The Furies (20 page)

“Things are different here, John. In your world, the most important thing is personal freedom. That's the philosophy of the whole country, the American way. But here in Haven we see ourselves as servants of the community. Our duties are more important than our freedom. We all work toward a common goal.”

He grew impatient as he buttoned his shirt. Ariel was spouting platitudes. He wanted more than that. “Really? So what's your goal?”

“Remember what I said when I met you? In that bar in New York City?” Now she turned around. Her eyes startled him, they were so avid. “Our goal is to turn ourselves into angels and turn the earth into paradise. So we can bring God into the world.”

John remembered. That's what made him fall for her that night, what she'd said about God. At the time he'd assumed she was speaking figuratively, waxing poetic. But now he wasn't so sure. “I don't get it. How can you—”

“Put on your shoes. I'm going to take you upstairs.”

“Upstairs?”

“To Aunt Cordelia's office. Where she sees the future.”

 

 

Ariel took him on a roundabout route, guiding him along the zigzagging corridors of the building, which was called the Pyramid, naturally enough. As John had guessed, the building was Haven's command center and communications hub. First, they walked down the hallways of the ground floor and passed enormous rooms full of computer servers and fiber-optic lines. Then they took an elevator to the library on the second floor, where they walked past bookcases holding thousands of rare and ancient manuscripts. Then they ascended to the third and fourth floors, which held the offices of Haven's government, the hundreds of people who carried out the orders of the Council of Elders.

The great majority of the workers they passed in the corridors were women. The few men they saw wore Amish clothes and stared curiously at John as he walked by. The women, in contrast, mostly ignored him, averting their eyes. The news of his arrival must've spread throughout Haven by now, and fewer people seemed shocked by his presence.

He sidled closer to Ariel, who was moving amazingly fast for someone on crutches. “There's more women than men here,” he noted. “I guess that's because the women don't die, right?”

She frowned. “First of all, our women
do
die. Staying young isn't the same thing as being immortal.”

“Okay, okay, let me rephrase it. You
rarely
die.”

“That's not true, either. Until a few hundred years ago the average lifetime of a Fury woman was only twice as long as a man's. They didn't age, but they died in plagues, they died while giving birth. Because we can keep bearing children as long as we live, childbirth was our number-one killer.”

“Wait, I thought your mother was a thousand years old. How did she live so long?”

“She avoided having babies. Besides Basil and me, she had only one child, a girl named Lavender. She died in infancy eight hundred years ago.”

“Okay, but things must've changed a lot in the past hundred years, right? I mean, no one dies from plagues or childbirth anymore.”

Ariel nodded. “It's true, our death rate is very low now. All we have to worry about are accidents and homicides. But our birth rate is also low. Procreation can be a challenge when all your men are infertile and you have to seduce strangers under difficult circumstances.” She looked John in the eye, as if to remind him of their own difficulties. “And we have other problems too. The extra gene in our DNA affects pregnancy as well as aging. Our bodies will reject any fetus that doesn't have the extra gene in one of its X chromosomes. Because we mate with outsiders who lack that gene, at least half of our pregnancies end in miscarriages.”

She seemed at ease talking about genetics. John remembered what Gower had said about Ariel, how her greatest passion was for science. “So you go to all that trouble to find a paramour, and most of the time it doesn't even work?”

“Exactly. About fifty years ago many of our women started using donor sperm to become pregnant, and that's certainly easier. But some of us are uncomfortable with that method. We want to at least see the men who will father our children.”

Her voice quavered. She was thinking again of her own attempt to get pregnant. John decided to steer the conversation back to generalities. “Okay, your birth rate is low and the death rate of your women is very low. So if your men die at a normal rate, eventually you're gonna have a lot more women than men, right?” He gestured at the dozens of women striding in and out of the offices along the corridor. Only a handful of men were among them.

