by Various
“Were the Tribes very frightened when the Storm came?” Natasha remembered asking in their Garden schoolroom, her knees tucked under her chin and her girls’ uniform of pink shirt and white coveralls baggy around her waist.
“Most people did not have time to be afraid,” Teacher Penelope answered. “Just like with the sweeps today, the Storm came too fast for anyone to realize what was happening. They saw the black clouds approaching, and that was it. There were survivors, of course, the ancestors of the people who make up the Tribes today. But even they could not have comprehended the enormity of what was happening. The survivors must have been in hiding already, most likely up in the mountains somewhere. Under no circumstances could they have perceived the full impact of the Storm on the world. But remember everyone,” Teacher Penelope told them firmly, “survivors of the Storm were a very, very rare exception. For the vast majority of people, the Storm was an instantaneous end to a lifetime of suffering. Really, to a whole history of suffering.”
Teacher Penelope paused and looked down from her chair at the little Epsilons sprawled before her in the grass.
“There are some things, children, that even adults cannot imagine. I am a Beta and I cannot imagine it. In the dark times, when the Alphas were your age, before the Storm, there were fifty-nine billion living, breathing human beings inhabiting this tiny Earth.”
“How did they fit in the Dining Halls?” Caroline Churchill whispered.
“There were no Dining Halls. There was not even food or clean water for many, many people. In order to have those things, you needed money. And some people had no money at all.”
“What’s money?” Preston King asked.
“Pieces of paper with faces drawn on them,” Teacher Penelope said. “If you collected enough of them, you could own for yourself—for your own self and nobody else—anything in the world.”
The children had laughed at this idea, but Natasha had not laughed. She was still imagining the black clouds covering the Earth during the Storm and the thought of it had made her cry right there in the middle of the lesson. Teacher Penelope had scolded her and sent her away from the group, and Natasha had sat alone on a bench under the largest oak tree until she could calm down.
Surely Teacher Penelope’s report of that day had found its way to the Alphas, and other incidents too: how Natasha used to have nightmares long after the other children had learned to banish strange visions from their unconscious mind, and how she used to draw pictures not of the beautiful, future Day of Expansion like most children did, but rather of wild animals and long-fanged monsters that positioned themselves just outside the settlement doors.
But even those were nothing compared with Natasha’s worst transgression—the only thing she had ever done to seriously anger her elders. It had happened just weeks before the Epsilons’ tenth birthday. The clock on the maincomputer read a few minutes past the twenty-third hour, and Natasha was being dragged by the elbow toward the Department of Health, on account of a bloody nose. Teacher Robyn was angry; she thought Natasha was guilty of “dirty picking,” which Natasha should know better than to do at her age. Natasha, meanwhile, was holding a handkerchief to her face and doing her best not to fall. Teacher Robyn had not waited long enough for Natasha to find her rubber leisure shoes, and Natasha’s socks kept slipping on the Dome’s marble floor. Natasha would never have seen what she saw (or thought she saw) if not for two things. First, due to the presence of Tribes in the northern mountain ridge, the white floodlights were off in the Dome; leaving only the low, red floorlights to guide their way, and making the Dome windows transparent to the Outside. Second, in order to slow the drip of blood, Natasha had tilted her head way back, causing her to look not at the double doors to which she was headed, but at the first row of honeycomb windows just above the Dome’s circular base.
She and Teacher Robyn were about twenty paces from the Department of Health when Natasha saw them: three ghostly faces peering through the glass, two men and a woman, their pale heads floating like impossible little moons, swags of dirty fabric wrapped around their necks, and their eyes fixed directly on her. Natasha screamed. She screamed and threw her weight back, making Teacher Robyn trip to her knees and cry out in surprise. Blood poured over Natasha’s lips and hotly to the bib of her nightgown. The faces disappeared but she screamed and thrashed to get away, back to the elephant, and eventually it took three full-grown Gamma men to restrain her.
