Si Vis Pacem (Heinlein's Finches) Page 4

  The door of this room fits so well that no light comes through. I start to feel like I’m choking, like the walls are closing in on me. I really need to piss, too. That’s a good enough excuse: I'm getting out of here to find a ‘fresher. Nobody can have a problem with that.

  I take a couple of slow breaths to get myself together before opening the door. The bright light beyond fries my eyeballs. I close the door as quickly and as quietly as I can not to disturb the guys, but I can hear them grumbling behind me. Hey ho; serves them right for being so lazy.

  I try to walk down the corridor calmly and confidently while being as invisible as I can. It’s not a winning combination, so I give up and settle for not scurrying, for looking like I have a reason to be out here. I’m not sure why I bother, because the place is still dead quiet. The couple of Outsiders I pass ignore me and carry on with their business.

  I get to the front of the building without having found the ‘fresher. I’m about to head back when a ray of light catches my attention. There are no windows in the front wall, but the door has a little slit in the middle of it, and the light is shining through it. If I stand on my tiptoes, I can see out, just. The road outside looks like any other road, until I catch a glimpse of the wall at the end of it. The damn thing is just as ominous from this side.

  “Hey! Where do you think you’re going!” A hand grips my arm as a voice makes me jump out of my skin. An Outsider is looking down at me, hairy nostrils flaring.

  “Nowhere! I was just…”

  He grabs my other arm and shakes me.

  “Why did you leave your quarters?”

  “I needed to…”

  He shakes me so hard I bite my tongue. It hurts like hell and the blood fills my mouth. My ears start to ring, my vision gets fuzzy, and my brain goes blank. He yells some more stuff right in my face, but I can’t process it. After he’s finished yelling, he shakes me some more.

  When he lets go of me I fall backwards and land on my ass. I look up, and Noah and Jake are behind the Outsider. They’re talking to him. A bunch of other people are turning up to stare at me. The Outsider keeps waving his arms around, close to my face. I wonder if he’s going to hit me.

  When my ears start working again, I hear him telling the guys that I was trying to get out. They’re apologizing on my behalf. I want to say that I did no such thing, that I was just looking, that nobody told me anything about staying away from the door, that if the guy had told me to I would have backed right off, that this isn’t fair, but I can’t. All I can do is hold back the stream of tears trying to burn their way out of my eyes.

  I get up. The Outsider doesn’t touch me. I start to walk back towards our room. He shouts something, but he lets me get on. I don’t look back to see if Noah and Jake are following me. When I get to our room, I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I try to stop my brain from running around in circles, but I can’t. The guys turn up and try to talk to me, but I ignore them. After a while they give up. I don’t think they noticed that I peed myself a little.

  They don’t process us till after breakfast; only, as nobody told us that we were supposed to go and get our breakfast from somewhere, we get our processing instead of our breakfast. The guys moan about it to each other, which seems to me about as brave as it is useful, but I don’t care. I doubt I could eat. I still haven’t been able to shift the lump that lodged itself in my throat when that guy started shaking me around. The tightness in my belly is helping, actually; it makes everything that’s going on feel more real, more immediate, but somehow less important.

  The processing is weird. They cram us in another small room that looks like it holds more furniture than it was designed to do, but has nowhere for us to sit. We are told to stand in the middle of it, behind a yellow line painted on the floor. A woman who looks either very tired or very bored is sitting behind a perfectly normal desk covered in all kinds of weird-looking crap. I feel like I did back in the transport, driven by Outsiders: the contrast between normal and alien makes my stomach queasy.

  I thought she’d be asking us questions, but instead she gives us answers to questions we never asked. She flashes a light in our eyes, runs a stick along our necks until it beeps, looks at the apparatus on her desk, and starts to reel off crap we are supposed to memorize. Our Citizen Identification Number, which is long as hell and is a string of letters, not a number. Our last name – we’re all down as “Pax”, even though we are not related and we’ve never been called that before. Our Citizen Com Code, whatever one of them is. Then the woman’s face tenses up and I realize that she’s angry, but trying to hold it in.

  “Has anyone explained to you about your Citizen Investment Level?”

  We all shake our heads and her eyes narrow.

  “In a nutshell, you don’t have one. The investment level of every minor in the Fed is linked to that of their parents, but your situation is different. Your parentage is of no account here. You are Fed wards until your majority. That means that your living expenses will be covered by the Fed, and you will incur no debt during this period. It is a privileged position, in many ways. All your needs will be met.”

  “Where?” croaks Noah.

  “What?”

  “Where are our needs going to be met? Where are you taking us?”

  “To a Youth Sorting Centre.”

  “What’s one of them?”

  “A school,” she coughs, “of sorts. You will have the opportunity to acquire the training and qualifications that you will require in order to become productive Fed citizens. You will need to choose your training program carefully: your future will depend on that. The Sorting Centre staff will be able to assist you with that. You should heed their advice.”

  She stares at the apparatus and her eyes and voice go flat.

