by Various
“You look like you’ve seen better mornings,” Jeffrey said to her now, his voice hoarse but upbeat. He moved his chair closer to hers, so that their thighs were only inches apart, causing a Gamma teamleader named Claudia Kim to glare at them from the adjacent cubicle. “What’s the matter, didn’t get much sleep last night?”
“Nice work,” Natasha said with a smile. “You don’t even need the rest of us. You could probably run this whole Office yourself.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Jeffrey said, quick to temper the compliment. “Did Arthur tell you? It was pretty intense there at the end. The kids were so amped up about the deer and the men coming home. I kept thinking that a couple of them might run off into the water and I’d miss them and launch the nova too soon. That’s my biggest fear. That one of them will survive the sweep and lie there mangled and terrified before we can get to them.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, which were red and heavy with exhaustion. “You should see me, sometimes,” he added with a short laugh. “I go a little nuts over it. I’m always calling it up in the Pretends.”
“But it was clean,” Natasha said reassuringly.
“It was clean.” Jeffrey put his glasses back on. “Are you all right?” he asked more quietly, so that no one at the other cubicles would hear. “I’ve been thinking about you. Wondering what you make of all this.”
For a moment, Natasha prepared to lie, to give him the easy answer she knew he hoped for instead of the truth. But then she stopped. If she had any desire to confess just a little of what she was feeling, her chance was now. Jeffrey would never report her to Arthur or to the Alphas. Unlike most people in the settlement, he did not consider the doctrines of the Ethical Code glaringly self-evident. He believed in them, of course, and lived by their word. But he also felt (and had told Natasha as much) that questioning and analyzing one’s own ethical feelings were essential practices for understanding. Every great ethical thinker, he had told her once, has struggled with or even doubted the laws that the settlement holds most dear. Besides all this, Natasha simply felt good after talking to Jeffrey, and she was desperate for that reassurance now. He would listen to her. He would be curious to hear what she had to say. Not once in all of Natasha’s life had Jeffrey ever judged her or reprimanded her for admitting her honest thoughts, no matter how silly those same ideas seemed to Natasha in retrospect, or how well they fit with the Ethical Code.
“I had this weird feeling last night,” she said softly, the memory of the blacked-out Dome hovering in her mind. “Like I didn’t want the sweep to happen.”
“What do you mean?” Jeffrey asked. “You wanted the lives of the Tribespeople prolonged?”
“Yes, I guess so.” She looked at him pleadingly. “It just feels so empty now, the place where they were all alive yesterday. I don’t know how to describe it. It leaves a gap in my stomach. It makes me feel bad.”
“You remember how they looked,” Jeffrey urged. “Like corpses, practically.”
“I know, I know.” She could see them in her mind’s eye: the skeletal faces, the backbones curved at awkward, uncomfortable angles as the women and old men shuffled through the sand, the babies who writhed and then went still from sheer lack of energy. They had been watching the Cranes for nearly a month now—from mid-June until this morning, the twelfth of July—watching their bodies shrink and their faces grow long and hollow.
“It’s better now,” Jeffrey said. “Better nonexistence than pain.”
But it wasn’t helping. Natasha was willing herself not to cry.
“What did they look like,” she asked, to change the subject, “when they realized the men were alive?”
Jeffrey hesitated. “They were… overjoyed.”
“And did they eat the deer?”
“No, we swept them while the first chunks of meat were still cooking.”
“Oh.”
Natasha could not help but feel disappointed. She and Jeffrey had been on shift together when the Crane hunters and the second group of young men had reunited and made the kills. They had watched the hunt play out on the sensors and it had given Natasha such a thrill to see it, she had almost forgotten to pity the deer.
“We couldn’t have let it go a second longer, Natasha,” Jeffrey said, as if reading her thoughts. “Besides, the food wouldn’t have brought them as much enjoyment as you’d think. They probably would have gorged themselves. Their bodies wouldn’t have been able to handle that much protein at once. They would have eaten too fast. It would have made them sick. In this case, anticipation of the meal was much preferable to the fulfillment itself. The smells, the sight. It shouldn’t matter, ethically speaking, but the Cranes did leave existence at the moment of highest pleasure.”
“I wish I could have been there for it,” Natasha said. “Maybe seeing the sweep would have made it feel different.”
“There’s still the Pines.”
“Yeah, right. We’ll never get them. I bet they cross the southern perimeter by the end of the week and we never see them again.”
The computer beeped and Natasha turned to enter her username and password: NWiley, Waverider4. She could feel Jeffrey’s attention on her, a different kind of attention from what he’d showed her when she’d first walked in, and an attention that made her just slightly uncomfortable. Sometimes Min-he interrogated Natasha about Jeffrey, insisting that Jeffrey had lustful and maybe even fully empathetic and loving feelings for her, but Natasha would vehemently deny it. She and Jeffrey shared an interest in the Outside, she would tell Min-he. They worked on the same four-person team, and that was all. Privately, of course, if Natasha was being completely honest with herself, she did often feel something between her and Jeffrey: an attraction at once bodily and also deeply rooted in the mind, which Natasha had not experienced with any of her past Epsilon boyfriends when stealing kisses or sneaking quick embraces under the covers in their old dormitory. And yet, as all the citizens did with their feelings from time to time, Natasha forced her attraction to Jeffrey behind a Wall.
