The Death of the Wave (2 page)

Ex igne veritas

This world

ever was,

and is,

and shall be,

ever-living fire,

in measures being kindled

and

in measure going out.

—Heraclitus

Whose son am I?

I close my eyes in the waiting and thank myself for a hiding place.

The precious things of broken men.

A notched stick,

a scrap of letter,

paper.

I can see my kingdom traced behind my eyelids as if fired behind by the sun.

Cot. Sink. Toilet. Wall.

Sometimes I see fantastic images in the stone,

and other times I see nothing.

Yesterday there were tigers with outstretched claws,

as if come back from the dead.

I have never seen a tiger outside of one picture, though there were mentions of an elderly male,

the last of his kind,

still languishing in a zoo somewhere beyond the Hives when I was a child.

No tigers today.

There exists nothing else but to wait for the five strikes

of the heavy iron tongue in the clock tower.

Soon there will be bread.

The ring of the clock-tower in the Citadel, for the new voice will sound over Eden.

The old voice and his lord are dead.

Long live the king.

Edict 10975, the rights of the Breakers.

A cough from the man across from me, dry and desperate.

Soon there will be nothing left.

For I, myself, am alone and

I smile, knowing the mechanics to be easy.

It is best to think, best to remember, or to risk forgetting.

When we were first brought into the Barracks, we still strutted as if we were soldiers, and murmured all sacrifices’ names loosely behind cupped hands.

Now we only wait, and eat the bread of dead men.

No, I will remember the lies.

I will remember my name.

EDICT 4907: The Citizen Evaluation Exam is fair. It does not discriminate against race, class, or creed. If a man revolts against his just position and place in life, that man will be imprisoned or else put to death.

The war never ends. Only the enemies change.

I waited, for once at peace within the Artists’ slums

and listened as the clock-tower in the Citadel, far off, far off, rang six.

For another hour, Newton, the Voice of Eden, blared out over the sound-waves,

today: the Censor’s listing, the banning of the books,

and the Citadel controls all allotment and use of technology.

A young couple strolled idly by in the gloom.

I could tell that they were young by the ease with which they strolled,

they had not yet learned to fear the night, as they should have.

But this was their kingdom, and they strutted like the king and queen of beggars.

The youth looked straight at me and his eyes blazed with a secret threat.

I only smiled and adjusted, revealing the stunner gun strapped to my hip.

He knew that I could drag him to the Barracks, under the care of Lady Justice

and looked away, his arm too tight around his girl.

I was, I am recognized.

Enemy.

Breaker.

I kept the balance in the slums and in the palaces of the elite.

My presence was reminiscent of the sweaty Hives where the orphans are kept

and of the hellish Barracks and the Factories where citizens are detained.

I am everything and nothing.

I was

I am

neutral.

But there, I affected the easy stance of a poet beyond caring.

My badge was contained neatly in my coat pocket,

256

and Eden’s oak tree insignia was carefully covered by my coat.

For Poet’s Camp.

For the benefit of the Artists.

I knew their leader, Dante, dead these months, and they tolerated me.

When I was with them, I was home.

For the sudden fires in the shanty-town beckoned me and

the musicians had made their peace with the poets.

So faint, so faint, a fiddle sounded as if gathering up all the sadness in the world.

There, in the poorest edge of the ghetto.

It was always alive with the buzzing of words, the blending together of a thousand images.

A woman sung her baby to sleep with a snippet of poetry set to the lonely music.

I wondered if the words had meaning for her, or if they were just nonsense, a part of a history long denied, as beautiful as they were empty.

I hummed along quietly under my breath and earned a startled glance.

Calmly, I walked over to the fire.

The huddle made room for me, and wordlessly,

I was given a piece of their meat by a man who would not meet my eyes.

The fiddle music swooped and I watched the motley group

as they remained silent for my benefit.

The night, it still suffers from the bright flares over the Camps.

They write no poems about stars, nor dare to lift their heads.

But one began to murmur a bit of Shakespeare as the fiddler slowed his bow,

his deep sonorous tones achingly familiar.

I thought that his name was Sonnet and his face was familiar as well, neither old nor young,

but he gathered the ragged children as if they were his own.

He intoned about tomorrow and the great betrayal of Scottish kings.

How melancholy and how beautiful!

But what of Scotland, and what is Scotland?

Tomorrow.

A desolate word, under dying skies, dropped like a coin down a well.

Out, out brief candle.

I trembled, and one of their skinny mongrels lifted his head and bayed at the sickle moon.

Roasting meat.

Bright fire.

Molasses words under a too-bright sky.

I’m not sure how I got involved in all of this.

