I was destroyed yet made complete; darkness descended upon my life as a great light; wretched things did become great treasures; cool, healing touches burned and wounded; I wept for there was tremendous sorrow too, but I regretted not, for at last I was given a soul.
—From the book, Petals of Dawn, banned by the State, 2051 A.G. Its possession became a capital crime in 2055 A.G.
The bus matched the sky, a mournful slate gray of a face all cried out, resignedly to the point of going on, regardless of the cause of tears; so too did the clothes worn by the people in the morning somberness, the pants and long sleeve jackets ashy like the complexions on the expressionless faces that revealed nothing, not even furtiveness. They knew that furtiveness drew attention. Quickly and with certainty.
A man waited in front of the transport kiosk. He stamped his feet, while rubbing his hands and shrugging his shoulders to warm himself. He snuck a fleeting look at the reflection in the plexiglass walls of the kiosk, but the glass was too scratched and grimy to see anything but a gray blur that might have been the sky, after all.
He was surprised he felt no dread, and this pleased him. Too long had he lived submerged in drowning fear, the purpose for which had been long forgotten until the need for being afraid had itself become the reason for its necessity.
Around him stood a few others; silent, vacuous countenances long conditioned to display no emotion; yet, he knew they were sad; this he knew without any doubt because he had been just as they were, all their faces blending in with the sky, the clothes, the buildings and buses, as a single seamless bleak despair.
Boarding the No. 2 bus, the pressing crowd jostled him until finally he secured a grip on one of the suspended handrails. The vehicle lurched forward in a cloud of acrid diesel exhaust that reached inside at them through the poorly sealed windows.
They rumbled along, making frequent stops to let passengers on and off. He tried to stare straight ahead, but risked glances outside at a frequency he hoped did not draw…attention.
For a few blocks he pretended he was not of this world, instead a detached observer given leave to study an alien place, and from which he’d eventually return to…to a better place. Outside the streaked windows existed the clones who were not genetic copies in a laboratory sense; standing, waiting, walking, almost always singly, rarest of rare in pairs, never in groups of three or more; most waiting for their buses—others, he noticed, performed menial tasks such as cleaning the streets or sidewalks that always seemed grimy despite the constant attention of the maintenance workers.
He’d come to this same bus stop six days a week for the last twenty years, yet he was familiar with only a few of the other passengers. Eye contact among them was only made accidentally. He kept his eyes averted, wanting no accidents today. No one said a word. Engaging in conversation required a person to be completely certain everything said would be considered acceptable and safe—and such a thing was never certain.
A woman who lived in his building, for at least the last ten years as he could recall, sat two rows ahead; he thought her name might be Celia, but he wasn’t certain of anything except that he knew she was a multipara who worked at a factory just outside of town. “Did she mourn for the children she’d given birth to but had never seen?” he wondered. He couldn’t know the answer. He’d never asked, and it was hard to tell one sadness from another, anyway.
Three rows up and one across, sat another neighbor, Geoff, fixing his gaze at the back of the head in front of him. People believed peering out a bus window was an act of folly, even though it was as yet not officially prohibited. But a new law could come any day and their being applied retroactively was not unknown. They could just as easily pass a law against staring out a bus window as they could against sabotaging a government power plant, and the punishment could well be the same for both. Geoff, like himself, worked in one of the large government record halls; but neither really knew what the other did, an oppressively superficial familiarity that the man thought foolish.
As the man shifted his hold, he noticed near one of the rear windows a man he had not seen before on the bus.
“Oh my God,” he screamed inside his head, “why didn’t I leave well enough alone!” Terror talons gripped his entrails, as he’d unknowingly beseeched a god who had long ago been done away with.
They were everywhere. Who hadn’t been taught in Pre-productivity School the story about the boy whose entire family were, unbeknownst to him, agents, and how he’d reached his third offense before the age of six. BETTER THE HERD THAN THE THIRD went the slogan. At that moment, outside the bus, affixed to a building, the man saw one of the clean, new signs that said this very thing. Its fresh newness in blaring contrast to the tired sameness of the wall to which an apparatchik had dutifully attached it.
