GROUP 201583G, SUBJECT 39B
CULTURAL INTEGRATION SESSION #1
The woman sits in a room alone on a narrow bench, the ceiling too close, the seat too hard. The walls glow softly, then erupt into colours unnatural to her eyes. She blinks, and recognizes a facsimile of her forest home.
The trees disappear and for a vertiginous moment she is suspended in a dark night sky. The sights that follow—of people, some like her, some not; of suffering, drought, starvation; of war fought for water or a patch of green—these are stories she knows, the story of her own people and all the people who remain.
The voice that fills the room speaks her language, but is accented strangely. Some of the words are not ones she knows.
Earth.
Humankind once believed that the Earth and its bounty belonged solely to us. Through our reckless overuse of resources and disregard for the species with whom we shared the planet, we pushed our fellow creatures to extinction and the Earth to the brink of human habitability.
As the sea levels rose and famine spread across the globe, the human world came together to acknowledge our fatal mistakes and use our ever-increasing technological know-how to survive—and to atone.
The result is the city of Habitat, a self-sustaining, carbon-neutral environment, created to provide shelter for the survivors of our self-imposed apocalypse, and to prevent humankind from doing further harm. Through the use of carbon-capture technology, vertical farming, population planning, and many other gifts of science, Habitat is a safe and sustainable place for all humankind.
Welcome to Habitat: your new home.
Smiling faces and gleaming towers flow one after the other as the woman buries her face in her hands and weeps.
Dr. Jayita Chandra Lamar believed three things: that people belonged in Habitat—and nowhere else; that collection and assimilation was the only acceptable outcome for both the rogue tribes and every species spared by their removal; and that no one was better at the job than she was.
So it was her greatest frustration that in two years spent tracking and studying the tribe known as Arboreal-7, she had lost them twice. Just as she thought she knew them, their rhythms and behaviours, their consistencies and idiosyncrasies—well enough, certainly, to begin putting together an assimilation protocol—they disappeared. She would find them again hundreds of miles—and some months later—deeper in the North American forests, and she would begin again.
She had missed something vital, or hadn’t been cautious enough. She was making assumptions based on past missions; she wasn’t looking at it from the right angle. Had the drones been spotted? The numbers were well within the expected rate of loss for a machine the size of a dragonfly, something a stiff breeze could knock into a cliff or be mistaken for dinner by a hungry bird. After her first failure she stopped using flying surveillance and sent in crawlers instead; they could cling to tree trunks and hide in the canopy, providing ears as well as eyes. They didn’t catch anything, either.
She blamed herself; she had let grief affect her work. Maybe she hadn’t been ready to resume her position. But with Marcel gone, what had been left for her to do but work?
Her third attempt was just days away, and Jayita was—for the first time in her career—unsure of herself. Her eyes had grown bleary from hours of reviewing the footage, and her head ached; she needed to walk away for a bit, clear her head, breathe some fresh air. Come back to it invigorated.
It was late afternoon, and the sun shone bright on the top deck of the government tower. Jayita’s apartment was forty floors below, and natural sunlight never reached her small balcony. Up here the air fairly sparkled with light that the lush plantings drank up as greedily as Jayita did now. She walked to the edge, where a transparent barrier kept her safely inside, and looked out at the dense forest that began just a few short miles outside Habitat, extending to a mountain range in the hazy distance. She stretched, reaching high above her head in a posture that felt akin to worship—she understood how her primitive ancestors could mistake the sun for a god. The power that ran the city still came from the sun.
A door slid open behind her and she turned. Carlos.
“I thought I’d find you here. Srini said you seemed tense.” He shaded his eyes against the sun. She closed her eyes, enjoying the warmth on her skin, and then of Carlos’s hand on her waist. They stood in silence for a long moment. “So, do you want to tell me what’s wrong? Is it the mission?”
“Of course.” Jayita sighed. “What if it happens again?”
“Then we’ll figure out what went wrong, and we’ll find them—again.”
“I could hardly blame Command if they didn’t put up with another failure on my part.”
“This particular group has outsmarted not just you, but everyone else on two teams. The failure isn’t yours. Your previous three missions—” He ticked them off on his hand. “Victoria Island, New Boston, Baffin Bay—weren’t just successful, they were record-breaking. Command knows that.” He put his arms around her. “You’re the best,” he assured her with an affectionate squeeze. “And you’re pretty good at your job, too.”
Jayita pulled away, laughing. “Cute.”
“Come on, we’ll go over it one more time together. You’ll feel better.”
“Sure.” They walked back into the tower hand-in-hand, but the nagging feeling at the back of her mind had not abated. If anything, it had grown worse.
The first of the Arboreals was caught alone on the ground, in the net cast by Jayita’s craft. She allowed herself a sigh of relief as her command team cheered, and then turned back to her display to watch the rest of the mission unfold.
“Jay, are you there?” Carlos’s voice came across her personal comm.
“I’m here.”
“We have a problem,” he said.
“Not again.” She gripped the arm of her chair tighter. “Where?”
“The Eastern end.”
“I’m watching.”
Glowing figures moved across her display. The Arboreals scrambled: north, south, east, west—while the collection team slashed down the intricate network of bridges that hung between trees, cutting off escape. There, she saw it—at the eastern end of the village as Carlos had said, one by one, they winked out.
