One thing Tyler had said was undoubtedly true: this was a test. How devoted was Erno to the Society of Cousins? How good a judge was he of Tyler’s character? How eager was he to see his mother and the rest of his world made uncomfortable, and how large a discomfort did he think was justified? Just how angry was Erno?
After Erno got back to his room, he lay awake, unable to sleep. He ran every moment of his night with Tyler over in his mind, parsed every sentence, and examined every ambiguous word. Tyler had never denied that the Philosopher’s Stone was a bomb. Erno looked up the term in the dictionary: a philosopher’s stone was “an imaginary substance sought by alchemists in the belief that it would change base metals into gold or silver.”
He did not think the change that Tyler’s stone would bring had anything to do with gold or silver.
He looked at his palm, long since washed clean, where Alicia had written her number. She’d asked him to call her before he did anything stupid.
At 1545 the next day Erno was seated in the amphitheater among the crowds of cousins. More people were here than had come the previous week, and the buzz of their conversation, broken by occasional laughter, filled the air. He squinted up at the dome to try to figure out just where they had placed the stone. The dome had automatic safety devices to seal any minor air leak. But it couldn’t survive a hole blasted in it. Against the artificial blue sky Erno watched a couple of flyers circling like hawks.
1552. Tyler arrived, trailing a gaggle of followers, mostly young men trying to look insolent. He’d showed up- what did that mean? Erno noted that this time, Tyler wore black. He seemed as calm as he had before, and he charted easily with the others, then left them to take a seat on the stage.
At 1559 Debra Debrasdaughter took her place. Erno looked at his watch. 1600.
Nothing happened.
Was that the test? To see whether Erno would panic and fall for a ruse? He tried to catch Tyler’s eye, but got nothing.
Debrasdaughter rapped for order. The ranks of cousins began to quiet, to sit up straighter. Near silence had fallen, and Debrasdaughter began to speak.
“Our second meeting to discuss-”
A flash of light seared the air high above them, followed a second later by a concussion. Shouts, a few screams.
Erno looked up. A cloud of black smoke shot rapidly from a point against the blue. One flyer tumbled, trying to regain his balance; the other had dived a hundred meters seeking a landing place. People pointed and shouted. The blue sky flickered twice, went to white as the imaging system struggled, then recovered.
People boiled out of the amphitheater, headed for pressurized shelter. Erno could not see if the dome had been breached. The smoke, instead of dissipating, spread out in an arc, then flattened up against the dome. It formed tendrils, shapes. He stood there, frozen. It was not smoke at all, he realized, but smart paint.
The nanodevices spread the black paint onto the interior of the dome. The paint crawled and shaped itself, forming letters. The letters, like a message from God, made a huge sign on the inside of the clear blue sky:
“BANG! YOU’RE DEAD!”
“You’re Dead!”
One of the other Stories for Men was about Harry Rodney and Little Bert, two petty criminals on an ocean liner that has struck an iceberg and is sinking, with not enough lifeboats for all the passengers. The patriarchal custom was that women and children had precedence for spaces in the boats. Harry gives up his space in a boat in favor of some girl. Bert strips a coat and scarf from an injured woman, steals her jewelry, abandons her belowdecks, and uses her clothes to sneak into a lifeboat.
As it happens, both men survive. But Harry is so disgusted by Bert’s crime that he persuades him to run away and pretend he is dead. For years, whenever Bert contacts Harry, Harry tells him to stay away or else the police might discover him. Bert never returns home for fear of being found out.
In the panic and confusion, Tyler Durden disappeared. On his seat at the meeting lay a note: “I did it.”
As a first step in responding to the threat to the colony, the Board of Matrons immediately called the question of ostracism, and by evening the population had voted: Tyler Durden was declared invisible.
As if that mattered. He could not be found.
It took several days for the writing to be erased from the dome.
A manhunt did not turn up Tyler. Nerves were on edge. Rumors arose, circulated, were denied. Tyler Durden was still in the colony, in disguise. A cabal of followers was hiding him. No, he and his confederates had a secret outpost ten kilometers north of the colony. Durden was in the employ of the government of California. He had stockpiled weapons and was planning an attack. He had an atomic bomb.
At the gym entrance, AI’s checked DNA prints, and Erno was conscious, as never before, of the cameras in every room. He wondered if any monitors had picked up his excursion with Tyler. Every moment he expected a summons on his wristward to come to the assembly offices.
When Erno entered the workout room, he found Tyrus and a number of others wearing white T-shirts that said, “BANG! YOU’RE DEAD!”
Erno took the unoccupied rowing machine next to Ty. Ty was talking to Sid on the other side of him.
A woman came across the room to use the machines. She was tightly muscled, and her dark hair was pulled back from her sweaty neck. As she approached, the young men went silent and turned to look at her. She hesitated. Erno saw something on her face he had rarely seen on a woman’s face before: fear. The woman turned and left the gym.
None of the boys said anything. If the others had recognized what had just happened, they did not let it show.
Erno pulled on his machine. He felt the muscles in his legs knot. “Cool shirt,” he said.
“Tyrus wants to be invisible, too,” said Sid. Sid wasn’t wearing one of the shirts.
“Eventually someone will check the vids of Tyler’s performances, and see me there,” said Ty between strokes. “I’m not ashamed to be Tyler’s fan.” At thirteen, Erno and Ty had been fumbling lovers, testing out their sexuality. Now Ty was a blunt overmuscled guy who laughed like a hyena. He didn’t laugh now.
“It was a rush to judgment,” one of the other boys said. “Tyler didn’t harm a single cousin. It was free expression.”
“He could just as easily have blown a hole in the dome,” said Erno. “Do they need any more justification for force?”
Ty stopped rowing and turned toward Erno. Where he had sweated through the fabric, the “Bang!” on his shirt had turned blood red. “Maybe it will come to force. We do as much work, and we’re second class citizens.” He started rowing again, pulled furiously at the machine, fifty reps a minute, drawing quick breaths.
“That Durden has a pair, doesn’t he?” Sid said. Sid was a popular stud-boy. His thick chestnut hair dipped below one eye. “You should have seen the look on Rebecca’s face when that explosion went off.”
“I hear, if they catch him, the council’s not going to stop at invisibility,” Erno said. “They’ll kick him out.”
“Invisibility won’t slow Tyler down,” Ty said. “Would you obey the decree?” he asked Sid.
“Me? I’m too beautiful to let myself get booted. If Tyler Durden likes masculinists so much, let him go to one of the other colonies, or to Earth. I’m getting laid too often.”
Erno’s gut tightened. “They will kick him out. My mother would vote for it in a second.”
“Let ’em try,” Ty grunted, still rowing.
“Is that why you’re working out so much lately, Ty?” Sid said. “Planning to move to Earth?”
“No. I’m just planning to bust your ass.”
“I suspect it’s not busting you want to do to my ass.”
