Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (27 page)

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He would not look at her. They reached the Department of Government entrance, and Jeffrey tapped his finger. The doors opened directly into a much smaller version of the elephant, this one paneled with thick, maroon fabric. As they sank down, the noise from the Dome disappeared. Jeffrey turned to face the doors on the opposite side. He was sweating; he kept taking off his glasses to rub his eyes. Natasha had never seen him look so pale; even his lips were white.

The little elevator eased to a slow stop, and the second set of doors opened. For her entire life, Natasha had wondered about the Department of Government. All the Epsilons had. She had always imagined what a treat it would be to get to see it one day—but not like this, of course. She had not imagined this.

Terrified as she was, Natasha gasped in awe at the magnificent sight before her as she stepped into the wing. The space was big and airy like the Dome or the Garden. Little windowed rooms rose up on all sides, and the circular center of the wing was open to a frosted-glass ceiling above. But facing her was the thing that made this sight unlike anything Natasha had encountered before: thundering down from near the roof was a vertical river of blue and white water. A waterfall, Natasha thought, remembering the name. It was seven stories tall at least; and the cascading rush fed into a wide, deep pool, white with mist. The rest of the floor—if you could even call it a floor, the whole area seemed alive—consisted of the most beautiful garden that Natasha had ever seen, real life or Pretend. Little streams snaked off from the pool, winding under curved footbridges and through the vines of miniature trees. The grass was short and spongy, and the ground rose and fell in little hills dotted with subdued white flowers or intricate rock designs.

Natasha began to notice the Alphas then. They sat on benches or stood like statues amid the green. Many of them wore hoods that fell low over their faces, but Natasha could tell that they were looking at her. One man with a high brow and square chin shook his head sadly as Jeffrey led her along the path; they must know what she had done.

Natasha took in a breath and coughed.

“The atmosphere in this wing is different from what you're used to,” Jeffrey said, his voice still shaky. “Try to take shallow breaths, otherwise you might faint. We're going to the fifth floor.”

They rose up in a different elevator, this one glass and small like the first. It traveled alongside the edge of the waterfall and the two motions together combined to create a dizzying effect. Jeffrey led her into a bright room with white walls on the left and right. The back wall was not a wall of solid material, but the underside of the waterfall.

The Mother and Father sat with their backs to the water, on two tall white chairs that had a biological quality to them, like giant petals, the high tips of the chairs waving in the waterfall's breeze. Jeffrey led Natasha to a wide chair lined with controls that seemed like it belonged in the Department of Health, and which was separated from the Mother and Father by a narrow table of marble. Natasha thought that Raj or maybe a few of the others would be here—and her anxiety increased when she realized that she was alone.

The Mother pushed back her hood, revealing her bright hair, papery skin, and a pair of ice-blue eyes that were more stunning, even, than Jeffrey's.

“Thank you, Jeffrey,” the Mother said, “for escorting Natasha here. Though I'm sure she would have come by her own volition, once she had checked her messages. Please relax, Natasha, I can't stand that shaking. Jeffrey, your expertise is now needed in the Office of Mercy. Kindly go to Arthur's aid. He is not as adept in emergencies as you are.”

A hint of irony lit her last words, but Jeffrey did not seem to notice.

“I wanted to stay,” he said loudly, with surprisingly little command over himself, as if he had suddenly forgotten where he was and to whom he was speaking. “This goes back to me. This began with me years ago. You can't blame Natasha. This is my doing. I take responsibility for what happened today.”

“Responsibility is not yours to assign, Jeffrey,” the Mother replied. “We'll get to you later. We're concerned with Natasha right now.”

“Then I'll help,” Jeffrey said quickly. “I'll explain myself. Just let me stay.”

“No,” said the Mother.

“Please.” Jeffrey took off his glasses. “At least let me hear what you have to say to Natasha. I need to hear something. I can't understand how this happened.”

From behind them, and in answer to a motion of the Father's hand, two male Betas entered the room. They stood on either side of Jeffrey, not quite touching his shoulders. Jeffrey began to speak again, but caught himself, his mouth hanging open. And with one long and terrified look at Natasha, he allowed the two Betas to lead him out of the room.

