by Rich Larson
In junior high, sex ed was mandatory, no ifs or buts. Amy and her friends were stumbling through puberty. Tampons, budding breasts, aching midnight thoughts, long conversations about what boys liked and what they wanted.
She already had a good idea what they wanted. Girls always complimented her about how pretty she was. Boys stared at her when she walked down the hall. Everybody so nice to her all the time. She didn’t trust any of it.
When she stood naked in the mirror, she only saw flaws. Amy spotted a zit last week and stared at it for an hour, hating her ugliness. It took her over an hour every morning to get ready for school. She didn’t leave the house until she looked perfect.
She flipped the page again. A monster grinned up at her. She slammed the book shut.
Mr. Benson asked if anybody in the class had actually seen a plague child. Not on TV or in a magazine, but up close and personal.
A few kids raised their hands. Amy kept hers planted on her desk.
“I have two big goals for you kids this year,” the teacher said. “The main thing is teach you how to avoid spreading the disease. We’ll be talking a lot about safe sex and all the regulations about whether and how you do it. How to get tested and how to access a safe abortion. I also aim to help you become accustomed to the plague children already born and who are now the same age as you.”
For Amy’s entire life, the plague children had lived in group homes out in the country, away from people. One was located just eight miles from Huntsville, though it might as well have been on the moon. The monsters never came to town. Out of sight meant out of mind, though one could never entirely forget them.
“Let’s start with the plague kids,” Mr. Benson said. “What do all y’all think about them? Tell the truth.”
Rob Rowland raised his hand. “They ain’t human. They’re just animals.”
“Is that right? Would you shoot one and eat it? Mount its head on your wall?”
The kids laughed as they pictured Rob so hungry he would eat a monster. Rob was obese, smart, and sweated a lot, one of the unpopular kids.
Amy shuddered with sudden loathing. “I hate them something awful.”
The laughter died. Which was good, because the plague wasn’t funny.
The teacher crossed his arms. “Go ahead, Amy. No need to holler, though. Why do you hate them?”
“They’re monsters. I hate them because they’re monsters.”
Mr. Benson turned and hacked at the blackboard with a piece of chalk: MONSTRUM, a VIOLATION OF NATURE. From MONEO, which means TO WARN. In this case, a warning God is angry. Punishment for taboo.
“Teratogenesis is nature out of whack,” he said. “It rewrote the body. Changed the rules. Monsters, maybe. But does a monster have to be evil? Is a human being what you look like, or what you do? What makes a man a man?”
Bonnie Fields raised her hand. “I saw one once. I couldn’t even tell if it was a boy or girl. I didn’t stick around to get to know it.”
“But did you see it as evil?”
“I don’t know about that, but looking the way some of them do, I can’t imagine why the doctors let them all live. It would have been a mercy to let them die.”
“Mercy on us,” somebody behind Amy muttered.
The kids laughed again.
Sally Albod’s hand shot up. “I’m surprised at all y’all being so scared. I see the kids all the time at my daddy’s farm. They’re weird, but there ain’t nothing to them. They work hard and don’t make trouble. They’re fine.”
“That’s good, Sally,” the teacher said. “I’d like to show all y’all something.”
He opened a cabinet and pulled out a big glass jar. He set it on his desk. Inside, a baby floated in yellowish fluid. A tiny penis jutted between its legs. Its little arms grasped at nothing. It had a single slitted eye over a cleft where its nose should be.
The class sucked in its breath as one. Half the kids recoiled as the rest leaned forward for a better look. Fascination and revulsion. Amy alone didn’t move. She sat frozen, shot through with the horror of it.
She hated the little thing. Even dead, she hated it.
“This is Tony,” Mr. Benson said. “And guess what, he isn’t one of the plague kids. Just some poor boy born with a birth defect. About three percent of newborns are born this way every year. It causes one out of five infant deaths.”
Tony, some of the kids chuckled. They thought it weird it had a name.
“We used to believe embryos developed in isolation in the uterus,” the teacher said. “Then back in the Sixties, a company sold thalidomide to pregnant women in Germany to help them with morning sickness. Ten thousand kids born with deformed limbs. Half died. What did scientists learn from that? Anybody?”
“A medicine a lady takes can hurt her baby even if it don’t hurt her,” Jake said.
“Bingo,” Mr. Benson said. “Medicine, toxins, viruses, we call these things environmental factors. Most times, though, doctors have no idea why a baby like Tony is born. It just happens, like a dice roll. So is Tony a monster? What about a kid who’s retarded, or born with legs that don’t work? Is a kid in a wheelchair a monster too? A baby born deaf or blind?”
He got no takers. The class sat quiet and thoughtful. Satisfied, Mr. Benson carried the jar back to the cabinet. More gasps as baby Tony bobbed in the fluid, like he was trying to get out.
The teacher frowned as he returned the jar to its shelf. “I’m surprised just this upsets you. If this gets you so worked up, how will you live with the plague children? When they’re adults, they’ll have the same rights as you. They’ll live among you.”
