The Emergency, page 22
A boy with the long beak and elongated neck of a heron answered, “Words lie, dirt is true!”
“Words lie, dirt is true,” the pig repeated. “That means: don’t believe everything a Burgher girl says.” Laughter rippled across the Manimals. “What’s the third rule of Dirt Thought?”
The answer came from the bear who had lost the fight. “Men are stronger than women,” he said in a husky voice, and as if on cue the entire assembly followed up with a prolonged roar.
The trial reminded Selva of none she’d ever heard about. If anything, the call-and-response was more like We Are One, though We Are One had no commander. The point was not to argue but to dissolve in perfect unity. She could sense the eagerness of the boys waiting for the pig to ask the next question so they could all think the same thought and aim it at her.
“‘Men are stronger than women.’ But what does that mean? I know your little brothers could take this girl down in five seconds.” More laughter, which he silenced with a raised hand. “It means we have to live by a code. It’s called honor.”
The pig pulled Selva forward by the arm, and she tripped and caught herself before falling.
“Look at her. She thinks you’re a bunch of savage Strangers who can’t control themselves. That’s why she’s scared. She doesn’t understand—Manimals submit to the code because we’re stronger. And it’s a harsh code. We follow a strict diet. No alcohol, no tobacco, no girls. Every day we train and perfect our bodies and stand by our brothers and prepare to fight. If we ever break the code, we pay a high price. If a boy gets caught spying on this unit for the enemy, what happens to him?”
“Death!” someone shouted.
“You’re right,” the pig said. “But not a girl. The code tells us to respect girls. If a girl is guilty, she must be punished, but not with death.”
He raised his snout. His narrow eyes were looking in the direction of the stone hut under the plane tree. At that moment a boy came out of the door and began walking across the meadow toward the platform, slowly, almost nonchalantly, a boy with a boy’s head preoccupied by something he was holding in his hand.
“Another part of the code is we don’t punish without evidence,” Gard said. “But we have evidence.”
He extended an open hand. A kind of dog head—perhaps it was supposed to be a jackal or wolf—approached and placed in it a pair of white glasses. The pig held them up by the strap for all to see. “Yours?” he asked Selva, and didn’t wait for an answer, which he already seemed to know. “These are spyglasses. One of our patrols found them at a checkpoint. They let Burghers see our thoughts.”
“No!” one of the heads cried, and was quickly drowned in a wave of indignation that rose to shouts of rage.
Then the unit parted and made way for the boy from the stone hut. He came out onto the center of the platform. He was smaller than the other boys, maybe two or three years older than Pan. His body was still undeveloped, and a bee’s fuzz covered his scalp, but his face frightened her as none of the others did, because among all the Manimals it was a human face—the face of a child bored to vacancy, dull-eyed, emotionless, blank, and young enough to be capable of anything. His thin arms were covered with burn scars in shapes that looked nothing like brandings. He was holding the hook grip of an iron rod whose far end glowed orange.
“This is Tee,” the pig told Selva. “He doesn’t speak but we think he’s an orphan. I found him eating grain mash behind our silo. I trained him in smithing.” He took the iron rod from Tee and, dangling the goggles in his other hand, held it up by its hook grip for the unit’s inspection. “He forged it just this morning. My idea.”
Tee nodded, indifferent. Selva saw that the end of the rod was burning with a triangle and, inside it, an open eye. The triangle of femaleness, the eye of espionage.
The pig dispatched Tee into the assembly. “Put them on.” He pushed the goggles into Selva’s hand, and she stretched the strap over her head and fastened the eyepieces on her face. “Tell us what you see.”
What had once allowed her to flee into a glorious dreamscape gave no help. She was looking into utter darkness. “Nothing.”
“What am I thinking?”
“I don’t know.”
“Selva Rustin, I charge you with spying for the Burgher and Stranger enemy. You are allowed to defend yourself. How do you answer?”
“I’m guilty.”
The pig made a sound of surprise. A murmur of confusion and displeasure ran through the unit. She felt the warmth of the rod close to her arm.
