Children of Eden (23 page)

At first I can see the grasses beneath the bodies. But as I walk—and because it is a dream, I can't stop walking, can't weep, or run away—the bodies grow thicker on the ground until it seems as if the Earth itself is sprouting them from the dirt. A crop of human corpses.

I forge my way through, almost wading, until the bodies are piled on top of one another and I have to step high, then climb, and finally crawl up a mountain of bodies. Their rotting flesh sloughs off beneath my fingers as I scramble upward. I can't stop, because there's someone standing atop this mountain of the dead. A tall, slender man with dark hair, a neatly trimmed goatee. I know I have to reach him.

He looks down at me, and his eyes are so gentle. How can that be, when he's standing on ten thousand corpses? Corpses he made. Because of course, the man is Aaron Al-Baz.

He reaches out a hand as if to help me to the summit, but I hold back. He tilts his head, looking at me curiously, and says, “Extinction is natural.”

This wasn't a natural extinction, I want to say, but in my dream I'm mute.

“Humans evolved to the point where they could wipe themselves off the face of the Earth,” he says in that soft, reasonable voice. “They would have, eventually. It was just a question of how many other species they took with them. My way was best.”

Dream Me manages to shake her head.

“It was a hard thing to do,” he says, a shade of sorrow crossing his face. “But the right thing. You will see, in time.”

Unable to resist, I reach for his hand. But instead of pulling me up to the summit he shoves me violently backward and I'm tumbling, cartwheeling over the pile of bodies, landing in a tangle, trapped in a net of corpses that pull me under like quicksand . . .

I wake up screaming!

I'm out of bed and down the hall before I really know if I'm awake or still asleep. No one wakes, no one peers out of their bedrooms. The solid rock must have shielded the sound of my screaming.

I could go to Flint. He's the leader, he's responsible for all of these people, and for me now. I should tell him what I know. I could go to Iris, let her take me in her plump maternal arms and comfort me as if I were one of her brood of second children.

But instead I go to Lachlan. I'm drawn to him, irresistibly, in my moment of need.

He showed me where his room is, in passing, as he was giving me a tour of the Underground, but he didn't invite me in. His room is one of the few occupied dwellings on the upper story of galleries. As I race up the stairs I realize that if the Eden authorities ever found this place and launched an attack, Lachlan would be first in the line of fire. Of course, he would also be the first one with a clear shot at the invaders. Knowing him (and strangely, I almost feel as if I do), he probably thought of both when picking his room. He would be either a shield, or a sacrifice for the vulnerable second children he was defending down below. Whatever was required, he would do.

I pound on his door. I don't have the composure for a polite knock. Almost instantly the door opens a crack and I see not his face, but the muzzle of his weapon, the glint of his eye barely visible behind it.

The first words out of his mouth are “What's wrong?” He opens the door another inch and looks beyond me for danger.

“I . . . I had a nightmare,” I confess.

He visibly relaxes, and I wonder if he looks a little disappointed in me. Like he expected me to be able to get through something as trivial as a nightmare on my own. He doesn't realize it is so much more—a nightmare about a terrible truth.

He pushes the door open with a sigh. “I'm not sleeping anyway. You might as well come in.”

Somehow I expect his room to be stark and ascetic: bare walls and weapons. But it's like nothing I imagined. Standing racks of clothes are almost decorations in themselves. I realize they're costumes, the disguises he uses to move freely around the city. The bright colors of inner circle fashions dominate, muted here and there by various uniforms—of reclamation workers, deliverymen, and other Eden workers who could pass virtually unnoticed. I even see the collection of pieced-together rags that made up his hobo disguise, complete with false hair and beard.

But it is the walls that are the most surprising. Every square inch is covered in artwork. Mesmerized, I move closer to look. Most of the pictures are obviously drawn by children, bold and colorful depictions mostly of small grinning little stick people holding the hand of a tall stick man obviously meant to represent Lachlan. Without exception, the balloon-headed Lachlans the kids draw wear huge smiles.

