Be Thou My Vision (The Population Series) Read online

  “That, Io, is not your choice to make. That’s ours.”

  Io, Make a Copy

  “Again. Try again.”

  Pressed to my temples as though to funnel my every thought into a single, unified stream, my hands tremble with hopeless effort as I struggle to obey the woman’s command. The chair sits neglected a meter behind me, abandoned after I slid to the floor, after my attention became so fully focused on my mind, even sitting up straight became a chore and a distraction. Before me, a blank white wall mocks my laboring mercilessly, ugly and bare compared to the brilliant image illuminated in the floor below. Never before have I seen such undying luminosity, colors I never knew existed intermixed into so many shades and hues, my eyes ache with a primeval longing for more.

  And that’s exactly what the white-coated people behind me are telling me to do. Make a copy, they told me. Take the picture you see on the floor and make it appear simultaneously on the wall using only your mind. But for all the good it’s doing, they might as well have told me to tear down that same wall with my little finger. In fact, that would probably be the easier of the two tasks, because at least I would know where to start. Make a copy of the image? What does that even mean?

  “I can’t do it.” It wounds my ego to so repeatedly and readily admit defeat, but my hope and pride both fled days ago, taking each other by the hand and sprinting out the door, never to return again.

  A man standing behind me responds, “You can do it. You just aren’t doing it. Again.”

  “It’s not my choice. I don’t know how.” I try to turn around, to directly address my captors, but a pair of hands grabs my head and without hesitation forces me to face the image. At this point, it’s the last thing I want to look at, but the choice has never been mine.

  “Not at us. At the picture. Right now you’re just looking at it. You have to see it.”

  I squint and then widen my eyes, tilt my head one way and the other, but nothing changes. The same collection of angles, lines and shapes, the names of which I can’t quite place, greet me not like an old friend, but like an incessant memory dogging me in the dead of night. For hours now, this has been going on, and even the bright colors have lost their initial thrill.

  My eyes begin to tear up in passive frustration as I shake my head. Some part of me is furious with myself for permitting this sort of pathetic reaction, but it’s an incredibly minute part whose influence was decimated the moment I woke up after the Last Chance. The rest of me just can’t find the strength to care.

  “I can’t do it.”

  The woman calls to some unseen Governor, “Peter, this one isn’t going to work for her. She doesn’t get the abstract stuff. Try the one of the atrium.”

  A scattering of blue lines dance laterally across the screen, flashing in an alternating fervor until, one by one from the top down, they are replaced with the makings of a new image. After a few seconds, the atrium glares out at me from within the square, just as it looked when we used to watch the Last Chance on the screens in our dormitories. But it’s so much clearer, so much more colorful, if that’s even possible with all the white walls. I would say it was a window were we not, I remind myself, already sitting somewhere deep below that very space.

  “Try again.”

  And I try. I give it just as much effort as I did before, if not more, but to no avail. The wall remains as blank and dull as ever.

  “Try tossing her around a bit. You’d be surprised the kind of results fear produces in them.” This one is a new voice, rough and choppy, but of a higher pitch than it should be for the man who produces it. It irritates my ears to the highest degree.

  The woman cuts him off definitively. “No. Absolutely not. Stress is only useful to a certain point before it becomes injurious. The last thing we need is for her to shut down entirely.”

  I hear her sigh and I can feel her eyes, all of their eyes, drilling into the back of my neck, focused on the spot just below my hairline that my fingertips have repeatedly found in the days since I woke up. A miniscule scar, two intersecting lines each no more than a centimeter long, marks the location through which the chip passed on its way into my head. It’s strange how something that left so little a visible mark could have such a massive effect on my life, my future.

