Free Tomorrow by C. K. Kelly Martin Page B

continue the species with.
    It felt as if I was probably already too late when I strode into the Billings Library on the evening of August tenth with a pad of paper under my arm and a sharpened pencil tucked behind my ear. It felt more like an act of stubbornness than one of rebellion. You can’t give up when you and the people you love are still living and breathing, even if logically you know your days are numbered. I was overflowing with the need to do something. Scared as I was, I was ready.
    The smell of cloves reached me in the hall before I stepped into the brightly lit room one of the librarians had directed me to. The old U.S.A. had closed most of its public libraries thirty-five years earlier, but when the grounded movement succeeded in having grounded education restored in 2050, many of the libraries were reopened. I loved the aroma of old paper and the heaviness of a book in my hand. But the cloves reeked, countering my warm feelings for the library, even as the stench revealed that the same instructor I’d encountered in one of the Fairfield camp dormitory levels was teaching “Authentic approaches to life through art.”
    Seats were arranged in a semicircle around him, an easel in front of each one, and I dropped into one of the few remaining empty chairs, glancing slyly at the other people in the classroom. They all had their own pencils and sketching pads, but aside from that there was no visible common denominator between the students—my classmates were of various ages, races, and genders, and Isaac was not among them. Nobody paid me the slightest attention and soon the instructor was guiding us through a shading exercise.
    There was a reason I hadn’t done any drawing since I was eight years old and my egg, as I followed along with our instructor, looked morosely saggy on the otherwise unblemished paper. I did a little better at the line drawing exercise and listened to the instructor wax on about the relationship between art and the love for physical life. “You can’t devote yourself to capturing the life force in the crook of someone’s little finger, for example, and not realize the perfect uniqueness of that individual,” he said. “That appreciation for the unique unites us, when we let it. Real perfection is flawed, not sterile like what one encounters on gushi.”
    “Lots of people don’t like imperfection,” the brown-skinned, dark-eyed woman seated next to me interjected. “And the more time they spend on gushi the less tolerance they have for it. How do we combat that in other people?”
    “ Does anyone have any ideas?” The instructor whirled around, his eyes scanning the room in search of someone ready to volunteer a nugget of wisdom. “You.” He pointed at a middle-aged man with a beard, who spluttered and shook his head. “You, then.” The instructor’s finger aimed my way.
    “By stealth,” I joked. “So they don’t know we’re doing it.”
    The instructor smiled but we both knew I hadn’t really answered his question. If I knew how to make people appreciate the merits of being grounded, I wouldn’t be sitting in his class. That was the problem; I didn’t know how to help.
    No one had a sound answer for the woman, and by the time we’d completed another exercise and the session was beginning to break up, I was asking myself why I was hanging out in the Billings Library pretending to be an artist. Did Isaac get some kind of kickback from referring people to the course? Had he been stringing me along with that talk of doing something to help? It seemed I’d wasted most of my night. Before long it would be curfew.
    A few of the other students were talking amongst themselves as the instructor began to pack his things away. My chair screeched as I impatiently pushed it back along the floor and got to my feet. The woman next to me—the one who’d posed the question about tolerance—stood up quickly alongside me. I guessed she was in her early twenties, older than me