Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (11 page)

Because then, on top of everything, there was the mission, his disappointment in her over the mission. (Or maybe the two were intertwined, Natasha thought—he decided he liked her less when he realized what an idiot she was.) It hadn't occurred to Natasha to regret what she had said to Arthur until Jeffrey had cast this new light on her actions. She realized only now how ridiculous it was to have thrown a fit over the Tribe's speaking English. She should have perceived that possibility herself, simply from knowing the basic history of the Storm, and knowing that once, the Alphas and the other human beings on this continent had shared a common language. She thought about chasing after the Tribe dog and her self-hatred plunged a notch lower. Of course she knew how stupid she'd been, of course everything Jeffrey had said about her mistake was true—but hadn't she suffered enough for it yet? She certainly didn't deserve to have people like Claudia gloating over her failures. Natasha pressed her cheek into the pillow, wishing for a thing that she had never wanted before: that she did not have to go to work tomorrow, that she could spend her Alpha-given eternity in bed.

The evening deepened and the lights began to dim automatically. Natasha felt too tired to get up and hit the override switch by the door, and she was about to change into her nightclothes when a noise from the hallway caught her by surprise. She lay there for some seconds, listening. Then it came again, someone tapping lightly at her door. Thinking it must be Jeffrey coming to apologize, Natasha jumped out of bed. She wiped her face with her sleeve and turned on the lamp, catching sight of her own reflection in the small oval mirror by her wallcomputer. She pinched her cheeks to redden them but it was a losing battle; she was a frightful mess. The tapping sounded again and she leapt across the room and opened the door. But she had guessed wrong: it was not Jeffrey, but Eric who stood in the hallway, hands in his pockets, looking weary and afraid. The hopeful glow in Natasha's chest snuffed itself out at once; she had never been so disappointed to see anyone in all her life. She remembered what Jeffrey had said about her being better suited for Eric and she almost slammed the door in Eric's face.

“Your roommate here?” Eric whispered, noticing nothing of Natasha's distress.

“She's working late, I think.”

“Good, that's what I heard. Can I come in? I need to talk to you.”

Natasha sighed heavily, but she stood aside and let Eric past her. Citizens rarely visited one another in their sleeprooms. To have two visits in one night—first Natasha to Jeffrey's and now Eric to hers—was unheard of. Natasha gestured to Min-he's bed and Eric sat down, still nervous.

“What's the matter?” Natasha asked. “Did something happen in the Office?”

“No. At least, not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“Listen,” he burst out, “I want to know what they said about me, what Arthur said. I heard he came to visit you in the medical wing.”

“We didn't talk about you,” Natasha said, completely bewildered.

“But they told you about the manual sweep?”

“They said Nolan did it. Eric, what's this about? I was almost asleep.” Natasha was getting annoyed; she didn't feel like talking about the Pines right now.

But then, to Natasha's astonishment, Eric dropped his face into his hands and groaned.

“I messed up, Natasha. I totally froze out there.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Twenty minutes after you left,” Eric said, still refusing to look up, “they told us you were missing. Jeffrey took off. Alejandra was ten feet ahead of me when I heard something behind us. I knew it couldn't be Douglas or Nolan, because they were coming from the other direction. It was a Pine. A man.”

“Who?” Natasha asked.

“I don't know
who
,” Eric said. “But he spoke to me.”

“In English.”

“Arthur gave the order for a manual sweep,” Eric continued, “but I just stood there. And then when I finally thought I could do it, the man dropped to his knees. He begged me to let him go. He swore he wouldn't come back here again. I couldn't do it. I couldn't sweep him. It didn't seem right. I know it was the ethical thing to do, but it didn't seem
right
. And then he ran away and everyone yelled at me.”

“Maybe it wasn't right,” Natasha said. Suddenly Eric's presence was not so unwelcome, perhaps someone in the settlement did understand her after all. She walked over and sat beside him on Min-he's bed. “The same thing happened to me when I tried to sweep one of their dogs. I hesitated and it got away and I followed it. That's how they got me. But the thing is, I don't feel sorry I let the dog live.” Natasha wasn't totally sure how safe it was to confess the full truth of her feelings to Eric, but she pressed on. “I'm glad it lived, no matter what the Alphas say.” She put a hand on Eric's shoulder. “Aren't you glad you let the man live?”

