Children of Eden
Page 8
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No. I might wish it had been me, but I can’t wish it were me instead of him.
“Then Ash was born, small and almost blue. He didn’t breathe for the first minute of his life, and when he did, it was obvious that he was in trouble. Your father diagnosed it immediately as a serious chronic lung condition.”
Mom nods as she sees I understand.
“We had to make him the firstborn, Rowan. We didn’t have a choice. Without being in intensive care for the first few months of his life, he wouldn’t have survived. There was no way he could have lived if we’d hidden him away.”
Unspoken in that moment of silence is the other bitter truth: no matter what our birth order, if it had been up to the Center officials to decide our fate, they would have chosen me to live and terminated Ash even after birth. I was strong and healthy, an asset to Eden. He was not. It’s probably only because both of his parents are high officials that he was allowed to live at all. For a poor person on the fringe of Eden, a far-flung outer circle, a sickly first child would be eliminated, the parents encouraged to try again.
My brain is in a tumult. Angry, terrible thoughts seem to attack my head, bitter thoughts that are unworthy of me. Unworthy of the love and protection I’ve known all of my life. But I can’t keep them at bay. It should have been me.
I hardly listen while Mom tells me what will be happening next. Soon, I’ll go to a secret surgical center and have my lenses implanted permanently. Then I’ll be smuggled to my new family. I don’t understand exactly how this is possible. If my own family can’t fabricate a story to keep me, how can a stranger?
Ash comes downstairs, his hand raised to the wall but not quite touching it as he walks, as if he doesn’t trust his legs to hold him up. He gives me a weak smile.
I glance at Mom, and she shakes her head. Ash doesn’t know.
I want to shout the truth to him. Go hide in the hole, second child! Let me be free, like I should have been all along.
I hate myself for thinking this.
I can’t be in this house anymore.
MOM MUST JUST think I need a minute alone to process everything she’s told me, so she doesn’t follow me when I run out to the courtyard. Neither does Ash. I think she must be holding him back. Alone? How can they think I want to be alone when my whole life has been essentially alone? My world is three people, and they are gone all day having lives of their own. I exist in a state of loneliness. Alone? Solitude is the very last thing I need.
What I need, I decide suddenly, is everything that has been denied to me. I feel angry, resentful, reckless. For nearly seventeen years I’ve left my fate up to my parents and whatever machinations and bribes they’ve been arranging to get rid of me. Now it’s time I take matters into my own hands. I may not be a real, official person according to the only humans left alive on Earth, but maybe I can be in charge of my own destiny. For one night at least.
Dimly, miserably, I’m aware that I’ll have to conform to whatever my parents arranged for me. I’ll have new lens implants that will mark me as a different person, and somehow a new family to fit that identity. But right now I want to take a taste of everything I’ve been missing all these years. Everything I was entitled to and didn’t realize it until a few minutes ago.
I climb once again to the top of the high courtyard wall. Eden glitters around me, a mix of the greenish-blue fairy lights of bioluminescence from the modified microorganisms that permeates the city at night, providing a base light, and the electric glow that lights up wherever a human moves. I can see a living diorama in flashes of light all around me, the people showing up as deeply contrasting shadows. There, just down the block, a neighbor I’ve never met, and never will, opens his front door and steps into the night. For a fraction of a second the city seems to examine him. Then, as if the very street itself must have decided to accept him, it lights up beneath his feet. He walks on in the direction of the entertainment district, and the light leads him on, following his footsteps just long enough to let him know he’s not forsaken. I watch his personal light grow smaller in the distance, a will-o’-the-wisp from Mom’s old stories that seems to call me.
From my height I can see the lights of several people from our circle all heading toward another ring, where they’ll be going to parties, clubs, restaurants, the theater. If only I had someplace to go, someone who was waiting for me to arrive. I picture myself entering a party, all of my friends calling my name, beckoning me over. Someone hands me a drink, another cracks a joke about something we’ve all shared. I am welcome. I am accepted.
Again, I swing one leg over the outer edge of the wall, but this time, I start to climb down.
Mom sometimes uses an expression: I know it like the back of my hand. As I lower myself in grueling slow motion down the far side of the wall, I realize that defines my entire life until this moment.
In the first few seconds of my first foray away from home, I am overwhelmed with difference. Since birth, I’ve known every detail of my whole world to a hair’s breadth. If I lost my sight I would hardly notice—I could navigate my tiny realm without any of my senses. The home side of the wall is a friend, with crevices that reach out to help me like welcoming hands. On this side, the wall almost seems to be trying to throw me off.
I cling, frozen, just a couple of feet down from the ledge. Deliberately I steady myself, trying to feel the memory of the Earth within the stones. This helps a little, and I ease myself down another few inches. As I breathe slowly, the rock seems to breathe with me, pressing rhythmically against my chest. Smiling a little to myself, I descend again.
I make it down two more hand- and footholds before a crevice I thought was stable suddenly collapses under my toe. My hands tense and my foot scrapes against the wall, searching frantically for a hold. I find one—barely. The edge of my shoe is just touching the tiny outcrop. Worse yet, my hands are slipping.
The inside wall has been neglected, giving it character and, more important to me, irregularities and crevices I can use to climb. This outer facade, with its face to the world, has been maintained so that all the plaster between the stones is relatively fresh, the rocks themselves smoother. The holds are so much narrower than I’m used to.
I pick the worst hand grip and let go, to skitter my fingers over the wall like a long-extinct spider, searching. There’s one! I shift my weight, trying to remember not to hug the wall too much. If I try to press myself against the stones too hard, I’ll actually thrust my body out away from the wall.