Ariel sighed. “Yes, there's an imbalance. And it's getting worse. Right now we have seventeen hundred women and four hundred men, but almost half of our men have left Haven to join Sullivan.” She stared at the women in the hallway, some of whom nodded a greeting at her before marching past. “Sometimes I wonder if the imbalance is partially to blame for the rebellion. Maybe our men felt diminished as they became a smaller portion of our community. They're still an important part of the Guard and the Ranger Corps, and we rely on them to work the farmland aboveground, but there aren't many men in leadership positions in Haven.”

“Didn't you say that the men rebelled because they were getting impatient? Because you weren't working fast enough on a new kind of medicine?”

Before she could respond they reached the end of the corridor. In front of them was another elevator, with a glowing keypad on the wall beside it. Ariel tapped the keys, opening the door, and they stepped inside. “Aunt Delia's office is in the capstone, the very top of the Pyramid.” The door closed and the elevator lurched upward. “After we talk to her, I'll try to answer all your questions.”

When the door opened John saw a room full of computer screens. Dozens of flat-screen monitors covered the sloping, triangular walls, which converged at a point directly overhead. Some of the screens showed familiar things that John recognized immediately: a weather report, a CNN broadcast, a scrolling list of share prices on the New York Stock Exchange. Other screens displayed video feeds from overseas, news reports in Chinese and Spanish and Arabic. Still others showed digital maps of the world, with various regions highlighted in cold blue or flaming red. In the center of the room was a circular desk holding half a dozen keyboards, and next to it were three office chairs on rolling casters. Elder Cordelia Fury sat in one of the chairs, her wooden left hand resting on the desk, her flesh-and-blood right hand poised over a keyboard. She wore the same long-sleeved, ankle-length black dress she'd worn in the council chambers, and her face also looked the same: pale and vacant. But instead of staring into space, now she gazed at the largest screen in the room, a jumbo-size monitor on the opposite wall. It displayed the text of what looked like a scholarly article. The title at the top of the page was
Oxford Journal of Archaeology
.

Ariel hobbled into the room. “I did as you asked, Auntie. I brought my paramour.”

Cordelia didn't turn her head, but her pale lips curved into a smile. “One moment, child. I'm reading a new study of an archaeological site in southeastern Turkey. Please, take a seat. I'll be done soon.”

Rolling her eyes, Ariel led John toward the circular desk. She sat down in the unoccupied chair to the right of Cordelia, and John sat in the one to her left. He glanced at Cordelia's wooden hand, which rested on its side. He noticed that the wood was a little too dark to be lifelike, and there was a small carving of a butterfly etched on one of the knuckles.

As they waited for Cordelia to finish reading, John listened to the jumble of audio from the various news reports playing on the screens overhead. With all the cacophony in the room, he couldn't imagine how Cordelia could concentrate on anything, and yet she seemed content. Ariel, though, was getting annoyed. She furrowed her brow and lowered her eyebrows as the minutes passed. Finally, she let out an exasperated groan. “Auntie, you said you wished to speak to John.”

Cordelia kept reading. After a few seconds, though, she raised her wooden hand and pointed its stiff fingers at the screen. “These archaeologists claim that a Stone Age tribe occupied the site in Turkey approximately twenty thousand years ago. According to our oldest Treasures, our family originated in the same region, near the Euphrates River. This site may be one of their first dwellings.”

Ariel shook her head. “You said you had important matters to discuss, Auntie.”

“Aye, and this is one of them. We can't predict the future without understanding the past. How many times have I told you that, child?”

“Many, many times. But—”

“Just imagine it.” Cordelia's smile broadened as she stared at the screen. “Somewhere on the grassy plains near the Euphrates, a random mutation occurred inside one of the egg cells of a Stone Age tribeswoman. A section of DNA in the cell's X chromosome flipped from one configuration to another, and the new pattern was passed down to the tribeswoman's daughter. And look at all the wonders that came into the world from that tiny molecular rearrangement!”

