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I don’t want to trade anything! I almost exclaim to him, and then I realize that he seems to be sincere.
I point to the Sisyphus River on the map, one tiny black thread of hope running along the paper. “Do you know anything about this river?” His voice hushes. “I heard a story about it once when I was younger. A long time ago the river turned toxic partway down and no one could live near its banks. But that’s al I’ve heard. ”
“Thank you,” I tel him, because now I have an idea, thanks to what I’ve learned about the way our elderly die. Could our Society have poisoned the waters on their way down to the enemy country? But Ky and his family weren’t poisoned. Perhaps they lived farther up, in the higher of the two Provinces along that river.
“It’s only a story,” the man warns me. He must have seen the hope flash across my face.
“Isn’t everything?” I say.
I walk out of the Museum and I do not look back.
My Official waits for me in the greenspace outside the Museum. Wearing white, sitting on a white bench, backed by a white-yel ow sun. It’s too much; I blink.
If I close my eyes a little I can pretend that this is the greenspace next to the game center, where I wil meet my Official for the first time. I can pretend that she’s going to tel me that there’s a mistake with my Match. But this time things wil take a different turn, go down a different path, one where Ky and I can be together and happy.
But there is no such path, not here in Oria.
She gestures for me to come and sit by her on her bench. It strikes me that she’s chosen a strange place to meet, right here next to the Museum doors. Then I remember that it’s a perfect place, stil and empty. Ky was right. No one here is interested in the past.
The bench is carved of stone and feels solid and cool from the hours it spends in the shade of the Museum. I put my hand against the rock after I sit down, wondering where they quarried the stone. Wondering who had to move the rocks.
This time I speak first. “I made a mistake. You have to bring him back. ”
“Ky Markham has already had one exception made for him. Most Aberrations don’t even have that,” she says. “You’re the one who sent him away. You’ve proven our point. People who let the data slide, who let emotions get involved, create a mess for themselves. ”
“You did this,” I say. “You set up that sort. ”
“But you performed it,” she says. “Perfectly, I might add. You might be upset; his family might be devastated, but it was the right decision, as far as his ability was concerned. You knew he was more than he pretended to be. ”
“He should be the one who decides whether to go or stay. Not me. Not you. Let him choose. ”
“If we did, everything would fal apart,” she says, patiently. “Why do you think we can guarantee such long life spans? How do you think we eradicated cancer? We Match for everything. Genes included. ”
“You guarantee these long life spans but then you kil us at the end. I know about the poison in the food for people like Grandfather. ”
“We can also guarantee a high quality of life up until the very last breath. Do you know how many miserable people in how many miserable societies across the years would have given almost anything for that? And the method of administering the—”
“Poison. ”
“Poison,” she says, unflinching, “is unbelievably humane. Smal doses, in the patient’s favorite foods. ”
“So we eat to die. ”
She dismisses my concern. “Everyone eats to die, regardless of what we do. Your problem is that you don’t respect the system and what it offers you, even now. ”
This almost makes me want to laugh. The Official sees the twist of my lips and launches into a list of examples, of ways I’ve broken with the Society’s rules in the past two months—and she doesn’t even know the worst of them—but she doesn’t cite a single example from al the years before. If she had a way to track al my memories, she would see they are pure. That I truly wanted to fit in and be Matched and do everything the right way. That I truly believed.
That part of me stil believes.
“It was time for this little experiment to end anyway,” the Official says, sounding regretful. “We don’t have the manpower to focus on it anymore.
And, of course, situations being what they are—”
“What experiment?”
“The one with you and Ky. ”
“I already know,” I say. “I know that you told him. And I know it was a bigger mistake than you led me to believe that first time we spoke. Ky was actual y in the Matching pool. ”
“It was no mistake,” she says.
And I am fal ing again, just when I thought I had hit the bottom.
“We decided to put Ky into the Matching pool,” she says. “Now and then we do that with an Aberration, simply to gather additional data and watch for variation. The general public doesn’t know about it; there’s no reason they should. What’s important for you to know was that we were in control of the experiment al along. ”
“But the odds of him Matching with me—”
