In any case, we have been fortunate in how solid the producer-consumer relationship has been for both communities, the sole interruption being more than twenty years ago, when for several weeks every fish tank had to be emptied and scrubbed after an outbreak. The scales of the fish fell off in patches, which led to infections and suppurations and eventually death. As a precaution, the trays of plants suspended over the tanks were also completely cleared, and until the new fish and plants could become mature, our Charter customers had to source their food from unfamiliar facilities, which you can imagine made them very nervous. Charters are famously nervous, for despite their wealth and security and self-satisfied demeanors, they are obsessed with minimizing hazards of any kind, and are perhaps racked most of all by the finally unknowable dangers of what they ingest. It’s the only thing that they have not mastered.
As for B-Mor, it was a particularly difficult period, to say the least. With our routines disrupted and with no work to do, an unwelcome enervation set in, people quickly becoming irritable, and soon enough irrational; with so many folks milling about the streets and stoops, there were more scooter and bicycle accidents, plus incidents of fisticuffs and vandalism in the malls, with the few verified homicides in B-Mor history also taking place during that time, the usual lovers’ quarrels and bad business dealings disastrously inflamed. A fourth cousin of ours, in fact, was poisoned by his wife, who found out he was going to leave her for a tea-shop girl the same age as their daughter, and laced a sweet red-bean bun (that he himself had brought home from the tea shop) with rat poison, causing him a most protracted death.
Charter biologists and engineers revised our feed and tank formulas, and instituted new facilities practices, and an outbreak of that scale has not happened since. Every level and composition — from the feed, to the water, to the air, to the grow media, to the spectrum of the lighting — is constantly monitored and reviewed, though the truth is that over the years the calibrations have grown so fine that new equipment was necessarily developed, given how decimal places kept being added, the measuring process itself evolving into a kind of test of our mettle, to see how far we could go in realizing an ultimate standard.
Which is why, when you think about it, there should be no sense in the notion that our Charter customers have lost a taste for B-Mor goods; they are their goods, after all, of wholly their conception, from genesis onward. We have simply made their wishes real. For what could be more important? Other settlements near and far-flung provide their clothing and gadgets and furnishings and so on, but we sustain them fundamentally, we enable their children to thrive, while all along offering them full confidence that there are no compromising or exogenous elements, nothing but the fortifications exactly specified by them and them alone.
And yet now there was noise of a new movement in the Charter villages, what the proponents were calling Back to Soil; it’s said that select teams of Charter experts had identified certain experimental plots in the open counties, and even planted them, presumably to see what the qualities of what they raised and grew in a totally “natural” way might be. The fact that “natural” is no longer a dirty word is amazing, seeing how the Charters had pretty much given up on everything outside their gates and ours, leaving it to the livestock and agro-companies whose artificially boosted yields are purchased by the ever-numerous counties masses, both here and abroad. Most every canton of the world ecology, in their view, had been contaminated beyond remediation, at least for the foreseeable future, which is why a place like B-Mor was developed at all, and then replicated many times over after our successes.
Ensure the input to ensure the output!
Back to Soil, we have to explain to our young ones, is a reprise of an old philosophy about the unequaled purity of naturally growing things, that a particular and endemic matrix of earth and water and air and sun will result in the ideal expression of whatever one is growing, in color, structure, taste, and, of course, the most critical quality of all, which can only be healthfulness. The definition of healthfulness, of course, is different for Charters from what it is for us, and quite different still for counties folk, who can’t hope for anything beyond the basic functions and have to trade away too much when needing attention (if they’re lucky) from someone like Quig. We B-Mors are looked after pretty well, but once a potentially terminal episode is diagnosed and treated, it will not be treated again, unlike for Charters, who have enough wealth to visit their specialists as often as they wish, theoretically ad infinitum, or at least until their bodies eventually succumb to the accrued effect of the interventions. Nobody goes C-free — nobody — an axiom that we B-Mors and counties people have surely accepted but that Charters probably never will, given the obscuring veil their essentially inexhaustible resources can throw over reality.
Which brings us back to our most humble Reg.
Reg, whose gangly, sapling-like figure seemed ill suited to most every occasion and task, whose brightest sparks were borne of heart rather than mind, whose place in the annals of B-Mor before his disappearance was like any of ours, which is to say genealogical, and no more. For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic.
But by now Reg — or more specifically, the idea of Reg being C-free — had overtaken B-Mor. The place reposed anew. Was there more birdsong in the air? Did the streets show a heightened gleam? With the directorate gone silent, all that remained was our imagination, which had been ours alone but somehow felt completely unfettered now, like an old swaybacked mare whose pasture fence has been dismantled; she runs no faster but there’s a lift to the breeze, a ready vault to the ground, and with the high motoring in her chest, she is almost certain that she will sprout wings and fly.
So we must picture Reg in a Charter laboratory, sampling from a buffet of typical B-Mor dishes prepared solely for him. Through a straw he sips a tall salt lassi in between nibbles. He hasn’t gained any weight for his naturally speedy metabolism and his homesickness and most of all his lovesickness for Fan, even as he can’t help but eat ingenuously and with enthusiasm. A troupe of physicians monitors him from behind a glassed booth, debating the interplay of his genetic panel, his blood and hormone levels, even his posture and demeanor, trying to unlock the secret of his constitution. Is it his minuscule inflammation factor, several deviations below the mean? Is it his particular fusion of original and native blood? The fact that he eschews alcohol? Spicy foods? Or is it the discovery, when the caterers took in the dishes, that the young man did not touch the fish.