The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  We sit out there for a long time, Natalie looking at her feet, some of us watching the guy. Every so often he jerks around for awhile and stops. Finally we go in to work until dinner, and when we come out to get our slop, the poor sucker is gone.

  * * *

  It’s not going to stop me, you know? There’s always a way. Once I get out of Protection, all I got to do is get to Saint Louis, then I can hitch with a transport and be in Cleveland in no time. In Cleveland I know some people who’ll hide me.

  People get in, people can get out.

  But it dawns on me that it’s getting on to winter and I’m not real sure about my chances of getting to Saint Louis in the winter. Besides, if I winter over in Protection, then the hair on the back of my head will grow out better and I won’t look so much like a goddamn escapee. My clothes’ll get worse, but maybe next spring I can steal the clothes off a newcomer. And during the winter I can watch and plan, so I can figure how to get out of here.

  Anyway, if I’m going to be spending the winter here, I’ve got to start playing the game different. Got to work the system a little better, score some points with the guards and the upper orders, you know? When I was in juvenile detention they made a big thing about political instruction, so I try to pay attention.

  Thing is, all that stuff about ideology and infrastructure and shit goes right over my head. And Natalie is always asking me things like, “Why are we here in Protection?”

  “Cause we screwed up,” I say.

  Natalie shakes her head and asks somebody else and they answer with one of those slogan kind of answers about society and bourgeois mal-a-dap-tation. And I look at Paul and roll my eyes. I can’t keep this stuff in my head. I mean, it’s all just words that don’t mean anything. I can’t understand why anyone would ever get in political trouble because none of it ever seems to mean anything. Maybe if I’d finished high school it would be easier.

  I can’t figure out what’s so awful about capitalism in the first place. Back when America had capitalism we were rich and powerful. Now we’re not. So isn’t capitalism better?

  One night I wait until lights out and I ask Paul.

  He laughs. “It’s not that simple, Janee.”

  “So why not,” I whisper.

  “Because we lost our power while we were still capitalist. You’ve heard about the Second Depression.”

  Sort of. “When New York City used to turn off the electricity at night?” I used to watch this show called “Stormtime,” it was real popular, with that cute guy, Sam Basarico. They were always turning the electricity off and people always had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night or die, and Sam Basarico was always waking up doctors and stuff.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “So,” I say.

  “So what?” he says.

  “So what’s wrong with capitalism?”

  He sighs. For a minute I wonder if maybe he’s a capitalist. But then he says, “It’s not a fair system.”

  “That’s stupid,” I say. Things aren’t fair. Only little kids expect things to be fair.

  “I’m tired,” Paul says. “Go to sleep.”

  “No,” I say, and start kinda making up to him, scrunching up against him, playing with him. And when he’s starting to get all hot I say, “You want to go to sleep?”

  “Jesus, Janee,” he whispers. So we hump a little in the dark. I should be worried about getting pregnant. I wonder what they do if someone gets pregnant? But I haven’t had a period since I got to the camp, which is strange. Maybe the implant.

  “Okay,” I say, “now tell me about capitalism and what’s wrong with it.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “No,” I say.

  And the guy on the rack above us hisses, “You two shut up!”

  So we’re quiet for awhile and then I say real close to Paul’s ear—he’s falling asleep and I’m tired, too, but you can’t give up on stuff like this—“Come on, tell me about capitalism.”

  “If we talk politics, I’ll get in trouble and you’ll get in trouble,” he says.

  “If I don’t figure out how to say the right stuff in political instruction I’m going to get in trouble anyway.”

  He kind of laughs. I can feel him shake, even though he doesn’t make any noise. “Okay,” he whispers. “But tomorrow. Go to sleep.”

  So he starts by asking me what I know about capitalism.

  “People were rich and there was a lot of corruption and a lot of crime,” I say. “And now we have socialism and people are poor and there’s a lot of corruption and a lot of crime.”

