The Emergency, page 1
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for David Becker
and
Daniel Bergner
with thanks for miles gone and still to come
PART I
1
Looking back, Doctor Rustin realized that the Emergency had been a long time coming. This was how empires of old that he had learned about in school fell: imperceptibly, then shockingly. Even with an enemy army gathering outside the walls, no one can believe that a way of life is about to end or imagine the strange new life that will replace it.
Reports of an impasse at the top of government reached the provinces like word of some far-off, slow-moving threat, an outbreak of a new disease halfway around the world. The standoff dragged on for weeks, paralyzing imperial functions; but even news of street fighting in the capital between mobs armed with nail-studded clubs and iron bars made little impression on Burghers in the city by the river amid the high drama of exams week. Selva, the older Rustin child, was sitting for hers, and the family was much too distracted to notice that the empire was collapsing.
And then, one day in late spring, a week after exam results were announced across the empire, the ruling elite fled the capital. In the city by the river local officials abandoned their posts, police disappeared from the streets, communications across the region went down, and the Evening Verity never arrived. It was the start of the Emergency.
That night at dinner, sitting at the head of the table, Doctor Rustin informed his family of the situation. Annabelle gave her husband the satisfaction of bringing the news and pretended that she didn’t already know. “We’ll go about our normal lives,” he said. “These things never last.”
“Is there going to be a war?” Pan, their eight-year-old son, asked.
His father laughed. “Are you thinking of enlisting?”
“What if they cancel the next round of exams?” Selva asked. “I’ve been working so hard.”
“You’ve done so well,” Rustin said. “Don’t worry, just keep studying.”
“Are you sure this won’t last, Hugo?” Annabelle asked.
Rustin reached across the table for his wife’s slender hand. “Doesn’t everything turn out okay for us?”
The next morning, he left for the Imperial College Hospital as usual—not out of personal courage or civic duty, but because he was too rational to imagine all that could go wrong. The streets were nearly empty and the tram wasn’t running. The few people he met avoided eye contact, and as Rustin walked along the silent tracks he suddenly understood in his central nervous system that only the threat of consequences from higher authority had allowed him to share a street or tram without fear of violent death. Now anyone could do anything. All that mattered was whether this person approaching intended to kill him.
The director, the chief of personnel, and most of the junior staff were missing, and the hospital was down to a skeleton crew. The two dozen who had shown up gathered in the meeting room—still configured in the old way, with a podium at the front facing rows of chairs. As chief surgeon Rustin was the senior medical officer present, and he stood at the podium and thanked everyone for coming to work amid such uncertainty. He asked for volunteers to take on the basic duties of patient care, admittance, security, and cleaning. He said that he himself would begin the day emptying bed bottles.
His colleagues refused no task, however lowly. They were not acting on orders but of their own free will, out of concern for the good of the hospital, the patients, and one another. Rustin had never felt before that they were his brothers and sisters, but he felt it now. He could almost hear the heartbeat of everyone in the room. The meeting, which lasted just ten minutes, left him transformed. They all went out in a kind of delirium. No one used the word or spelled out the principles, but on that first day of the Emergency the spirit of Together came to the hospital.
The looting started that night. Most of the looters were teenagers, and they went street by street through the Market District shouting, “Our city!” and hurling loose cobblestones at shop windows. They were followed through the shattered glass by big-eyed children and a few stray adults picking over the remaining goods. The city by the river was an orderly, judgmental place where Burghers kept an eye on their neighbors’ property and loud noises were discouraged. This wild energy must have been lying there all along, held down by custom and censure, now exploding in the streets.
By the third day most shops had been cleaned out and the looters went searching for other targets. A rowdy group of a dozen headed uphill along the tram tracks, passing the Warehouse District—where they would have had a tough fight on their hands—toward the hospital. It held a commanding view of the city, and through the canteen windows Rustin saw them coming from a quarter mile off. He had expected the looting to stop on the first night, and even when it continued for a second and third day, he never thought it would reach the hospital. He rushed to the main entrance.
The heavy-faced guard in blue overalls had procured an iron rod, but Rustin told him that it would be foolish to use force against the looters. Suzana, his deputy, offered to summon the police, then cut herself short with a dry laugh. There was no way to summon them, and there were no police. It was the director’s first day back, and he stood helplessly with his hands stuck deep in the pockets of his white coat. “This is unprecedented,” he kept repeating, as if the insight might solve their problem. The title “Director,” stitched in red thread on his coat, was so familiar that Rustin had never been aware of its reassuring power until now, when the power was gone.
The looters appeared outside the double doors and banged on the glass and shouted “Our city!” They could have shattered the doors and stormed the lobby, but something kept them back, as if their desire was waning but they didn’t know how to stop. A sinewy boy with an intelligent face scarred by acne pushed in front of the others. He squished his open mouth against the crossed rifle and book of the imperial seal that was etched into the glass, and from deep in his throat came a howling noise—a human sound that Rustin had never heard before.
The director opened the doors a few inches. “This is a hospital. You have no right to do this.”
