The Death of the Wave (5 page)

but all that brilliance comes at a significant price.

We are at their mercy, but at least we feel something, however brief, in our existence.

They were…are… not human.

They can feel neither hatred nor love, and the games that they play with our lives are as meaningless and immature as a child picking the wings off a fly.

They torture us not out of malice but out of alien curiosity.

To see how long it takes us to die.

And we were special in our ignorance, aristo-who-writes.

I wonder if this is not just an elaborate sham, if he was just affecting emotion to get into my head or whatever unfortunate reader would stumble upon his words.

I wonder if everything I saw had been a projection—

that half-tilt looking out past the curious crowd might have been anything

from complete boredom to sudden hunger.

But no, sadness, I was sure of it.

Say what you like, aristos are not like us.

But they have families, mothers, fathers.

How could they when they were bred in a lab, a swab of cheek cells?

How many infants bobbing in amber vials slumbering in dreamless sleep?

You hear things as a writer employed to formulate the messages of the Palaces,

but nothing like this.

Families? A new era of aristos? Were they outmoding themselves?

Descartes. I almost chuckled at the presumption of it.

Past twenty years ago I would have leapt at the chance to take another shot at a story.

It was almost as if he knew the journalist heart in me that pulsed involuntarily

at the most sordid tale, the weapon that could exact the most damage.

I thanked my lucky test scores I made it to translate the Aristo message to the people.

I set a trap and penned the lies to the world.

What choice did I have?

What choice do I have?

The letter rests temptingly in my hands.

Five seconds more and it will lie torn into anonymity.

It was a cold December morning twenty years ago when last words fell into my hands

and attempted to tear down a dynasty.

I trusted long ago in the power of those words and I ended up here.

What was left for me without one last story?

What else exists for me but to again pick up the paper and the pen?

The tests get harder every year for everyone, including new Breakers,

but it doesn’t stop there for the Watchmen.

First few weeks are always the hardest.

Your district group of prospective Breakers is brought to the Palaces by your overseeing Breaker where you undergo a physical evaluation overseen by norm assistants.

If you pass that, you are put through a special series of exams in the Citadel

to further test your mental acuity.

Failure in any examination results in execution.

If you pass the exams, you are permitted to go into training,

which involves first a ten-day stint in the Palace training fields and gymnasiums.

You are given marginal food, water, and sleep.

Failure to keep up with training results in execution.

Pass initial training and you meet your first aristo.

For our section of Eden, we had Human Services Coordinator Galileo

and Human Services Assistant Newton.

Who ever is Coordinator now, young Darwin, gives you your initial beats.

Survive a year on all your assignments while wearing the red uniform and you are given

an official badge with your number, a place in a Breaker village with your kin, and a destiny.

I remember the glory of that day,

the freshness first off the training field, drenched in sweat and blood.

There were only five survivors in my grouping, with 376 as one of them.

I remember 376, the man who would become my shadow, and far more.

How he did not smile when the uniforms were presented,

but wore his like a second skin.

We stood in a haggard line, gazing with veiled mistrustful eyes at

the mass of sleek Breakers watching us indifferently,

for they must have known that our suffering was far from over.

None of us were naive enough to believe that our lives would be improved.

Not after testing in the Hives, not after our training.

But despite this, our weary hearts were heavy with the Duty,

and some fools such as me were filled with the fire

to serve to make the lives of our families better.

But all of us knew that we were traitors.

Every last one of us had been born into poverty in the Camps,

and we shivered there, at the center of the State

that had murdered our people.

We were guard dogs meant to run with the wolves.

But with your stomach full, a gun in hand loses its abhorrence,

and a traitor lives, if only as a traitor.

So I watched the Watchmen after my report.

I was in the house of Galileo, who sat gracefully

and watched the recruits on the training field with hooded eyes.

Sonnet’s poetry still echoed in my mind, but I feared that he could read my thoughts.

Sometimes Galileo watched me instead, as if he would speak.

He was beautiful in the synthetic light, and on his face I traced lines that looked like my own.

