Office of Mercy (9781101606100)

by Djanikian, Ariel

  If she wanted to, Natasha could build a Wall right now; she could barricade her mind against her present feelings and try again for dull, easy, thoughtless sleep. Earlier today that had been right; but not now, not when she had the luxury of open, empty night before her. Hadn’t she promised herself standing in line yesterday morning that she would confront these terrors? That she would face them head-on?

  Natasha squeezed her eyes shut, giving herself back to the horrific landscape of her semisubconscious. Then she was here but she was not here; the concrete column of underground levels could not contain her; her thoughts burst out in all directions, expanding like a supernova through time and space. She allowed it to be so. More, her release was a testament to her faith in the Ethical Code. For Natasha knew, in the Office of Mercy, in the blacked-out Dome during the alarm, that she had acted rightly only because she had forcibly used the Wall to block out her true feelings. That was okay for a child, for an Epsilon, but a mature, enlightened citizen of the world should not require such crude techniques. Faced with the merciful destruction of life, an enlightened person would be capable of perceiving all the goodness in that annihilation, and afterward, after a sweep for example, would feel only the firm satisfaction of having, by the power of human action, increased the pleasure and lessened the pain in the universe. If Natasha ever grew to be as wise as an Alpha, she would not need to correct her mind to fit the Ethical Code at all, because living ethically would be as obvious to her as putting one foot in front of the other in order to walk across the room.

  Black blood seeped through the crevices of her imagination, like creeks within the darkness, distinguishable for its stickiness and its heat. He must have died slowly, the man with the spiral tattoos up his arms, and known as he lay on the ground that he was dying. Was there some fantastical place he believed he was headed? Had his last thoughts blossomed with the expectation of some miraculous world of sweetness and light; a wondrous unreality constructed stone by stone by the labor of one generation after another, and perfected only finally in the last moments of the mind’s eye? For his sake, Natasha wished that it was so, though she suspected a different end. Because there had been no peace in his movements and no calm resignation, no willingness to die, in that last twitch of his legs. More likely, his last thoughts had raged out against his fate: I will not fall like this, we will murder the beast, they will save me. . . . Until the fight had collapsed with his body into the dust. Impossible, impossible, I will stand up and walk home again, impossible. . . .

  If only Arthur had allowed a partial-Tribe sweep. But how many more deaths would that have led to? Natasha closed her eyes tightly, thinking it through. The total suffering must be kept to a minimum; that was the essence of the Ethical Code.

  As her mind relaxed deeper into these dreams, her fingers uncurling from the edge of the blanket, Natasha’s thoughts reached back to the Cranes, and how it had made her sick to see their empty, obliterated camp on the Office of Mercy’s overhead screen. But hadn’t it been just as bad, she asked herself—no, worse—watching them suffer? Even before the Crane men had taken off from the camp on their final hunt, the members of the Tribe had been starving. Residual weather patterns from the Storm, the citizens knew from the satellite feeds, had made the ocean temperatures inconsistent, leading to an instability of fish populations all along the eastern coastline. Recently the fluctuations had been so pronounced that Tribes like the Cranes could not adapt quickly enough to the changes. In fact, just days after the Cranes had crossed the perimeter, Natasha had watched from the Office of Mercy as they launched their final boat into the waves. The boat was a flimsy thing, a skeleton of rounded riblike wood, with a flesh of stretched, dried hide. Two lanky, thin-faced boys sat at the bow, holding paddles over their laps (brothers, maybe, they looked so alike), while two men with fishing nets draped over their shoulders shot the vessel powerfully out from the shore.

  In the wild, Jeffrey had told her once, hunger is an inexhaustible source of illogical choices.

