Asimov's Science Fiction (14 page)

C7 swiveled its cylindrical body slightly. The small screen, its flatness dull after the holos, appeared on the wall. Two boys stood there, no more than nine or ten, holding hands. They looked terrified. Isobel and Gary hovered behind them. At the sight of her, something bloomed in Zed's chest. She might have been only using him to try to get inside the wall, but nonetheless he wanted to touch her in the same unreasoning way he wanted food, water, sleep.
Primitive Boy.

"Can we come in?" said the slightly taller of the two boys. He scowled.

"It's a ploy," Jamie said. "They're too young to either make up their own minds or to be of any use here."

C7 said, "Sometimes it's hard to know what will be of use." A pattern of light flashed on its body and a small square of wall below the screen lit up briefly. Now that he was looking closely, Zed could see that the wall, from just below the screen to the floor, was almost imperceptibly marked with a grid of small squares, each no more than an inch on each side.

On the screen, the smaller child gasped and clutched the other. The wall must be opening.

Isobel and Gary darted forward and met with the barrier. Gary began cursing. Isobel put her hand on the shoulder of the smaller child. "He can't go in without me! I take care of these children! You have to let me come in with them!"

The older boy started forward, dragging the younger away from Isobel. On the older boy's thin, pinched little face shone determination. The younger looked about to cry, but he followed. They dropped to their knees and began to crawl through the opening, their faces growing larger on the screen.

"No!" Isobel called, grabbing the younger and hauling him back.

Quicker than Zed would have thought possible, the older boy backed through the opening, whirled to face Isobel, and drew a long, wicked knife. It flashed in the sunlight as he lunged at her. She screamed and let go of the younger child. Gary started forward as the older boy yelled, "Pete! Go!" and the younger, short enough to not need to crawl, ducked his head and scooted through the mist. The older, brandishing his knife, followed, and then the wall screen shifted to show them both in the featureless chamber Zed remembered so well.

Jamie said, "C7, you can't let them in! He's violent! Why did the barrier even let him cross?"

C7 said, "I overrode the amygdala scans. The child is only violent in protecting his brother, I think. He has determination. Besides, what harm can the boy do in here? He will not bring his knife."

What harm can the boy do in here?
The words echoed in Zed's brain, for all the world as if they'd been bounced off the mountain he used to live on.
What harm can the boy do in here?

Jamie scowled but said no more. Zed was surprised she'd said that much. Zed never told C7 what to do. Not because C7 seemed to be the leader of the aliens, not because C7 was Zed's teacher, not because Zed had been raised to not answer back to his father. Some other, unfathomable reason.

C7 said, "Jamie, take Leah and go meet the children. Bring them to J4."

"They're too old for the nursery," Jamie said, but she left. C7 turned back to Zed. The interrupted holo reappeared—it
was
a church. Others followed. As always, Zed did not try to think about them but merely let his brain absorb the images. As always, the effort exhausted him. Why should that be? Experiencing holos, playing chess—none of it should be anywhere near as tiring as clearing rocks from tiny upland meadows, planting, weeding, harvesting, chopping wood, butchering chickens, fetching water. But it was.

What harm can the boy do in here?

The computer team, who called themselves the Wave Wonders, had a breakthrough in their work. Zed did not understand it. He understood, with some diff iculty, that computers Outside were connected to each other through "servers" on "the internet." He also understood that the computers Inside could not join the internet or they might be "hacked." The computers Inside had started, Ruhan told him, with decrepit and mostly non-functioning laptops brought in by some of the first humans to enter The Resort. These had been supplemented and then replaced with new technology partly given by the aliens and partly developed Inside. Zed gathered that it used a different kind of design, a different way of talking to each other, and none of it required electricity but was powered by "fuel cells." That was all he understood, and eventually Ruhan gave up trying to explain it to him.

Ruhan said instead, "So how are the private lessons going? With C7?"

They sat on a huge rock a few feet from shore. The day was cloudy and the sea choppy. Occasionally waves washed up the side of the rock and over Zed's bare, extended feet. His mouth was filled with cake made of honey and rice and algae. "Mmmfff."