Third. Six. So young to already get there. He shivered.
There was a look about the man at the rear of the bus, which the brief glimpse had burned into his brain, a confidence rarely seen in the masses, that of a hunting animal who suddenly finds itself amongst a group of hapless prey, hardly knowing which to strike first—paralyzed at first by indecisive greed. The previous feeling of elated temerity he’d had at the bus stop evaporated, replaced again by terror. Maybe someone had seen him last night and reported what he’d done to the police.
Underneath the clothes, his skinned quivered. A drip of sweat hit his free hand, startling him; he could sense perspiration on his face, a certain sign of guilt on a cold, fall day such as this. Could something as small as a drop of sweat be seen from the back of the bus? If he were asked, he would feign an illness with fever and hope he would not be questioned too closely. What if they made him see a doctor? What if they took him—right then and there—to see one?
Moisture slickened his palms and made it difficult to grip the handrail as the bus sped up and stopped with abrupt movements. A silent voice chanted the familiar mantra: “Go to the police and tell them what you’ve done. Honesty is the only policy. Go to the police and tell them what you’ve done…go…go…”
It was rhythmic, soothing, perhaps the result of his stays in the camps—if only he could remember exactly—but he was determined not to follow any of the pithy slogans that dominated their lives. “No, I will not!” He almost said this out loud, further frightening him; for to have done so would have been madness and surely drawn scrutiny, worst of all, perhaps arrest, before he could finish what he’d come to do. “Be careful; don’t make a mistake now.” He tried to calm himself by controlling his breathing and concentrating on the back of the bus driver’s head.
A few times he strained to gain another glance at the man in the rear, but he couldn’t do so without himself being seen looking; he was sure the man was staring at him; after all, they watched everything and everyone, their powers of discerning the impolitic thoughts within the minds of others legendary. In his pocket, the gift nestled against his heart, carefully wrapped to protect it during its short journey.
The night before he’d risked an evening walk, something he had not done in years. Passing by a small rubble-strewn lot, where a building once stood, and on which a streetlight cast an uncertain, opaque glare, he barely saw it poking slightly above some scattered bricks. At first, he did not realize what it was, pausing fearfully lest his interest in the lot should attract attention.
One rarely saw living things.
The State was very efficient in killing everything, except what was absolutely necessary for its survival. There was only a need for people who could be controlled to the satisfaction of the State and those things required to feed them. He knew that living things other than humans had been common long ago, remarkably, their growth even encouraged whether their existence was necessary or not, and, oddly, this was done oftentimes solely for wasteful pleasure.
“It must have been strange,” he thought, “to have lived among plants which waved at the sun, or watched animals the Old Ones said flew through the air; to smell and feel and touch and taste and see, not gray, but…but colors,” the last word coming back to him in a flash of variegated lights.
He couldn’t immediately remember what they used to call ones like this—the general name they used came to him with some effort…a flower. He might has well have screamed, FLOWERS! He was certain the man in the back could hear the word as he thought it—how loud they make your thoughts seem—he closed his eyes trying to keep the sound of his thoughts from escaping.
He recalled this species was not considered a desirable flower; in fact, they were regarded as weeds by most people, killed by less efficient means than used now, yet killed for reasons that seemed equally malevolent: so other things could grow unimpeded. Somehow, the property had been inadequately sterilized, or perhaps the seed from which this one sprang was especially hardy, but, nonetheless, there it was, growing alone and forlorn—and strangely defiant. A strange emotion welled up from some unknown place inside of him, one of pity for the small plant, and he felt like crying, not understanding anything of tears.
Crying was forbidden, or so he thought he’d heard or read somewhere.
