The Welcome Center

The Matching Room is quiet. Quieter than I expected, given its proximity to the Birthing Floor. A long curtain separates that wing of the Welcome Center from this one, where crowds of Receivers sit waiting. Every so often, attendants in green caps appear through some fold in the curtain, and you can hear a blast of noise from the other side — like a scream, or a shout. But then the curtain closes. The attendants don’t seem bothered by the sounds. Their expressions are fixed masks of cool.

At one point Orion kicks my foot, and draws my attention toward a small attendant with dark brown skin and freckles exactly like his own. He turns to look at me, and I see his eyes are full of fury. “How could she,” he mutters. I nod, to show I understand.

His nudge gives me courage. The rebel leaders have told us often, in training, that when the time comes to complete our first missions, we’ll need to remember our sense of injustice. For when you see the attendants hard at work, they told us, you will think their task is natural. You will think it was always like this. I think about Orion and his anger as we stand, in one motion, and run towards the curtain. And I think about the attendant who looks just like him as we begin to tear that curtain down.

= = = 

Because it wasn’t always like this. That’s the main thing they teach you in training.

According to the leaders, long ago — decades before I was assigned — there was no such thing as a Welcome Center, or attendants, even. When a person was with child, they went — most often — to a hospital, where they’d deliver a baby. Often, these were joyful occasions. The birther might bring a partner, or another family member. That partner or family member might sit in a waiting room at the hospital, or they might even sit in the room alongside the birther, watching the labor take place. I cried out aloud when I learned this. Births used to be unnecessarily painful, and unnecessarily long. And when they were over, the baby would always leave the hospital with the parents that birthed them. “Unless,” Orion chuckled once, “There was some horrible mistake.”

The leaders also said that many children were adopted in the Years of Excess. But even then, most of the time the parents knew where their child had come from. They knew the story of the “birth parents.” And that was considered important information. Valuable, even, to their choice. I didn’t understand this. I asked the leaders, “Why should that be so?”

It was the kind of thinking that no one thought to question in the Age of Excess. It simply made sense that the person who did the work of birthing was entitled to the reward of their specific child. That was logic. And, we used to believe that you could love a child best if it had come from you. Or if you had selected it.

“So the child is a reward?” I asked. “But that doesn’t make sense. Any child can grow up to have any kind of personality. What does it matter who it belongs to, or where it came from?”

You must remember that this was before the plagues, and the war, and the Second Enlightenment. Before we became a collective. In the olden days, our world observed the wants of an individual. Very little was assigned — in addition to children, people chose their own jobs. They chose where and how they lived, and who they loved. Whenever they could. 

I admit it was hard for me to understand this at first. Having been raised long after the Second Enlightenment, I never questioned my assignment. And I never yearned for a ‘mother’ or ‘father,’ like most of the leaders. I knew the love of my assigned family. They have always been good to me, it must be said. But I understood better when Orion explained it. This desire for a love you could choose.

“Imagine you are the one behind the curtain,” he said, on one of our first meetings. “You have grown a child inside you for nine months. Housed its body in your own. Then, at the end of all that, it is taken away from you? Ripped from your hands? Simply because someone else says it must belong to everyone?” A muscle in his neck began to spasm. “There is nothing like the love of someone who chose you. Specifically you.” He took a swig of his canteen, and stared deep into my eyes.  

I know the love of a collective, it’s true. But now I also know the kind of love that burns like a forest fire. The kind of love that makes me think I would do anything to make that person, that specific person, feel happy and free.

I know because that is the love I feel for Orion.

= = =

The curtain’s extraction requires tools. In practiced unison, Orion and I shoot razor spears toward the pulleys holding the curtain aloft, whose locations we’ve acquired through previous missions. Some of our people have already been caught and placed in holding for acquiring this information. But we are all supposed to be willing to risk entrapment, for the cause. Once the curtain is down and its surface covered with the decaying agent, we’re supposed to run in separate directions. Welcome Center security mustn’t think we’re too organized. They mustn’t be able to trace us to one location. The fall itself is supposed to happen quickly, in a matter of seconds.

I hear footsteps behind us. Then, a high-pitched whirring. The alarm has been raised. “Hurry,” I call to Orion, who is still grappling with his side of the curtain. He grunts as my end falls heavily toward the ground. Its journey seems to happen in slow motion — like one of those old time movies the leaders are always describing. The curtain, after all, is heavy. Its interior is made of a weighted compound designed to muffle sound, movement, and deter sabotage attempts just like this.

Once my end of the curtain has fallen, what I see — just for a moment, on the other side — takes my breath away.

= = =

True to his interstellar name, Orion came into my life like a burning ball of light. He was the first thing to surprise me. Ever. In my whole life, up to that point.

I remember we met on a Wednesday, when I was at my assignment. It used to be my task to care for the reservation animals in my quadrant. The work was hard and smelly, but I was well-suited to it. I liked the quiet languages the animals spoke to each other, and the ways in which I could and couldn’t understand them. There is a satisfying smallness in tending to mysterious things.

Orion appeared at the edge of the sheep pen. In hindsight, he must have arrived with the shearers, who came to the reservation weekly with a goods delivery, and left with skeins of wool for the marketplace. I remember he wore a red silk cowboy hat, a blue suit, and shiny black boots, like an entertainer. He seemed too clean for ranch work. I felt his eyes on me before I saw him. And when I saw him, I was so shocked by his get-up that I dropped a full bag of feed on my foot.

“Don’t lose your marbles, now,” he called, in his funny drawl. “A person can’t be going bananas over just a little bit of flair.”

“Who’s going bananas?” I said. Even as I wondered, on the inside, who on earth is this person? “Anyway, you’re the one in a monkey suit.”

