Incubation Page 2

  “To be decided,” he says. “You’ll be informed when I’ve made my decision.”

  “Thank you, Proctor Fonner.”

  “From here on out, do your thinking in the lab.” He turns to the window; I’m dismissed.

  In the anteroom, an AC I don’t know is reporting the theft of a ring to Proctor Fonner’s aide. There’s been a rash of petty thefts recently and Proctor Fonner has admonished us as a group, directing the guilty party to come forward so “the fabric of our communal life can be mended.” I’m grateful now that he didn’t steal my Reunion Day and I jump into the elevator before he can change his mind.

  Chapter Two

  So relieved I feel like I’m floating, I collect my feather from Halla—I knew she’d save it for me—and tell her what happened. She seems anxious, edgy, but I’m too wound up to draw her out. Telling her I’ll see her during Assembly, I take refuge in the dome. Walking through the doors that whoosh open after an iris scan, breathing in the moist, loam-scented air, I feel like I’m home. My shoulders relax. Even though I’ve lived at the Kube ever since the government repossessed me from my unfit or unlicensed parents, except for the couple months I was fosted out, it’s only in the labs or the dome that I feel truly at home. I was first allowed in the labs when I was eight, after tests showed my aptitude for biology and chemistry. I’m sure that stacked against geneborn students I’d be nothing special. It’s just that in the Kube, where all the kids are nats—natural-borns—I have some sort of freak ability. I think in chemical equations the way most people do words.

  The dome is cavernous—a hundred acres—and I hop on a battery-powered ACV scooter to get to the lab which is at the eight o’clock radii if the interior entrance I'm at is at six o'clock. Passing experimental rice paddies, a citrus grove, and the new strain of wheat we’ve developed with a bitter taste we hope the locusts won’t like, I arrive at the lab, a building all stainless steel and tile. Leaving the scooter at a recharging dock, I burst into the lab waving my feather. “Dr. Ronan!”

  “Where the hell have you been, Jax?” Dr. Ronan looks up from the slide he’s preparing and glares at me from under bushy brows. Wiry hairs stab in every direction.

  He always greets me like that, even if I’ve only been gone a few minutes. “Look what I found.”

  “I’m busy." I get his white-coated back and a view of his luxurious, collar-brushing hair, dyed a dark blond that might have been his natural color a half-century ago. Now approaching ninety, with long, fleshy ear lobes and wrinkles to prove it despite the telomere stabilization processes perfected in the 2020s, the hair is a strange vanity.

  “It’s a feather. I found it on the beach.”

  I can tell from the way he stills that I’ve caught his attention. He doesn’t turn, though.

  “It must mean there are still birds, somewhere.”

  “Of course there are birds somewhere,” he says irascibly, looking up from the microscope finally. The eyes beneath the lively brows are shrewd, despite age-yellowed corneas. “It is statistically unlikely that every bird on the planet perished from the avian flu. There are too many different species and habitats. Use that brain God gave you and don’t believe everything you hear. Analysis. Skepticism. Why have I wasted eight years of my life on you? Hunh.”

  I’m unoffended and undismayed by his scathing tone. He says something similar on a weekly, if not daily basis. “Well, they’re gone here.”

  He plucks the feather from between my fingers and studies it. “Something with a big wingspan. Diomedea epomophora, maybe, or fregata. Did you know that perhaps eighteen percent of the world’s population suffered from ornithophobia? Hard to imagine. Beautiful creatures, birds. Maybe it was the beaks, or the fluttering. Now, if only spiders had died out, instead of birds, imagine the relief, although that would have had a negative impact on the ecosystem, as well. Spiders are important little buggers.” He hands the feather back. “You can research it later, if you like, on the computer.”

  I commit the Latin names to memory. “Thank you. I’ll let you know what I find out.” Computer time is a gift and I’m excited. It’s hard to believe, but in the early twenty-first century, everyone had a computer and could communicate with people all over the globe. Since the Pragmatists took power, only government entities and a chosen few have computers and even they don’t have access to international networks, if such still exist.

  He takes my hand and lifts it. Startled, I start to tug it away until I realize he’s squinting at the red welt near my wrist. “Where did this come from?" he asks.