He decided what he must do. The law required he report it to the nearest police station, but this he would not do. The crunching sound of the gravel seemed to scream into the thickness of the night, a piece of unseen glass broke like a rifle shot under his boot; he expected firm hands to grip his arms at any moment; as quickly as possible, he walked over and plucked the flower, placed it in his jacket pocket, and fled toward home.
He could hear his heart throbbing a warning in his ears as he headed back to his apartment; “Had anyone noticed him?” he wondered, wanting to look around to see if someone was watching, fearful lest the act of checking would itself draw notice.
He felt both terror and guilt; the fear of being caught was understandable, it was, after all, something they faced each day; but his guilt was not because he believed he had done something wrong, even though he knew he had, but because he’d pulled a living thing out of the ground. “It was like the rest of us,” he considered as he rushed along, “only wanting to live, and, by rising out of ruins, maybe feel the sun on its…its.” He struggled to remember. Leaves? Petals? He couldn’t remember which was which, and he wanted to pull the flower out of his jacket to study it and assign the correct name for the green and the yellow pieces, all of which had been plucked from the nurturing earth only because it was different and dared to be where it was not supposed to be.
Taking it back to his apartment was an incredible risk; he knew if he were caught with it or even suspected of having it, he would be forced to undergo the last phase of sensitivity training. A new wave of dread came over him as he considered this possibility. He’d been sentenced to the sensitivity conditioning camps two previous times, the terror of it always weighed on him, for this was what it was supposed to do. One’s natural conscience is too unpredictable to be trusted, but one molded by the State can be shaped with surety and in a manner of standardized conformance. There would be no return from a third trip to a training camp; a third offense resulted in the person being deemed incorrigible, a crime punished by mandatory termination after completion. Yes, they’d waste time on this last effort, if for no other reason than to prove it doable, that they’d not be beaten in the end.
The first time he’d been only six years old and living at Elementary Housing Commune No. 145 in a town the name of which he could not recall. There was water. The sunlight shining on its surface appeared far off in the foggy distance. “Yes! I remember now.” The air tasted salty and smelled of iodine. A town near the sea. Some of the Old Ones lived there, and they fished and met together—in groups I think they called them, daring the uniformed men to take them away. Which they must’ve done one day because the boy had seen them no more.
He recalled going to the beach, alone after dark, sneaking out after the other children had gone to sleep. This itself was strictly forbidden because independent activity was prohibited and deliberate solitude only allowed when it could be controlled or used to sever the bonds of unity with others. His mistake had been to dare being happy about a plaything found on one of these nights.
It washed on shore from he knew not where, a small plastic round thing, its colors faded, but to a little boy in such a drab place, the colors seemed very bright indeed, brighter than anything he had ever seen. The concept of a toy was alien to him, but the instincts of children are strong and the State had not yet been capable of grinding out all the vestiges of childhood from its people; so the boy played with the orb and took great pleasure in throwing it along the beach, chasing it, his laughter fortunately muffled by the roaring of the surf; bouncing it against the rocks, its unpredictable return paths testing his reflexes and reaction times as he tried to catch it; kicking it, retrieving it from the water’s edge; he’d never known joy before. Before returning to the dormitory each night the sphere was carefully and lovingly hidden; even at this young age, he knew it was wrong to possess such a thing.
For a week this continued, until a night when one of the other children had not been asleep. The boy left without taking the care he usually exercised to avoid detection. He was too eager to return to the toy he had secreted by the beach; his happiness, though carefully concealed during the day, made him less circumspect that night. “Fool!” he later chastised himself for the first time.
Another child immediately alerted the ward mistress of the unauthorized departure. He was soon found at the beach in possession of a “ball” as they called it; a crime of great enormity; unsmiling faces surrounded him; these faded off in the distance with the water. The deliberate efforts on his part to avoid detection and hide the toy clearly damned him as a threat to the State’s security. Sent to sensitivity training camp that night, he never saw the commune or the other children again.
