Unnaturals (37 page)

"The glasses are so that you don't see where she is looking. Eyes are not currently fashionable."

The boy didn't wear sunglasses, and his eyes were big and round. They got fixed on the pictures on the walls like the eyes of someone from the village.

"There we go." Before Adi had finished the words, a medstat the size of a fist, scurrying on the table by which the newcomers had just sat, had issued a shot. The little boy's eyes became glazed.

"Mama, my eyes h—" the boy had started saying, but then he stopped.

Another medstat, bigger and floor-based, had wheeled to the boy and slipped sunglasses over his face. His eyes didn't hurt any more. They weren't as sensitive to the light, and as exposed, as a moment ago. Probably had stopped hurting before he'd even noticed the pain. The words were a delayed reaction.

The boy's shoulders were hunched, but still a vapid smile spread over his face as he leaned back into his chair. The mother was fingering her celery.

"Yes, it is the fruit and vegetable fashion again." Adi laughed. "For a while after you were gone, we had none of it. Someone had taken the train to somewhere and not slept—really,
really
not slept—someone had broken the rules, and
look
how exciting that was—so for a whole week people broke the rules. They took the stairs even though medstats told them to take the elevator, they went to work on time and started poking into computers with toothpicks. Feeds had appeared that described a person doing just that.

"I was worried, but Eryn said it was all right. People broke a few computers, but we replaced them. Ivan even told me that the broken computers were broken on purpose. There was no way a clueless person with a toothpick could break a computer, he said. The person must know what to do first—and even he, Ivan, didn't. Even if he did, he said computers were much safer these days than, say, six months ago. He didn't even know why the computers had been broken, but once he told me,
I
knew. In the rare cases when people decide to do something by themselves, they must see a result, you see? Otherwise, what is the meaning of it all?"

Adi laughed. "Forgive me, Mel. I am talking like crazy. Even Ethan—my husband, that is—and Ivan can't stand me when I do it. To think I used to talk almost not at all. But, once you're a doctor—once you've seen and remembered so much—you can't hold it all in yourself. And I don't quite like the thoughtmotion interfaces, so all I do is talk. I think I'll like the hivers even less. Have you worked on the hivers? No? Anyway, I am so glad to see you again—you do listen to a person. It is the fruit fashion again. For a while, it was technology, after people started poking into computers. Computers looking like trains, like medstats, cleaningstats, or what have you. That was the incredible thing the pokers found, I think. Technology. People were noticing its existence—say, for a week or two. Now it's fruit again. And flowers, because of the hivers. We, like bees, of one mind—you understand. Natural. Though no one has ever seen
bees
—Oh, but I forgot about
them.
"

"Everything is done, madam," Adi said in a clear loud voice, which sounded through speakers in the other room. The woman jumped, then clutched the boy's hand and scurried away.

"There still needs to be a voice," Adi said. "They don't need to see the doctor any more in person—why distress them so much? Why tell them they are so wrong? But they still need to hear the voice. They need to know, for a little while, that something has happened. I don't know why. Eryn says that it is perhaps going away in the next iteration. What could be better, she says, than people getting cured without having been sick?"

"I wonder," Meliora said, opening for her mouth for the first time in minutes, "where they will get their future doctors from, that way."

"Perhaps they won't need doctors." Adi smiled again.

He talked to me, once. He explained about old feeds. He gave me pills, which I replaced with candy. What will this little boy do
?

"And don't forget, Mel"—Adi smiled again—"this boy is five years old. He was created twelve years after you were, and the banks of perfect genes are used more liberally year after year. He has better genes than you do. If he does want to be unnatural, he is better equipped for it than you were."

"You keep smiling. I have never seen you smile so much. Are you happy, Adi? Can a doctor be happy in Lucasta?"

"Happy?" She appeared to ponder the idea. "No, I wouldn't say...happy. But I do have a place. It is better than when I was a girl—and you know, Mel, for the happiness of the many to continue, the happiness of some must be paid as a tribute. You and I know this. We both do."

