Hunger and Thirst

by Wightman, Wayne

“You know I hate this,” Loris said to Quentin, seated at her left. “The noise alone....”

  It was noisy at The Matches, but they were anonymous there, even if they did have trouble hearing each other. Below them, in the shallow arena, two men fought three women; the men were all hooded, without eye holes, wearing fat mitts on their hands. The women, bouncing above them from tall cushion to tall cushion, swung at the men's heads with padded clubs. The audience screamed with impatience as the slow fugue of violence moved slowly toward the inevitable frenzy of beatings and minor injuries.

  “Someone was in our condo!” she shouted.

  “Lloyd?!”

  She shook her head. “Went through my stuff, went through my papers in detail!”

  Quentin thought, then shouted, “I'll watch my stuff!”

  To this she nodded enthusiastically.

  They held hands, but with people jumping up and down, flailing the air, and screaming words without consonants, it was barely affectionate. As they left, Quentin looked back toward the center of the arena. The hooded men had got one of the women off the cushions and were beating her enthusiastically to the cheers of the audience.

  Entering the quiet acro hallways, Quentin whispered to her, “They always surprise me.”

  “The stupid are unpredictable, not creative.”

  “Last week I thought that human windmill thing they did was creative. I was surprised people would do that to themselves. Very creative.”

  Directly looking at him, she said, “Neosyphilis type four,” as they walked.

  “What?”

  “Was saying the first thing that came to my mind creative or impulsive?”

  “Neosyph four was the first thing that came into your mind?”

  They were still walking. Loris smiled large at him, turned her face forward, and let the back of her hand touch Quentin's.

  “I don't understand you,” he said.

  ....

  Loris began arranging for JoyLynn to meet Lloyd three or four times a week. Without Quentin, and with better lights, she could go to the outside and wander among the trees for as long as half an hour. One night, she heard Lloyd, in the closet, singing quietly to JoyLynn. It was an eerie, slowly warbling sound — small, sad, and suggested to her the affection he could never inspire in her. She let it go.

  One night early on, in the beam of her light, Loris discovered a leaf with a foamy cluster of tiny eggs on its underside — and then three more leaves with eggs. She smuggled them up to her condo and put them in a transparent box to see what would happen. In a week, they burst into hundreds of tiny flying beetles, blue-black wing covers and perfectly segmented legs, all alike, all beautiful. She fed them till she had to get a bigger box. She told no one of this.

  ....

  Instead of going to The Matches, Quentin and Loris sometimes met in the audience of What If...? one of several acro quiz shows broadcast through the vid. The questions were asked, and then while the contestant allegedly thought about a winning answer, the audience presented in increasing decibels its thoughts, arguments, objections, and non-ideational exclamations, giving Quentin and Loris periodic minutes to talk, only having to elevate their voices moderately.

  Today, they had longer periods to talk, because there was some problem with the contestant; namely, the host, Mr. Glone (sleek, professorial, impeccably suited) had to educate the contestant on the nature of the hypothetical.

  It began with Mr. Glone saying with a big arm-swing, as he did twice a week, “What if! Ready, Mr. Cortine? Good! Now, Mr. Cortine, what if you were in a place without water, and you —”

  “I wouldn't do that.”

  (Low key audience participation; grumbling and disbelief; this gave Quentin and Loris twenty-five seconds.)

  “But what if you were, Mr. Cortine. What if you were in a place without water....”

  (Audience commentary, brief; fifteen seconds.)

  “I'd take water with me.” He said this without guile, without irony, without understanding.

  (Audience shock, outrage, sympathy, confusion and, in limited areas, boredom; some physical expressions; one minute fifteen seconds.)

  “Mr. Cortine — Was he screened? Okay. Mr. Cortine, we're not going to put you anyplace without water.”

  “Good. I wouldn't go.”

  (Twenty seconds.)

