Part 7 (1/2)
Another contained a treatise on WHAT THE PROCTORS DIDN'T TELL YOU ABOUT INITIATION.
to which some anonymous wag had added (THOSE b.a.s.t.a.r.dS).
During the first few weeks, cooperation ran high among the boys. Even the most odious task was a novelty, and everyone was eager to take his turn pulling weeds and was.h.i.+ng clothes. Many of the boys eyed Natch and Brone warily and took bets as to when the fighting would break out between them. But the two retreated to their wary fencers' dance, keeping their distance, looking out for sudden movements.
Spring pa.s.sed into summer without incident. The boys spent their leisure time improvising rustic versions of soccer and baseball and trying to guess how their favorite teams were performing right now in the civilized world. Horvil slimmed down and lost his irrational fear of the outdoors.
Natch began to take long walks in the woods by himself. He grew fond of the trees, especially the tall ones that stretched up to the edge of his vision. While he walked, Natch mentally played back the conversations with Serr Vigal and Figaro Fi, dissecting them like an occultist looking for clues to the future.
Brone is a vicious person headed for a vacuous career, Vigal had said. But you, Natch, you're better than that. You are not ready to run your own company. If you jump into the fiefcorp world too quickly, you will regret it.
Where is your direction? Figaro Fi had asked him. You have endless wants. But want without purpose destroys a person. Those who can't master their wants are loose cannons.
It was all a matter of direction, wasn't it? Natch spent days looking around the spare plains for hints. Which direction should he choose? And how would he know when he arrived at the right one? As far as he could see, the four points on the compa.s.s were featureless and drab. It seemed like he could wander the entire earth following one of those paths and not see a single distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic.
But the trees-the trees pointed majestically upward into the sky. Their leafy arms reached for the sun without shame or compromise. Even the little death of winter could only delay their aims, and it was only a matter of time before they were reaching upward once again.
Marcus Surina came to visit Natch one night towards the end of autumn. He drifted in the cabin door, tiptoed around a slumbering Horvil, and came to rest barely half a meter from Natch's face. In this ghostly apparition, the great scientist looked just as ruggedly handsome as he did in all the pictures and videos the boy had seen. Except the eyes, which had been wide and luminescent in life, were now cold and dim and utterly devoid of light.
Watch, said Surina.
Natch huddled into the corner of his bed with chattering teeth as dozens of specters paraded through the room, figures from history and legend frozen in grotesque positions of death: Julius Caesar, Tobi Jae Witt, Abraham Lincoln, Joan d'Arc, Tul Jabbor, his mother. Each figure wafted over to the boy in turn, mouth open as if to speak some horrible truth from beyond the tomb. Yet the ghostly figures remained stubbornly silent. Were they all withholding their secrets from him by tacit agreement? Or did they simply exhaust all their words in life, and now have nothing to say?
The parade continued for an eternity of midnight-time, despite multiple attempts by Natch to cover his eyes and will away his tormentors. He tried screaming, burying himself under the blankets, ignoring them, but the ghosts would not be denied. His efforts only succeeded in summoning more, until the room was thick with their gray, misty effluence.
Finally, after what must have been many hours, the shade of Marcus Surina floated up to Natch and hovered there, centimeters away.
Now, run! said Surina.
Too frightened to disobey, Natch arose and fled for the door. He stumbled outside into the deepening autumn and discovered that the entire camp was enveloped in the same stinging mist. Mist curling over his feet, wrapped around the wooden posts of the cabins, thick and sharp as smoke ... and full of voices.... The voices of his fellow initiates, yelling in confusion....
”Over here!” came a familiar nasal tw.a.n.g. Horvil. Natch felt a fleshy hand grab his shoulder and drag him outside the boundaries of CAMP 11 and up a nearby hill. Most of the hivemates had already a.s.sembled at a safe spot in the lee of the wind.
”What's happening?” said Natch sleepily. ”What's that smell?”
”Smoke,” replied Horvil with a groan. ”The smell of initiation going up in flames.”
The cabins themselves were not the worst casualty of the fire. Even frightened boys who had never spent a winter outdoors knew that trees could be chopped down and cabins could be rebuilt. Only six of sixteen cabins had burned down completely, while three had suffered minor damage. There was still plenty of room for all to find s.p.a.ce indoors.
No, the real calamity was the destruction to their tool sheds and food supply.
One by one, the boys limped out to the fields, where most of their perennial crops now lay under a shroud of ash. Somehow, they had always known there was something unnatural about the variety of nutritious grains and vegetables that sprouted every spring, despite the harsh winters of the midwest and generations of inept teenage farming. Their ancestors had never had such a bounty of genetically engineered supercrops to sustain them. But now, staring at the remains of their harvest-not to mention the twisted ruins of two of the tool sheds and the charred silo containing most of their stored grain-the initiates knew that this game was no longer tilted in their favor.
The origins of the fire were a mystery. Most likely it had been the product of carelessness, someone forgetting to smother the dying embers of a torch. Perhaps back in the civilized world they could have scavenged for evidence and mounted an investigation, but here all they had was vague conjecture. Before long, whispers pa.s.sed through Brone's side of the camp laying the blame on Natch's shoulders.