Amy stiffened at her desk, neck clenched with tension at the idea. A question formed in her mind. “What if we don’t want to live with them?”
Mr. Benson pointed at the jar. “This baby is you. And something not you. If Tony had survived, he would be different, yes. But he would be you.”
“I think we have a responsibility to them,” Jake said.
“Who’s we?” Amy said.
His contradicting her had stung a little, but she knew how Jake had his own mind and liked to argue. He wore leather jackets, black T-shirts advertising obscure bands, ripped jeans. Troy and Michelle, his best friends, were Black.
He was popular because being unpopular didn’t scare him. Amy liked him for that, the way he flouted junior high’s iron rules. The way he refused to suck up to her like the other boys all did.
“You know who I mean,” he said. “The human race. We made them, and that gives us responsibility. It’s that simple.”
“I didn’t make anything. The older generation did. Why are they my problem?”
“Because they have it bad. We all know they do. Imagine being one of them.”
“I don’t want things to be bad for them,” Amy said. “I really don’t. I just don’t want them around me. Why does that make me a bad person?”
“I never said it makes you a bad person,” Jake said.
Archie Gaines raised his hand. “Amy has a good point, Mr. Benson. They’re a mess to stomach, looking at them. I mean, I can live with it, I guess. But all this love and understanding is a lot to ask.”
“Fair enough,” Mr. Benson said.
Archie turned to look back at Amy. She nodded her thanks. His face lit up with a leering smile. He believed he’d rescued her and now she owed him.
She gave him a practiced frown to shut down his hopes. He turned away as if slapped.
“I’m just curious about them,” Jake said. “More curious than scared. It’s like you said, Mr. Benson. However they look, they’re still our brothers. I wouldn’t refuse help to a blind man, I guess I wouldn’t to a plague kid neither.”
The teacher nodded. “Okay. Good. That’s enough discussion for today. We’re getting somewhere, don’t you think? Again, my goal for you kids this year is two things. One is to get used to the plague children. Distinguishing between a book and its cover. The other is to learn how to avoid making more o
f them.”
Jake turned to Amy and winked. Her cheeks burned, all her annoyance with him forgotten.
She hoped there was a lot more sex ed and a lot less monster talk in her future. While Mr. Benson droned on, she glanced through the first few pages of her book. A chapter headline caught her eye: KISSING.
She already knew the law regarding sex. Germ or no germ, the legal age of consent was still fourteen in the State of Georgia. But another law said if you wanted to have sex, you had to get tested for the germ first. If you were under eighteen, your parents had to give written consent for the testing.
Kissing, though, that you could do without any fuss. It said so right here in black and white. You could do it all you wanted. Her scalp tingled at the thought. She tugged at her hair and savored the stabbing needles.
She risked a hungering glance at Jake’s handsome profile. Though she hoped one day to go further than that, she could never do more than kissing. She could never know what it’d be like to scratch the real itch.
Nobody but her mama knew Amy was a plague child.
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ANNEX
look out for
ROSEWATER
by
Tade Thompson
Rosewater is a town on the edge. A community formed around the edges of a mysterious alien biodome, its residents comprise the hopeful, the hungry and the helpless—people eager for a glimpse inside the dome or a taste of its rumored healing powers.
Kaaro is a government agent with a criminal past. He has seen inside the biodome, and doesn’t care to again. But he is a sensitive, able to access the minds of others through the “xenosphere”—a shared unconsciousness the aliens brought to Earth—and something is killing off others of his kind. He must defy his masters to search for an answer, facing his dark history and coming to a realization about a horrifying future.
Chapter One
Rosewater: Opening Day 2066 Now
I’m at the Integrity Bank job for forty minutes before the anxieties kick in. It’s how I usually start my day. This time it’s because of a wedding and a final exam, though not my wedding and not my exam. In my seat by the window I can see, but not hear, the city. This high above Rosewater everything seems orderly. Blocks, roads, streets, traffic curving sluggishly around the dome. I can even see the cathedral from here. The window is to my left, and I’m at one end of an oval table with four other contractors. We are on the fifteenth floor, the top. A skylight is open above us, three foot square, a security grid being the only thing between us and the morning sky. Blue, with flecks of white cloud. No blazing sun yet, but that will come later. The climate in the room is controlled despite the open skylight, a waste of energy for which Integrity Bank is fined weekly. They are willing to take the expense.
Next to me on the right, Bola yawns. She is pregnant and gets very tired these days. She also eats a lot, but I suppose that’s to be expected. I’ve known her two years and she has been pregnant in each of them. I do not fully understand pregnancy. I am an only child and I never grew up around pets or livestock. My education was peripatetic; biology was never a strong interest, except for microbiology, which I had to master later.
I try to relax and concentrate on the bank customers. The wedding anxiety comes again.
Rising from the centre of the table is a holographic teleprompter. It consists of random swirls of light right now, but within a few minutes it will come alive with text. There is a room adjacent to ours in which the night shift is winding down.