“He won't live long,” he answered. “And I wasn't strong enough to give him a peaceful end. Stupid, embracive thinking. I let down my Wall.”

“But it's more complicated than that,” Natasha urged. “And I bet other people would agree with us too, if they'd seen the Pines like we had.”

“There was something different about them, wasn't there?” Eric said. “They didn't act like the Cranes. Or the Larks or the Wolves,” he added, naming two partial sweeps from when they were children. “I tried to explain that to Arthur, but he didn't get it.”

“Jeffrey wouldn't listen to me either.”

As Natasha spoke, trying to keep the hurt out of her voice, her gaze drifted to her wallcomputer, which was glowing with an announcement. She walked over to turn off the screen, her eyes scanning the Alpha bulletin regarding progress on the New Wing.

 

Eighteen members of the Office of Material Science and the Office of Agricultural Maintenance have been transferred to the Construction team. We hope that these new additions will hasten work on the exterior paneling, as well as free up our electrical engineers to work exclusively on the phase-three and postliquid incuvat environs. As for our eighty-three generation Zetas, they continue to develop in the Office of Reproduction. Their liquid-emergence date remains December 10th, and not even we, as Alphas, can request that they push it back.

Eternally Yours, Alphas/deptofgov

Natasha circled the sender address with her finger. She had an idea. It was risky; it would probably get them in trouble with Arthur. But given that he had already demoted their team to satellite watch, she figured they didn't have much to lose.

“Eric, do you think you could write down what you just told me, about the man begging for his life?”

“Why would I write it down?”

“Because I want to send a message to the Alphas. I want to tell them what happened to us in the field. Both of us.”

Eric shot her a dubious look.

“Wait, think about it. Who knows what Arthur's telling them? What he's censoring from his reports? He's already made up his mind about the Pines. Why would he bother making a case for them to the Alphas?”

“And you'll message them?” he asked. “Message the Alphas? You realize what you're saying, right?”

“Yes, I do. We should explain what really happened and request a meeting with them. A meeting in the Department of Government. No Epsilon has ever contacted them directly before, as far as I know. At least they won't be able to ignore us.”

To Natasha's surprise, Eric did not immediately dismiss the idea. In fact, he agreed to the plan with seemingly more conviction than what she herself felt. They spent the next hour writing their message, thinking over every aspect of the mission and refusing to leave out a single detail. They signed it
Natasha Wiley and Eric Johansson, Epsilons, Office of Mercy
, and on Eric's final okay, Natasha sent the message to America-Five's highest authority.

•   •   •

No response came, not the next day or the day after that. Probably Natasha would not have been able to hide the turmoil she felt over the message or, what was worse, the shaky agitation that gripped her at any mention of Jeffrey's name, except that everyone in America-Five was anxious these days, and so Natasha fit right in.

Ready or not, the Zetas were nearing their sixth month of gestation, and would soon grow too large for their current phase-two incuvats in the Office of Reproduction. The scientists wanted to transfer them soon, but construction continued to fall behind schedule in the New Wing. The parties in charge had considered transferring the Zetas
before
the construction had concluded, but no one liked the idea of laser drills and electron saws flashing and roaring around the developing babies. Anyway, it seemed a dark, inauspicious beginning if it did come to that. Conversations from last year were slowly cropping up again: doubts about the prudence of creating a new generation when the underground levels were already filled to capacity, and when they were forced to build a whole new wing just to make room for the phase-three incuvats. (To say nothing yet of the dormitories and schoolrooms that the Zetas would eventually require.) The Alphas had waited more than two hundred years after the Storm before creating the Betas; and, in turn, the Alphas and Betas had waited another sixty years after that before considering themselves fit to receive a generation of Gammas. Because of course, as the Ethical Code directed, no new life should ever be brought into existence without the settlement's first proving to itself that it had triple the energy, space, and resources to sustain the new additions. With this truth in mind, a few citizens were going so far as to wonder if the Alphas would choose to destroy the Zetas. But according to Cameron Pacheco, who was heading the project, however unhappy the old ones were, the Alphas did not view the situation as dire as that.

