Concord, Chapter 5
Vital services
The story so far: Sixteen years after escaping the ruined mainland aboard Concord, a self-sustaining floating city, Second Founder Saul Klein lives a quiet life as a teacher, haunted by the loss of his former lover, Suzanne. When desperate refugees arrive by sea, Saul fails to save them but secretly takes possession of a duffel bag containing forbidden relics from the outside world. Meanwhile, Marco Vespucci, Concord’s reclusive First Founder, has been neglecting his troubled daughter, Lila—who confesses to Saul that she is pregnant. With security forces closing in and Concord’s fragile order at stake, Saul must decide whether to finally challenge the world he helped create.
Mrs. Dodge had suggested that Saul take his injury to the Clinic. It wasn’t, of course, a suggestion; if he didn’t go it might look suspicious. And in any case, he had other business there.
It stood right off the village green, styled like a white farmhouse. Though it was only one story, its depths housed a small but complete medical complex: two surgical theaters, an intensive care unit, a fully stocked pharmacy, and a morgue. On the lawn a small white flock of projected sheep grazed, accenting the pastoral feel. One seemed to look up at Saul and bleat at him as he entered.
“Fuck off,” he told it.
There was no one in the waiting room. Nurse Bruce, a hulking man in maroon scrubs, glowered at Saul from his spot behind the pharmacy window. Before Saul could ask if the doctor was in he appeared—Lincoln Chatterjee, MD, a dapper Punjabi man who made up for his small stature with a high-stacked salt-and-pepper pompadour. He was escorting his last patient out the door. Jean Rodefer sashayed across the room looking like a Technicolor film star, her ash-blonde hair bound up in a turban, wearing a close-fitting periwinkle blouse and white hip-huggers. Small, dark, agile, Dr. Jee followed her, snapping off a pair of red latex gloves and depositing them neatly in a pink biohazard container. Nurse Bruce’s jaw dropped slightly, adding to the vacuity of his heavy-browed stare.
She looked at Saul with cool amusement. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
“Hi, Jean.”
“Let me know if the issue recurs,” Jee said to her in the lilting accent he could switch off or on at whim.
Jean directed her thousand-watt smile at him. “That I surely will, Doctor.” She batted her eyes and extended a hand to Saul. He took it awkwardly and she squeezed it. “What brings you here?” she asked Saul. “Is it the headaches?”
Jee glanced sharply at Saul and then up at his bandaged forehead. As casually as he could, Saul said, “No, just a checkup. How about you?”
“Oh, it’s that time of the month,” Jean said airily. She turned toward Nurse Bruce and raised her voice. “I get really bad cramps!”
Bruce snapped shut his open mouth and hastily withdrew his head from the window.
“Sounds uncomfortable,” Saul said, watching a blush brighten Dr. Jee’s ash-colored cheeks.
“Mrs. Rodefer must take care,” Dr. Jee said, still looking at Saul with troubled eyes “Your fertility is a precious gift.”
“Don’t worry,” Jean said, her lips smiling, her eyes cold. “I know what I’m valued for.”
“I’ll walk you out,” Saul said.
“Oh no,” she said. “You mustn’t keep the good doctor waiting. And I’ll bet your head is simply splitting.” She slipped on a pair of angular black sunglasses and favored them once more with her radiant smile. “Arrivederci, boys.”
She held out her hand to Dr. Jee, who held it limply for a moment, then stepped to the pharmacy window, where a bottle prepared by Nurse Bruce stood waiting. She slipped it daintily into her purse and waved it at them as she left. The door clicked shut behind her and they exhaled.
“I’m glad to see you,” Dr. Jee said to Saul. He tapped his wristwatch with his finger. “You’re long overdue.”
They had to pass the pharmacy on their way to the doctor’s consulting room. Nurse Bruce, whose eyes were on Saul, scribbled furiously on a clipboard as they passed.