“What are they doing?” Carlos wondered aloud.
“Getting away, that’s what they’re doing.” She switched to an open channel. “What the hell is going on down there? I’ve got two hundred forty souls on my monitor, down from two hundred eighty-nine, and falling. Gilles, are you tracking them?”
“It’s worse than that.” Gilles appeared on the display, frustration plain on his face. “Those signatures you’re seeing—they’re not Arboreals.”
He swung around to show the scene before him: hammocks hung empty, shelves and suspended netting for storage were equally bereft. Clean and tidy—no sign that the occupants had left in a hurry.
“They’re gone,” Gilles said.
“Then what the hell am I seeing on the scanner?”
He swung his view around and upward toward a dark corner. Something moved in the shadows; the camera ducked as something flew toward it, then disappeared through the octagonal window and into the trees beyond.
“Bats,” Gilles said wryly as the camera drone swung back around. “Very large bats.”
“So how many are we missing?”
“We have the majority of them,” Gilles said. “Two hundred . . . and five.”
“And the rest?”
“Gone. They knew we were coming. But how?”
It hardly mattered. Jayita cursed.
Nearly one hundred uncontained homo sapiens sapiens remained at large outside the walls of Habitat.
Her command; her fault. She had failed again.
Sunrise came slowly in the jungle. The light filtered through the canopy in a way that Jayita associated with dusk in the city of Habitat, when contrast is lost and the world appears veiled. She walked beneath the empty structures of the arboreal village in a haze of disbelief, the jungle’s green, earthy air filling her with the scent of failure.
Jayita watched as men, women, and children were herded toward the holding camp set up by the Collections and Cultural Integration Team. They looked defeated and afraid, as every rogue tribe did when they were collected, but Jayita wasn’t worried. The Integration team was good at its job. They would adapt and begin new lives in Habitat, where they belonged.
A few remaining bridges soared over Jayita’s head, hanging in graceful catenaries between the enormous trees, terminating in platforms that encircled the tree trunks. The wooden platforms were hexagonal, octagonal, decagonal, or whatever the creators had needed to meet their aesthetics in creating a perfectly symmetrical and functional floor. From below they looked like fractal patterns rendered in parquetry.
She went over the mission in her head, step by step, and could find no flaw. She had been careful. She had done it right. Yet it had still gone unbelievably wrong.
“Aren’t they amazing?” Carlos asked from behind her. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“Eighty-four,” she said. “We’re missing eighty-four. I feel sick. I can’t believe I could screw this up so badly.” She peered up into the canopy. “Do we know where they could have gone?”
“There’s nothing up top but the usual birds, bats, and bugs. The bridges end a hundred feet up, and don’t extend outside the village.”
A young woman in a CCIT jumpsuit ran toward them, strands of black hair clinging to her sweat-damp face. She doubled over and tried to catch her breath.
“Dr. Lamar, Dr. Huerta! You’re needed right away,” the girl said, flushed and panting. “It’s Dr. Lamar, ma’am. I mean the other Dr. Lamar. They found him.”
Jayita’s breath caught. The news she had waited for all these years. Here? Now?
And then the words sank in. Not They found his body, or his remains.
They found him.
The roar of blood in her ears drowned out the forest sounds and filled her head with static. She put a hand on Carlos’s shoulder to steady herself.
Impossible. A mistake.
A miracle.
“What?” Jayita asked. Her own voice sounded far away.
“He was with the Arboreals, ma’am.”
“With the—is he hurt?”
“I’m supposed to bring you back with me. I’m sorry, I don’t know anything else.”
Jayita looked out at the CCIT’s row of domes in the distance, moon-white and dewy in the early morning light.
Carlos gently removed her hand from his shoulder. “Jayita. Go.”
She went.
Jayita followed the girl, weaving between domed shelters and square command tents, past the stricken Arboreals and efficient officers. The temporary village buzzed with activity, processing and preparing to move the individuals designated for relocation to Habitat as quickly as possible. A small team would be left behind to restore the area to its natural state. Three days from now, it would be like they’d never been here at all.
The girl, whose name she had never thought to ask, left her outside a tall tent. The hastily marked tag above the door panel read “Shilan Wu, Deputy Director CCI.” The door panels parted and she pulled her hand away sharply, her instincts telling her to flee.
Shilan looked as wrought as Jayita felt, greying hair pulling out of her pony tail in wild wisps where her hand strayed to her head in consternation. “Jay, come in.”
When Jayita didn’t enter, her friend reassured her. “I know this is a shock. It’ll be okay. Come in.”
The tent was sparsely furnished with a modular bed and storage, a small table and two canvas camp seats. The table was piled with equipment—tablets and monitors and displays—much of it identical to what Jayita worked with every day. A cloth partition divided the front of the tent from the rear. A file had been pulled up on one of the displays—was that Marcel’s picture? Shilan blacked out the display with a gesture.
“You’re sure it’s him?”
“It’s Marcel. He’s okay, really. Physically, I mean,” Shilan added. “He’s been with them for a long time.”
“The whole time, you mean? Seven years?” She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her temples. “Who found him?”
“He found us. Walked up to Da-Eun and cussed her out in French. He hasn’t said anything since.” Shilan stuffed her tablet in a bag. “Go in. I’ll be right outside if you need me.”