  This place – the sights, sounds, smells, feelings and everything associated with it – is so completely unlike the image of expectation I have held in my mind for all these years, I can scarcely convince myself that I’m not going to wake up in a few minutes, the sole witness to a nightmare that challenges my every perception of where I belong in the world. In the pit of my stomach there’s a growing hollowness that stretches all the way to my heart and mind, out to my feet and hands, which have lost even their blessed familiarity to the complete foreignness of these circumstances. And with every tiny comfort I lose, it becomes just that much greater an effort to cling to whatever little persistent bit of hope still exists in me. Compared to here and now, the optimism I felt upon first leaving the Last Chance seems nothing more than a vague memory made brilliant by the generous distortions of hindsight.

  I jump as a door shuts roughly behind me. The image of the atrium lingers on the floor, but I can tell without looking that I’m entirely alone in this room. Every part of me aches in desperate protest as I struggle back to my feet, legs half numb from disuse and head throbbing from just the opposite, but I find more comfort in the pain than I have in anything else for days. If nothing else, I recognize it.

  The sound of the door opening once again triggers an involuntary shiver through my spine, a deeply intuitive belief that these people are my enemies. It’s odd that the thought hasn’t yet crossed my conscious mind, but nothing about it surprises me. An enemy is a hard thing to define, but neutral is too pleasant a term for the five people who now form a circle around me.

  “We’re going to try something new.”

  To Recreate the Sun

  A vertical monorail, one single car zooming straight upwards, brings us higher in the Governors’ City than I’ve ever been before, and given my history, that’s quite an accomplishment. But we travel straight through from below the atrium without so much as a glimpse of a window, so in reality, my sense of location is dependent only on a vague guess and whatever part of my brain is responsible for giving me those sensory hints. I figure we must be near the top, though, because the ride on the monorail was fast, but long, and there’s a sharp pain ringing through my ears that I doubt has anything to do with the chip in my head.

  When the doors of the monorail open, the blackness of a darkened room greets me like a spike of terror driven straight through my heart. In the nothingness, I feel the same awful horror that defined my first day awake, when they wouldn’t allow me to be exposed to any light and I was thoroughly convinced that they had decided to blind me after all. But with a person gripping each of my arms, I have no choice but to enter the room and fight back the hyperventilation that threatens my resolve. From somewhere in the darkness, a weak red light flares up, and one of the women crosses the room and begins counting off a series of panels on the wall.

  “What time is it, again, Dirk?”

  “Eight, our time. You’ll want the east side. Maybe the fifth one up.”

  “Maybe the fifth one? We have to be certain.”

  “Okay, definitely. Definitely the fifth one. Got it yet?”

  “Yeah, I think this one’s the one. Put on the glasses and cover her eyes.”

  A whirring mechanical noise echoes around us, and the panels begin to shift, sliding in rows and columns so that a single space, a shadowy patch without a metal cover, travels slowly across the wall before us, constantly being covered by one panel only to be uncovered in the adjacent spot. Finally, it comes to a stop directly in front of me, five spaces up.

  “Why are we covering her eyes?”

  “In case we get it wrong. It needs to be direct light, not just the glow.”

  “Get what wrong?” My question doesn’
t even hinder their rapport for a moment.

  “Is there a way we can check it?”

  “That’s what we’re doing. We’re wasting time, Dirk. Cover her eyes.”

  The silhouette of the woman against the dark red glow is replaced by black as a rough, dry hand, big enough to cover my entire range of vision, presses over my eyelids. Part of me fleetingly entertains the idea of resisting, more out of curiosity for their reactions than any true desire to flee, but again, rationale wins out and I succumb to apathy, tuning my ears to the proceeding conversation to guess at what my eyes can’t show.

  “Is that it? I remember it being brighter.”

  “No, we’re off by a few.”

  “Try the one above it. Oh, yeah. That’s it. Wow.” His hand tightens – inadvertently or not it’s hard to tell – over my eyes until the pressure begins to hurt. I pull back in discomfort but, voice half-lost in captivation, he mutters, “Not yet.”

  “Dirk, you can uncover her eyes. Dirk? Dirk!” The pressure, the darkness, fall away abruptly, and now I can understand his preoccupation.

