She was not allowed to talk to either. Talking was done only out on the connecting catwalk or down on the assembly floor. And there was no point.
Every conversation:
“I’ve been kidnapped. I want to go home. I want my mother!”
“You’ve been liberated, freed! Wait until you see. Wait until you understand!”
“I don’t want to be here. What is this awful place?”
“We call it the Doll Ship. We’re like the beloved toys of the Great Souls. It’s so happy here!”
The words would change, but never the conclusion, never the message, never the smiling acceptance.
They loved her. She was going to be so happy.
The top of the sphere was the big painting, the one that showed God the Father and Charles Darwin. Between those two was a disturbing creature that could only be meant as some sort of metaphor. It showed a completely—embarrassingly—nude man with what amounted to two heads. The two heads were seemingly joined together, allowing for a third eye.
Minako figured the third eye was meant to evoke wisdom and knowledge. The possibility that this painting—and that third eye— was anything other than a metaphor did not occur to her. It simply never occurred to her that the sky painting was of a real person.
There were seventy-six people in Benjaminia, but there were lodges for more. The residents of the sphere—the town—ranged in age from ten or eleven, on up to middle age. And all of them she had encountered—all of them—were happy.
Very happy.
Consistently, sustainably, happy. It was a madhouse. A floating insane asylum. A lunatic cult hidden inside a liquefied natural gas ship.
At the announcement that the Great Souls would be coming for a visit, the residents were more than happy. Word had come over the public address system and everyone had come rushing from their lodges and raced down the spiral staircases to the assembly floor to hug and cry tears of joy. It reminded Minako in some way of a nightmare version of The Wizard of Oz. No Munchkins or witches, but a terrible falseness and suppressed hysteria in everything.
They said she would understand soon. Someone they called Toblerone—like the chocolate bar—had taken sick, so they were without an adjustor until he recovered. But don’t worry, Minako, they said, Toblerone will be back, or someone just like him, and your happiness will be assured.
You will be as happy as any of us.
Have you watched the third video? Wasn’t it the best ever?
Have you read the pamphlet titled “Youth and Happiness: They Really Do Go Together”? Didn’t you find it amazing?
But Minako overheard two of the proctors—those in charge of the village of Benjaminia—talking in hushed voices. Toblerone had died. Meningitis, they said. And now, in the wake of a suicide by someone called Joe Carpenter, there was no “twitcher” on board, no adjustor.
That left her, Minako, the only unadjusted person aboard, aside from much of the crew.
All of this was mysterious to Minako, who spent her days worrying about her mother and her little brother. And sketching on the paper they supplied her. And pretending to read the boring Nexus Humanus pamphlets.
And counting.
And crying.
And plotting escape.
Helen Falkenhym Morales lay in her bed alone. So strange. She had spent nights without MoMo while on overseas trips. Rare, but it happened. But in the three years she had slept in this room in the private portion of the White House, she had never been alone.
Now, alone.
Her staff was walking on eggshells with her. They were keeping things from her, trying to give her time to come to grips with the tragic death of her husband.
Morales saw the moment in memory, saw her own hands as they grabbed MoMo’s head and SLAM!
It had made a sound like a cracking walnut. That was how hard his head hit the tile.
Crack.
She’d been lucky the tile didn’t break.
As it was, everyone had bought her story of finding MoMo dead in the bathtub when she got up in the night to relieve herself.
Now she had a cover for any strange behavior. People would say, Oh, she’s coping with the grief.
But what she was coping with was the question: What in God’s name had happened to her? How could she have done that terrible deed? She was not a murderer.
Her heart was broken. She had killed him. She had bashed in the head of the only man she had ever loved.
Something …a gear had slipped. Like when she was little and riding her bicycle and suddenly the chain would fall off the sprockets and the pedals were no longer connected and the bike would wobble as she tried to regain control.
That’s how she felt.
She was scared. The pain in her heart was so terrible it had to be physical, it couldn’t just be her emotion squeezing her like that, like an iron fist that wanted to stop the beating.
Reality did not leave the president alone to grieve. She wasn’t the only one who seemed to have slipped a gear, the entire country had gone nuts: the bizarre death of Grey McLure and the indescribable horror at the stadium; the UN massacre; a terrible mass murder in a house on Capitol Hill; and now early reports were coming in that some of Rios’s ETA people had lost it and shot up a bookstore, supposedly in a gun battle with a terrorist.
The thing on Capitol Hill was at least a local matter. So far. The rest was all on her plate. She was getting hourly updates on the investigation into the UN terror attack, each report amounting to the same thing: we don’t know. Now she was getting word that there was a fullscale turf war going on over the bookstore massacre, with FBI and Washington police fighting over witnesses.