I wanted to ask him how many Watchmen he thought would survive,

but I did not open my mouth quickly enough.

His young child asked it for me.

Aristos are predominately male, but it took me a moment

to recognize the child is referred to as a boy.

The child, Darwin, moved with small, careful movements as he constructed with rapidity

a perfect copy of the major Palace collection,

the Citadel and its clock-tower, out of interlocking blocks.

It was a casual question, a throw-away, and Galileo smiled a sudden secret smile.

Outside a Watchman lagged behind the group, and a shot rang briefly out upon the air.

As many as deserve to
, he responded, and his long hand ruffled the hair of the child.

I still stood but for a gesture from Galileo and then I sat there at his feet.

A strange rebellion had corroded my heart and sickened the feel of his hand on my arm.

We are all somebody’s dog,
I thought, and the boy looked up at me

with eyes as black as ink, no whites at all.

I looked at the lines of hopeful and doggedly obstinate Watchmen marching out there on the fields, and the one cast to the side, so small and so still.

How many would be left for the next day?

Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow,
I said quietly,

and Galileo glanced at me with wild dark suspicion.

He asked where I heard it, came by it.

I called it foolishness.

A rash deed, I assured him, and he turned his head.

He could not have heard it, then.

Breaking the Censor would be madness.

Almost as bad as kill a king.

As kill a king.

As kill a King.

Words with a man on Cleaning Day.

Shivering in the January cold, I stare steadily ahead at the man in front of me

who on that fateful day had passed me the letter.

His sickness has worsened, lesions puckering his skin, his eyes blank as two marbles.

I wait expectantly for my letter and when it comes down the line

I grab it and seize that moist hand.

I demand to know who passed me the letter, but his hand lies limp and unresisting in my grip.

He ignores me.

I attempt to reason it out.

How could the aristo have communicated to his man that the letter was for my eyes only?

How could his man know who I am?

Who was he?

And Descartes is dead.

So who is it now?

I growl in frustration, and ask if these letters, the first and the last were always meant for me.

His eyes never bother to turn my way but the corner of his mouth raises in a silent ironic smile.

“We all know who you are and what you have done.”

My fingernails have dug crescent moons of blood into his palm.

I whisper furiously the importance of knowing my benefactor and inquire if it is him,

but he only coughs weakly and smiles that sad little smile.

I hear a Breaker’s shout and I drop the man’s hand, folding up my letter in fifths

and shoving it unceremoniously down into my uniform shirt.

The Palace car has gone, and the Cleaners wander unhurriedly down the line.

The man in front of me turns his head to meet my eye.

He had passed the last elimination.

He would not pass another.

A plague-stick points towards the left and he is gone.

Who am I?

I thought I knew.

Gunshots in the distance.

I was a journalist, that much I was certain, although I was sure

that was not the title they would have used.

I was a promotion specialist.

I was hired for my lies, and for my words.

I could convince anybody of anything.

I had chosen my fate as much as anyone could in my time.

Confronted by an aptitude for numbers,

I had chosen to skew the scores, fail the science, choose the Camps.

I doubt anyone ever knew, but I had long fancied myself a hero.

Now, here, in the damp and the snow, I’m not so certain,

and the woman that cleans my cell agrees.

It reminds me of someone I once loved,

and a smile that evaporated

like breath off a blade.

We all know who you are,
she seemed to whisper, and he was straight-backed as they led him off.

They never look back.

If that prisoner was right, then they all knew of my failure.

Tell me what you know,
and the whispers sounded

of elegant instruments just asking to be used in a windowless room.

Tell me what you know,
and a prisoner I have never met asks me for a name that is not mine.

Tell me what you know, servant of the State.

Twenty years ago, I watched the words die in the cold and the snow, and did nothing.

I was happy to live.

I unfurl the letter in the privacy of my cell and turn the paper over to note that it is another page of the booklet, and the Edict number is
4563: The Exemption of Aristos.

I turn it over again and folding out the corners with hands damp with snow, begin to read: