The New World: A Novel

by Chris Adrian

  “Dr. Jane Julia Cotton,” Alice said, “your application is terminated. Congratulations, you are invited for a personal interview on the Polaris Campus in Oviedo, Florida 32788. A Polaris representative will contact you shortly to arrange your appointment. It has been a pleasure conducting your interview. Good luck to you!”

  Everyone in the house promised Jim they’d come to Sondra’s funeral service, though none of them seemed too troubled by her death. “She’d made such progress this time,” Sondra’s social worker had said, tsking over the corpse.

  “Wait, what? This time?” Jim had asked. He’d seen plenty of death in the hospital, but he’d never visited a crime scene. He’d turned away from the horrible gaping wound in Sondra’s neck, from the dull glint of bone deep in the cut, and buried his face in his Alice’s shoulder.

  “This was not her first incarnation,” his Alice said, a little sadly.

  “Or even her second,” said Sondra’s. “Though she stayed with us two weeks longer this time.”

  Alice patted Jim on the head and explained that they would begin the process of waking Sondra again tomorrow. “Don’t be sad,” she said. “It’s not like she’s exploded. Sondra’s connectome endures.”

  She led Jim out of the room, and the three of them went back downstairs to break the news to the others. Heads shook but no one shed a tear, and dinner went on as if nothing of particular note had happened. Jim got very drunk, and moved around the table, gathering rsvps for the funeral service and saying, “Someone has died!” To which the reply was always, “But not really,” and eventually Alice asked him, politely but firmly, to stop saying that, and when he didn’t stop, she escorted him up to bed.

  “But what about the latest part of her?” Jim asked her as she tucked him in. “The part since you woke her up. Isn’t that part dead?”

  “Well,” Alice said thoughtfully, though she looked a little exasperated at the question. “I suppose it is.”

  “But isn’t that terrible?” he asked. “Don’t you think that’s terrible?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not particularly terrible. This iteration of Sondra wished to destroy itself, and now it has got what it wanted. Tomorrow, the iteration of her that wants to live forever will awaken again. What’s terrible about that?” Alice’s smile was so genuine and unconflicted that Jim wondered for a moment before he fell asleep if it wasn’t so terrible after all. But he woke three hours later, sober and ill, to remind himself that at least the latest iteration of Sondra should have a funeral. He turned on his light and walked softly to his desk. Turning his book over and flipping to the end of it, he spoiled page after page with a funeral sermon for his minimally deceased friend.

  The next day was a holiday (which nobody would hear of canceling): a new client had come to the house in the night. Jim asked stupidly if it was Sondra come back again already, but Alice only shook her head. Still, he sneaked out of his room when the social workers told them all to disappear so the new client could have a tour, but all he saw was a head of short dark hair disappearing down the central staircase, followed by a social worker whom he’d never seen before.

  No one volunteered to help with the service. “I like a Viking service best,” Jim said to Alice, “and I think Sondra would have too. Though of course we didn’t talk about it. What do you think?”

  Alice said the manufacture of loveliness was always to be encouraged, but asked him if he really thought a funeral was strictly necessary.

  “Yes!” he said crossly. “It really is!” He calmed down as he set up the chairs outside. He supposed he couldn’t expect Alice to really understand anything about a funeral. They probably didn’t have them anymore, in the future.

  He put the chairs in a semicircle, a safe distance from Sondra’s bier, then made the punch and cake, and reviewed his sermon. He’d hardly ever presided over a formal funeral, though he’d given dozens of little services in the hospital, rituals tailored on the fly to the needs of the survivors gathered around the late person always (even if they had been dying for weeks or months or years) so suddenly and shockingly dead. The mourners usually seemed to him to be waiting for someone to organize their grief, to close the endlessly strange, eternal moment of death enough for them to escape it, however briefly, and leave the bedside and the body and the hospital behind. Not that everybody needed this done for them, but the people who needed it the most seemed never to know to ask for it.