  Is that why, when the sky closed over with dense, silver clouds, the four Cranes had not returned to land? Did they think the first drops of rain would bait the nonexistent fish to the surface? And did they hang on to this hope even while sprays of chilly water filled their boat and turned their limbs to ice? They capsized at 1512 hours, in the high corner of sensor W13: four dark heads disappearing and reappearing, their bodies breaking over the water clean through to the waist, then melding into the waves again. The black silhouettes of their twiglike arms thrashed and tried to climb above the ocean’s plane, but there was nothing to call brave, as Pre-Storm fairy tales about heroes battling the natural elements would have one believe. There was nothing permanent or noble, no shining of the human soul. And when the water sucked them down at last (they were so weak and diminished already), they must have clawed against their death until the very last current of thought had drowned too.

  A muffled sob broke from Natasha’s chest into the hard mattress. Poor people. Poor creatures of Earth. It was terrible. A terrible design that would allow suffering to flourish, and make pain and dying essential gears in the machine of life. To imagine that a benevolent God had made such a world! (Because for centuries their ancestors had all thought so.) Once Natasha had asked Jeffrey about it, about religion, and according to Jeffrey, the pervasive belief in God actually revealed a great deal about Pre-Storm times. The religions of that era, Jeffrey had said, were almost always concessions that pointed directly to the violent nature of living itself; and concessions that exposed more than anything else the defeat that once had lived in every human heart. Their poor ancestors, much like the Tribes, had not wielded a power even remotely comparable to the power of the settlements to put an end to suffering and death. And so, Jeffrey had explained (he explained now, his voice soft and soporific in Natasha’s mind), their ancestors had done the next best thing, they had colored their doom with a sense of purpose. They gave to suffering the aura of the divine; they gave it a witness and a reward; and to death, they granted a nature inverse of truth—calling the end a beginning.

  Natasha sat up, pushing her hair back from where it stuck to her cheeks. She wanted out of these thoughts; she could not lie still anymore. She groped for the switch of the small table lamp and turned it. For a second, she held her breath, looking at the other bed. But the sprawling black mop of Min-he’s head was still, and her breathing did not falter. Natasha smiled. This was one of Min-he’s many good qualities as a roommate: she was unfailingly an extremely sound sleeper. Natasha felt a little better in the light (no matter what they had learned as children, the light always helped), but not good enough to try sleeping again. Quietly, Natasha pulled out the drawer of the table between their beds and removed their copy of the book that was present in every sleeproom and office of America-Five, and present (though no one could verify this directly) in every room of every settlement across the whole continent and in the other Alpha-inhabited continents too: the Ethical Code.

  Their copy, according to Min-he, was from the fifth printing, published thirty-one years ago in honor of the Deltas’ birth and revised to fit the conclusions of both the Year 251 and the Year 267 debates. It was a heavy book with a navy cover that had frayed to white at its edges. Natasha ran her fingers over the simple black letters on the front and felt a kind of warmth travel up through her arms. She stood her pillow up against the wall and lay back again, propping the book open on her stomach, and allowing its comforting weight to forcibly slow her breathing. She was not in search of any one particular section; what she needed was a reminder that the chaos of questions that haunted her this night was not hers alone; that these were the same terrors that the Alphas had known since the Pre-Storm times, and the same that the Alphas had pledged to end and would have ended, had it not been for the extra-settlement survivors of the Storm. But one beautiful day—and this was the promise of the Ethical Code, of all labor within the settlement—they would make the world cle
an of horror Outside while, at the same time, their bioreplacement programs would absolutely guarantee eternal life, cell by cell with no end. Then, according to the Alphas, the Day of Expansion would come. And human beings all over the planet would break free from the self-created confines of the settlements, and live again in the open air. Only this time, in this society, human life would look much different than it had before. Because this civilization would not have come about by the haphazard forces of nature and Pre-Storm political history, but rather by the grace of reason, ethics, and science alone. That was the dream, the achievable paradise. Of course, for Natasha, especially in this moment, it felt a long way off.

  Natasha turned to the chapter titled “The Last Unmade Generation,” the history of the Earth in the years before the Storm, and she began to read at random, near the middle of the second page of the chapter.

