Pascale's Wager: Homelands of Heaven

by Anthony Bartlett

  As she sat listening and thinking and having this amazing feeling she did not hear her companion’s voice steadily rising. People around were staring at them and, suddenly, she realized he was shouting.

  “How can they expect people to swallow this stuff? People do, just like the sheep in the holograms chewing stupidly on whatever is put before them!”

  Cal fought back a wave of panic. There was nowhere to hide and it seemed very difficult to shift Poll's mood or explain what they were talking about. Then, for almost the first time in her years at the Training Center, she was glad to see Danny, her brother. He was sauntering into Dining in the company, as always, of his posse of beautiful people. By definition they always turned heads, and now Cal waved frantically at them to deflect attention away from herself and Poll. Danny looked around casually and saw it was Cal.

  “Hey!” he said. “It’s Cal. She’s with that crazy guy who's always getting thrown out of class. Let’s rescue her.”

  Danny began to make his way through the tables across to where Cal was sitting. He was trailed by a couple of very attractive girls and a tall young man with a dark-skinned face and a therm-suit covered in black and silver patches. Actually, Danny was pleased to be noticed by Cal. Secretly he admired her a great deal and really would have been pleased to have her join his special group. But Cal always held herself aloof. She lived very much inside her own thoughts and would not be drawn into his circle.

  “What am I going to say to him?” Cal muttered fiercely to Poll who by now was also looking over his shoulder. He shrugged his usual disinterest in other people's responses toward him.

  “Is this guy bothering you?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Cal countered brightly. “He's…he’s my boyfriend! Poll, this is my brother, Danny.”

  It was hard to say who looked the most surprised. Poll’s face turned a little ashen.

  Danny stared blankly first at Cal, then at Poll, then slowly recovered.

  “Oh, yeah, right, great… That’s great! Well, hey, say hello to my friends!” He gestured first to a short-cropped blonde wearing a tight gold belt accenting a stunning figure, and then to a raven-haired girl who bubbled with enthusiasm every time Danny opened his mouth. Finally he indicated the young man in the eye-catching therm. “This is Liz, and Esh. And, here, this is Wes.”

  “And here, guys, is my sister, Cal, with her new…uhh…boyfriend.”

  The surprise was still echoing in his voice as it trailed off. Cal had never gone out with anyone. She was too different and hard to make friends with. Now, out of nowhere, she had declared herself for an obvious loser.

  “Whatever,” Danny decided. “If you guys are an item then you’ll be together at the 100th Day Fest, won’t you?”

  Cal had not considered this and was slightly dazed herself by the thought. Romantic relationships in the Homeland were highly organized. In the confined spaces of domestic and social life there was hardly ever an opportunity for young people to be alone. Dating was limited to formal occasions put together by the local Worship Center. Community gatherings called “fests” were held on a regular basis at the Centers, often in conjunction with the religious celebrations. The stadium could be morphed into a kind of town square with the holograph of a fountain in the middle and seating along the edges under colonnades decorated with flowers. Families could walk around the square or gather in groups to chat or sing. Dancing was also offered, a combination of line dances and group circles. Young people looked forward to these occasions intensely, as high points of the social calendar. A couple could be together, in each other's exclusive company, at these events, and even get to disappear briefly behind a few discrete colonnades. The next Fest was due the day after the great 99th day celebration, and it had a special tremor of excitement attached to it. There would be good food, lots of dancing, new dates would be announced and most likely some proposals of marriage. For Danny and his cohorts it was an opportunity to show off even more than usual. But right now Cal was unable to cope with the concept so she just nodded dumbly. Poll just stared.

  Danny felt he'd made an impression so he drew up a chair and the others did too.

  “What’s going on, Poll?”

  Poll looked at him as if he had two heads. “I was talking about the weather,” he said.

  Danny thought he was being sarcastic. He pushed himself back on his chair and glanced around at his courtiers with a mocking grin.

  “Some date, eh?”

  Esh giggled. Liz smirked.

  “He means meteorology.” Wes spoke flatly, without irony.

  Danny was wrong-footed, but he went with it. “I know that! But can’t see why. What's there to talk about? The only weather we get are in the Holo-casts, that’s why I like my Dad’s shows.” He flashed his perfect smile.

  “That’s exactly my point,” broke in Poll, seeming energized once more. Cal was again horrified and she grabbed at what Danny had just said, blurting out anything that might stop Poll talking.

  “You know,” she said, fixing her new boyfriend with a significant look, “Dad’s computer has files dating from very early in the history of the Homeland. They’re from before anyone alive today can remember and no one looks at them 'cause they're mostly just numbers…”

  This was news to Poll and for the second time in the conversation he looked stunned. “In that case…”

  “Yes, indeed,” interrupted Cal. “They would be of great meteorological interest. And I would like to invite you personally to come observe my father preparing the Holo-cast and perhaps check them out.”

  She looked around triumphantly at the company which seemed vaguely aware they'd missed something. Before anyone could comment, she carried straight on to a new topic, one she was certain would get everyone off the weather.

  “The swimming finals!” she said. “That’s another huge event. Everything’s happening all at once! It’s tomorrow, Dan, right? And you’re competing?”

