Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

Jason squeezed the trigger. But Germaine had already pushed it to the side and before Jason could squeeze off a second shot she had the gun from his sweat-slicked hand, and driven her fist into his groin so hard he slammed against the window hard enough to crack glass. Jason didn’t fall out, though—just slid down to the floor, the pain in his gut and middle renewed and amplified. When he opened his eyes, Germaine was standing over him, the gun trained on him.

“I can’t see any reason for me to apologize,” she said coldly, “but I shall in any event. Nephew.”

“You killed—” Jason choked and pressed himself higher “—you killed all those folks.”

“Culled,” said Germaine. “That’s what I did—what the germ did. By my own hand, I only killed one person—a sickly old man, who tried to gain entrance to the town office. And I may not have killed him. Do you recall that window pane? The one that you remarked upon, with the bullet-sized hole in it?” She smiled, and let out an incongruously girlish giggle. “Oh, it was all I could do to keep from laughing aloud, when you pointed that out. Laughing aloud. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“The fellow may not, of course, have died from my bullet,” she said. “He disappeared from the window, and when I checked later on, there was no body. Oh stop looking at me like that.” Germaine motioned with the gun. “Get up,” she said. “Get into bed. You’re hurt.”

Jason did. He hobbled over to the bed, as Germaine motioned with the gun. “Now, take off your shirt.” When Jason hesitated, she added: “I need to examine you! Please, Jason—I am a nurse!”

Jason did nothing to comply. He had thought about what she said. “You were culling them, you said… . You were culling them to find the folks that might survive this sickness, figuring there would be just one or two. That right?”

Germaine’s eyes widened, filling the glasses, and her lips parted. “You are bright, as is to be expected.”

“As I think of it, I do recollect that bullet hole, said Jason. “I also recall you telling about Charles Davenport and what an impression he made on you. You said something about him wantin’ to get rid of the bottom ten percent of people. What’s he think of you tryin’ to get rid of the bottom ninety-five? ’Cause that’s what you were doing, wasn’t it?”

“Dr. Davenport is the bright face on our movement. There has never been a need for him to know the whole of what we are doing. And in any case—we do not aim to get rid of, as you say, the bottom ninety-five percent of humanity. If I’d wanted to do that, I would have unscrewed the jar in the middle of New York City.”

“Then—”

“For us it was simply a matter of finding that top five percent. Finding—” Germaine smiled, looking Jason right in the eye “—the hero. And look… here he is.”

“Here,” said Jason, “in Eliada.”

He felt dizzy at the revelation: how Germaine Frost had with evil foresight come to Cracked Wheel, unleashed a plague and taken the one boy left standing as her own. Taken him… here. To Eliada, this place where the creature they called a Juke lived. “Tell me something,” said Jason. “About Dr. Bergstrom—is he one of your eugenicists? Like M’sieur Dulac?”

Germaine nodded and said, “For that I will apologize. Dr. Bergstrom had been engaged in promising research here, I’ll warrant that. When he contacted me last, it seemed as though he had found something beyond a hero. Something like a god: a creature that seemed resilient to dismemberment and illness—a hermaphrodite, inter-fertile with humanity. I was supposed…” She looked down. “I was supposed to find a girl.”

Jason looked up, aghast. “So you could breed her with the Juke?”

“When it was you, you who survived, I should have taken you straight back to New York.” She sighed. “Dr. Bergstrom has fallen into madness. Sheer madness.”

She lowered the pistol and leaned back against the wall, eyes still downcast. Jason briefly thought he might be able to overpower her; launch himself across the room, knock the gun from her hand as she had knocked it from his. Either shoot her or, more likely—for Jason was not so good at shooting folks as that—just get out.

But the moment passed. Her eyes looked up at him, over the tops of the glasses. They were small, curiously pig-like without the magnifying effect of her spectacles.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll find a strong sow for you, my prize hero. Before the day is out, we will have you bred.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Ruth Harper,” she said. “I am not so old, Nephew—” she said the word like an epitaph “—not so old, that I can’t smell the rutting urge.”

Jason barely listened.

Ruth! He hadn’t forgotten about her, but in the cascade of revelation, her predicament had fallen far from the top of his mind. And her predicament might have been dire indeed—for hadn’t he lost track of her, going into the quarantine, where Mister Juke—

“Where is she?” he demanded. “You know where she is—”