The Emergency, page 11
BETTER HUMANS
Below, in smaller letters, the sixth principle of Together was written out: YOU SHALL BE AS GODS.
The words had a strange effect on Rustin. They took him back to the first days of the Emergency, that improvised morning at the hospital, the emptying of bed bottles in a warm, communal glow. Yes, that was it—to be better! It was what everyone in all times wanted, even if the wish lay buried for years under layers of quotidian debris. But the effort needed was immense, the human stuff so flawed—indifference, indolence, fear. Within a week of the Emergency he had found himself annoyed by his new brothers and sisters, and now they were all gone, as if he’d been offered a view of a stunning landscape and barely taken time to notice.
Rustin removed his pack and set it at his feet. “How do you do it?”
“The more interesting question is why.” The Manager held up a finger. “Understand something: we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you were a native Burgher here. Everything in my workshop stays under the seal. You’ll be on your way, am I right?”
Rustin nodded. The Manager took off his glasses and wiped them delicately with a handkerchief that he pulled from his trouser pocket.
“How do I do it? By the way, others toil here with me.” The Manager waved at the crowded floor. “This is my workshop, but I certainly do not work alone. That would be impossible.” He had a way of saying something and then holding Rustin’s gaze as if every statement was a point won and he was waiting for the other to concede. “The faces impress you? They’re the easy part—primitive. Form a life mask with sculptural plaster, fill with modeling clay, build out the head, decorate, cast in fire, horsehair wig and eyebrows. Our ancestors had all the tools. But during the interview we observe closely. We’re after a characteristic expression. The human essence.”
“What interview?”
The Manager closed his eyes and sighed extravagantly at the difficulty of explanation. “First, we don’t recruit. They hear of Better Humans through friends or self-orgs, at We Are One, at the Suicide—never mind the local details. The point is they find their own way to my workshop. They all arrive in extremis. Nervous exhaustion. Many visibly underweight, those horrible gray costumes hanging off them like death shrouds.” His thin upper lip curled. “Facial tics, permanent goggle marks. Some can’t stop crying, some can’t stop talking, and some can’t say a word.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“What’s wrong with them?” The Manager gave a harsh laugh. “What’s wrong with you? The pain of being human!” His tone seemed to add, you idiot. “Most of them barely knew they existed. They burrowed their way like naked mole rats through the only possible world. Flash! The Emergency turns on the lights. Freedom! The city belongs to the young! Futurum condimus! They should feel euphoric, right? But consciousness turns out to be a form of torture. Have you ever tried really thinking for yourself?” He touched his own forehead at the thinned hairline and made a show of wincing. “Every neural pulse is an electric shock. There’s a cactus in your prefrontal cortex. Outside your skull are these creatures called other people, all enduring the same thing. You made Together sound easy; I can assure you it’s not. It takes work, and a lot of the time it doesn’t work. People quarrel, there’s a meat shortage. Not what they were told! And their cactuses are still growing! You have children?”
After a moment Rustin said that he didn’t.
“Try to imagine. The past, the human past, is of no use to them now. What fool said making the world new would take four months? After blaming everyone else, they turn the torch flame on themselves. And then they come to us.”
Rustin imagined a torchlight parade of shrouded youthful figures lurching single file along the canal amid a chorus of metallic groans, free arms swinging from shoulder gears on pulleys, faces fixed in fired clay.
“And you interview them?”
“We prompt them. ‘If you could change one thing about yourself.’ ‘If you could live in a myth.’ ‘Your dream costume.’ (Please, not the gray sack.) ‘Imagine this city in five years.’ ‘Describe the perfect world.’ We give them back the sense of possibility, and for fifteen minutes they forget the pain.” The Manager registered these marvels with detached satisfaction. “While they answer, our artists sketch. What they sketch is not the face as it is, but the face we intuit the subject wants to have, without the hive of jabs and jolts behind the brow. That first interview gives us the key to the whole person. By the end we already have their Better Human essence.”
