Agenda 21 Read online

  Our Living Space was a square building, small and squat, on a path used by bus-boxes and bicycles, in Compound 14, the Transport Compound. Men in our Compound spent their day providing transportation by pulling wooden bus-boxes. These boxes could transport up to six people at a time, one in the forward seat, one in the back, and two on each side. These existed because all transportation had to be approved by the Authority. No Citizen could walk freely because that was an expense of energy that could not be afforded. Our daily energy was, of course, to be used walking our boards or performing our assigned tasks for the betterment of the Community.

  The Transporters worked in teams of six. Father had muscles on his back that bulged, hard and round, under his orange uniform. Mother said the only good thing about Compound 14 was that everybody assigned there came from the middle part of the old nation. Common, hardworking folks.

  “They’re just like us,” she said. “And that gives me comfort.”

  Mother stayed at home with me and walked the energy board. Back then I had a toy energy board I had to walk every day. Not as many hours as Mother, of course, because I was a child. Children had some privileges then, but they still had to be trained. Sometimes Mother would get off her board long enough to give me a hug or teach me a song. “I’m a little teapot, short and stout” and she showed me how to pretend someone was going to “tip me over and pour me out.” Other times she taught me “The itsy bitsy spider crawled up the waterspout . . . .” but I had to stop her and ask what a waterspout was.

  “A waterspout is a pipe that allows rain to drain from a roof of a building into a container. There are no more waterspouts anymore. No more collecting rain.”

  I thought about this for a minute then asked her: “Why can’t we collect rain? Why can’t we drink the rain?” Rain was water, after all, wasn’t it?

  “Rain,” she said, “belongs to the Earth, and the Authority controls everything that belongs to the Earth.” She stopped singing and talking for the rest of that day.

  I am one of the last children to have been allowed to stay at home with parents. That was my biggest privilege. Mother told me so. She said it was her biggest privilege, too. She explained to me what happened at one of the Social Update Meetings. The only thing I remember about going to those meetings when I was little was that I had to stand very quietly in the row with Mother and Father and not fidget or Mother would pinch me on the arm. It’s hard for a four-year-old to stand still for so long, but she didn’t want anyone to notice me. At the end of this particular meeting, when we were outside on the bicycle path, she bent down and hugged me hard and tight. And she was crying. I felt her wet cheek and touched it with my hand. When I put my fingers in my mouth, they tasted salty.

  “I’m allowed to keep you,” she said. “I’m allowed to keep you.” I didn’t know why that would make her cry or why she thought she couldn’t keep me. I was her daughter. Father hugged me, too, but he kept looking around nervously, and shuffling his feet as though he wanted to run somewhere.

  “Let’s go home, Elsa,” he’d said to Mother. “Let’s go now. Not everyone is as lucky.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  About four years ago I reached reproductive age. It was scary to see blood on my underwear. I thought I was dying. I tried to hide the underwear by rolling them up in a ball and shoving them under my clean clothes, but I couldn’t fool Mother. She found them. She gave me a folded cloth to catch the blood and said it was time we had a talk.

  By then I had a real energy board with a rolling black mat, metal side arms, and the little, round meter with a red needle. Mother and I walked side by side on our boards. I’ve forgotten lots of things Mother told me, but I will never forget what she said about the Children’s Enhancement Laws.

  “The Authority,” she said, her words in rhythm with her steps, “decided they could do a better job of raising the children than us. Make them more productive. Train them better than their parents could.”

  As she talked, I put my fingers in my mouth, tasting the salt in my sweat. I needed her to explain the blood on my underwear. Why was she talking about this? But I knew she would just shut down if I tried to change the topic.

  She gave me a sideways look, as if trying to figure out how much information I could hold, like I was an empty cup that needed to be filled a little bit at a time, and only with what she wanted to tell me.

  “I don’t know how long they had been planning this. They never announce plans. Or ideas. They just proclaim.” She scratched at her left forearm with her right hand without breaking the rhythm of her walking. When she talked about the Authority, her words came out like spit.

  “Quit scratching,” I said.

  “Quit sucking your fingers,” she answered. “You’re not a child anymore, you’re fourteen and a half.”

  We walked for a few minutes in silence, with just the low rumble of our rotating mats and the occasional hiss of the energy being sucked into the download bar.

  “Your father saw them putting up some buildings. I think he knew what was going on. The Transport Team always knows at least a little bit—”

  “What buildings?”

  “The Children’s Village. A new Compound. New flags. Pink and blue.”

  Everything, it seemed, had an assigned color. Colors to define rank. Colors to define purpose. Citizens could only wear their assigned colors. You could tell at a glance what someone did or if someone was important. Mother and I wore the same orange as Father. Our colors marked the boundaries of where we could go.

  “But he didn’t tell you?” I asked. “He didn’t tell you about the new buildings?”

  “No. He didn’t.” Mother pursed her lips.

  “Why not?” Mother and Father must have had secrets from each other as well as secrets from me. And those secrets must be about bad things. Why else wouldn’t Father have mentioned the new buildings?