Though the kids' drawings dominate, there are other more skilled and subtle works, too. One is a simple pencil sketch of an elderly woman sitting in a kitchen, a lump of dough on the table before her. The lines are sparse but evocative. I can almost smell bread baking. In one corner is the title,
Nana
. In the other is the artist's name: Iris. I can see Iris's life all in an instant—raised by a beloved grandmother, bereft and alone
when her grandmother died. And now she's here, grandmother herself to a huge family. Why did she give this drawing to Lachlan? To remind him that everyone here is family?

And then there are a couple of paintings that can only be described as masterful. They're done on rough material, inexpertly mounted, and attached to the rock walls with adhesive . . . but the skill is astounding.

Each picture shows an animal in the center, in a pose that suggests it has no idea anyone is watching. A leopard lolling in indolent magnificence; a squirrel hanging by its hind feet, nibbling a nut held in its forepaws; a dolphin breaching the surface of the foamy sea just enough to snatch a breath, its eye murky beneath the water.

Near the beasts, their environment is depicted in vivid, minute detail. The leopard's jungle is lush and green; the dolphin's sea is speckled with sargassum and silver fingerlings. But as the color stretches to the outer edge of the canvas, the details begin to fade. The richness is diminished, the colors become muted. Their world is vanishing. Suddenly I can see prescience in the animals' eyes. They know their existence is ending.

In the right-hand corner, in scratchy black letters, is the artist's name. Lachlan.

“These are incredible,” I say, and I feel like that pat praise sounds insincere. I want to gush about them, about what his paintings make me feel, the autumnal nostalgia for something I never experienced, the loss that happened before my time. But I feel shy, and can't find the words.

Lachlan shrugs. “Just something I do in my spare time,” he says, dismissing his own skill. “Not that I have much of that.”

I try to explain my reaction to the paintings. “They capture that feeling of things slipping away, the inevitability of it . . . There was a time, I'm sure, when people knew the end was coming, that there was no stopping the Ecofail. When
they still had their cars and air-conditioners and pesticide-laden crops and could pretend everything would go on like that forever, but they knew the edges of their world were dissolving, and there was nothing they could do about it anymore.” I'm frowning, struggling to express myself.

“One man could have done something about it,” Lachlan says staunchly. “Aaron Al-Baz tried to stop the man-made catastrophe, and no one would listen. He couldn't stop them from destroying the world, but he could save them. Save us. We have to live up to his memory so we're worthy when we can finally go out into the world, when it heals.”

“He's your hero, isn't he?” I ask softly.

“He's everybody's hero.”

“What if he wasn't?” I force myself to ask.

Lachlan is fiddling with his weapon, doing something the purpose of which I can't fathom, but it is taking his concentration. He seems to think I'm suggesting something hypothetical, an intellectual exercise in debate.

“If he wasn't a hero, why were our ancestors all saved in the final human refuge: Eden?” he asks absently as he makes a minute adjustment to the sight of his weapon.

I make myself speak more firmly. “Lachlan, I mean it. What would happen to the people of Eden, of the Underground—to you—if you found out that Aaron Al-Baz wasn't the good man everyone thinks he is?”

I have his attention now. His head comes up, his entire body is tense like he just spotted danger.

“The fact that we're here, when every other animal on the planet is gone, seems to me like proof of his goodness.” His voice is challenging, almost antagonistic, and a part of me wants to let the whole thing go. “If the people of Eden found out otherwise . . .” He looks confused for a second. He can't conceive of quite what I'm getting at, or what the
consequences might be. “It would disrupt everything. Everything that everyone believes in.”

“I found something,” I say in a small voice. “My mother gave it to me, before she . . .” I swallow hard. “She found it in our house, hidden behind a stone wall. The house belonged to Aaron Al-Baz just after the Ecofail.”

And so I sit down on his bed and tell him what I learned.