Jayita stood there, staring at the space beneath the partition, waiting for something—a sign, a glimpse of his foot to prove that there was even anyone there. But of course he was there. And had heard her arrive.
When no such sign came, she pushed aside the curtain.
Even with his hair hanging in long plaits, wooden beads and nut shells adorning the ends, even in the peculiar folded robes that made him look like half a tree himself, he still looked like Marcel.
But he looked like them, too. Brown and brown and brown, hair and skin and robes, made from the earth that they rarely touched and the trees they called home.
He hummed quietly to himself, hugging his knees to his chest where he sat on a cot in the corner. His hair swung in time with the tune he sang, his head moving almost imperceptibly.
He looked up at her arrival. “Jayita.”
That was all? She had expected—she didn’t know what she had expected. More.
She crouched beside him and drank him in, every muscle and hair, fine age lines and wiry curls of beard. “Are you all right?” Her hand involuntarily reached for his face, stopping short when she saw the look in his eyes—was it fear? Of her? The yawning gap of time spread between them—years in which she had grieved his death, worked hard to heal, and moved on.
“Jayita, I must ask you.” There was a clip to his words, an accent that wasn’t there before. “Please. Let us go.”
“What?” Her heart stalled in her chest—here was the man she had lost, had thought gone forever, and his first words were to ask to leave her again?
Brain washing. That happened. She’d read about it, been told about it.
“This is our home. This is where we belong.”
“You belong in Habitat, like every other human being. All of you,” she emphasized. He knew this.
“We are part of this place, and it is part of us.” His gaze was direct. Earnest. “Let us be.”
“We’ll find them, Marcel—you know we will.” How could he believe that being hunted could be anything but traumatic for this community? “Help us. A swift integration is more merciful than letting them continue to run.” Jayita’s head swam—why was she having to tell him these things that he already knew? Why were they talking about the Arboreals at all, when after all this time he had finally been returned to her? “I can’t believe you’re here. I missed you so much. What happened to you?”
Marcel just looked away, her question unanswered. “You’ve already broken protocol by bringing me here,” he said, the words sounding strange and forced, as if he wasn’t sure they were the right ones. “Break another one. Let us go.”
“What protocol? You’re a CCI Specialist, lost in the field, and now you’re found. And now you’re telling me you want to go back?”
A cold calm washed over her then, the calm that she had learned those many years ago when she returned to work, only to be reminded of him everywhere she turned. She looked at him again, willing herself to see him with a detachment that would allow her to find her way out of—whatever this was, a confrontation she could never have imagined. Before her was an Arboreal, a rogue human, outside of Habitat. Not her husband. Not Marcel.
She stood and forced herself into an authoritative posture that did nothing to diminish the pit in her stomach. “You know I can’t do that. I’m not sure what will happen to you now. I would help you, you know. If you’d let me.” She turned her back on him then and pushed the partition aside, fighting tears she thought spent long ago. But, no. These were new—tears of betrayed. Her fingers gripped the fabric so tightly she felt the stitching pop as it pulled on the rod above.
“I thought you were dead.” The words came in a hiss, through clenched teeth, in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own.
“Do you think he has a family?” she asked Carlos as they lay on the two cots they’d pushed together in their own tent. It was uncomfortable, made more so by the fact that this was their first mission together as a couple. Jayita was reminded of the many nights she and Marcel had spent like this.
“He hasn’t said anything about one.” He tucked her hair behind her ear gently and kissed her cheek. “Would it bother you if he did?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She stared into the dark. “What does it mean? Is he still my husband?”
“I don’t think so. We’ll have to find out, legally, of course. But you and I know he’s not. He’s one of them.”
“But our job is to turn ‘them’ into ‘us.’ He will be one of us again, and then what?”
Carlos turned away from her and rolled onto his back. “You still love him.”
There was a long silence while she thought about it. “I don’t know.”
She could hear Carlos’s breathing quicken, waiting for her to go on.
“I loved him when he disappeared. It’s not like a breakup, a progression of falling out of love—the person I loved was just gone. He left a hole in my life, a place inside me where he always was, and then he just—”
“He just wasn’t. I know, Jay. You don’t have to explain.”
“You’re okay with that?”
“No. I’m not okay with it. But I think I understand it.” They fell silent, and after a few minutes Jayita thought Carlos was asleep. She was startled when he spoke again. “But you’re probably going to have to come off the team.”
“I could help him.”
He rolled back to face her. “You need to leave this to someone else. Especially if he does have a family. This is going to be a hard transition for him. He could make it hard for the rest. There’s been talk about isolating him.”
“You can’t,” she insisted now.
“We may have to. We’ve never had a wild card like Marcel before. And it’s not we really, it’s they. I can’t stay on this project, either. I’m sleeping with his wife, after all.” There was an uncharacteristic bitterness in his tone; she could hear the hurt, and she could feel the distance between them—caused, she knew, by her own confusion.
She tried to imagine Marcel hunting and gathering in the trees, living in those wooden hives, with a brown-robed and beaded new wife, and maybe even children.
What had happened to him out there? What had so charmed him by their way of life? Or—the thought struck her like a blow to her chest—what had been so awful about his life with her that he hadn’t tried to come home?