Even if Min-he was right, Natasha knew, even if Jeffrey did like her, he would never act on those feelings, not in the real world. Another man would have, perhaps, but not Jeffrey, who was always striving for a purely depersonalized, universal perspective, and who would never consciously allow the pursuit of his own happiness to interfere with the chance of living a fully ethical life. Because what were the fleeting highs of romance and love (Natasha could almost imagine him saying) compared with the exaltation of creating a pain-free and carefully maintained paradise here on Earth? What was an obsessive commitment to one individual compared with committing oneself to the whole humankind? Jeffrey also took very seriously the Alphas’ boast that all emotional and physical needs could be met within the bounds of a person’s everyday work and leisure activities. For companionship, the citizens should find fulfillment among the members of their own generation and the people they worked with. For physical pleasure, they had the Pretends.
Of course, the majority of citizens did not follow the Alpha guidelines too strictly. People often met up for covert encounters with various favorites, and Natasha herself had never found such acts detrimental to a capacity for ethical thinking. Not that her opinion was based on any very recent experiences. For the last couple of years, Natasha had been slowly straying from these kinds of brief partnerings—with the exception of what she did in the Pretends. She attributed this change in herself to moving out of the old Epsilon living quarters and focusing on her career. And not, as Min-he would have done, to a preoccupation with a certain unobtainable coworker. As for actually romantically committing herself to one single person one day, even Natasha felt that was a long shot. Some people did it. There was an entire hallway of couples’ sleeprooms on level one, with double-sized mattresses and bed frames and a table and lamp on each side. In general, though, those sleeprooms were never in high demand. Solitude was hard to come by in America-Five, and the citizens didn’t relinquish it easily. Th
e single rooms, for instance, had a waiting list of nine years.
At last, Natasha finished uploading the necessary coordinates and found the three Pine men whom she would track for the day. She could not get a good visual—only a limb here or there, the foliage was too dense—so she chose the infrared (or “IR”) option. Three red streaks jumped out against the muted background. For now, at least, the men appeared to be stationary.
“You know,” Jeffrey said, “as soon as we take care of the Pines, there’s going to be a Crane Recovery mission. Arthur’s put me in charge. I’m on my way to meet with the Alphas about it right now. They want me to assemble a team within the next few days. The mission can’t happen for a while, of course, not with the Pines crawling all over the field….”
He trailed off as Natasha turned expectantly toward him. Could he be saying what she thought he was saying?
“I was planning to bring up your name at the meeting. The Alphas have the final say, but I can do my best to get you on the team. If you’re interested.”
“Are you serious?”
“Would you want that? This sweep has been hard on you.” He paused, his brow wrinkled. “Maybe it’s too much.”
“But Jeffrey, you know,” she could hardly get the words out. “You know I’ve been dying to see the Outside all my life!”
“Don’t use that word.” Jeffrey’s face had turned as pink as the scars on his scalp. “Don’t say you’ve been dying.”
“Sorry, sorry, I’m just so excited.”
“Well, don’t get too excited. Remember, most people have ten years in the Office before they get assigned to a mission. I only wanted to tell you that I’d give it a try.”
“Yeah, but it’s different if you recommend me.”
On the screen, the three red streaks billowed up and drifted like angry little clouds out of view.
“Mother,” Natasha cursed. She quickly drew up the four sensors clustered in that area: MD19, MD20, MC19, and MC20. She found the Pines in the southeast corner of sensor MC20 and zeroed in on their location.
She turned the sensor to visual feed to confirm that the red streaks were indeed the men, a protocol move during sensor transfers ever since one now infamous Office of Mercy worker had inadvertently switched from tracking people to tracking a herd of wild cows. Through a triangular window in the spidery branches and vine, Natasha caught sight of a thickly muscled, bent human arm passing steadily through the forest. She was about to return to IR when a second movement caught her eye: appearing in the same spot, framed by a halo of jagged leaves, came the sudden and shocking profile of a man with a sharp nose and high, square cheeks. His thick mass of hair reached his shoulders and, as Natasha watched, he tucked one strand behind his ear. A beautiful man, Natasha thought, yes, beautiful was the only word to describe him. He took a step forward and, as he did, he carefully pushed aside a draping frond, almost as if he did not want the delicate thing to tickle his flesh. Maybe it was the lingering effect of having tracked the listless, withered Cranes for the last several weeks, but Natasha found herself stunned by this image of sensitivity and self-command and full-faced, full-muscled health.
“You should probably switch back to IR,” Jeffrey said.
“Oh, right,” said Natasha, flustered. She quickly changed the setting so that the three Pines transformed to red heat on the screen.
“Anyway, I should get going,” said Jeffrey. “I wouldn’t want to keep the Alphas waiting.”
