Veracity (29 page)

He won't let me talk. Shushes me, good-naturedly, every time I start to ask another question.

Lazarus comes in with a jar of honey and a plate of cut lemon to go with his tea. Things I've seen Lilly bring in to soothe his voice. Means he'll be talking awhile.

"How are you doing today?" he asks.

Lazarus's eyes are drawn. It's the pain in his joints. Moist days like this, when the rain up top swells the beams of our underground home, are his worst.

"Fine," I answer. "How are you?"

Lazarus waves a hand. "Yesterday's training with Noam go all right?"

A shrug. "Yeah."

It was another of our daily sessions in which Amy was taking notes behind her computer and Noam was at my side, guiding me farther and farther out. He hasn't come right out and told me so, but each day's
training
is obviously an actual attempt to find the main redactor. With Noam's soothing voice in my ear, I'm guided as far as my mind will go. We're making progress toward the fields of redactors that lie in the Geddard Building's basement, but it's often one step forward and two steps back. Yesterday, I was able to approach National House Square and even get close to some of the people walking the streets. But then I couldn't find my way around a city I know like the back of my hand. Travel via the mind doesn't work the way it does with the body. It's not
Turn left here. Take a sharp right there
. It's
Imagine a room you've never been
in and think yourself there
. The process can be so disorienting that today, I wound up in an entirely different city.

"It's going okay," I offer.

Lazarus doesn't buy my answer, but he lets it go. "I have a tight schedule so we need to get right to it. I'm going to tell you about the beforetime," he says, then proceeds without pause.

Before the Pandemic, our country was governed by a central text known as the Constitution. A doctrine that established a government by the people and for the people, meant to keep us from becoming what we are now--a tyranny. Slowly, the freedoms it provided were rolled back. Plucked away only as quickly as people could adjust. So when the Pandemic hit, there was some precedent for the exchange of rights for security. It had become natural, this forfeiture. Expected.

The first few were small. People handed them over as if they were old clothes. Things they never got out of the closet anyway. Warrants. Trials. Privacy. All last year's fashions. By the time Blue Coats came calling for the real finery, people were already beginning to lose their good taste. Out came the big-ticket items, the ones they kept stored in clear zippered bags. Personal beliefs. Personal possessions. Personal anything. It was no longer in vogue to be an individual. It became more about
not
standing out.
Not
standing up.

The Pandemic was coming across the water. On the backs of birds, in their waste. Sometimes the story changed. The birds became fish that would pollute every lake, stream, and ocean. The disease became a flu and then a fever that went up and up. They were all variations on the same theme. What the Pandemic brought was the fertile seed of fear. It was planted and took root, choked out all reason. Allegiance became servitude. Servitude became acquiescence. You either lined up for the silver shackle worn in the front of your neck or you were proved a traitor. Taken away to the unknown elsewhere or shot loudly and on the spot because that had become the
right way to serve your country. To hold still and die when you're told. To take aim and, on command, fire.

The Pandemic coincided with an election year.

In the beforetime, our government was different. People voted for
a
president. A man or woman subject to the title, willing to submit himself or herself to an article such as
a
or
the
. If they proved themselves not equal to the task, they were removed or replaced. So passionate was the respect for the title of President, the man or woman holding it melted away. They became their role. The role did not become them.

A month before the vote, the government announced the election was being postponed. The Pandemic was coming. It would be too dangerous for citizens to leave their homes. People were to stay inside. Protect themselves with blue masks worn over their mouths. They could leave their homes to buy groceries, to go to church, and for medical emergencies only. December passed, and January. In February, small pockets of resistance formed. A few troops were attacked outside the National House.

One died.

It was the opening those in office had been waiting for. They could remove all remaining liberties in the name of safety and defense. People were turning on one another. Riots would ensue and morph into civil war unless we gave them everything they asked. They couldn't help us without our compliance.

"Compliance became another word for patriotism," Lazarus says.

If a citizen so much as questioned a command, they weren't good Americans, weren't fit to keep company with other, better citizens. One word might spread their restlessness, so such toxicity was protected against. The murders of these freethinkers and the eradication of their poison was deemed
preemptive self-defense
. A beautifully marketed term for Confederation-sanctioned genocide.

Lazarus takes a sip of his coffee and sets his mug too hard
on the table. Some sloshes out. "We lost our capacity for tolerance when we lost our freedom. Or maybe it was the other way around. I'm not sure which one I miss more." He's angry, one finger banging against the table.

"The trouble comes when we forget we're family! You, me, the people living halfway around the world! The problem is this ridiculous idea that there is an
us
and then an
other
! A
them
to which the rules of humanity don't apply! If I could put one word on that goddamned Red List, that's the one I'd choose!
Them!
There is never a
them,
Harper! There's only
us
! If we could get that learned, we might just figure out how to stop killing ourselves!" Lazarus sits back. Pours out a glass of lemon water, rubs some of the butter melting in a small dish over his chapped lips and into the gray, crusting skin of his palms. It is his rite of composure, moisturizing. Putting back in some of the soft that's been leeched out.

People began to sorely miss those giveaway rights. They were detained with no charges levied against them and no appointed time set to go before the judge in their Sunday best. Detentions could go on for as long as the government felt necessary. Families didn't warrant notice or information. Those that grew too loud or drew too much attention disappeared. A person, many persons, could fall off the face of the earth and no one would have to know. All government records were closed to the public. The policy became
Don't ask
.

