Natasha did learn that her fear of a snake under her bed and her desire to steal the dinner roll from her neighbor’s plate were survival instincts, and she fought them down with reason.
Likewise, as she and the other Epsilons grew, they discovered that a great number of their feelings had, as their source, archaic situations in nature, situations that clearly had nothing to do with life today. For instance, in their adolescence, they learned that a preference for certain facial arrangements and body shapes held no rational meaning—that these predilections were a remnant of the animal drive for productive sexual selection, left over from a time when people needed to have sex to create new generations. On the same note, sexual drive in general (and in all its permutations) was essentially a manifestation of a vestigial need to continue the species, and should not be mistaken for mature, fully empathetic partnerships, which the Alphas did condone, though not encourage. Feelings of competition with other Departments or other generations had roots in bygone struggles for survival in the wild, and overdetermined urges of small-group pride and kinship were the same.
What Natasha had felt last night for the Tribe, that surge of horror, was a more subtle anachronism than any of those—though it was certainly not unheard of, especially among young Office of Mercy workers such as herself. It even had a name: Misplaced Empathy, a form of Psychological Projection. What Natasha had done during the alarm was to place herself, her level of awareness and expectation, onto the blank faces of the Tribe members. It was a very human, very natural thing to do. Psychological Projection in general—the understanding that other human beings have a mind that works more or less like your own—was a basic social necessity that allowed individuals to comprehend and to predict how people around them would act. The trouble came when one allowed this powerful but relatively crude mechanism of the mind to take over for reason. In the most mild cases of Misplaced Empathy, a person might project human faculties onto nonhuman minds: so that a child would think his doll capable of feeling pain, or a farmer would believe that the chi
ckens she tended possessed special pangs of affection for her. But projection like what Natasha had done was not only wrong, it was immoral and dangerous. The Tribespeople did not have her life or a comparable life experience. They were starving and weak with disease; even if they burned with the animal will to live, they had no future to hope for (whether they knew it or not) except for further suffering and, soon, a painful death.
Last night, when the low alarm had sounded to signal a probable sweep, Natasha had mistakenly foisted onto the Tribe feelings that were, in this situation, simply beyond the capacity of their understanding. She had, more specifically, imagined for them the terror of imminent death that only a person who already knew about sweeps could possibly have experienced as they watched the round head of a nova rip toward them through the sky. But the Tribespeople—whether it was Cranes or Pines, Natasha would find out soon—could not have comprehended the meaning of the nova. They could not have felt dread. They could not have understood enough to mourn their own end. If all had gone right, they would have felt at most perhaps the briefest flicker of wonder; and Natasha could not expect to perform at her job in the Office of Mercy if she did not remember that most fundamental fact.
“You’re up,” said Maria Chávez, a fellow Epsilon who was standing in line behind her. Natasha thanked her a little breathlessly and stepped forward to tap her finger on the soft, rectangular reader, registering her unique genetic code.
The light flashed green and the tall doors smacked apart along their seal.
At least she was feeling a little better now, Natasha thought, as she entered the gleaming white hall of the Department of the Exterior. And as her hard-soled shoes rapped on the polished floor and fell into step with the steady stream of citizens moving toward their respective Offices, the values of the settlement—the values put into practice each day in the Office of Mercy—began to bloom and flourish again in her mind, so that she could almost forget last night, and forget the monsters of her imagination that lurked behind the Wall. The values of America-Five, which Natasha lived by, were these: World Peace, Eternal Life, and All Suffering Ended.
The overhead screen in the Office of Mercy glowed above the jumble of four-person cubicles, rolling chairs, and arriving morningshift workers. It was so massive that it drew all attention toward itself as one entered the room; and its light reflected in glints of blue and gray off the silver desk legs, the idling computer screens, and the glass carafe of the coffee machine, which sat gurgling on the side table. Today the overhead screen showed a single feed from one of their easternmost sensors: a wasteland of beach and forest. There was nothing immediately remarkable about the image. One might have even thought it a still, except for the mute lapping of foamy waves and the occasional flutter of a bird on the periphery. But in the distance (it took a second to notice), about one mile from the camera eye, was a strange upset to the landscape. Here the trees lay split and tossed about—one ancient oak stripped of leaves and half immersed in the water—and the blackish wet sand from underground erupted to color the paler surface.
Despite the changes, Natasha recognized the place immediately: it was the same beach that she and the three other members of her team had been monitoring for the last fifteen days, only this image was from a sensor that she had never looked through before. Cranes, she thought, a tightness coming over her gut. True, she had already guessed that there had been a sweep, but it was different, so different, to see the proof before her. At that moment, the camera zoomed in to a spot of sand on the lower left side. At a detail of 500x magnification, Natasha could now make out the charred remains of a woman’s bare torso draped backward over a thick, horizontal tree trunk and, a few feet away, what appeared to be the lower portion of a human jaw smiling full-toothed up from the sand.
She recoiled a step, knocking into her Director, who was just entering the Office; though luckily for Natasha, he did not seem to notice.
“We swept the Cranes,” said Arthur Roosevelt, coming over to stand beside Natasha. Arthur was a broad-shouldered, round-bellied man of very dark complexion, except for a patch of unpigmented skin beneath his left eye, where he’d once had emergency bioreplacement. “But unless you’re in system failure, you’ve probably figured that out already.” He nodded toward Natasha’s own four-person cubicle at the back of the room. “Jeffrey did it, he stayed up all night.”