“I was spying.”
“Selva—”
“No, I want to confess.”
She had made her father bring her out here, and now she would have to do this alone, and the sun’s eye was merciless, and her family so far away. Whatever Gard had in store for her, she would finish it herself. She began speaking rapidly so that fear couldn’t catch up with her.
“Here’s my story. I was a vain, naive little Burgher girl. I grew up performing monkey tricks in jumpers and school uniforms. I performed some of my tricks right here on this farm. Gard can tell you.”
She felt his free hand on her shoulder—not with the hard command of Gard the Strong but, she imagined in the darkness behind the goggles, with the mute face of Little Cronk, imploring her to stop.
“Then the most wonderful thing happened in our city. The world ended. Yes, it disappeared—overnight! When the world ended, it was like putting on these goggles for the first time. I could see clearly. I saw through everything. I saw through the world where I’d been performing monkey tricks, the world that had just ended, and it was a foul, stinking, decaying heap of lies. I saw through my good father and nice mother—oh, right through them to the bottom! With these super-powerful glasses my sight was so strong that when I looked at my father, an important and respected man in our city, they shrank him down to the size of my little brother’s thumb. I couldn’t stand to listen to him because all his favorite words, the eternal truths he raised us on, made a tinny noise like a cowbell, ting ting ting.”
Someone in the unit laughed, and Selva nodded in his direction. At least they were listening. Maybe she was making sense.
“But the best and worst part was that I saw through myself. It was more than I could bear.” A perverse desire was driving her to bring Gard to the verge of doing what she had begun to sense he didn’t want to do. “Fortunately, the world started over. We got rid of the stink and the lies in our city and made everything new. It was a lot of work, but we did it with a smile on our faces because we had a purpose. And I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear that I made myself new. I wanted to be good. You have no idea how good I wanted to be! I wanted to be so good that I could see through myself right down to the bottom and bear it. But no one can be that good without an evil enemy, and it didn’t take long to find one. Our enemy had been right there all along. You, of course.”
Yes, they were listening, because somewhere a boy howled like a wolf, and another took it up, and soon the whole unit was erupting with barks and roars and shrill cries, and even Gard’s shouted orders couldn’t make them stop, for Selva had taken from him the voice of command. On impulse she placed her hands together and bowed her head. This blind supplicant’s gesture surprised them into silence.
“Manimals! I’m almost finished, and then you can deliver your verdict, but first you have to let me confess. You were the enemy, and what a pleasure it was to despise you! You made it easy, with your ignorance, your absurd delusions. Just ask your commander how I made him feel back in my monkey days. He must have felt like one of those helpless Cronk pigs, wallowing in the pigpen, waiting for the knife at the butcher’s block. Yes, he was always the pig on his head and his arm. Because we can’t escape our fate.”
She turned away from where Gard was standing and felt that she was facing the place where the meadow ended at the slope down to the quarry.
“To state the Burgher view plainly: you’re the past, we’re the future. You can keep your Golden Age, because we’re making a new world where everyone is perfect except you.” She became aware of unhappiness bubbling through the unit and began to hurry. “But something about this view must not have sat right with me, so I had to see for myself. We Burghers have a song about Brave Bella. I wanted to be a brave girl like her, so I came out here to spy on you and see how evil our enemy is. And I’ve seen—I’ve seen! You’ve got those two slaves tied up in your quarry when all they wanted was a meal and a place to sleep. You’ve got your sisters locked up somewhere, wasting away. You made a branding iron just for me. Oh, I’ll have plenty to report back to my city if I ever get out of here.”
She felt the heat of the rod near her face. It went away, then came back.
“But I don’t want to spy on you anymore. I don’t think you want to hurt me, Gard. I think we can be friends.”
She took off the goggles and turned to him. The snout was pointed at the sky. The eye slits appeared to be squeezed shut just like at his moment of agony in the classroom. He was shrinking away from her as if she was the one hurting him, though he held the rod so close it singed her hair.
