Works/Early Dismissal

Arthur could always tell when Liet was up to something. He wasn't sure exactly how, because Liet was very good at hiding her games. A certain look maybe, the way her eyes shifted or her cheeks moved when she smiled. Or maybe it was that she smiled more. Liet was never as happy as when she had found some new trouble to get into.

She had her chair pushed way back now, outside even the roughest of rough circles, nearly against the wall. The Yudai said, "Liet, join us," without needing to turn. The kids all said the Yudai could see through the back of her head.

Arthur stopped watching Liet scrape her chair along the floor, pulling it gradually with her feet instead of standing up. He tried to concentrate on what the Yudai was saying. A page number. He flipped through the acres of print. Everything in this book looked alike. He hated having paper books. Only the Adjustment kids had to use paper books.

He looked up and saw the Yudai's eyes just barely dart away, caught in the act of watching him scowl at his book. He rubbed his face and tried again to concentrate on the discussion.

It was a really stupid book anyway. All the books they had were stupid. They were always trying to show the virtues of hard work and character and stuff like that, which was okay but not when it was the only thing they ever got to read about.

"That's enough for now," the Yudai said. Arthur blinked and looked up at the big square clock over the door, whose loud tick made it difficult sometimes to read when the room was quiet.

Now was the part he hated most of all, as the paired kids hurried out of the building together. Three hours to go. Sometimes he'd draw in his notebook, watching the Yudai out of one eye so he could hide it if she came by. Sometimes he'd make up stories. He didn't write any of those down. They were never about hard work and character.

He didn't talk to any of the other kids in the room, nor they to him. That was what your pair was for. Arthur was a little frightened by the idea of having a pair, but he knew it had to be better than sitting in the classroom for three hours every afternoon by himself, with only his ideas to break the quiet, and with the Yudai in her chair somehow managing to watch the whole room at once.

He used to talk to Liet, but for the last month she had been leaving with the paired kids. He'd asked her about it. She said her parent was on a special shift now and was home in the afternoons, so Liet was allowed to go home. Arthur doubted if Liet ever went straight home. But he kept that to himself. Talking to Liet always tired him out anyway. She went through ideas like tissues. She'd blow her nose on one idea, then immediately reach for another, leaving little wet discarded concepts in a pile around her feet. At least, that's what it felt like to Arthur. He kept that to himself too. He had learned to keep most things to himself.

Arthur's parent hadn't cried when they told her Arthur would need Adjustment. She hadn't even looked surprised. He'd only been a little kid then, of course, but he was sure he was remembering it right.

"Were you sad when they told you?" Arthur said, looking up from his dinner.

"When they told me what?" asked his parent, spearing a legume without enthusiasm.

"That I needed Adjustment." He tried to make it casual. Were you sad when they told you it would rain today?

She focused on him. Her eyes were ferocious when they weren't somewhere else. He forgot sometimes what they looked like with the light in them. The Yudai could do that - go from paying you utterly no attention to completely locked-on with such intensity that it could freeze you in your tracks. He was sorry he'd asked now.

"You don't like your school very much," she said.

"I guess not," he replied. "I mean, it's not horrible."

She watched him for a while and then decided to try salting the legumes. "There are things you don't understand yet," she said, wielding the shaker vigorously.

He knew then that she thought he was a freak too.

Adjustment was for the kids who needed help. The kids who wouldn't be able to survive in the world model without special guidance. The kids who had to be taught the things that everyone else knew without being told. Hard work and character.

He was so sick of it that the next day something in the back of his head finally erupted and he closed his book and threw it against the floor. The cover hit the tiles foursquare with a much bigger noise than he expected and the tiniest cloud of dust. The Yudai raised her eyebrows a tenth of an inch.

"Even if you don't like the book," she said, "there's no need to throw it."

Arthur stared at her.

"In return for that outburst," the Yudai said, "I want you to write me two thousand words for tomorrow. Show me what you think is wrong with the book, and why."

She returned to the discussion. Arthur eventually reached down and picked up the book. The Yudai's reaction kept replaying in his head, drowning out the rest of the discussion, drowning out the dismissal of the paired and Liet, and by the time he had come back to the classroom and the insistent ticking of the clock, the something in the back of his head had decided to do something dangerous.