Next Meliora saw Ivan and, by chance, Theodore, who was visiting his old Academy and his old student. They laughed when they saw her, they hugged her. Then they bent over their screens, focusing back on their work.

They were working on hiveminds.

"Those are hard to implement, Mel," Theo said. "This is why Lucasta's and Annabella's Academies are collaborating so much. We didn't use to, we were quite separate, but this thing is bending our minds, so we try to help each other. It's not easy—the cities are so different—but the world changes. We must go with it, even if old people like me are not always ready." He laughed again.

"You? Old? Oh, come on, Theodore." Meliora smiled. "How's Cheryl?" she asked. Theodore had gone to the incredibly different Annabella City because of her.

"Gone." His smile was just a shadow of a smile now. "Normally. She was older than me. I still miss her. I guess that's what I get for being a fool who wouldn't have the proper mate, age and everything, chosen for him."

Ivan shook his head. He'd started listening only in in the last sentence. Just like in the times of old, Ivan forgot the world when he saw a computer program.

Yet, "You know," he said, "Adelaide and I were thinking of being mates for some time. With the two of you gone, I guess the two of us were kind of lonely—and most of Olaf and Veronica and the others were mated already, and, well, we felt kind of closer, she and I. It would have been, of course, a foolish thing to do. She's now happy with Ethan, and I am happy with Sally. I checked the compatibility percentages, shortly after she went for Ethan, out of curiosity. Well, she was right. No way we could have been happy together. The system, after all, knows best. It also knows best about the hivers,
Theo.
Come on, now, help me. Mel? You want to help, too?"

"Yes. I do," she said. "But I don't know how yet. I will see you guys later, all right?"

She took the train back to the city. She got a bike and rode, like so long ago in Annabella, until she fell from exhaustion. A medstat hovered close to her, ready with a shot. She barely chased it away. They were harder to control, even with her credentials as a doctor. As for toothpicks...

Oh, Garry, if you're ever imprisoned in a doctor's office, I do hope you have better genes than me
.

***

By the time she returned to the City of Death, she knew what she should do.

The happiness of some must be sacrificed for the happiness of many, Adelaide had said.

Nic was lying on a bed in their apartment, his eyes closed and his hands on his face again. She put her hands on his. She didn't even ask what he'd seen this time. He should not be doing this. Once in the City of Death, you should not dwell on everything. You could not go on if you did, you could not make a single step.

"I know how to cure young age," she told him softly. "Only, there will be a price to pay."

"I know that, too," he said. "I've known it for some time now. But I won't let you." He removed her hands from his face and looked at her. "I won't let you bleed for it, or die for it. If you plan on doing this—I'll drag you to the village if I must. Let's say that in this I am a selfish bastard. I won't lose you, no matter what."

She smiled sadly. "You won't lose me. It can't be me, Nic, for this to work.
I
have to be here after all is said and done, to take care of what is left."

Slowly, he nodded. "Fine then. But
you
still won't do it. Let's go."

He pulled her up from the bed and led her to his airtrain, passing through Benedict's room to ask to borrow his medstat.

"This is a new one," Benedict said. "Jerome took the one you must want."

Nic cursed.

Benedict smiled. "He'll return it. He knows he must."

Meliora had taken Ben's devastating emotions for a day and fed them into a machine—and that had opened a way for the same to be done easier later. If Benedict had his medstat with him when guilt-ridden depression struck, he snapped out of it quickly enough. The medstat could help other people with bad emotions, too. One or two of the "
emotionless
" doctors had already been borrowing it.

Somehow Mel didn't believe that Jerome had borrowed it for the same reasons as the others.

She put her hand on Nic's elbow. "We don't need the medstat now. We know all we could have learned from it."

They'd need it later. They'd need any computer they could reach, including those clunkers down there, many of which Nicolas had already gone through and made to work. They would, indeed, need the whole City of Death.

And the whole world.

They got into Nic's airtrain. They sat in the soft comfortable chairs, holding hands so tightly that it hurt.

