Джеймс Келли: The true history of the end of the world

There were perhaps thirty hardcopy books in the farm's library room, which was across the hall from Roberta's office. But Chester was not looking for books. He used the datagate to retrieve the architect's plans for the cooperative, and downloaded them into a secure file in his journal, called "Magus."

Over the past few weeks, as he learned his way around the farm, parts of the plan had come clear. The farm kept chickens, a few cows for milk, and six vats of solarfish; all were for refusenik consumption. The cash crops grew in two hydroponic greenhouses, buried in the earth for insulation. From a distance their flat transparent krylac roofs made them look like plastic lakes. Greenhouse #1 was filled with long season crops: tomatoes, eggplant, okra, celery and melons. Greenhouse #2 supplied leafy vegetables: lettuce, chard, pak choi, kale, and cabbage. Labor-intensive fresh produce grown year-round for the restaurant and gourmet grocery trade; the Corley Mitchell Accommodation Farm actually turned a slight profit for the C-K state.

The underground utility room which housed the hydroponic recirculators and greenhouse heating system was virtually impregnable. From it he could emerge to grant interviews, with ranks of swiss chard as a reassuring backdrop.

Bet Wiley was group leader for Greenhouse #2. Chester eagerly volunteered to work there, hoping to discover some way to bend her to his purposes. Brother Emil chose her group as well, no doubt for the same reason. However, as the weeks wore on, each discovered that she was as dedicated to her brassicas as she was to the Mother of God. She had little time for idle chatter. When she spoke at all, it was usually to the plants. Chester tried endlessly to draw her out about the accident, C-K politics, why she had become a refusenik. She was as slippery as a melon seed. At least Brother Emil was being similarly frustrated. Often as not, the two of them ended up trying to convert one another.

Bet's volunteers spent five hours a day in the greenhouse, monitoring the

nutrient solution, staking climbers, moving seedling flats, cornposting spent plants. Their most arduous task was hand-picking a maddening variety of pests off the plants: white flies and spider mites and mealy bugs and scale. The irony of this task was not lost on Chester. Just as he plucked offending aphids from the backs of lettuce leaves, so had the civics removed him from the alleys of Manhattan. When he shared this observation with Brother Emil that day, Bet chanced to overhear.

"But you were not removed," she said. "You were brought to where you belong. This is what She wanted." Her gesture encompassed the three of them. "You both working together. Working with me for Her."

"Mrs. Wiley," said Chester, "I wonder how much you know about the two of us, about the different nature of our respective pursuits."

Bet shook her head. "She has told me more about you than you ever could."

"But — "

"You both grew up knowing that the world you were bom into must end," she said. She tumed to Chester — "For you it was a somber realization," — and then to Brother Emil — "For you, ecstatic revelation. But it was the same thing. And you're both afraid you failed. She knows, so I know."

"This mirrors my current thinking exactly," said Brother Emil excitedly. "It occurred to me in group: by claiming to resolve both our agendas, the Carcopino society reveals them to be one and the same."

"I don't for a minute grant your point."

"Look at it this way," said Sanger. "Isn't all visionary political thinking, like yours, ultimately utopian? By definition?"

"Possibly."

"And isn't a utopian state one where communion between different men, and

different nations, is so complete that it becomes a state of spiritual —

apotheosis?"

"An ideal politics might send me groping for metaphors like 'communion,' and 'spiritual,' and 'apotheosis,' but they would still be metaphors, employed in describing a thing that would still be politics."

"Wait, listen: in a politically achieved utopia, wouldn't each individual be free from political concems, class questions, questions of survival and economics?"

"I expect so." Chester noticed that Bet had slipped away.

"Free, therefore, to concentrate on questions of the individual's existence, development, fate- on spiritual questions?"

"If the individual in question so desired," he grumbled.

Brother Emil grew more excited. "Listen, Chester. Isn't that precisely the deficiency you sense in the Carcopino state? They claim it as a utopia, yet the individuals are all bright surface, without depth, like energetic children! Having made the world one state under Carcopino, they should be struggling with new levels of meaning, new emancipations. Instead, they appear completely lacking in breadth, completely numbed to any sense of the great human cause, of tragic profundity, the great story."

Chester was silent.

"The only utopia is heaven," said Bet Wiley, passing by with a flat of kale seedlings. "And She says heaven is nothing more than true freedom."

At that moment they were interrupted by the appearance of a group of school children, led by Dwight. Chester stiffened; it was the first group of C-K tourists he had seen at the farm. A boy — Chesterguessed he was twelve or thirteen — stepped forward, his expression bright and attentive. "Please go on with what you were saying," he said, and then smiled encouragingly at Bet, Chester and Brother Emil. "I was interested in hearing your thoughts on freedom."

As he looked at the boy's open face it came to Chester with renewed force how few they were, how large the C-K society, how formidable were the forces arrayed against his retum to power. This boy probably couldn't remember a time before the boost. Chester felt swirling up out of him a despair as black as any he'd ever known.

"My thoughts on freedom are in the public record," he said to the boy, and turned and strode quickly out of the greenhouse. 7.

After stalking around the grounds in a black rage for twenty minutes, he found himself at the end of the drive. The highway stretched east and west like an invitation. He wasn't a prisoner; no one was going to stop him. The worst that could happen was that some civic would pick him up, feed him supper and call the farm. But which direction should he pick? East, back to Farron's Landing and the train?

To the west, the road curved off into the trees. The air had a late-fall bite to it, a hint of the winter just around the comer. West was America's direction, the bearing of manifest destiny. It beckoned.

The road to manifest destiny was, however, falling apart. The C-K state had over-regulated the private automobile to the point of extinction. The vast amounts of money that for the better part of a century had been expended on making and maintaining roads were being spent elsewhere.

A couple of miles down the road he came upon a farm house. White frame, at least a hundred years old. On the roof a satellite dish the size of a wok listened silently to the southern sky. In the yard was a tangle of aluminum siding that had been ripped off the house. Beside it, covered by a blue tarp, was a stack of clapboards in twenty foot lengths. Something he had overheard at the center sparked in his memory: Roberta telling Darla Coy that she was restoring an early twentieth century house.

He tried the side door and found it unlocked. A large butcher block table, scarred and darkened from years of use, dominated the kitchen. It seemed somehow barbaric. Roberta managed to live without a dishwasher, microwave or hydratot. The breakfast dishes were neatly aligned in the drying rack by the sink. One bowl, one spoon, one coffee cup.

Her office was upstairs. In one comer was her personal datagate, the latest from Cognico. There was also a flowered futon and a charmingly anachronistic metal filing cabinet. The walls were plastered with dozens of stickers for long departed pre-millennial political organizations: Amnesty International, National Rifle Association, Gays for God, The Alphysics Movement, InfoMass, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the Moral Majority. The names stirred a cloud of associations from Chester's youth. Some of these he had belonged to; others he had fought.