The consulting room was simply furnished: wooden desk, small white sink, exam table, and on the wall—prim relic of the unfloating world—Dr. Jee’s diploma from Harvard Medical School. Only the best here, thought Saul. Our floating meritocracy. He made himself comfortable on the exam table as best he could, long legs dangling. Dr. Jee shut the door, listened for a moment, then jabbed Saul’s chest with his finger. “You and Mrs. Rodefer are indiscreet.”
“I should think you were discreet enough for both of us.”
Dr.Jee did not smile. “I am being serious. You are playing with fire. She is a married woman.”
“I’m pretty sure she’s finished with me, Doc. She’s lost interest.”
The doctor shook his head. “Do not misunderstand me. I do not take a moral point of view but a practical one. Does she understand what’s at stake?”
“Better than we do, I think.”
Dr. Jee pointed at Saul’s bandage. “Now tell me what happened here.”
“I fell. I was out for a run.”
“Glad to hear it.” He took a pair of latex gloves out of a drawer and snapped them on. “At our age it’s important to remain active. Remove your shirt, please.”
After changing Saul’s bandage Jee examined him with his eyes and hands, palpating his liver, lifting his eyelids. The gloved hands were cool and dry. “Jean must understand the facts of life. She needs to take better care. You should remind her. Perhaps she will listen to you. Say ah.”
“I’m the last man she’d listen to,” Saul said. “But like I said, it’s over.”
“Would Jean agree with that statement?”
Dr. Jee drew a drop of blood from Saul’s fingertip with a lancet and held it up to the light. His eyes went vague. As a medico Dr. Jee was one of the few villagers to still have an active neural mesh, enabling him to make direct contact with the medical database housed in the Concord mainframe. Once Saul too had been able to conjure with a wink of his eye a heads-up display that only he could see, projecting the enormous skein of data the COO of the Concord Corporation needed to navigate his day-to-day. The paraverse, they called it; Marco’s innovations in creating it had been the underpinning of his vast wealth. A portion of that wealth had been channeled into building the floating island on which they and the other shareholders now resided. Save for a few members of Vital Services, the shareholders’ implants had been rendered dormant. The paraverse was the past; in the future, Marco had said, we will no longer live in our heads. We will make the desert of the real bloom.
Saul wondered if Jee had requested the exemption, to make him a more efficient physician, or if it had been forced upon him. He wouldn’t ask. No shareholder would.
Jee’s eyes refocused. “I congratulate you,” he said. “No discernible issues.” He frowned. “But what was that Mrs. Rodefer said about headaches? She was not referring to your running injury?”
“She was not,” Saul admitted. “I get migraines sometimes.”
Jee frowned. “How often is sometimes? More than once a week? Twice a week? Daily?”
“It isn’t that bad,” he lied. “I can still function.”
“How often, Saul?”
“A few times a week.”
Still frowning, Jee took a key out of the pocket of his white coat and unlocked a drawer on his desk. From it he withdrew a slender black oblong cable, curled like a whip.
“A neural probe?” Saul said. “What do you need that for?” He heard the panic in his voice and grimaced.
“Due diligence,” Jee said. “Lie back on the table, please.”
“You said it was impossible,” Saul objected. “My mesh was deactivated years ago and the OS wiped, same as everybody else’s. An inactive mesh is just that. You ought to be the one with headaches, not me.”
“We had better rule it out,” Jee said. “Hold still.”
Saul felt one of the cool dry hands cradling the base of his skull. The hairs on the back of his neck rose as the neural whip pressed gently against his occipital bone. Dr. Jee, his voice tight, said, “You won’t feel anything.”
But he did.
Something uncoiled inside his skull as the cold tip of the whip pressed into his skin, probing his mesh, the synthetic nanofiber network he and almost everyone else born and raised on the mainland had had implanted at the base of their brain upon reaching adulthood. Like others of his generation, Saul had followed the natural progression from the glass oblong devices his grandparents had called “phones” to the holographic terminals people wore like jewelry, until at last they’d been meshed, wired for sound and image. The web made flesh.
