The children have lessons on Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
On Saturday they hunt, and on Sunday they disappear to do esoteric
things of their own. To loot the city’s remaining
libraries for books, to play games and build nests and experiment with love and
loss and longing, and all the other things they’ll need when they’re older.
Saturdays and Sundays are the worst
days for that reason – because Justineau is left so much to her own devices.
Melanie comes when she can, but she has children of her own now and they take
up a lot of her time. There have been expeditions, too, that have taken her
away for weeks at a time. One of these was to the base, where the other children from Melanie’s class were
found safe and well in their subterranean bunker. There were happy reunions, and
a great round of storytelling.
Another of the expeditions was
south, to Beacon. Melanie has refused to tell Justineau what they found there,
so she knows it must have been terrible. They brought back no children that
time.
At first, Justineau delivered all
the lessons herself. She’d put on one of the environment suits, pick up books
and markers and paper (all rustled up for her by Melanie
and the ruthless, virtuoso band of scavengers she’s dubbed the ‘classroom monitors’) and
walk through the airlock into the world. The world that she can never touch
again except through this thick, unyielding plastic-polymer skin.
But now, increasingly, the children
from the first few cohorts are delivering
the lessons themselves. When Justineau teaches, she’s aware of satellite lessons going on
all around her in the parade of gutted shops that have become both the children’s school and the seat of their loud, raucous,
free-form government. And when she stops, when she goes back inside, the
lessons go on through the evening, even into the night.
They learn
so quickly, she can’t keep up with them. The benign monster that lives in
their brains accelerates the uptake and retention of knowledge, with each cohort
benefitting from connections and shortcuts made by the class before.
The third generation, Melanie tells
her – including Melanie’s own children – don’t even have the hunger. They eat
very sparingly, a bite or two of raw meat lasting them a day. And they don’t
need to sleep! They’re actually less beholden to their physical bodies than
their predecessors, humanity 1.0.
Justineau has started to think of
herself as the monster, and her students as the norm.
The culls of first-generation
hungries which had been common practice before the advent of Melanie have long
since stopped. The unfortunates are humanely trapped
and penned (there’s no shortage of old buildings that can be adapted for this purpose), fed
regularly and allowed to live unmolested until the fungus inside them fruits.
Sometimes, even now, they continue to breed. The babies are taken away and raised
communally.
A world is
growing up in front of Justineau’s eyes. She takes pride in it, happy that she’s
had a part in its birth. By teaching the children to read and write and count,
by assembling and disseminating the knowledge of the world that existed before, she’s made this time of transition easier and less
painful than it could have been.
If she’s
lonely, in her cell, that’s not so hard to bear. Melanie has brought her pictures,
for her walls, and books to read.
One of the books is Tales the Muses Told by Roger Lancelyn
Green. It’s not the copy she gave Melanie, all
those years before: it’s a battered paperback with the stamp of the
Berkhamsted Public Library on its inside cover. She often picks it up and turns
the pages, remembering.
Thinking that Pandora was made the
way she was for a reason.
