LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

iris-scanned, beamed by a materials detector, and patted down. She would be spending the night in a Grid guesthouse. She had been told to bring a change of clothes and toiletries, but no percs or phones were allowed. Her driver, Eduardo, had driven right up to the Grid barrier and through an archway that led to a checkpoint. Behind the checkpoint was a slightly shorter wall that was curved to block any outsiders’ view. There were soldiers with rifles on either side of the road; on the left, beside the checkpoint, a woman soldier seemed to be making time with the man in the booth.

      Eduardo had a definite accent, and Lila wondered where he’d come from. He was taking her, he said, to the guesthouse at Village 42. Other than that he’d said little. Perhaps his English was a problem.

      “Shut your mouth!” the female soldier cried to the man in the booth. She leaned into Eduardo’s truck and spoke directly at Lila. “Don’t let these mariachis give you a bad first impression.” Lila nodded awkwardly. “You been on the Grid before, darling?” the female soldier asked. Her hair beneath her hat was poufy and clearly took effort.

      Lila, stiffening, shook her head. She didn’t expect another woman, especially one younger than her, to call her darling.

      “You’ll love it,” the woman said. “Everyone loves it. Best place in the world.”

      This surprised Lila speechless, and suddenly the checkpoint man was handing back her pass card, the gate was raising, the female soldier was waving, and Eduardo steered them right then left and there they were, two people in a truck with a wall behind them, looking out under a heat-hazed sky over 25 million agricultural acres that used to be part of Ohio.

      It was less flat than Lila expected. Oh, it was flat: flat and huge and green (although the acres of wheat had their golden look) but flat less like a plain than like a beach, with small rises and hillocks and ridges. There was a road straight in front of them going north and a crossroad that extended east and west, and Lila knew from her reading that ten miles north there’d be another crossroad, with another crossroad ten miles beyond that: not for nothing was the transformed landscape called the Grid.

      “We go north first,” Eduardo said. And suddenly, with the fields falling from the road around her, it wasn’t enough for Lila to be here, on the ground: she wanted to be in a plane above the landscape. She wondered at her own greediness, reminded herself she was lucky to be here at all. She sneaked a glance at the speedometer: eighty. Eduardo’s hand was relaxed on the steering wheel; he looked around the Grid with possessive nonchalance. “Corn’s good this year,” he said. And indeed, the corn plants were erupting from the ground like thousands of green fountains. Thousands? No, millions, and Lila, who in water was used to big numbers, felt almost humbled by the thought.

      “Wait a minute,” she said after fifteen or twenty silent minutes. “Can we stop and look?”

      He glanced at her, then halted the truck in the middle of the road. Lila almost objected, but of course no one else was coming, and if they did Eduardo’s truck could be spotted from miles away. “Look,” he said, waving his hand, and Lila got out and stood in the road.

      So this was the Grid. It was broad and not quite flat, and it was alive. Vegetatively, not humanly, alive. Lila’s forehead was slick with sweat. The Ohio sky had been transformed into a Big Sky. Every few miles there was a row of ten or twelve trees. She pointed at one of them and called out to Eduardo, “What?” “Windbreaks,” Eduardo called back from the truck, and this was understandable, although today was hot and still. In front of Lila and behind her, in fields as thick and lush as a giant’s carpet, was soy, the new American mainstay, usually processed into fake meat. Northeast, miles away, beyond acres of corn, buildings of a village shimmered on the horizon. They looked wavery and insubstantial in the heat. No cars.

      All the intentional villages had numbers. Village 28 people had heard about: it was the processing center for perch and walleye from Lake Erie. “What number’s that?” she called to Eduardo, pointing to the buildings.

      Eduardo frowned and turned off the engine. The whine of an insect became audible. “Oh,” he nodded when she repeated her question. “Village 104. They got a school there. We’re going to 42.” He pointed east.

      In the middle distance a reaper crossed a field of wheat, shooting out a spray of chaff. If Lila strained her ears she could possibly hear it. Other than that there was no human sound or motion. The fields of wheat had a teeming look. A fly landed on Lila’s shoulder.

      “How many kids in the school?” Lila called, unwilling to leave her spot in the road. A bead of sweat ran down her forehead and stopped at her eyebrow.

      Eduardo climbed out of the truck and approached her. “Thirty? They got two teachers, I know that.”

      How did they get teachers? Lila wondered if they advertised on the media. No one really had contact with the effs: rumors said they were clannish, suspicious. They married only each other. They rejected embryonic preselection. The Grid had its own message and info system, and data from outside were blocked. Family members that had been removed during the Gridding could send perc messages to the family members who stayed to become Gridians, but in return the outsiders got rare, sporadic answers, usually around holidays. The religion of the Gridians might have changed. There were stories of churches with stalks of wheat on the altar and roasted soybeans in place of communion wafers. “What are they like?” A friend of Lila’s had asked a waitress once in Florida, where the effs took their group vacation. “They’re people,” the waitress had answered. Then, unburdening herself (and the Florida workers, Lila’s friend pointed out, surely signed confidentiality agreements and were monitored): “They dress like bumpkins, and they don’t tip diddly.”

      “Where do you live?” Lila asked Eduardo, glancing at his clothes. A buttoned shirt, jeans, work boots: he looked well-dressed enough to her, but she’d never had much sense of fashion.

      “Twenty-nine. Nice place. Good people. We call it Gayville.”

      It surprised Lila enough to hear Eduardo’s town had an actual name and surprised her more to hear what the name was. She wondered what things about her the youngie in Columbus had read on the computer, what information had been passed on. Suddenly she wondered why Eduardo had been sent to guide her, if he … “Why Gayville?” she burst out, regretting her question right off. She shouldn’t ask questions. They might kick her out.

      Eduardo shrugged. “It’s always been called that.”

      As if the origins of the name had been lost in time. The Grid was only thirteen years old, and it had taken a good year, Lila had heard, for the villages to be established. Until they were built, the effs lived in clusters of trailers.

      “Do you have a mayor?”

      Eduardo laughed. “There’re only three hundred and six of us. We don’t need a boss.”

      “Are you married to a woman?”

      “Tamara.”

      “Kids?”

      “We have three.” He reached for his pocket. “Want to see them?”

      “Cute,” Lila said, inspecting the photo. Like normal kids, she thought. Everyone in the country distrusted, even feared, the effs: people who’d agreed to stay when towns they’d lived in or near were destroyed; people who seemed to thrive in communal isolation; people who apparently had no desire to escape the life their government had planned for them. Their staying on the Grid was like a collective back turned upon what people had taken to calling Free America.

      She got back in the truck and Eduardo drove on, a series of small hillocks breaking the cornfields around them, surrounding a very round hill that reminded Lila of something. She twisted her neck to look back at it, a mound like a dromedary hump against the sky, and then she remembered the Indian mound near Lancaster, her hometown. That was when it hit her: this hill, like the Indian mound, was a burial hill of sorts: in it lay the remains of a town.

      Bombed, then bulldozed. A new style of B-and-B.

      Lila had never really liked this part of Ohio.

Скачать книгу