Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (2 page)

What Natasha had felt last night for the Tribe, that surge of horror, was a more subtle anachronism than any of those—though it was certainly not unheard of, especially among young Office of Mercy workers such as herself. It even had a name: Misplaced Empathy, a form of Psychological Projection. What Natasha had done during the alarm was to place
herself
, her level of awareness and expectation, onto the blank faces of the Tribe members. It was a very human, very natural thing to do. Psychological Projection in general—the understanding that other human beings have a mind that works more or less like your own—was a basic social necessity that allowed individuals to comprehend and to predict how people around them would act. The trouble came when one allowed this powerful but relatively crude mechanism of the mind to take over for reason. In the most mild cases of Misplaced Empathy, a person might project human faculties onto nonhuman minds: so that a child would think his doll capable of feeling pain, or a farmer would believe that the chickens she tended possessed special pangs of affection for her. But projection like what Natasha had done was not only wrong, it was immoral and dangerous. The Tribespeople did not have her life or a comparable life experience. They were starving and weak with disease; even if they burned with the animal will to live, they had no future to hope for (whether they knew it or not) except for further suffering and, soon, a painful death.

Last night, when the low alarm had sounded to signal a probable sweep, Natasha had mistakenly foisted onto the Tribe feelings that were, in this situation, simply beyond the capacity of their understanding. She had, more specifically, imagined for them the terror of imminent death that only a person who already
knew
about sweeps could possibly have experienced as they watched the round head of a nova rip toward them through the sky. But the Tribespeople—whether it was Cranes or Pines, Natasha would find out soon—could not have comprehended the meaning of the nova. They could not have felt dread. They could not have understood enough to mourn their own end. If all had gone right, they would have felt at most perhaps the briefest flicker of wonder; and Natasha could not expect to perform at her job in the Office of Mercy if she did not remember that most fundamental fact.

“You're up,” said Maria Chávez, a fellow Epsilon who was standing in line behind her. Natasha thanked her a little breathlessly and stepped forward to tap her finger on the soft, rectangular reader, registering her unique genetic code.

The light flashed green and the tall doors smacked apart along their seal.

At least she was feeling a little better now, Natasha thought, as she entered the gleaming white hall of the Department of the Exterior. And as her hard-soled shoes rapped on the polished floor and fell into step with the steady stream of citizens moving toward their respective Offices, the values of the settlement—the values put into practice each day in the Office of Mercy—began to bloom and flourish again in her mind, so that she could almost forget last night, and forget the monsters of her imagination that lurked behind the Wall. The values of America-Five, which Natasha lived by, were these: World Peace, Eternal Life, and All Suffering Ended.

•   •   •

The overhead screen in the Office of Mercy glowed above the jumble of four-person cubicles, rolling chairs, and arriving morningshift workers. It was so massive that it drew all attention toward itself as one entered the room; and its light reflected in glints of blue and gray off the silver desk legs, the idling computer screens, and the glass carafe of the coffee machine, which sat gurgling on the side table. Today the overhead screen showed a single feed from one of their easternmost sensors: a wasteland of beach and forest. There was nothing immediately remarkable about the image. One might have even thought it a still, except for the mute lapping of foamy waves and the occasional flutter of a bird on the periphery. But in the distance (it took a second to notice), about one mile from the camera eye, was a strange upset to the landscape. Here the trees lay split and tossed about—one ancient oak stripped of leaves and half immersed in the water—and the blackish wet sand from underground erupted to color the paler surface.

Despite the changes, Natasha recognized the place immediately: it was the same beach that she and the three other members of her team had been monitoring for the last fifteen days, only this image was from a sensor that she had never looked through before. Cranes, she thought, a tightness coming over her gut. True, she had already guessed that there had been a sweep, but it was different, so different, to see the proof before her. At that moment, the camera zoomed in to a spot of sand on the lower left side. At a detail of 500x magnification, Natasha could now make out the charred remains of a woman's bare torso draped backward over a thick, horizontal tree trunk and, a few feet away, what appeared to be the lower portion of a human jaw smiling full-toothed up from the sand.