Aaron Al-Baz was a visionary, who saw the imminent destruction of the global ecosystem long before anyone else. He was a genius, who put technology to work, first to stop the devastation and then, when that proved impossible, to fix it. He made the machines, the computers, the programs, work for him to begin the generations-long process of saving the planet. But before that, he decided to get rid of the thing that had poisoned and burned the planet in the first place.

It wasn't the Ecofail that killed off the human species. It was Aaron Al-Baz. He did it to save the rest of the planet.

It made sense, in a sick, inhumanely logical kind of way. The planet was dying because of people. He could either try to fix the harm humans had done . . . or go straight to its source. At some point the brilliant, mad genius developed a virus that would kill nearly 100 percent of the population. His talent knew no bounds; he simply created a program that would devise an unstoppable pathogen, and let his mechanical minions create it. Then when the scientists unleashed their particles into the atmosphere in an attempt to reverse global warming, Al-Baz released his disease.

Of course, he made sure that he himself was immune to it. His family, too. As for the rest of humanity, he left that up to chance.

Natural selection, he calls it in his manifesto.

He reduced the human population to a fraction of its original billions. Then he gathered up some of the survivors
and installed them in Eden, to await the day humans could repopulate the world.

And the rest of the humans who survived the plague? The ones he didn't take into Eden? They were left to fend for themselves, to die slowly in the dying world along with all of the other animals.

“No,” Lachlan says flatly when I finish telling him what I've learned. It is the first word he's spoken throughout the tale. The whole time he sat still and silent on his bed next to me, almost expressionless except for a slight downward turn of his brow.

“But I have proof,” I insist, thinking he doesn't believe me.
“Aaron Al-Baz's own admission. I can show you.” I start to get up, but he pulls me back down onto the bed.

“No,” he says again, softly but so firmly.

“But . . .”

He holds my hand in his, so I don't even try to rise again. I look down at his knuckles, at the seams of white scars where the skin has been split countless times. So many punches, so much fighting. That has been his life. But he's calm now. Almost unnaturally calm. The only sign of his agitation is the nervous way he strokes my skin with his thumb, over and over again in the same place.

“Have you told anyone else?” he asks. I shake my head. “Don't. Please,” he adds, and I can see a deep worry in his eyes.

“Don't people deserve to know the truth?”

He looks down at my hands for a moment, and I wonder what he reads about me there. Short fingernails, ragged now, though clean after my shower. Callused fingertips from climbing my courtyard wall day in, day out. Split knuckles of my own, fresh and crusted over with a scarlet line. My first battle scar. First of many? I feel like I'm on the cusp of something big, and dangerous, and sublime.

“Aaron Al-Baz isn't just
my
hero,” Lachlan says. “He's the patron saint of Eden. What we plan to do—the revolution that will make all citizens of Eden free and equal—will be launched in Aaron Al-Baz's name. He is our touchstone, our inspiration.”

“But he was a monster!”

“No one knows that,” he tells me. “No one can know. It will lead to chaos. That's the last thing we need. The Center is doing terrible things, but at least Eden is whole and sound. Water flows, people eat, and the deadly environment outside is kept at bay. We mean to make a smooth transition.”

“You said you're at war,” I remind him.

He nods. “A subtle war. A battle from within, as bloodless as possible. Do you remember the craters you saw in the outermost rings?”

I do.

“They're from the last time the outer circles staged an uprising. They're from bombs.”

I'm shocked—almost moreso than when I read the truth about Aaron Al-Baz. “What do you mean? There has never been an uprising! No one ever dropped bombs inside Eden. It's not in the history books.”

“What
is
in the history books?” he asks sharply. “Ancient history of pre-fail Earth. The life of Al-Baz. Environmental history. But what do the books say about the generations that have lived in Eden?”

I think about it. There are civics books, explaining the tenants of Eden. There are books about the governmental system. Lists of previous chancellors and cabinet ministers. But history? Of the years humans have spent in Eden? No. I assumed that was because nothing much happened. We simply lived our lives, waiting for the time when we could reenter the world. It never occurred to me that history could be happening in Eden.