In the following days, certain Betas and Gammas had given Natasha many logical explanations for the faces: that she, Natasha, had been semiunconscious, still dreaming; that holding her head back too far had overstrained her windpipe, reducing the flow of oxygen into her bloodstream and making her brain go just a little foggy. They sat her down in the Archives and showed her surveillance images of the green inner lawn on that night. Nothing. No one. But Natasha would not change her story, and her elders went from being sympathetic to being annoyed. They suspended her for three days from her Epsilon group on account of her promoting illogic, and her teachers told her how disappointed they were until Natasha’s anger had transformed to a dull ache in her chest.
Eight years later, when Natasha applied to work in the Office of Mercy, her past came back to haunt her. The Department of Government had held her application five days past the usual timeline, despite Natasha’s ranking third in her class and scoring a 97 percent on the Office of Mercy entrance exam. She could not be sure, but she believed that Jeffrey had vouched for her. He had visited their Epsilon group a few times as a volunteer teacher, and he had always paid a little extra attention to her. Not overtly, nothing that the other children would notice, but in the way he stood still and listened to her when she gave an answer and how once, when she was very little, he had put his hand on top of her head and kept it there, as if to say, Out of all the sixty-two Epsilons, you are special.
The metallic clang of a chair leg striking the cubicle announced the arrival of Natasha’s fellow Epsilon team member—twelve minutes late for his afternoonshift. As a conciliatory gesture, he had brought Natasha a mug of coffee, which he set down beside the feeler-cube in which Natasha’s fingers danced, controlling the computer.
“You should see it out there in the Dome,” Eric said, looping his audioset around his neck and rolling back in his chair. “The Alphas finally posted the sweep. Everyone’s cheering around the maincomputer. Hey, you weren’t in the Office for it, were you?”
“Nope,” said Natasha, taking a break to sip the hot coffee. “Wave One Defense in the Dome. Jeffrey did the sweep himself.”
“Well, that’s still better than me. I was on ammo support with your roommate.”
“We’re back to tracking Pines, did you check your instructions yet?”
“I am right now. Mother, I was hoping to monitor the Crane sweep site.”
“Claudia’s team got the assignment, I think,” said Natasha, savoring a few more sips, then setting the mug aside. “But Arthur says it’s clean. There’s nothing to see.”
“Exactly,” said Eric, letting forth a mighty yawn. “By the way, I was browsing the America Boards this morning. Did you know we’re ahead of America-Forty-seven now? Way ahead of America-Six.”
“Are we really?”
Natasha flicked her pinky finger in the feeler cube, drawing up the Extra-Settlement connection. This was the single feed used for communication with the other American settlements, the 158 Dome-capped structures stretching from ocean to ocean, all along latitude 39 degrees North. Besides weather warnings and announcements of new generations, the America Boards served almost exclusively to keep track of the sweeps. One of the programmers in a central settlement had set up a ranking system, where settlements could self-report the number of Tribespeople swept. Officially, the Alphas in America-Five did not approve of this program—though they had never made a rule against it either. America-Five usually ranked very high, in part because they were the easternmost settlement (Americas One through Four had been tragically lo
st during the Storm, when the ocean surged miles inland, in defiance of all computer models and calculations). America-Five, therefore, intercepted most of the fishing Tribes traveling down the coast. Tribes, in other words, like the Cranes.
The top rankings on the board read as follows:
America-158 147,011
America-5 146,987
America-47 146,935
America-6 143,002
“Check out the total count now,” Eric said, looking over Natasha’s shoulder.
Natasha scrolled down. The total count, the number of human beings on the North American continent granted mercy since the Storm, was 8,300,019.
“That’s something, isn’t it?” Eric said. “We’re the ones to push it over 8.3 million. Mother,” he said in a hushed voice, “all those people.”
There was something in Eric’s tone that Natasha had detected before, a note of giddy self-satisfaction that Jeffrey would have reprimanded him for, had he been here.