  She glanced at me again. “He had his reasons.”

  Through the window slit, we could hear the rumble of a bus-box going past and the shuffling footsteps of the Gatekeeper making rounds. We didn’t talk until he passed our space.

  Then, in her metronome voice, she told me what the Authority had announced at that Social Update meeting over a decade ago. They were concerned about the decreasing birthrates in various Compounds as well as the way the older kids were maturing. They said children didn’t reach their full potential because parents were not properly raising their children. They said that they could do it better.

  “I told your father that maybe they should consider blaming the decreasing birthrate on the increasing demands for all Citizens to create energy. There’s no energy left to create babies.” She actually gave a little laugh when she told me that. She could be sarcastic, almost funny, on the days she felt good. Other days she was just quiet, her voice flat.

  But the most important thing she told me that day, important as anything I ever heard, important enough to make breathing hurt all the way from my ribs to my feet, was that I had had my fourth birthday a week before that meeting. It was there that it was announced that all future babies and all existing children under the age of four were being assigned to a new Compound. Compound 2. The Children’s Village. As a result, I am one of only a few Citizens to actually be raised by a natural parent.

  We were about halfway done on our boards. I had already drunk my morning ration of water and my lips were dry, my tongue furry. The folded cloth in my underwear felt sticky and wet. I thought she had forgotten about my bloody underwear. But she hadn’t.

  “You’re old enough now to have to undergo testing. To get your reproductive-ability score. They’ll schedule it when your father tells them about it.”

  “About what?”

  “You got your first monthly. The bleeding. It’s normal. Your father will tell them, they’ll schedule the test, and the Transport Team will take you to the Human Health Services.”

  “It’s normal?”

  “It’s normal. It means you’re old
enough to be paired with a man. It means you may be moved to a different Compound.” Her voice was sad but, at the same time, had the abruptness of a door slamming shut. She was done talking.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jeremy was still sleeping, but he was moving restlessly from one side to another. Even though he had done his washing up, I could still smell that rank odor. My heart began to race, fluttering like bird wings in my chest and high in my throat. That smell! The smell from the building I saw this morning, the one they took Mother to. The Recycle building.

  Feeling dizzy, I sat on my sleeping mat and held Mother’s blanket against my face. I don’t know how long I sat there, breathing in the smell of Mother from her blanket, trying to shut out that other odor, trying not to remember seeing Mother pulled into that building, hearing the door slam behind her. I heard Jeremy whimpering in his sleep. A whiny, childlike whimpering. I wanted to escape his smell and that sound. I wanted to run away from him but there was no place to go.

  Useless to try to sleep. My mind was racing with questions, with memories. Images and conversations as vivid as if they had just happened.

  Like the day I heard my parents talking while I was in the washing-up area. Father’s whisper had come slow and deep out of his throat like the growl of a crouching animal, while Mother’s was higher, faster, like a bird, chirping and swirling.

  They were arguing about something being scheduled, and Father was angry that Mother hadn’t told me about something else. She said she just wanted to keep me safe. And then Mother said something strange. “If I tell her everything she’ll never feel safe again.”

  Jeremy moaned, sat up, then went to the washing-up area, interrupting my thoughts. As he walked past me, the smell got stronger. I wondered what he did at Re-Cy. I wondered if he had seen Mother with those ropes on her wrists. I sat still and small when he went back to his mat. When I could hear him snore, I went back to thinking, back to that day Mother and Father had argued.

  I remembered rubbing sanitizing solution on my hands. It burned around the places where I bit my fingernails. Mother was always after me about putting my fingers in my mouth. I pulled aside the privacy curtain and they immediately stopped talking. I remember the dead silence. It seemed to last forever.

  Then Father told me I was scheduled for reproductive-ability testing the next day. He said they would examine me all over. I didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t look at me when he said it. Mother didn’t say anything. I said I didn’t want to go because I didn’t know what it meant to be examined. He told me the Authority required it, and I shouted that I didn’t care.

  That’s when he grabbed both of my shoulders. His fingers were so strong that they dug in. He seemed like he was about to shake me, but instead he just looked straight into my eyes. How dark his eyes were, the whites tracked with little red veins. I had never seen him so angry.

  “Whatever you do, Emmeline, whatever you do, don’t fight them. Do you hear me? Don’t ever fight them.”

  I pulled away and stared at him. “I’m not going!”

  He let his hands drop to his sides, his fingers still curled into a grip.

  “Yes, Emmeline, you are. I mean it. Promise me you won’t fight them. Do whatever they ask. Promise me.” He sounded like he might cry. I had never seen my father cry.

  “Emmeline,” Mother said, her voice thick, “listen to your father. Promise.”

  Sitting here now in the dark, I realized Father wasn’t angry that day, he was frightened. I dug through my memories, trying to remember every detail for any clue I might have missed. Every conversation, the way people looked and talked and what they did. The night dragged on while Jeremy slept. It was long, and my memories pressed in on me like the walls of our tiny Living Space.