Meanwhile, in the Office of Mercy, the Pines continued to elude detection, and the stress was wearing away at them all. Arthur lapsed into periodic fits of faultfinding, accusing one team or another of missing a flicker of human migration over the deadzone perimeter. But he was always wrong. Nothing tripped the sensors but birds, rabbits, deer, and the occasional fluffy-tailed squirrel. The Alphas called at regular intervals now, and Natasha had learned to recognize the drawn, despondent expression that came over Arthur's face when he spoke directly to the Mother or Father. The whole settlement felt their failure, and shared in their fear. Even Min-he began asking Natasha for updates, though she hadn't shown much interest in the Office of Mercy before, and had once even dismissively dubbed the sweeps “janitorial work,” cleanup from the Storm.

For most citizens, the only thing that made these setbacks bearable was the promise of the Crane Celebration, scheduled for the first week of September. The settlement held a celebration for any large sweep; and they were among the most extravagant and unique days in America-Five. According to a short section in the Ethical Code, such celebrations served to remind the citizens of their higher purpose on Earth: namely, not only to create peaceful, happy, and long lives within the settlement (as described the work of most citizens), but also to supplement this
positive
work with the work of
negating
what life was not peaceful and happy and long. The Epsilons especially were looking forward to the holiday, since they had only attended a handful of celebrations before, and most as children. Also at the Crane Celebration, the citizen whose labor had most directly contributed to the success of the sweep received a medal of service. In the case of the Crane sweep—as was announced on the maincomputer, and to no one's surprise—that citizen was Jeffrey.

As for Natasha, she wanted absolutely nothing to do with the preparations for the Crane Celebration. Work was bad enough, with Eric a nervous wreck and Yasmine a total dolt—always going on about how proud they should be about Jeffrey's medal—and Claudia Kim sneering at Natasha whenever she had the chance. So far, the only real mercy (as far as Natasha's life was concerned) was that Jeffrey seemed to be consciously staying away from the dayshifts, and steering clear of the shift changes too.

Natasha had no desire to put an accidental end to this deliberate estrangement, and no desire, either, to put herself in the company of those citizens who still liked to ask her questions about the ill-fated mission. So in order to avoid the volunteer committees that gathered in the evenings—the Menu Committee, the Garden Committee, the Agriculture Beautification Committee, and the Committee for Music and Entertainment—Natasha took to returning to her sleeproom directly after dinner. These long evening hours would have been unbearable, she could not have endured them, except that lately Min-he had been borrowing stacks of Pre-Storm books to look over during her leisure hours. While the Ethical Code sat cold and foreboding in the table drawer, no longer holding for Natasha the promise of comfort, she would instead leaf through these strange manuscripts, printed on delicate, musty-smelling paper: stories of people living in cities and wars between nations and other strange subjects like slavery and marriage and ocean voyages. She could barely comprehend the concepts, or the finer details of the texts. But the stories sparked Natasha's interest and allowed her, at times, to forget herself and her own situation, and made her wonder, too, at the variety of experiences possible within far-flung, individual lives of the same human species.

One night, though, while poring over the fantastic tale of a man who fights off a fire-breathing dragon to save his home village (a place of thatched-roof houses, no less), Natasha began feeling restless. Eventually, she closed the book and returned it to the top of Min-he's stack. She threw on a fuzzy second-skin top and, for the first time since before the mission, she headed to the Pretends.

The gray-blue walls of the Pod curved around her, nestling her in its cocoon. On the virtual menu hovering before her eyes, the computer presented three options: Experience, Game, Free Play. On a whim, Natasha chose Free Play. The neurotranslation technology specific to Free Play still had a few glitches, being so new. Last time, when Natasha had tried to evoke the scene of a Pre-Storm, black-tie dance, it had thrown her into an aviary with ostriches and cockatoos and Natasha had ended the simulation only just in time to avoid being pecked and squawked at to oblivion. But Natasha did not really care what the computer did. All she wanted was something new, some escape from her messed-up life. She wouldn't mind if it sent her skateboarding with baby antelope or whatever else. The Pod faded from blue to black; her eyes closed and then, a second later, the world lighted to reveal the Dome on a usual morning at 0800 hours.