Her future must be hopeless, Natasha thought with growing panic as the door closed behind them. If Jeffrey was breaking down, then they must be banishing her. Jeffrey must already know.

“Well,” said the Father, a man with a small, round face and shadowy eyes. “You've had a busy day. Romping through the forest, masterminding attacks, aligning yourself with a Tribe and then changing your mind. You're probably half-dead on your feet.”

The Father's words injured her but, at the same time, they seemed far away. How long did she have? A day? Hours? How long until the airlock banged closed on her, and she was alone with the weather and the trees and the animals? Her best hope was that the surviving Pines would find her and, in their outrage, would kill her fast—that her death would not be slow.

“Please,” said Natasha. She was not begging for forgiveness; it was too late for that. Her only wish was to make herself understood before they sent her away. “I never meant for anyone to get hurt. The Tribe lied to me. They weren't supposed to shoot anyone. They told me their only purpose was to destroy the novas. We were going to empty the Strongroom and bring the novas to the ocean. We were going to drop the novas in the water and that's all. After that we were going to disappear—”

“And you trusted them?” the Mother asked, cutting her off.

“Yes, yes,” Natasha answered, frantic to explain everything, even though it was almost impossible to imagine that according to what she had thought before, at this moment she was supposed to be in the forest. “I had their word. I've been meeting with them, sneaking Outside. The chief, Axel, he promised me. He said they wanted to destroy the novas because they believe in life over death.”

“And what, my dear child, do you think
we
believe in?” the Father asked. “Did we build this settlement because we thought it might look pretty? Do our citizens in the Department of Health and the Department of Research work sixteen-hour shifts perfecting new technologies because it makes for lively talk over dinner?” He raised a twisted, bony finger at her. “You have been spoiled into forgetting that your life and the life of your fellow citizens is something that we fight for every day. Yes, our daily workshifts may fail to provide the thrills of a Pre-Storm blood-and-guts war, we don't do it with guns or arrows, but we rise each morning in this settlement ready to do battle with death. The whole of America-Five is engineered toward that purpose!”

“I don't think that violence is exciting,” Natasha protested. “Tezo, one of the Pines, he shot me. Do you think I planned that? He knew it was me. He saw I wasn't in the New Wing, and he probably assumed that I'd changed my mind. That I'd betrayed them. And he was right. I did betray them, because they betrayed me. They lied to me. I told you. They weren't supposed to shoot at people. If Min-he—if anything happens to Min-he or anyone—”

“Then you would only have your own choices to blame,” said the Mother.

“I know,” said Natasha. She was groaning now, a low, ugly, guttural noise. “Maybe this was inevitable,” she said. “I could never have been a part of their Tribe. But I wasn't meant to be here either. I don't belong in the settlement. I don't belong anywhere. Because I am one of them. It's true. I know it's true. They told me, and I saw it in the Pretends. And when I asked Jeffrey, he admitted it. He said that he was the one to take me here, to make me a citizen. He shouldn't have. I didn't want it.”

“The question of what a person wants or does not want holds no relevance here. What matters is the system that we have created and how each life factors into that system.” The Mother shook her head. “You are very young, Natasha. And it is the special privilege of the young to live and breathe the present. To take the situation of the world you were born into largely for granted, with little interest in how it all came about.”

“I don't take it for granted,” Natasha said. “I wanted to change it!”

“Yes, you did, but not to anything new. We've been following your actions closely these last few months. We know that you and Eric left the settlement on the night of the Crane Celebration, and we know the basic content of your meetings with Raj and his Delta compatriots . . . though his antics down on level nine, I'll confess, did catch us by surprise, as did your breaking into the Strongroom. Indeed,” the Mother conceded, “the methods were your own. But what you were trying to do, to destroy the control of the settlement and to spread the promise, the false promise, of life equally among the living is not a new idea in the least. If you had succeeded, you would have achieved nothing more or less than the destruction of three centuries of proven progress. You would have thrown us back into some of the darkest years of human existence, to the world before the Storm.”

The Mother's face relaxed, but only in a pitying way.