While the Manager was talking, Rustin studied the bodies around the floor. They were no longer corpses, but young people, beautiful young people, resting from their labors, musing, dreaming.
“Now I come to the most important step—my modest contribution to the process—without which these assemblies would stay inert. While they talk, a little device of my invention inscribes their voice on a wax cylinder. When the subject comes back for the beginning of fabrication, we create more cylinders. Every time they return, more wax, more words, preserved in perpetuum. By now we have a dozen cylinders for each Better Human. Hundreds in all. Soon, thousands.”
Eight or ten bodies away lay a boy who might have been the leader of the looting gang. No acne scars, but the same pursed, sarcastic mouth.
“Can you guess where we keep them?”
Half-listening, Rustin realized that the Manager was waiting for him to answer. He shook his head. The Manager tapped on his own chest.
“The Better Humans are learning to speak.” The Manager narrowed his eyes to assess whether Rustin grasped the momentousness of this statement. “What do I mean? It would be boringly easy to have a voice box inside each assembly that repeats word for word what we capture on wax. The subjects don’t come to us so they can hear how they already sound. They want to hear how their Better Human could sound. We train them to experiment with their cylinders, combine material, erase it and reshape it, manufacture new sentences, whole paragraphs, new forms of expression and thought—almost a new mind. What is it?”
Lying in one of the rows of bodies, next to a round-faced boy in a sort of jester’s costume, Rustin had spotted a girl with keen almond eyes, a half-open smile with a slight overbite, an expression of eager readiness. He looked away.
“Go on.”
“Now we come to why. This part requires your full attention, and even that might not be adequate.” The Manager waited until Rustin nodded. “Why a new mind? Because our purpose is not therapeutic. We don’t much care if the young people who come here feel better. Our goal is to make them better. See that?” He nodded at the banner on the far wall. “The last and highest principle. But is anyone else in this city trying to achieve it? Oh, no! Too hard!” The Manager’s voice filled with agitated mockery. “They’ve all settled for ‘Everyone belongs,’ which makes the children even unhappier because they know they were promised more. ‘You shall be as gods.’ They can only get it here.”
Struggling to pay attention, Rustin again peered at the figure of the girl. Her skin was painted Selva’s olive color. Whoever molded the features had created the face that Rustin pictured whenever he thought of her. This was his ideal daughter lying twenty feet away, with the face of one of the goddesses she used to love hearing him read about when she was a little girl. Or the face Pan conjured when he sang the song. Brave Selva.
“The ridges carved on wax will gradually replace their own words—we call it the Crossover. At that point Better Humans will begin teaching subjects, not the other way around. The boys and girls we’ve interviewed several times are already thinking more clearly—logically.”
He hadn’t seen this face for a long time, not since before the Emergency, during exams week, and he wanted to cry: It’s you!
“Then comes the process of inter-wiring. This will interest you as an engineer.” The Manager’s voice grew more resonant, as if he feared losing his audience at the crucial point. “We’re not there yet, but connecting the assemblies and splicing their cylinders together will realize a combined cerebral power that we don’t even know how to measure. Errors of fact—even of thought—will disappear. Dialogue will produce amelioration, not conflict. Don’t let our name deceive you: the human individual is not our concern. The goal of Better Humans is to dismantle and rebuild the individual in a way that allows for the perpetual improvement of human society. And yes, I mean Burgher society. Imagine if we wired together a bunch of ‘Better Yeomen.’ What a horror! Short circuits, explosions, chaos! Or ‘Better Strangers’—unknowable, we’d never get past the language problem.”
The dress belonged to Annabelle, tailored from lambswool and dyed pomegranate, form-fitting through the bust and waist, ruffled at the neck and wrists. She had stopped wearing it after giving birth to Pan but kept it hanging in the same closet where Rustin later stowed the coat of arms. Of all things, Selva had chosen to wear this antiquated ex-dress of her mother’s. When had she started coming? Why? He could imagine why.