  In the century leading up to the Storm, the human population had experienced an inflationary rate of growth. The rapid downfall of economic infrastructure across Western Europe, the unification and expansion of central African cities, as well as the organized rejection of fertility regulation policies, all contributed to this effect. In the Americas and eastern European countries, a steady average of 4.28 children per woman during the preceding New Jacobean Era resulted in a population boom concomitant with the first reported losses in worldwide food production, as well as the first criminal reconfigurations of the energy grid. The Era culminated in massive shortages of fresh water and energy, which in turn caused not the dip in population that one might expect, but instead ten years of unprecedented surge. In the year preceding the Storm, 39 percent of the population was under the age of twelve.

  The effects were staggering: men, women, and children starving with no means of bettering their situation, women dying in childbirth at rates unheard of since the beginning of surgical and sterilized medicine, and vast living complexes so unsound in their construction that one in every one hundred deaths was thought to be the result of a building collapse. After millennia of slow improvement, sanitation conditions eroded. Sewage systems backed up and leaked into the already precarious soil and local water sources—leading to the return of many bacterial and viral diseases thought to have disappeared two centuries prior.

  Natasha stopped. Min-he rolled over, still asleep. With a restless flick, Natasha jumped ahead several pages and began reading again.

  A senseless, unethical jungle, that is what the inhabited Earth had become. As unrest and fighting spread, only the extremely resourceful were able to find isolated spots of refuge in what remained of the wild. (Eventually those hideaways would be compromised too, and what survived of them purged with the cities during the Storm.) The farming and ranching industries still produced enough to keep their ventures active, but the food did not travel far, and was heavily guarded. Every storehouse on the continent posted ten armed guards at each door. As for the cities, no outside food ever reached them, the tunnels, bridges, and major arteries having fallen to the power of highly sophisticated pirates.

  By this time, we should remind ourselves, any hope of reviving the Yang political system had gone. And the peaceful society of shared prosperity and shared labor that the Yangs had imagined was irrevocably out of reach. Without communication, without basic infrastructure, the transformations in societal organization could not occur, and everyone felt it. Chaos, fear, and suffering reigned, and the law of violence and strength took over as it had not since pre-Modern times. The Yang members refused to acknowledge their own defeat, a failure which only worsened the already immense suffering of that time and delayed its relief. But change did come, despite the terrible odds against it. Change arrived as an act of will, from people who could not stand by any longer.

  For when the bunkers that housed the Yang political leaders—as well as the power that was synonymous with those bunkers—at last fell into the hands of their natural children, we knew better than to repeat the mistakes of our natural parents. We converted these bunkers into settlements, sealing ourselves off from the death outside. Within this self-destructing world, only your Alphas harbored any positive plans for the future. Only your Alphas did not partake in this terrible march toward extinction. Only your Alphas asked instead: How can we start over? How can we live better than the way we are living now?

  The heaviness in Natasha’s chest gave way a bit. She had always found the Alphas’ tone in this section jarringly and almost humorously self-aggrandizing. They gave scant information about the Yang political group, and yet still managed for several pages to assert their superiority over their predecessors. (On page 284, for example, the Alphas dismissed the Yangs as “fumbling moral philosophers, who, if they were to spot a venomous spider perched on the shoulder of their dearest friend, would not know which creature to save.”) Granted, the Alphas had good reason to feel proud. The members of the Yang party had all died around the time of the Storm, back in Year 0 (the current date in the settlements was Year 305), while the Alphas, who were in many cases the biological children of leading Yang members, had preserved themselves through those dangerous times and, subsequently, had kept themselves alive century after century with the bioreplacement programs of their own invention. The Alphas had also remained overseers of the old Yang bunkers, rescuing the structures from decay and transforming them into the brilliant homes they all lived in today.