  Her brother at once settled into the role he was best at, the guy with the great athletic body. He wasn’t one of the Sector’s most able swimmers. He was moderately successful, but every competition gave him the chance to grace the poolside, doing hand springs and flips. His every action was accompanied by the barely suppressed sighs of young female fans who came only to watch him. It was his moment of true glory, and there was something in him that really did expect at such times to be carried off by the gods.

  “Yes, I’m swimming,” he replied serenely.

  “Well, we certainly wish you luck, don’t we, Poll?”

  Poll who was still registering the information on the Worship Center programs barely acknowledged her.

  “Well, we have to get to class now. It was great meeting you guys, really. Come on...”

  She stood up with her books and waited by Poll expectantly, until he also got up. As they left she glanced over her shoulder and smiled at Wes.

  “That’s my sister,” Danny said admiringly. And after a pause, “But why is she hanging out with that weirdo?”

  5. FROSTBITE

  Night in the Homeland and the world was deserted. Lights from the TEPs were extinguished. The great domes of the Centers were likewise shrouded in darkness.

  Outside in the lethal cold the only light was the stars. A thousand thousand of them, glittering in the canopy of space. On nights of its cycle the moon would rise up in astonished brilliance over the wastelands of ice. Night was the one true natural beauty of the Homeland. Yet it was very rarely appreciated: the razor edge of minus-sixty made sure people gave it the briefest recognition as they glanced through the external ports. For Cal, however, the night held a precious meaning.

  She had found comfort in it ever since, as a child, her father had paused in the port of the TEP and, opening the outside door for a moment, had tilted her head upward. He had told her that every twinkling light she saw was an angel in heaven. When she was in bed she would try to position her head so she could see a patch of the sky through the skylight. S
o long as she could hold one of those high distant beings in view she would go to sleep comforted. Older now, she sometimes borrowed her father's spare jacket with its extended hood to pull on top of her own. With the annihilating air partially blocked she would exit the TEP to look up at the chorus of the stars. Breathing inside the mask of her hood she drank in the shimmering sky and for a brief instant she felt at one with her world.

  Tonight she was anxious to finish the evening meal and for the systems to close down, so at last she could experience that same special peace. Her encounter with Poll had left her deeply unsettled. His restless sense of something not right had infected her. His questions had opened a way for her and it was now impossible not to be deeply suspicious of everything around her. She needed desperately to feel the comfort of her secret guardians, the high fires of the arctic night.

  She left the port and stood looking up at the heavens, seeking out the familiar beauty that had always been her anchor. Her cheeks burned in the merciless cold and the vapor of her breath formed an instant crust of ice around her mouth and nose. The boots on her feet grated against unyielding ice, the iron pavement of the Homeland. She sensed around her the city of TEPs but she saw only the merest outlines. The wall of night was impenetrable. She gazed above, pleading with the heavens to be her friend, as so often before. She waited and then, all at once, she was not so sure. She was changing even as she tried to feel the same. She looked intently at the stars, probing the sky for the certainty she sought. Suddenly it was like the dark space both flattened and elongated, stretching back without end. She was pitching headlong into that bottomless, thin nothing, the frozen emptiness around her entering her very soul. She sensed with desperate certainty that if she did not do something she might never again climb out of the abyss.

  She remembered Poll, seeing his face in her mind. He had done this to her and now she had to choose. Agree with him and accept his questions as the one honest thing in a universe of lies, or cut him off, have nothing to do with him. Either step could be disastrous. Nothing was certain.

  Part of her longed to say, “You're right, Poll, you're right! These questions are our lifeline. They're the only thing that makes sense in this whole horrible world!” But Poll was a freak, a weirdo. His questions might be right, but what confidence could she have in them, or him? The Homeland rules were far too powerful to deviate from and not expect to be destroyed.

  There had to be something else, another source. But what was there? There was only God. But Cal had not been able to accept the idea of God. Not when she had understood how awful life was. Her father talked endlessly about heaven as the reason for it all. This seemed to her pointless—putting everyone through this misery, in order to bring them eventually to a better place. And there was the whole thing about being good, of measuring up and being found worthy of everlasting happiness. If you didn't, they said, you went to an even worse place than this one. But that made everything more stupid still. Could anything be worse than the Homeland? If all that God could do was create an ever worse sequence of places for humans to be miserable in, then the whole idea of God was a sick joke.

  Cal was desperate. The empty black well of the sky mocked her. Its darkness glittered with icy hate. If God was ever going to have a use it was in the void where her soul was sinking now. Only something like God could catch her. Only God could put life in dead space.

  “Please," Cal muttered, “I don't know what you are, whether you are me or you are you, but I need your help right at this moment. I don't care about heaven. I want this world to be good, like we see it in the Holo-casts. Like it must have been before we messed it up. And I do care about hell—because I'm in it now!” After a moment she added: “And while you’re at it, please help Poll too, because we’re down in this hole together.” And in a last falling whisper: “Please, please, I beg you...”