  Host Glone began, once more, from the top, reciting the same words he'd said before. Big arm swing. “What if! Ready Mr. Cortine?” Etc. This time, however, Mr. Cortine appeared confused as well as angry and wanted to know how much he'd have to pay to keep from going through all this twice and why wouldn't they take his money? (Five minutes, twenty-five seconds in six segments; a record.)

  During that particular broadcast of What If...?, Loris described two not-quite-right conversations with strangers she'd had. One slyly tried to get her to complain about her dissatisfaction with living in the acro. Nosy. Reminded her of an acro official. The other conversation, initiated by an attractive and tastefully dressed woman in her extended youth, chatted her through clothes, through restaurants, and to the quality of her love life. Loris gave her little on any subject and used one of her durable lines, “I never thought about that” more times than made her comfortable.

  Quentin said the conversations didn't seem that odd to him, but then he wasn't there. He said nothing of the kind had happened to him and asked her if she had been doing anything illegal that he didn't know about.

  “No, you idiot. But sometimes I think I'm being watched. Followed.”

  Up on stage, Mr. Cortine had thrown something at the host, Mr. Glone, and the audience rose in united howling. Under the din, Quentin and Loris left, holding hands.

  ....

  The next day, first thing Loris noticed in the office was Bethina's over-frequent head-tossing and her mirthless smirk, both aimed in Loris's direction. If it made Bethina smug and tossy, Loris knew it was something she wasn't going to like.

  At 10:00 AM, Mr. Strickman called her into his office. Mr. Raff sat off to the side, dusty and silent. Today he still held his long dusters, and though he sat in a chair, he waved them lazily, idly, over the nearby walls.

  Mr. Strickman said, “You're transferred. To Acro B, today, 8 PM. Tube station twenty-three.” It wasn't Lloyd's station.

  “Today?” This had to be a mistake. She'd have to leave Quentin and Lloyd behind. And Bethina, Strickman, and more halfwits than she could count. “Transferred today?”

  Mr. Strickman shrugged. “What it says. Eight PM. At number twenty-three.” He floated the paper into the trash can.

  Mr. Raff sat silent, waving his dusters like long feelers.

  Other than that, nothing was revealed. She left.

  She sat at her desk a half an hour, doing little work and lots of speculating. Well, okay, she thought. It's going to happen, and appeals take months. So do the next thing. Say the goodbyes. She left before lunch without speaking to anyone in the office.

  Bethina pranced among the desks.

  ....

  Mr. Raff wandered around station twenty-three, dusting the walls with his long dusters, ignored by a dozen thuggish-looking security officers who cordoned the area against non-travelers, of whom there were none. The goodbyes left her still shaken, but she walked as though it were a normal journey, a normal day, however difficult it was for her to remember a normal day.

  Mr. Raff met her at the open underground entryway which displayed the same kind of door, same kind of complicated latch she now knew well, this one already opened.

  “By yourself, you could open that in eight minutes,” Mr. Raff said.

  As she stepped into the car, she said, “It isn't as complicated as it looks.”

  Confinement, she suspected. Maybe they would expel her.

  Tight-muscled and tense, she evinced nothing. She took a seat and gazed impassively in front of her, as Mr. Raff, without his dusters, took a seat directly in her line of sight.

  A banging clunk and percussive air release
s accompanied the slow acceleration away from Acrolith D.

  “You're not being transferred,” Mr. Raff said. “You're not going to Acro B.

  Her heart jumped. “I'm being expelled?”

  “You tested out. Would you like some lunch? We'll be ten hours in transit.”

  She quickly gathered herself and feigned coolness. “Tell me what you're talking about. What is this 'tested out'?”

  “You tested out. You're leaving the acrolith. You get to live with people more like yourself. You're out of there.”

  Loris started moving pieces of what she knew into different patterns till something looked right.

  “You don't know how rare you are,” Raff said. “First, your mother, in the acro, got pregnant; that wasn't supposed to happen. You're one of the few born there. Then you grew up among those people — that alone takes more character than I've got — and you still tested out.”

  Everything flipped over. “The tests,” she said, “weren't for weeding out stupid people — they were to weed out the people who weren't?”

