Page 4 of Arch Conspirator
All the buildings in this part of the Electran District were worn by weather and wind, but covered in colorful graffiti, some more artful than others. I paused by a scene of a boat in the midst ofa stormy sea, a cartoon duo boxing in a ring with gloves made of rock, a woman’s face with a name and date scrawled beneath it. I walked past little shops with no signs: Hardware stores that were just rows of buckets with nails and bolts in them, electronics stores advertising access to the old Internet for ten spend a minute, bakeries stacked high with bread loaves behind bars.
I reached the steps at the foot of the hill, and waited in line to climb them. They were wide enough for one person going up and one person going down. My feet ached in flat sandals. I had not planned to come here. But with Polyneikes’ “just in case” Extractor weighing down the bag at my side, I had no other choice.
On the steps, the man in front of me was counting every time he picked up his foot. I wondered who he was going to visit—a spouse gone before him, or a child gone too soon. Or maybe he was going to prepare a place for himself. It was possible even for the poor to find a place in the Archive now. My father’s law, my father’s doing. I listened to the feeble voice in front of me saying, “Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two.”Immortality,I had once heard my father say,should be for everyone.
The back of my neck was slick with sweat by the time we reached the top, the old man’s counting now in the shape of a harsh exhale. The straps of my sandals had worn blisters into my heels and toes. There were people sitting on the rocks at the top, resting, staring out at the city—the dust-haze moved through the streets, the bumps of short buildings and the sheen of their windows and the rolling hills that surrounded us on all sides too distant to be clear. I could only see their faint ripple against the sky.
Beyond the hills was wilderness in every direction. I’d never been out there, but my father had told me it was exactly what I would expect: ruins.
From there I could see the High Commander’s house to the east, in the Seventh District, a grand, sprawling structure withan open courtyard that was a market, an oddity, a place of public pronouncements and demonstrations. Not far from it was the Trireme, our beacon of hope.
The Trireme was a ship, but the ocean would never touch its hull. Instead it would leap into the stars that enfolded us—it would leap as high as it could go, and send out a signal that said,we are here, help us,to whoever might be listening. Our planet was a tomb, but hope still lived in the Trireme for the rock to be rolled away, for the grave to be unearthed.
It reflected the bright clouds back at me. I turned away and walked toward the Archive.
At the entrance, I removed my shoes with a sigh of relief and let them dangle from my fingertips by their straps. As I passed between the columns at the entrance, cool air washed over me and I sighed again.
It was dark—early superstition had said that too much light might compromise the samples, though we knew now that wasn’t the case. But where there was light, it was warm, almost orange, thanks to the color of the high stone walls. Rows and rows of shelves confronted me, narrow, and I thought of the photographs I had seen of grand libraries from other eras, housing books instead of gametes. There were still books, of course, but time had devoured them. They existed digitally, but accessing them was onerous—you had to find a port, pay for your time, and download what you wanted to your own device, which was likely finicky and prone to malfunction.
I counted the fourth row from the left and walked down the aisle, a few paces behind two women who walked with hands clasped, whispering to each other. The one on the left wore her hair loose over her shoulders; she threw it back and leaned into the one on the right, smiling. The one on the right glanced back at me and released her partner’s hand abruptly. It wasn’t uncommon for two women to come here under the guise of friendshipto make a child together. They would explore the Archive together, and then one of them would meet with an Archivist alongside a man willing to play the part. The Archivist, none the wiser, would help them narrow down the kind of resurrection they wanted to facilitate.
I turned at the end of the row to give them privacy. I knew what it was to be something you were not permitted to be.
My existence, as well as my siblings’, was blasphemous. People didn’t resurrect their own genes—to do so was considered dangerous, for practical as well as mystical reasons. We were each of us born with a virus, passed on from mother to child, and there was no cure. It deteriorated our genetic code from the moment we were born, introducing abnormalities, aberrations. Genes therefore needed to be edited before they were passed on, so that every child could be born with a clean slate—so that they wouldn’t die young, as my siblings and I would.
But for the mystics, not the scientists, there was another crime in having a natural-born child. Each person’s ichor was like a tapestry containing the many threads of those who lived before. When combined with another person’s ichor, that tapestry grew richer and more complex. But ichor couldn’t convey the soul through the cells until a person’s death. Having a child of your own flesh, while you were still alive, meant having a child who wasn’t a part of that tapestry. It meant having a child who had no soul.