“Then Ash was born, small and almost blue. He didn’t breathe for the first minute of his life, and when he did, it was obvious that he was in trouble. Your father diagnosed it immediately as a serious chronic lung condition.”
Mom nods as she sees I understand.
“We had to make him the firstborn, Rowan. We didn’t have a choice. Without being in intensive care for the first few months of his life, he wouldn’t have survived. There was no way he could have lived if we’d hidden him away.”
Unspoken in that moment of silence is the other bitter truth: no matter what our birth order, if it had been up to the Center officials to decide our fate, they would have chosen me to live and terminated Ash even after birth. I was strong and healthy, an asset to Eden. He was not. It’s probably only because both of his parents are high officials that he was allowed to live at all. For a poor person on the fringe of Eden, a far-flung outer circle, a sickly first child would be eliminated, the parents encouraged to try again.
My brain is in a tumult. Angry, terrible thoughts seem to attack my head, bitter thoughts that are unworthy of me. Unworthy of the love and protection I’ve known all of my life. But I can’t keep them at bay. It should have been me.
I hardly listen while Mom tells me what will be happening next. Soon, I’ll go to a secret surgical center and have my lenses implanted permanently. Then I’ll be smuggled to my new family. I don’t understand exactly how this is possible. If my own family can’t fabricate a story to keep me, how can a stranger?
Ash comes downstairs, his hand raised to the wall but not quite touching it as he walks, as if he doesn’t trust his legs to hold him up. He gives me a weak smile.
I glance at Mom, and she shakes her head. Ash doesn’t know.
I want to shout the truth to him. Go hide in the hole, second child! Let me be free, like I should have been all along.
I hate myself for thinking this.
I can’t be in this house anymore.
MOM MUST JUST think I need a minute alone to process everything she’s told me, so she doesn’t follow me when I run out to the courtyard. Neither does Ash. I think she must be holding him back. Alone? How can they think I want to be alone when my whole life has been essentially alone? My world is three people, and they are gone all day having lives of their own. I exist in a state of loneliness. Alone? Solitude is the very last thing I need.
What I need, I decide suddenly, is everything that has been denied to me. I feel angry, resentful, reckless. For nearly seventeen years I’ve left my fate up to my parents and whatever machinations and bribes they’ve been arranging to get rid of me. Now it’s time I take matters into my own hands. I may not be a real, official person according to the only humans left alive on Earth, but maybe I can be in charge of my own destiny. For one night at least.
Dimly, miserably, I’m aware that I’ll have to conform to whatever my parents arranged for me. I’ll have new lens implants that will mark me as a different person, and somehow a new family to fit that identity. But right now I want to take a taste of everything I’ve been missing all these years. Everything I was entitled to and didn’t realize it until a few minutes ago.
I climb once again to the top of the high courtyard wall. Eden glitters around me, a mix of the greenish-blue fairy lights of bioluminescence from the modified microorganisms that permeates the city at night, providing a base light, and the electric glow that lights up wherever a human moves. I can see a living diorama in flashes of light all around me, the people showing up as deeply contrasting shadows. There, just down the block, a neighbor I’ve never met, and never will, opens his front door and steps into the night. For a fraction of a second the city seems to examine him. Then, as if the very street itself must have decided to accept him, it lights up beneath his feet. He walks on in the direction of the entertainment district, and the light leads him on, following his footsteps just long enough to let him know he’s not forsaken. I watch his personal light grow smaller in the distance, a will-o’-the-wisp from Mom’s old stories that seems to call me.
From my height I can see the lights of several people from our circle all heading toward another ring, where they’ll be going to parties, clubs, restaurants, the theater. If only I had someplace to go, someone who was waiting for me to arrive. I picture myself entering a party, all of my friends calling my name, beckoning me over. Someone hands me a drink, another cracks a joke about something we’ve all shared. I am welcome. I am accepted.
Again, I swing one leg over the outer edge of the wall, but this time, I start to climb down.
Mom sometimes uses an expression: I know it like the back of my hand. As I lower myself in grueling slow motion down the far side of the wall, I realize that defines my entire life until this moment.
In the first few seconds of my first foray away from home, I am overwhelmed with difference. Since birth, I’ve known every detail of my whole world to a hair’s breadth. If I lost my sight I would hardly notice—I could navigate my tiny realm without any of my senses. The home side of the wall is a friend, with crevices that reach out to help me like welcoming hands. On this side, the wall almost seems to be trying to throw me off.
I cling, frozen, just a couple of feet down from the ledge. Deliberately I steady myself, trying to feel the memory of the Earth within the stones. This helps a little, and I ease myself down another few inches. As I breathe slowly, the rock seems to breathe with me, pressing rhythmically against my chest. Smiling a little to myself, I descend again.
I make it down two more hand- and footholds before a crevice I thought was stable suddenly collapses under my toe. My hands tense and my foot scrapes against the wall, searching frantically for a hold. I find one—barely. The edge of my shoe is just touching the tiny outcrop. Worse yet, my hands are slipping.
The inside wall has been neglected, giving it character and, more important to me, irregularities and crevices I can use to climb. This outer facade, with its face to the world, has been maintained so that all the plaster between the stones is relatively fresh, the rocks themselves smoother. The holds are so much narrower than I’m used to.
I pick the worst hand grip and let go, to skitter my fingers over the wall like a long-extinct spider, searching. There’s one! I shift my weight, trying to remember not to hug the wall too much. If I try to press myself against the stones too hard, I’ll actually thrust my body out away from the wall.
