by Bina Shah
“What is it?”
“There’s a private room showing up, on the thirty-second floor. Instructions say post-operative. VIP, Do Not Disturb. And there’s no name on the room, nor a Green City ID. It just says, Patient X, female, 21.”
Julien’s eyes narrowed and his teeth bit hard against the inside of his lip. Someone was making deliberate changes in real time to the hospital records to accommodate her. Whoever had brought her to Shifana was monitoring exactly what was happening to her. And sending out a message that she was under that someone’s protection. But whose? Julien’s stomach clenched at the idea that her protector was watching their every move.
Julien studied her face closely for the first time. Her dark hair, smooth olive skin, and full lips denoted youth and good health. She had a slight scar under her lip. Her narrow jaw and small ears were almost elfin to look at. Her fragility was deceptive: even though she was still unconscious, now she had power, because there was a nameless, faceless someone pulling all their strings like puppets, directing them to save her life.
“What are you going to do?” said Mañalac, with a slight emphasis on the word you. No matter what his complicity in Dr. Julien’s actions, people like Mañalac survived by never questioning their role. Dr. Julien would take the blame for whatever had already happened, and whatever would come next.
Julien wiped the sweat off his forehead, then raked back his hair with his fingers, tugging on his hair until his scalp tingled. “Let’s get her in that room, quickly. I don’t want anyone to see her.” He scrubbed his hands clean, peeled off his surgical suit, and dropped it into the incinerator.
Mañalac’s shoulders slumped. Dr. Julien should have said he would report to Dr. Bouthain first, before deciding to move the woman into the room. But look at how he’d acted to save the girl, not even thinking of the rules and regulations. It was what every good doctor should do, but in Green City, flouting the protocols was classified as rebellion, and everyone sooner or later paid for the crime. There was already someone watching them, the person changing the records.
Everyone at Shifana knew the young doctor had a golden future ahead of him; he wouldn’t stay a junior for long. Already word of his talent was reaching the ears of the Bureau, the Agency, the leaders, and higher-ups. They’d pluck him away from the hospital one day and put him in a position where he would make decisions concerning all of their lives. Mañalac hoped that Dr. Julien would remember him for his loyalty and dedication when that time came. Maybe Dr. Julien would even take him with him, as an assistant or right-hand man. In Green City you survived when you learned how to control others, bend them to your will, make them think that your subtle manipulation was for their own good. Mañalac hoped Dr. Julien was his bridge from one class to another, which most men of Mañalac’s background could never hope to achieve.
There was only one thing that stood between Julien and his destiny: Julien himself. Dr. Julien mistakenly thought that each person’s individuality mattered as much as the collective duties the authority figures had assigned them according to their station. Nor did Dr. Julien sacrifice his own autonomy for the greater good of society. It would not serve him well once they took notice.
Mañalac had spent hours observing the young doctor, attending to him during the long work days and nights at Shifana. While Julien was correct in his interactions with the senior doctors and the hospital administration, he lacked the deferential manner that his position demanded and his seniors expected. He ventured his own opinions without fear or embarrassment; he never indulged in the obsequious bowing and scraping that a junior doctor was expected to show. He remained quiet throughout floor meetings, listening calmly, usually not saying a word among other juniors too eager to impress the seniors.
Mañalac knew that Dr. Julien’s patients always recovered quicker than the others, that he was requested again and again whenever former patients returned to the hospital. He delivered results that nobody else could match, and there was talk of him winning the Green City Doctor’s Award this year, although it usually always went to someone far more senior than he was.
Mañalac admired and feared for Dr. Julien in equal measure. As he watched Julien’s eyes move all over the girl’s face, a painful sorrow came over him. He could see, with dangerous prescience, where this would lead: they would both be caught, Dr. Julien and the girl, and punished by the Agency for rebellion, if not revolt.
“Ram, you’ll stay here and clean up?” said Julien.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Julien,” Ram said, busy with trays and instruments. “It’ll look like nobody’s been in here for a week when I’m done with it.”
Julien stayed behind George and Mañalac as they maneuvered the young woman onto a stretcher. They wheeled her away from the main areas, again using private corridors and elevator. The elevator sped up to the thirty-second floor in a matter of seconds, blocking their ears up with pressure and making Julien slightly dizzy in the ascent. He kept wondering what was at work here other than the usual authority. Clearly it was someone with the access to the hospital system, someone who was, obviously, incredibly powerful.
When they reached the preassigned room, Julien spoke his name quietly to the electronic lock, “Dr. Julien Asfour.”
The door recognized his voice and immediately unlocked itself, revealing a luxurious room usually reserved for only the most important patients: Leaders and their families. The walls sparkled with fresh leaf-green paint, the air maintained at ambient temperatures, and the lighting in the room changed color depending on the time of day. Right now the lights were pulsing a gentle blue, to match the powder-light sky of the early morning just beyond the walls of glass. Julien shook his head, amazed. He’d lost all track of time in these past hours, and was astonished to realize that the world was going on as normal, while he was plunged in this unfolding, complicated situation.
