The Attachment Race Page 6

  Impossible.

  Something fell from the sky before Belinda could process any further and bounced off the top of her head.

  “Belinda Q!”

  The image was blurry at first. But as things started falling into place, thoughts gradually assembled themselves in a way that made sense. Belinda concentrated on the figure with canary-yellow coverall in front of her. Another not-too-gentle tap on the head with something hard.

  “Are you sick?”

  Belinda shifted on her bunk, anticipating another knock to the skull by what appeared to be a set of knuckles. Still trying to separate from the dream she’d just had, Belinda pulled back, right up against where the wall met her bunk. This was still Upsilon. There was no reprieve. Today – tonight was the Attachment Race.

  “What is it?” Belinda asked.

  “Pill drop. Come on.”

  Belinda managed to climb off the mattress as her envelope was handed to her along with a freshly-drawn cup of lukewarm water.

  “This one’s getting a deep sleep just about every night all of a sudden,” the Watcher who’d awakened Belinda said to her partner.

  “It’s too bad you leave tomorrow, sweetie. A brand new bunk to get used to,” the other said.

  How had she been so soundly asleep? And what was this horrible sensation sticking to her brain? Memories began dribbling back. The previous evening had been tense. Peg’s bravado at the dress selection was fine for the compound, but Belinda couldn’t stop worrying that Clame would find a chance for revenge. She’d swallowed not only the regular dose of Vroo for the evening – instead of squirreling it away – but pried another tablet (or was it two?) from the hollow bunk frame to make sure she’d be able to sleep and shrug off the pressure that hugged her gut.

  Once the Watchers were gone, the three roommates started down for breakfast. Belinda could feel her feet beneath her once more and the echoes of the dream grew less and less painful as the Vroo did its job.

  Screens in the mess hall offered a rapid-fire recap of all the men of Omicron who had been featured over recent days and certain of the women paid particular attention. The food available on the final full day on Earth was a noticeably-better grade of poor and a greater portion of each tray ended up in stomachs instead of the garbage.

  Peg, already waiting for the other three, told of a fight between two women over a dress several doors down from her room. Both would be kept out of the Race and the dress (about which many women had inquired) was tossed back in with all the other unchosen garments for the next crop of Upsilonians.

  Sessions held in the gymnasium detailed the process for the following morning and ended on reminders of rules for the Attachment Race. The group was offered a cursory ‘good luck’ and dismissed to take a nap or otherwise pass the time indoors.

  Between lunch and the light dinner which would precede the Attachment Race, two more suicides occurred. The first, a jumper from the roof of the tallest dormitory – five stories high – required that everyone be kept inside their rooms until cleanup was complete. An hour later, another hanging (the most popular form) led to the entire population of Upsilon taking the compound.

  Several of the women complained that this was going to cut into their time to get ready for the Race. The majority shouted them down, calling for decency.

  The light early evening meal commenced on time, followed by another four-minute shower session, again with the lavender-scented soap. Perfume was available for those who wanted some and one of the Watchers with previous experience doing hair hurried through the dorms to assist where needed (but only two minutes max per “customer”).

  Belinda sat on her bunk, the brown dress draped over the mattress, in no particular rush to get ready. Grace remained undecided about how much care to put into preparing for the Race. She walked up and down the hall a few times, peeking into other rooms to see how the neighbors were coming along and then back to her own room, lifting the green dress she’d chosen, examining it from all sides, not loving it…not hating it.

  Alisson was already dressed, ready and waiting dutifully on the chair beside her bunk. She stared off into space. Belinda hesitated to speak to her, in the event that she might interrupt some moment of inner peace.

  A couple of the broods who liked Alisson strolled past the room – not in dresses and with no intention of attending the Race:

  “Go at it, girls. But don’t give it away.”

  They laughed without being derisive. Belinda sensed they were celebrating their freedom from the anxiety that the Race caused most others in the compound. These women – and the others like them at Upsilon – had been preparing for demise most of their lives. They’d earned a little laugh and jauntiness.

  The lavs began to overflow with Upsilonians fighting for mirror space. There was little to no pretense among the women any longer. They could make fun of the men of Omicron on the mess hall screens and joke about ‘toying with the boys’ once the event began, but if they were going to march through the gates in a short while and put themselves out there for a possible attachment, it was time to be serious. After all, who didn’t want to believe that life off-Earth might be a little more enjoyable (dare one say it: even happy?) with the right person alongside?

  Belinda put on her dress, watching these women scoot past her doorway, searching for a lav that didn’t have a crowd spilling out into the hall.

  They want it to be the way we’ve been promised, she thought, watching the others. They want it to mean something. She tried to stop thinking before inevitably rolling around to her own expectations. Alisson was still staring into space. Grace had just finished wrapping her own dress around her body and was weighing the notion of slipping out for a look.

  The three roommates hadn’t been this distant since before they met on that first day at Upsilon. Better get used to it, Belinda realized. Soon enough they’d be worlds apart, in all likelihood. Twenty-four hours in the future, each of them would be nothing more than a three-week memory to the others. With any luck, there might be something a fraction as good to replace it.