Like me.
In the gap between the shelves, I saw the couple stop near the end of the row. The woman on the right tugged the placard out of its place next to one of the samples, and they both crouched to read it, the woman on the left resting her chin on the other’s shoulder. I could have moved past them, but I lingered, watching them instead as they read the summary of a life they found on the little metal sheet.
They would choose two souls in the Archive that they found worthy of resurrection, and in doing so, at least in theory, they would choose their child’s story before they were born. I wondered what kind of story these two would want. A quiet life, maybe, unremarkable but peaceful, kind. Or perhaps—drama, a tragic end, a life of tumult and potential. In the Archive, you could read a person’s story and remake it. Combine it with another pattern, to heighten it or temper it. The possibilities were endless, overwhelming.
It didn’t matter if a person wanted a child or not. It didn’t matter if they changed the rest of their body, if they embraced a new name—if they were viable, the state considered them a woman, and they were required to carry a child, even though only half of them would survive it. Our species would die without this law, people were so fond of saying. And perhaps they were right about that. Every year, we were shrinking. Contracting. Receding.
Regardless, I didn’t see, in the women who walked beside me, separated by shelves of samples, any hesitation, any resentment. That their bodies were considered vessels for the continuation of the species rather than things that belonged solely to them did not appear to weigh on them. They looked caught up in this mystical alchemy, genes and ritual stirred together in the incense- and dust-saturated air of the Archive.
Or maybe I was just seeing what I expected to see. Pol often said that I saw the world in extremes. And I often reminded him that it was an extreme world.
The couple turned at the next throughway, and I continued ahead to the sealed records at the very back of the space, where the famous, the notorious, the prominent were kept. Their genes couldn’t be repurposed without express permission from the state. That was where my parents’ ichor resided.
Ichor,I heard my mother say, sneering, in the back of my mind.No one likes to use the technical terms for things, do they? Not enough romance in “egg” and “sperm” for them.
I was sure that Kreon would hold my parents’ ichor hostage, using the threat of their permanent destruction to control us.Wecouldn’t resurrect them, but as long as they were stored here, someone could. One day. And I had believed in resurrection, once. Even now that I didn’t… Pol, Ismene, and Eteocles still did, and I wouldn’t be the one to take the hope of my parents enduring away from them. And so the axe blade was always dangling over us.
It was even darker here, the channels cut in the ceiling farther apart. Each sample occupied a space the size of a book, making the library comparison even more apt. During the day, a dim light glowed beneath each one, to illuminate the name written on a label beneath. In a slot beside them was a slate with a description of their lives. I didn’t need the label to find my father and mother, settled next to each other in a place of prominence, near the front. Oedipus. Jocasta.
Oedipus, who would have been our first freely elected leader. Jocasta, who sought to give childbearing to everyone—thus freeing those who didn’t want it. A scientist in a city where only men were scientists; an impossibility of a woman.
Some people came to the Archive to grieve. I heard their whispers even then, like a distant stream. I wondered what they said to the dead. I didn’t come here to tell my mother and father my secrets, my sorrows, and my regrets. I came here because it was the only place where Kreon wasn’t watching. I knelt on the stone floor in front of my parents’ names, set my sandals down, and opened my bag. I took out the Extractor and held it up to the light.
It was one of my mother’s old ones, I was sure. We had so little of her, of him. Distributing their possessions was a rite of mourning, and we had not been permitted to mourn. The closest Ismene and I had come was preparing the bodies. I had strippedthem bare; Ismene had washed them. Ismene had said the prayer; I had done the Extraction, plunging one instrument into my father’s body, two inches below the belly button, and another into my mother’s. It could only be done on the dead. I closed my eyes, and forced myself to imagine doing it to Polyneikes, but try as I might, I couldn’t envision him dead. He was only ever sleeping.
I put the Extractor back in my bag, and took a deep breath. The name “Jocasta” was scribbled in poor handwriting on the label. It took me a few seconds to remember that it was mine. Those days had passed in a fog.
“Hello, dear,” came a soft voice on my right.
I jerked to attention. Standing at the end of the short aisle was Eurydice, Kreon’s wife.
