by Eden Wolfe
"May I come in?"
He walked away from the doorway; he'd taken up every inch of the opening and more; leaving the apartment would be a logistical challenge for him to maneuver through. His body was still in an advanced stage of degradation, and yet he didn't go the way the other men did. His wheelchair waited by the table and there was a pseudo-wall that could slide closed to make a bedroom, and the entire place was a disaster. It appeared that he'd made a brief, feeble attempt to organize thousands of papers into piles - on the bed, on the countertop of the small kitchen corner, across every visible surface.
"Is anyone else here?"
"You can see every inch of the apartment from where you stand. Do you see anyone?"
"Rose has a way of hiding in corners where no one can see."
"Rose left a long time ago."
"She did?" Sara remembered the deformed face of the girl-woman well. Something very soft in her, but also something very persistent. Her dedication to Lucius had been unquestionable, as though Lucius were her father. And where does a genetic deviant go if they manage to get out of Cork Town at all?
"It's good to see you, Lucius," she finally managed.
"Don't give me that. Why are you here?"
"I mean it. I didn't want to stay away, but it wasn't worth the risk of exposing - "
"Don't speak of that here," Lucius hissed, holding his hand up.
Sara nodded, "I'm here on business entirely unrelated to - to that."
Lucius cocked his head, "Oh? Now, this is getting interesting. I can't imagine you having any sort of business for the likes of me."
"I was equally surprised." She remembered again the moment Roman mentioned Lucius' name.
Looking at him now, little had changed. The more she took in Lucius' spread, his waddle to the wheelchair, the way his body seemed to sink into the earth, the more she realized he had not changed at all in five years. Even she was beginning to feel the years on her. Lucius, who must have been well past ninety, seemed to have stopped somewhere along the line and remained at that age, even with his advanced state of degradation.
He'd broken through the gate of time.
But physically, he was still struggling. He lowered himself into the wheelchair, apparently the same he'd had for more than thirty years, and wiped the perspiration off the side of his face.
"Sit."
Sara sat.
"Tell me everything."
She did. She started with the incubation birth numbers.
Lucius gave a low laugh. "That'll have consequences."
Sara was startled.
How could he know that already? I haven't said anything about it.
She went on to tell of the adaptations they'd made with each phase, the samples she'd collected in the social environments, the behavior tracking, the initial reports. Lucius nodded, making circles with his hand that she understood to mean she should go faster.
She came to it. "We can't identify the cause of the behavior; the reports are coming in at higher rates than we ever could have expected. The children are in advanced states of depression without cause and none of the traditional therapies work. We can't code it out of them, and now we have a dual problem. How do we end the pattern for future incubation phases? And what do we do with the thousands already born with the anomaly we can't seem to treat?"
She sat back in the chair, her eyes glued on Lucius. Everything was riding on him. She was pretty sure he knew it. He had that way about him.
He pursed his lips, nodding slowly.
"Which treatments have you tested?"
She gave the list.
"Yes, that does sound exhaustive. I don't know why anyone would have thought that Q-enzyme would work."
"We were desperate. We thought perhaps the molecule - "
"There was no reason to believe the molecule for primase enzyme would have any effect. It's a red herring." He inhaled deeply, and Sara heard the sounds from his body, a grumbling growling from somewhere deep within. "Would you turn on the fan?"
"Sure." She got up and had to weave between his chair and the bedroom door. Squeezing past she tried not come into contact with the back of Lucius' head, but her breasts grazed his ear and the chair. She closed her eyes and sucked in further to go by.
"Turn it up to three." She snapped the knob up a notch. "That's better." Lucius had never lost his hair. Thick and black, peppered white, it blew in the fan's breeze.
She inhaled and sucked in, passing back to her seat. "So?"
"So what?"
"What do you think?"
"You can't expect me to respond just like that."
"I thought you could."
"It's not a question of could. It's a question of custom. Protocol. You come to my home, burst in with your business demands, meanwhile, you haven't had a word to say of our history nor any concern for my well-being."
Sara saw something of a glint in Lucius' eye.
Is he toying with me?
If he was, she had no choice but to play along. She was not in a position to bargain.
She folded her hands on the table. "How have you been, Lucius?"
"You don't care about how I've been."
"I do," she meant it sincerely. "Not just because of - of that - but because the time was so charged. Adam..." her voice trailed off but Lucius didn't interject.
Adam. His body in her bed the night they decided to take on the project. The night they passed in each other’s arms. On the one hand, nothing of note had passed between them. Certainly nothing like what they talked about in the textbooks about the old ways between men and women. Those base sexual needs that had since been carefully out-coded from their sequence. No, nothing like that.
But something else. Something worse.
She loved Adam.
She loved Adam more than she loved herself. And she’d known it in that one night together, seen it in his eyes. Those eyes that flashed blue though they were deep brown in midday sun.
