Wednesday, April 22, 2708

I wake with a crick in my neck as the least of my worries--right where I passed out across the tree's hard roots.  Sick and hurting, I push myself more or less upright to sit there and blink in way too much sunlight.  I rub my neck and feel the gumminess of hair that stinks of cloying brandy and stale beer.  I feel the dirt that sticks to it; the grit seems to have gotten under my scalp somehow. 

Before me bottles and butts litter the ground, along with the occasional teenager.  Some of the children--mostly those who ended the night early--pick up litter in a halfhearted way.  They move like little old men and ladies, as Father Man clucks softly over them. 

Imad broods over there, by the ashes of last night's fire, with Mischa stretched out beside him, smiling in her sleep.  He pokes tinder into the ash morosely and blows on it till he elicits a little wisp of smoke. 

I use the tree to pull myself to my feet.  I stagger back into the underbrush as far as I can make it from the others, and then empty myself of last night’s debauch to the full extent that I may.  The entire grove reeks of hangover and I feel ashamed, so very ashamed, for myself and for all of us glorious Egalitarians. 

I return to the clearing.  Painfully I stoop to the humbling task of cleaning up our mess.  Cigarette butts go into the compost heap, bottles we rinse to reuse.  I find as many whole corks as I can.  Broken glass--well, some villages pay to recycle the shards.  I pick at the pieces with painstaking care before some barefoot kid stumbles into them.

"Here, Deirdre--this'll do you good."  Rashid turns a wan face up to me and offers me some kind of cooled tea.  "Go ahead--we've brewed up a whole cauldron-full."  I gulp at it gratefully, realizing my thirst among my other pains.  "And Alysha's cooking up soup now--that'll help you, too."

I can smell the broth from here--actually almost palatable.  I turn to Father's ramada, where Alysha dishes out the first bowlfuls already--and I gasp at the sight of her face.  Blood-clotted abrasions crust the swollen, discolored mess, the worst I've ever seen it; she can barely open her eyes.

I go up to her and I...I can't say anything.  What could I say that she would listen to?  At my expression she averts her eyes and tells me, "I fell into a bush last night.  Must've hit every branch on the way down."  Then she laughs weakly as she hands me a bowl.  "Serves me right for drinking too much."

I just stand there like an idiot, the bowl warming my hands.  I still can't squeeze one sensible word of reply out of my badly abused brain.  Finally I turn back to the tree under which I had spent the night. 

I eat very slowly, acclimatizing my stomach to the food.  Birds in the Charadoc sing loud and shrill, and they never, ever stop.  Idly, I gaze out to the center of the clearing.  Imad now has gotten a few thin flames to flicker feebly against the daylight--why, in this heat?  What do we need with two fires?

Cyran joins me with hir own bowl.  In a forced-cheery voice e says, "Ten new Egalitarians--that's something to take pride in."

"Pride?" I exclaim.  "I can't tell you how much it disgusts me that I had any part in last night's spectacle."

"Ohhh, aren't we the fine one, Milady!"  E forces hirself to eat, then stares out across the clearing with sunken eyes made darker by a mess of old eyeliner.  "You may know a thing or two about fighting, and marching, and wilderness survival--all learned in nice, safe, classrooms, no doubt--but that hasn't made you any less a sheltered little princess."

"Sheltered!" I cry, then cringe from my own loudness.  In a quieter voice I hiss, "No one has ever, ever called a Til Institute upbringing sheltered--not all of us survive our lessons, I'll have you know!"

"Oh, I don't doubt that for a moment."  E pokes at hir soup, with a scowl on hir face, and forces down another spoonful.  "For noble, sacrificial reasons, you Tilián will risk even your young--or other people's, I hear--in the service of the World.  Lovequest, you call it.  I've read about that."

"Then how can you say..."

"That you're morally spoiled rotten?  So arrogantly sure of your souls?  Has it ever occurred to you that in some parts of the world virtue is a luxury?"  E gestures with hir spoon out at hir hungover followers.  "You think we're pitting Innocent Victims against Evil Oppressors?  Where'd you get that crap?"

Again e pokes at hir bowl.  "No one can be a victim and stay innocent for long," e says.  E gives up on breakfast, so e lays the bowl aside to brood on the young people out there, and I see lines on hir face that shouldn't be there yet.  At last, in a voice so quiet that I strain to hear, e says, "I know we're scum, Deirdre--you don't tell me anything new.  Oppression swallowed us up and chewed us up, and by the time we passed through all of the acid twists and turns of Oppression and came through to the light again, we’d become as you see us."  E gestures to the sick and sorry crowd.  "Something you'd wipe off your hand in disgust if you found out you'd touched it.  Oh, don't I know."

E pulls hirself to hir feet by the tree, much like I did before, then gives me a hand up, too.  "I don't fight the upper castes out of any idea of us being nobler, somehow--we aren't."  I pick up our bowls and we walk down to the ramada together.  "I'm fighting for the chance to become nobler.  Those others..." and here e spits, hir blue eyes cold again, "Those rich folk, they had their chance and they blew it."

Alysha notes hir half-eaten breakfast and tells Cyran, "You finish that up, or you go into the stewpot next."

E picks the bowl back up, but says, "Alysha, we have to talk.  Later.  In private."  She nods, wincing, but then says, "Go wash your face, Cyran.  Your eyeliner's so smeared you look like a ghoul."

"After breakfast," e mutters, then weakly spoons up more soup.  E looks up at me and says, "You know what we are, Deirdre?  Scum with dreams."  Hir face brightens.  "Yeah, that's it--scum with dreams."  E slips the emptied bowl and spoon into the wash-basin, flinching when they lightly clunk against the other bowls.  "That's not so bad, when you think about it.  Maybe that's what started the whole evolutionary ball rolling."  And then e rolls up hir sleeves to wash the dishes.

I hear gentle muttering behind me.  I turn to see Father Man daub crosses in cooking-oil all over Mischa's body.  Her smile doesn't change.  As I step closer I notice how her eyes don't quite close all the way.  They haven't, in fact, for some time now.  Tears roll down Father's face, streaking the grime. 

Imad stands at last.  He lets the lock of hair fall crisping into the fire that he'd made.

"Mischa died last night," he says.

"Of course," I respond, too stupid to think of any other words.