  “I got swarmed. I guess one of the locusts mistook me for a tasty leaf by accident,” I say, trying to reclaim my hand. “Or, I banged it on something when I hit the ground.”

  He lets go reluctantly. “The locusts have adapted disturbingly quickly to our countermeasures, but this . . ..”

  “‘This?’ What—you think they’ve become carnivorous?” I stare at him, incredulous. “Locusts are herbivores.”

  “I don’t think anything, not in advance of the evidence. The welt could be an anomaly, not related to your encounter with the swarm, or it could be something more. The provisional hypothesis, however, deserves consideration and study. Speaking of which, wouldn’t it be lovely if you actually got some work done before Assembly?”

  Knowing that tone, I put the feather aside, don my lab coat, and return to the data I was analyzing before lunch and my unauthorized beach visit.

  Assembly time rolls around and I carefully lock up the samples I was working with before hurrying to join Halla at the transport station. The monthly Assembly is the only regularly authorized out-of-Kube expedition and it’s exciting to join the other residents of Jacksonville in the arena for the broadcast. I look for Wyck on the platform and disappointment prickles when I don’t see him. He’s probably at the arena already. IPF troops file into one compartment, booted feet clanging on the metal flooring. No train travels without an IPF contingent. Halla and I settle onto the bench seats of the train, thigh to thigh with the others kids from the Kube, and head into the city.

  You can tell by the number of buildings rising on the horizon that Jacksonville was a big city before the pandemic. Now, though, only a few thousand people live here, most of them within a five mile diameter of the Kube and arena. They get their rations from our dome, so it wouldn’t make sense to live far. Half of them work in the desalinization plant, turning sea water into drinking water since many of the land-locked water sources were poisoned by the insecticides two decades back. Half of them work in the fish farms, harvesting and drying the country’s most reliable form of protein. The impressive-looking skyscrapers—hard to believe there were once enough people to fill them—are empty shells, unstable, one strong breeze from collapse. Hurricanes have demolished many, and rubble blocks the streets with no one to haul it away. Only a handful of urban outlaws live in the city center, scavenging to survive.

  As the train hums toward the arena, I stare out the window at old wheeled automobiles grown over with kudzu, a vine that has adapted so the locusts won’t eat it. It’s a poisonous chartreuse color now, and secretes a small amount of acid that makes it inedible for the locusts and, unfortunately, for us. I wonder yet again what genomic factors enabled it to mutate so quickly and effectively. Something to do with the alternative respiratory pathway of the kudzu’s mitochondria? I file the thought away to discuss with Dr. Ronan. The cars are unrecognizable except for a rusted tailpipe sticking through the vibrant leaves, or a glint off a broken windshield. Hillocks of kudzu mound beside the tracks, evidence of homes or warehouses that were bombed out in the resource wars, abandoned, devoured by termites, or all of the above. It’s eerie, the way the vines have taken over, growing a foot a day, impassively strangling the damaged and the intact alike, utterly undiscriminating. I spot what seems to be a mast rising out of the kudzu sea, with a tatter of sail sagging from it. It’s a boat washed inland by a hurricane, maybe. The sight depresses me and I turn away.

 
; “Dr. Ronan thinks my feather is from a frigate bird or an albatross,” I tell Halla, having looked up the Latin names.

  “Great,” she says, clearly distracted. Her fingers pluck at the sky blue fabric stretched over her thigh. She leans in, her shoulder pressed against mine, until her mouth is an inch from my ear. “Can we talk, Ev? When we get back from Assembly. I’ve got to talk to someone, and you’re the only one I—” She stops on something suspiciously like a sob.

  My brow furrows. Halla is the most upbeat person I know. “What’s wrong?” I whisper.

  She shakes her head hard. “Not now. We’re here.”

  “Here” is the arena, a former Baptist church built to allow ten thousand people to worship at once. The Pragmatists aren’t against religion, but most citizens stopped going to church—or to any other gathering place where they might get infected—round about the second wave of the pandemic. Most never went back, even when the flu threat diminished, because they were out of the habit, or maybe because they’d quit believing. With almost every citizen in the area in attendance, the arena is less than half full. The seats are raked so everyone has a good view of what used to be an altar but is now a podium with a huge screen behind it for the broadcast from Atlanta. It smells faintly of old candle wax, or maybe that’s my imagination.

