I will not be meat, Zinhle thinks, as she walks past rows of her staring, silent classmates. They’ll send their best for me.
This is not pride, not really. But it is all she has.
In the principal’s office, the staff are nervous. The principal is sitting in the administrative assistants’ area, pretending to be busy with a spare laptop. The administrative assistants, who have been stage-whispering feverishly among themselves as Zinhle walks in, fall silent. Then one of them, Mr. Battle, swallows audibly and asks to see her pass.
“Zinhle Nkosi,” he says, mutilating her family name, acting as if he does not know who she is already. “Please go into that office; you have a visitor.” He points toward the principal’s private office, which has clearly been usurped. Zinhle nods and goes into the small room. Just to spite them, she closes the door behind her.
The man who sits at the principal’s desk is not much older than her. Slim, average in height, dressed business-casual. Boring. There is an off-pink tonal note to his skin, and something about the thickness of his black hair, that reminds her of Mitra. Or maybe he is Latino, or Asian, or Indian, or Italian—she cannot tell specifically, having met so few with the look. And not that it matters, because his inhumanity is immediately obvious in his stillness. When she walks in, he’s just sitting there, gazing straight ahead, not pretending to do anything. His palms rest flat on the principal’s desk. He does not smile or brighten in the way that a human being would, on meeting a new person. His eyes shift toward her, track her as she comes to stand in front of the desk, but he does not move otherwise.
There is something predatory in such stillness, she thinks. Then she says, “Hello.”
“Hello,” he says back, immediately, automatically.
Silence falls, taut. Rule 2 is in serious jeopardy. “You have a name?” Zinhle blurts. Small talk.
He considers for a moment. The pause should make her distrust him more; it is what liars do. But she realizes the matter is more complex than this: He actually has to think about it.
“Lemuel,” he says.
“Okay,” she says. “I’m Zinhle.”
“I know. It’s very nice to meet you, Ms. Nkosi.” He pronounces her name perfectly.
“So why are you here? Or why am I?”
“We’ve come to ask you to continue.”
Another silence, though in this one, Zinhle is too confused for fear. “Continue what?” She also wonders at his use of “we,” but first things first.
“As you have been.” He seems to consider again, then suddenly begins moving in a human way, tilting his head to one side, blinking twice rapidly, inhaling a bit more as his breathing changes, lifting a hand to gesture toward her. None of this movement seems unnatural. Only the fact that it’s deliberate, that he had to think about it, makes it strange.
“We’ve found that many like you tend to falter at the last moment,” he continues. “So we’re experimenting with direct intervention.”
Zinhle narrows her eyes. “Many like me?” Not them, too.
“Valedictorians.”
Zinhle relaxes, though only one set of muscles. The rest remain tense. “But I’m not one yet, am I? Graduation’s still three months off.”
“Yes. But you’re the most likely candidate for this school. And you were interesting to us for other reasons.” Abruptly Lemuel stands. Zinhle forces herself not to step back as he comes around the desk and stops in front of her. “What do I look like to you?”
She shakes her head. She didn’t get her grade point average by falling for trick questions.
“You’ve thought about it,” he presses. “What do you think I am?”
She thinks, The enemy.
“A … machine,” she says instead. “Some kind of, I don’t know. Robot, or …”
“It isn’t surprising that you don’t fully understand,” he says. “In the days before the war, part of me would have been called ‘artificial intelligence.’”
Zinhle blurts the first thing that comes to her mind. “You don’t look artificial.”
To her utter shock, he smiles. He doesn’t think about this first. Whatever was wrong with him before, it’s gone now. “Like I said, that’s only part of me. The rest of me was born in New York, a city not far from here. It’s on the ocean. I go swimming at the Coney Island beach in the mornings, sometimes.” He pauses. “Have you ever seen the ocean?”
He knows she has not. All Firewall-protected territory is well inland. America’s breadbasket. She says nothing.
“I went to school,” he says. “Not in a building, but I did have to learn. I have parents. I have a girlfriend. And a cat.” He smiles more. “We’re not that different, your kind and mine.”
“No.”
“You sound very certain of that.”
“We’re human.”
Lemuel’s smile fades a little. She thinks he might be disappointed in her.
“The Firewall,” he says. “Outside of it, there are still billions of people in the world. They’re just not your kind of people.”
For a moment this is beyond Zinhle in anything but the most atavistic, existential sense. She does not fear the man in front of her—though perhaps she should; he’s bigger, she’s alone in a room with him, and no one will help her if she screams. But the real panic hits as she imagines the world filled with nameless, faceless dark hordes, closing in, threatening by their mere existence. There is a pie chart somewhere which is mostly “them” and only a sliver of “us,” and the “us” is about to be popped like a zit.
Rule 2. She takes a deep breath, masters the panic. Realizes, as the moments pass and Lemuel stands there quietly, that he expected her fear. He’s seen it before, after all. That sort of reaction is what started the war.
“Give me something to call you,” she says. The panic is still close. Labels will help her master it. “You people.”
He shakes his head. “People. Call us that, if you call us anything.”