  He laid the hymn he’d chosen down on each chair, weighting each paper with an apple from the orchard so it wouldn’t blow away, and he scattered some apples on the bier (not thinking, until much too late, that along with the applewood fuel they would make Sondra, as she burned, smell a little like dinner) and straightened Sondra’s robe, and moved the chairs back a bit more, and then everything was ready.

  He waited as long as he could stand to before he started. He went inside once to call up the stairs, “Hey, everybody, it’s time!” but he didn’t go knock on any doors. A few of them, including his Alice, came to their windows to look at the fire once it really got going. “My dear friends,” Jim said to the empty chairs, “let us celebrate the life and the memory of an extraordinary human being. Let us celebrate the story of our friend, and hold the meaning of it together, in this moment which we sanctify together in love.” He paused.

  He didn’t ordinarily need notes for a funeral. If he had time, he’d write out an order of service and a sermon, but he didn’t ever read them—they always stuck in his head. Now, though, everything he’d written down so carefully the night before was lost to him, even though he’d been careful not to put it in his book, and been careful not to think of it, as he wrote it, as a story to forget. Nonetheless, that ten-minute story of her life, her fiercely striving, fiercely loving existence, was gone. He could just go upstairs for his notes and read them aloud, but he didn’t want to go inside.

  Instead, he sat on the grass next to the bier, and never-minded the sermon and the absent audience. He just talked to her.

  “Well, my friend,” he said. “I guess it’s time to say goodbye. To this part of you, anyway. I feel that we’ll meet again, though you won’t know me, will you? Maybe, after my Debut, I’ll come back here as a social worker. I wonder if that’s allowed? If anybody but an Alice could do it? I think it would be a good idea. You know, like how in halfway houses the counselors were usually junkies, once upon a time. Which is exactly what makes them good at their job.” He scooted closer to the bier and took an apple from among the wood, polishing it nervously on his shirt.

  “I usually have all sorts of things to say to a dead person,” he told Sondra. “You know, ‘You will be missed. Your life mattered. I could feel the love your family has for you when I walked into the room.’ Half-made-up, of course. But half-true, too. Or true because I believed it, if that makes sense. True for that moment, anyway, because I chose for it to be true, with every death. It’s different when everybody else has left the room. When it’s just you and the body. I have all these lovely one-liners, but I can’t really say them now. I haven’t forgotten them all. I just don’t know what they mean anymore.”

  It was the taste of the apple that made him burst into tears. Of course he had cried during funerals all the time, but it was unprofessional to sob. He knew he couldn’t have looked very dignified, with snot in his mustache and apple bits inside his mouth, but he kept talking anyway. “They should know it, shouldn’t they? They should know back home, back then, that we might be sad too. They should think about how we’re holding funerals too, way out here on the other side of life, for all of them. They should all stop thinking about themselves sometime—it’s so selfish, isn’t it?—and think for a minute about how we’re the ones who are actually alone. About how they left us.” He sat and finished his apple, and then he lit the fire.

  He added his chair to the flames, and then the other chairs too, and then as many vegetables as he could pull out of the earth, tossing them from a distance as the fire burned hotter
and hotter. It was a shame, then, that the others weren’t there, because it would have been nice for everyone to throw a carrot or something on the fire. So he kept an eye on the door into the house, telling himself that his anger toward the others would be undone if just one other person came out to say goodbye to Sondra. Nobody came out, but he could see through the window that they had started to gather in the kitchen. Then, just at the tail end of dusk, a stranger emerged from the orchard, bramble-scratched and sunburned and dehydrated-looking. “Thank goodness for that bonfire!” she said. A tall girl with a pixie haircut, she looked too young and too pretty ever to have died. “I might never have found my way back if I didn’t see it! I’m Olivia. You must be one of my crèchemates!” She stuck out her hand.

  “I suppose I am,” Jim said. “And let me be the first to wish you a happy birthday.”

  “It kind of is my birthday, isn’t it? Something smells delicious. Is that dinner?”