  The arena is segregated as usual, with geneborns and their families on the left side of the aisle and nats like us on the right. The proctors have herded everyone from the Kube toward the back and Halla follows me to the second-to-last row. As I crab my way toward the middle, Wyck sidles around the students approaching from the other end and snags the seat beside me. I get a little flutter in my tummy and smile.

  “Missed you at the station,” he says, dropping into the chair with loose-limbed grace. My age, he has curly brown hair and hazel eyes that seem greener when they sparkle with mischief and browner when he gets moody. He came to the Kube relatively late, when he was almost seven, with a broken arm and lots of bruises, and he was a holy terror initially. He still manages to rack up more demerits than any other kid in the place, and Proctor Fonner told him last month that he’s arranged for him to enter border sentry training with the next class. The proctor says the military discipline will be good for him. Wyck says the Atlantic will freeze over before he becomes a border sentry. He’s smart enough to be in the Infrastructure Protection Force instead, but he refuses to take the aptitude tests. It might have something to do with his father being an IPF soldier.

  “I was late leaving the lab. I was researching this. Look.” I pull out the feather and tickle his neck with it.

  He scrunches his shoulder up and takes the feather from me. I like the way he handles it, almost reverently. “Wow. It’s twink. This means—”

  I nod enthusiastically. “I know.”

  “I’m going to find them one day,” he says fiercely, handing the feather back. “Birds. Other people. I’m not staying in Amerada. We can’t cower here forever, afraid that if we set foot out of the country we’ll bring home a new flu or plague. Who knows what’s still out there? There’s got to be something, someone. You know, in the last century and the first part of this one, we actually traveled in space, went to the moon, thought about going to Mars. Now, because we let a bunch of chuffers tell us what to do, we can’t even go to Europe or Africa.” His eyes burn greenly.

  The student on his other side hushes him nervously. He’s coming close to criticizing the Pragmatists which is a very, very dangerous thing to do. I squeeze his arm, trying to tell him to pipe down. He jerks away and slumps as a march plays and the screen comes alive. On my other side, Halla crosses her arms and lets her chin drop; no one pays much attention to the propaganda blasts that open each Assembly. There’s a montage of IPF troops putting down a Defiance attack against a power generation facility; providing security for Pragmatist ministers traveling through Atlanta; and using full bio-chem intelli-textile suits and breathing gear in a training exercise.

  Wyck tenses beside me. “IPF,” he mutters. “Automatons. Robots. No minds of their own. Kill first and ask questions later.”

  “Ssh.”

  A pregnant woman, wholesome and round, replaces the soldiers on the screen and begins to talk about how privileged she is to serve Amerada as a surrogate. Blah, blah . . . the usual song and dance. We all know how important it is to help rebuild the population, but I can’t even imagine being pregnant. I’ve known several girls from the Kube who volunteered for surrogacy, though. The on-screen woman says how wonderful it is to bear a child for Amerada, and then turn it over to approved parents before pursuing her studies or career with a government stipend.

  I glance casually around the arena and my gaze snags on a young man seated a row in front and off to the left, the geneborn side. The way his auburn hair breaks over his ears is familiar, as is the slope of his nose. I tense. It can’t be him—they don’t live near Jacksonville anymore. I can’t look away. Finally, he turns his head slightly to talk to the man beside him. He’s got the gold eyes of a geneborn, the engineered genetic marker that sets the geneborn apart, but it’s not Keegan. The breath I’ve been holding wheezes out of me. Even after all this time—twelve years—the possibility of being in the same room, even in a crowd, makes my hands damp with sweat.

  A bagpipe flourish announces Premier Dubonnet. Her face fills the screen. Blunt-cut gray bangs brush thin brows, crowding her large features into too small a space. Dewlaps waggle when she talks. The imaging unit pulls back and we can see she is seated at a conference table, surrounded by several stiff-backed ministers. The seal of Amerada above them with its eagle imposed over a maple leaf provides the only color in the room. In the background, IPF troops are ranged along the wall, alert as always.

