On the other hand, she may have had more particulars in mind than anyone knows. It’s perhaps the only way to explain how she decided to try to make contact with her eldest sibling, Liwei, the one who also left B-Mor, though many years prior and under very different circumstances. Again, we can’t be sure what Fan thought or planned from the beginning or decided along the way, except, of course, for the goal of reuniting with Reg, but she must have known all along that her brother was out there, beyond the walls, and most likely in a Charter village.
Liwei, as we all know, was among the rare few from B-Mor who are promoted each year to join a Charter village, and if they succeed with their foster families and in school and, of course, engage a sustaining career, they can live there as fully fledged citizens. The determination is made solely by the results of the Exams, which the Charters take a grade-specific version of each year but that those B-Mor (and like settlements’) children interested in promotion take only at the age of twelve. It’s primarily a test of mathematical problem solving and logical reasoning, with multiple sections of number and word and spatial puzzles, all of it extremely difficult and not material that is fully covered in our schools. We have made light of Reg’s not even bothering with the test, but the fact is Fan did quite poorly on it, as did most everyone else who takes it. We’re all in a range, as they say. It’s best this way.
For the Charters, it’s much more fraught a process, at least in their last year (when they’re eighteen), with the lowest-scoring decile put on a probationary list and given the chance to take the test once more, when they must score better than half their flagged peers or be slated for service jobs such as retail or teaching or firefighting, unless, of course, they inherit enough money to make a sizable contribution to the directorate as well as permanently sustain a Charter life. There’s always a path. Still, with the stakes so high, Charter parents will spend whatever they must to prepare for this, hiring developmental therapists and tutors when their children are as young as six months of age. For B-Mors, of course, it’s no big deal, for as previously noted, one of ours must score in the top 2 percent of Charter results to be eligible for promotion, this without any enrichment training or tutoring at all.
No surprise that those who do attain that mark number in the handful each year, across all facilities; sometimes there are just two or three; and about a third of the time there is no one at all. This is not to say that there isn’t great excitement when someone does make the grade, as Liwei and a girl from West B-Mor did a few years before Fan was born. Their names along with the others are etched in a stone monument that graces one of our parks, this roster of the exceptional, and departed. Before they leave, their clan will typically host a massive block party that is something like a public festival and an important wedding combined, with long banquet tables of food and drink and loud popular music and booths where they run games of chance, the profits going to defray the costs of traveling to whatever Charter the gifted child has been accepted into, whether here or, very rarely, to a Charter abroad, as there’s a Charter association in pretty much every country, even if there is only one village, as in places such as Iceland and Laos.
The party that Fan’s clan threw for Liwei was especially memorable, as they hired musical performers and had a dunking station with water stocked with some of our very own fish, swimming around clueless as the clan patriarch — a famously grumpy man who has since passed — sat on the plank in his pajamas, kids and adults alike taking their turn hurling a ball at the target beside him. Even he was giddy that day, making the funniest faces for the littlest ones, all the while gamely goading and taunting the long line of throwers. He got plenty wet but climbed back up each time with a smile, knowing that someone in his line would be attaining the heights.
Fan was, of course, not yet present, but with all the stories she must have heard over the years, she must have felt she had been there herself, chanting her sibling’s name with the rest of the crowd at party’s end as he raised his fists over his head, which was donned with a customary crown of herbs and flowers grown in our facility. With tears in his eyes, he waved and bowed good-bye to us, and we shouted: Liwei is our champion! Fare thee well, Liwei!
The understanding, of course, is that we’ll never see this person again, that he or she will not return, even for a visit. For what good would that do? What lasting joy would it bring, to us or to them? Isn’t it better that we send them off once and for all beneath the glow of carnival lights, with the taste of treats on our tongues, rather than invite the acrid tang of doubt, and undue longing, and the heart-stab of a freshly sundered bond? Isn’t it kinder to simply let them exit the gates, and for us to turn away, too, and let our thoughts instead draft up on their triumphs to come?
Because it’s known which Charter they’re headed for, it’s easy enough to picture, given the scads of material you can browse, spying the streets and fields and commercial areas of the village, its layout rarely rectilinear like ours, perhaps to heighten the sense of insularity, perhaps so that you don’t have to see the disheartening terminus of any path or lane. We don’t as a community much concern ourselves with Charter life except in this one regard, but ultimately our annual interest remains an abstraction, seeing the promoted child the same way we might imagine a friend on a foreign tour, say, climbing the steps of some postcard ruin or sampling a local delicacy, giving ourselves just enough detail for shape and color but not for any lingering anxieties, such as how he’ll be welcomed by his new family or accepted at school, which career he’ll pursue, or who will be his mate. You just see that he’s traveled to a kind of heaven, if that’s in your belief system, a place that is presumably better in every way than it is here, and surely never worse.
Fan certainly could look up where Liwei had been accepted, a village named Seneca Hamlet. It’s a simple matter of record. And although Charters are indeed mobile, and can buy a seat on a global and pop in on other Charter villages around the world, and even have the right to live there if they can afford it, very few choose to leave their home village permanently, even for one within the region. Like everybody, they rely on their families and friends and associates for not just the practicalities but for moral support as well. So chances were good enough that Liwei was still in the same village. And probably she couldn’t help but wonder, too, as we would, whether he had successfully assimilated into the life of his adoptive family and community, and taken up a sustaining career, and, most of all, enjoyed the rarefied prosperity that his exceptional performance had surely promised him.
That it might be the very Charter that she and Quig and Loreen were now again speeding toward after the encounter with the Nickelmans would be too coincidental. And yet, even before she was struck that very first night by Quig’s car, she must have had a northward heading in mind, and in this light her initially compelled and then willing residence at the Smokes can be seen as an instance of her singular patience, and faith. Again, we don’t speak of faith much in B-Mor, as there’s really no religious or spiritual practice to speak of, no worship of any kind either in public or within the households. It’s not clear what our people think of the existence of God, or the afterlife, or why we are here. What Fan’s position was on these questions will never be known. She simply had a faith — an amazing, profound faith — that like some great waterfall would not stint or diminish. Where it came from or how she nurtured it is a mystery, and what we can see is that she drew upon it in every episode of her quest, for fortitude and strength. It is thus partly faith, and solid reasoning, at least from Fan’s perspective, that her never-met sibling might be helpful in her aim of reuniting with Reg. Liwei was a Charter, after all, and by definition would have the necessary means or connections or maybe even some power.