“We’ll do whatever we fucking want!” The boy, who seemed to be the leader, looked around for support, and shouting rose from the others: “Our city! Freedom!” The director made an ineffectual attempt to close the doors, which only goaded the looters into shoving back. Rustin pushed the director out of the way and opened the doors wide.
Stumbling inside, surprised to find themselves in the lobby, the looters gazed at the instructional signs, the white lights overhead, the long corridors. Rustin addressed the leader.
“What do you want? Medicine?”
“Where is it?”
Standing just behind the leader was a younger boy, maybe fourteen but small for his age, with dirty hair and an injured look on his face. Rustin thought he’d seen him before.
“Were you in Selva Rustin’s class this year?”
Startled, the boy half-nodded.
“What’s your name?”
The boy glanced at the leader. “Iver.”
“Iver, right. You sat next to my daughter.”
The leader stepped forward, puckering the corners of his mouth in a sarcastic grin. “Yeah, Iver here tried to diddle your daughter. Where are the fucking pills?”
Rustin took a breath and kept his voice steady. “Tell me what you need.”
The leader hesitated, and his grin dissolved. He leaned forward and said in a low voice, “It’s my mama.”
“Really? What’s wrong with her?”
“It hurts here.”
The leader tapped his chest. His mother’s pains had started just before the Emergency, during exams week. “Was this your year?” Rustin asked, keeping eye contact. He liked to think that one of his talents was staying calm in tense situations. “She must have been anxious for you. We certainly were for Selva. How did you do?”
For an answer the leader snorted derisively. He seemed like the kind of boy who would slack off all year and then cram for a few nights and do well enough to pass.
Rustin persisted: “What’s your father’s guild?”
“My papa? The Guild of Dickless Assholes. Heard of it?”
“I know a few members.” This was meant to be a friendly joke, but the leader’s scarred face went a deeper color. “Of course, Selva’s headed for medicine. Does that interest you?”
“Fuck medicine! I’m joining the Guild of Excess Burghers.”
The term was considered improper, but everyone used it. Rustin realized that these boys would enter no guild. They had failed their exams, their hopes were over. They were newly minted Excess Burghers.
“Iver, too—right, Iver? All of us are. We’re taking over the city. Ex-cess Bur-ghers! Ex-cess Bur-ghers!”
There was a round of mirthless chanting.
“I can give you something for your mother,” Rustin said. “When the streets are safe, bring her in for an examination.”
The looters made a show of rifling through closets, but their spirit was spent. On the way out, in a last act of sel
When the looters were gone, the director offered Rustin a grateful smile. Suzana patted his shoulder: “Well done, doctor.” He waved them off to conceal his pleasure. He had relied on a belief that all people, young and old, Burghers and Yeomen alike, could be brought to reason if he addressed them with respect—not necessarily as his equal, but as fellow human creatures. He tried to treat his patients this way, train his staff, raise his children. This was his creed, and it had a private name that was too grand to share with anyone but Annabelle: humanism. It had worked with the looters.
In that first week of the Emergency everyone Rustin knew asked the same question: What can I do? Doing nothing was inconceivable. Some of his neighbors organized an anti-looting platoon, arming themselves with fireplace pokers and garden tools, and dragging out trash barrels to barricade their street. Annabelle knocked on doors where elderly shut-ins were known to live and took down requests for food and medicine—the demand for pet food was especially heavy—then organized her reading circle into a delivery service. Selva and her school friends went to the Market District with brooms and bags to help sweep up the littered shops. When the schools reopened, Pan brought his collection of dead caterpillars to class in case anyone wanted them, though no one did.
Even with the loss of public services and basic goods, those were magical days, set apart from normal life. Self-reliance and solidarity, opposites in ordinary times, joined together in the vacuum left by the Emergency. No one seemed to mourn the empire much, as if it had been an abstraction, but a fierce attachment to the city by the river stirred the hearts of its Burghers. They didn’t wait to be told what to do, for there was no one to tell them. They just moved, and because they did it freely, there was a pinch of heroism in every act, love in every face. Throughout the week Rustin ached with anticipatory nostalgia.
2
For as long as anyone could remember, the empire had been governed by two factions that took turns in power. Though their programs differed, they both enjoyed the legitimacy of the imperial seal. In the marble halls of the capital, political conflicts seemed like death matches for the largest stakes; but in the provinces, including the city by the river, these dramas went barely noticed by the empire’s ordinary citizens, its Burghers and Yeomen. Even higher-status Burghers like Doctor Rustin had trouble keeping the factions in the capital straight. Over the years nothing much changed as people went about their lives. The children of Burghers sat for comprehensive exams at age fourteen that placed them on tracks to positions in their family guilds. The children of Yeomen inherited their parents’ farmland and artisanal skills. The age-old harmony between Burghers and Yeomen rested on the three pillars of the imperial system, known as Good Development: patriotism, mutual obligation, all in their place.