On the mainland he had walked in two worlds, the world of data layered upon the world of the senses, each made palpable and nearly indistinguishable from one another. The paraverse. For the first few weeks he and his fellow shareholders had suffered from withdrawal, only gradually coming to accept the limitations of a single set of senses. Most people adapted quickly; only a few still felt the need for the Mesh Anonymous twelve-step meetings that took place in the Chapel on Sunday mornings. For Saul, the loss of the paraverse came simultaneously with the loss of Suzanne and all his inchoate hopes. He had been a regular at the meetings for the first few years, sitting in a folding chair in the basement, looking up at the sympathetic eyes all around. Hello, my name is Saul, and I’m a paraholic. And the chorus of responsive voices: Hi, Saul.
Now he was slipping again beneath the surface of the paraverse. On the mainland it had supplemented his senses with the facts about whatever he was looking at: the history of the Golden Gate Bridge, a VC’s Wikipedia page, or the ingredients of a burrito, data splayed before him without his having to search for it. Reactivated, his mesh pierced the veil of Concord’s projectors, which had been designed to appeal to the old senses; they were literally tricks of the light. Through augmented eyes he saw the consulting room no longer as a Norman Rockwell painting of an early twentieth century physician’s surgery. Instead it was lined with screens and sleek virtual devices for taking a patient’s data. A scan of his nervous system floated on the ceiling, looking down on him through vacant white eyes. Vertigo swam. Instinctively his eyes flickered up to the upper left quadrant of his vision—yes, there, the liquid sigil that had been required by law of all advanced AR and VR rigs. The watermark that told him what he saw was not, strictly speaking, real.
The unsettling sensation of something shifting in his head, like an animal turning over in its burrow, faded. Jee’s eyes flickered as he scanned the patterns of data floating in the air. “Readings are normal. Your mesh is dormant and has been since your last full medical can, almost six months ago.” He made a barely discernible gesture and the projected images faded away, the watermark with them, leaving Saul alone again in his body, relieved and yet bereft. Only the office projector continued to present an MRI-style image of Saul’s brain activity in the air for them both to contemplate. “You see?”
“Six months?”
“Five months and twenty-seven days.” Jee moved the dataforms around for a moment, tapped the screen again, shrugged. “Perhaps your symptoms are…”
“Psychosomatic,” Saul said. “Yeah.”
“Tell me about them.”
Saul stared at the screen, at the fractal blossom of his mind. Could it be telling the truth? Could he? “They’re migraines,” he said at last. “They make me a bit nauseous but they’re not that painful. Mostly I just feel the, what do you call it. The aura.”
“When does this happen? What time of day?”
“Early.” Saul involuntarily touched his bandaged forehead and winced. “Before I wake up, when I’m still dreaming.”
“And what is it you dream?”
Saul turned away from the scan to look Jee in the face. “Nothing unusual.”
“The dreams are not especially vivid? Do you remember them?”
“No.”
Jee nodded. “These dreams, they happen only at night?”
“When else?”
The doctor picked up a prescription pad from his desk and started scribbling. He tore off the sheet and handed it to Saul.
“What is this? A stabilizer?”
“Everyone takes them,” Jee said lightly. “Why not you?”
“Will it help with the headaches?”
“Let’s see.” Jee watched Saul getting dressed. “Anything else on your mind?”
Saul slipped on his tie. His head felt wonderfully clear. “Yes. Lila Vespucci.”
Jee’s face clouded. “She’s overdue for her fertility check. What about her?”
Saul weighed what he was about to say. Linc was a good man, a trusted man. They had known each other for years, even before Concord’s launch. But behind the crinkled eyes and the easy manner, Saul sensed something else, a great weariness, like a man carrying a burden that was slowly, inexorably bearing him down to the ground. Could he trust him to bear a bit more.?
“She’s fertile, all right,” he said slowly.
Dr. Jee brightened. “That’s wonderful news.”
“Is it?” Saul asked bluntly. “She’s not even eighteen, Doc.”
