Emotion, Individuality, and the Human Experience Theme Analysis

There was a celebratory dinner her last evening in the dwelling. Her brother, older by six years, had already gone on to his own training in the Department of Law and Justice. They saw him only at public meetings; he had become a stranger. So the last dinner was just the three of them, she and the parental unit who had raised her.

She couldn’t look down at her own body but carefully moved her hands to rest there on what had been her own taut, swollen belly. It was flat now, bandaged, and very sore. The Product was what they had carved out of her.

And she missed it. She was suffused with a desperate feeling of loss.

“See here?” Using a metal tool, the girl pointed to a discolored, eyeless egg. “This one’s dead.” Carefully she plucked it from the tray with her forceps and discarded it in the sink. Then she returned the tray to its rack and reached for the next one.

“Why did it die?” Claire asked. She found that she was whispering. The room was so dimly lit, so quiet and cool, that her voice was hushed.

But the worker replied in a normal tone, very matter-of-fact. “I don’t know. The insemination went wrong, I guess.” She shrugged and removed another dead egg from the second tray. “We have to take them out so they don’t contaminate the good ones. I check them every day.”

Claire felt a vague discomfort. The insemination had gone wrong. Was that what had happened to her?

Claire was fascinated. “What did people do with ‘pets’?”

Dmitri shrugged. “Played with them, I think. And also, pets provided company for lonely people. We don’t have those now, of course.”

“Nobody’s lonely here,” Edith agreed.

Claire was quiet. She didn’t say this, but she was thinking: I am. I am lonely. Even as she thought it, though, she realized she didn’t really know what the term meant.

In another, recurrent dream, Thirty-six was here with her, in her small room at the Hatchery, but no one knew. She kept him hidden in a drawer, and opened it from time to time. He would look up and smile at her. Secrecy was forbidden in the community, and the dream of the hidden newchild caused her to wake with a feeling of guilt and dread. But a stronger feeling was the one that stayed with her after that dream: the excitement of opening the drawer and seeing that he was still there, that he was safe and smiling.

“Were there any surprising names?”

“Not really,” Jeannette said, “except I was startled to hear that one, a boy, was given the name Paul. That was my father’s name.”

“But they can’t use the same name twice!” Edith said. “There are never two people in the community with the same name!”

“But they do regive names,” Claire pointed out, “after someone is gone.”

“Right. So that means my father is gone. I was surprised to hear it,” Jeannette said.

“When did you see him last?” Claire asked. She could remember her own parents, but it had been several years, and details about them had begun to fade.

Jeannette thought, and shrugged. “Probably five years. He worked in Food Production, and I never go over that way. I saw the woman who was my mother now and then, though, because she’s in the landscaping crew.”

What on earth was the matter with her? No one else seemed to feel this kind of passionate attachment to other humans. Not to a newchild, not to a spouse, or a coworker, or friend. She had not felt it toward her own parents or brother. But now, toward this wobbly, drooling toddler—

She would not let them take that from her, that feeling. If someone in authority noticed the error, if they delivered a supply of pills to her, she thought defiantly, she would pretend. She would cheat. But she would never, under any circumstances, stifle the feelings she had discovered. She would die, Claire realized, before she would give up the love she felt for her son.

“Sixteen,” Water Claire repeated in her soft voice, and though she said no more, they knew that she was mourning the knowledge of the years that the sea had gulped away. She watched the little girls at play, laughing as they ran through the meadow, quick and colorful as butterflies, but there was sadness in the watching, for Claire’s meadow days had been taken from her. They did not come back, even in dreams.

“My father was a fisherman, and he was out with the boats. It was this time of year, with the cold and the wind. He likely had a bad time of it too. But he was a hard man, my father. Strong. Used to the weather.”

He shrugged. “As I am,” he said.

“But you’re not hard, Einar.”

“Hardened to the weather, I am. I must be, for the creatures.”

She knew he meant his flock of sheep.

“I don’t feel the cold as you do,” he told her.

“You’ve always been here. You’ve learned to live with it.”

Briefly, on a day when she was exhausted, she thought of Einar with frustration, of how demanding he was, how relentlessly he made her do the exercises again and again. Then she thought of how he watched her, assessing and admiring her strength, and she knew that his gaze was also that of someone who loved her.

“To me you’re a child, still. And a mum always loves her child.”

“It should be so, shouldn’t it? But something stood in the way of it. I think it was a—well, they called them pills. The mothers took pills.”

“Pills?”

“Like a potion.”

“Ah.” That was something Alys understood. “But a potion is meant to fix an ill.”

“Claire yawned. She was achy and exhausted.

“My people—” (“My people?” What did that mean? She didn’t really know) “They thought that it fixed a lot of ills, not to have feelings like love.”

“Fools,” Alys muttered. Now she yawned too. “You loved your boy, though. That’s why you’re soon to climb out.”

Claire closed her eyes and patted the old woman’s back. “I did,” she said. “I loved my boy. I still do.”

“I have a son,” she said. “I want to find my son.”

“A son! How sweet. Maternal love is such a delicious trait. So you don’t want riches, or romance, but simply... your son?” The way he said the word, hissing it, sneering it, made her feel sick.

The veer worked. But not in the way Gabe had planned. He found no math answers there. Instead he had an overwhelming feeling of a kind of passion: for knowledge, for learning of all sorts—and for the children who sat that day at the small desks, as Gabe did. He felt Mentor’s love for his students and his hopes for them and what they would learn from him.

He repeated them, like a chant. He loosened the paddle from there it was wedged. With his fingers he could feel the carved names in the smooth wet wood: Tarik. Simon. Nathaniel. Stefan. Jonas. Though she had not carved her name, he added Kira in his mind. Then little Matthew, and Annabelle. Finally he said his mother’s name—Claire—aloud, adding it to the list of those who cared about him. He shouted it—“Claire!”—into the night, begging her to live. Holding tightly to the paddle, he began to kick his way easily across the gently flowing water in the moonlight.

Frantically he tried again to remember what Jonas had told him. Use your gift. That was it. Use your gift!

He was very frightened, but looking directly at Trademaster, he concentrated and willed himself to veer.