She’d always believed that Adam would be the one to change their human history, to bring them back to their natural state. To invigorate the DNA of boys who could become men who would populate the world again with new commitment to their future. A future of peace. A future of life’s fullness.
She’d never thought he’d be called out as a traitor.
Some said he’d been disappeared to the Forgotten Islands, but Sara had known from the start. He was dead.
It was the risk they knew they were taking. She just wished it had been her instead.
She looked up at Lucius and tried to swallow, but a rock had lodged in her throat.
"Adam's absence is felt. Across the Tower. But especially here." She put her hand on her chest. "I miss him, Lucius."
Lucius’ face flashed an emotion that Sara didn’t recognize.
"Don't get teary on me now," he looked out the window.
"I do miss him. He could see through the numbers to patterns that no other could identify. He was so - so human compared to the others."
"The other what?"
"You know what I mean."
"Say it."
"The other men."
Lucius sat back in the wheelchair, looking at her sideways.
She felt heat coming up her neck. "It's not a criticism, it's a fact. Most men in Geb had become obsessed with the Male Program. There was nothing else for them, they couldn't see beyond it. The good of Lower Earth - "
"What good is there in Lower Earth for a dead man?"
"They weren't dead."
"They are now. Dead."
Sara bit her lip. So many had gone. Degraded. The numbers dwindled. Live births of boys were almost at zero.
Lucius stood back up, and Sara thought he might march straight to the front door, open it, and insist she leave. She steeled herself for it. The truth was that she wanted to stay with him. Wanted to talk about Adam. The subject had been taboo from the time he'd been disappeared, and with Isaac's degradations so soon after, she'd been left on her own
to navigate Central Tower.
Lucius was the closest thing to an old friend that she had now.
He crossed in front of her and she held her breath, keeping the disappointment at bay. But the feeling snuck into the muscles under her eyes. She felt them twitch.
He approached the front door and then turned back to her. "Come." Lucius moved alongside the wall to the place where it met the separation with the bed area. It couldn't be called a bedroom, though there was a sort of partition between the spaces. Sara stood, not knowing what he could possibly be leading her towards.
Lucius turned on the bedside lamp and then bent one knee resting his hands on the bed for balance. He pointed to the divider wall, "Slide the door shut."
She slid the cardboard-like wall, giving privacy from prying eyes, but not more than that.
Lucius struggled to get his other knee to the floor, but eventually he folded it under himself. His body spread on the floor as he pushed a small rug from under the bed.
What has he got under there?
Lucius lifted a plank. And then another. And another. Little by little he revealed a gap, wide enough that he could maneuver himself into the hole. A stairwell led to the basement.
"You go first," he gestured melodramatically. "It will take me a while to get down the stairs. I should have built them larger while I'd had the chance."
Sara sat on the floor letting her legs drop into the hole. Her feet touched the first stair. She could only see the first few stars that were lit from the bedroom's light. She felt her way down, one foot at a time. She reached for a banister but found only open air. She stepped more gingerly after that. Eventually her foot hit a floor without anywhere further to descend.
"Some light will help," Lucius said from above. She heard him pull on a string that brought the room into a yellow glow.
She glanced around the room, the sight of it answering questions she'd had for years.
A laboratory. That's how he does it.
On all four sides around her was equipment, cabinets, a sink. Several long tables that ran the length of the apartment and then further under into the adjacent apartment building's basement.
"No one ever noticed this?"
"There's no one to notice. I put up a triple-thick wall beside the main apartment building's basement. Anyone down over there wouldn't know the difference unless they were digging for the foundations."
Unlike the apartment above, the laboratory was spotless. She ran her hand along the first table. Stainless steel gleamed back at her.
"This is incredible, Lucius."
"Fortunately, I'd thought ahead. Had I not installed this when I was still the Great Geneticist, there's no way I could do it now." He tapped his forehead. "Not just book learning up there."
"What are you working on?"
"This and that. My involvement is relatively defunct since Rose left. She'd always been the one to bring me active files from the Tower. I knew I was dependent on her, but I still manage to make a breakthrough here and there."
“But is Rose coming back?”
He ignored her question, "So I've thrown most of my energy into a single project."
Sara's heart jumped. She stopped admiring the microscope, which was nearly vintage but of a quality they didn't have in most of the Central Tower labs. She looked up to him, saying a prayer in her head that he would say what she thought he would say.
She could barely find her voice. "What project, Lucius?"
He pursed his lips and looked at his hands.
She cleared her throat. "What project, Lucius? What project?"
He looked up, meeting her eyes.
"4957."
She left Lucius after all his explanations, feeling in a daze. Her feet worked despite her brain. She was consumed.
How could he have made such advances, all alone? How did he find the code behind it? How, I don't get it, how did he isolate the chromosome's secondary genes?
Fire ran through Sara's veins, a feeling of being alive that she hadn't had in so long. She remembered Adam's touch, the way they'd held each other, innocent and guilty at once. The way he'd grabbed her with joy when he first found out that 4957 was viable.