Jeffrey stood, pushing his chair away and stretching his elbows over his head. It was a marker of Jeffrey’s status in the settlement that he did not appear a bit nervous. Anyone else on their way to meet the Alphas would be pacing trenches into the floor, or at least sweating under the arms a little. Jeffrey, however, wore the same cool expression as always. Of course, Natasha thought, as she had thought on many occasions, even the Alphas must respect his intelligence. Jeffrey had simply accomplished too much in the Office of Mercy—developed the new IR sensor technology when the Department of Research had failed, anticipated the mass Tribal migration of Year 278, and swept more Tribespeople than any individual in the settlement—not to be highly esteemed.
“Keep your eyes on those Pines, champ,” Jeffrey said, touching Natasha’s shoulder lightly as he passed behind her. “If they stumble on that Crane sweep site, no one’s going anywhere.”
2.
THE THREE PINES meandered through the lifeless gray background of the IR map, and Natasha—forgoing all previous avowals to stay focused on her work—allowed the dull screen to erupt into a world of colorful possibility: she and a team of citizens venturing to the Outside. If anything could distract her from her mixed feelings about the Crane sweep, or rather, if anything could further complicate those emotions, it was this. If Jeffrey could get her a spot on the team, if Natasha got to see the Outside, it would be the most amazing thing to ever happen to her—yes, she decided, even more amazing than receiving her position in the Office of Mercy. She imagined suiting up in a real, custom-fit biosuit, not the stiff, mass-produced versions they wore during alarms. She imagined passing through the airlock in the Office of Exit, the only passageway into or out of the settlement. All that green. All that sky. And miles and miles of fresh, Post-Storm wilderness to explore, and land that melted away into water, and the ocean that curved to infinity. There would be bumpy, gnarly forest ground beneath her feet, not marble; and wildly growing trees and wild animals and gusts of wind that did not come from a fan. Maybe a bluebird would come and land on her shoulder like they sometimes did in the Pretends. She would get to hike along the beach; sand intrigued her, how it was so soft and loose but sturdy too, when piled up; and waves, her heart fluttered at the thought of ocean waves, those little mountains rising up and disappearing indefatigably, with a calm vigor that put the monstrous backup generator on level nine to shame.
And Jeffrey would be there; Jeffrey would be leading the team. He was the only one in the settlement who talked openly about what the wilderness was like, and Natasha could never get enough of his stories. He had even been to the ocean once, on a sensor repair mission some time before the Epsilon birth, and he had told her (this was years ago, but Natasha remembered it well) that the waves made a sound like pulsing static on a dead sensor feed. He also said—not to be repeated to anyone from the Office of Recreation Engineering—that the Pretends were no substitution for the real sound and sight and full-flesh experience of the Outside.
For the chance to leave the settlement once, only once, and to live that dream with Jeffrey, Natasha was ready to trade two decades of cleanup duty in the Dining Hall. One mission, she was sure, would provide enough wonderment to replace the stuff of her nightmares for years.
Because there was another draw too; another facet of Natasha’s desire to see the Outside that she revealed to no one, often including her own conscious self. Natasha believed—it made no logical sense but still she had believed ever since she was a small child in her upper bunk in the old Epsilon dormitory—that some burning curiosity within her might find relief if she could only get to the Outside. She could not explain why the Outside should have this effect or what exactly was so unsatisfactory about life lived entirely within the settlement. All Natasha could name was a vague feeling that despite the wisdom of the Alphas there yet remained some realm of being that they chose not to access, some ancient truth (There is no truth but the truth that the human mind bestows, the Alphas would say); no, no, but still some inchoate, natural understanding that only the wind could whisper in the listening ear, that only the leaves could describe in their rustling or the ocean waves convey in their white crash and backward swirl.
It was a ridiculous idea. People in ancient times had occasionally thought this way, had put their faith and hope in the natural world, and they had not arrived at any satisfactory method for living, and certainly nothing that rivaled the Ethical Code. Plus, what was of a more practical concern, if anyone knew that Natasha indulged such outrageous fantasies, they woul
d never allow her to work in the Office of Mercy. Natasha, therefore, took care not to reveal the full depth of her unease—except occasionally to Jeffrey. She had extra reason to be glad about her caution now, if she wanted the Alphas to approve her for the mission. Especially (as Natasha thought, with a tinge of regret) given that there was enough in her permanent file working against her already.
Natasha felt confident, proud even, of the work she had done in the last six years in the Office of Mercy. Two awards had come her way, one group award for best four-person team, and one solo award for her work in mapping the migratory patterns of large game animals using data from the satellite sensors. But there were other things, incidents from Natasha’s childhood that signaled a dangerous tendency for unethical thinking. From the ages of six through eleven—before she was old enough to hide it—Natasha had exhibited an overwhelming, even obsessive interest in the Outside; so much so that some of her fellow Epsilons still teased her about it when they got together in the Dining Hall to reminisce about old times.
It was normal, of course, for children to be curious about the Tribes, but Natasha had openly expressed empathetic feelings for them in a way that—in the words of her monthly school reports—completely disregarded historical contextualization, and disregarded the distinctions between her modes of thinking and theirs.