From the direction of the quarry she heard the grind and wheeze of an engine. She looked and saw the front wheels of a vehicle climbing over the slope. She saw the hauler bouncing and skidding across the meadow, she saw a man pointing a gun at her, she saw Gard shuddering and falling into her legs, she saw the little dead-eyed boy coming toward her with the rod, she saw the man running with the gun, and that was the last thing she saw.
PART III
1
As soon as Annabelle stepped outside the air stung her face, and she realized that true fall had come. She should have worn a coat—but after packing Selva’s bag, then the difficulty getting Pan off to school, she was already late. The walk to the hostel would have to warm her up. She set off in her black fitted jacket for the riverfront boulevard.
At her back the sun had cleared the park’s tallest oaks, throwing a golden spill on the waterway. As she walked along the boulevard with her short, rapid stride, eyes moving around her field of vision for anything unexpected, she was aware of a multilayered unease. At the top was the problem of meals. She had fewer people to feed now, but her cupboards were almost empty, and the markets where she did her shopping were out of everything Pan liked—beef, rice, apples. A black market had emerged somewhere in the city—she’d heard about it from her neighbors and a woman in the Stranger self-org—but she didn’t know how to find it, and the notion of getting fleeced by an illegal dealer in some backstreet made her anxious. Hugo would have gone, and probably enjoyed it. For the next day or two she would have to handle such things alone.
Pan had thrown a fit this morning when he couldn’t have baked apple for breakfast. Annabelle guessed that the reason for this uncharacteristic tantrum was waking up to no father, sister, or dog in the house, but she was too tired from a bad night to soothe him. Raising her voice, she’d told him not to be a baby, and when he’d shoved his cup of milk aside, spilling it across the table, she’d grabbed his wrist too hard, and now she regretted it.
Regret was one of Annabelle’s closest friends; it came around to look in on her almost every day. But the feeling that lay at the bottom of the others was too tangled for simple regret, though that was in the mix.
Last night, after Selva had left their room, Hugo pulled the covers to his chin and turned on his side. An hour earlier they had been sleeping limbs entwined for the first time in weeks, but the insouciance of his gesture enraged Annabelle. She jerked the blanket away and sat over him, saying, “How dare you keep a secret from me, then abandon me?” “I’m not abandon—” he began, but there was no stopping her. “You wanted nothing to do with Together—now you go off to save the world?” and “If something happens to her, am I supposed to just forgive you?” and even “Take her—you always wanted her for yourself.” Saying things she could hardly believe in daylight as she passed the old stone footbridge where she used to stroll with Hugo arm in arm when they were courting.
In the morning there had been no time to make up. He went off with their daughter on an adventure that didn’t include her, leaving her to Mr. Monge.
In the lilac garden outside the hostel, a circle of Stranger children sat in the sun on the yellowing grass. There were about two dozen boys and girls of all ages, from toddlers in the laps of older siblings to young teenagers, all still and silent, giving full attention to an older Burgher girl who sat at the head of the circle. She was from the self-org committee, homely, with fleshy cheeks that squeezed her eyes narrow. Annabelle couldn’t remember the girl’s name because she never said a word at meetings but stared without expression in a way Annabelle found unnerving.
But now the girl was speaking, with her head bent over a small chalkboard propped on her crossed legs.
“No—one—is—a—Stran—ger,” she said—almost sang, in an unnaturally high voice that gave each syllable a different note, while a powdery index finger moved along the words written on the board. She looked up at the children. “Now your turn.”
“No—one—is—a—Stran—ger,” they sang in chorus, exactly mimicking her tone and rhythm.
The girl turned the board around and rubbed her fingers across it with a dry rasp. She picked up a piece of white chalk lying in the grass and wrote something, then revealed it to the Stranger children.
“I—am—no—bet—ter.” The girl tapped her chest, and the children echoed her, tapping their own. “And—nei—ther—are—you.” She waved her finger around the circle, and they echoed her again, pointing at one another, a few of the younger ones giggling.
“Are you better?” the girl asked, indicating an older boy with the tattooed lines and dots on his cheeks.
“No, I am no better,” he said, in the same tune as before.