He started writing. He kept writing, filling pages of lined paper until he became aware that the something in the back of his head was finally losing steam, and the Yudai was walking toward him. No one else was in the room.

"Your parent is going to start wondering where you are soon," she said.

"I think I'm finished with this," he said. She took the pages from him, but didn't look at them. He quickly gathered his things and ran out. Before she could read it.

Arthur didn't feel very hungry that evening. His parent even said, "Are you sick?"

"No," he said, and shoveled in some food to prove it before she could ask anything else.

She sighed. "By the way," she said, "I wanted to give you this before I forgot." She pushed a slip of paper across the table. "You do remember that tomorrow night I'm going out with my pair?"

He nodded. Then, as he reached for the paper, he stopped. "Can you write a new slip?"

"Why?"

"If I'm going to go to the childspace then I might as well go after class, when all the paired leave. I hate sitting around the school. Please?"

She gave him one of her looks, but then crumpled the old note and reached for a pen.

Arthur watched the Yudai all morning, waiting for an explosion that never came. She said nothing about it until they were changing materials for the book period. Then she called him over and handed him the pages.

"Excellent work," she said. "Remember this next time you find one of the books tedious." She picked up her book, stood, and walked over to the circle of chairs without saying anything else.

That was the moment when he decided.

He had sort of had it in the back of his head the previous night, but even that part of him knew it was too much, too far. Now he urgently needed it.

So when the Yudai let the paired go, and Liet - and today him - he didn't go to the childspace. Slowly, his heart pounding at his own audacity, he followed Liet. And, as he expected, she didn't go home.

Arthur kept out of sight behind her as she wandered into one of the new forests, not far from the school. He'd never been in one, of course; he didn't have a pair and his trips with his parent tended to be for shopping or to see some approved entertainment, not wandering around green places. The forests were supposed to be safe, just like everywhere else. He kept looking around as he crept forward, trying not to step on leaves or anything else noisy, while at the same time waiting for something to leap onto him at any moment. It was tricky work.

Then the forest began to thin out, and ahead of him he saw Liet begin to float into the air. He rubbed his eyes and moved a little closer; no, she wasn't floating, she was climbing a chain-link fence. Over the fence and gone. The land dipped on the far side. He ran to follow.

When he reached the fence, he froze. Below, in a valley, were the bodies of buildings not yet reforested. Several blocks of concrete and metal and broken plate glass, their colorful signs fading into unreadability. He had never seen a discarded zone before, but he had heard stories. Everybody had heard stories.

He saw Liet enter one of the buildings. No wandering. She had a destination. Arthur started to climb the fence, hands shaking.

Liet's doorway led into the dark. Arthur moved very slowly. Feeling his way down a hall, wondering what he was doing here, he suddenly emerged into a room where there was light. Dim light, but light. A large round room, with what was left of a carpet beneath his shoes, making a slightly rancid smell. The room seemed to be a place for people to sit and congregate; even though most of the furniture had been reduced to its skeletons by now, Arthur could see the basic layout of comfortable chairs arranged around a series of low tables, like a very large living room.

Liet was not there. The only other way out of the room was on the far side. It was a huge stairway, big enough for four or five people to walk abreast, leading downward. Arthur felt as if he was crossing that big room in slow motion. Every shaky step was a victory over his impulse to turn around and run out. Every movement sounded, to him, like it was amplified a hundred times, booming in his ears. On the brink of the stairway, he stopped for the longest time, unable to move.

Finally he descended into another dim area, another round room. The room had nothing in it, no features of any kind - except doors. Doors, dark enough to barely contrast against the room's circular wall. Lots of doors, all around the perimeter, spaced as closely as they would fit. He didn't stop to squint and count them because one of the doors was open, and through that door was a curtain of grayish, misty light - a glowing cloud concealing whatever lay behind it.

Arthur surprised himself by how quickly he moved to the door. He passed through the mist, and stood agape.

He stood on warm sand, the sunlight ferocious on his head. The sky was a brilliant and cloudless blue, the waves of the water visible just ahead a somewhat darker blue. Every so often he heard the cry of an unknown kind of bird. He smelled something salty.