“You’re right.” She lay back and he held her, stroking her hair and kissing her face. “It’s a lot to take in.” She took a deep, shaking breath. “But you’re right. We’ll go home tomorrow.”
His arm across her relaxed and his breathing steadied and deepened until she knew he was asleep. Jayita lay awake, thinking of that wild person who used to be her husband, who had once lead these missions himself, who had slept beside her and had promised her that when their last mission together was over, they would apply to have a child.
And then he had disappeared.
GROUP 201583G, SUBJECT 39B
CULTURAL INTEGRATION SESSION #5
The woman has been reunited with her children, for two hours a day, under the supervision of two people, a woman and a man. She and her children eat together, one meal a day. The children don’t seem to mind the food, though it is unclear if her captors think this is what they eat: a spongey stew that never saw a bird or a nut.
Coming to Habitat can be a confusing and disorienting experience. For your comfort, the Cultural Integration Team has spent many months creating an environment nearly identical to the one you have left behind. You’ll find food, shelter, clothing, furnishings, and even artwork made to ease your transition into life in the greater city of Habitat.
Every effort has been made to provide you with familiar things of daily life as you learn more about your future with us. Through study and practice with our trained Integration experts, you will soon find contentment and joy in new friends and a new vocation.
On behalf of all of us, welcome to Habitat—a safe place for all humankind.
The woman puts her spoon down and pushes the bowl aside. She has no appetite, and time with her children is short.
Panels along the corridors leading to Jayita’s apartment displayed live video from cameras across the continent, from verdant forests to wind-blown sagebrush and the fauna that once again made it their home—the places and creatures they had spared or saved by coming together as one sentient species, custodians of the planet. The streams were infrequently interrupted by news from the Mars colony and the Lunar Dome—Jayita tended to ignore such news. She felt less kinship with the people who had left the world behind entirely than she did even with those who willingly flaunted the rightness and necessity of Habitat.
She stopped to watch her favourite stream of the moment, a shoreline on the south coast of the Gulf of Ontario. The view was hauntingly beautiful, especially at low tide, when the seabirds settled on the tips of a long-drowned forest peeking above the waterline. With a gesture she switched her earbud to pick up the sound.
Soft chimes replaced the sounds of the shore, and the well-known visage of Councillor Park appeared. All around her, people stopped what they were doing and turned to the nearest panel expectantly.
“Citizens of Habitat,” Park intoned, “the Council has good news. In four weeks’ time you will welcome your newest neighbours to the Sea Quarter.” A panoramic view of three small islands in a deep grey sea shifted and zoomed in toward the largest of the islands. Sage and scrub gave way to tangled trees and a burbling spring, sighting along the way several tufted foxes, snakes, and sea birds. “The Calcoast people come to us from a grim state of survival, competing endlessly with the other species in the island chain for the few meagre resources available.” Around her, people tsked and murmured their disapproval as the camera pulled back out to sea, where it kept pace with a pod of common dolphins who swam and leapt in and out of frame. “But now, at long last, they have come home.” A muted cheer could be heard from the nearest plaza. “So get ready to make them welcome in Habitat—a safe place for all humankind.”
The announcement over, the panel returned to the shoreline, and Jayita moved on, glad she hadn’t been the one assigned to the Calcoast group. Island collections were particularly dangerous and difficult, almost always necessitating an underwater approach. She wondered who had been lead on that mission; Mischa, maybe. Good for them, she thought. There’s a commendation in their future, for certain.
The apartment she had so recently come to share with Carlos in the Sand Quarter had lost something since Marcel’s return. It was a single room, like all homes in Habitat, decorated with their few precious belongings, mostly mementos from past missions, along with the occasional heirloom, like the framed scrap of embroidery from the robe her mother wore when her parents were married. Sage blossoms and sand dollars, mule deer and plover, twisting manzanita and wild, unruly oak—all picked out in careful stitches sewn by her mother under her grandmother’s instruction, memories of a place far from Habitat—a place of coastal bluffs between the mountains and the sea that their family hadn’t seen in five generations. Half of it was now a desert, the other half drowned—but they remembered through vids, stories, and art such as this.
They had placed each item carefully in the limited space, creating a careful balance of his and hers. Carlos had an eye for composition, and Jayita gladly followed his lead in creating a space that she would have made merely functional.
From the back of a drawer she retrieved an unremarkable box the length of her hand, and lifted the lid off carefully. Colourful pins that once decorated Marcel’s uniform, awards of merit gained throughout his career; an engraved cup announcing the union of Isatou Mboge and Abel Lamare, Marcel’s parents; a ribbon from the circlet she had worn on her own wedding day. She set the items personal to her aside and mentally catalogued the rest; she would have to return these to him. She wondered if they would mean anything to him; she wondered, too, what they now meant to her.
Jayita had never been inside a wing of the Cultural Integration Centre after it had been programmed for its new arrivals—the job of Collections Specialist ended when the immigrated tribes set down in Habitat and Integration took over. Walking through the halls of Arboreal-7’s new home, she was astonished at the way the Fabrication team duplicated the angles and bends of their architecture. The roots and greenery that lined the walls looked so real she had to resist the urge to break off a piece of lacy lichen as she had done in the forest. Bird song and the soft susurration of insects played on the sound system, so subtle she didn’t notice it at first. The light panels overhead displayed dappled sunlight filtered through the forest canopy. She nodded in approval.