Perhaps the predictability and comfort of empire contributed to its collapse, bringing on a cognitive decline in the form of thick-brained boredom. Much later, Rustin would try to retrace the warning signs. There were the frequent manias that swept through the imperial ruling elite, such as the obsession with a new cheese produced by Yeomen sheep farmers in the capital region. This cheese, called Venus, soft-ripened in buttery wheels, with a thin blue line of mold and a satiny rind, was so delectable that it soon appeared in every shop window and on the dinner table of every ambitious host. Eating Venus became a competitive activity, driven less by its taste than by the display of wealth—for the price of the cheese soared, though the rain of money never seemed to descend as far as the Yeomen producers. Waistlines in imperial offices widened, and a syndrome called “Venus Goo” left avid eaters sluggish and unmotivated.
The cheese bubble burst one summer week when Venus lost all its prestige. The wheels in shop windows went unsold, and the price dropped by three-quarters, ruining the sheep farmers who had committed a whole season’s milk to making Venus. The ruling elite returned to the sober business of running the empire, until the next mania took hold.
And perhaps boredom even led to the Little Border War that broke out the winter before the Emergency. The strange thing was the uncertainty of why it started at all. There was no territorial dispute, no quarrel over fertile land or mineral deposits. There wasn’t even an ideological conflict. Good Development created the best possible life within the empire, but this system could never be imposed on other lands where relations between citizens were less friendly and more fraught.
Yet war came. In one of their usual power struggles, the two factions in the capital tried to outdo each other in hurling charges against the empire’s western neighbor. One faction accused the neighbor of massing troops in the forests along the border; the other faction raised an alarm that the neighbor was sending hordes of semi-nomadic plains people, called Strangers, across the mountains to infiltrate the capital for some purpose of sabotage. Neither charge could ever be proved (in fact there was no truth to them at all), but the same impulse that had created a frenzy for Venus cheese now drove the empire into an ill-advised, three-week war.
After early battlefield success, overconfidence in the imperial officer corps produced a series of tactical mistakes. A regiment of mostly Yeomen troops was caught in an enemy trap that led to terrible casualties. Whole units dissolved in chaotic retreat or surrendered en masse. The empire was forced to sue for a peace that imposed humiliating payments, and the slump that followed lasted several months. The war became so unpopular that each faction tried to blame the other for starting it.
The Little Border War hardly touched the city by the river. Some Burgher families with special ties to the ruling elite were able to buy their sons out of fighting. As for the Rustins, their two children were under the age of military service. Spring arrived, the school year neared an end, and Selva sat for her exams. Then came the Emergency.
As a boy Rustin had been taught that empires fell after catastrophic events—foreign conquest, earthquake, plague, revolution. The empire in which he had lived all his life died of boredom and loss of faith in itself.
3
After the upheavals of the first week, Rustin waited for everything to settle back into the old ways. But when the anesthesia of the magical time wore off, he became aware of constant discomforts. Life before the Emergency had been relatively frictionless; he often told Annabelle that he could not imagine a better one for himself and their family. But now even small pleasures began to elude him. The cigars that he enjoyed on evening walks by the river with Zeus left dry tobacco flakes clinging to his tongue. The right shoe of his favorite leather pair now squeezed as if the shoe had shrunk or the foot had grown. He associated these petty new irritations with the Emergency.
Every community of the late empire had to find a way to govern itself. It was impossible to know what was happening out in the countryside. Tales reached the city by the river of unspeakably cruel rites with farm animals, of whole villages swallowed up by forest, but it all sounded like nonsense to Rustin. He was certain that Yeomen would fall back on sturdy traditions. As for the city, he expected a group of respected Burghers from his generation to assume control of civic affairs until the establishment of a new regime, or else the restoration of imperial rule with necessary reforms to the system of Good Development. But nothing like that occurred.
Instead, the informal groups of the early days turned into self-organized committees that took over the running of everything in the city, from the transport system to the schools. How these committees got started was something of a mystery. They seemed to be leaderless and open to anyone who wanted to participate, regardless of background, age, or skills. Excess Burghers not only were allowed to take part but assumed important roles. The committees followed the looters’ cry of independence and ownership: “Our city!”
“Self-org,” as it was soon called, didn’t strike Rustin as a durable model. It had the strengths of spontaneity and fluidity, but before long Burghers would want the return of duly constituted authority. He believed in the dignity of all human beings, but he didn’t intend to waste his years of expertise emptying bed bottles. Nor did he see why it was necessary to close down every guild club in the city, including the Physicians Social Club. Rustin hardly had time to use his membership, but several evenings a month he stopped by after work to sink into a leather armchair and sip grain whiskey with the director and their senior colleagues. It was important to be seen at the club, since he was regarded as the leading candidate to take over the hospital when the director retired. After two decades in medicine, individual patients no longer held much interest for Rustin—the same injuries and illnesses, even some of the same names—and he turned more and more responsibility over to his deputy. At the club he relished high-level talk about health systems and policies affecting large numbers of people—that, not patient care, would be his future. Also, not every doctor in the city by the river was a member of the Physicians Social Club; it was an honor to be invited.