  The Premier speaks enthusiastically about the progress made in cleaning out Amerada’s lakes and rivers. Beside me, Halla is unusually still and I give her a worried look. Whatever is on her mind is keeping her from poking fun at the propaganda ads like she usually does, and she hasn’t once whispered a comment about the address, or asked me about any of the technical terms the Premier used about the water situation.

  Premier Dubonnet talks for another ten minutes before asking the Minister for Science and Food Production to speak. Slim and severe looking, with blond hair scraped back from a high forehead, Minister Alden looks into the imager and explains experimental techniques under development for eliminating the super locust and other crop-devouring insects, and improvements to the crops themselves. I lean forward, interested. Her voice is crisp as a radish and I’m sure she keeps everyone working for her on their toes. Dr. Ronan has spoken about her a couple of times, calling her ambitious and impressive; he taught her at university, I think.

  Her remarks about locust eradication fire my imagination, and before I quite realize what I’m doing, I’m on my feet to ask a question. “Minister Alden, Apprentice Citizen Everly Jax from Kube 9. May I ask a question?”

  Minister Alden sits taller and sucks in an audible breath, taken aback at my presumption, I assume. There’s rustling around the arena and I feel everyone’s eyes on me. I wish I hadn’t leaped up, but in theory anyone is free to ask questions during an Assembly. No one ever does, though—not without pre-approval. Still, I remain standing. Minister Alden studies me, her lips slightly pursed. She’s older than I thought, in her sixties.

  “Go ahead, Jax,” she nods. Her frown tells me she won’t hesitate to rake me down publicly if she thinks I’ve wasted the Assembly’s time.

  “You mention trying to eradicate the locusts by inserting sterile males into the population. My experiments suggest that the radiation required to sterilize them frequently leaves them at a competitive disadvantage against non-sterilized males. If that’s also your experience, have you found a way to overcome that problem?”

  She doesn’t answer right away. “That’s a superior question, and as you probably can guess, I don’t have a full answer yet. I can tell you that we’re experimenting with recombinant DNA appr
oaches that might solve that problem.” She leans in. “Where did you say you’re from?”

  “Kube 9.” I whisper now, regretting my impulsiveness.

  “Perhaps Proctor Fonner will be kind enough to forward me your file.” I can tell it’s an order, not a “perhaps.” “I’m always looking for the best and brightest.”

  Flushing with relief and gratification—the Minister for Science and Food Production might want me to work for her!—I sink into my seat. The Assembly goes on, but I take in nothing.

  Wyck socks my upper arm surreptitiously. “Brass ones, Ev,” he whispers.

  I shrug, and am relieved when the Premier wraps up by leading us in the pledge of allegiance. We all proclaim, “Amerada before family, before friends, before self. Amerada over all!” before filing out.

  Over the babble of conversation on the transport platform, Halla says, “You were so brave. I would never have the nerve to speak up in Assembly.”

  “I didn’t really plan it,” I admit.

  She giggles, her face momentarily lightening, and says, “Everly Jax spoke before thinking. Aren’t you stunned, Wyck?”

  He nods solemnly, playing along. “Stunned.”

  I make a face at them. “Fine. Make fun. But maybe by this time next year, I’ll be working for the Ministry of Science and Food Production. You’ll be a border sentry repelling immigrants on the Cali-Mex border, and Halla will be—” I don’t know where I think Halla will be, but it doesn’t matter because something has recalled her worries and she looks like she’s trying not to cry. Wyck is pissed that I’ve brought up his impending sentry duty, and we step onto the train in silence.

  There’s the usual post-Assembly hubbub of conversation, but my friends are silent, so I stare out the window, almost hypnotized by the train’s movement. A girl across from me complains to a friend that she can’t find her little pocket mirror. It’s silver-backed, special to her. They search the floor. Suddenly, the brakes squeal and a huge impact slams me forward. I grab the underside of the seat as the train lurches to a halt. The force strains my shoulders. The girls across from me sprawl on the floor.