His memories of the camp were vague. He remembered pain, but wasn’t sure if it was inflicted on him bodily or mentally—or even if it had occurred at all. This was the exquisite part of their skill, the victim never able to recall too much about the methods but always slavishly bound to the results. All he could recollect is that after leaving, he was still young, at most seven or eight years old, but, despite his youth, he was never a child again.
The second incident occurred when he was eighteen, an age at which times past would have been considered the beginning of manhood; today there were no such concepts as manhood; one simply was a person, an occupation, and one of many sexes, each reduced to irrelevancy except as it related to productivity and control.
There had been a girl—it bothered him that he could not bring her name to mind or remember what she looked like with certainty. Vaguely, through the mists of time and conditioning, which blurred the images, he saw a pretty blonde girl with green eyes. Had he wanted to smell her hair, stare into her eyes? He believed that perhaps he had. “They have taken even that memory away from me,” he thought angrily, the anger causing pressure on the bonds of control so meticulously placed by the State around their souls.
Every week they were required to attend an instructional movie at the community hall. He did not know why at the time, nor did he understand now, but he wanted to ask this girl to go to the movie with him so the two of them could sit together. This sort of behavior was strictly outlawed, for even in a room full of hundreds of people, no one was supposed to be there specifically with anyone else; two people with a common objective, acting in concert was legally defined as a conspiracy. Conspiracies would not be tolerated.
It took him weeks to finally get up the courage to ask. He carefully arranged for the opportunity, and coordinated his visit to the water fountain with hers, making sure they were alone for a few moments. She quickly said yes, and he felt happy afterwards thinking he might be ill, since it was an emotion he did not understand; but he reveled in it, intoxicated by the strange, wonderful sensation.
At the following week’s film, they sat next to each other, not daring to speak. Her smell, the brief touches when either slightly changed position, the mere awareness of her nearness to him; these things were wonders he could not explain, but they were accepted by him as good, despite what he had been taught; he was happy—his happiness the fatal mistake. The girl was disciplined enough or perhaps fearful enough to maintain her inscrutability, but he let slip his pleasure, perhaps by a quick smile or maybe an untoward warming of his cheeks or an abnormally lingering glance at her face out of the corner of his eye; maybe they sat just a fraction of an inch too close.
They came for them, quickly, during intermission; and as before, he never saw her or the theater again.
This trip to the camp he remembered little better than the first. Except for the pain. Pain. Neverending pain. This time he knew it, in fact, was real.
For what length of time it lasted, crushing down upon him, he had no way of knowing. He seemed to remember that it felt like he’d been placed in a great metal vise—at least not literally—but the crushing, steady, constant, never relenting—was real, in spite of his opaquely recalled details.
The bus lurched to a stop, catching him off guard. Like a snowy viewscreen given a fortuitous kick, the focus cleared to crystal…
The crime they said was “sinister untoward attention toward a different sex”; for this he was to be permanently reconditioned so as to never annoy a female again. He was taken to a small room, not unlike a clinic, and strapped naked onto a stainless-steel table. Wires were taped to his skin and connected to machines, sharpness jabbed into each arm, and then the pain began and never…never ended.
A hint of fluid welled in his eyes. He stared straight down at the bus aisle.
If he had been born in the past, he might have known of books that had been written to warn of a future which was now his own time and place. Written by men the names of whom he would not have recognized: Huxley, Wells, London, Orwell. Books whose real message was largely ignored in their own time, because the people believed there was too much freedom for them to ever lose their liberty to the oppression of others. But the authors of these books knew better; they realized that freedom is an ephemeral thing, and they saw the warning signs that others would not heed. That freedom is a priceless and delicate creature which must be protected and well-cared for, forever and always. If taken for granted or ceded in increments because its preservation for the moment seems too onerous, is to make its loss certain.