Certainly my beginning was unremarkable.

I was born in an Artist Camp somewhere, I was assured, and sold or given into the Hive system.

It was assumed that I was born into the largest Writer’s Camp,

where most of the orphans had been coming from.

Lack of food and even poorer water supplies had driven the poor bastards out,

and in the North, under leader Tolkien, the population boom had been too much for them.

People were starving,

but compared to my potential fate, the Hives weren’t all that bad.

Mine was shabby but well-cared for, and the Head Keeper was distant but affable.

The kids slept in iron-runged bunks during the night, fifty to a dormitory,

and in the morning trudged off to whatever rooms could be spared to prepare for the tests.

Testing prep began at age six, half way to the Citizen Evaluation Exams,

and these mock exams served as a kind of training ground for the real thing.

They also served a far more important purpose, as the kids who failed the mocks could be

Marked.

Winnowed

out from the intense prep and save the teacher Keepers their valuable time.

The lesson was clear—fail a mock and you would fall behind,

and failing the CEE could be fatal.

Citizen Evaluation Exam.

Everyone took it the year of their twelfth birthday

and your entire life had been leading up to this moment.

It was a lottery roll based on pure brain-power.

Score high on the science and mathematics sections, and your life was pretty much assured. You’d be sent to the Palaces to dwell in the world of the aristos, working in their labs,

building their bridges, calculating their busy-work.

Score high on reading comprehension and analysis, and you were off to the Camps, your talents geared towards usefulness in the world of the Censor.

Score low on all sections, and you had but a small prayer of surviving.

Intellect is the currency in our delightful society.

The race is no longer to the swift, nor the jerk to the strong and fools are not suffered to live.

It is a simple question of resources.

This is the way it has always been.

Who marks that it can change, or even if it should?

One life. One test.

The kids in the Hives against the kids in the ghettos.

The kids in the ghettos against the kids in the Palaces.

The norm kids in the Palaces against the aristos, genetic engineering.

Brilliance bred.

An uneven gamble.

One life, one test.

I was child 56409.

My age set was Youth.

My Hive number, 45834.

There was nervousness in the holding area where our cots were.

Some of the other boys were scared and they worked slowly

through their Citizen Evaluation Exam workbooks.

The workbooks were dog-eared, some had pages missing, some were water-logged.

Mine was singed as if the kid that had it before me had let his lamp burn low.

The clock tower rang out seven and the edict remained.

Edict 90865, the fate of a thief.

I put my book to the side, and I stared at the ceiling, all around me hearing

the whispered scratches of graphite and paper.

7897 was breezing through his at a thousand miles per minute.

He was sure to pass.

I told him to score high.

But he did not answer.

The pencil they gave me had perfect teeth marks.

I felt like I am one of them.

I am like them.

It was so warm and so quiet.

A young woman carefully stroked my arm to feel the fabric of my coat.

She whispered a name that sounded like Poesy.

Names in the Artist slums mean everything.

They indicate tribe and offshoot profession and status in the tribe.

In all things specificity counts.

She asked me mine and there I hesitated.

None of us start out with names; it is when we are tested into our lives

that we take our names and our place in society.

Because Breakers never chose which side, Breakers are nameless.

We only gain a different life-number.

But I could not give them my number, as they would know then of my profession.

I told her that my name is Byron.

She did not get the reference.

I relaxed slightly and thought of how these names were just names, without any history.

They were only words in a void, repeated for so long that they had been leached of all meaning.

I was born in the Camps.

I was not always a Breaker, a killer of my own people, a cog in the machine.

I grew up in a place like this, in one of the Writer’s Camps in the bowels of Eden.

I knew all about being hungry, testing in the mock tests in the Hives and ducking the recruiters.

I had seen men with dirty faces, and I was a Camps child in the street

before they put a weapon in my hands and a lie in my heart.

What choice did I have when the results came back to stare me in the face?

A tiny chance, an equal score, the Palaces or the slums and their tiny warring factions—

If I became a Breaker, there would be bread for my mother and little brother. We would be taken from the Camps and placed outside the Barracks with the other Breakers.

I would be given authority, my face wiped clean, a uniform, bread—

My little brother would have his fate decided when he took his CEE,

but my mother was safe, provided for.

I made the right decision

and so have no regret.

I cannot regret.

My eyes slowly closed, Sonnet’s droning echoing in my mind.

I was the enemy, and these people distrusted me.

But I am, I must be

like you.

There was, is, something in me that reminded them of an aristo, and inspired instinctive dread—those pale gaunt synthetic beauties.

Genetically engineered humans bred for beauty and mind and—cruelty.

But I am not.

I am but their guard dog.