“Nonetheless, it’s good news,” Jee said. “Good for her, better for Concord.” He pressed his palms together. “Marco will be pleased, I expect.”
“Marco doesn’t know,” Saul said harshly. “Nobody knows. And I want you to help me keep it that way.”
“What is it you are saying, Saul?”
“She needs our help, Linc.”
Dr. Jee opened his mouth to protest, but just then there was a sharp rap on the door. Both men whirled to see Nurse Bruce’s oleaginous head thrust through the door. “Your four o’clock is here.” He took in their shocked expressions. “Everything all right?”
“Everything is fine,” Jee said quickly. He took the prescription slip out of Saul’s hand and waved it at Bruce. “Run this for Mr. Klein, won’t you?”
Bruce accepted the scrip into his enormous hand and sniffed at it. He left without closing the door. Jee shut it with a bang. He glared at Saul. “Are you insane?”
“We have to help her, Linc.”
“What do you mean, we?” Jee hissed. “Do you understand what you’re asking me to do?”
“I’m not asking you to do anything. Yet.”
Jee made an impatient gesture and a column of projected figures danced onto the blank white wall. “Fertility is down sixty percent from five years ago. Do you know what that means? Sixty percent! Live births are even worse.”
“Just have her in for a routine exam,” Saul said. “Make sure everything is okay. I’m not asking you to tell me the results.” He forced a neutral expression onto his face. “It’s not like we’re related or anything.”
“I’m going to forget we had this conversation, Saul.”
“I’ll ask her to come in,” Saul said. “Then you listen to her. Okay? That’s all I’m asking you to do. Listen.”
Dr. Jee looked at him and Saul glimpsed anguish in his eyes. Then the doctor turned away. “Pick up your prescription,” he said coldly. “I have other patients today.”
Saul left him to smooth his ruffled feathers and walked out into the waiting room. A few shareholders sat in the chairs, leafing through replica magazines. Nurse Bruce was waiting behind his window. He shoved a white bottle of pills toward Saul. “Take one daily.”
“For how long?” asked Saul as he picked up the bottle.
Bruce beetled his heavy brows. “Until we tell you to stop.” He came out from behind the window and barred Saul’s way. “Take one now.”
Saul paused. “I don’t have any water.”
Glaring, Bruce stalked to the water cooler, filled a paper cone, then trudged back over to Saul and thrust it at him. Saul tapped a pink pill into his palm, held it up before Bruce’s eyes, and popped it in his mouth. He accepted the cone, toasted Bruce with it, and drank. “Satisfied?”
“One a day,” Bruce said gratingly. “Until we tell you to stop.”
On his way out the door of the Clinic Saul turned his head and spat the pink pill into the bushes. The projected sheep cropped projected grass. He strode through one, and it bleated in protest.
His path home took him past the Créche, a compound within a compound on the opposite side of the Green, near the Constabulary. The stately central building, the Sisters’ dormitory, and a large playground were covered entirely by a curtain of reinforced glass that arched upward into a dome, sealing it off from the rest of the village. A few couples and here and there single women stood at a wistful distance, watching the children play in the sandbox or come giggling down the slide into the arms of a presumably smiling gray-masked Sister. Standing on the steps of the main building was the slight form of Mother Dorian herself, watching over her charges. She wore an ankle-length black skirt and a ruffled white blouse with a cameo at the throat, coal-black hair swept up in a bun. The parents glanced at her anxiously, as if fearful she might come out from behind the glass wall and chase them away.
Saul thought about what Dr. Jee had said about falling birthrates. If his figures were accurate they had fallen behind the minimum replacement rate that had been discussed at the Association meetings all those years ago. “The human factor,” Doctor Jee had told the group back then, with an elegant shrug, “is difficult to control for.”
“You can’t fault us for trying,” Saul murmured to himself.
