The Oracle Year(47)
The screens still showed the stage at Teatro Solís, where emergency workers—medical, police—and tearful, traumatized members of the production, milled around Pittaluga’s corpse. No one had thought to end the broadcast, and while there wasn’t very much to see, the images were a reminder of how wrong things had gone.
The Oracle, for whatever reason, had wanted the world’s attention focused here. Had wanted millions, if not billions of men, women, and children, all around the planet, to watch a man’s murder.
It began on the beach. A bottle arced up above the crowd and smashed against one of the poles of the metal scaffolding holding the large screen, with Montevideo Bay visible behind it. Fragments of green glass rained down amid a shower of foam, sparkling in the light cast by the image on the screen. Almost immediately, more bottles, crashing against the supports and the screen itself. Inevitably, the rain of glass found upturned faces below, and cries rang out. Shoves, anger, shouts as perpetrators were sought, leading to blows.
At last, the screen went dark, either via damage from the glass or because a technician realized what was happening, but too late. A critical point had been reached, and the crowd broke, spilling out from the beach into the city in a panicked, gleeful, drunken surge.
Word spread quickly, and the group from the beach was joined by others, from all across the city—windows were smashed, cars overturned, people were hurt or killed or burned or trampled.
Three days later, an overwhelmed police force was finally relieved by army units from the Ejército Nacional, who restored order in the city through an indiscriminate application of force. An uneasy peace, and then a checkpoint close to the city center was firebombed, with responsibility claimed by a group calling themselves the Nuevo Tupamaros, after the infamous liberation movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
Their public statements claimed no connection to the Oracle, insisting instead that they simply wished to free Uruguay from the long-standing political oppression now finally, tangibly evidenced by armed soldiers on the streets infringing upon the freedoms of citizens. More bombings, robberies, manifestos, and at last martial law was declared within the municipal borders, until such time as the threat posed by the Tupamaros was neutralized—clearly their goal from the start.
Decisions, consequences, adaptation, and further decisions, all based on a future that was becoming impossible to predict.
Chapter 19
“Sit down, Tyler!” Miko said, in that special tone of voice all teachers could produce on demand—sharp with irresistible authority and barely restrained exercise of higher disciplinary powers, from ruler raps (once, anyway), to visits to principals’ offices. Or, if the infraction was sufficiently dire, the ultimate threat—a black mark on the never viewed but monolithic set of documents governing the future of every child in every school—the permanent record.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sheikh,” Tyler said, slinking away from the classmates he’d been distracting and returning to his own desk.
Miko shifted her gaze away and scanned across the rest of the room, where twenty-five fourth graders worked through their free-choice reading with varying degrees of engrossment.
Teachers developed any number of superpowers—the voice was one, but another, almost as important, was the read. The same batch of kids could be working quietly on two different days and appear identical to an outsider. But on one of those days, the serene pods of children scattered around their beanbags and desks and wedged into corners might be mere moments from an eruption into undisciplined chaos. Impossible to foresee, unless you had the power of the read—and any experienced teacher did. Knowing the moment to strike, to head off the tornado before it had the chance to develop into anything more than a few isolated wisps of curling wind.
Miko ran her hand across the increasingly pronounced curve of her stomach, thinking about the future. She glanced down beneath her desk, at her long, battered teacher’s purse, suitable in dimension for carrying stacks of folders filled with essays and math work home to be graded. A slim manila envelope projected from the top of the purse, where it had been sitting since she picked it up a few days earlier—and would sit until she figured out what the hell to do with its contents.
She watched as Tyler turned pages in his book much too quickly to be reading them, making furtive glances over at the group of friends he had been harassing moments before, with a particular focus on Linden, a long-haired blond specimen.
Miko considered singling him out again, but too much could make things worse—Tyler could decide, whether consciously or not, that the attention he was getting from the teacher was making him cooler in the eyes of his fellow students (or more particularly, Linden), and a feedback loop of misbehavior would begin. She flicked her eyes up at the wall clock—the day was almost over. She could let this one go.
Miko touched her stomach again, feeling a little flutter that might have been the baby, might have been her. She glanced down at the envelope in her purse again, then back up to the wall clock. Just a few more minutes.
She reached out with her teacherly senses again to take the temperature of her class—they were anxious, beyond just the end-of-day readiness to get the hell out of school—and it was no surprise. The state-run standardized tests were just a few months away, and they were required by the DoE to spend a certain amount of every day preparing for them. These kids were nine and ten, and they were already losing sleep over a test that supposedly would have a significant impact on their futures.