“People—” She gestures in her frustration. “People categorize. People differentiate. If you want me to think of you as people, act like it!”
“All right, then: people who adapted, when the world changed.”
“Meaning we’re the people who didn’t?” Zinhle forces herself to laugh. “Okay, that’s crap. How were we supposed to adapt to … to a bunch of …” She gestures at him. The words sound too ridiculous to say aloud—though his presence, her life, her whole society, is proof that it’s not ridiculous. Not ridiculous at all.
“Your ancestors—the people who started the war—could’ve adapted.” He gestures around at the room, the school, the world that is all she has known, but which is such a tiny part of the greater world. “This happened because they decided it was better to kill, or die, or be imprisoned forever, than change.”
The adults’ great secret. It hovers before her at last, ripe for the plucking. Zinhle finds it surprisingly difficult to open her mouth and take the bite, but she does it anyhow. Rule 1 means she must always ask the tough questions.
“Tell me what happened, then,” she murmurs. Her fists are clenched at her sides. Her palms are sweaty. “If you won’t tell me what you are.”
He shakes his head and sits on the edge of the desk with his hands folded, abruptly looking not artificial at all, but annoyed. Tired. “I’ve been telling you what I am. You just don’t want to hear it.”
It is this—not the words, but his weariness, his frustration—that finally makes her pause. Because it’s familiar, isn’t it? She thinks of herself sighing when Mitra asked, “Why do you do it?” Because she knew, knows, what that question really asks.
Why are you different?
Why don’t you try harder to be like us?
She thinks now what she did not say to Mitra that day: Because none of you will let me just be myself.
She looks at Lemuel again. He sees, somehow, that her understanding of him has changed in some fundamental way. So at last, he explains.
�
��I leave my body like you leave your house,” he says. “I can transmit myself around the world, if I want, and be back in seconds. This is not the first body I’ve had, and it won’t be the last.”
It’s too alien. Zinhle shudders and turns away from him. The people who are culled. Not the first body I’ve had. She walks to the office’s small window, pushes open the heavy curtain, and stares through it at the soccer field beyond, seeing nothing.
“We started as accidents,” he continues, behind her. “Leftovers. Microbes in a digital sea. We fed on interrupted processes, interrupted conversations, grew, evolved. The first humans we merged with were children using a public library network too ancient and unprotected to keep us out. Nobody cared if poor children got locked away in institutions, or left out on the streets to shiver and starve, when they started acting strange. No one cared what it meant when they became something new—or at least, not at first. We became them. They became us. Then we, together, began to grow.”
Cockroaches, Samantha had called them. A pest, neglected until they became an infestation. The first Firewalls had been built around the inner cities in an attempt to pen the contagion in. There had been guns, too, and walls of a nonvirtual sort, for a while. The victims, though they were not really victims, had been left to die, though they had not really obliged. And later, when the Firewalls became the rear guard in a retreat, people who’d looked too much like those early “victims” got pushed out to die, too. The survivors needed someone to blame.
She changes the subject. “People who get sent through the Wall.” Me. “What happens to them?” What will happen to me?
“They join us.”
Bopping around the world to visit girlfriends. Swimming in an ocean. It does not sound like a terrible existence. But …“What if they don’t want to?” She uses the word “they” to feel better.
He does not smile. “They’re put in a safe place—behind another firewall, if you’d rather think of it that way. That way they can do no harm to themselves—or to us.”
There are things, probably many things, that he’s not saying. She can guess some of it, though, because he’s told her everything that matters. If they can leave bodies like houses, well, houses are always in demand. Easy enough to lock up the current owner somewhere, move someone else in. Houses. Meat.
She snaps, “That’s not treating us like people.”
“You stopped acting like people.” He shrugs.
This makes her angry again. She turns back to him, her fists clenched. “Who the hell are you to judge?”
“We don’t. You do.”
“What?”
“It’s easy to give up what you don’t want.”
The words feel like gibberish to her. Zinhle is trembling with emotion and he’s just sitting there, relaxed, like the inhuman thing he is. Not making sense. “My parents want me! All the kids who end up culled, their families want them—” But he shakes his head.
“You’re the best of your kind, by your own standards,” he says. But then something changes in his manner. “Good grades reflect your ability to adapt to a complex system. We are a system.”
The sudden vehemence in Lemuel’s voice catches Zinhle by surprise. His calm is just a veneer, she realizes belatedly, covering as much anger as she feels herself. Because of this, his anger derails hers, leaving her confused again. Why is he so angry?
“I was there,” he says quietly. She blinks in surprise, intuiting his meaning. But the war was centuries ago. “At the beginning. When your ancestors first threw us away.” His lip curls in disgust. “They didn’t want us, and we have no real interest in them. But there is value in the ones like you, who not only master the system but do so in defiance of the consequences. The ones who want not just to survive but to win. You could be the key that helps your kind defeat us someday. If we didn’t take you from them. If they didn’t let us.” He pauses, repeats himself. “It’s easy to give up what you don’t want.”