Dr. Souxada Chantharath met her at a door marked with both familiar Arabic numerals and the dot-curl script of the Arboreals. “Dr. Lamar, thank you for coming.”
“Of course. What can I do for you?”
“We have a situation I’m hoping you can help us with,” Dr. Chantharath said. She swiped her hand across a sensor panel beside the door and the top half flickered for a moment before resolving to a low opacity. “This is E’kaia.”
Beyond the faint display of foliage a woman huddled in the corner of a room outfitted to be identical to those found in the Arboreal-7 village. A wooden bowl—or a convincing facsimile of one—sat full of a stewed root concoction, untouched. The characteristic rough-fibre robes were pulled protectively around her head; brown, crabbed fingers peeked out from a tightly-wrapped bandage coloured a bright green—easy to spot tampering or additional injury.
“Why the safety bandage?”
“She tried to chew into her hand to get at her implant.”
Jayita took a deep breath. “And why is she alone?”
“She tried to kill her family, starting with her two children.”
“Tried?” She swallowed back bitter bile. “But didn’t succeed?”
“One is in critical care. The other is all right. Her minders were able to restrain her quickly.”
“Thank goodness.”
Dr. Chantharath waved the window back to opacity.
“Unfortunately, there’s more. There are nearly two dozen—refusing to eat, attempting to remove their implants, sometimes smashing the furniture and the walls.”
“Did we not get the specs right? Your reconstruction looks exactly like I remember it.” She swiped the window clear again and peered in at the furnishings, the textiles, even the carved artwork on the beams, shapes of birds in flight between sinuous wisps of cloud.
“It is, down to the millimetre. We’ve tried to ask, but they keep repeating one word and otherwise refuse to speak to us.”
“What’s the word?”
“’Dar-ai.’ Marcel says it means ‘sun.’”
“What is it, a religious thing?”
“Something like that.”
“So give them a sun,” she said, indicating the display panels that lined the room from floor to ceiling. “Give them a sunrise, or a solstice, or whatever it is they need.”
“We’ve done that. They attacked the panels.”
“They attacked? With what?”
“With whatever they had. Fists, feet, chairs.”
“Who’s their religious leader? Do they have a shaman or something?”
“Guess.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Marcel. “How the hell did an outsider come to be their spiritual leader and head sun-worshipper?”
“Apparently by helping them evade capture repeatedly. He knew our protocols and kept track of time by the sun. He knew when we were coming, and he moved them out ahead of your team.”
Of course. She should have known. “What else did Marcel say?”
“Very little. That’s why I asked you here—he’s refusing to cooperate.”
“Not even with this? It was clear he had no intention of helping us retrieve the ones who got away, but—these people are killing themselves, and he has nothing to say?”
Dr. Chantharath shook her head. “I was hoping you might be able to convince him, before anyone else gets hurt.”
Jayita watched the woman through the window as she rocked and keened. How could a paradise like Habitat be such hell?
“Of course,” she replied. “Whatever I can do to help.”
“You shouldn’t get involved,” Carlos said, as he deftly sliced a prized fresh pepper into a sizzling pan.
“I have to talk to him.”
“And say what?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something. I’m his wife. I should be able to make him see reason.”
“I don’t think you have the kind of influence in this situation that you think you do.”
Jayita looked at him sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You were his wife. Now you’re . . .” He let the word hang in the air, unspoken. “Seven years is a long time. A lot has happened to him. And to you.”
Jayita took a deep breath.
“Look, you don’t want to break protocol. You’ve been removed from the project for a reason.”
“Break protocol? There are human beings breaking down there, right under our noses. Screw protocol.” She set the dishes down on the table too hard, the sound echoing her frustration. “There must be a precedent for this. Surely other groups have had similar problems and overcome them.”
“Other groups have had similar problems, yes.”
“But?”
“I wouldn’t say they overcame them.”
“What are you talking about? Our success rate is over eighty percent.”
“Yes, but the other twenty were near-total losses.”
“But those were exceptional cases,” Jayita argued. “The Mesa tribe was said to have a genetic disorder, and the Lower Marsh—”
“Haven’t you ever wondered why they don’t announce new additions until they’re almost out of Integration?”
“To protect the integrity of the program.”
“And why does its integrity need protecting?”
“Because—” She hesitated, uneasy. “Because the outcome has an element of uncertainty.”
“Exactly. The process is ugly, much uglier than we want anyone in Habitat to know. For those of us who were born here, the psychological crisis these people go through is literally unimaginable. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and I still can’t fully appreciate it.”
Jayita thought back to all of the Citizenship ceremonies she had proudly attended over the years, and how small the groups seemed, dwarfed by the enormity of the Tower and the square. But was that why? Or was it that many of them didn’t survive, and there really were so few? She had done her job, removing them from the greater environment and bringing them here, where they belonged—or where they would belong, with a little time. Or so she had thought.
And now Marcel was on the other side of the equation, along with the people he had adopted as his own, enduring an ugliness, as Carlos had put it, that she had never fully considered until now.
“Have they made any demands?” she asked.
“Immediate release.”
“I have to talk to him.”
