“And you’re not going to feed them?” asked Woolf.
Kessler seethed. “Of course we’re going to feed them.”
Woolf creased his brow in mock confusion. “Then you’re not going to allow them any fresh air or sunshine?”
“Where else are they going to work at a prison farm but outside in a field?”
“Then I’m confused,” said Woolf. “So far this doesn’t sound like much of a punishment. Senator Weist ordered the coldhearted killing of one of his own soldiers, a teenage boy under his own command, and his punishment is a soft bed, three square meals, fresher food than we get here in East Meadow, and all the girls he could ever ask for—”
“You keep saying ‘girls,’” said Tovar. “What exactly are you envisioning here?”
Woolf paused, staring at Tovar, then picked up a piece of paper and scanned it with his eyes as he talked. “Perhaps I misunderstood the nature of our ban on capital punishment. We can’t kill anyone because, in your words, ‘there are only thirty-five thousand people left on the planet, and we can’t afford to lose any more.’” He looked up. “Is that correct?”
“We have a cure for RM now,” said Kessler. “That means we have a future. We can’t afford to lose a single person.”
“Because we need to carry on the species,” said Woolf with a nod. “Multiply and replenish the Earth. Of course. Would you like me to tell you where babies come from, or should we get a chalkboard so I can draw you a diagram?”
“This is not about sex,” said Tovar.
“You’re damn right it’s not.”
Kessler threw up her hands. “What if we just don’t let them procreate?” she asked. “Will that make you happy?”
“If they can’t procreate, we have no reason to keep them alive,” Woolf shot back. “By your own logic, we should kill them and be done with it.”
“They can work,” said Kessler, “they can plow fields, they can grind wheat for the whole island, they can—”
“We’re not keeping them alive for reproduction,” said Tovar softly, “and we’re not keeping them alive as slaves. We’re keeping them alive because killing them would be wrong.”
Woolf shook his head. “Punishing criminals is—”
“Senator Tovar is correct,” said Hobb, rising to his feet. “This is not about sex or reproduction or manual labor or any of these other issues we’ve been arguing. It’s not even about survival. The human race has a future, like we’ve said, and food and children and so on are all important to that future, but they are not the most important. They are the means of our existence, but they cannot become the reason for it. We can never be reduced—and we can never reduce ourselves—to a level of pure physical subsistence.” He walked toward Senator Woolf. “Our children will inherit more than our genes; more than our infrastructure. They will inherit our morals. The future we’ve gained by curing RM is a precious gift that we must earn, day by day and hour by hour, by being the kind of people who deserve to have a future. Do we want our children to kill one another? Of course not. Then we teach them, through our own example, that every life is precious. Killing a killer might send a mixed message.”
“Caring for a killer is just as confusing,” said Woolf.
“We’re not going to care for a killer,” said Hobb, “we’re going to care for everybody: old and young, bond and free, male and female. And if one of them happens to be a killer—if two or three or a hundred happen to be killers—we still care for them.” He smiled mirthlessly. “We don’t let them kill anybody else, obviously; we’re not stupid. But we don’t kill them, either, because we’re trying to be better. We’re trying to find a higher ground. We have a future now, so let’s not start it by killing.”
There was a scattering of applause in the room, though Marcus thought some of it felt obligatory. A handful of people shouted back in disagreement, but the tenor of the room had changed, and Marcus knew the argument was done; Woolf didn’t look happy about it, but after Hobb’s words he didn’t look eager to keep calling for execution, either. Marcus tried to get a look at the prisoners’ reactions but still couldn’t see them. Isolde was muttering, and he stooped back down to hear her.
“What did you say?”
“I said he’s a stupid glad-handing bastard,” Isolde snapped, and Marcus backed away with a grimace. That was not a situation he wanted any part of. She insisted that her encounter with Hobb had been willing—she’d been his assistant for months, and he was very handsome and charming—but her attitude had soured significantly in the months since.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to be deliberating any further,” said Tovar. “I call for a vote: Marisol Delarosa and Cameron Weist will be sentenced to a life of hard labor on the Stillwell Farm. All in favor.”
Tovar, Hobb, and Kessler all raised their hands; a moment later Woolf did the same. A unanimous vote. Tovar leaned down to sign the paper in front of him, and four Grid soldiers walked in from the wings to escort the prisoners out. The room grew noisy as a hundred little conversations started up, people arguing back and forth about the verdict and the sentence and whole drama that had unfolded. Isolde stood up, and Marcus helped her into the hall.
“All the way outside,” said Isolde. “I need to breathe.” They were ahead of most of the crowd and reached the outer doors before the main press of people. Marcus found them a bench, and Isolde sat with a grimace. “I want french fries,” she said. “Greasy and salty and just huge fistfuls of them—I want to eat every french fry in the entire world.”
“You look like you’re going to throw up, how can you even think about food?”
“Don’t say ‘food,’” she said quickly, closing her eyes. “I don’t want food, I want french fries.”
“Pregnancy is so weird.”
“Shut up.”
The crowd thinned as it reached the front lawn, and Marcus watched as groups of men and women either wandered off or stood in small groups, arguing softly about the senators and their decision. “Lawn,” perhaps, was misleading: There used to be a lawn in front of the high school, but no one had tended it in years, and it had become a meadow dotted with trees and crisscrossed with buckling sidewalks. Marcus paused to wonder if he’d been the last person to mow it, two years ago when he’d been punished for playing pranks in class. Had anyone mowed it since? Had anyone mowed anything since? That was a dubious claim to fame: the last human being to ever mow the lawn. I wonder how many other things I’ll be the last to do.
He frowned and looked across the street to the hospital complex and its full parking lot. Much of the city had been empty when the world ended—not a lot of people eating out and seeing movies while the world collapsed in plague—but the hospital had been bustling. The parking lot spilled over with old cars, rusted and sagging, cracked windows and scratched paint, hundreds upon hundreds of people and couples and families hoping vainly that the doctors could save them from RM. They came to the hospital and they died in the hospital, and all the doctors with them. The survivors had cleaned out the hospital as soon as they settled in East Meadow—it was an excellent hospital, one of the reasons the survivors had chosen East Meadow as a place for their settlement in the first place—but the parking lot had never been a priority. The last hope for humanity was surrounded on three sides with a maze of rusted scrap metal, half junkyard and half cemetery.