  “Inside,” Jim said. “I think the others are all waiting for you.”

  “That’s awesome,” the girl said, still pumping Jim’s hand and looking all around at the house and the sky and the orchard and the dwindling fire. “This is awesome. Are you coming in too?”

  “Not right now,” Jim said. “I have a lot of work to do.” When Alice called him to dinner a little later, he said he would come when the fire was out, but when the flames had died to nothing, he went inside through a door close to the stairs and went up to his room. There he began to write out all the memories of his wife he had been holding on to in the secret, stupid hope that he would be allowed to carry them along with him into the new world. He quietly and diligently inscribed his love upon the page, pressing firmly as if to pin the words and their feelings to the paper. But since he could still remember what it had been like to want something with his whole heart and know he couldn’t have it, he said to himself, Now it really does feel like being alive again.

  Jane was afraid Brian would meet her at the airport. She didn’t feel ready to see him. But it was a fizzy young lady who met her, holding up a blue Polaris sign with Jane’s name on it. When Jane approached, the girl bowed to her with her fists pressed over her heart. Jane clasped her hands over her stomach and bowed back, not sure of what else to do. Oh, Jim, she thought to herself. How could you not tell me you were joining a cult? “Greetings and salutations!” the girl said. “I’m Poppy.”

  “What a lovely name,” Jane said, pretending to be a nicer version of herself. “I knew a girl named Peony once in grade school. All the boys called her Pee-on-Me, but she didn’t care. I never knew how she could be so gracious and strong but very much later I started to think she was somehow protected by the beauty of her name.”

  “I wasn’t born with it,” Poppy said, very brightly of course, as they waited for Jane’s bag to come out on the carousel. Jane hadn’t dared carry it on with the Kiss inside—Hecuba couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t set off alarms at security—and now Jane was anxious that the bag was lost, or being tampered with. “It’s my Polaris name. It’s what I want them to call me in the future. What’s yours?”

  “I haven’t selected it yet,” Jane said. “And anyway, that might be premature. I’ve got one more interview left.”

  “Oh, the last one’s easy! Alice asks you everything that matters. This is just a formality, really.” She gave Jane a sly smile. “But it’s the most wonderful formality ever. Once I saw campus, I never wanted to leave again. I wanted to go right away, you know. But of course that was impossible.”

  “Of course,” Jane said, trying to sound sad.

  “So I did the next best thing,” Poppy said. “I moved in!”

  “I’m really looking forward to seeing the campus,” Jane said, which was true in its way. She had felt a tremendous pressure of anxiety behind her, building since Alice had congratulated her on becoming a Polaris Novitiate and clearing the way for her to take her final interview and become a member. Within a few days Jane had booked her flight, and Hecuba had sent her to an address deep in Crown Heights. Jane rang the bell of an ordinary-looking brownstone and was handed the envelope through the mail slot by a well-manicured lady’s hand. She never saw a face.

  By her last night at home, the pressure was nearly pushing her out of the house. She said good night to her mother and lay awake with a flavor of insomnia different from the one to which she had grown accustomed in the weeks since Jim had died. She rose every now and then to sniff at the envelope a few times—Hecuba said it was totally harmless to unfrozen, full-bodied human beings. It smelled very strongly of cinnamon and paprika. She spent most of the night quietly dressing in the dark, and gave herself a whole half hour just to sneak down the stairs and out the door. Still, Millicent came down before she’d shut the door, standing like a mad shadow in the dark. Jane put a finger to her lips. Millicent put a finger on the side of her nose. Jane met a cab around the corner with sunrise still two hours away.

  “Oviedo is lovely,” Jane said in the car, which prompted a snort from Poppy.

  “It’s a dump,” she said. “That’s what makes the campus so amazing—you’ll be able to see the pyramid in just a minute.” And soon enough, as they rose up a highway ramp, Jane saw it glinting above the strip malls. “Look at it! We’re still three miles away!” Poppy shouted, rolling down the windows, as if to start savoring the air.

