Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

Frances maintained the pretense that all was normal. “Oh, not the shuttle,” she complained. “You said we could use the gliders.”

“Next time.” Judy gave a last look around her lounge. Low tables and tatami mats stood in the center, extending the Japanese theme she had adopted wholesale since moving here to the Shawl. “Now, should I wear shoes?” she wondered, looking at the white split-toed tabi on her feet. “We are going Earth-side, after all.”

Frances was fiddling with an ornament: a metal horse’s head that stood on a nearby chest.

“You can get some down there if you need them,” she said.

“I suppose so. Come on, let’s go.”

A black bundle tied up with ribbon lay by the wood-and-paper door, a yellow card and a red carnation tucked into the band. Judy picked them out and beamed.

“From the EA. Only five more days…Enjoy!” she read from the card. She touched the carnation to her lips, breathing in its scent. She wondered what awaited her outside this morning. Judy slid the flower into her hair, just beside the black rod of her console. Frances adjusted it for her as she untied the bundle and shook out the loose black cape it contained. She hung that around her shoulders.

“This should be good,” Judy said, then slid aside the door and looked out into her section of the Shawl. There was a fluttering as a robin came into the room, but Judy ignored it. She was too taken by what she could see outside, looking out into the space of the World Tree.

A great swirl of color and sound came bubbling up from below. She was gazing into a well of light and life, of paper banners hanging from the grey branches of the tree that filled the central space. The World Tree: a genetically modified beech that ran the 1.616-kilometer length of the section. In this place gravity had been set to run towards the roots of the tree, so that for Judy, living as she did towards the apparent top of this section, stepping from her apartment was like stepping out over a kilometer-deep drop. A white ramp led from Judy’s door to join the tangle of other white ramps that threaded their way through the silver-grey branches, and the section’s other inhabitants walked and rode those ramps, or flew between them on gliders and spider lines.

And this morning they had all chosen to dress in black and white, and they all wore a red carnation.

The laugh that had been building inside Judy bubbled out and she turned to Frances.

“Come on,” she shouted. “Join in!” But Frances was already changing the golden skin of her body to banded patterns of black and white. The buttons between her legs blossomed red like a flower.

The last days of a Shawl section were always a celebration. Today the EA had set people walking about their business at regular intervals, great loops of people moving along the ramps at a steady pace, forming zebra patterns as Judy looked down through the paper-hung branches of the World Tree. Pale blue light shone down from above as they skipped down the ramp to join one of the main loops that led to the intrasection paths. A gap opened up in the black-and-white lines of people as they approached.

“Hey, Judy!” called a man, waving. He wore a black one-piece suit and a white hat, a carnation tucked in the band. “Coming to the party at the treetop?”

“No time,” Judy called, waving back with both hands. “Why aren’t you wearing a kimono, Glenn?”

“Didn’t have one in a suitable color,” he called back, and then the crowd spun him down a different ramp.

There were calls from behind: “Wave! Wave!”

Judy and Frances turned to see people jumping in the air, arms outstretched, a wave of people heading their way; fluttering down through the air beside the human movement came a formation of paper streamers spelling out words in black and white:

FIVE MORE DAYS…

FROM THE ASHES…

CELEBRATE LIFE!

WE‘RE GOING DOWN IN STYLE

Judy turned to Frances, a beaming black smile across her white face.

“I love this place,” she said, sighing.

Judy lived in Section 49 of the twenty-sixth level of the Shawl. The last remaining sections of the twenty-fifth level had been released to their fiery ends in Earth’s atmosphere a few months before. The first few sections out of the twenty-sixth level were due to start falling in the next couple of days, and despite her upbringing, despite the constant reinforcement of the need for change proclaimed by Social Care, this thought filled Judy with sudden sadness.

Frances spoke: “What’s the matter with you?”

The robot was leaning against the transparent wall of the bubble that the section airlock had blown to transport them up to the forty-second level and the shuttle station. Her body, now turned back to smooth gold, was visible as a faint reflection, deep in the plastic of the bubble. Judy studied the ghost of her own reflection, half seen against the blackness of space beyond.

“I know I shouldn’t think this,” said Judy petulantly, “but I don’t want the section to fall.”

Frances reached out and took her hand. “No one ever said you shouldn’t feel regret, Judy. You know that.”

“I know,” Judy said. “I was assigned to a group of people just last week who were trying to form a protest group. They wanted to save the World Tree. And I thought: they have a point, don’t they? It’s a shame for it to die.”

“It is,” Frances agreed.

“Oh, I know,” Judy said quickly, “all things must pass. The circle of life, all that sort of thing. I understand that we can’t just keep taking from the Earth and not allowing anything to return. I agree with the Transition. We couldn’t have gone on as we were. Even so, when you come up against it, it all seems so harsh and cold-blooded.”

“It is, but so is life. On Earth, on the Shawl, in the processing spaces. After the Transition, the EA removed that illusion. Do you want people to go on hoarding goods to no end, establishing ideas founded on a permanence that is not feasible?”

“Of course not.” Judy looked down at the Earth beneath her feet. “Of course not. But every time I step out of my door and see the World Tree now, I imagine it falling towards the Earth, a cloud of VNMs expanding around it. It makes me feel regretful.”

“But Judy, that’s the way the Shawl works. New sections will grow at the top and begin their slow progress downwards. You know that.”

And then I dream about the tree burning through the night sky, branches shriveling in the heat, bark peeling away and flashing to nothing, and me riding the trunk, my body blackened and dead, my mind still living and screaming in pain as all that carbon goes down to rejoin mother Earth .

“You believe in permanence, Judy,” Frances said. “It’s part of your character. Look at your sisters: some people actively seek to be different from their personality constructs. Not you. Only your dress is different…”

“It’s the job,” Judy said. “You don’t like to think that it changes you.”

A widening dark line above them was the twenty-seventh level. The bubble in which they traveled, caught in the fields of the connecting filaments, rode a flexible path that threaded the successive layers of sections rising to the thirtieth level, where the closest shuttle station lay. Pastel lettering wrapped itself around the skin of the bubble as they entered Section 50 of the thirtieth level, listing the local environmental parameters.

Gravity: along direction of section height

Atmosphere: STP

Day: Earth latitude 20° north (locked)

General Description: park land along major section surface. Not just a shuttle station! Come and spend some time in the well-kept grounds that make up the rest of our section! Mown lawns, tended trees. Relax on foot or horseback. Explore secluded pathways on your own or with friends, old and new!