Chapter Three
When I looked around the shed, I saw only my little bed and the tiny chair. Other than that, there was just a small rug, nothing on the walls, and just the one small window with metal bars up and down. I opened the window and tried to push out the bars but they didn't budge. The door was always locked from the outside. This was for my protection. According to mother, there were ruthless hunters all around outside just prowling for stupid little kids like me. Through the bars I could see the next shed over. There were seven of these in a row. I knew Random Williams was in the one right next door, and Joker Variety next door to him. On the other side there was Parsnip Caravan and there was nobody else next to her because that was the last one on that side. If I could get out I thought I would check and see if Random also wanted to run away.
I had done a lot of settling already. Pretty soon I would be putting two and two together. That's what Mother kept saying, and it was not a good thing because then it would be too late and my value would go down. I was supposed to be “optimally pliable”. I was supposed to be “weaponizable”. I was supposed to be “all-purpose you-know-what”. I didn't know what, but I was going to know soon, once my settling was complete. It was all going to sink in for sure. I crawled around the floor inspecting every inch. It was mostly concrete but someone had put the window in a frame, and under the sill there came and went ants. I watched them very closely. Where they came from. Where they went. Of course I wasn't as small as them, but where there's a crack there's a fissure, and where there's a fissure there's a hole, and where there's a hole there's a way out and a light at the end. I used a piece of the bed frame, a metal bracket piece that snapped right off, and I worked around the whole edge of the window, slowly and slowly all night after Mother had come to give me the sleepy night-juice. I didn't drink any of it.
The whole window popped out. Silly, I know, how easy that was, what with all the metal bars up and down. The night time was cold and the breeze had picked up. I'd never been outside alone in the dark.
I had to think about what to do next. I wasn't all settled and nothing like this was in my Nurture so far. It was going to be Nature or nothing. I was seventy five percent frightened. I was. It was totally quiet and dark. I didn't see any lights, not even from the old guy's house. Any little thing was going to scare me to death. It didn't compute, not at all. I tried to enter the data, one step at a time. I was on pavement, I think. I was halfway between my shed and Random Williams'. I was wearing my shoes. I was wearing my yellow dress, like always. I was five feet and two inches tall. I weighed eighty seven pounds. I had a lot of long dark wavy hair way down below my shoulders. I had dark brown eyes. My fingers were cold. The tip of my nose was very cold. I couldn't see much. I was trying to breathe calmly. Anything could happen. Inside of my head was a scream.
Luckily it stayed there when I accidentally stepped on the cat. He was the one who yowled instead.
“Watch what the fuck!” he mewed.
“Oh, sorry!” I whispered, stepping back. “I didn't see you.”
“Tell me about it,” he snickered. “Your kind are fucking blind. Not to mention mostly deaf and stupid as shit.”
“Sorry,” I lamely whispered again. It was totally dark and as far as I could tell the cat was gray. I had no idea what color he really was.
“What's your name?” I asked as politely (and quietly) as I could.
“Hmm,” he sniffed. “Your kind call me Snowball. It's not my real name, of course. We don't tell your kind our real names.”
“So who are you?” he asked after a long pause in which he stared up at me with gleaming green eyes.
“They call me Candles,” I said, “but that's not my real name, either.”
I was glad we had something in common. I had never met a real cat before in person. I only knew about them through Smoothies. I was going to ask him something else, but before I could think of a question he was at my ankles, rubbing his head furiously against them.
“That ought to do it,” he said when he was done.
“Do what?” I asked.
“We have to tag your kind,” he explained, “if you're not already tagged or if the tag is worn off. It's a common courtesy, to let other people know what kind of people-person you are.”
“I'm a young lady,” I told him, for this is what I'd been taught, but he snickered again. Cats, I discovered, have a very rude and unpleasant way of laughing at you.
“Who cares,” he said. “You're just one of the seventeen kinds of people-people. That bony creature who brings you stuff and takes you in and out is another kind. Then the old one in the big house is a third. We don't have all of the kinds around here, thank goodness. The ones we do have are bad enough.”
“What kind am I?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to know.
“Dumb and lost,” he laughed again, and stalked off into the night with his tail sticking straight up in the air.
It was true, or partly true, at least. I was kind of lost, even though I was standing only a few steps away from the only home I'd ever known. Midgerette told me I'd been only six actual months in the world. She'd been around for eight years already. She said she was ancient. She said Mother was ancestral. I was wishing I'd asked the cat about Mother, and about the old guy too. I'd only seen the old guy once. He frightened me. He showed up at the window one day and peered down at me when I was still very small. He had a big red scar across his forehead and did not seem very friendly.
I decided to knock on Random Williams' door. I was ninety eight percent that he was sleeping but even so I tapped very softly, thinking the whole time that he wasn't going to hear me like that but if I did it any louder then Mother might hear. Then I realized I had no idea where she was. Was she asleep in the big house? Was she in one of the sheds? What if she never slept at all? What if she was standing right behind me? I never knew when to expect her. She could show up any time.
I counted up the few things I really knew from my own life experience. There was the house, the school and the sheds, Nurture Smoothies, sleepy night-juice and naps, the mechanical walking stripe I had to walk on several times a day, the lift machine, the chair and the bed, Midgerette and Folder, ants and moths and spiders, and once a funny little cricket. Everything else I learned from school. In school I'd been around the world and seen all sorts of things. I had talked with many kinds of people. I knew the names of places and things. I knew the stories behind a lot of events and knew what I was supposed to think about them. I knew that everything was getting better all the time, that the world was continually being improved upon by their kind. I knew that everything that happened was for the best and had to be the way it was. I knew I had a purpose that one day would become revealed to me. Until then, there was the golden rule, obedience and kindness and love. I was meant for something good, something that would help to make the world an even better place than it already was, and I was happy about that.
I knocked a little louder, and then remembered that the door was locked from the outside and I didn't have a key and he wouldn't be able to open it even if I woke him up and he wanted to come out. I walked around the side to the window and peered in like the old guy had once peered in at me. Random was fast asleep on his bed. He looked peaceful. I was glad I hadn't woken him up. Random was the same age as me, exactly the same. We had been hatched on the same day, in the same place, along with Joker Variety and Parsnip Caravan and Lindley MacAdoo and Hellen Duane and Margaux Santa Fe, all seven of us, in fact. Everyone in the school. Midgerette once told me that we all came out of the same brown box. She had been hanging around, hoping for a french fry, and was sorely disappointed when it was only phony-people-babies, each of us about three inches long, wet and smelly and squirmy. Midgerette's partner swooped down and tried to take a bite out of one of us. That's when Mother blew his head off with a shotgun. Midgerette had been plotting her own vengeance ever since.