Come again?
The caterers are instructed to provide fish again in several different preparations. It’s verified. Again he does not eat any of it, not a morsel of sweet cheek, not a flake of the tail. The fish is ours, of course, fillet of #1 B-Mor primes, and when they ask Reg how long it has been since he’s consumed any fish, he tells them he never has, as he’s put off by the smell, which to him has the odor of a pair of old slippers left out in the rain. Indeed, he cannot be too close to Fan if she hasn’t shampooed her hair after working in the tanks, though he doesn’t mention this to the experts, saying only that perhaps he’d been fed fish as an infant, though he cannot remember for certain.
For the researchers, this is startling information. They can’t quite believe it; for who in B-Mor would decline their single most prized product, drastically discounted for them and which not even every Charter could afford to have daily? Not to mention that it was a primary source of pure, low-fat protein in B-Mor, where red meats and fowl are served only for special holidays and celebrations.
Almost immediately public health surveys were ordered in the Charters and in B-Mor and its sister facilities to track the correlation between levels of fish consumption and every form of the disease, and though they would uncover nothing substantive, near countless other mandatory surveys were developed and distributed, testing hypotheses about various vegetables, grains, sweeteners, salts, et cetera, until there was almost nothing left to be examined and they returned to the inquiry into fish, which set off a mini-panic in the Charter villages and a precipitous decline in sales. Suddenly nobody had much of a taste for our fish. Within weeks, the Charter distributors halved their B-Mor orders. Tanks went unharvested, the volume of water per head steadily decreasing, and our pampered, exquisite #1 primes began to jostle for room, they started to nip at one another. Soon they couldn’t help but bite, and when the first of them was gravely injured, the others didn’t hang back as they might have before but pounced in a frenzy of flashing fins and teeth.
For a period, they sold the overgrown fish at B-Mor stalls, three for the price of two, then two for one, which was cause for great rejoicing and a rash of household gatherings and block parties until certain murmurs about what was happening in the tanks bubbled up and we, too, began to question why the fish were so plentiful and cheap. At the dinner tables the younger children were soon complaining about eating too much fish, for there was fish salad and fish fritters and countless tureens of fish soup, the air swam with the dead-sea aroma of salted fillets drying in the breeze like pennants, until in our dreams there were no more fish left and we turned to one another and wondered how we could feel so full yet so forlorn.
Was it Reg we were yearning for? Was it Fan? Yes. Let it be heard. We can speak it now. There are many who say there’s no point, that these sentiments will eventually drift away like so much smoke, and they are most likely right. But if we resolve not to quell ourselves, to keep up the talk, to preserve the good picture of the pair in our minds no matter how contrary to the designs of the directorate it might be, this practice alone invigorates us, raises us up, even if there is nowhere else we wish to go.
And perhaps in the end this is the best reason to keep thinking about Fan and her trials, to exercise mental discipline in the face of what must be the most serious challenge to B-Mor since the originals first landed. An existential threat. For what would we do to support ourselves if the Charters, chasing the dream of being C-free, finally deemed our products to be unacceptable? For decades they’ve had drugs and treatments to address every expression of the dreaded C but still there is no blanket prevention, no inoculation, no ultimate cure. Is this a defect of their science and medicine, or of a philosophy that holds that nothing is beyond their reach? Either way, it left us like this: We could perhaps feed ourselves but what of our housing, our power and water, our schools and training centers and most especially our clinics? How could we assure our communal well-being?
The truth is that we could not. As conceived, as constituted, we may in fact be of a design unsustainable. Which is why we needed Fan, in both idea and person. For within her was the one promise that could deliver us, the seed of all our futures, Charters’ and B-Mors’ and even of the shunned souls out in the counties, at the moment Quig’s foremost.
9
One morning in the predawn Loreen roused Fan from her spot next to a sweaty-headed slumbering Star and ordered her to pack a bag. They were going to go with Quig on a trip for a couple of nights. Loreen didn’t have to explain what was happening — she’d outlined the possibility several days before — but the reason for her presence was a mystery. Fan had no choice, so she didn’t ask any questions and simply readied her few things. Within the hour the three of them were in a newer SUV kicking up a storm of dust on the road that led down to the bottom of the hill. The weather had been hot and dry for a long time but now it seemed a genuine drought had descended upon the Smokes. The rains came infrequently, and when they did come, they were brief. The streams had all but disappeared and the level of the two wells of the compound had dropped below a meter and the men were arguing about where they ought to dig a third. Cold Pond, where Fan swam with Sewey and Eli, was plagued with spongy islands of bright green algae, and even after the water drawn from it was boiled, the essence of something reptilian or freshly born from the mud stuck to the tongue in an undying rime.
They were heading for a Charter village far north, somewhere near what used to be a city called Syracuse. Apparently, the residents of this Charter were not as rich as those closer to the coasts, though, of course, by open counties or B-Mor standards they were still untouchably wealthy. Last year one of these residents had been treated by Quig; the man was driving through the area on an old bypass road and in swerving to avoid a thigh-deep pothole crashed his car into a tree. Quig saved his leg from amputation, and once recovered, the fellow invited Quig to work and live in his Charter village. Quig had no interest in returning to Charter life, but now fresh water was a problem and he required a heavier drilling rig than could be hired nearby to plumb the solid fields of granite beneath their land, and so had contacted the former patient, who was the owner of a major mining corporation.
There was no talk in the car except for the murmuring conversation Loreen was having under her breath as she knitted Sewey a sweater for the winter. Along with the painkillers she was regularly popping for a bad tooth, the knitting acted like some kind of mood drug on her, as she conversed with uncharacteristic levity and patience with a voice she was hearing in her head. Her companion was none other than a younger, sweeter version of herself, and with this still joyous but innocent girl Loreen was maternal and generous. It was difficult to make out every mewling word but she gave boiled-down advice on how to deal with overzealous boys (Keep your knees together) and techniques of basic cooking (Prewarm the pan) and what to do in the event you disturb a nest of hornets (Hold your breath and run like the wind), and it was only after she joined the next ball of yarn that she stopped talking, having fallen asleep, her ratty hair pressed flat against the window, the tips of her needles slowly uncrossing. In the backseat Fan watched the countryside drift by — the counties road was typically cruddy and hazardous — while Quig stared straight ahead with his rakelike hand propped on the wheel, earbuds lodged, listening to what sounded like old-time fiddle music, twangy and swinging. Eli had loaned her a handscreen for the trip but because of the unsteady speed of the car she couldn’t read very long without feeling sick. Of course, there was the bigger thing, too, that was roiling her gut, as she wanted to ask more questions about why she was accompanying him, but she was both afraid of him and of the reason, the most chilling possibility being that he was intending to sell or barter her.