Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (29 page)

Natasha trembled, her eyes opened to the bright, white room.

“We're also hoping you might comprehend better now,” the Mother continued, “the difference between empathy and Misplaced Empathy. Would you have recognized that mind as Tezo's if we had not told you in advance?”

Natasha forced her lips to move. “No,” she said.

“Is that a mind you could have loved?”

Natasha shuddered. “No.”

As the Mother returned to her chair, she ran her fingers through the moving wall of water. The light glinted, dancing white ribbons of light.

“There is the chance for so much good in the world,” she said. “But first, we must clean out the bad. Life without peace and eternity is terrible, and we must end it. We must clean it out. Nature couldn't do it. Faith couldn't. Only we can, man and woman. We are the only merciful intelligence in the universe.”

The Mother and Father remained looking at her, and the only sounds were of rushing water and Natasha's sobs. The echo of Tezo's pain washed over her, again and again, making her cells tremble. Her legs jerked like they were trying to flee the suffering and the death that now had no vessel, no center, that hung like a low, threatening fog over the earth, clinging to the walls of the wings and the curve of the Dome. Anything was better than to let it in. If she could, she would run away from here and find a hidden cubby among the storagerooms on level eight. She would stay there forever and live on bread and water rather than face the pain again.

After some time, Natasha did not know how much, the Mother spoke, her voice calm and velvety.

“You think we're going to banish you from the settlement,” she said. “But however much trouble you caused, we would never respond in that manner. We'll see what this meeting does for your thinking. If we find you still in need of illumination, there are other methods we might try. The process of reeducation varies with each individual, but a truthful ethics always triumphs in the end. We can guarantee that from three hundred years of experience. Believe it or not, you're not the first citizen in America-Five to question our way of life—though perhaps you came the closest to doing it real damage.”

“Why did he save me?” Natasha asked. “I wish he hadn't. Why would he take me Inside?”

She did not know the question burned in her until she asked, but then she understood it as the crux, the origin of her unrest. Because it had all started with that, hadn't it? And now she could not begin to understand the losses of this day until she had finally made sense of her own position, until she had freed herself from the muddledness of her own imprisoning perspective.

“Ahhh,” breathed the Mother. “Why did our most accomplished member of the Office of Mercy risk his life and throw away his beliefs to save a child he had set out to sweep? Well, have you asked him?”

“He told me that he didn't think. That I looked so perfect and innocent he couldn't help but take me.”

“I'm sure that's true, but it's not the whole story. Over the years, your friend Jeffrey has experienced many of the same doubts that you yourself harbor. He's gone through countless sessions of reeducation, beginning when he was a very young man. He generally performed quite well at his job, but there have been hard times for him. Times when he regretted sweeping every human being whom he had saved from suffering. Before the Palms' attack, he was actually thinking about resigning from the Office of Mercy. We believe—and he believes too—that he saved you in an attempt to make up for the lives he had ended.”

“It doesn't make up for it.”

“No, of course not. One has nothing to do with the other.”

“He shouldn't have taken me.”

“It would have been fine if he hadn't. As it turns out, your suffering as a small child would not have equaled the suffering you caused to others as an adult. But Jeffrey did save you. He took you, and that's all that matters. Once you entered the settlement you became one of us. Your future was fixed. We named you immediately, within the first hour you came Inside. ‘Natasha' was a variation of the name you called yourself—‘Nassia.' We gave you ‘Wiley' in honor of your cunning skill in so wholly altering the design of your life.”

The clamps had fallen back from Natasha's wrists and the helmet had released its grip.

“Understand,” said the Father, “we are not going to make this information public to the rest of the settlement, and neither should you. No one but Jeffrey—and eventually, Arthur—will know your full involvement in this incident. We have told your friends the same. Raj, Mercedes, Sarah, Ben, and Eduardo will each have their own program of reeducation. There is no danger that any of them will revisit the subject of this treachery with you. Kindly pay them the same courtesy.”

“What am I supposed to do now?” Natasha asked.

Two Betas had entered the room; they were helping her up from the chair.

The Father raised his eyebrows, as if the answer were obvious.