“Who is better?”
This was addressed to the whole group. The chorus answered: “No one is better.”
“Is she better?”
“She is no better.”
“Are they better?”
“They are no better.”
“Very good!”
She led the children through the entire list of Together principles, skipping the one about no Burghers being Excess Burghers, which obviously would have been too complicated. When she came to the last principle and recited, “You shall be as gods,” a girl of twelve or thirteen gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. At least one of the children had begun to learn the language.
Annabelle stood watching by the main doors under the bronze sign IMPERIAL WATER AUTHORITY. She hadn’t been to the hostel since Hugo’s visit, and whenever she missed a few days something inevitably went wrong: a new family failed to register and didn’t receive their meal tickets, a child on the third floor broke a doorknob and no one fixed it. So it was gratifying to see this girl coming into her own—finding a way to combine language and moral instruction while making it fun for the children in the fresh air of an autumn morning. Wasn’t this the whole point of self-organization?
Annabelle caught the girl’s eye and smiled. In reply, the girl’s smile died into blankness, and her eyes seemed to grow narrower. Her expression wasn’t actively hostile, but all feeling had drained from her face, as if Annabelle’s appearance had pulled a plug. The girl stared long enough for a few of the children to look at the woman standing thirty feet away, and she might have gone on staring if Annabelle hadn’t abruptly turned and entered the building.
The hall was emptier than usual, the smell of newly arrived bodies was gone. The HELP tables were no longer set up in the middle of the floor but shoved against the high walls to make room for several dozen Strangers standing in two rows that faced away from the main doors. There were no children here, only adults of both sexes and all ages, including a stooped woman with a whitening braid down her back, all wearing loose, yellowish-gray tunics and drawstring pants—not their own clothes but the costumes Selva and her friends invented as Stranger tributes. Whose idea was that?
It was some kind of adult exercise class: step forward, step back, twist left, twist right, bend knees, arms raised, jump in place, and the echo of feet thundered from the stone floor up to the vaulted ceiling. They moved in precise unison, like a troupe of dance performers or a military squad, as if they’d been training for weeks—except for a small, lean man at the far end of the second line, who was having trouble executing the moves and kept falling out of time. Even without seeing his face Annabelle knew he was Mr. Monge.
They were following the lead of a Burgher girl who stood facing them with her legs apart, hands on hips. She wasn’t dressed like the Strangers but in olive-green, close-cut pants and jacket, and a slender cap like the kind imperial mail carriers used to wear. She was unusually tall, and her hair was cropped short like a boy’s, a style associated with Excess Burgher girls. Annabelle had never seen her at the hostel or any self-org meeting, and it took her a moment to recognize the girl. Her name was Lynx. Annabelle knew her from before the Emergency.
Under the empire no concept of volunteering had existed. There had been civic offices, guilds, and families, but no middle zone where Burghers acted to benefit neither empire, loved ones, nor themselves, but simply to help people they didn’t know. So when a woman in Annabelle’s reading circle mentioned a classmate of her daughter who had done poorly on her comprehensive exams (the neighbor didn’t say “Excess Burgher” but it was understood), and who seemed to be drifting into the city’s underworld of opium smokers and prostitutes, and Annabelle had the bright idea of inviting the wayward girl over for a cooking lesson, she didn’t think of herself as a volunteer. She wasn’t even sure what purpose it would serve. She just wanted to give the girl something constructive to do.
One bright, cold afternoon a teenager of about sixteen appeared at the Rustins’ front door, gangly and fidgety, with bowl-cut hair and eyes that avoided contact. She’d brought a friend, a girl with a prematurely aging face who was so stunted that Annabelle wondered if she might be a dwarf. The first girl was Lynx, and from the way she spoke it was clear that she came from a good family, which made her fate seem all the more poignant. Annabelle was thankful for the uninvited friend, because the baking lesson in her kitchen was so awkward that only the girls’ whispered talk and giggles broke whole minutes of silence. But they paid attention, followed instructions, and expressed a kind of self-mocking pride when the result came out recognizably cake-like.