Nicolas pulled a map of the domed cities on his screen. "Which one?" he said. "Does it matter?"

She shook her head.

"Then I will choose it. You look away."

She did. He was a chief and a hunter. She was a doctor and a healer. He could do this—but perhaps she still couldn't. Not when it truly came to it.

The airtrain took off. Soon, there was a city beneath them. She didn't know which one. She was busy with her computer and the airtrain's. She connected to their vague nerves as much as she could without physically hurting herself.

Snowflakes wouldn't work on a dome. But airtrains also carried explosives strong enough to shake and break the earth.

What chance did a mere city stand?

There was enough blood, there was enough pain. There were enough computers washed in those, some still with interweb connection. Enough to make the computers' nerves as bright as sunlight—no, as
brightlights,
since brightlights shone stronger. As people died with computers in their hands, Meliora took the imperfection that made them die too young, and fed it into machines. Just like she had fed Ben's affliction to a medstat.

She needed many people. The imperfections of a whole city would, hopefully, suffice. She needed many computers, too, to store all of these—and later use it to heal whoever was left in the world and their future children. Hence the clunkers. Ben's medstat, she had determined, could help the depression of three or four other people in addition to him, now that it had whatever Ben had given it.

A dead city should help the other three cities live.

It would not be that simple, of course. A city didn't stand isolated from the world. Especially a city ruled by computers. Computers would be breaking everywhere. There could be train crashes and worse in the other three cities, and there would be trouble in the City of Death as well.

But many people would live. Many people would live long lives—and even if too many died now, even if too few people were left on the earth, the artificial wombs would take care of it. She'd made certain to not damage
those
too much today, unlike, say, the malls. And if the artificial wombs didn't work properly immediately—well, people had done without them for long enough.

But perhaps the artificial wombs—and medstats—would persevere. Nic was helping her now control the computer programs all over the world, where people were screaming, and towers were falling, and trains stopped in their tracks whole but lifeless. He couldn't connect directly to a machine with his mind yet, but he had a talent for working with machines, and he had learned much in the City of Death.

The trains would start. New towers would rise.

As for the City of Death—it was theirs. Right now, no one could control a computer there without passing through the two of them first.

***

Jerome was waiting for them when they came back, a wrinkled grinning figure of calmness and self-satisfaction despite the others running around. People were shouting at flickering screens that had lost half their imagery, trying to salvage their work.

Meliora didn't know what she expected Jerome to say, but it wasn't, "Finally. Finally I can retire in peace. Perhaps I'll even go to my old hag, now that we won't have anything to argue about."

"Yes," he said when they both stared at him. "You two are smart, you must have figured that out already. No? You were busy figuring out other things, such as making junk computers work or dealing with Ben's microbes? Busy, perhaps, with finding a cure for young age? Well, that's exactly how it should be. Change. The world has to move—and so does the City of Death. Or did you think I had to have my own way and impose my opinions forever? That
never
led to anything good. We know this, in this city. Some of us even have the task of remembering to let go sooner or later."

He grinned.

"What did you think, that we created a dystopia? We didn't. Our ancestors had given us plenty of examples of what not to do. My old hag, who likes to live out there and pretend she goes along with
nature's way,
even put it poetically once. '
We didn't wrap the world in so much darkness that flames could barely flicker,
' she said. '
Neither did we light fires so big and high that they wouldn't only push the darkness far but also turn our world into cinders'.
" Jerome looked at them. "We did just
the right thing.
And now it's your turn."

Meliora had access even to Jerome's private feeds now. She saw the boy and the girl who had run together from Aetna and found no village to shelter them because the one closest to them was destroyed. They built their own hut and killed their own food, and the boy discovered that he liked that, and he knew that was wrong. He knew that he could not remain in the wilderness if he didn't want to turn into what, in his mind, Aetna's rulers were like. The rulers—hidden, of course, just like the old feeds said—had an agenda, the boy thought. Too many people disappeared in the city, too often, too young. The boy thought that, just like a hero in those fairytales that didn't make sense, he'd find them and defeat them.