“I hear they read Dumas last night,” says Bola.
She’s just making conversation. It is irrelevant what the other shift reads. I smile and say nothing.
The wedding I sense is due in three months. The bride has put on a few pounds and does not know if she should alter the dress or get liposuction. Bola is prettier when she is pregnant.
“Sixty seconds,” says a voice on the tannoy.
I take a sip of water from the tumbler on the table. The other contractors are new. They don’t dress formally like Bola and me. They wear tank tops and T-shirts and metal in their hair. They have phone implants.
I hate implants of all kinds. I have one. Standard locator with no add-ons. Boring, really, but my employer demands it.
The exam anxiety dies down before I can isolate and explore the source. Fine by me.
The bits of metal these young ones have in their hair come from plane crashes. Lagos, Abuja, Jos, Kano and all points in between, there have been downed aircraft on every domestic route in Nigeria since the early 2000s. They wear bits of fuselage as protective charms.
Bola catches me staring at her and winks. Now she opens her snack, a few wraps of cold moin-moin, the orange bean curds nested in leaves, the old style. I look away.
“Go,” says the tannoy.
The text of Plato’s Republic scrolls slowly and steadily in ghostly holographic figures on the cylindrical display. I start to read, as do the others, some silently, others out loud. We enter the xenosphere and set up the bank’s firewall. I feel the familiar brief dizziness; the text eddies and becomes transparent.
Every day about five hundred customers carry out financial transactions at these premises, and every night staffers make deals around the world, making this a twenty-four-hour job. Wild sensitives probe and push, criminals trying to pick personal data out of the air. I’m talking about dates-of-birth, PINs, mothers’ maiden names, past transactions, all of them lying docile in each customer’s forebrain, in the working memory, waiting to be plucked out by the hungry, untrained and freebooting sensitives.
Contractors like myself, Bola Martinez and the metalheads are trained to repel these. And we do. We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer. A professor did a study of it once. He found a correlation between the material used for firewalling and the activities of the customer for the rest of the year. A person who had never read Shakespeare would suddenly find snatches of King Lear coming to mind for no apparent reason.
We can trace the intrusions if we want, but Integrity isn’t interested. It’s difficult and expensive to prosecute crimes perpetuated in the xenosphere. If no life is lost, the courts aren’t interested.
The queues for cash machines, so many people, so many cares and wants and passions. I am tired of filtering the lives of others through my mind.
I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city …
On entering the xenosphere, there is a projected self-image. The untrained wild sensitives project their true selves, but professionals like me are trained to create a controlled, chosen self-image. Mine is a gryphon.
My first attack of the day comes from a middle-aged man from a town house in Yola. He looks reedy and very dark-skinned. I warn him and he backs off. A teenager takes his place quickly enough that I think they are in the same physical location as part of a hack farm. Criminal cabals sometimes round up sensitives and yoke them together in a “Mumbai combo”—a call-centre model with serial black hats.
I’ve seen it all before. There aren’t as many such attacks now as there were when I started in this business, and a part of me wonders if they are discouraged by how effective we are. Either way, I am already bored.
During the lunch break, one of the metalheads comes in and sits by me. He starts to talk shop, telling me of a near-miss intrusion. He looks to be in his twenties, still excited about being a sensitive, finding everything new and fresh and interesting, the opposite of cynical, the opposite of me.
He must be in love. His self-image shows propinquity. He is g
ood enough to mask the other person, but not good enough to mask the fact of his closeness. I see the shadow, the ghost beside him. Out of respect I don’t mention this.
The metal he carries is twisted into crucifixes and attached to a single braid on otherwise short hair, which leaves his head on the left temple and coils around his neck, disappearing into the collar of his shirt.
“I’m Clement,” he says. “I notice you don’t use my name.”
This is true. I was introduced to him by an executive two weeks back, but I forgot his name instantly and have been using pronouns ever since.
“My name—”
“You’re Kaaro. I know. Everybody knows you. Excuse me for this, but I have to ask. Is it true that you’ve been inside the dome?”
“That’s a rumour,” I say.
“Yes, but is the rumour true?” asks Clement.
Outside the window, the sun is far too slow in its journey across the sky. Why am I here? What am I doing?
“I’d rather not discuss it.”
“Are you going tonight?” he asks.
I know what night it is. I have no interest in going.
“Perhaps,” I say. “I might be busy.”
“Doing what?”
This boy is rather nosy. I had hoped for a brief, polite exchange, but now I find myself having to concentrate on him, on my answers. He is smiling, being friendly, sociable. I should reciprocate.
“I’m going with my family,” says Clement. “Why don’t you come with us? I’m sending my number to your phone. All of Rosewater will be there.”
That is the part that bothers me, but I say nothing to Clement. I accept his number, and text mine to his phone implant out of politeness, but I do not commit.
Before the end of the working day, I get four other invitations to the Opening. I decline most of them, but Bola is not a person I can refuse.