There was the solace of the impersonal.
I was enrolled in five courses, three of them “introductions”—to English literature, to psychology, and to philosophy. These were large lecture courses with quiz sections that met once weekly. It was possible to be invisible in large lecture halls and to imagine that no one was observing me.
If I saw, on campus, or in one of my classes, a girl from Acrady Cottage, my vision blurred and didn’t register what I saw. If a girl waved to me, or smiled at me—I did not seem to see. Wherever it was possible, I was invisible.
Eventually, they would leave me alone, I believed. I would learn in Intro to Psychology the phenomenon of operant extinction: when reinforcement is no longer forthcoming, a response becomes less and less frequent.
All my determination was to survive. To get through the challenge of the first weeks, the first semester, and the first year; to get through four years; to complete my Exile, and be teletransported back home.
I did not want to think that absolute obedience to The Instructions might not save me. I did not want to think about the future except in the most elemental terms: behavior, reward.
Almost it seemed to me, S. Platz had personally promised me—my Exile would end, one day.
In the meantime I was obliged to obey The Instructions. I had immediately memorized them though I did not quite understand what was meant by the admonition against providing “future knowledge” in the Restricted Zone.
So far as I had been informed the microchip in my brain blocked many memories of my past (that were, of course, in 1959, anticipations of the “future”). I could not confidently “foresee,” still less predict. When I tried to recall classic discoveries of the intervening decades—the discovery of DNA, for instance—the development of molecular genetics—brain “imaging”—any modern history apart from Patriot History—it was like trying to peer through a frosted glass window.
You can see shadowy shapes beyond, maybe. But you cannot see.
How ironic it was, I’d been, for those few cruel days, valedictorian of my high school class!
AS FOR THE ADMONITION against seeking out “relatives”—I would not have known how to begin.
In the Cultural Relocation Campaign that swept the country when I was in middle school, hundreds of thousands—millions?—of individuals were evicted from their homes, to be settled in relatively depopulated areas which the Government wanted to “reconstitute”; among these were Mom’s and Dad’s parents—Roddy’s and my grandparents—who were evacuated to western Nebraska and northern Maine, respectively; but I had no idea where they’d lived previously, still less where they might have been living in 1959.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
