Kane hadn’t seen either of his parents in years. His mother had vanished from his life right after he entered the division. Her disappearance wasn’t unusual. Though matrimony and child producing were considered the supreme social responsibility by the barons, it was also considered only a temporary arrangement.
Children were a necessity for the continuation of society, but only those passing stringent tests were allowed to bear them. Genetics, moral values and social standing were the most important criteria. Generally a man and a woman were bound together for a length of time stipulated in a contract. Once the child entered a training regimen of one of the ville divisions, the parents were required to separate, particularly in the case of male children recruited by the Magistrates. So his mother had removed herself. She probably realized there was a limit to the pointlessness she could endure of being a parent in absentia.
It was all pointless, really.
Who was she? Was the entire purpose of her life to give birth to him? After he entered the division, her duties discharged, the rest of her life must have been one long, total anticlimax.
God knew he tried to see a point and adjust his life in its direction. During his first, formative years at the division, he believed in the Unity through Action doctrine, believed that humans were too intrinsically destructive to be allowed free will and free rein.
The ruined planet was mute testimony to that philosophy, and he hadn’t argued with it. Who in his right mind could?
He agreed that the wicked old Beforetime of smoldering desperation and unchecked chaos was inferior in every way to the ville societies. Medical advances kept people from dying early from nukecaust-induced toxins, but the world was still underpopulated. Babies needed to be born, but only the right kind of babies. Like him and everybody else in the Enclaves.
That was the theory. Deep inside of himself, nearly buried by the strictures of duty, was the notion that there was something very wrong with the theory, at least in practice.
The contradiction in the theory was that all of the predark advances in science, all of the achievements, meant absolutely nothing. They were worthless. Yet those same predark achievements had been the building blocks of the Program of Unification. All that Unity through Action had accomplished was simple controlestablishing a status, then a quo, and then a method of maintaining it.
He put the bottle on the floor, noting absently it showed more clear glass than dark wine. Balancing the disk on his fist, he tried flipping it with his thumb, as if it were a coin. Instead, it clattered to the floor and rolled across it on its edge. When he sat up to retrieve it, he felt a not unpleasant wave of dizziness. He plucked the disk from the floor. The mystery it represented gnawed at his peace of mind, like the wine gnawed at his equilibrium. He wondered how many minds throughout history had been unbalanced by drinking the stuff.
When he thought of history, he thought of the archives. And he thought of a woman he had seen several months before on the promenade. He had learned she was a high-ranking archivist and she lived on this Enclave level. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought her name was Baptist or something.
Kane unsuccessfully swallowed a belch and eyed the disk, held between thumb and forefinger.
Yeah, Baptist or something.
Chapter Eight
Brigid Baptiste stepped out of the tiny shower stall and used a towel to dry her mounds of red-gold hair. There was nothing she could do to keep it from reverting to its naturally curly state. Wearing it pinned up all day tended to give her a headache, and once a co-worker had suggested she cut it short.
She had pretended to consider the notion, while privately scoffing at the unimaginative suggestion. Her hair, as thick and as heavy as it might be, was her only legacy from her mother.
Rather than don the bodysuit with the small rainbow-striped insignia of the Historical Division on its breast, she walked naked into her private cubicle adjoining the bedroom. The cubicle had once been a closet, but she had converted it into a crowded, miniature version of her work area in the division. There was just enough space in the small box of a room for her desk, desktop display and a chair.