A new kind of military took over. They took down the old flags and replaced them with their own. Those too loyal to their former cause, too honorable to serve under this new flag, were lined up against a wall. Made to go away. Those who were left, and others who were recruited, were to collect data and record any potential threats. Renting a book on world religions, purchasing the wrong ingredients at the grocery store, saying the wrong thing could get a citizen hauled away. Killed outright or imprisoned without trial.

Families gathered around their kitchen tables and prayed. They stayed indoors until Sunday, then went clambering off to church in record numbers, even before it became mandatory. The new church was so successful an advocate for the new government, it became an extension of it and was given reign over media, communications, and social programs--anything endemic to the human condition.

Lazarus has been talking for two hours. Lilly's come in three times to fill up the water pitcher and pout over his bleak countenance. She's asked him to take a break. Go lie down, settle his voice. The first was a request, the second a demand. Lazarus responded to neither and out she went. If he was going to keep this up, he wasn't going to see the new world. She had other, more important things to do. A whole library to turn digital while he was pushing himself, compromising the whole thing. Lilly continues her tirade out into the hall. Off to wherever she works night and day, fingers spent down to the bone.

Lazarus brushes away the books between us and takes my hands. "This is a lot to consider. Are you okay?"

I nod. "Yes." But there's so much.

He turns over my hands, rubs the skin of my palms. "We had the numbers to take them all those years ago, Harper, and we have the numbers now. What we lack is a way to talk to one another. A way to wrestle away the technological advantage from a surprisingly small group of old men. Now is the time for us to come together. What we're doing isn't surviving. We're dying, slowly and quietly." Lazarus is whispering. It makes one of his voices lift while the other dips. "Your family died with their integrity intact. Integrity means living life according to one's own measure. Doing the right thing as it's defined by just you and God and nobody else." Lazarus grimaces. He's been twisting in his seat for a few minutes, trying to stretch his back.

I go to his medicine bag hung up on the wall and dig into
the slouching front. I bring him the largest vial. Pour him some water as he unscrews the top.

"Thank you." He swallows two tablets between large gulps. "Do you have any questions?"

I nod. "What was it like for you back then?"

Lazarus rubs thoughtfully at the stubble on his chin. "I had an important position at the time so I was recruited, which means I was taken by force to one of their vetting centers and handed a packet of materials that outlined everything. The new governmental structure. The surgery I'd be having to implant my slate. My new position. It was a press kit. There was even a DVD that explained all the benefits of living and working in the Confederation."

He smiles at some memory. "If you were a man of some consequence, you got a beautiful young woman as an assistant. If you were a woman, you got a beautiful young man. They handled chores, served as nurses. If you wanted something more, they were lovers. It was a strange introduction to life in the Confederation of the Willing. Here comes this stunning woman with legs up to her neck. She pours me a glass of wine, asks what kind of carpet I'd like installed in my new home, then tells me there won't be any more traveling or music or free self-expression. They'd be replacing those with nicer things. It worked for a while. With me and the rest of the country. But then we got to remembering what it had been like before."

Clusters of insurgents formed. They killed Blue Coats, spray-painted government buildings with the Red Words coming out on daily lists. These groups thrived for short bursts of time. But without a glue stronger than rage to bind them, without a leader, resisters grew disenchanted. They quit. Or took their lives.

"So the government put together a team of social scientists," Lazarus says. "They came up with the antidepressant you know as Occlusia, doubled the number of bars, provided free sex. Their goal was to anesthetize the public and
it worked. People stopped killing themselves, but they were so high on their antidepressants they couldn't remember the Red Words. Before Confederation scientists found the right dosage, it wasn't uncommon to see people walking around with scorch marks on their necks. And the smell . . ." He grimaces. Leaves off.

Lazarus doesn't like this topic of conversation. I can see it in the way he turns his head, offering me an ear instead of a voice. So I ask something else. "I've heard it was Noah who developed the slates. But who discovered how to break them?"

The ponderous, world-weary look leaves Lazarus's face. He turns to me with fresh eyes, laughing. "Noah didn't develop the slates."

"Who did?"

"Scientists, neurosurgeons, linguists. Twelve of us, in total. I was second generation to the project. The first model had already been developed but it didn't always spark correctly. Too many infractions and a person could catch fire. So I was asked to be lead on the optimization team. While working out the misfiring issues, I studied the way slates were implanted."

My eyes fall to the scar running above and below Lazarus's slate. The skin there is dull and shriveled. A mottled purplish pink. "How did you break?"

"Every morning at eight o'clock, the pretty, young assistant I'd been assigned would come in and hand me a needle full of Occlusia. She was supposed to watch me so I wouldn't stick it in the dog they let me keep, or take it to the bathroom and flush it down the toilet. One day she came in, gave my dose to the sofa, and threw a schematic on the table. It was the last piece of the puzzle. The insertion points. Precise measurements of how the slate's extensions are placed around the carotid. The risks were obvious and the process, well, you know the process. And the possibilities for harm."

They'd been clearly written, taking up the whole second page in one of my many recruitment letters.
Breaking one's
slate has and could result in death, stroke, heart attack, infection, long-term damage to the voice box.
And so on. The ways in which you could be maimed or killed were mind-boggling.

"Where'd you break?"

"Right there in my apartment with my new assistant, who by then had become something a little more. I went first. It was a bad one. But I was off the grid immediately. We had no trouble getting out."

Lilly pokes her frowning face around the canvas door. "We have news from Dover."

Lazarus looks up. Nods. "I'll be out in a few minutes."

"It's Dover!" she shouts.

"Another few moments, please." Lazarus is calm with his answer.

It's a quality that infuriates Lilly. She grunts, then disappears.