“Was it clean?” asked Natasha.
Arthur and Natasha began walking together through the rows of cubicles, Natasha now moving with the air of sharp watchfulness that the Office usually inspired within her, and her posture so straight that she stood almost as tall as hunched-over Arthur.
By this time, most of the morningshift workers were already at their computers. In the front of the room, the lower-ranking teams had satellite images up on their screens: it was their job to monitor weather patterns that might affect Tribe and animal migration. These workers seemed preoccupied with the sweep, though, as were the groups in the middle, who were looking at images of the Pine camp. At Natasha’s cubicle, Jeffrey was talking into his audioset. He glanced furtively over his shoulder at her, then quickly away, and with a leap of feeling, Natasha wondered if Jeffrey had lingered past the end of his shift in order to see her. He had done so before, on several occasions in fact; it was by no means irrational for Natasha to hope that this was one of those times.
“The sweep was spotless,” Arthur said, answering Natasha’s question. “Not a single survivor from the whole Tribe. And it was overcast this morning so they probably never saw the nova coming. There they were, gathered around the fire, then, swish, nothingness. I only wish the men hadn’t gone on that hunting trip,” he added soberly. “That was fifteen days of terrible suffering that could have been preempted. Another week and I would’ve appealed to the Alphas to let us sweep the men and the camp separately.”
They arrived at Natasha’s desk and Jeffrey’s eyes met hers, while he continued muttering coordinates into his speaker. His gaze was at once anxious and calm, curious and slightly aloof. Yes, Natasha was sure now that he had stayed for her. After all, a full-Tribe sweep within America-Five’s perimeter, the fifty-mile radius of land that they monitored with sensors, didn’t happen every day. This was by far the largest sweep since Natasha had joined the Office of Mercy, and Jeffrey probably wanted to hear her reaction.
“So now all we have is the Pines to deal with,” Arthur was saying. “Speaking of which, there’s a new group for you to follow. Yesterday the man we think is their chief broke off from the camp with two other guys. I’d like you to track them. Tell me if they get within ten miles of the Crane sweep site. That’s the last thing we need after three months with these clever animals. I’d rather set off diversionary fires than be forced into a sweep that way.”
“Of course,” said Natasha.
For weeks in the Office of Mercy, they had worried about the complications of having two Tribes in the field (an unprecedented occurrence that promised to grow more common, with recent cold fronts pushing the Tribes south). The citizens’ biggest fear had been that the Cranes and Pines would meet at some inopportune moment and incite a small but violent war between them. That would have caused multiple problems. For not only would the Tribes have suffered physically and emotionally from the warfare, but the fighting would have forced them to scatter—to run away from an attack, or to leave the weak in one place and march the strong to another—making a sweep of an entire group that much harder. But the worries in the Office of Mercy had not ended with the sweep of the Cranes. Now they had to make sure that the Pines did not find the Crane sweep site. This goal was in strict keeping with a principal rule in their ethical guidelines: namely, that no Tribe should ever be allowed to suspect that there was such a thing as sweeps. For if the Tribes ever did suspect that people like themselves were being systematically wiped from existence, they would feel dread, and dread was a particularly terrible form of suffering, worse even, as some had argued during the debates of Year 121 Post-Storm,
than purely physical pain.
Jeffrey waited until Arthur had left for his office, behind a glass partition, before rolling around to Natasha’s side of the cubicle. Natasha was already busy settling into her desk for the day, but she looked up, anticipating his movement. She was glad for his notice. It seemed that Jeffrey was as eager to speak to her as she was to him. And for the first time since she’d heard the blaring alarm in the night, Natasha’s nerves relaxed.
Natasha trusted Jeffrey, far more than her Epsilon friends or even Arthur, to put the events of last night in perspective. Not that the others weren’t helpful or wise, but Jeffrey alone had the power to speak precisely to her hidden troubles, like a sensor eye that infallibly finds the crouching, warm bodies in the teeming wild. For a long time (especially since beginning her career in the Office of Mercy), Natasha had felt a deep closeness with Jeffrey, a similarity between his mode of thinking and hers that she experienced with no one else. It was as if their thoughts existed on the same, flat plane of awareness: noting the same behaviors in other people, dismissing the same concerns as unimportant, and creating the landscape of their individual lives from a similar set of compulsions and worries.
Had Natasha vocalized this feeling of closeness between her and Jeffrey to other people in America-Five, they might have found it odd, given the outward differences between them. Jeffrey was a member of the Gamma generation, and one of the most advanced and accomplished Gammas at that. He was tall and pale with thin blond hair that he combed over the medical scars on his scalp; and a rashlike burn extended along his whole right side—a scar from when the Palm Tribe attacked the settlement, the only direct attack in the history of America-Five. He always wore long sleeves to cover the burn, but the top of it still showed on his neck, rising up from under his collar to the shadow of his ear. Back when the Epsilons were kids, some of the boys and girls used to cower from him and whisper about his strangeness when he happened to pass by their Dining Hall tables. But even then, Natasha had gotten the impression that Jeffrey was a kind person, and had found him more mysterious than scary. As for the burns from the Palm attack, she considered them the mark of a thrilling and adventurous past lived outside the settlement’s enclosures.