The man did not consciously know of the concept of freedom, which men once claimed they loved so much, so much that it must be defended at all costs. They nevertheless destroyed it and then it was forgotten as if it had never been. He did not know of freedom in the sense of a formal education about it, but he surely knew, with the instinctiveness of the human species, which no tyranny can fully extinguish.
In the past, governments had been content with controlling physical things such as trade or overt acts such as behavior. Not content with such limits, some people began to consider the State as a means to rule that which is within men’s hearts; so, where in the past, evil governments built charnel houses for the flesh, now the State created charnel houses for the soul. And the smoke spewed out from these, all night and all day, every day of every year, the smoke so great that the distinction between the days, between night and day, and among the faces covered with the ashes of their own souls, became indistinguishable.
Disgustedly, they told him that he’d been a particularly difficult case to cure. When it was all over, they sent him to his present job in a different city. They deemed him “suspiciously fit” to return to society, though he would always be subject to additional surveillance due to his previous unreliability. He spent the next several decades living the uneventful nondescript life they all led.
Returning last night from the vacant lot, the door to his drab studio flat securely locked, he turned off all the lights except the one in the bathroom where he carefully removed the guarded flower. “It’s so bright, like a little sun.” Feeling inside himself a startling warmth, he’d whispered this out loud, strangely no longer worried of speaking. He filled a dingy glass, its rim chipped, with tap water. And put the flower in it, gently placed the glass on the sink, and sat down on the toilet lid to stare. This he did for several hours. Before going to bed that night, his plan for the flower was finalized and for the first time in his life, sleep came easy.
The bus pulled up to the curb in front of the Records Hall and many of the passengers got off. Several times, as he moved down the aisle towards the door, he was forced to fend off the bodies pushing to get by, protecting the gift from being crushed. As he turned to step off the bus, he caught a second glance at the man by the rear window, briefly, yet long enough to know that he was being closely watched, the efforts to safeguard the flower suspicious and cause for attention. When he reached the curb, he moved as quickly as possible towards the entrance, the stairs, and his workplace on the tenth floor. Only the police were allowed to use the elevators.
He gasped for breath when he finally arrived at his office, and he went directly to his desk. There had been many stairs, the enormity of his burden, and the footsteps he thought he detected behind him—was the man following him? Sweat ran as salty rivulets down his face. At the sound of his breathing, those nearby hunched down a little lower in their chairs, paid a little more attention to their tasks, strained harder to block the sounds around them.
Removing a tissue from his desk drawer, he wiped his face in as inconspicuous a manner as possible, then glanced across the office at a woman sitting twenty feet away at a desk identical to his.
He didn’t even know her name but didn’t think this odd. So few names of the others were known, even a co-worker a few feet away. She was thin, much younger than him, and plain; even with make-up—were cosmetics allowed anymore—she would have garnered scarcely a glance from most men. But he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The concept of beauty being actively discouraged by the State, there was actually a separate branch of the police dedicated solely to its eradication.
He’d watched her these last few weeks, ever intent on not being noticed, and had loved her from the first time he’d seen her. He didn’t even know what job she did despite the fact they’d worked together almost a month now. Remembering her first day, he smiled. One of his co-workers caught a glimpse of this smile and trembled; another saw it too, and a shocked look crossed this person’s face, for an instant, and disappeared.
The nearest he’d ever been to the young woman was a few times at the coffee dispenser. They’d never spoken except for a single “excuse me” on his behalf. By his best efforts, he’d been able to carefully arrange these encounters, no more than three times. And even here, he had to plan with great caution. A pattern would be quickly detected. Maybe that’s why—the man on the bus—he could have been mistaken in calculating his drinks. They had computers it was rumored that could find patterns in the most seemingly random and chaotic data. He became angry thinking there might be a cold, dark mechanical device, which had hunted him out like a frightened deer flushed from a thicket of trees.