“Don’t.” His hand covered hers and he leaned in close, resting his cheek against her shoulder. “You can’t fix this, Jay.”
“I have to try.”
She gripped the box tighter to keep her hands from shaking as she approached Marcel’s quarters. The young man on duty flashed a smile at Marcel as he let her in; Marcel had always been a charmer. Clearly that much had not changed.
Marcel’s rough brown robes had been exchanged for something softer, but with a similar drape. His braids were glossy, and his face rounder than when she’d last seen him. He looked healthy, she thought, if not happy.
She held the box out toward him. “I thought you might want this.”
He took it from her hesitantly. “Thank you.” He gestured toward the bare table flanked by two narrow chairs. “Please, sit.”
She did, uneasily, adjusting and readjusting herself as she tried to think of what to say next. He sat opposite her, at ease, while she felt like she could crawl right out of her own skin. “I met E’kaia,” she began.
He looked up, startled, perhaps at the sound of a familiar name. “How is she?”
“You know how she is.” She looked at him directly in the pointed silence that followed. “Why won’t you help them?”
“Why won’t you?”
Had he always been like this? Yes, she realized—this deflection, turning her questions back on herself, this wasn’t new. In fact, this was familiar in a different way. Had they talked about something like this before?
He smirked at her frustration.
“Does your Arboreal family think you’re funny when you do this?”
“Do what?” He raised his eyebrows and gaped at her in mock innocence. “And what you’re asking is whether I have an Arboreal family. I do not.”
She felt herself warm.
He reached for her hand tentatively. His touch was rough, calloused like a stranger’s, but amiable.
She pulled her own hand away.
“It has been a long time, but I believe we are together again for a reason. Are you not still my wife?” His voice, his eyes were so compelling, so sincere as they searched her face for an answer. “You know me, Jayita. Would I not have done anything for you?”
“Anything except come home.” She pushed her chair from the table, fighting the impulse to back away from him, as if he had become someone to fear. “What happened that day? The incident report showed no danger, no failure in your craft. They lost your comm, and you were just . . . gone. Were you hurt? Did the Arboreals find you? Rescue you? Take you in?” She could hear the pitch of her own voice climbing as she grew closer to the question she had been afraid to ask, but there was no stopping now. “Or . . . did you leave on purpose? Did you go to them?”
He slouched as if the breath had been knocked out of him.
“You left me for them. Why?”
“You said you met E’kaia. Did you not see it in her eyes? The cruelty of being brought here?” His eyes took on a distant look as he continued. “I’d seen it. Too many times. I believed in what we were doing, but . . .” He shook his head with a frown. “I had doubts about the way we were doing it.”
“We take every precaution—” She bit back her interruption. She hadn’t come here to argue.
“I just wanted to understand.” He shrugged. “And to try to convince them. I was sure they would see the rightness of it, and come of their own free will. I hadn’t intended to stay.”
“But they didn’t. They persuaded you.”
He shook his head. “No. I knew you would be back for them, and I was more convinced than ever that they would do something drastic to prevent capture—so I did what I could to save their lives. I helped them.”
Jayita took his hand in hers. “I’ve seen it now,” she said. “Their pain. Help me to fix it. There has to be a middle ground.”
“There is no fixing it,” he insisted. “If you want to help them, let them go.”
“Let you go, you mean.” She released his hand.
“If you’ll help them, I’ll stay.” He stood and faced her. “I’ll stay and spend my life making up for all I put you through. But please, Jayita. Before anyone dies.”
She looked at the box that sat on the table, unopened, filled with mementos of a life that belonged to someone she no longer knew.
“I should go.”
“Jayita, please—”
She paused at the door. “And you don’t have to make up for anything. Not to me.”
Jayita swiped the sensor panel and held her breath as the window cleared, not knowing what she would find on the other side.
The bandages were still in place, she could see that much from here. The woman—E’kaia, she remembered—sat on the sleeping platform, her knees pulled up to her chest, staring straight ahead, lost in her own thoughts: memories, perhaps, of freedom, or of her children.
Jayita swiped again and the door slid open, eliciting no response from E’kaia.
“E’kaia?” She knew she was pronouncing it wrong; her grasp of their language was weak at best, but she would have to try. “Your children are well. They miss you. They know you have been ill and did not mean to hurt them.”
The woman’s jaw tensed; she understood, then.
“You are still ill. Maybe I can help. Will you come with me?”
She extended her hand, palm up, and waited, never taking her eyes off the woman’s face. E’kaia’s dark eyes flitted toward her, and her body went rigid—Jayita took a step back.
“Please,” Jayita urged.
Slowly the woman rose and took a tentative step toward her.
“Good. Come with me.” She tried to remember the word. “Dar-ai. I’ll take you to the sun.”
The excuses and explanations she had rehearsed in her head weren’t needed. They encountered no one on the way to the rooftop patio.
Mist hung, heavy in the air. Jayita shivered, but E’kaia didn’t seem to mind. The sky lightened in the East and the two women watched together as the sun rose—first a pale orb in the mist, then brighter as it pierced the veil where it thinned on the horizon, and finally a burst of light that hurt Jayita’s eyes and made her turn away.
When she turned back, she found the woman beside her weeping silent tears, her palms pressed against the clear barrier.