“You dedicate yourself to the betterment of the world,” he said. “You preserve goodness and eliminate suffering. You labor to make your own life and the life of your fellow citizens peaceful and long.”

“How will I?” Natasha said, pleading. “The suffering is so bad. I can't forget it. I'll never be able to think about anything else.”

“Now you understand,” the Mother said with a sigh, “just a tiny fraction of what it is to be an Alpha.”

“How will I live though?” Natasha demanded, before the Betas could take her away. “How will I do anything without thinking about it?”

The Father looked down at her, the waterfall rushing behind him, and spoke his words slowly.

“You build a Wall,” he said.

18

T
hey let her sleep. The second round of medicine they administered for her wounded shoulder spread through her body, making her limbs feel numb and heavy and her thoughts groggy and slow. The Department of Government Betas took the job of escorting Natasha down to her sleeproom. Two Delta women rode the elephant with them, and despite the haziness of her mind, Natasha felt the sting of their every word.

“I heard it from Cameron Pacheco himself,” the first woman said. “They're recycling the Zetas. With the New Wing so damaged, we can't possibly sustain them.”

“No, it's too terrible,” the other replied.

“But it's the only way,” answered the first. “The future of the settlement depends on us obeying our own rules. We can't make a new generation unless we have triple the surplus to support them. And that's simply not the case at the moment. What with the Garden in ruins and Tom Doncaster trying to supervise twenty projects at once . . .”

Hours later, a heavy knocking at her sleeproom door roused Natasha awake. She threw back the covers and crossed the tiny space in the dark. Arthur stood in the hall. His grim and astonished look made Natasha sure that he knew, now, what she had done. The Alphas wanted Natasha in the Office of Mercy, Arthur told her; they had sent him down to collect her.

The Dome glowed mighty and sure, overwhelming the blank sky beyond its honeycomb windows. The floor was polished clean, and the injured citizens and medical supplies absorbed back into the Department of Health. At the end of the Department of the Exterior hall, the yellow door of the Strongroom glowed tall and impenetrable. Probably during the whole attack, no one had so much as touched it.

Inside the Office of Mercy, the computer stations were abandoned, the chairs tucked in and the screens blank, all except for Natasha's own. The room contained but three living souls: Jeffrey, the Mother, and the Father. They stood in a line beside her desk, and Arthur walked ahead to join them. Natasha had never seen an Alpha in the Office of Mercy before and, despite everything that had happened, she found their presence jarring.

“Your colleagues in the Office of Mercy worked all night to track the remaining members of the Pine Tribe,” said the Mother. “They have been located on the shore, only seven miles north of the Crane sweep site. It appears that they are trying to return to the mountains where they came from. Many of them are seriously hurt, but they have been moving steadily, attempting to escape the perimeter. Do you understand what needs to be done?”

“Yes,” said Natasha.

She sat down at her computer and touched the keys with clammy hands. The screen came alive, a black-and-white image of the surviving Pines scattered across the pale sand.

“The count is complete as far as we can tell,” Jeffrey said. His face was turned to the screen, but Natasha could see that he looked somewhat ill. “We think they must have lost a few more during their escape. They left the green carrying at least two bodies with them.”

She recognized them all, the figures on the screen. A head turned and Natasha saw the woman who had handed her a gun in the Pines' cavelike armory, and then the man who had sung the prayers the loudest, in response to Hesma's calls. Two young boys lay side by side in the shade of the trees, one with his head wrapped up in fabric. A woman screamed in pain or in grief, while Sonlow attempted halfheartedly to soothe her. A little outside the group, London sat doubled over, looking out at the ocean, his long hair whipping across his face in the wind. Axel walked over and crouched down beside him, rocking on his heels, his face drawn and still.

Natasha made note of their coordinates. She opened the screen marked “Sweep” and entered her username and password. Jeffrey gave her the clearance code, and she typed it. She double-checked the coordinates and copied them to the command box.

Are you sure that you want to nova coordinates 1150 5918?

Yes.

In the background, Axel leaned over, speaking to London.

Weapon information?

A1
, typed Natasha.

“I think size G will be sufficient, dear,” came the Mother's voice from over her shoulder. “There's no need to waste.”