He stood a few yards back from the glass barrier against which the parents pressed breathlessly, trying not to call attention to themselves yet hoping against hope to be noticed, picked out, by the children they called their own. The Sisters of the Crèche moved among their tumbling, shouting charges in their mouse-colored uniforms, sometimes stooping to murmur an inaudible word into a misbehaving tot’s ear. One of the single mothers, whom Saul should have recognized but didn’t, glanced over her shoulder at the pair of deputies leaning on their strollers behind her, and suddenly walked off, busying herself with her purse, as though she’d remembered an important engagement. The deputies watched her go. Their masks were not, the villagers were taught, intended to inspire fear. These men might well themselves be fathers who, deputized for the day, might visit their children at the windows of the Crèche, pulling their masks up and down to make them laugh. Peekaboo. The gray no-faces reflected featurelessly from the depths of the triple-layered glass.
The name of the remaining woman suddenly flashed on Saul: Teresa Alvarez stood by herself with her arms folded tightly against her chest, as if to stop herself from pressing her face to the glass. Physical contact with the curtain was frowned upon; it was difficult to clean. Only a year ago she had been Saul’s student. Foregoing apprenticeship she had instead made herself into a mother, a breeder, instantly a pillar of society, a provider of the most vital of Vital Services. Her child had lived, making her a provisional shareholder; if he graduated at the age of 12 into her custody, she would come to enjoy Concord’s full privileges. She noticed him and offered him a little wave. He walked toward her slowly, trying to smile.
“Hello, Mr. Klein.”
“Hello, Teresa. How is your boy? How old is he now?”
“He’s doing well,” she said, smiling tightly. “Eight months.”
“Do they bring the infants to the playground?”
“Not often. But I come anyway. Every day. I always think that today will be the day I might see him.”
They stood side by side, watching the children play.
“It’s not so bad,” she said. “I see him four times a week. I pump my milk, and they say he drinks it—I’m not embarrassing you, am I, Mr. Klein?”
“Not at all.”
Her cheeks were flushed. “I don’t think it’s right,” she said quietly. She glanced over her shoulder at the deputies, then turned quickly away. She looked pleadingly into his face. “A baby should be with his mother, don’t you think?”
“It’s for his own good,” Saul said. He watched Mother Dorian pluck a speck of something off her sleeve. “There are infections to shield him from, pathogens… You must have learned about them in Mrs. Rodefer’s class.”
“Of course,” she said, turning away to search the playground. “The safety of the children comes first. They’re very safe in there.”
“Yes,” he said. He felt a lurch of nausea and a white star seemed to burst suddenly like a halo over the top of Teresa’s head. Everything he told her was true, so why did he feel like he was in the wrong?
“I pump my milk,” Teresa said again. “I give it to them every day. But do they use it?” She looked at him beseechingly. “Toxins. They need to protect him from toxins in my body. That’s what they tell me. I give it to them anyway. I say, let him drink it, please. I’m his mother, Mr. Klein. His mother.”
He cleared his throat. “What’s his name?”
“Tomás.” She put a hand on the glass. “He’s big. And healthy. They let me hold him once, three months after he was born. I had to wear full PPE, a plastic gown, a mask, and a respirator. He must have thought I was a monster. But he didn’t cry. And I could feel him, you know—his weight in my arms. And I think that he could feel me.”
“I’m sure he could,” he said awkwardly.
“Do you have children, Mr. Klein?”
He placed his palm on the glass, felt its cool smoothness, its density and weight, wondering what he’d say. The truth, so far as anyone knew it. “No.”
She smiled, and to his surprise, reached out to touch his shoulder. “There’s still time, you know. You’re not so old.”
He shook his head, embarrassed. “I’d better go.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Klein. Be seeing you.”
“Be seeing you, Teresa.” He hesitated before putting his hand on her shoulder briefly, forcing himself to meet her eyes. “Take care of yourself.”
Though the glass was designed to be non-reflective he could picture himself mirrored in it anyway, growing smaller and smaller as he walked away, leaving Teresa alone there, waiting for a glimpse of her son.