”Why would he do something like that?” exclaimed Horvil the first time he heard the rumor. ”Do you even have the slightest bit of evidence?”
”The fire started near Brone's side of the camp,” one of the boys told him. ”Everyone knows those two hate each other. Natch was one of the last ones out, and his cabin is fine.”
”That's totally ridiculous. That's not evidence at all.”
The other boy admitted his theory had little in the way of factual support. ”But come on, Horv-you're his best friend, right? Doesn't he scare you?”
Horvil bristled. ”All I know is that Natch's test scores were higher than half the cla.s.s combined. That means he's smarter than you. And that means he knows setting fire to the camp would hurt him just as much as Brone.” The conversation came to an abrupt halt soon after.
There was much to do. The boys went to work right away, picking every edible seed, berry and root on the horizon, repairing and filling the well, making defensive preparations against unknown enemies. The boys of CAMP 11 spent their spare time in an engineering frenzy, attempting to coax the last bit of practicality out of the everyday items around them. A frayed rope strand and several bottles could be converted into a makes.h.i.+ft dumbwaiter. Broken gla.s.s could be spread along the roads as an early intruder alert system. Spare rolls of plastic could be conscripted to channel excess rainwater to the well.
After a week of trying to pick up the pieces and sh.o.r.e up the damaged cabins, it became clear to the initiates that all their preparations might not be sufficient for them to survive the winter. An argument sprang up about how closely the proctors were monitoring their situation here in the wilderness. If the situation grew too precarious, would the proctors come and rescue them? The Proud Eagle wouldn't just let dozens of its pupils starve to death out here, would it?
And then, without warning, winter descended upon them.
The snow marched into CAMP 11 under an imperious wind, eager to pound and break any human habitation in its path. Within days of the winter solstice, the boys had abandoned all non-essential duties to concentrate on the snow. But there was much more snow than hands to shovel it. Milky precipitation smothered the plants and killed off the remaining vegetation. The initiates soon discovered that, unlike the geosynchron-regulated snow to which they were accustomed, natural snow could sting and burn. Insulation against the cold became their biggest worry.
A debilitating flu hopped from boy to boy and gave the initiates their first taste of real illness. Back in the civilized world, OCHREs diagnosed all their ailments, and bio/logic programs automatically dealt with them by consulting the Dr. Plugenpatch databases. No more. ”I remember reading that you're supposed to blow your nose when it gets clogged up like this,” Horvil announced earnestly one day. ”Does anybody know how to do that?” No one did.
The boys were startled to discover that even without OCHREs and bio/logic programming and Dr. Plugenpatch, the human body had a remarkable ability to heal itself. They came to realize that all the bio/logic technology society relied on for its survival had not been constructed out of whole cloth; it was patterned after cruder motifs pa.s.sed down through millions of years of genetic heritage. Natch, Horvil and most of the other boys quickly bounced back from the flu and resumed their duties.
But a few of the boys lingered on in their illnesses, their bodies unable to fully repel the alien microbes wreaking havoc in their systems. The argument about proctor intervention flared up again. But if anyone expected the proctors to suddenly swoop down from the clouds and rescue them from their misery, they were disappointed.
And so, under a chill wind, the initiates all huddled in the center of the camp one afternoon and tried to hammer out a strategy.
Now, under the pressure of starvation and with the added encouragement of the arson rumors, the much-discussed antagonism between Brone and Natch surfaced with a vengeance. Natch declared that CAMP 11 was ruined, and their only chance for survival lay in finding one of the other encampments out in the wilderness. Some of these other camps had to have some stored food available, he argued, as theirs had upon their arrival. But Brone immediately raised objections to this strategy, his opposition all the more intense because Natch proposed it.
”We can salvage what's left,” stated Brone. His voice boomed with the strong and vibrant tones of a born politician. ”We can survive here. But if we leave, there's no telling what we're going to find out in the wilderness.”
”And what are we going to live on?” yelled Natch. His voice was a crow's squawk, the sound of metal grating on metal. ”The stores we have are almost gone.”
”There are deer running around. We can hunt.”
Natch let out a dismissive snort. ”You're saying we should start eating real meat? Those aren't synthetic deer out there. We'll all get sick again, right when we can't afford to lose any time.”
”But we'll survive.”
The conflict raged through the afternoon, and gradually the boys began to polarize into two separate groups. Occasionally, someone would manage to insert a fact or an opinion into the discussion, but by and large it remained a conflict between Natch and Brone, the two stubborn boys at the top of their cla.s.s. When the sun finally slunk down over the horizon, someone suggested the question be put to a vote. Should they abandon their adopted home and search for other encampments, or soldier on here at CAMP 11 and hunt for food?
Natch lost.
The boy sat in the center of the ruined camp for several hours, oblivious to the whispers of the rest. All his frustration and humiliation from the Figaro Fi episode rushed over him in a black rage that clouded over his senses. Eventually, the rest of the boys abandoned the convocation and went off to find sleep.
Natch sat and sulked, his mind whirling. The stench of death lay over Brone's plan, as obvious to Natch as the wind or the rain. He couldn't just follow Brone to his grave, could he?
Horvil put a hand on his shoulder. ”You know what Sheldon Surina said?” he remarked to Natch quietly. ”He said, The man who doesn't know how to compromise only has himself to blame. ”