Natasha deleted her entry and typed in
G1
. It was not unfeeling, she thought, it was only the practical implementation of ethics. Pain had no place in a good universe, and it fell to men and women to eliminate what pain did exist as efficiently as possible.

Please confirm command.

Natasha could have clicked the last button with her eyes closed, but why shouldn't she watch?

The nova command box disappeared and the Pines returned to the forefront. The wind blew, throwing London's hair all the way back from his face. Axel placed a hand on the boy's neck, a gesture that at once offered strength and also showed a deeper desperation. Natasha thought that maybe the nova had malfunctioned, but then came a sudden burst and the whole visual went to static.

Jeffrey made a gagging sound in his throat. He turned and walked out of the room.

“Is that it?” asked Natasha.

“We can assume so,” said the Mother. “In a few days, we'll send out a team to confirm it was clean. That was your first sweep, was it not?”

“Yes,” said Natasha.

“And how do you feel?”

The static roared, empty and cold. The fight had left her, and the only answer beat in Natasha's mind like a truth so strong that it had its own heart.

“Relieved,” she said.

•   •   •

The attack had scarred the settlement deeply, and cut wounds in some places—the New Wing, the Department of Agriculture, the citizens' general sense of security—that would take many years to heal. Min-he had one of the longest stays in the Department of Health; and she emerged from that wing only finally, with a certain sullenness of affect where once a sparkling vivaciousness had dwelled, and with a gash across her face, left from her visor, that Bioreplacement could not fully dissolve. Natasha noticed that her roommate did not sleep soundly anymore; and on some nights Min-he would actually leave their room and slip into the hall, the light catching the rough outline of her cheek and reminding Natasha—as she was often reminded—of what, for Min-he, had almost been.

A cleanup crew dismantled the incuvats and piping systems in the New Wing for reusable parts. For some time, the screeching of saws went on day and night; even six levels down they could hear it. The construction teams sealed off the New Wing doors to the Dome, abandoning eight years of work. Of course no one could disagree with the Alphas' decision to discontinue the Zetas. Though still, it was a sad, somber day when the official announcement came over the maincomputer: “We regret to inform you that the Tribe attack has forced us to postpone the creation of a Zeta generation indefinitely. . . .” As the citizens crossed through the Dome that week, many threw long, regretful looks toward the covered New Wing entrance. How terrible that they had named them, the citizens would say to one another. How sad that they had already begun to imagine who the Zetas would be and in what Office they would one day work.

The ethical principles were similar, perhaps, but destroying the Zetas had felt so different from a sweep. In a sweep, one put an end to inevitable suffering, but with this—well, these were lives that up until the attack would have been plentiful and peaceful and good.

“Horrible,” the citizens would say, “and named already.”

And yet. The Alphas encouraged the citizens to remember that it was not
too
overwhelmingly sad. Perhaps a new generation of Zetas would come along in the next decade or so, once America-Five had picked itself up and restored its equilibrium. The bioengineers had the Zetas' raw DNA safely stored in the labs, available for reuse; and though the next group would not be literally the
same
, it should be close enough to provide consolation.

“The funny thing is,” Eric said loudly over dinner one night, largely repeating the Alphas' position, “once the new generation of Zetas comes, we won't feel badly about losing the first one at all. Because we'll know in the back of our minds that if the
old
Zetas hadn't been destroyed, these
new
ones could never have come into existence. And we'll love the
new
Zetas so much that all our loyalties will lie with them!”

As for Natasha, she did not dare test this logic with empathy—
Misplaced Empathy
—for the gone generation. Nor did she project onto the dead Pines, her blood family and her earliest companions on Earth, in foolish attempts to see the sweep from “their eyes”—eyes that were now molecules, dust. Her thoughts cowered in her head, not even needing a Wall to restrain them. Because how could she dare? Who was she to know, or to want to know, what lay beyond ordered life in the settlement?

Natasha could not tell how things were with the others. She saw Mercedes, Eduardo, Sarah, and Ben sometimes; but when she did, they never spoke to her. Like Natasha herself, they acted differently, timid and self-effacing. Once Natasha caught Sarah staring at her in the Dining Hall. But other than that, they showed no open curiosity about the extent of Natasha's additional involvement in the attack. Perhaps they could guess what she had done; or perhaps they assumed that the Pines had acted alone, and that Natasha was no more culpable in the attack than they were.

