Brave New Worlds

doors, and very cautiously made her way back to the tiny space between the floors. She slid the door open and deposited everything else she carried inside the cave. She tried to get to the kitchen for food, but stopped when she saw one of the Officers of Law. She returned soundlessly to the attic rooms and tiptoed among the beds to Lisa's cot. She placed one hand over the girl's mouth and shook her awake with the other.
    Lisa bolted upright, terrified, her body stiffened convulsively. With her mouth against the girl's ear Carla whispered, "Don't make a sound. Come on. "She half led, half carried the girl to the doorway, down the stairs, and into the cave and closed the door.
    "You can't talk here, either," she whispered. "they can hear. " She spread out the extra garments she had collected and they lay down together, her arms tight about the girl's shoulders. "Try to sleep," she whispered. "I don't think they'll find us here. And after they leave, we'll creep out and live in the woods. We'll eat nuts and berries. . . . "
    The first day they were jubilant at their success and they giggled and muffled the noise with their skirts. They could hear all the orders being issued by Madam Trudeau: guards in all the halls, on the stairs, at the door to the dorm to keep other girls from trying to escape also. They could hear all the interrogations, of the girls, the guards who had not seen the escapees. They heard the mocking voice of the Doctor of Law deriding Madam Trudeau's boasts of absolute control.
    The second day Carla tried to steal food for them, and, more important, water. There were blue-clad Males everywhere. She returned empty handed. During the night Lisa whimpered in her sleep and Carla had to stay awake to quiet the child, who was slightly feverish.
    "You won't let her get me, will you?" she begged over and over.
    The third day Lisa became too quiet. She didn't want Carla to move from her side at all. She held Carla's hand in her hot, dry hand and now and then tried to raise it to her face, but she was too weak now. Carla stroked her forehead.
    When the child slept Carla wrote in the notebooks, in the dark, not knowing if she wrote over other words or on blank pages. She wrote her life story, and then made up other things to say. She wrote her name over and over, and wept because she had no last name. She wrote nonsense words and rhymed them with other nonsense words. She wrote of the savages who had laughed at the funeral and she hoped they wouldn't all die over the winter months. She thought that probably they would. She wrote of the golden light through green-black pine trees and of birds' songs and moss underfoot. She wrote of Lisa lying peacefully now at the far end of the cave amidst riches that neither of them could ever have comprehended. When she could no longer write, she drifted in and out of the golden light in the forest, listening to the birds' songs, hearing the raucous laughter that now sounded so beautiful.

O Happy Day!
    by Geoff Ryman

    Geoff Ryman is the author of the novels The Warrior Who Carried Life , The Unconquered Country , The Child Garden , Was , 253 , Lust , Air , and The King's Last Song . His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Interzone , Tor.com , New Worlds , and has frequently been reprinted in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction series. Most of his short work can be found in the collections Unconquered Countries and the recent Paradise Tales and Other Stories . He is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the Tiptree Award, and the British Science Fiction Award. He is also the editor of the recent anthology When It Changed . Another story of his appears elsewhere in this volume.

    What is the role of violence in society? Is there a place for it? Is there a way to make violence socially acceptable? Or should it be eliminated—at any price?

    Our next dystopia gives violence a cold looking-over, and after the examination is complete, no one is left innocent. Like Golding's Lord of the Flies , where the wrong conditions turn harmless school boys into malevolent brutes, "O Happy Day" watches people we often stereotype as gentle innocents turn beastly. Women prove themselves as capable of mindless cruelty as men. Homosexual men succumb to fisticuffs and in-fighting just as nastily as any straight men. No one is immune to the temptation of