  He laughs. Anything I say about politics makes him laugh.

  “You think I’m not that smart,” I say. “Just because I’m not book smart.”

  “You’re not stupid, Janee, you just never had much chance.”

  I don’t know how to answer that so I don’t say anything, I mean, is it an insult or what? So he tells me about capitalism, and people making money. And he tells me about people having to pay rent for the places they lived. That sounds pretty screwy. People had to pay for water, too. People could sell anything.

  I make him tell me how capitalism caused global warming and he tells me all about how people wouldn’t give up things because if they stop buying capitalism doesn’t work, so the technology and the pollution made the earth heat up and now the whole corridor, Texas and Kansas and Oklahoma and Idaho and all those states that used to have farming don’t have enough rainfall. Protection used to be a farming community. Now it never rains.

  Which explains a lot of what was wrong with capitalism. I get the idea that people knew all this bad stuff was going to happen, but they wouldn’t stop buying gasoline-driven cars and stuff, and the government wouldn’t stop them. So now people like me have to suffer for it.

  Except none of that helps in political instruction.

  “What class are you?” Natalie asks me.

  “Proletariat,” I say. I know that one, I remember that from when I was still in high school.

  Wrong again. None of us know what class we are. Natalie sighs. We’re “criminal element.” Right, I should have got that.

  We have a stove in the barracks, and it’s getting real cold at night. I keep hoping that they’re going to start heating the place a bit. It’s been cold enough that one night water froze. And we may sew quilts all day but we never get to take any of them back to the barracks at night.

  “Hey,” I say in political instruction, “one of the big differences between capitalism and socialism is that in capitalist times people had to pay for stuff like where they lived and water and heat and all that, right?”

  “Yes,” Natalie says.

  “So if we live in Socialism, how come we don’t have heat?”

  Natalie scrunches her mouth together in a line, real flat. Paul looks down at his hands. I screwed up again, and I don’t even understand why I’m wrong.

  Finally Natalie says, “Girl, I’m telling you, you’ve got an attitude. You should be thinking about working on that.”

  All my life people have been telling me about my frigging at-ti-tude. Seems to me, a lot of times, my at-ti-tude has been all that’s been between me and the world making me part of the pavement. Seems to me, here in Protection, my at-ti-tude is about all I’ve got.

  * * *

  I’m cold all the time. Out here in Kansas, the wind blows all the time. It’s sunny, but the sky is real pale blue and real far away. Natalie says that long about January we’ll start getting dust storms.

  When the lights come on in the morning, none of us bother to get up. I stay right up against Paul, trying to get a little warm. We got two blankets because they’re two of us, but they’re really not big enough to cover two people, even when I lie right up against him. Still, we get some overlap. So my legs and feet are cold, and his backside is cold, because those are places where there isn’t enough cover, but we’re okay.

  We take our blankets to the factory, all wrapped up like Indians. If yo
u do it right, part of the time you are sewing a quilt you can have it in your lap, but if they catch us doing that they chew us out. Nancy gets in trouble because when she’s finished sewing a quilt, instead of putting it in her basket, she keeps it on her lap.

  We’ve been doing quilts a couple of months, it’s not real hard. We’re supposed to do twelve an hour, one every five minutes. You got to fold a little, pin a little, then zip, zip, zip, zip, four seams and you go on to the next one. When you run out of thread you have to signal Natalie and she brings you thread. If you don’t do twelve an hour, then you have to stand for detention. So I do fourteen or fifteen the first hour, just in case I have a problem, and then twelve an hour for the rest of the day. Our hands get so cold it’s hard to do them right. If you make a mistake, the bad quilt is called “waste.” I asked if we couldn’t keep a couple of the “wastes” to use ourselves but Natalie said that unscrupulous people would ruin quilts on purpose just so they could have them.

  Well, yeah, I would.