  Chapter 12

  Omicron had arrived. Nearly ten kilometers from Transition Compound Upsilon, Omicronians had to be shuttled in via the same beaten and bruised transports which had delivered Belinda and the others to their temporary home three weeks before. Omicron had been constructed around the bones of a dead town, just like Upsilon and other compounds that peppered the area.

  Flowing out of the dorms in a pair of single-file lines, the last bits of daylight faded and electricity took over for its shift of illuminating the grounds. The broods had arranged themselves on the ground near the north fence in the long shadow of the mess hall. They applauded and whistled, laughing among themselves. Yet it seemed to be clear in the minds of the women about to walk through the gates to the Race that there was no malice or envy on the part of the broods. Even with the differences among them, there existed a sisterhood. Almost as an affront to the system, to the Watchers, they were playfully bonded in this moment.

  Grace and Belinda were set side-by-side as Watchers reorganized the ladies into rows of five across. Not unlike a regiment prepared to march into battle, the group remained in place as the glow of the setting for the Race attracted their attention beyond the west fence.

  “Count on at least forty-five percent bullshit from all of them,” Grace said with a smirk.

  “At least,” Belinda agreed.

  “Do you think Alisson could use some words of advice along those lines before they unleash Omicron on her?”

  “Of course. But wouldn’t Peg be the best one for that job?” Belinda smiled a little. She appreciated the lightness of the moment, the respite from routine and the structure that had been imposed on them – finally reaching its crescendo in an exercise of sheer absurdity.

  Belinda scanned the lines behind her. Something was missing.

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?” Grace asked.

  “Alisson.”


  “She was…” Grace turned to look over the others, “…behind me in the hall. Wasn’t she?”

  Belinda worked her way back through the cluster of Upsilonians. As the last of the women cleared the dorms, Belinda tried to spot Alisson among the ever-shifting wave of dresses, but didn’t see her. Worse, she couldn’t, for the life of her, recall the color of Alisson’s dress for the evening. How many times had Belinda looked Alisson’s way, finding Upsilon’s “little sister” lost in thought? How could she not know the color of the dress?

  “Purple,” she said softly in an attempt to convince herself she did remember. It might absolve her of the guilt she harbored for looking right through the young woman with whom she’d shared a room, meals and drudgery since arriving at the compound.

  It finally dawned. Regardless of Grace’s recollection that Alisson had been behind her in the hall going down, Belinda had no specific memory of Alisson ever getting up from the chair.

  Into the dorm, up the stairs to the third floor and past open doorways, Belinda ran. She had nothing to go on. Not a single concrete fact to suggest anything was wrong. But the growing memory of the look in Alisson’s eyes sitting on the chair next to her bunk, wrapped in a secondhand garment – the look said it all. She should have recognized the quality of those young eyes at that moment because she’d seen it before.

  It was the look of resignation.

  Belinda clenched her jaw tight as she neared her room – grateful for the first time that there were no doors to the rooms – preparing for something horrible. She caught herself, swiveling her momentum, with a hand on the wall to pivot into the room.

  Alisson must have heard the footsteps approaching the length of the hall, for when Belinda caught sight of her, the young girl was already looking her way, eyes wide. She held half of a broken plastic comb in her left hand, and had managed to draw blood from her right wrist.

  Belinda, try as she might, couldn’t form any words. She burst forward, collapsed to the floor at Alisson’s side, removed the jagged piece of comb by force from the girl’s hand and flung it across the room.

  They stared at one another. Belinda pressed her palm firmly against the small wound on Alisson’s wrist, intent on keeping even a single drop of blood from escaping.

  “Why?” she was finally able to say, between gasps for air.

  Alisson raised her eyebrows, as if pondering the question, glanced down at the hand clasped around her small wrist and spoke:

  “Why not?”

  Grace appeared in the doorway.

  “Oh Jesus…” she said, starting to enter the room, then pulling back to look down the hall in each direction for anyone who might happen upon the scene. “What…what do we do?”

  “I need some time, Grace. Can you go back down? Go back down, tell them we had a problem with her dress.”

  “That’s not going to—”

  “Tell them it’s Alisson. Even the Watchers like Alisson. Say she’s nervous, but I’m helping her.”

  Once Grace had gone, Belinda removed her hand from the dainty wrist. The gash had never been so deep as to allow for a real flow of blood. That would make it easier.

  “Belinda,” Alisson said softly, “what’s your last name?”

  It had been one of the first rules laid out on the day of arrival at Upsilon: no last names. Last names were part of their past – nothing to do with the present and of no use to them in the future.

  “You’ll never know when someone’s listening,” Spryte had said in warning against violating the policy. No one, as far as Belinda knew, had broken the rule – not even Peg.

  “Query. I’m Belinda Query.”

  “I’m Alisson Lisst.”

  “Seems like we have a problem here, Alisson Lisst. Would you care to break some more rules to fix it?”

  In a glow of emancipation, Alisson smiled and nodded. Hastily, with a quick look over her shoulder to assure their privacy, Belinda cracked open her toothbrush case and removed two pills.