“I saw Jeffrey this morning,” Natasha said, reminded of her earlier conversation. “He’s meeting with the Alphas right now about putting together a Recovery team. It’s supposed to go out as soon as we sweep the Pines. Or at least as soon as the Pines are out of the field.”
“I wouldn’t mind being a part of that. Too bad we’re Epsilons.”
“Actually, Jeffrey said he’d bring my name up to the Alphas.”
“What?” Eric cried. A few people glanced over from nearby cubicles, though when they saw it was only Eric talking, they quickly lost interest. “I logged just as many hours as you this quarter,” he continued. “Plus I was the one to correct the count to 437 when that female gave birth. If you’re getting on that team, then so am I.”
“The Alphas probably won’t clear it. Like you said, we’re Epsilons.” Natasha was backtracking quickly, but Eric waved her off, shaking his head. “Take it up with Jeffrey then,” Natasha said, very sorry that she had confided in him. She should have known better. Eric was quick and smart at his work, but famously immature.
“You bet I will. And Arthur too. How come you were on Wave One Defense last night and I got supplies? Playing favorites.”
“Eric,” she snapped. “We rotate through those positions. Next alarm, I’ll probably be four levels underground—”
A new shape on the screen caught Natasha’s eye while, at the same time, Eric’s face widened from an expression of self-absorbed petulance to one of genuine shock.
Natasha whirled around and looked at the screen. “Oh, no,” she moaned.
The IR map burned with a fourth orb of radiating life, one much larger than the men. Natasha knew at once what she was seeing: bear. So that’s what the three Pines had been after. Natasha switched to visual. The men stood on a rocky patch of ground, partly walled off by a sharp rise of stone. They looked terrified, taut and still to the point of being inhuman. Their shoulders tilted toward the same shadowy place, and then the bear came into view—its big round body half obscured by a leafy tree in the foreground. The beast got up on its two hind legs, snapped its jaw, and fell heavily down again with a soundless bellow. The tallest of the men, the beautiful one, stood before the animal, his spear raised and his sandaled feet shuffling as if searching out some magical position that would give him the strength to make his kill. To his right was a round-faced curly-haired man and, to his left, a man with narrow features and spiraling black tattoos up each arm. Natasha fumbled for the switch on her audioset. She inhaled a breath. The Wall rose up in her mind, blocking interfering feelings of Misplaced Empathy behind it.
“What is it?” sounded Arthur’s voice in her ear. “They’re nearing the Crane sweep site?”
“No. Bring up sensor MC30.”
“Ah,” said Arthur, with dawning understanding. “They must have gotten desperate. Or arrogant. They’re hard to understand, these guys.”
“Look!” Natasha interrupted.
The beautiful man had launched himself forward and pierced the bear through the thick fur of its shoulder. Soundlessly, the beast roared, rolling its head on its muscular neck. “Poor bear,” whispered Natasha, recognizing the perversity of the kill-or-be-killed Outside in a distant sort of way. But then—two seconds later—it was not “poor bear” at all. The blow did not have enough force behind it; the spear unstuck from the flesh as the bear lashed out, enraged. With one sudden swipe, the bear caught the tattooed man in the chest. The man’s face turned to the side and he staggered. His legs crossed over themselves and he fell.
“Arthur!” Natasha said. She could feel Eric breathing hard at her side. She was already drawing up the command box for launching a nova. Her thoughts from that morning, her doubt about the goodness of sweeps, dissolved in the face of this singular instance of terrible suffering. “We have to do something. A G4. They’re twenty miles from camp. No one would see.”
In certain, very rare situations, when the suffering was especially awful, the Office of Mercy broke its own rules: it allowed for one group to be swept separately from the rest of their Tribe. In a case like this, it would only take a tiny, compact explosion. Four bodies, all within a radius of ten feet. The yellow box flashed before her, asking for the clearance code to access the nova launch program. She waited, wishing that Jeffrey were here to watch for mistakes, to make sure that their next moves proceeded correctly. She could do no more herself. Only Arthur and certain teamleaders had access to the nova controls. On the screen, the tattooed man twitched once, as if wanting to bring his knees to his chest. The curly-haired man was waving his arms and jumping, trying to scare the bear away. The beautiful man lurched forward ineffectually, reaching for his spear. It could not be allowed to continue, no, they must wipe it out now.