“It’s beautiful,” Jayita said.
E’kaia only wept harder; Jayita hoped that it was for joy, but a small, quiet fear told her it was not.
GROUP 201583G, SUBJECT 39B
CULTURAL INTEGRATION SESSION #68
The droughts and famines that pushed humankind ever northward took not only our means of feeding ourselves, but also the elements of our cultures that gave depth and meaning to our lives.
The founders of Habitat understood the human need for tradition and belief. Habitat’s crown jewel and the ultimate symbol of its success is the Tower of Hope, located at the city centre. The artistry of your own people is even now being incorporated into a new tile to be unveiled at your own Citizenship ceremony, where it will join the others that have come before, a symbol of welcome to all humankind.
Tomorrow you will join your fellows in our most sacred tradition as you complete your Integration studies and become free citizens of Habitat. Your new friends wait to welcome you to the neighbourhood of New Arbor in the Leaf Quarter, where you will live and work with us in creating a glorious and sustainable future for all humankind.
E’kaia had kept the bright sliver hidden first in her robes, and then stuck between two joints on the underside of her small table.
Her visit with her children had been a happy one; they liked it here and did not miss their home. Where she saw gaudy inauthenticity—in the dead fibres made to look like vines, or the light panels showing scenes that never existed—they saw wonders.
As the filmed announcement faded away to the mockery of forest she had been forced to live with, she felt for the slender shard of pottery she had picked up from the floor of the rooftop enclosure. The woman had tried to befriend her; tried, perhaps, in her way to make her happy.
And in her way, she had succeeded. The shard was sharp enough; E’kaia would soon be free.
Morning light flooded the bedroom as Carlos opened the shades. Jayita rolled over and squinted up at him: dressed, his ident pin clipped to the collar of his uniform, the wide strap of his bag over his shoulder, and grinning down at her. “Good morning, Collection Specialist Chandra,” he smiled. “Welcome back.”
Back. Back from suspension, she realized groggily. Let’s hope I don’t get anyone else killed.
“I wish you didn’t have to go today,” she said.
“Me too,” he said with a kiss. “Marcel will be coming out of Integration with the rest of them, won’t he?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.
They hadn’t talked about it much after those first weeks last fall, letting the subject rest apart from the occasional news items over dinner. “I heard the Arboreals entered Section Three today,” he would say, careful not to say Marcel’s name, and she would say something non-committal and change the subject. Carlos hadn’t pushed, and Jayita avoided the topic.
This time he didn’t let it go.
“Will you see him while I’m gone?” he asked.
She was certain she had just turned to glass and that Carlos could see her heart racing and the blood rushing to her face. “Yes, I’d like to catch up with him. We have some legal things to sort out.”
Carlos nodded, his fingers faltering on the buttons of his cuff.
She got out of bed and wrapped her arms around his waist. She rested her head against his chest and he kissed the top of her head.
“Three weeks,” she said. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too. Stay out of trouble,” he added, the quip going right to her heart like a shard of sharpened clay.
The plaza in the centre of Jayita’s neighbourhood of Paseo Nuevo was decked for the Spring Festival. The overhead panels provided a cool, dappled light that played on the potted fruit trees, blooming in every shade of pink and yellow. Colourful bulbs filled planter boxes on every balcony. Food and craft vendors had set up early and people bought, sold, ate, and laughed. Costumed children adorned with flowers and paper butterflies chased each other, sticky hands wielding fried dough, sweet crystals trailing after them like pixie dust.
Musicians found their place in each quarter of the plaza, playing soft and melodic tunes to welcome the day. By nightfall they would add percussion; breakfast pastries would be replaced with grills. With the children in bed the plaza would fill with men and women, tingling with wine and spring fever.
Jayita wound her way to the central tower, where the newly integrated would be made full citizens this morning.
She entered through the back and took her place with other authorities on the dais. Hundreds of new faces looked back at her, some smiling, some anxious—a handful with the narrowed eyes of the bored, or resentful, a notion she had never entertained until now. But the rest—that was the important thing: these new Citizens of Habitat. That was what her job was really about. She felt the warm glow in her chest that she always did at these events, satisfaction that she had done a good thing for both the people below her and the species now left unthreatened outside the walls, tempered only slightly by those few scowling faces.
She found Marcel among them, in the third row, sitting stiffly. He flashed a smile her way when he saw her, and looked away.
The ceremony was a blur. She sat and stood at the proper times, mouthed the words she’d known by heart since she was four years old, but she didn’t hear what was said. When it was over, and a cheer rose from those assembled, she looked to Marcel. He did not join them.
Jayita watched him as he moved through the crowd that poured out into the festival atmosphere of the streets. On impulse, she followed him.
He was waiting for her just outside the gates as if he’d known she would find him. He looked uncomfortable in his new clothes, as if every seam was an irritant. The beaded braids were gone, his hair shorn and his beard trimmed close. He looked nothing like the man she had seen outside the walls of the city. He looked now closer to the man she had married, but infinitely sadder.
“So, how does it feel to be a citizen . . . again?” There was an awkward shyness between them, born of a inescapable familiarity in conflict with the sense that they had only just met.
“It’s hard to describe.” They fell in together, walking side by side in the festive street. “Different for me than for the others, of course—I don’t know what I expected to feel. I’m returning to something old, not starting something new.”