He turned around. In front of him was a rectangle of gray mist with no visible means of support. Beyond that, stretching out behind the depthless rectangle, were dunes and palm trees, sea grass. He moved to the side of the rectangle and took a few tentative steps toward the dunes, hands in front of him, expecting to hit an invisible wall. He did not. He took a few more steps. Now he was climbing one of the dunes. A breeze from the ocean swirled over the top of his head. A little sweat had started to drip into his eyebrows. More than anything, he realized, he wanted to take off his shoes and socks, roll up his pants, and wade in the blue water.

A touch on his shoulder and Arthur shouted and spun around. The person who touched him shouted as well, and jumped back, and they both lost their balance and fell into the sand and stared at each other.

"How did you get in here?" Liet asked. "You followed me, didn't you? How'd you get out of school?"

"I'm supposed to be at the childspace. My parent's out tonight. What is this place?"

"Why'd you follow me?"

"I wanted to - I knew you were - I -"

"You're not going to tell anybody, are you?"

Arthur shook his head.

"Oh, okay then," Liet said, and bounced up, all sins forgotten. "Isn't this great? What do you think?"

He stood up slowly. "What is it?"

"It's a beach, silly."

"No, I mean this whole place."

"Oh. I don't know," she said. "But every room is someplace else. I mean, someplace that's another place. You know what I mean. They're not all beaches. Come on, try the water!" She scampered over the dune.

He followed. At the water's edge, he sat down on the sand and started to pull off his shoes. Liet had already been barefoot; she was splashing in the shallow part of the surf, watching the waves return and fill in her footprints. He sat and watched, suddenly reluctant to feel the water on his toes.

"Don't just sit there!" she said.

"Yesterday the Yudai gave me a penalty," he said. "Do you remember?"

"Uh-huh. You threw your book on the floor." She reflected on this. "It is a pretty dumb book."

"She asked me to show her what I didn't like about it. So finally I decided to write a story instead. I wrote a story that kinda showed the way I thought the book should go. Where the kid decides to do something different."

Liet flopped down next to him. "You didn't."

"It just came out of me. Like, once I got the idea, I couldn't do anything else. I wrote the whole thing that afternoon. I just got so mad and it all happened at once."

"Well, I guess she didn't kill you or anything." Liet was wide-eyed. "I saw her talk to you today. What did she do?"

"She said it was excellent. No, really! She said to remember it next time I got bored with one of the books."

Liet considered. "Like she's saying it's okay to do it again? But what about -"

"Adjustment, I know. I don't get it either. And I had to tell somebody."

"Wow." She stood up again and wandered into the surf. After a few minutes Arthur stood up and joined her. The water was just cold enough to be thoroughly pleasant.

"My parent isn't really on special shift," Liet said suddenly.

Arthur shrugged. "I kinda figured."

"Want me to show you how to make one of the forms? Then you could get out every afternoon too. Least until they find pairs for us."

He didn't have to consider it very long.

For the next few weeks, every afternoon, they would get out of school and hurry through the forest as quickly as they could. Arthur became as adept as Liet at fence-climbing. They would dash through the decaying furniture in the front room and pick a door, more or less at random. One room was a sort of desert town which Arthur figured must have been very old even when the room was new, with wooden buildings and barns and a variety of small structures which made both children giggle when they realized they were outdoor toilets.

Another put you into a short corridor with another massive door at the end; beyond that door, there was no gravity and they had to pull themselves along the skeletal, harshly-lit corridors by handholds. Once they encountered a large window in that place with nothing but stars and darkness outside.

Another was dense jungle, hot and very wet; Arthur didn't like that room much. Then there was a place with lots of bright signs and big rooms with green soft-topped tables with strange markings and little round plastic disks and strange machines which seemed to do nothing but spin and click and make noise. Yet another was a set of steep, snow-covered slopes and a large building with odd equipment. They never did figure out the room with the green tables, but eventually they solved this one: The idea was to put the long runners on your feet and use them to slide down the slopes at high speed. That was fun.

Arthur had been sitting in the classroom for most of one morning before he noticed that one of the desks was empty. He felt stupid, but it was a little bit better when another student suddenly asked the Yudai, "What happened to Martin?" He knew they hadn't noticed until then either.

"Martin no longer needs Adjustment," said the Yudai, and Arthur thought there was something about the way she said it. Maybe she was sad. It was hard to imagine the Yudai being sad or happy or anything like that, though.

But he didn't think of that right away, because his stomach was too busy flip-flopping from envy, even though he knew kids didn't stay in Adjustment forever. At least, most of them didn't. He'd probably be stuck there. He felt like being Adjusted got further away every day.

