“We all cringed. We thought she’d made a mistake.” Edith straightened and tensed, demonstrating with her posture how nervous she and the others had been.
“Everybody thought so. Did you hear the murmur go through the Auditorium?” someone asked.
“And the boy she skipped? Number Nineteen? I could see him from where I was sitting. He was completely nonplussed!” A young man at the end of the table grinned.
“So what happened?” Claire asked.
“Well,” Rolf explained, “after she finished with the last one—”
“Number Fifty?”
“Yes. But of course she had only called up forty-nine to the stage. Then she apologized to the audience.”
“The Chief Elder apologized?” It was hard to believe.
Rolf nodded. “She laughed a little. She could see we were all sort of nervous. So she reassured us, and apologized for making us uncomfortable. Then she called the boy, number Nineteen, to the stage.”
“He looked as if he was going to throw up,” Eric said, laughing.
“I don’t blame him,” Claire said. She found herself feeling sorry for the boy. It must have been an awful moment for him. “What did she say to him?”
“That he hadn’t been assigned—which we all knew, of course. But then—this was the surprise. She said he’d been ‘selected.’”
“Selected for what?” Claire had never heard of such a thing before.
Rolf raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Didn’t she say?”
“Yes, but I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Did any of you?” He looked around at his coworkers at the table.
“Not really,” Edith said. “It was important, though. It had to do with the Giver and the Receiver.”
“Whoever they are,” someone murmured.
“Yes, it sounded really important,” Eric agreed.
“Do you think the boy understood?”
They all shook their heads. “He looked completely confused,” Edith said. “I felt sorry for him.”
The cleanup buzzer sounded. They began to gather their plates and forks. “Who was he?” Claire asked. She was still fascinated by the idea of the selected boy.
“Never heard of him before. But we all know his name now, don’t we?” Eric said with a laugh.
“What do you mean?”
“The whole community called out his name. It was a kind of ceremonial . . . What would you call it? A recognition. We all shouted the name over and over. Jonas!”
Rolf, Edith, and some other workers joined in. “Jonas! Joooonas!”
People at all the other tables looked up. Some seemed amused, others a little worried. Then they too called the name. “JOOOONAS! JOOOONAS!”
The final buzzer sounded and they fell quiet. People looked around at each other in the sudden silence. Then they stood to leave the room. Dinner had ended.
Eleven
Claire walked again along the river before retiring. Once more she was alone. Usually the workers took walks in pairs or groups, but again tonight the others were tired after the unusual day. One by one they had gone to their rooms, some of them carrying the readers that they were supposed to study in order to advance in their jobs. From time to time Claire turned her reader on and skimmed the material, but she had little interest in it. She had not been selected for this job by a committee that had perceived her fascination with fish. They had simply sent her here because they needed a place to put her after her failure as a Birthmother.
She had read the manual pages listlessly several times, guiltily aware of her own disinterest. She had memorized a phrase: cle**age, epiboly, and organogenesis. She could still say it but realized that she had completely forgotten what it referred to.
“Activation of cortical alveoli,” Claire murmured, walking. That was another phrase, a heading she had memorized in the manual.
“What?” a nearby voice asked, startling her. She looked up.
It was one of the boat crew, a young man in shorts and a sweater. He wore dark laced shoes made from a kind of canvas, with thick, textured soles that Claire assumed prevented him from slipping on the wet deck of the vessel. She wasn’t frightened. He was smiling and looked quite friendly, not at all anyone to be nervous about. But she had never spoken to any of the boatmen before, or they to her.
“Is that a different language?” he asked, grinning. He had the distinctive accent she had overheard.
“No,” Claire answered politely. “We speak the same language.”
“Then what is ‘amplification of corsical alveoli’?”
Claire couldn’t help laughing. He had gotten quite close to her words, but still he was amusingly wrong.
“I was just trying to memorize something for work,” she explained. “A phase of embryonal development. It’s a little boring, I’m afraid, unless you are fascinated by fish. I work at the Hatchery.”
“Yes, I’ve seen you there.”
“You’ve had to wait to unload because of our annual Ceremony.”
He shrugged. “Not a problem. Nice to rest from the work. We’ll unload tomorrow and be on our way.”
He had begun to walk beside her and now they were approaching the bridge. They stopped there for a moment and watched the turbulent churning of the water.
“Do you ever worry that a bridge might be too low? Do you encounter other bridges? Might your boat be too tall for a low one?”
He chuckled. “Not my job to worry,” he said. “The captain has the charts and knows the routes. We’re six point three meters. Never bumped a bridge yet, or knocked a crew member into the drink.”
“We’re required to learn to swim but we’re not allowed in the river,” she found herself telling him.
“Required? Who requires it?”
Claire felt slightly flustered. “It’s just one of the rules of the community. We learn in a pool. When we’re five.”
The young man laughed. “No rules like that where I come from. I learned when my dad threw me into a pond. I was eight, I think. Swallowed half the pond before I made my way to the dock, and my dad laughing the whole time. I bawled when I got out and so he threw me back in.”
“Oh. Goodness.” Claire didn’t know quite what to say. She couldn’t imagine the scene. Her own swimming class had been orderly and precise, with special instructors. No heartless laughing men called Dad.