"Going that well, huh? Zed, what is C7 teaching you to do? There's a lot of speculation."

Zed swallowed. "To far-see."

Ruhan gave a low whistle. Zed, who could not seem to learn to whistle, felt a silly stab of envy. "And can you far-see yet?"

"No. Look at that big fish out there!"

"Big, all right." Ruhan shot him a complicated look.

Zed was uncomfortably aware that he had not been entirely truthful. He could not far-see, not really, but sometimes he had flashes of... something. Images would suddenly click into place in his brain and he would see connections among them, configurations like those in chess, as if the future were a vast chessboard with a vast number of squares and a game had already started. There were so many possible ways the game could go, and yet only one most likely outcome, lost in the thousands of patterns the images suggested. No, not really lost, it was
there.
Somewhere. And he didn't really "see" the patterns, either—it was more like he
felt
them, palpable rocks in a field he was clearing. Or something.

Since none of this could be explained to Ruhan, or even to himself, Zed didn't try. This was why he saw so little of Ruhan, of Leah, of Delia and June and Paul, these days. He didn't belong, not anywhere. But, then, when had he ever belonged? He was relieved to see Ethan and his little brother, Peter, climbing over the rocks toward them. A distraction.

Ethan had not threatened anyone with a knife in the month that he had been Inside, nor caused any other harm. Neither had he made any friends. J4 had set the boys to tending the goat herd, and they did that well enough. With good food, Ethan had filled out a little. Peter had not. Peter never spoke, never left his brother's side, never looked less frightened than when he'd arrived.

Ethan said, "This is
our
place. You
go.
"

Ruhan frowned. Zed said, "We were just leaving anyway."

On shore, Ruhan said, "You shouldn't let him talk to us that way. That's not how we treat each other Inside."

Zed said, "Ruhan, why did you come Inside?"

Ruhan stopped walking. "You never asked me that before. Not in all these months."

"Why?"

"I wanted to."

"Yes. So your parents brought you here because it was a great opportunity and one girl had already left but said that no one was harmed Inside and the aliens were teaching advanced science and so your family decided all together that it would be okay."

"If you already heard my story from somebody else," Ruhan said irritably, "why did you ask?"

"Because Ethan and Peter didn't get brought here by a family in order to learn physics. Those kids have been beaten and hurt and they're escaping. Inside might kill them, but that was better than what they had Outside."

"How do you know all that? Did Ethan talk to you?"

"No."

"Then how do you know?"

Zed said, "I looked at them."

Ruhan, the young scientist, persisted. "But how do you know the—" "I just
do.
Let's not talk anymore."

Ruhan was offended. Zed didn't know how to make it right between them. They parted in confusion and unhappiness.

That night, alone on the beach under a cold sky—it was late September—Zed finally opened Isobel's note from months ago. In the moonlight he could just make out her blocky, all-capitals handwriting, written so hard in black ink that the letters nearly went through the paper.

ASK THE ALIENS IF THEY WOULD DO JUNE 30th AGAIN. IF THEY WILL DESTROY AGAIN IF WE GET LIKE WE WERE, AGAIN.

Dawn. Zed fell into a restless sleep just as the rest of his dorm was wakening. No one disturbed him. Nor did they walk or talk any more quietly than usual beyond the thin walls of his cubicle. All of them had their own projects to go to. Goop Guys, carpenter team, Wave Wonders, bread baking and rice-vat tending and lessons in the physics and biology and ecology that were supposed to create a better world.

Zed slept again. Just before he woke, he dreamed: not of Karachi or New York or Beijing or Los Angeles vaporized, not this time. Instead he dreamed of Ethan and Peter. They stood in the middle of a street that was so featureless that, although it had shadowy shapes of buildings and other people, everything was so blurry that this could be any large city, anywhere. Only the two boys stood out clearly, every detail of their faces clear as water from a mountain spring. Ethan scowled. Peter turned his head and clutched at his brother. Something large was running toward them, someone with a stick to beat them with. Ethan turned his head again, to look straight into Zed's sleeping eyes. Then, silently and in a burst of light, the boys were vaporized.