  “The Pax educational system does not meet Fed criteria. Your testing is psychometric rather than knowledge- or skill-based. In order to prove your qualifications, you will have to get tested. This can be easily done at any Fed outpost, at no charge to you. You can use your CIN – your Citizen Identification Number – to log in at any Training Bureau terminal. They are widely available on all Fed property. Practical qualifications will require practical testing. You won’t be able to access that until you have reached the Sorting Centre, but you can start theoretical testing during your transit. Fed vessels are equipped with the relevant terminals. I would advise you to use that opportunity.”

  She looks up at Noah and Jake. “You have no time to waste. At eighteen you will become independent adult Citizens. As Fed wards you may continue your education or training until the age of nineteen, provided that you are enrolled and up-to-date on a Fed-recognized program. If that is not the case, as you hold neither stocks nor bonds, you will need to be financially independent from your eighteenth birthday. You have just short of eight months to enter a training program or find yourself a job, and your current skillset isn't in demand. If you can’t find a position, the Fed will incorporate you in its labor pool. You do not want that to happen, if you can at all avoid it.”

  The guys look stunned. Jake’s mouth is moving as if he were trying to form a sentence, but nothing is coming out.

  I take a step forward – not far enough to cross the line on the floor, but hopefully enough for her to remember that I exist. “What about me?”

  “Your situation isn’t as precarious. You have four to five years to complete your training and testing.”

  “What if I finish it sooner?”

  She sneers. “You won’t. Well, you could, conceivably, but you will stay at the Sorting Centre until you have reached your majority either way. Unless you marry an adult, that is. From the age of sixteen to eighteen, if you marry an adult you will become their ward.”

  “Marry?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “What? Don’t you people…” she sighs. “Marriage. A contractual relationship agreement between two or more parties.”

&nb
sp; “Contractual relationship? Like prostitution?”

  “No! Nothing like prostitution!”

  “What’s the difference?”

  She goggles at me. “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “No. I don’t get it. If you exchange sex for money or goods…”

  “Enough of this!” she shrieks. When she’s satisfied that I’ve stopped talking, she carries on. “You may also become the ward of any adult willing to adopt you. You will need a Fed representative’s permission to enter in either arrangement, but as you’d be saving the Fed two years’ worth of living expenses as a minimum, they are unlikely to stop you.”

  “What about the guys? Could they marry or get adopted?”

  She snickers. “Theoretically, I guess. But they are unlikely to find anyone who would want to keep them.”

  “Keep them?”

  “Cover their costs. Look after them.”

  “But someone may want to keep me? Like a pet?” A burning hot feeling is starting to fill the hole that missing breakfast left inside me.

  “It is more than likely, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are a young female. Although your ethnicity is substandard, you meet the criteria of many males, though I suspect your attitude would require some work.”

  “My attitude?”

  “You are awfully shrill for someone so young, particularly one in your position.”

  “You just suggested I sell myself to someone so they keep me, and my attitude needs adjusting?”

  “If you think that’s the worst option in front of you, then you’ve failed to grasp your situation. Goodbye.”

  She gets up and walks us out of the office, slamming the door behind us.

  2.

  Our ship leaves that night. I watch them load it up: a few Outsiders, a bunch of tech, and crate after crate of meat. Not animals: meat, lifeless and skinless, piled in heaps on wheeled carts that leave bloody smears on the ship’s ramp. The Outsider who told us that we were eating corpses sees me watching and comes to talk to me. He doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t talk back. He tells me that animals get scared getting loaded and hate it in transport, so it is a kindness to them to kill them beforehand.

  I am scared of getting loaded. Maybe they’ll kill me too.

  Then he tells me that the meat isn’t as good when the animals are scared, that the fear releases something in their blood that makes it taste awful and go bad fast, and that’s when I start laughing and laughing and I just can’t stop. I don’t know why I thought that they might be acting out of consideration for the animals, or respect for the lives that they are taking for their own pleasure. But no: they will only do a kindness if it benefits them. They do not know the meaning of kindness at all.

  The Outsider leaves me then. He probably thinks I am going mad, and maybe I am. The structure of my whole existence has crumbled, taking with it everything I believed about everything, including myself. I am lost in a maelstrom inside my own head, and I don’t know if I will ever find myself again.

  It doesn’t matter for now. All I have to do, all I can do, is what I’m told. Stand before the yellow line. Present my neck for scanning. Follow the green line on the floor, up the ramp, to a seat. Take my seat. Let an Outsider jostle me while he checks that I am adequately strapped in. Sit back, and watch my life disappear.

  Noah and Jake got seated next to me. That ought to make me feel better, but it doesn’t. They didn’t watch the loading. Noah tried to get me not to watch, too: he thought I’d find it upsetting, which of course I did. That was the whole point of watching it. Upsetting things are happening. This is the reality of our situation, and I am too much of a coward to look away from it. I need to know what I’m facing.