  Then one morning, Corbin, who with Natalie is one of our Group Leaders, says that we’re going to have a change. Corbin doesn’t have any teeth in front. At first I thought he was real old, but then I found out he’s only thirty-six, but he’s been in labor camps for fourteen years. I guess that and the fact that his mouth is all caved in from having no teeth is what makes him look old.

  He says that there is rationing outside, like there usually is in the winter. It’s the first time anyone has mentioned outside in a long time. It seems so far away, outside. I guess there didn’t used to be rationing, before the Second Depression, but I guess if they could farm the corridor there would be a lot more food.

  From now on, he says, if we make 120 quilts a day, we get regular rations, if we make more than 180 we get extra rations, and if we make less than 120, we get half rations.

  I figure maybe I can make 180 quilts, I mean, I’ve never really tried hard before. I have to make eighteen quilts an hour. The first hour I make nineteen, raggedy-assed things but nineteen and they’re good enough to pass, not waste, you know. Man, I figure I got this thing licked, and I’m tasting extra rations. But the next hour I screw up two and I only end up with fifteen. And the third hour I get up to thirteen and the thirteenth one I screw the thread all to hell, tangled in the bobbin and all, and I got to be real careful or I’ll break the needle. If I break the needle they’ll dock me ten quilts because needles are expensive. I finish the day with 154. Chris, this big guy from Detroit who killed somebody with a top from a trash barrel, he makes 182. His fingers just blur. I’m always afraid that I’m going to end up sewing my own hand if I go that fast.

  This other guy, Nesly, he only makes 114. He’s just a klutz, he goes real slow and he messes some up. At dinner, Chris gets two extra buns, and I’m disappointed, I thought he’d get more than that. But Nesly only gets half his beans.

  We discuss it at our political meeting. First the title of the lesson, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Then Natalie has a discussion group and we talk about what it means.

  Nesly says, kind of desperate, “It doesn’t seem fair, I work as hard as I can.”

  Maybe he does, I don’t know. I don’t like Nesly, he’s one of those people who you look at and you know they’re a screw-up. He’s not very big, and he’s got no front, no pride. And he whines all the time.

  Natalie says, “Think about it, Nesly. People like Chris work harder, they need more food. Society is like a machine. A person like Chris makes sure that more people have blankets. It’s for the good of society that if there is only so much food, people like Chris get it, because he’s more efficient.”

  Some people nod. I can see it, in a way.

  Mostly I don’t care, it’s warmer in the bunk, with Paul, and that’s where I want to be. I’m tired all the time, from being cold. It seems like I just go to sleep and the lights snap on.

  I close my eyes again, not bothering to get up.

  Paul says, “You still want to learn more for political instruction?”

  “I dunno,” I say, and then from habit, because he’s doing something I want him to do, “Yeah, I guess.”

  But he doesn’t talk about anything that makes sense, he starts by saying, “What’s feudalism?”

  “Bad,” I say, thinking about how in half an hour I have to go stand out in the cold for roll call. When we have roll call in the morning, the stars are still out and it’s still dark.

  “Why is it bad?”

  Hell, I don’t know, I don’t even really know what feudalism is except it has to do with kings and queens.

  So that morning he tells me about serfs, who were like slaves, because only a few people owned all the land, and everybody else had to work for them. And because if you didn’t work for someone you would starve, you’d do anything to work for someone. But they could pay you whatever they wanted.

  I think I can understand that pretty well. “People like us,” I say, “we’re like serfs, because we’re trapped, and they don’t have to do anything but give us a little food.”

  “Right,” he says, pleased with me. Well hallelujah, Janee finally said something right. “The only difference,” he says, “is that a feudal economy is based on land. Since people don’t have much money, mostly land, they can’t really buy and sell a lot. I mean, you can’t carry a hectare of land in your pocket, you know?”

  I laugh, because I’m supposed to, but he sounds like a frigging teacher.

  “Now a factory is expensive,” he says. “You know how animals and people evolve?”

  “Like people started out from apes,” I say.