  Because the light that greets my open eyes is like a breath of fresh air after ten thousand years in the sewers, like a sip of water when you haven’t had a drop in your life. My eyes throb in beholding the brilliance, burned as though by fire after so long in the darkness, but just like with the images earlier, they ache for more. I can’t understand this light, why they’re showing it to me, where it could possibly come from, the inordinate amount of energy it must take to power such a source, but it strikes a primitive chord somewhere deep in my heart that this is somehow my sustenance, my salvation. It’s like some part of me knew it was there all along. Never in my memory have I seen this light, but it’s so incredibly familiar.

  “Io, make a copy,” someone whispers in my ear, and it doesn’t sound quite so impossible anymore. I fix my eyes on the illuminative spot, exploring the way it plays off the corners of the missing panel, how visible rays spread outward, filling my range of vision and reaching around to just barely caress the edges. It floods into me, a sort of inexplicable warmth, and through a slowly growing pain that I can’t yet find reason to mind, I simply do as they tell me. I think of the blank array of panels to my left and, willing that the incredible light should appear a second time, it does.

  And then it begins to burn.

  As though the twin fires before me have burrowed their way into the back of my skull, the searing point forces my eyes shut and almost immediately incapacitates me, except for a whimper that forms involuntarily in my throat and triggers a noticeable reaction in the hands that hold me where I am. My thoughts are drowned out by a piercingly high note that no one else seems able to distinguish, but whatever its source, whatever its nature, it makes the pain radiate ten times worse throughout my head and mind. If this spark of agony were light, it would shine as bright as the ones before me, and yet through the fog of pain, I can hear very clearly the footsteps of one of the women entering behind me, her voice as she attempts to ascertain exactly what is occurring.

  “Is she doing that?”

  “It has to be her. It’s not us.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It’s the brightest we’ve ever seen, but I think something’s wrong.”

  “Please make it stop.” I don’t make any effort to keep a sob from slipping into my words, because, contrary to what I would have believed possible just seconds ago, the pain is still growing. Every degree of my effort, every ounce of my being, has now become dedicated to ending this pain, to escaping before my mind bends and then breaks under the unrelenting pressure.

  “No, not yet,” the woman commands. “The longer it goes, the wider the channel will open. The vicarious sight could become almost indistinguishable from reality. I want to see how far she can take it.”

  How far I can take it. The words echo through my mind not because of fear, not because of anger, but because they seem so useless. Doesn’t this woman know that I’ve already passed that point? That any minute now I could slip into the iron grip of insanity, never to return to my right mind again? And if madness isn’t the limit she has set for me, then what is? Death? At this point, the idea of eternal, infinite darkness sounds peaceful, welcoming. Anything at all to escape the pain.

  “Heather, I think it’s killing her…”

  “Longer. She can handle more than this. I know it.”

  “Her eyes are closed. She isn’t even looking at it anymore. Can you imagine what it’s doing to her mind, to recreate the sun?”

  “The untapped potential of the human mind isn’t something to quell. It’s marvelous, and marvelous things should be free.”

  “Yes, but there’s a difference between freedom and exploitation. Look at her.”

  “Fine, fine. Let her stop so she has time to recover. She’ll be of no use to her Plenties in this state.”

  That first flaming point of pain is now lost in the midst of what feels like a massive crack running through the back of my head, like all my bones breaking simultaneously with someone treading all over the jagged edges. Whatever I’ve done, either my endurance or the act itself, must have left an impression, because the voice of the man who now addresses me has lost its indifference, the awful unreadable neutrality. It’s saturated with uninhibited pity. “Io, you can stop now.”

  Somewhere deep inside, where the pain is more an ache, I find the strength to open my eyes, to look directly at the man who stood behind me when we were below the atrium and the woman who opened the panel. My words come out as a gasping whisper in my tears. “I don’t know how.”

  “It’s not hard. Easier than starting. Just let it go.”