  A click came from high over the foot of Natasha’s bed: the circular light above the door was glowing weakly, the first phase in five of the underground dawn. By 0700, it would be shining across the full solar spectrum brightly enough to illuminate every nook and cranny in the room, and with a high-intensity spike at 297 nanometers, enough to warm the flesh and activate a morning burst of vitamin D in the system. Natasha replaced the Ethical Code to its spot in the drawer and crawled out from under her blanket. From the basket beneath her bed she fetched her robe and pulled it snugly over her nightclothes. She tore off her socks, tossing them onto the bed, and slipped her feet into a pair of rubber leisure shoes.

  The hall was empty, as she’d expected, and only one of the ten stalls in the women’s shower room was in use. A warm white steam hung in the air, and the hot damp smell carried with it just a tinge of lavender shampoo. Natasha pushed open the creaky cedar door to the changing stall, and closed the latch behind her. She removed her robe and nightclothes and hung them neatly on the metal hooks. Then she stepped behind the curtain and gave the water some seconds to heat up before moving under it, her chestnut brown hair darkening a shade and becoming wet and heavy on her back.

  As she washed—the pounding warmth relaxing her muscles and sliding down the length of her body—Natasha was careful to keep her lips tightly closed. The water, which came from underground streams and rainwater gathered on the roof, was treated and purified of course, though not with the same attention as the water that went to the kitchens. She turned her face to the spigot and scrubbed her cheeks, nose, and forehead with rapid motions, at last feeling fully awake.

  After Natasha had wrapped herself in her robe again, she left the changing room, expecting to find the shower room empty. The sight of a second reflection in the mirror took her slightly by surprise: the intelligent eyes and black bangs that made a severe line across the forehead, a perfect and striking contrast to the pale, oval face beneath. It was Claudia Kim, the Gamma who worked at the adjacent back cubicle in the Office of Mercy—and one of the last people Natasha felt like seeing right now.

  “Oh,” said Natasha, “I didn’t realize there was still someone here.”

  Claudia sniffed; she laid her hairbrush aside, meeting Natasha’s gaze in the foggy reflection.

  “What did you expect, Alpha treatment? Are we supposed to defer to you, give you privacy?”

  “I’m sorry—what?”

  Claudia turned to face her.

  “Look, we all know that Jeffrey adores you. He’d probably drain his arteries into your bloodstorage b
anks if you asked him to. But you should know that whatever special advantages he’s managed to wrangle for you, you haven’t earned them. You’re a rookie. Your record is average. You’ve done nothing to distinguish yourself among your peers. If it was up to me, you never would have been permitted—” Claudia stopped and shook her head, too full of loathing to continue.

  Been permitted into the Office of Mercy, Natasha was sure she had wanted to say.

  As far as Natasha knew, she and Claudia were not enemies, exactly, but the older woman had made it obvious early on in Natasha’s career that she did not care much for Natasha at all. In general, Natasha tried to ignore it. From what she could tell, Claudia didn’t like anyone who was close with Jeffrey—and so, logically speaking, there hadn’t been any reason for Natasha to take Claudia’s feelings too much to heart. It still hurt Natasha’s confidence, though, and on some days made her more nervous and unhappy at work than she would have been otherwise. But what could Natasha do about that? As for the nature of the original antagonism, the one between Jeffrey and Claudia, Natasha had virtually no understanding of it at all. Both Jeffrey and Claudia were Gammas; they had a history within their own generation that was beyond Natasha’s awareness and general interest. It was not strange that it should be like that. Each generation contained its own nuances of relationships and hierarchies and rivalries that remained largely invisible to those outside—and especially to those farthest removed by age. The Gamma generation had eleven and a half years on the Deltas, and a full nineteen years on the Epsilons.

  “I don’t know what special advantages you’re talking about,” said Natasha, growing more curious by the second to know the cause of Claudia’s anger. “Unless you mean tracking a poor, suffering Tribe man for five hours and watching him die.”

  “Check your mail then.” Claudia sneered. “I hope you’ll be satisfied.”