  “You’ll have to do without water.” she told Alisson, dropping the meds in her left hand. “We need to hurry.”

  “Is this…?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  Alisson considered the pills for a moment.

  “What does it feel like?”

  There was no time for such discussion. A Watcher might appear at the doorway any moment. But Alisson was waiting on an answer.

  “Like…sunshine,” Belinda said, gesturing for Alisson to take the Vroo.

  As she swallowed the pills and got to her feet, Alisson looked at her wrist once more. The bleeding had stopped, but the skin was raw from the clawing of rough plastic.

  Belinda stripped the covers from her bunk, took hold of the white sheet and tore a strip of the material away. She led Alisson from the room, down the hall, into the lav. A quick rinse of the wrist washed away everything that could be removed. Once dried, Belinda wrapped the strip of white sheet around the wound and tied it into the most elaborate bow she could manage, giving it the look of a decorative flourish instead of a bandage.

  Part 2

  The Race

  Chapter 13

  Spryte called for the west gate to be opened. The women were prompted to prepare for the walk out of the compound. Belinda had taken up a spot in the back row of the nearly two hundred women. Alisson was at her side. She kept a close eye on her troubled roommate, on edge over what else might go sideways. She assured the pair of Watchers tending to the rear end of the group that all was well and Alisson had run into a case of nerves. When they asked the girl themselves, they received a sweet smile and nod. Belinda figured that the Vroo was beginning to assert itself.

  Grace peered repeatedly back from her place further up in the arrangement of the sisters of Upsilon, trying to catch Belinda’s eye. She was finally given an indication that Alisson was fine just as the rows began their walk toward the open gate.

  The slightly uneven terrain between Upsilon’s western gate and the site of the Attachment Race would have proved tricky for the women in the ‘party shoes’, but a temporary platform snaking through the trees to the clearing allowed ease of crossing.

  Belinda thought she spotted Peg’s red hair in the front row as the group passed the last set of floodlights before the clearing. That was about as far as she could see with any sense of clarity. Figures already positioned in the ‘arena’ for the Attachment Race were vaguely visible, but too far away to make out a single face. The torches on the perimeter of the clearing and a few portable space lamps deposited randomly around the area didn’t make for much illumination.

  It all struck Belinda as ritualistic. The best part of that was that rituals could be deciphered and understood. Their structure gave the identifiable parameters and stages. True to the formal flavor of the event, nothing was said, and no one else moved until the women of Upsilon were arranged in a broad arc that hugged their end of the clearing’s perimeter. The Omicronians were spread out in a similar fashion and, for the first time, Belinda could see the features of some.

  The men were, on the whole, sober and unexpressive. None of them had been through an Attachment Race either. Reticence was understandable.

  The clearing, as Belinda scanned it, was about as orderly and decorated as a wilderness setting could be made. Yet the clusters of trees starting at the perimeter and fading into the night the further they shrank from the light gave the space a positively primitive quality. It was as if this were a pagan festival of some sort, ripped from the past and dropped neatly into the reason-driven age of forced migration.

  Belinda caught sight of certain men from Omicron adjusting ill-fitting suits (which were every bit as out-of-date as the frocks worn by the women). The entire scene would have been absurdly funny if it weren’t for the depressing certainty of what was to come in the morning.

  Mounting the stage where attachments would be confirmed and announced over a sound system as the Race proceeded was a carved piece of granite functioning as a man. His name was
Peter Krawl and Upsilonians had been made aware of him the previous day as final instructions were given in the gymnasium. Krawl, the director of Omicron, was identified as Debra Spryte’s co-host for the evening. His light-colored hair was cut close and, it seemed to Belinda, that he wore a few scars on his neck and face. It could have been from days gone by when the Watchers’ jobs were more daunting. Besides, men might be more prone to object to the transition compounds in a physical way. Krawl did wear the canary-yellow coverall which was the uniform of job, but he covered it, in part, with a dark gray vest. Black gloves and dark boots laced nearly up to his knees (what they used to call jackboots) completed his version of the Watcher ensemble. As rough as he appeared to be, when Krawl spoke, there was something unpredictably calming in his voice.

  “Good evening, ladies. On behalf of these men of the compound Omicron, I’d like to extend my best wishes for an engaging and productive Attachment Race. As we’ve all been informed of the rules, I won’t go into them again other than to remind you that when the clock hits zero, any attachments not recorded aren’t going to be recognized. Factor this into your thinking as you near the end of the Race.”

  Belinda glanced in Grace’s direction. They were making such a point of this, one had to wonder if it was a common issue.

  “And now,” Krawl said, looking over the women of Upsilon with what might be regarded as a paternal reassurance, “on behalf of Madame Director Spryte and myself, I now proclaim this Attachment Race…open!”

  The display clock, counting down from three hours, appeared on a screen behind Krawl and the first few seconds ticked away. There was no missing the numbers on the timer, no uncertainty about just how much time there was left to arrange an attachment. The display was nothing if not large and bright.