Inertia

Inertia

By Nancy Kress

The sociologists hung on longer than anybody else. Journalists have to be timely and interesting, but sociologists merely have to polish. Besides, everything in their cultural tradition told them that Inside must sooner or later degenerate into war zones: Deprive people of electricity (power became expensive), of municipal police (who refused to go inside), of freedom to leave, of political clout, of jobs, of freeways and movie theaters and federal judges and state-administrated elementary-school accreditation – and you get unrestrained violence to just survive. Everything in the culture said so. Bombed-out inner cities. Lord Of The Flies. The Chicago projects. Western movies. Prison memoirs. The Bronx. East L.A. Thomas Hobbles. The sociologists knew.

Only it didn’t happen.

The sociologists waited. And Inside we learned to grow vegetables and raise chickens who, we learned, will eat anything. Those of us with computer knowledge worked real jobs over modems for a few years – maybe it was as long as a decade – before the equipment became too obsolete and unreplaced. Those who had been teachers organized classes among the children, although the curriculum, I think, must have gotten simpler every year. Rachel and Jennie don’t seem to have much knowledge of history or science. Doctors practiced with medicines donated by corporations for the tax write-offs, and after a decade or so they began to train apprentices. For a while – it might have been a long while – we listened to radios and watched TV. Maybe some people still do, if we have any working ones donated from Outside. I don’t pay attention.

Inertia. Photograph by Elena

Eventually sociologists remembered older models of deprivation and discrimination and isolation from the larger culture: Jewish shtetls. French Huguenots. Amish farmers. Self-sufficient models, stagnant, but uncollapsed. And why they were remembering, we had good lotteries, and took on apprentices, and rationed depositary food according to who needed it, and replaced our broken-down furniture with other broken-down furniture, and got married and bore children. We paid no taxes, fought no wars, wielded no votes, provided no drama. After a while – a long while – the visitors stopped coming. Even the sociologists.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)