The End Has Come

In her front room, Nayima’s comm screen flared white, turning itself on. A minder waited in five-by-five on her wall, as though she’d been invited to breakfast. The light haloing her was bright enough to show old acne scars. Makeup had yet to make a comeback, except the enhanced red lips favored by both men and women. Full of life.

“Hello, Nayima,” the minder said. Then she corrected herself: “Ms. Dixon.”

Nayima nodded cordially. Nayima’s grandmother, born in Alabama, had never stood for being called by her first name, and neither did Nayima — an admittedly old-fashioned trait at a time when numbers mattered more than names.

The minder seemed to notice Nayima’s puffed eyes, and her polite veneer dulled. “You remember the guidelines?”

Guideline One and Only: She was not to criticize the lab-coats or make it sound as if she had been treated badly. Blah blah blah and so forth. Questions about the embryo — the girl — broiled in Nayima’s mind, but she didn’t dare bring her up. Maybe the marshals wouldn’t come. Maybe she could still get her water credits.

“Yes,” Nayima said, testing her thin voice.

“We added younger students this year,” the minder said. “Stand by.”

Three smaller squares appeared inset beneath the girl’s image — classrooms, the children progressively older in each. The far left square held the image of twelve wriggling, worming children ages about three to six sprawled across a floor with a red mat. A few in the front sat transfixed by her image on what seemed to be a looming screen, high above them. Every child wore tiny, powder blue plastic gloves.

Nayima had to look away from the smallest children. She had not seen children so young in forty years, and the sight of them was acid to her eyes.

Hadn’t Raul said the girl was four?

Nayima blinked rapidly, her eyes itching with tears.

Crying, she was certain, was against the guidelines.

Nayima willed herself to look at the young, moony faces, braving memories of tiny bodies rotting on sidewalks, in cars, on the roadways, mummified in closets. These were new children — untouched by Plague. Their parents had been the wealthy, the isolated, the truly Chosen — the infinitesimal number of survivors who were not carriers, who did not have the antibodies, but had simply, somehow, survived.

Nayima leaned closer to her screen. “Boo!” she said.

Young eyes widened with terror. Children scooted away.

But when Nayima smiled, the entire mass of them quivered with laughter, a sea of perfect teeth.

Nayima’s teeth were not perfect. She had never replaced the lower front tooth she’d lost to a lab-coat she’d smacked across his nose, drawing blood. He’d strapped her to a table, raped her, and extracted her tooth on the spot, without anesthesia.

Nayima had been offered a dental implant during Reconciliation, but a new tooth felt like a lie, so she had refused. In previous classroom visits, she had answered the question What happened to your tooth? without bitterness — why should she feel contempt for brutes any more than she would a tree dropping leaves? — until a minder pointed out that the anecdote about her extracted tooth violated the guidelines.

The guidelines left Nayima with very little to say. She chose each word with painful care.

These schoolchildren asked the usual questions: why she had survived (genetic predisposition), how many people she had infected (only one personally, as far as she knew), how many carriers were left (fifteen, since most known carriers were “gone now”). By the fourth question, Nayima had lost her will to look at the children’s faces. It was harder all the time.

The girl who spoke up next was not yet eight. Her face held a whisper of brown; a girl who might have been hers. And Raul’s.

“Do you have any children?” the girl said.

All of Nayima’s work, gone. No composure. No smile. A sharp pain in her belly.

“No, I’ve never had children,” she said. “None that survived.”

Nayima shot a pointed gaze at the minder, who did not contradict her. Maybe the minder didn’t know about Specimen 120. Maybe a bureaucrat had made up the story to tease Raul.

“Okay,” the girl said, shrugging, not yet schooled in the art of condolences. “What do you miss the most about the time before the Plague?”

An easy answer came right away, and it almost wasn’t a lie. “Halloween.”

When she explained what Halloween had been, the children sat literally open-mouthed. She wondered which part of her story most stupefied them. The ready access to sweets? The trust of strangers? The costumes?

The host looked relieved with the children’s enchantment and announced that the visit was over. A flurry of waving blue gloves. Nayima waved back. She even smiled again.

“Don’t forget my water credits,” Nayima said from behind her happy teeth.

But the minder’s image had already flashed away.

* * *