She recoiled a step, knocking into her Director, who was just entering the Office; though luckily for Natasha, he did not seem to notice.

“We swept the Cranes,” said Arthur Roosevelt, coming over to stand beside Natasha. Arthur was a broad-shouldered, round-bellied man of very dark complexion, except for a patch of unpigmented skin beneath his left eye, where he'd once had emergency bioreplacement. “But unless you're in system failure, you've probably figured that out already.” He nodded toward Natasha's own four-person cubicle at the back of the room. “Jeffrey did it, he stayed up all night.”

“Was it clean?” asked Natasha.

Arthur and Natasha began walking together through the rows of cubicles, Natasha now moving with the air of sharp watchfulness that the Office usually inspired within her, and her posture so straight that she stood almost as tall as hunched-over Arthur.

By this time, most of the morningshift workers were already at their computers. In the front of the room, the lower-ranking teams had satellite images up on their screens: it was their job to monitor weather patterns that might affect Tribe and animal migration. These workers seemed preoccupied with the sweep, though, as were the groups in the middle, who were looking at images of the Pine camp. At Natasha's cubicle, Jeffrey was talking into his audioset. He glanced furtively over his shoulder at her, then quickly away, and with a leap of feeling, Natasha wondered if Jeffrey had lingered past the end of his shift in order to see her. He had done so before, on several occasions in fact; it was by no means irrational for Natasha to hope that this was one of those times.

“The sweep was spotless,” Arthur said, answering Natasha's question. “Not a single survivor from the whole Tribe. And it was overcast this morning so they probably never saw the nova coming. There they were, gathered around the fire, then, swish, nothingness. I only wish the men hadn't gone on that hunting trip,” he added soberly. “That was fifteen days of terrible suffering that could have been preempted. Another week and I would've appealed to the Alphas to let us sweep the men and the camp separately.”

They arrived at Natasha's desk and Jeffrey's eyes met hers, while he continued muttering coordinates into his speaker. His gaze was at once anxious and calm, curious and slightly aloof. Yes, Natasha was sure now that he had stayed for her. After all, a full-Tribe sweep within America-Five's perimeter, the fifty-mile radius of land that they monitored with sensors, didn't happen every day. This was by far the largest sweep since Natasha had joined the Office of Mercy, and Jeffrey probably wanted to hear her reaction.

“So now all we have is the Pines to deal with,” Arthur was saying. “Speaking of which, there's a new group for you to follow. Yesterday the man we think is their chief broke off from the camp with two other guys. I'd like you to track them. Tell me if they get within ten miles of the Crane sweep site. That's the last thing we need after three months with these clever animals. I'd rather set off diversionary fires than be forced into a sweep that way.”

“Of course,” said Natasha.

For weeks in the Office of Mercy, they had worried about the complications of having two Tribes in the field (an unprecedented occurrence that promised to grow more common, with recent cold fronts pushing the Tribes south). The citizens' biggest fear had been that the Cranes and Pines would meet at some inopportune moment and incite a small but violent war between them. That would have caused multiple problems. For not only would the Tribes have suffered physically and emotionally from the warfare, but the fighting would have forced them to scatter—to run away from an attack, or to leave the weak in one place and march the strong to another—making a sweep of an entire group that much harder. But the worries in the Office of Mercy had not ended with the sweep of the Cranes. Now they had to make sure that the Pines did not find the Crane sweep site. This goal was in strict keeping with a principal rule in their ethical guidelines: namely, that no Tribe should ever be allowed to suspect that there was such a thing as sweeps. For if the Tribes ever did suspect that people like themselves were being systematically wiped from existence, they would feel dread, and dread was a particularly terrible form of suffering, worse even, as some had argued during the debates of Year 121 Post-Storm, than purely physical pain.