  “It’s quite large!” Jane shouted above the wind.

  “Exactly as big as Cheops!” Poppy said, something Jane knew already from the brochure, but it really was something to see it in person, glassy and enormous amid the Oviedo sprawl. After they parked, Poppy led her to a sunny terrace where two other applicants were waiting on a stainless-steel bench, a married couple named Sally and Bill. “Greeting and salutations!” Poppy said to the pair. Sally and Bill did the Polaris bow, but Jane could only wave feebly. Her other hand was in her pocket, to make sure of the envelope. She took her hand away only to dry it when she was worried her sweaty palms would compromise the fine particulate nature of the Kiss. “Are you ready to spend a few hours in the future?” Poppy asked them all when she’d brought them around to the main entrance. Bill said he was born ready. Sally said she was so excited she was going to explode. Jane said she might explode too. The giant glass doors slid open.

  She supposed it was amazing in there. She still felt the pressure behind her, blowing her toward the dewars, which made it hard to consider very deeply anything that Poppy was saying. Poppy loaded them onto an electric cart and toured the interior of the daylit portion of the pyramid, which receded upward into balconies and catwalks. Poppy was talking about membership services and the R&D section and the Foundation initiatives. The upper pyramid was all about bringing the future into the present, she said, while the inverted lower pyramid (the whole building extended as far under the ground as it did up into the sky) was all about sending the present into the future.

  “But when will we see the dewars?” Jane asked, when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Those amazing dewars,” she added, when Poppy looked at her strangely and didn’t answer.

  “I believe those are last on the tour,” Sally said, holding up the itinerary. Jane had wadded her copy in a sweaty fist.

  “Don’t worry. They’re not going anywhere . . . except into the future!” Poppy said. “And I should tell you,” she said, lowering her voice, “that Brian likes to quiz folks a little on the Foundation activities. So pay attention to all the details!” Jane felt a little thrill of nausea at Brian’s name, and the thought of his actual presence in the building.

  “Pay attention?” Bill said. “Poppy, my dear, I’ve been waiting all my life to hear about this!”

  “Can you believe we’re going to meet Brian?” Sally asked, squeezing Jane’s arm.

  “It’s like a dream come true,” Jane replied.

  They went toodling along the glass-and-steel runways and catwalks and balconies and causeways, Jane feeling more and more like she was on some combination of very slow roller co
aster and living diorama of the future. Futuristically styled, artificial-looking people waved at them from their workstations or work-sponsored recreations, having indoor picnics or doing yoga or playing badminton without a net or racquets. In the future, Poppy told them, Polaris would make Florida the center of the world. Jane, wishing she could say it to Jim, thought very sadly that crazy, ridiculous Florida was already the center of the world.

  At last they had gone all the way up, so then they went all the way down, into the basements and subbasements and sub-subbasements, lit at first with skylights and then with snaking optic cables that carried actual sunlight from tens of thousands of collecting nodes (Poppy said ecstatically) in the glass walls of the pyramid. The basement was full of research; Poppy told them about a vigorous twenty-five-year-old mouse named Methuselah, which she’d fed from her own hand.

  “I think my ears are popping!” said Sally, just as they came to the first of the three dewar chambers.

  “Are you ready?” Poppy whispered reverently, as she keyed a code in the tiny door. “Are you really, really ready for this?” They all nodded hard, even Jane, who, despite the pressure behind her back that she thought might push her right through the steel door before Poppy could open it, suddenly didn’t feel ready at all. “Then . . . let’s go!” Poppy said, and swept them inside.

  Days or weeks or months later, Jim was ready. He lost track of the hours, and lost track of the others in the house, even his Alice, taking his meals alone and spending the little time when he wasn’t working asleep, or walking through the orchard and beyond. The morning he finished his book, he put his head down to rest and was woken again by the noise of the bus in the yard. He went to the window to see who was going to leave today, and stood a long while before Alice knocked on his door and he understood that the bus was waiting for him.