Raj looked different too, though not in the same way as the others. Where the others seemed guilty or remorseful, Raj was only hollow. Natasha wondered if he had experienced a simulation like what the Alphas had done to her—and if Raj, who had such an embracing mind, had learned suffering the way Natasha had learned it. They did speak once, despite the Mother and Father's prohibitions, finding themselves accidentally alone together in the elephant.

“We made a terrible mistake,” said Raj, once the doors had closed behind two Gammas exiting on level two. His face had grown thin and sharp, and his flesh bluish around the eyes. “We're young and we did what young people do. We mistook passion for perception. I understand that now. I want to apologize for—” he stumbled. “For my part in contacting the Tribe.”

“I'm sorry too,” said Natasha, staring at the elephant doors.

“There is no in-between, is there?” asked Raj. “No good between nothingness and life in the settlements. And death like what happens Outside . . . it's a worse thing than I'd thought. To have all this ripped away from you. To watch as your life is stolen from you, and you unable to stop it. I love living. It made me realize how much I love being alive. I never want to die, do you?”

“No,” said Natasha. “I never want to die. Never.”

They parted ways in the Dome, and from then on Natasha tried her best not to come within several yards of Raj Radhakrishnan. For reasons she did not try to name, the mere sight of him—his erect and elegant posture, his wise face and sharp eyes—was enough to throw her into a frightening relapse of thought: Axel kneeling down beside his brother, the wind whipping their hair and the dead roar that followed, Tezo's mind, foreign and enraged—the memory of it would burst into Natasha's head, and the emptiness would try to swallow her too.

Meanwhile, the Betas who directed Natasha's reeducation made all sorts of promises. They claimed that her case was by no means hopeless; and they detected progress in her mode of thought even before Natasha herself could feel it. They constantly assured her that, with time and steady exertion, she would continue to improve. And in the weeks following the attack (she worked on a crew in the Garden, welding iron bars together that would serve to protect the new skylights in the roof), Natasha did her best to follow their instructions, and for whole mornings or afternoons would exercise blending her thoughts with the Ethical Code.

Often while Natasha worked, she found herself able to contemplate the Wall and the views of the Alphas with a newfound comprehension and ease. How the Alphas taught the younger generations to build Walls because they loved their children, and wished to protect them from a knowledge of the dreadful things Outside. And the danger too. The danger of throwing your mind too much at other people, as Natasha had done with the Tribe, so that you begin to lose your own self, and lose the beauty of your own life.

Natasha drew down her mask and guided a small blue flame along the juncture of an iron bar and its frame. A finished plate, this one circular and intended for the very center of the Garden roof, fell with a clang and she jumped, her heart racing.

Any sudden noise reminded her of the attack. The screams and the blood. How easily a place of calm and peace can shatter to reveal the hell at its foundation.

The heat of the flame rippled the air and, with practiced dexterity, Natasha rounded the flame to the opposite side of the bar.

The only hope was for places of peace to go on, she thought, and for places of horror to disappear. It would be difficult, of course, but they could make it happen if they tried. World Peace, Eternal Life, and All Suffering Ended. It helped Natasha to remember those aims, the bedrock of the settlement's ethics. And, in lengthening moments, she occasionally managed to stand on its plane, viewing the universe from that solid ground.

Even Natasha's own past had begun troubling her less than it had: the fact that, if Jeffrey had not rescued her twenty-two years ago, she would have numbered also among the nonexistent. Because there was another law, Natasha had found, a higher law, in which she could take comfort. The law of time. The past was past, as the Alphas had said. And Natasha's past could only have happened the way it had happened. The fire could only have rushed out of control and Jeffrey could never have chosen
not
to save her because if he had not saved her then he would not have been Jeffrey. It did not make sense to wonder, what if he had not reached over the fire and grabbed her, had not run until they reached the Dome? What if he had not held on until they had to pry her out of his arms? The law of time gave him only one chance to decide, and he had decided. It could not have happened differently. It could never be otherwise.