Zed woke, sweating, clutching at the blanket. Not a city gone, not many cities gone. Only two lives, real and individual and separate as pebbles on the beach.

And then it happened, just as C7 had said it would, after sleep. The vague configurations superimposed in messy semi-patterns in his mind—they all resolved. The sensation was as distinct as the click of a door opening, or the checkmate move in chess. Clear, inevitable, final. Zed was far-seeing.

He threw on his clothes and went outside. Autumn sunlight streamed down, mellow and golden. A sweet salty breeze blew in from the sea. He walked along the path, gravel and sand, toward C7's building. If C7 had called him on his link, Zed didn't know it. He'd left the link on the beach at midnight, weighting down Isobel's note.

C7 said, "Good morning, Zed. You are late. What is that for?"

"Yes," Zed said. He raised the pickax he'd taken from the carpenter team's tool shed and brought it down hard on C7. The remote's words from last June rang in his mind:
"It is alive, an extension of myself, like an arm would be for you... pain and the equivalent of armlessness.
"

The remote shattered. Without a second's hesitation, Zed ran to the section of wall that brightened whenever the screen appeared, and brought the pickax down in the grid of tiny squares beneath it. The screen leapt into life to show the dome wall just as Zed's savage blows destroyed the machinery that maintained it. On the screen, the high, dark wall around The Resort disappeared. Like Karachi, like New York, like Beijing.

Only it wasn't cities that had disappeared. He knew that now, knew it through to his marrow. It was individual lives—gone, along with all they might have been. Again and again he swung the pickax, the wall much easier to destroy than he'd expected. He was smashing the smashers of the world, smashing the shadowy person who had beaten Ethan and Peter, smashing his own father.
What harm can the boy do in here?

Screams outside. No, Inside, which had now become part of Outside. Zed stood, panting, watching the screen, ragged and broken at the bottom but still transmitting. It showed the camp that Isobel had said were Earthers trying to keep people away from aliens and Ruhan said were guards ensuring they could get in. Ruhan had been right; Isobel had pretended to be what she was not; none of that mattered now. In the camp, people stopped whatever they were doing to stare, cry out, rush forward. Some snatched up guns or even bigger weapons Zed could not identify.

Delia rushed into the room and gasped at the pieces of C7 scattered around. She screamed, "What have you done?"

"They will do it again," Zed said. "Isobel was right. It all will happen again. We build the world again the same terrible ways as we did before, and then they do it again." And then, "I far-saw."

"You're a monster!" Delia cried and launched herself at him.

Zed had expected to die—why wasn't he dead already?—but from aliens, not a human girl. Delia was strong and a fighter. She gouged his eyes, kicked his balls, scratched at his face. But he outweighed her by sixty pounds and had a man's muscles. He got her in a hold she could not break, not hurting her, and maintained it.

"Let me go!"

The screen changed to the inside of a ship, a sight so startling that Zed released Delia and they both stood, gaping. Zed knew it was the inside of the ship, although he didn't understand how he knew. A long narrow room with unknowable machinery, and beings standing or sitting.
Now
he would be vaporized.

He wasn't. One being moved closer and said simply, "Why?" Delia cried. "He did it! Zed! Not us!"

"Why?" the woman repeated. Because it
was
a woman. Human, or so close as to make little difference: cousin to humans. She had gray eyes, larger than humans' eyes, and two flat nostrils instead of a nose. Her voice was C7's.

Zed said, "I far-saw."

C7 stared at him for a long time. There was no room around Zed, no Delia, no shattered robotic emissary. Only Zed and the woman, who finally said, "You are not ready. Your whole race is not ready."

"Go home," Zed said.

The screen blanked.

He doesn't know how long he stood there, staring at nothing, before he moved again. Two men from Outside, that was now Inside, rushed in. They were dressed like soldiers. They seized Zed, who didn't resist. "Come with us!"

He went. Soldiers were rounding up the 119 people in The Resort and bringing them to the gazebo. People rushed here and there, carrying weapons or Resort projects or links or babies. Somehow in the melee Isobel spotted Zed.

"Zed! Did you bring down the wall? A woman with a scar said it was you!"