Part of him had hoped the afternoon activities would somehow make the rest of the day easier to take. But now he knew it was making things worse. Now it was almost torture to sit through the book period, at the end of the day, when he knew what was waiting outside. Worse, he found his attention wandering all the time; his sketches and drawings were threatening to fill up his entire notebook, and one day he realized he had started to write another story when he should have been doing commerce exercises.

Then came the day of the movie.

Every so often the Yudai would do this instead of the book period. The movies were no better than the books, but this one was the worst. Happy people at work, row after row, gray square building after building. There were no pictures of anyone coming home with their backs and necks held too tensely from exhaustion, with their hands red and abused, with their eyes distant and glassy. Like his parent. Did any of the people in this movie ever get to slide down snow or play on the beach? Then they showed the children with the Cai tutors, learning with an interactive display that actually looked like it might be interesting, instead of sitting with a chalkboard and paper books in a dusty room. Was this what Martin was doing now?

Normal kids. Hard work and character. They'd each go on to work in a gray square building and come home every night with red eyes and once in a while do something with their pair, maybe see an approved entertainment ... and eventually each would have their one child and that child would spend days with a Cai and get a pair and work in a box and have a child, and that child would ....

The film ended and the day was over, and Arthur ran out of the room without waiting for the Yudai to dismiss them.

"Hey! Wait for me," Liet said, panting to catch up with him.

Arthur wiped the last of the wetness out of his eyes. "Sorry," he said.

"It's okay," she replied. "Come on, forget about it."

He nodded and followed her into the new forest. They sped up as they approached the fence - then stopped dead as the valley came into view. Arthur clutched the fence, all his weight held up by his iron grip. His legs didn't feel like they could support him.

The buildings were all gone. Only rubble. A huge yellow machine rumbled on its treads and, as they watched, took the last bites out of a web of crumpled ironwork.

Eventually, painfully, they turned to look at each other. Then they turned their backs on the valley, finding the willpower to walk away. And then they froze again. Standing in the forest, some ten feet away, was their Yudai, watching them with utterly no expression on her face.

They all stared for a very long minute, the Yudai still impassive, the children utterly stunned. Then Arthur screamed: "Whose side are you on?"

He ran away before the Yudai could react.

Arthur very nearly used the sore throat from his scream as an excuse to stay home the next day. Being home sick was reserved for very dire conditions, though, as was anything that kept his parent from work, and he finally decided that whatever the Yudai could do to him couldn't possibly make him feel any worse than he already felt. Everything good had been taken from his life at once, with a chomp of big yellow jaws. He wasn't even sure why he'd said what he said. But he knew he hated the Yudai, and the world, and everything in it except maybe his parent and Liet.

The Yudai said absolutely nothing to him, good or bad, until the end of the day. He had almost begun to think nothing would happen, almost begun to relax a little, when she called his name. And Liet's. She dismissed the paired and had the two of them sit down in front of her desk.

"First," she said, "I think you should know that I have made the official recommendation that the two of you be paired. Of course that is subject to confirmation, but in practice it is as good as final. Do you both find that acceptable?"

They looked at each other, then recovered the presence of mind to nod to the Yudai.

"When the confirmation is finished, I will discard your forged papers for early dismissal, since you won't need them anymore."

Open mouths.

"Arthur, did you like the movie yesterday?"

As she fixed him in that fierce stare, he knew he couldn't tell the lie he was sure he was supposed to tell. "No."

"Liet?"

Liet shook her head.

"I want you the two of you to write me a story about the beach. About the seagulls and the sand between your toes and the salt smell and the cool water. A collaborative effort. I expect you to illustrate it. It should be at least ten pages long and I want it by the end of the week. Is that understood?"

The children nodded, mystified.

"Then you're dismissed. Stay out of trouble."

They stood up, slowly, and moved away. As they got to the door, they both turned to look back at the Yudai, who sat watching them, expressionless once again. Then, escaping before the wind changed, they ran out of the room. As they ran down the hall they started to giggle. They were shouting, just for the noise of it, by the time they got outside.

Arthur did wonder whether they were really supposed to stay out of trouble. He had an idea about that. But he didn't tell Liet. Not yet.

Besides, she probably already knew.

Copyright © April 2001. Do not distribute or reproduce.