One might ask how someone can love another person knowing so little about her. Even in the Old Times, there were those who scoffed contemptuously at the concept of love at first sight. But in this regard, both the Past and the Present are wrong; it is always the heart which first knows, and sometimes the heart by itself can know another person well enough to love. These feelings within the heart, of which love is the strongest, had to be eliminated because they were beyond the control of the State; therefore, great efforts were made to condition and eradicate all nonessential feelings within its people. And in this, they had been almost completely successful.
As a youth he had heard some of the Old Ones talk in hushed voices of Love. Though his recollections were nebulous, he remembered it had seemed they considered Love of great importance, almost sacred, though the meaning of sacred wasn’t clear to him, a force of tremendous power in their lives. When he’d seen the flower in the lot, his first thought was to give it to her, though the idea insane. But that didn’t matter anymore; nothing was of concern except this final act of defiance. He wondered if what he felt towards this woman was Love. He hoped it was.
Pushing his chair back, he stood. As if they were all flies affixed to the same web, the others immediately sensed the peril in the room, and paused at their tasks to take note of him as he strode the short distance to her desk. The years of conditioning to avoid that which is unusual was strong, but not strong enough to divert their eyes, at least for a few moments, from the spectacle playing out before them.
She perceived his approach and this caused her to glance up. He stood in front of her desk; she didn’t know his name. She sensed the start of a smile on her face when she saw him, and this frightened her, for which she was glad because it kept her from doing such a rash act. The man reached for something in his pocket.
It seemed so simple now. He would ask her to come with him to a movie and then afterwards they could go to the beach together, the same one at which he had found the ball a long time ago. He stopped directly in front of her and she looked up, appearing to him as if she was going to acknowledge him, and this made the warmth within him grow greater, but the look on her face passed so quickly that he wasn’t sure if he’d seen correctly; the glow remained though, and he was glad.
Reaching into his pocket he pulled out a single droopy dandelion and saw her eyes go to it, and, briefly, her eyes smiled the one her face could not.
“I want to tell you…you look very pretty this morning.” He thought the words sounded as if a stranger were speaking. The voice clear and strong, in a way that itself would surely constitute a crime. The others trembled uncontrollably at what they were hearing. “Here…this flower is for you. I’m so sorry I don’t know what kind of flower it is.”
“Thank you,” she responded, taking the flower, unable to say more. She’d never seen anything like it; it was so bright that she almost squinted. He watched her examine it, and it saddened him to see the hand which held the flower begin to shake.
He smiled shyly, knowing he would not ask her to go with him anywhere, knowing this was the only time he would ever have meaningful contact with her; there would be no beach or movie or soft touch of skin or anything else. With a sadness—deep, eternally deep—he told her, “I’m sorry.”
He returned to his desk realizing that he had placed her in great jeopardy. When they interrogated him, he would remain insistent she’d nothing to do with his actions today. He’d feign insanity and tell them he thought she was an undercover informer and he was trying to frame her. To make this lie effective, he knew he’d have to let them take him to the breaking point before revealing it.
The other workers, including the young woman, dropped their eyes to their desks knowing what would occur shortly. She dropped the flower in the center of her desk, trying unsuccessfully not to steal quick peeks at it.
There was only a few minutes delay between the time he returned to his desk and the arrival of the police; the man from the bus was with them, and he appeared quite rested; there was no sweat on his face or on those of the men who accompanied him. One of the men quickly snatched up the flower, rudely jamming it into a black evidence bag.
The man stood as they neared his desk; they barely had to touch him to get him to come along. This made them feel relieved because often when they apprehended a person for their third offense, they put up a fight, sometimes necessitating field termination—and much additional paperwork. And the man from the bus knew there was always a reckoning when the State was deprived its third.
But there was no protest from the man because along with the flower and his final smile, he had given the woman the last remaining piece of his soul; at least they would not have it. He had beaten them. Their camps and slogans and pain and gray sky had failed. The look on his face disturbed the police; they became rougher with the man but could not get the expression to change.
And he went along calmly, wearing the slightest of smiles.
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