“You have not lived in those times,” she continued. “As I said, the young study the present. It is only when you are old, when the present is a little less captivating, that your mind can let go, and expand. We Alphas may not be as quick in the Bioreplacement rooms, or in the Research laboratories, but we do have that undervalued quality of unimpeachable memory. We remember. We remember what it was like before the Storm. When there were cities, and wars. When every single day was a struggle for power, and power was a thing that bounced around from one group to another, so that it was impossible to imagine how the fighting would end. For thousands of years, no one tried to stop it. It seemed
natural
to them, to compete for resources, to suffer and to die their noble little deaths. Instead of resisting, they said ‘this is what makes us human,' and bore it, and were inexorably crushed beneath it. Generation after generation went like this. Advances in medicine, yes. Better living conditions in the richer nations, true. But those were small triumphs, little advances against a great darkness. Human society had no defined goal. It was a failing machine. It refused to throw off the laws of the animals.”

“What about the Yangs?” Natasha challenged. She thought of the Alphas' vitriolic dismissal of that long-dead generation in the Ethical Code. “The Yangs wanted to make life good for everyone.”

“Well, yes,” said the Mother, a wistful smile touching her lips. “The Yangs were our intellectual forefathers, in a way. For many of us, they were our actual, biological parents. Edmund Yang was a gifted leader. And the group had great support in the early decades of their existence. They claimed that the divide between the very rich and very poor could be solved, not by sacrifice, as the wealthy class would have abhorred, but simply by better organization. That sounded good to everyone. Within thirty years, they had convinced a couple of billion people.”

“And it would have worked,” said Natasha, remembering what Mercedes had said once in the conference room, what seemed itself a hundred years ago. “If you had seen their project through, it would have worked.”

“They had their chance, Natasha. No amount of time would have helped. You see, the Yangs' ideas made perfect sense on paper. In fact, we have many of their ideas in practice here in the settlement. Put people to work in agriculture, water purification, power production, teaching, scientific research, and medical science, and each citizen of the world should have enough to keep themselves alive and happy many times over. What we needed to eliminate, according to the Yangs, were the toys, the idleness, the wasted hours, the heaps of trash, from overvaried clothing to electronic knickknacks—to eliminate that great distraction called business, to replace the goal of making money with the goal of producing useful, life-preserving materials. But most of all, it was the Yangs' idea to give the trillions of hours of human labor that occurred each day a meaningful, clear, and concise direction.”

“To extend human life.”

They nodded.

“To end suffering.”

“Yes,” said the Mother. “Though they would have balked at the Office of Mercy. It wasn't their way.”

“Why can't we be like the Yangs then?” demanded Natasha. “Why can't we stop the sweeps?”

“Because the Yangs failed,” said the Mother. “We don't know exactly why. For a short time there was no fighting, no strife. People were still hungry, and in poor health, but there was hope. As I said, we hold the same ideals as the Yangs. Their collapse was really a great sadness to us. But they did fail, they did. Most believed the lessons of the Yangs in their minds, but not in their hearts. The upheavals came soon, and once they started, human beings found themselves in a terrible, terrible place. The population at that time numbered over fifty-nine billion. The structure of society—its equilibrium—was delicate. The Yangs had already disrupted it once. And once the dissolution process began, it could not be stopped.”

“The Yang era,” said the Father, “marked the last attempt to carry every living soul on earth into a peaceful future. And we Alphas were the first to put an end to those attempts and to take the necessary and merciful actions toward the world you live in today. It was difficult at first, to realize the extent of the sweeps that would be necessary to bring about this new society. But we can't be too hard on ourselves. The road to peace is always paved with corpses. Even in our most beautiful and fantastic dreams, human beings have accounted for that. The all-powerful God of the old religions was selective. Even heaven had gates. But if you get there in the end, if you create the earthly paradise at last—a paradise free of that threefold evil of physical pain, mental suffering, and death—then it's only logical to forgive yourself. As for the ones we had to leave behind, the ones we could not include as Alphas . . . Well, if they don't
know
they've been left behind, then where is the harm? The dead don't suffer. The dead feel no anguish or regret.”