“But when every young Burgher in this city has a Better Human, and all these Better Humans are inter-wired, then everything can be known, every question answered, every decision made, every difference resolved. Together will become a living reality, We Are One will be superfluous, self-orgs will disappear. We will have perfected our humanity. And then”—in the moment after striking this resounding major chord, the Manager’s voice suddenly dropped to a quiet, almost melancholy minor note—“the place of the human individual will be uncertain.”
Rustin was hardly listening. He was waiting for the girl to notice him, sit up, open her mouth, and cry, “Papa! You’re here!”
“Am I wasting my time with you?” the Manager demanded.
Rustin turned away from the sight of his daughter. “Can I hear one of them speak?”
The Manager detached his scrutiny from Rustin and let it roam across the Better Humans. He seemed to be making some calculation, adding up figures in his brain to be sure that he would come out victorious.
“One and done. Your time appears limitless—mine is not.”
“What about that one. That girl in the red dress.”
There was just enough room between rows for the Manager to walk on tiptoe without stepping on his assemblies. He lifted Selva by the wrists and casually draped her over his shoulder. This person who put so much effort into human perfectibility was plainly repelled by actual people—he seemed to prefer them embodied in metal. Selva’s hair fell forward from her scalp. The dress left uncovered her smooth, gleaming calves and neck and hands. Rustin sensed how light she was—how lifeless.
The Manager set her down at Rustin’s feet, legs straight and flat on the floor, head and torso somehow propped up without support. Rustin knelt down to the level of her eyes. They stared back at her father’s with no recognition. His gaze fell to the scrap of paper pinned to her dress.
“Her real name is Hebe?”
“Of course not. They all take a new one.”
“What was hers before?”
“Look around,” the Manager said, exasperated. “We’ve created eighty-three Better Humans. You expect me to remember them all?”
I expect you to remember this one. What did she want to change about herself? Describe her perfect city, you supercilious ass. Rustin had repeated the story of Athena at countless bedtimes when Selva was five and six. Pallas had been her idol. Why had she named herself after a minor goddess? The little shit of a Manager must know why. Rustin felt a jealous rage boil up. This complete stranger had heard and forgotten intimacies that her father was denied.
“This one isn’t finished. She came every day for a week and then stopped.”
With a practiced hand the Manager reached for Selva’s neckline and pulled it down to her chest. Rustin was about to protest when he saw exposed at the base of her throat a bronze knob with a serrated circumference. The Manager cranked it clockwise three full turns while hidden gears purred.
From somewhere within the assembly came a noise, whirring and scratchy. Then a voice.
“Father, drink from my golden cup.”
Selva’s. Clear, dramatic. Her reciting voice.
“Honeyed wine, sweet and pure. Drink and grow young through me.”
Rustin, clutching at every word, understood nothing.
“Mother, eat from my silver plate and I will fasten this yoke to your horses. Brother, I will bathe you and dress you for battle.”
Rustin looked up for an explanation, but the Manager only raised his eyebrows as if registering another win.
“Father, your fair-ankled daughter attends you. Eternal unaging, no loss or decay. Drink from my golden cup and grow young through me.”
With a final scratch the noise stopped. The knob clicked off.
“There’s a lot more,” the Manager said. “This one wouldn’t shut up.”
“Can I hear it?” Rustin asked, subduing his desperation.
“We’re done.”
Rustin crouched at Selva’s level and willed her to speak. Her almond eyes looked back, sightless.
“Out, out.” The Manager was shooing again. “Come back in a month. Things are changing so fast, you won’t recognize her.”
