The arc of the hub’s perimeter is lined with windowed rooms in which you can see the orphans in extremis. They lie here in weirdly tilted beds, attended by dormitrons and tightlipped RNs. Tubes and electrodes sprout from their bodies like odd mechanical fungi. All of them seem to be equipped with oxygen masks, tracheotomies, or respirators. Even over the machines laboring to sustain them, you can hear them breathing from fifty or sixty feet away.
Father H—, a gray silhouette against a luminous white backdrop, stands at the bedside of one such person. His posture tells you he is listening to the patient’s whispers or measuring his or her laggard unassisted breaths. The TV set in this room, muted, runs through a succession of familiar images from the War on Worldwide Wickedness: statues toppling, buildings dropping in cascades of dust and smoke, warriors on patrol through rubble-strewn courtyards or past iced-over stone fountains.
The patient couldn’t care less. Neither could you, if this enterprise had not also devoured Brice and Elise, many thousands of their contemporaries, and so many civilian slammies — as the media now insists on calling civilian natives of foreign war zones — that not even the Pan Imperium can number them.
Mr. Weevil, the director, enters from an outer corridor with several cronies, five or six small men and women, wearing ivory smocks and sneakers. They float past you to a treatment unit. Mr. Weevil slides the glass door open and calls the doctor and his team to the portal to report on the patient’s condition.
Dr. S—, a cadaverous Dravidian with lemur eyes, flatly and loudly says that his patient is a near goner whose lungs need help, whose liver has badly deteriorated, whose kidneys have failed, and whose blood, despite a full course of antibiotics, still teems with pernicious microbes.
None of this person’s organs retains its original life-sustaining function, says Dr. S—, and he must soon die. I say must in the sense of an eminent inevitability, not as a Hippocratic recommendation.
The doctor might just as well have spoken over a PA system. His words echo through the hub like the pronouncement of a god.
Helplessly, you step forward. I’ll bet he can still hear, you say.
Everybody turns to look. You bear their gazes as the Incredible He-She at an old-time freak show would bear those of a paying crowd.
What? Mr. Weevil says. What did you say?
I said I’ll bet he can still hear. Hearing is the last of the senses to go, so even this patient may still be able to hear you.
Dr. S—’s mouth quirks sourly. And what good does that do him? None. No good at all.
The director and his cronies agree, as do the RNs and the promoted dormitrons at the doctor’s back. You dwindle before them like a melting ice statue in a time-lapse video. Amazingly, not one of these obtuse brains gets the poignant underlying import of your observation.
Mr. Weevil turns to address the doctor: Every life has huge merit, of course, but we really need that bed. Carry on! He and his smock-clad retinue exit the intensive care hub while Dr. S— and his team fall back into the treatment unit to await the convenient inevitable.
Appalled, you walk about the hub in rings of increasing size until Father H— comes out and hails you as he might a lost friend. Ah, Ms. K—, what a surprise and a treat to see you!
What day is it, Padre?
Friday — another good Friday — why do you ask?
You hear the stress on good, but not the Easter-designating capital G that would turn your fugue into an enacted allegory. You note that it’s been little more than twelve hours since two cruel stooges informed you of Elise’s death.
And a little over two years since you learned of Brice’s, he says gently.
You smile and ask after the women who journeyed to the Furnace Room to visit their spouses.
Their hearts will grow heavier soon, Father H— says. Given their ages, how could they not?
They’ll die without seeing the war’s end.
‘War Is Peace,’ Orwell said. Besides, who will? Who sees anything well finished, even one’s own life? It’s little different from those medieval stonemasons who worked on cathedrals.
I don’t like your analogy, you tell him.
Father H— laughs heartily. Of course you don’t: it stinks.
Moments later, he leads you to the mouth of a nearby tunnel.
Care to visit the ovens, Ms. K—?
You like this question less than you did his cathedral analogy because it suggests an analogy even more distasteful. But what else do you have to do?
Okay.
As you walk, the father offers you a rice cake and an ampoule of red-wine vinegar from a communion kit sewn into his jacket lining. For your spiritual sustenance, he says, but you bemusedly shake your head.
Two gurneys trundle up behind you, one pushed by a dormitron, the other by a young woman in uniform. To let them pass in tandem, you press your backs to opposite walls of the tunnel. The first gurney takes a corridor to the left; the second, bearing not only a body but a casket draped in a flag of the nation’s newly adopted colors, swings right. You raise an eyebrow at the father.
Vinegar Peace cremates our war dead as well as wrong-way orphans, he explains. Which way would you like to go?
You answer by angling right. Far down this corridor you see a wide brick apron before double crematory doors and ranks of scarlet-draped caskets before these doors. An honor guard in full dress stands at formal ease to one side of the tunnel; a military choir on crepe-decorated risers, to the other.
Both contingents await you in this incarnadine cul-de-sac; in fact, when you have almost drawn close enough to read the soldiers’ nametags, they crack to attention and a pitch pipe sounds. They then begin to sing, the expanded honor guard and the choir, as if triggered by your arrival as auditors. You recognize the melody as a halt-footed variation on an old hymn’s tune:
The choristers conclude fortissimo and stand at ease again. The Red, Wine, and Blood — Bold Gory — has recently replaced the Red, White, and Blue — Old Glory —, and these soldiers gladly hymn the new banner’s praises.
Two members of the honor guard open the double doors of the oven, and Father H— nods you forward, as if accustomed to this ritual.
Go in? you ask him. Really?
Just for a look-see. You might not think so, but it’s an honor, their approving you for an impromptu tour.
Why me?
Most young enlistees have living parents. You’re a proxy.
A soldier yanks the scarlet banner from a coffin and brings it to you as if to throw it over your shoulders. Its stars and stripes are mutedly visible as different shades of red. You lift a hand, palm outward. No thank you.