  With that she was done. She looked again at the sky and it seemed to stop moving. The stars did not go back to where they had been before, in their comforting majesty, but they had reappeared and they were holding the sky together in some sort of order. They were motionless and she was motionless, and everything was dull and lifeless, but it no longer seemed menacing. She was not sure how long she stood there, emptied of feeling, almost not feeling her surroundings, until all at once she realized her nose and cheeks had stopped hurting. She was gripped by another, much more practical fear: the tale-tell signs of frostbite. She turned rapidly and re-entered the port and then the family cabin. She went straight to the bathroom and ran a bowl of warm water from what was left of the day's allowance. She plunged her face in it and soon felt a fierce pain shooting through her cheeks and nose. She knew at once the blood was returning, she was going to be OK.

  6. DAY 98

  The tumbled line of cloud heaped under a wash of amber gave evidence of the storm-world, a grim chaos held at bay by ingenious technology. The sun's first rising was obscured by the thick layer of cumulus, but then it emerged in sullen crimson and quickly changed to the dazzling lantern that presided, ever without warmth, over the icefields of the Homeland.

  Out there beneath that far horizon thousands of powerful refrigeration units condensed and re-vaporized their gasses, pumping them through a vast underground network of heat exchanges, creating the artificial tundra. Wherever the network ran it froze the earth, and then the arctic ring extended its grip inwards until everything was an unbroken platform of ice. Cal gazed through the observation window next to the door and imagined the machines at work maintaining the rigged climate of the Homeland. For the first time she wondered about the true numbers behind it all. How did it all really happen, and what was beyond the horizon?

  She had never thought to ask these questions before Poll put them to her, and now they pounded in her brain. No one had ever traveled farther than the refrigeration plants. No one ever thought of doing so. The only people even near the borders were the maintenance crews, and to work in one of them was to be sentenced to a wretched life and, very possibly, a short one. Only criminals went out there, and the security guards in charge were all criminals themselves. They were people who had produced their own hierarchy and who relished opportunities for cruelty. Abandonment on the ice was rumored to be a frequent practice by the guards. For anyone to be out there on their own meant certain death: no one could survive a single night on the permafrost. As for someone actually breaching the border and experiencing the chaos of wind and flood beyond, that was undreamt of. The world outside the Homeland was the story of religion, a place everyone had been saved from, by God's mercy and the Global Weather Shield. To return there voluntarily would be flying in the face of the universe itself. It would be to deny religion, to engage in suicide, and to be an outlaw, all at once. Yet Poll had gone there in his mind, and somehow he had brought her with him.

  After her experience the previous night she had been unable to find sleep. Every time she dozed off the shocking nothingness of the stars came back to her and brought her awake with a jolt. Now she stood at the observation window where she'd been from the first hint of light. She was very cold, but she didn’t care. For the first time in her life she was seeing things as they were. She saw the whole earth out there, not just the country of salvation, the Homeland. She saw the sun rise as if for the first time, and as it cleared its curtain of cloud she felt as if the planet moved under her feet. As the earth pitched forward she fell with it, down into the forbidden zones, the badlands, the nameless world of flood and storm. She fell but she did not die. Instead she found herself flying across the surface of the waters, swooping and soaring again, seeing in her mind's eye the wild immensity of seas covering the face of the earth. Across them, scattered here and there among the waves, were desolate mountain chains and storm-lashed isles. She fell and soared like a great solitary bird, over the unending ocean.

  “Cal, Cal" her mother's voice was calling anxiously. “What on earth are you doing out there? Have you gone crazy? What are you looking at?”

  In
the background the voice of the WIA was also speaking: “Welcome to day 98 of our current cycle. All residents of the Homeland are invited to begin this day with hope in everlasting life and an attitude of kindness toward each other.”

  She heard these voices as if in a dream. She was plunging deeper and deeper into the world beyond the border. Everything was gray and bleak, with relentless cloud-cover and roiling sea. Suddenly her brain was stabbed by a blinding flash, and she was falling even farther and faster, into an enormous well of light. Her legs buckled beneath her and she fainted, unable to stand the terrible brightness inside her head.

  “Oh, my God,” her mother screamed. “Benn! Benn!”

  Her father had just unzipped his bed covering and saw Cal fall to the floor.

  “How long has she been standing there? We’ve got to get her back to bed at once. Someone turn on the heat servo right away.”

  They stumbled over each other to get to her, half carrying, half dragging her to the bed.

  “Danny, help us,” cried her mother. “Switch on the servo.”

  “Yes, and hit the emergency code to Communications,” panted his father.

  Danny took in the scene open-mouthed. “Whoa! What’s up with her?”

  “Just help us,” yelled his mother. By this time they had threaded and pushed Cal inside the bed. Danny leaned over and flipped the servo switch on the wall and quickly returned to observe his sister. She was just regaining consciousness.

  “Where am I?” she whispered.

  “Where have you been is more like it,” Danny said. “You look really strange.”

  “Leave her alone, Danny,” snapped his father. “And send that code, or shall I?

  “OK, OK, I’m on it.” Danny sprang out of bed and hit three buttons on the Communications Console. A voice asked for details of the emergency. Danny texted a message back. “Sister half froze, watching sunrise without therm-suit.”