“Father of races, put them out of their misery,” whispered Eric.
The audioset crackled. “We can’t sweep,” Arthur said, with an air of finality.
“But they’re far enough from the camp!” Natasha cried. “I’m looking at the map right now!”
An echoing in her ear signaled to Natasha that their feed was now public. Likely her computer images were public too, up on the big screen. The Office of Mercy had become very quiet.
“It’s not an issue of other Pines observing the blast,” Arthur said. “We believe that the curly-haired man is their chief. The other two men are leaders in the Tribe. If we sweep them, the rest of the Tribe will go nuts. They’ll fan out looking for them, a worse scatter than what we observed with the Cranes.” He paused, breathing heavily into the speaker. “If you think the Pines are hard to sweep now, well, annihilating these three would make it impossible.”
A flash came in Natasha’s mind: the Wall disappeared and in its place was a bright conflagration, her own dread and terror at the sight before her. This evil, this death. Her feelings for the tattooed man and the two hunters forced to witness his pain reached such a state of intensity that Natasha was no longer feeling for them but with them. Suffering what they suffered. Only another small but well-trained part of her mind comprehended that she was being unethical; that she must overcome this passionate burst of Misplaced Empathy in order to do what was right. Natasha was good at controlling her thoughts, when she chose to. She had turned on and off, at will, whole regions of her brain during the Office of Mercy entrance exam, and she had the bioscans that proved it. Natasha gripped the edge of the desk. She looked at the man again, only now with the tether of instinct-driven feeling cut off. Then the tattooed man was receding from her, and existing, now, at a faraway distance. Instead of seeing a reflection of her own fears and her own sadness in his image, Natasha saw a stark human figure, solitary and small in the universe. The Wall had returned, and Natasha’s mind was clear to make the most rational decision. She would, as Arthur was urging, act in such a way as to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
“Got it,” she said. She closed the program, her hand trembling ever so slightly as she did.
Out in the forest, forty miles from the Office of
Mercy, the Pines fought for their lives. The beautiful man retrieved his spear, and they battled the bear over the body of the tattooed man until their legs moved sluggishly and their weapons circled in tired arcs. The bear was injured, but angry too. The tattooed man lay still. His lacerations were not visible to them in the settlement, but a pool of dark blood was thickening beneath his body, seeping slowly into the earth.
“It’s horrible,” said Eric.
Natasha understood his revulsion but understood better the necessity of their restraint. Her mind remained focused; her years of training were serving her well. Instead of wishing for Jeffrey’s help, she thought now that he would be proud of her for keeping so calm.
Arthur was addressing the group: “This is one of those unfortunate cases in which deferring the present suffering would lead to more pain in the future….”
With a click, Natasha switched from visible to IR feed. The red streak of life that had once marked the tattooed man had lightened to pink. The other two men began creeping away from the bear, into the forest. Twice they made quick changes of direction, last-ditch efforts to retrieve their third, but soon they retreated and took off at a jog. Meanwhile the pink gave way to orangey-yellow and the fringes softened. By the time the bear returned to inspect and gnaw at its kill, the smear of life was a warm tan. Then the only color was the burning red orb of the bear; the tattooed man had faded into the grayscale shapes of the forest.
“He’s dead,” said Natasha, aware that everyone in the Office and maybe even the Alphas could hear her. “Permission to change the count?”
“Permission granted,” said Arthur.
She pulled up the Pines’ profile and deleted the count of the living. Then she reentered the number: 436.
Lara Elena Donnelly became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “The Witches of Athens” in Strange Horizons (Oct. 2013), edited by Brit Mandelo, Julia Rios, and An Owomoyela.