  “See? You don't belong back there.” Mr. Raff stood up. “I'll order you some lunch. There are some magazines over there, handpad, few books, mini-vid. Look around. And just ask for me if you need anything.” He left. They had put her in what had to be a first class shuttle car — six reclining seats, bar, restroom — with a shower! And how clean everything was.

  Loris expected to feel devastated — her entire life ripped away, Lloyd left to fend for himself, and Quentin.... She felt stunned, but she didn't feel devastated. Lloyd tested so low, he'd never be expelled; if he could only know, it would rest his heart. And if Quentin could figure anything out, he could leave and she'd see him again. Or not.

  Lunch came and it wasn't fooprod — she could tell that at first aroma. Around the plate lay green leafy pieces that could never be imitated in fooprod, delicate-textured pieces of translucent fruit, and a real apple, which she had never seen before. She wasn't sure she liked the strange tastes.

  Ten hours later, a full hour spent in the shower, she arrived at a sleek station, the sun just coming full above the mountain-edged horizon. The door opened, she stepped out, and a young man standing there smiled at her. He said, “Quite a journey.”

  All she could say was “Yes” with too much aspiration. Compared to the acro, everything here was small, the air odorless, and she could see so far — to the mountains at the horizon. And clean — no trash or pieces of fooprod lying around. Clean little buildings separated by clean walkways.

  “You're going to like it,” he said, leading her to a two-seat conveyance. “We aren't like the acro community. Things go smoothly here — that's what all the rescues say. You're called a rescue, by the way,” he said with a big smile. The conveyance closed around them and they sped silently into the town. “And I'm reliably told,” the young man said, “that the transition is a lot fun.”

  She might have said, “Yes.” But at that moment, in a burst, she was thinking of Quentin's face and Lloyd's face and how awful it was to live with those other people in the acro and how she was going to miss Quentin and Lloyd and how much fun this was going to be, away from that place. All this made her ache. Retiring into darkness would have been relief.

  But the reality in front of her face needed attention. She focused on what she saw. Rows of trees lined narrow streets; groves shaded smaller green areas. “You live among trees?” she asked as though she were unstressed.

  “Yes, we do.”

  She had only seen trees in the acro garden areas. Big bushes, really. Living among them seemed a peculiar concept.

  ....

  “Oh, lookie!” Bethina said, slapping her hands together. It was just before lunch and she was anxious to eat, but here came Quentin Denmore, newly available, with a big grin on his cute face, carrying a big pink box with a big pinker ribbon on it. He put it on her desk, and as she ooohed in several pitches, she read the tag aloud: “Dear Bethina. This is my farewell gift to thee. Loris.” The thee caused Bethina to tear up.

  “That was sooo nice,” she said, getting her arm around Quentin's waist. “I wonder what it is! Do you know what it is?”

  Quentin shook his head. “She left it behind all wrapped up.”

  Eventually she used both hands to wave everyone over, even Mr. Strickman, and then she opened the gift.

  In a ballooning buzzing whine, hundreds of iridescent beetles blew past their faces and began a frenzied circulation through the office.

  On a personal cover note, Loris had cautioned Quentin about lingering after he delivered the gift, so he had not. Fawn waited outside the office where he left her, with her big lovely lips and everything double-jointed below the waist. Even the screams from inside the office could not distract Quentin from the lust that once again sliced the throat of his judgment.

  ....

  7:30 PM. Quentin's doorbell rang. He'd got back from Fawn's just an hour before and was still dehydrated. It was JoyLynn Podendall, alone with her grin.

  “I want to thank you so much for inviting me to know Lloyd,” JoyLynn said to Quentin, just outside his front door, waiting to be invited in. Her wide eyes and frizzy electrified hair made her look ready to jump in several directions. She made Quentin nervous. He discreetly braced his shoulder against the edge of the door.

  “Loris did the introducing. I didn't do anything.”