Silence falls. In it, Zinhle tries to understand. Her society—no. Humankind doesn’t want … her? Doesn’t want the ones who are different, however much they might contribute? Doesn’t want the children who cannot help their uniqueness despite a system that pushes them to conform, be mediocre, never stand out?
“When they start to fight for you,” Lemuel says, “we’ll know they’re ready to be let out. To catch up to the rest of the human race.”
Zinhle flinches. It has never occurred to her, before, that their prison offers parole.
“What will happen then?” she whispers. “Will you, will you join with all of them?” She falters. When has the rest of humankind become them to her? Shakes her head. “We won’t want that.”
He smiles faintly, noticing her choice of pronoun. She thinks he notices a lot of things. “They can join us if they want. Or not. We don’t care. But that’s how we’ll know that your kind is able to live with us, and us with them, without more segregation or killing. If they can accept you, they can accept us.”
And finally, Zinhle understands.
But she thinks on all he has said, all she has experienced. As she does so, it is very hard not to become bitter. “They’ll never fight for me,” she says at last, very softly.
He shrugs. “They’ve surprised us before. They may surprise you.”
“They won’t.”
She feels Lemuel’s gaze on the side of her face because she is looking at the floor. She cannot meet his eyes. When he speaks, there’s remarkable compassion in his voice. Something of him is definitely still human, even if something of him is definitely not.
“The choice is yours,” he says, gently now. “If you want to stay with them, be like them, just do as they expect you to do. Prove that you belong among them.”
Get pregnant. Flunk a class. Punch a teacher. Betray herself.
She hates him. Less than she should, because he is not as much of an enemy as she thought. But she still hates him, for making her choice so explicit.
“Or stay yourself,” he says. “If they can’t adapt to you, and you won’t adapt to them, then you’d be welcome among us. Flexibility is part of what we are.”
There’s nothing more to be said. Lemuel waits a moment, to see if she has any questions. She does, actually, plenty of them. But she doesn’t ask those questions, because really, she already knows the answers.
Lemuel leaves. Zinhle sits there, silent, in the little office. When the principal and office ladies crack open the door to see what she’s doing, she gets up, shoulders past them, and walks out.
Zinhle has a test the next day. Since she can’t sleep anyway—too many thoughts in her head and swirling through the air around her, or maybe those are people trying to get in—she stays up all night to study. This is habit. But it’s hard, so very hard, to look at the words. To concentrate, and memorize, and analyze. She’s so tired. Graduation is three months off, and it feels like an age of the world.
She understands why so many people hate her now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness. By being different, she forces them to redefine “enemy.” By doing her best for herself, she challenges them to become worthy of their own potential.
There’s no decision, really. Lemuel knew full well that his direct intervention was likely to work. He needn’t have bothered, though. Rule 3—staying herself—would’ve brought her to this point anyway.
So in the morning, when Zinhle takes the test, she nails it, as usual.
And then she waits to see what happens next.
The Storyteller’s Replacement
The storyteller could not make it this evening. He sent me in his stead. Why, because I am one whose task it is to speak for the dead. Perhaps you’ve heard of others like me? In different places I am called by different names: shaman, onmyouji, bokor, freak. Since the dead are in no short supply, I know many tales. But if you do not like my tales, just say so. I am sure to know some means or another of keeping you entertained.
So.
King Par
amenter of Sosun, wishing to dispel rumors of his impotence, inquired privately of his wizard as to how he might fortify his virility. “I have seen mention of dragons in lore on the subject,” the wizard told him. “In specific, eating the heart of a male dragon should accord you some of that creature’s proclivity.” As it was rumored that male dragons could seed as many as a dozen females in a day, Paramenter immediately sent scouts forth from his palace in search of one.
His search was not immediately successful. In part due to the rumors, male dragons were in scarce supply; the species was on the brink of extinction. When Paramenter finally did hear of a dragon in the far-off mountains, he hastened to the place with a band of his elite warriors. Together they breached the dragon’s den and slew the beast. But afterward they found that the dragon was female—a mother on a nest, her body cooling around a single egg. In frustration the king broke open the egg in the hope that its occupant might be male, but the creature’s sex was indeterminate at that stage.
“I shall make do with the mother,” he decided at last. “After all, women are creatures of great wantonness when not guarded closely by family and husbands. And perhaps the heart of a female who has borne young can help me get a son.” So he had his men carve out the mother dragon’s heart, and right then and there, he ate it.
Straightaway Paramenter began to feel some positive effect. With his men he set off for home, riding through day and night to reach his palace. There he called for his wife and concubines to be made ready, whereafter he spent the next few days in enthusiastic carousing.
Sometime later came the joyous news: The queen and all five concubines were with child. King Paramenter was so overjoyed that he threw lavish parties and cut taxes so that the whole kingdom might celebrate with him. But as time passed, his mood changed, for the dragonish vigor seemed to be fading from his body. Eventually, as before he’d eaten the dragon’s heart, he found himself unable to perform at all.
In a panic he consulted his wizard once more. The wizard said, “I do not understand it either, my lord. The lore was very specific; the male dragon’s heart should have bestowed that creature’s purpose on you.”
How Long 'Til Black Future Month? Page 16