  The undocking sends my insides into turmoil, but only for a moment. As soon as the engines cut in, the ship steadies. I can feel the forward movement so faintly that I might be imagining it. It’s only an unpleasant feeling because it reminds me of what is happening, of the distance they are putting between my life and me. Then we take a wide, sweeping turn and the whole of Pax is laid before me, more beautiful than I ever imagined. Moments later it disappears from the screen and I have to stifle a scream. It’s OK, though, because now that the ship is steady we’re allowed to get off our seats.

  I find a rear-facing screen and watch Pax get smaller and smaller, until I just can’t believe that the tiny ring floating in the void contains everything I know. When it’s so small that I can’t see it, I close my eyes, turn around, and get on with facing the rest of my life.

  I heard what that woman said during our processing, about the school we’re going to, the tests we’ll have to pass, and the time we have to do that in. The whole thing creeped me out: the only tests I’ve ever taken were our standardized psychometric tests, and they are a joke. I have never heard of anyone failing them. It’s hard to fail a test when you know what the correct answers are – when, really, there is always only one correct answer to each and every question. Peace is easy in theory; it’s the practice that trips people up.

  For everything else, the only test we have is whether we can do it or not. If you can milk a cow, that shows that you know how to milk cows. If you can do sums, that shows that you know how to do sums. Your performance is the proof of your ability. If what you are doing gets easy, you try your hand or your brain at something harder. Some people stop once they find something they really like doing, which tends to be something they excel at, but that never happened to me. I get bored too easily, so I always kept moving on, kept on learning. I wondered sometimes if I would ever get to a point when I’d run out of stuff to learn and all I was faced with was endless repetition, which is my idea of hell, but I was normally too busy to waste time on pointless musings. Stuck on this ship with nothing to do and nowhere to go, it would be only too easy to let these worries chew at me, so I decide to deal with them head-on.

  I don’t understand the system the lady described. It sounds limiting and overcomplicated. That is the system I am being fed into, though, and I have no illusions as to my chances of explaining to the Fed that they’re being silly, so I better learn to work with it.

  Straight after dinner, which is lackluster but at least does not involve corpses, I find my way to the terminal suite. I’ve used terminals before, so the mechanics of the process are not an issue, but I do not know how to navigate the Fed’s systems. It takes me a good couple of hours to work out what’s what, by which time I am exhausted but highly entertained.

  You enter the learning system through a test that checks whether you can perform certain tasks – reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. The results of that test determine which learning options you are offered. You can then access those learning options, each of which consists of a set of inputs and outputs. You are given a piece of information, and then have to prove that you’ve “learned” it by repeating it back. The test gives you a “grade” depending on how accurate your repetition was. If you “pass”, you can access more learning opportunities. The more courses you pass, the more grades you accumulate, and the harder future courses are.

  There is a lot I don’t understand about this; in particular, I don’t understand how a score of 60% can be a pass. If there is 40% of a topic you haven’t learnt or understood, shouldn’t that be an indication that you’re not quite there? I do understand the basic workings of the system, though, and I find them hilarious: it’s a basic reward system like we’d use for infants or animals, but the Fed use it for thinking adults. It works, too; I find myself getting a dopamine hit every time I get a good grade, which makes me want to pass more classes. No part of this seems to have anything to do with actual learning, because I can store information in my short-term memory and regurgitate it on demand without understanding it or internalizing it, but the dopamine hits keep me at it.

  By the time I unglue myself from the terminal and drag myself to bed, I’ve started out on a number of learning tracks. Once you get past the basic stu
ff your options branch out in more and more directions. There is more to learn than I ever thought possible, and something inside me is buzzing with joy about that.

  When I get to our cabin Noah and Jake are there, and so are a couple of other guys. They’ve somehow managed to rustle up some drinks that smell awful but must taste good, because they seem keen enough to drink them. They seem to be having a good time. I want to tell them all I discovered about the terminals, about all the learning hidden inside them, but I don’t think they are in a mood to hear about it. I curl up on my bunk and try to do the right thing, the social thing, but nothing they are saying is remotely interesting to me so mostly I just space out, until I nod off.

  I’m happy enough on ship, but I’m not happy. I keep myself busy with my courses partly to get a sense of purpose and progress, to feel that I am achieving something, but mostly because every time I stop and give myself a chance to feel, my mind unravels. I hate it here: it’s cramped, it’s ugly, and everything around me is dead. I am used to moving among living beings. Everything on Pax, even the soil, is or was alive. Even the dead things, like timber, are alive in their own way, by being a habitat for other creatures. Here everything is dead and always has been. There are no animals at all, and if I want to see a plant I have to go to the vats room, which isn’t precisely scenic. There are plenty of people, but that just makes me feel crowded out. I miss feeling the breath of life around me. I miss it so much that every time I think about it I feel talons clawing at my chest. It’s not pleasant and it’s not useful, so I don’t do it: instead of thinking, I sit myself at the terminal and “learn.”