  “Well, Lloyd said you were very nice and modest, but I want you to know, if you ever want to fool around, you just give me a day's notice. Lloyd says it would be all right with him because” (she whispered) “there's enough to share, if we don't carry on too long.”

  “No, please,” Quentin said, “it was Loris that introduced you.”

  “You just tell me on a day's notice. If you have a minute now, you know, since I'm already here, you could, you know....” She showed him a thing or two. “You know you'll hate yourself if you don't,” she said.

  Quentin could see Lloyd's interest. JoyLynn had at least two interesting qualities. He thanked her and excused himself because he had to take his neighbor's dog in for an insulin shot. He nodded, made concluding noises, and finally got the door shut and got back to his charts.

  He'd collected six more questions and fourteen answers from recent takers of the test. Sooner than he thought, he might be able to retake it and score high enough to apply for relocation — to Acro B, with Loris. Maybe in three months. But he'd heard it took a really high score.

  More banging at the door.

  This time it was Fawn, weeping. He took one look and his brain clicked off like a light switch. She allowed herself to be comforted till around 10:00, and then she got up and dressed because she had to meet someone named Henry.

  Quentin sighed alone.

  He would enter the test data tomorrow, sure thing, and fell back on his bed.

  ....

  At that moment, the exact moment Quentin fell back on his bed and stared at his blank ceiling, Loris was stepping outside from her temporary quarters. She was exhausted from being shown around all day, nearly dead on her feet. Her rooms were spacious and clean with many windows, but at the moment Quentin fell back on his bed, she decided she needed to be outside a little longer, to take one more look at her new normal, to get a few more deep breaths.

  She had to laugh. She couldn't believe it. She just had to laugh.

  Those To Be Destroyed

  Are First Shown Love

  (from The Arrival of the Overlords: vol. 2 of Matter Is Mostly Space)

  “Some become pets,” the counselor explained, “some become servants, workers, sex toys—that always happens; some will go to comfortable resorts—what you might call zoological gardens, where they have activities to occupy them.” The counselor was attractive without being beautiful, her voice soothing. Those people always looked well-fed and spoke softly. “Those inducted have a wide range of options, but they are property and can be directed as seen fit. You should know that intentional damage of property is a puni
shable offense. It rarely, rarely happens.”

  Landis and Catrin and their two small children sat in front of the counselor at the induction agency, holding hands and listening to the her go over what they already knew, what everybody knew. They had seen endless images of their loved ones living among those people—but no one who went in came out or sent any messages back. Everybody knew anything could be faked, and the darkest suspicion was when you were inducted, they simply killed you. But in these desperate times, hope was greater than reason.

  “Whole families can be inducted,” she continued, raising her eyebrows. “It's done more often than you think. Once inducted, we keep families together until they decide to separate.”

  Landis almost glanced at Catrin. “Does separation happen a lot?” he asked. He firmed his hold on her hand.

  “Nine out of ten,” she said, “and always by mutual agreement; no one is hurt. Marital formality seems to become less important.”

  “We're not going to induct the family,” he said. He reached out and encompassed the nearest child's waist.

  “It's completely up to you,” the counselor said. Leaning forward a little, she said confidentially, “Catrin—” (those people always used first names) “—I've heard that you play the violin.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “That must be wonderful,” she said warmly. “Do you play for the children?”

  “I don't anymore. The bridge on my violin broke.”

  The counselor nodded sympathetically. Then her demeanor subtly shifted: “I know there are a lot of rumors, so I want you to take this.” She slid a datapage across her empty desk into their hands. “Induction is very simple, if that's what you choose. Two of us will come to your home at whatever time you choose. We're gentle, we're quiet, and we make it very easy for everyone. We are discreet.” She gave them a lovely smile. Those people always had perfect teeth and lovely smiles. “Please do think about it, and if there's anything else I can help you with, return and ask for me, Olivia. I'll be here.”

  “You could send us some food,” Landis said angrily. Catrin shielded her face with her hands. “We're hungry,” he said as a kind of retreat.