She didn't walk; she floated down the alleys of Cork Town. She was well ahead of the local curfew, even though it didn't apply to her. Still, she'd be pleased to cross back through the gates without further rebuke.
But she had one more stop to make before she could leave the Cork Town commune. It was the only thing Lucius asked of her. She couldn't possibly say no.
She wound her way down the gravel of Cork Row, through the vendors in the market who only had half-rotten vegetables in their baskets. The stench of them invaded Sara's nose. Every sensation was heightened in her. Her chest rising and falling with her breath. The sound of the air as it entered and then exited her nostrils. Her pulse in her wrists, her thumbs, her neck. The gravel crunching under her shoes, sliding to the side as she stepped.
Her destination, according to Lucius, wasn't far off the Third Road, down the Second Alleyway. She would know it by the swinging wood door, the only part of the building that stood out. She saw it further down the alley and couldn't help but walk faster. There was no sign, no lights, no indication that anything particularly was there.
Sara pushed open the swinging door and stepped in, the low ceiling and single window giving the impression that she was already underground.
Some women were sitting around one of the pub's tables, another woman standing with one hand on her hip and the other holding a rag. All eyes turned and any conversation came to a complete stop.
Sara walked in further, her eyes adjusting to the dark. She approached the standing woman. "Are you Trudith?"
"Yeah, who're you?"
"A friend of Rose."
The women around the table all shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Trudith's eyes narrowed as she watched Sara's face. "You're a friend of Rose?"
Sara swallowed hard and nodded.
Trudith looked to the women around the table, though no one spoke a word.
Finally, Trudith grabbed a chair from a nearby table.
"Well, then you'd better sit down."
13
Trudith
Trudith had just finished preparing the foods for the following day. The beans were soaking and the grains were put away. She'd had to become more creative with their meals; the variety at the market was at the lowest she'd ever known it. She hadn't been able to get soup fortification powder in weeks. The bland beans and grain would have to do, even though she knew the crops had become less and less nutritious.
"Didn't you see the market today? It's horrifying. Don't think for a second they eat like this in Geb." Yala’s voice carried across the room, though there wasn’t anyone else to hear than the group who came regularly. The pub had become their spot to dream, complain, and plot against their rulers.
Today, they were back on the topic of the conditions in Cork Town. Trudith was growing tired of it. There wasn't anything they could do, even if they wanted. Yala was particularly vocal. As usual.
“Trude!” Yala called, “This ale is worse than the sewer water they force us to drink!”
“Low on barley again,” Trudith didn’t lift her eyes. “I’m making due. Drink tomato juice, if you don’t like it. I have plenty of tomato juice from the West Fields overproduction.”
“Too acidic! Overproduction, you see?” Yala turned to the group around the table again. “That’s the best they’ll give us here, what’s left from overproduction.”
Yala’s head twitched.
“Don’t get worked up now,” Anna spoke gently. “You’ll have another episode. Remember how long it took you last time to recover? I could have sworn those guards were going to beat you to a pulp, the scene you were making in the square.”
“It’s the injustice, gets me every time.” She twitched again.
“It’s not the injustice, it’s your damn neurological condition,” Matilde drawl
ed. Matilde’s cleft palate was the only visible sign of her deformity, though they all knew she couldn’t eat more than three bites in a meal or else her digestive system quit on her. It was why she was hardly more than skin on bones.
“But the injustice sparks it. It gets me all riled up.”
So why bother? Trudith thought I'd rather put my time towards something that will bring out change. Politics is a deep, dark hole.
But she let them use the pub. She wasn't unsympathetic after all. Trudith had never known how seriously to take them. On the one hand, simply for the words they shared over the table in her pub, they could all get disappeared, or at least a good beating. Trudith, too, for allowing it to happen. On the other hand, they were so far off from planning anything real, so out of proportion with anything they could actually do, that Trudith couldn't take them seriously.
"Did you see them the other day, doing rounds on Cork Row? They had their batons out before they had anyone to use them on." Matilde wiped the saliva that was dripping down from the side of her mouth.
"They found someone though, didn't they?"
"Rishelle."
"Poor Rishelle."
"I think they sought her out, they knew she'd have an episode. That's her genetic problem after all. They use it as an excuse."
"Is she alright?"
"Define alright."
"Last time I went to give blood, they took so much I almost fainted," Anna spoke from the corner. She wasn't one to talk much. "I really hate the mandatory blood collection."
"For our own good, they say."
"Protecting us from future viruses. I don't believe it for a second."
"Look, we need a different approach." Yala leaned forward. "I have an idea. We could sabotage the checkpoint."
Trudith couldn't bear it anymore, "You'll do no such thing unless you have a wish to be disappeared."
"We could do it from afar."
"You overstate your abilities." Trudith grabbed the broom from behind the bar. She had to distract herself or else the women would get her all worked up.
"What do you know?" Yala stood up. "Why do you always think you know everything, huh, Trudith? Why do you always have the last word?"