  I remembered the morning after Mother and Father had argued; Mother gave me a headscarf. She brought it in with the nourishment cubes. The Gatekeeper must have left it. It was white. How did the Gatekeeper know to leave it? So many mysteries.

  Her fingers were shaking as she helped me tie the scarf. “You only have to wear this when you’re outside of our Living Space. Inside you don’t have to.”

  I reached up and felt the smooth coolness of the fabric.

  “Why is my scarf white but yours is white with black around the edges?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  She clicked her tongue, and a little puff of air pushed through her lips. That meant she didn’t want to answer. But I asked again, pushing against the wall of her nonanswers. “Because why?”

  “White means you’re of reproductive age. They add a black band when you’re paired. Enough with the questions.”

  We both heard the rumble of the bus-box at the gate.

  Mother looked at me with a sadness that made her appear older. “Go now,” she said, nodding toward the door.

  “Come with me.”

  “I can’t. You’ll have a chaperone.”

  “Just to the gate, then?” I asked.

  “All right. Just to the gate.”

  She stood at the gate as I got on the bus-box. As we pulled away, she put her hand on her chest, on her heart.

  The Gatekeeper made a notation on his clipboard. The bus-box was a square wooden thing with wooden bench seats. I don’t know what the wheels were made of, but they were big and the bus-box was high enough off the ground that I had to use a step to get on. When the Transport Team started pulling, it lurched forward and I almost fell over. There were no backrests on the side benches.

  A woman was already on the bus-box. The chaperone. And she was paired. Her headscarf was like Mother’s, white with a black band. It felt good, figuring that out by myself. She sat on a bench in the front of the box, facing me. Her bench had a backrest. We left Compound 14. Past the great flag, the same orange as Father’s uniform. The same orange as Mother’s and my clothes. It hung limp and lifeless.

  The trees grew close to the bicycle path, the branches arching overhead so that as we moved, the sun and shadows flickered over my face. I pulled my headscarf back to feel the sun on my head. The chaperone frowned and shook her head. Her headscarf was wrapped so that even her forehead was covered. I wasn’t used to a headscarf. I fumbled with it until I made it look like hers.

  The bus-box was wider than the bicycle path and lurched over the uneven ground. I held on to the side and swayed with the movement. I could hear the Transport Team breathing hard, grunting. Father was not on this team. I heard him tell Mother last night that he hoped he would not be one of the men who took me for testing.

  We entered another gate. Here, two flags were hanging side by side from one pole. A pink flag and a blue flag. This had to be the Children’s Village. We turned toward the largest building. I didn’t see individual Living Spaces. Instead there was a fenced-in play yard with practice energy boards lined up very neatly and evenly spaced against the fence.

  The work of children is play. Mother told me that a famous person had said that. There was nothing else in the play yard, not even grass. Just hard dirt. Most of the window slits on this building were lower than the ones in our home.

  Waiting by the main doorway were two girls about my age, both in pink uniforms. Pink is such a pretty color. The tall woman standing with them was gently adjusting their headscarves, tucking their hair under the fabric, but the girls looked bored, scuffing their shoes against the dirt and sending little poofs of dust into the breeze.

  When the girls got on the bus-box, they sat together across from me.

  “Ever been on a bus-box before?” one of them asked. She had thick eyebrows, like caterpillars that grew almost across her nose.

  “You got your monthlies?” the other one asked me. “How old are you anyhow?”

  “Fourteen and a half.”

  “Fourteen and a half?” the girl with the eyebrows said. “We’re thirteen and a half and we already got our monthlies. And not a day too soon. I can’t wait to be paired.” I was pretty sure the chaperone
couldn’t hear her.

  We passed an animal feeding station where wooden boxes were filled with some kind of grain. And something else. Lumpy things, maybe nuts. Fat gray animals with furry, curled tails jumped from tray to tray, eating the grain and the nuts. Squirrels. I had never seen so many in one place. Hundreds of them, a swirling mass of gray fur and curled tails. So many it seemed like a great gray thunderstorm, right there by the bus-box. They chattered and scolded each other, and the bigger ones chased the smaller ones off the trays.

  “Why are there so many squirrels?” I asked.

  “What are you, stupid? Don’t you know anything?” said the girl with the eyebrows. She turned to the other girl. “I pity the man she gets paired with.”

  There was that word again. Paired.

  “Praise the squirrels,” one girl said.

  “Praise those who feed the squirrels,” said the other one. Each formed the circle sign with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and held it to her forehead as they gave their praises. They said it loud enough for the chaperone to hear. She nodded her head and gave them a tight smile. As if her face might break if her smile was too big.

  It seemed strange to me that the squirrels were so free, free to go anywhere. Why didn’t I feel free?

  “Never saw you in the Village. You must be one of them,” the girl with the eyebrows said.

  “One of what?” I didn’t like the way she said “them.” It was like a snarl.

  “One of the home-raised. Homeschooled. You know. Not one of us. If you were one of us, you’d know there are so many squirrels because the Authority makes sure they get lots of food. That’s what the Managers of Nature do. They take care of nature. You would know that if you were one of us.”