The tide of people swept them along, and they took their time, the laughing crowd flowing around them like water around stone.
“Are there any who aren’t ready?” Her professional concern masked the question that was really on her mind: Are you ready? “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me. But you know, if any of them need help, I’ll see to it they get what they need.”
He looked up at the ceiling high above, now glowing in golden afternoon hues. He pressed his lips together and shook his head sadly. “Habitat can’t give them what they need.”
They passed under an archway that divided the central plaza from one of the neighbourhoods.
“Is it that bad, really?” Through this archway the colours changed to warm apricot and terracotta. Through another on the north end of the plaza they would be bright turquoise and pinks, each neighbourhood proudly displaying its identity and heritage in the colours of their apartment facades and the decorations they used to welcome Spring and their newest neighbours. “Look around, Marcel. Won’t they think this is as beautiful as we all do? Won’t they feel as welcome? What makes them so different?” They strolled a few yards and stopped beside a tiled fountain. “What makes you so different?”
“I haven’t seen the tower in so long,” he said, and Jayita let the question drop. The central tower was off to their right, a gleaming white monument with the emblems for each neighbourhood embedded in the side like colourful gems. “And until today I’d never seen it from the primary floor. Always from the dais, always looking down at them. Why did we arrange it that way, so that we always look down on them?”
“It’s not meant that way.” But . . . was it? She watched him as he took in the sights of Habitat again on his first day of true freedom. “What will you do now?”
“Paul came to visit. He wants to put me on his team. He thinks my experience will be helpful to the CIT. Maybe I can make it better for those to come.”
The lines beside his eyes hadn’t been there when he disappeared. There was something beautiful and sad about those lines. She fought the impulse to trace them with her fingertips, and to kiss them.
She kissed his cheek instead. His eyes went wide with surprise, and then he smiled softly and took her hand. Their fingers entwined, and they walked like new lovers. She thought once of Carlos, but Marcel had found the stall where he had once bought her a flower garland, early in their life together. She laughed as he set one on her head, and her heart said husband.
They ate festival food and drank festival wine, which made them giddy as they reminisced about their lives together. As the wine went to their heads they grew braver, and they told each other stories of their time apart.
Later that evening beside a fountain, under strings of twinkling lights, with the scent of spring blossoms and the sound of stringed instruments on the air, he kissed her.
She woke in the night, the warm breeze coming in through the open door of her balcony touching her skin like fingertips. The space beside her was rumpled and empty. She smoothed the pillow where Marcel’s head had rested, and tried to go back to sleep.
The silence prevented her. No sound from the bathroom or kitchen; no running water or hum of the pantry cooler. No sign that Marcel was still here.
She got up, pulling the blanket with her. His clothes were gone from the floor.
She stepped onto the balcony. He must have gone back to his own apartment. Maybe he was getting fresh clothes. Or maybe he just needed some time. She tested her heart, and found only a twinge in the space where Carlos had been.
She gathered her clothes where they sat in a heap beside the bed, and felt for her ident pin. Had it fallen? She searched with new urgency as the cold wash of panic crashed over her.
Marcel.
Getting outside Habitat was not an easy thing to do—impossible for most people. But, presumably, not for a Collection Specialist. Jayita had never tried to get outside without authorization, and she did not know if her ident tag would get her past the doors, sensors, and alarms.
She threw on her clothes and ran to the lift; rode past the agricultural levels and research levels to the ground level, and the first of the security clearances.
The first doors were manual, and she shoved through them. But there would be more ahead, locked and encoded. She was certain they would not yield, that she would find herself stopped there, impotent to do anything but raise the alarm.
She would not do it. Whatever was happening out there, it was happening to her husband.
But one after another, doors stood open. Sometimes only enough to let her squirm through sideways, jammed with whatever piece of detritus had been at hand.
She slowed as she approached the doors that led beyond the wall, the world a grey scrim beyond. She hesitated. Then she passed through into a world so open and so vast she felt it might swallow her whole.
The sky had lightened to a pale yellow, the same dusky light she associated with that morning Marcel was found alive. The sun would reach above the low hills in minutes, and the Arboreals would be exposed.
Except they weren’t there.
Marcel stood alone in the meadow. She stumbled to a stop. Around him were discarded clothes not unlike her own. The people who had worn them were gone.
She approached him slowly as the sun cleared the hills. “Marcel?” She touched his face, then his shoulder, but he didn’t respond.
Jayita followed his gaze. A lone figure paused at the edge of the forest, barely visible, and waved back at them. Marcel held up his hand in return, hesitant and with apparent effort, as if grief hung from his arm like a stone.
She took his hand, urging him to return with her now, but he didn’t move. Eventually she let go.
She understood. This was not her husband. Last night was not a new beginning. It was the end they’d never had. He did not belong in Habitat; he did not belong with her.
“Your friends,” she nodded through her own tears. “Will they come for you?”
He shook his head. “But I know where to find them.”
The woman sits in a room alone on a narrow bench, the ceiling too close, the seat too hard. The walls glow softly, then erupt into colours unnatural to her eyes. She blinks, and recognizes the facsimile of the place she once thought of as home.
Jayita Chandra, formerly Lamar, buries her face in her hands and weeps.