Jeffrey waited until Arthur had left for his office, behind a glass partition, before rolling around to Natasha's side of the cubicle. Natasha was already busy settling into her desk for the day, but she looked up, anticipating his movement. She was glad for his notice. It seemed that Jeffrey was as eager to speak to her as she was to him. And for the first time since she'd heard the blaring alarm in the night, Natasha's nerves relaxed.

Natasha trusted Jeffrey, far more than her Epsilon friends or even Arthur, to put the events of last night in perspective. Not that the others weren't helpful or wise, but Jeffrey alone had the power to speak precisely to her hidden troubles, like a sensor eye that infallibly finds the crouching, warm bodies in the teeming wild. For a long time (especially since beginning her career in the Office of Mercy), Natasha had felt a deep closeness with Jeffrey, a similarity between his mode of thinking and hers that she experienced with no one else. It was as if their thoughts existed on the same, flat plane of awareness: noting the same behaviors in other people, dismissing the same concerns as unimportant, and creating the landscape of their individual lives from a similar set of compulsions and worries.

Had Natasha vocalized this feeling of closeness between her and Jeffrey to other people in America-Five, they might have found it odd, given the outward differences between them. Jeffrey was a member of the Gamma generation, and one of the most advanced and accomplished Gammas at that. He was tall and pale with thin blond hair that he combed over the medical scars on his scalp; and a rashlike burn extended along his whole right side—a scar from when the Palm Tribe attacked the settlement, the only direct attack in the history of America-Five. He always wore long sleeves to cover the burn, but the top of it still showed on his neck, rising up from under his collar to the shadow of his ear. Back when the Epsilons were kids, some of the boys and girls used to cower from him and whisper about his strangeness when he happened to pass by their Dining Hall tables. But even then, Natasha had gotten the impression that Jeffrey was a kind person, and had found him more mysterious than scary. As for the burns from the Palm attack, she considered them the mark of a thrilling and adventurous past lived outside the settlement's enclosures.

“You look like you've seen better mornings,” Jeffrey said to her now, his voice hoarse but upbeat. He moved his chair closer to hers, so that their thighs were only inches apart, causing a Gamma teamleader named Claudia Kim to glare at them from the adjacent cubicle. “What's the matter, didn't get much sleep last night?”

“Nice work,” Natasha said with a smile. “You don't even need the rest of us. You could probably run this whole Office yourself.”

“Well, I don't know about that,” Jeffrey said, quick to temper the compliment. “Did Arthur tell you? It was pretty intense there at the end. The kids were so amped up about the deer and the men coming home. I kept thinking that a couple of them might run off into the water and I'd miss them and launch the nova too soon. That's my biggest fear. That one of them will survive the sweep and lie there mangled and terrified before we can get to them.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, which were red and heavy-lidded with exhaustion. “You should see me, sometimes,” he added with a short laugh. “I go a little nuts over it. I'm always calling it up in the Pretends.”

“But it was clean,” Natasha said reassuringly.

“It was clean.” Jeffrey put his glasses back on. “Are you all right?” he asked more quietly, so that no one at the other cubicles would hear. “I've been thinking about you. Wondering what you make of all this.”

For a moment, Natasha prepared to lie, to give him the easy answer she knew he hoped for instead of the truth. But then she stopped. If she had any desire to confess just a little of what she was feeling, her chance was now. Jeffrey would never report her to Arthur or to the Alphas. Unlike most people in the settlement, he did not consider the doctrines of the Ethical Code glaringly self-evident. He believed in them, of course, and lived by their word. But he also felt (and had told Natasha as much) that questioning and analyzing one's own ethical feelings were essential practices for understanding. Every great ethical thinker, he had told her once, has struggled with or even doubted the laws that the settlement holds most dear. Besides all this, Natasha simply felt good after talking to Jeffrey, and she was desperate for that reassurance now. He would listen to her. He would be curious to hear what she had to say. Not once in all of Natasha's life had Jeffrey ever judged her or reprimanded her for admitting her honest thoughts, no matter how silly those same ideas seemed to Natasha in retrospect, or how well they fit with the Ethical Code.