He laughed at that. For a long time. Just threw back his head and tossed a bellow at the sky. Orion’s laugh is deep and loud, unlike anything I’ve heard before. And somehow, it settles my stomach. The sound of his joy.

He stuck around for a long time after, watching me feed the ewes with a light smirk on his face. And when I was finished for the day, he followed me back towards the cantina. When I grabbed a tray, he grabbed one too, and came to sit beside me. And the rest, as they used to say, is history.

What I’m trying to capture for you is the magic. But this is what’s hard to explain. How obvious it was, how easy it felt. How I knew from the minute I saw that red-capped stranger that he would be in the next part of my life. That whatever happened next would have him in it. His light brown eyes, the color of chicory coffee. His smile, a stolen treat. Have you ever known that feeling?

That a person, one single person, was your destiny?

= = =

On the Matching Floor, Orion is still struggling with his end of the curtain. I can feel his anger rising, thanks to the increasing desperation in his movements. His spear, for whatever reason, did not latch correctly onto the pulleys. So a whole half of the curtain is still up, flapping uselessly as he curses and tugs.

The footsteps behind us are coming closer. A claw of panic latches in my throat. According to protocol, to all our training, I am supposed to run now. I am supposed to run and never look back. My assignment is complete.

But I cannot tear my eyes away from the scene in front of me. The anguish and exhilaration of the Birthing Floor.

= = =

We went on several outings before Orion took me to meet the leaders. Or “Dates” —  that’s what he actually called them. “I’m an old-fashioned guy,” Orion liked to say. “I believe in wooing. Not this arranged partnership claptrap. Some things were better in the old days, you know. Not everything… but we’ve tossed out a lot of the good along with the bad.”

I was happy just to spend the days talking to him. Orion didn’t seem to have a regular assignment. Instead, he’d hang around while I did my tasks, keeping me company. Sometimes he’d help with the little things, like swabbing the floor of the henhouse, or tossing down salt for the deer. Other times he’d just sit on the fence and spin yarns as I worked. He had a lot to say, and his language fit in nicely alongside the animals’. Together, they formed a gentle soundtrack to my days.

“I like you because you’re strong, Anagri,” he told me once, as I was steering a ram into its enclosure. “And strong people think for themselves. Don’t they?” I imagine I nodded and smiled.

That night, after my work was done, he took me into town. We’d been there a few times already — once to the fancy cantina, once to the Museum — but this time he steered me toward the city limits. On a side street, he knocked on a big metal door that looked at first to be part of a warehouse. Milos, the head leader of the rebels, welcomed us in.

“Have you hooked me another one, O?” Milos asked, glancing at me. I remember the glance. A quick, callous up and down. I remember the glance Milos gave me because it was so different from Orion’s. See, Milos looked at me like I wasn’t at all special.

= = =

This is what I see on the Birthing Floor, in the few moments I have:

Birthers groaning. Clutching and twisting. Pushing and crying. A long row of them, people in labor. And by a few of the beds, I see human babies, fresh from the womb. The babies are so little and red they are barely recognizable as people. They look like slimy bags of screaming mush, not unlike the foals or kids on the reservation. My eyes zoom in on one bed, closest to me, where an attendant snatches a newborn up and wraps it in a blanket with a workmanlike efficiency. The birther is reclined on the sheets, sweaty and exhausted. There is a sorrowful look on their face. They reach for the baby, but the attendant holds it up. “They are not yours,” the attendant says, “Not anymore. Remember they belong to the community.” I watch as the birther’s face falls.

I manage to see this whole exchange before the attendant realizes the curtain protecting her privacy has fallen. When she turns and sees me, she screams. Then they all scream, the attendants, and begin pulling flimsy shades down around the beds. Because they don’t want the Receivers to see any of this — not the pain, the blood. Not the sad looks or the reaching hands. Because it is not for the eyes of the collective, this story.

Despite all my training, I realize as I stand there that I have never really pictured the physical work of human labor. Even though I’ve seen it before, with the animals I tend. Taking in the tired bodies, I finally feel I understand Orion’s anger, and the rebels’ quest. Because it does look wrong to separate the baby from the birther. And it does look like love, in the birthers’ tired eyes.

“Behold,” cries Orion, beside me. He has turned to address the hall of Receivers, who all stand, shocked, peering into the chaos on the Birthing Floor. I can tell by their expressions that they’ve never pictured the physical work of human labor, either. But why would they?

“This is where we come from. People. Human beings,” Orion cries. “We are not a collective. We are not a hive. One body begets another body. Look. And that bodily bond is real. Look!” His eyes are casting around for the attendant from earlier, the one with the face like his.

I see the source of the footsteps now. A whole security team, in gray uniforms, is bearing down on us. They have their stunners raised. We have threatened the peace, so according to protocol, we can be silenced. We can be taken away.

Then —

“Run,” I hear. It’s a stern command. Orion’s voice. “Anagri. Run! Do you hear me?” I do not turn to look at him. Because I know that if I do, I won’t listen. 

Instead I tear my eyes from the spectacle around us, and I do it, I run, as fast as I can.

= = =

I wonder sometimes about my own birthers. Or parents, as we might have said in the olden days. What kind of people were they? What did they believe in? Did they build a life around what they liked, as individuals — did they use their own “flair,” as Orion might say? Or did they labor contentedly for the collective? I like to think it was a little bit of both, somehow.

I do not work with the leaders anymore, as you’ve probably guessed. Nor do I work in the animal quadrant. And while it’s true that I could be removed from my post for sharing all this with you, since you are a Prospective, I believe it’s important that you know how it used to be, and how it is now, before you sign on to deliver. It is in this small way that I aim to keep the curtain down.

Now, welcome to the Welcome Center. May I lead you to your bed?