The New World: A Novel by Chris Adrian & Eli Horowitz

Author:Chris Adrian & Eli Horowitz [Adrian, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781937894320
Publisher: Atavist Books
Published: 2014-08-09T20:00:00+00:00

Days or weeks or months later, Jim was ready. He lost track of the hours, and lost track of the others in the house, even his Alice, taking his meals alone and spending the little time when he wasn’t working asleep, or walking through the orchard and beyond. The morning he finished his book, he put his head down to rest and was woken again by the noise of the bus in the yard. He went to the window to see who was going to leave today, and stood a long while before Alice knocked on his door and he understood that the bus was waiting for him.

Alice held his hand the whole way to the city. Except for his book, he brought no luggage. Though the bus had no driver, it seemed to know just where it was going, rolling confidently over the hills on its big moon-buggy tires. Neither he nor Alice said anything for the first hour of the trip. Jim stared out the window at the lovely landscape, pretty streams and tidy woods and stark blue lakes that looked like they belonged high in the mountains somewhere.

“Do you feel ready for your Debut?” Alice asked at last, squeezing his hand.

“I think so,” Jim said. “I feel ready for something. I’m not having stage fright, if that’s what you mean. It doesn’t sound too hard, anyway. I just burn the book, right? As a pledge. And then I say I’m ready to become a citizen if everybody will have me. I make my testimony, and cross my fingers that they’ll all say yes.”

“No need to cross your fingers,” she said. “You’ve already done the hard part. I have every expectation that you’ll succeed today. You’ve made this last part just a formality. I’m very proud of you.” She pointed out the bus’s curved window. “Look, we’re nearly there now.”

Jim turned his head and saw a slender metal spire rising from one of those displaced tarns. Mercury-silver, the tower looked almost liquid itself. A door opened in the lake and the bus drove in. Shortly, they came to a brightly lit underground garage.

Alice led him out of the bus to a smooth elevator, which seemed to move in a variety of directions. They stepped into an immaculate hallway, so white it was hard to tell the bright lamps in the wall from the wall itself, but carpeted in neatly clipped green grass. He laughed when she brought him into the greenroom, which was green all over, not just the floor carpeted in grass but the walls and even the furniture upholstered with it as well. “It’s the greenest greenroom I’ve ever seen,” Jim said. “Now what?”

“Now you can rest, and prepare. You won’t see anyone else until you see everyone else. But look, a friend has sent you some flowers.” They were on the table, a giant bouquet of sunflowers and posies and daisies, all of them shivering, vastly more alive than any flower Jim had ever seen before.

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