17
Before dinner Pan sang the whole of “Brave Bella” for his father. It wasn’t a long ballad, but halfway through Rustin forgot to keep listening—a habit with his younger child—and the end caught him by surprise. Pan glowed in the applause his father bestowed to make up for his inattention. He thought of telling a joke about the misinformed produce woman, but that would have spoiled his son’s accomplishment. Instead, he wrapped his arms around Pan and pressed his shoulder bones and felt the small hands clutch his back, kissed the top of his head, breathed his clean child smell. With a parent’s yearning for eternity, Rustin held on a few seconds longer than necessary as a familiar pang reminded him that the tightest hug did not stop time, that every throb of love was an intimation of grief. Not eternal unaging, but ceaseless change. Perhaps this was what made the Emergency his mortal enemy. In another minute his son would be on to a new game, a plan, a step farther away. Already Pan was wriggling out of his arms.
At dinner Rustin tried to raise spirits with selected tales of his day in the city. He left out the Better Humans workshop, which was dissolving into a realm of lucid dream. But a leaden mood had settled over the table. He found it hard to meet Selva’s eyes, imagining the mechanical girl seated upright with her luminous clay face. When he looked, she was watching him with the same worried interest of the night before. Annabelle’s gaze was downcast, and her full mouth was half-open with some pressure he knew to be sadness, which he was loath to take away because it made her beautiful.
All at once somewhere in the city the bells of clock towers and schools and temples of worship began ringing in unison. They didn’t chime a musical melody, or toll the routine gong of the hour, but rang an insistent clang-clang like a collective firebell, an alarm sounding from nowhere and everywhere, clang-clang for a full minute, so loud that Zeus hid under the table and howled in reply, and Pan rolled his head and banged a fist on the table to the rhythm of the bells. Then sudden silence, broken by Pan falling into hysterics.
“What was that?” Rustin asked.
“The Wide Awakes,” Selva said. The name made Pan laugh harder.
“Who are the Wide Awakes?” Annabelle asked.
“A new group.”
“A self-org committee?”
“More like a super-committee.”
“What do they do?”
“They wake up the city!” Selva said, as if the answer was obvious.
“The city isn’t awake?”
“The city’s half-asleep. The enemies of Together are already here, outside and inside.”
Annabelle did not look pleased with this judgment. “And who are the enemies of Together?”
“Yeomen!” Pan cried.
“Not all of them,” Rustin said.
“Some of them,” Selva said. She added, “Some Burghers, too.”
This came close enough to the family that it briefly silenced the conversation. Rustin remembered what Suzana had told him about the resident, Saron. “There’s a Wide Awake at the hospital. One of the young doctors seems to be in charge.”
“They’re going to save us.” Selva nodded with assurance, but her eyes flickered between her parents for their response.
“Do we need saving?” Annabelle asked. “Aren’t we doing our best?”
“Look around, Mama! Do you think everything is wonderful?”
“I think we should look for friends, not enemies.”
“No one my age thinks that way,” Selva said. “We have to do better. I have to do better.”
Rustin washed the dishes while Annabelle put away canisters of grain. “Poor Mr. Monge,” she said. “He just arrived and now he has to go out there again.”
“Mr. Monge declined to accompany me.”
On his last errand of the day Rustin had stopped by the hostel and found Mr. Monge sitting on his bunk in a cloud of smoke as if he’d been waiting the whole time for the doctor’s return.
“You are bringing good news to me, I think?” Mr. Monge lowered himself to the floor and took Rustin’s hands in his own, which felt dry and cracked like tree bark. “A bookkeeper job?”
“I thought you were asking about your son.”
“My son!” Mr. Monge gave a startled laugh.
Rustin noticed they weren’t alone. On the opposite top bunk a figure lay under a cloak, back to the room, long hair in a tangle, shoulders hunched as if asleep.
“He is Mr. Camba,” Mr. Monge said, following Rustin’s gaze. “He came last night. He is very tired. But he does not have my problems. In our Stranger land he was a shoemaker for horses.”
“Ah. A blacksmith.”
“As you say. Mr. Camba is lucky. He will find a job easily. I am not lucky.” Mr. Monge returned the pipe to his mouth, bent over, and tapped his legs. “Doctor, the pain is in my knees.”