  “Sort of,” he says. “Anyway, first are primitive societies, like the Indians. Then there are feudal societies, which are more organized. And then people get money together and they buy machines and build buildings and you have factories. But to start a factory you have to have a lot of money, you need capital. And that’s why people who run factories are called capitalists.”

  Okay. So out on the field for roll call, while I’m freezing my buns off, I’m thinking about factory workers and serfs. And about labor camps. Paul thinks they’re different, because of land and money, but they really aren’t. It seems to me that if society is going to evolve, it should get better for everyone, not just the people at the top, right? I mean, Indians had it a lot better than I do.

  * * *

  “Where did you live in Pennsylvania?” I ask Paul.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Did you live in a big city, like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh?”

  He doesn’t pay any attention to me.

  “Maybe in a little town, like Allentown?” Everybody has heard of Allentown, because it’s a famous battleground of class struggle. That and the little town in Kentucky where the miners went on strike. “Did you have a girlfriend?”

  “That was outside,” he finally says.

  “Do you want to know if I had a boyfriend?” I ask.

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “You don’t know,” I say. “You try to make it sound like you don’t care, but you don’t know anything about me. Maybe I ax-murdered my boyfriend,” I say.

  It irritates me, he won’t tell me anything. He doesn’t want to hear anything about me, either. I mean I don’t think it’s a good idea to always be talking about it, but it’s stupid to pretend that we didn’t have any life at all out there. I figure he had a girlfriend, maybe a wife. Sometimes, people divorce people who go into labor camps. It’s an okay reason for divorce.

  “What’s the big secret?” I say. “Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “That’s a whole different person,” he says, “a whole different life.”

  “Why don’t you ever talk about politics, I mean, you’re here because of politics.”

  “I am talking about politics,” he says, sounding angry, “I’m teaching you, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah, but you never teach me anything subversive,” I say.
“We just talk about feudalism. Natalie doesn’t even care about feudalism, I still don’t know the right answers when she asks me questions.”

  “It’s not something somebody can explain overnight,” he says.

  “I don’t even think you’re right,” I say. “You say that feudalism was better than the Indians, and that capitalism was better than feudalism. But it’s not, it’s just the same for people like me, we always get shit on. Except maybe for the Indians. I’d be better off if I were an Indian.”

  “That’s the point,” he says, exasperated. “Feudalism and capitalism exploit people like you and me.”

  Exploit. That crops up all the time, exploitation of the workers. I feel like I’ve just gotten another piece of the puzzle.

  “So how would you change things, Janee?” he says.

  I think. “I’d make sure that … I mean, people still have to work, right? Or we wouldn’t have anything to eat. But I’d give more to the people like me, like I’d make sure that people had enough to eat and all that. I wouldn’t let some people have a lot and not have to work. And I wouldn’t make people do stupid things. You know, sewing quilts all the time is boring.”

  “But how are you going to have factories if no one has enough money to build them?” Paul asks.

  He’s got a point. I mean, if everybody is pretty much the same, nobody has a whole lot of money. I try to think who builds factories. I get it, all the sudden I get it. “The government. The government can build them.”

  “Why the government?” he asks.

  “Because they’ve got the money,” I say.

  “But then the government just becomes like the capitalists, exploiting people.”

  That’s what we’ve got but I don’t say it.

  “Think about it, Janee,” he says.

  Right. He knows the answer, but he wants me to guess, stupid son of a bitch playing stupid teacher games.

  If it wasn’t for me, the poor sorry bastard would be in real deep shit. I know he thinks I’m stupid, I can tell by the way he talks to me. When he’s telling me about politics he talks slower, real careful, and he asks questions he already knows the answers to and there I am, trying to guess the right answer when he could just tell me and then I’d know. And why won’t he tell me anything about himself? Why doesn’t he want to know anything? ‘Cause I don’t really matter, that’s why. He doesn’t need to tell me anything because I’m just dumb old Janee.