“You're right, Auntie, 'tis astounding. But time is running short this morning. Mother gave us only three days to prepare John for—”

“Then let us begin his education.” She lowered her left hand, returning it to her lap, and with her right hand she tapped the
ENTER
key on the keyboard in front of her. “If he is to live the rest of his days in Haven, he must learn our history.”

All the monitors in the room suddenly went black. A moment later the screens flashed back to life, each displaying the same kind of runes John had seen in Ariel's notebook. The angular symbols scrolled upward on every screen, slowly at first and then more rapidly. It was like watching a strange, disorienting blizzard, where the snowflakes streamed upward instead of down. It made John dizzy.

“This is Aric,” Cordelia said. “The world's first written language. It was developed by our ancestors twelve thousand years ago, long before the Egyptians and Sumerians invented scripts for their own languages.” She raised her wooden hand again and pointed at the largest monitor. “Those runes are from the very oldest Treasure in our records, which was written by my great-great-great-great-grandmother. Her name was Umma, and she was a remarkable woman. According to her Treasure, she birthed one hundred and ninety-six children and lived for more than three thousand years.”

John looked askance. One hundred and ninety-six kids? That couldn't be right. “And you believe it?”

For a moment he thought he might've insulted Cordelia, but instead she smiled again. “Well said, John. A good historian questions everything. Because the world is full of lies.” She tapped another key on her keyboard, enlarging the runes on the jumbo-size screen. “But Umma's Treasure is believable because it's so meticulous. She recorded the births and deaths in her tribe, year after year. She realized there was something special in her blood that preserved her youth, something she'd inherited from her mother and passed on to her daughters, but not to her sons. Unfortunately, the vast majority of her children didn't live as long as she did. More than a hundred of them died before the age of five.”

Ariel squirmed in her chair, bored and impatient. She obviously knew this story, John thought. She must've learned it when she was a little girl, way back in the seventeenth century. But John was fascinated. “Why did so many of Umma's kids die?”

“They were a tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers. In times of plenty, children were born. When there were harsh winters or droughts, the children starved. This was a fact of life for all people on earth twelve thousand years ago. What made Umma unique was that she decided to change this fact.” Cordelia tapped yet another key on the keyboard, which highlighted some of the runes on the monitor, coloring them yellow. “These runes describe a species of wild emmer wheat that grew in southeastern Turkey. For hundreds of years Umma collected varieties of the wild plant and crossbred them. She sought to develop a hardy grain that could feed her family in good times and bad. And after nearly a millennium of effort, she succeeded. Other tribes in the area started planting her wheat. It became the first farm crop in the Fertile Crescent. Then it spread to Egypt.”

Once again, John was skeptical. “She invented farming?”

“It would've happened sooner or later, mind you. But Umma sped the process. Because she lived for so long, she could take on tasks that required generations to complete. And she used her accumulated knowledge to lead her people wisely. What's more, she recognized that this was her life's purpose. This was the reason why she and the other women in her family had been given the gift of everlasting youth.” Cordelia highlighted another set of runes on the screen. “She wrote this promise in her Treasure. The best translation is, ‘We must turn the desert into a garden. We must turn the earth into paradise. Then God will be born.'”

John had heard this quote before, of course. Those were the same words Ariel had spoken. He turned to her, and she grinned. She seemed pleased that Cordelia was finally getting to the point. “And Umma's daughters inherited this promise,” Ariel said. “They sought to change the world for the better, in large ways and small. Some of them focused on inventing useful devices, such as the ox-drawn plow. Others traveled to distant lands and became oracles or priestesses. They tried to alter the course of history, steering the world's emperors and pharaohs toward peace, not war.”

“They weren't always successful,” Cordelia added. “And very often they were persecuted and murdered. Our grandmothers were expert in many of the sciences, particularly medicine and botany, but the common people of the ancient world didn't understand science. They believed we were practicing magic. They called us sorceresses and witches.”