The small entourage paused before entering, even though the hermetic seal was already broken. But once they crossed the threshold, there was no going back. The scent of lemons wafted out from the room as they stood there, hesitating and shuffling.
“Look,” said George, pointing at the display on the inside of the door. “There’s a name. And an ID number.”
Julien stared. Faro, Female. GCID 9301102-2 read the display. Faro. Faro … where had he heard that name before?
Currents of fear buzzed through his body. Who was this woman?
As Mañalac and George eased the woman into the bed, Julien strode to the window and looked out at the sea, close enough to surround the hospital on three sides, like a protective moat. He was worried about the medical supplies they’d used in the operating room. Everything from the oxygen and drugs down to the last strip of gauze was automatically recorded on the hospital’s internal databases. Everything—the IVs, the monitors, the syringes, even the doors opening and closing—talked to the network to tell it how much was being used and what for. The hospital could be resupplied, expenditures tracked, and performance of the staff monitored, a system that eliminated wastage and stealing from every hospital in Green City. How could he have forgotten the precision of the system? It would betray him, even if nobody else in this room did.
George suddenly laughed “Wow. Unbelievable. The records don’t show anything. Look. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Julien looked at George’s device, followed his finger pointing to the rows and columns on the sheet: all the supplies for the operating room they’d just vacated were at full levels, at least according to the device. On the record, it looked as though the operating theater hadn’t been used since the day before. The benefactor again, resetting the system so that nobody would know they’d been in there.
“What the…?” muttered Julien. The continuing mystery was fraying his nerves, but he didn’t want them to know that. “All right, let’s get Mrs. Faro comfortable.”
She was not Patient X anymore, but Mrs. Faro. Julien couldn’t place
the name, familiar as it sounded. Perhaps one of his schoolteachers was called Faro, or he’d known a boy with that name. It was a long time since he’d felt like a boy, or thought of his days in school. In the space of these short hours he felt like an old, old man.
He leaned his head against the cold window and let his eyes grow unfocused, soothed by the white-capped waves fighting each other on the water’s uneasy surface. He put his hand on the window to steady himself: it was cold outside, too, the sun barely making a dent in the gray clouds. He thought idly of his sweater, wondered whether it would be warm enough for him on the way home. He wondered why the woman in the bed wore no wedding rings.
“Dr. Julien?”
“She’s doing well,” said Mañalac, nodding his approval. “Strong girl.” Julien started at the sound of Mañalac’s voice. George and Mañalac stood back from the bed, the girl lying in it, her head and shoulders propped up by pillows. Her eyes were closed and her mouth lay slightly open, revealing the white tips of her teeth.
She looked anything but strong to Julien. Patients were at their most vulnerable post-op, no matter how many antibiotics and bio-healers were pumped into them to speed up their recovery. Yet as much as infection threatened her, the possibility of discovery and denunciation added an extra sheen to the pale translucence of her unmoving body.
“What should we do now?” George said. “Do you want one of us to stay with her?”
Julien studied the girl, trying to pinpoint when he’d acquiesced to the plan laid out before him by this mysterious force, or person, whatever it was, who was responsible for her. And how could this benefactor have known that he would break all the rules to save her life? That he would instinctively agree to shelter her until that benefactor came to claim her? But how would he monitor her while shielding her from the prying eyes of everyone else at the hospital, much less any Agency spies that might be wandering the corridors?
“No, I’ll stay here with her for now. Start over with your new shift, tell them if they ask that you were with me. Inform Ram, too. None of you have to worry about this anymore. It would probably be best if you just forget all about it.”
“My tracking record?” said George. “It’s been almost three hours now. If anyone checks, they’ll know where I’ve been.”
“I’ll fix it,” said Julien. He didn’t have access to the hospital records the way the woman’s benefactor did, but he would try to make it look as if all three nurses were carrying on their normal hospital routines.
George nodded, then left. Mañalac hung back, shuffling from foot to foot.
“My shift’s over. Ended an hour ago. I can come back whenever you need me, Dr. Julien.”
Julien clasped Mañalac by the shoulder. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “I won’t forget this.” His fingers tightened on Mañalac’s sleeve for a moment, then let go. Mañalac nodded, embarrassed. Then he, too, disappeared.
When Julien was alone with the woman, he sat down in the soft chair opposite her bed and watched her sleep. Color was seeping back into her face, her cheeks turning from ivory into a sunrise. Her chest rose and fell smoothly, a bow slowly moving back and forth across the strings of a violin, sounding out long, clear notes of rest and healing.
Julien was still too young, too low in status to be assigned a Wife through the Perpetuation Bureau. His only chance of romance would be to strike up a relationship with one of the female robots in the hospital that smiled and moved their heads, extended their arms and legs, breathed in and out in a maddening verisimilitude that allowed men to pretend, for just a while, that they were human. Compared to the real women he’d known—his mother, an aunt on his father’s side, a grandmother who’d died when he was young, the robots were perhaps a little lacking in spontaneity or vitality, but they’d been engineered to be warm and pliable enough.
The first weekend after his eighteenth birthday, Julien went with two friends to the decrepit downtown area of the city known as Red Town, searching for a brothel that would accept the “comfort money” given to them by the Perpetration Bureau. Sleeping with a prosbot was something that everyone did at least once, if only to prove they were real men. It wasn’t something you bragged about, but single men had needs, and this was the only legitimate way to satisfy them. Thinking that it would help men control their impulses toward real women, the Bureau subsidized the first visit to a prosbot when men came of legal age, so it cost next to nothing. After that, it was true, some men became addicted to the physical release; others, to the deception that these were real women who cared about them, who truly liked them, who enjoyed their company, not just their money. Visiting prosbots could become an addiction as much as any of the rest of the pharmacological cornucopia that Green City had to offer.
A visitor spent an hour in a private room with one of the prosbots. Any act was allowed, as they had been constructed more sturdily than the anatomical ones in the medical school; they only were not allowed to willfully damage or dismember them.
Julien found no real pleasure in the female’s limbs around his neck, her synthetic lips on his, or her recorded voice; his body responded, but it felt like cheating on an exam or stealing money. Immediately afterward, the emptiness in his head and the pit of his stomach made him want to weep. He decided that he would not return. He would wait for something better, more human. And yet it was depressing to think that any woman he’d end up with would have two other husbands, at least.
At the same time, Julien decided to sacrifice all hopes of companionship in return for professional success. So far he’d been on target, working days and nights, taking on extra hours and emergency calls that had gotten him noticed by the hospital administrators. There was even talk that he might be promoted in the next year if he kept the pace up. He’d be the youngest doctor in history among the ranks of the elite surgeons; he might be deemed worthy enough by the Bureau to have a Wife sooner rather than later.
Julien was completely exhausted and suddenly felt a desire to lie down next to the woman in the wide hospital bed, to curve himself around her body and put his arms around her, bury his face in her hair, and simply close his eyes and drift away. It would be such a clean forgetting, a knife cutting time into before and after. It wasn’t his habit to seek comfort from another person in that physical way. Yet feeling the warmth that came off her like waves and inhaling the scent of her skin and hair, he longed for relief by her side.
Julien settled himself into the chair next to the bed and closed his eyes. He thought about how he’d taken out pieces of her flesh and blood and removed the life growing inside her. Her body had been violated enough by his hands. He would not impose himself on her even more in what remained of this day. Besides, she was married to J. Faro, whoever that was. He fell into sleep as quickly as a child in its mother’s arms.
Sabine
When I was eleven, I began to ask my mother questions. “Why do you only have one Husband?” She sat at her dressing table, carefully blotting her face with powder. She had a drawer full of makeup that she used only on special occasions. Women weren’t encouraged to paint their faces too much, to avoid drawing attention to themselves when they went out.
She dabbed powder under her eyes, first the left, then the right. Her mouth was pulled down into a funny shape, one that I imitated when she was gone, looking in the mirror and pretending I was applying makeup to my face, too.
“Our family is different,” she said. “One mother and one father and one child.”
“But my friends—Irene has three fathers, Jana has two. There’s one girl in the class above me who has four!”
“Do you want to have more fathers?” She turned to me and watched my face carefully.
I felt bad saying yes. “I don’t know.”
My mother’s hands fell into her lap. She bowed her head for a second, deep in thought. When she lifted it again, her eyes were clear, guileless as they looked into mine. “It�
��s my fault, Sabine. I can’t have more children, so they don’t want me.”
For years afterward, I believed her. When I was old enough, I imagined the pain my mother endured, the humiliation of monthly examinations, the prodding and poking of her body. For years in my mind she lived a martyr to infertility, a poor invalid who had to make monthly declarations that her body had failed her and Green City.
What I didn’t know is that instead of submitting to the rules of the Perpetuation Bureau, my mother defied them. She had been bribing a doctor who faked the results of her hormone tests, so she got classified as temporarily infertile. This momentous lie exempted her from having to marry two, three, or four men. The lie bought our family years of normality.
When I turned twelve years old, the doctor was exposed and betrayed by one of his patients. Panicked, my mother confessed everything to my father, who urged her to pledge herself as a loyal rule-abiding citizen of the Green City. When questioned by the Agency, she said she was ignorant of the doctor’s actions.
The doctor was swiftly arrested, underwent a public trial, and was eliminated. All the women he’d helped were ordered to take more husbands immediately. They wouldn’t be punished; the doctor corrupted them, led them astray from their paths. They could earn forgiveness in return for their complete obedience from then on.
My mother waited in dread for the notification, knowing that it would come soon. Probably on a Monday morning, when the most important missives arrived through the Network to the families of Green City. There was no question of my mother rejecting the assignment, of even choosing the Husband.
But before the notification ever came, my mother died, suddenly. When the Officials visited and the crews came to take my mother’s body away, they labeled it a suicide. They painted a compelling portrait of my mother’s mental state before her death. The psychological counsellors sent by the Agency wrote in their reports that the guilt and anxiety my mother underwent was too much for her; it drove her to an impulsive, impetuous decision to remove herself from our lives, so that we would be spared more repercussions of her rebellion.