  “I can’t. It’s not working. It hurts.” I feel myself curling tighter into a ball, fighting even for consciousness as the energy slowly drains out of me, replaced by endless flames. Their eyes grow wide as they glance at each other, and some preserved rational corner of my mind wonders what I must look like now, a tiny girl compared to their Governor stature, curled up on the floor and sobbing with the pain that apparently comes with reproducing this brilliant, glittering, incredibly powerful light.

  “Heather, get Mack. We can’t lose her, too.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’m already here. Back away now, if you will. Give her some space.” It’s an old man’s voice that reaches my ears and an old man’s hands that sit me up from the position I’ve fallen into. I don’t fight his touch, but neither do I assist in the effort, wound up so tightly in my nearly hysterical weeping that, if not for his grip, I would fall back to my side on the ground.

  “Hello, Io. My name is Mack. That’s a beautiful picture you’ve created there, but I think that’s enough for now. You can stop.”

  “But I can’t!”

  “Now, that’s not a good attitude to have. I heard you were saying that earlier as well, and what good did that do you? Calm yourself and don’t focus on the pain. Just think about how you made the picture. Did you move it with your hands? Did you throw it there with your thoughts? Did you imagine it on the wall and believe it would appear?”

  Abruptly, like water thrown over flames, the second light disappears. The pain is quenched and I’m left trembling in the hands of this old stranger, sobbing all the harder in my relief. It’s over. That’s all I can think about, the sentence that bounces around endlessly in my skull. It’s over. Now that I’ve found my escape, my level of focus has dropped further in the absence of pain. As blissful sleep creeps silently over my waking thoughts, I hear a last particle of conversation between the old man and whoever is left to respond.

  “Take her back below the atrium. When she wakes up, give her something to eat or drink, whatever she wants. I’ll meet you there and then we’ll introduce her to the Plenties.”

  “You mean the chip isn’t broken, sir? It’s not supposed to do that.”

  “Not supposed to, or it just never has? There’s a difference, you know. What you saw there was the result of a chip being
inserted into a brain that is far more powerful than the technology we seek to integrate. It’s like a muscle that’s been waiting years to spring. Even she had trouble controlling it, but we shouldn’t run into that problem again in the city.”

  “So you think she’s ready?”

  “Oh, she’s ready. More ready than any Optic I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if you can hear me, Io, but your Plenty is going to be the luckiest person in this whole city.”

  The Tears of James

  Just minutes after I open my eyes, alone once again in the room below the atrium, the door opens and permits entry to the three men and two women from the room above. Linked at the arm with one of the women is an elderly lady, whose voluminous gray hair and loose fitting clothes dwarf her diminutive stature – diminutive, at least, for a Governor. Clinging to her like a piece of fabric drawn by static is a small boy, maybe six or seven years old, who, unlike any Plenty I’ve seen before, regardless of age, seems terrified by the fact that he cannot see. His arm is outstretched in compensation for what his eyes lack, and he swings it back and forth, continuously surveying the meter of space before him in search of obstacles. He remains quiet, though, as Heather introduces us.

  “Io, meet Ruth and James. Ruth and James, this is Io, your Optic.”

  I don’t respond. It’s not out of any particular drive for rebellion, but little more than the fact that I am still so incredibly exhausted, it takes all of my energy, mental and physical, just to keep my eyes open. I guess it’s a good thing they can’t see me right now.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Io.” The thin, fragile woman stretches out a dark, aged hand, waiting for me to place mine in it and complete the salutatory custom. I ignore it, and my lack of immediate compliance triggers a series of disciplinary glares from the Governors around me, but it seems they’ve lost most of their authoritative power after my performance in the room at the top of the atrium. After that sort of pain, there’s not much they have left to hold over my head. Fortunately for them, the arrival of the old man saves them from having to seek out a solution to my overt defiance. He shakes Ruth’s hand in my stead – which seems more appropriate to me anyway, given the way their skins’ leathery wrinkles complement each other so perfectly – and introduces himself.