by Sue Burke
I had carefully prepared a formal request outlining the success of my studies and proclaiming my fascination with the robust grammar and vocabulary of Classic English, and detailing the utility that the dead language would have in my employment and benefit to our house. I didn’t mention that a profession might save me from becoming a mere minor wife, and especially, that I could learn more about myself, about NVA, the first step toward escape.
Now I would hear their response.
After formal greetings, I repeated my petition. “Our house dedicates itself to language. I want to specialize in Classic English. It’s a difficult language, and I’m prepared to work as hard as I can to master it.”
A secondary father rose to speak, so I was being granted scant importance. I felt enormous relief because this meant they didn’t know who I really was.
“Of course you can, Karola!” He didn’t seem as solemn as I had expected. “You’re determined—and very logical. You’ve done very well at languages. But you’ll have to study history, too, since Classic English is history and you can’t understand it if you don’t know history. It just won’t make sense. How about that? Do you want to study both Classic English and history?”
I felt myself smile before I fully understood how helpful it would be to learn everything I could about the past and myself. “I’d love to study history!”
“Then it’s decided. You’ll do both. We’ll handle all the permissions.” He looked at the other fathers, and they nodded with faces hard as glass. “And we know you’ll make us proud as well. And yourself proud. You’ve made the right decision.”
Then they dismissed me. Dinner was waiting—for them, in that fine room. For me, dinner would be served at the table in the kitchen in the girls’ wing. On my way out, I glimpsed the food that two of the mothers were bringing, meat, soup, two kinds of vegetables, and rice. The meal that awaited me would be only one simple dish, although plenty of it.
While I had been reminded of where I ranked, at least I had stopped being a child, and if I had been a normal young woman, I would have felt perfectly happy.
* * *
NVA’s feed is always public, always connected, always one-way. She surely knows that everyone sees through her eyes and hears through her ears because she was like me until suddenly she discovered she was like no one else in humanity. One day in my teens I connected to her for the last time and shared her captivity:
She stares up at the glass roof of her prison, watching a sandstorm. Clouds of dust whip past at insane speeds, leaving a trail of twisting, twitching dunes. The wind howls. Her own breath comes fast and loud. An emotion-meter in the right corner of our view shows that she is close to panic.
She lives in a prison, a wide bomb crater blasted into living rock, and she may know that, as punishment, she has been infected with a pathogen engineered to cause fear. She may dread against all logic that the roof will fall, and she may even know that the emotion is artificial and uncontrollable. Would that hurt even more keenly than true fear?
Her vision jerks, eyes darting from one place to another. The crater is large, two kilometers wide, full of black rock shattered by the bomb. She never sees her jailers. She is naked and alone.
Almost alone. Something moves behind a boulder. She cringes, ready to bolt. It’s a huge dog, and she is terrified. It bounds to the top of the rock and barks, ears back. She turns, and then the landscape bounces crazily as she runs and searches for a hiding place.
Her sight spins wildly as she falls and yelps in pain. She rises, looks at her leg, and dirty fingers brush away sand to reveal a jagged, bleeding cut. Behind her, the dog growls, and she runs again.
Finally, she drops behind a rock, eyes low to the ground, panting and cowering.
That was when I broke off the feed.
We’re told she deserves it, and some people watch all the time, but there’s a Classic English word for it: pornography.
Anyone subjected to that kind of stress could not live long. When the time for her replacement came, they would come for me.
* * *
I tried to learn more about NVA, about myself, and find the clue I needed to escape my fate.
The public record offered little. NVA had no recorded childhood; she had started a successful food business; and at some point she had begun adding a protein to her products that slowly destroyed the human brain stem and reduced people to vegetative states. Eventually too few people remained healthy to be able to help each other, and they all died as civilization fell into a nightmare. I could hardly bear to read the details.
I had caused that, or rather, I had the latent personality so twisted and evil that I could do that. My DNA, supposedly, carried that flaw. But I myself had done nothing, and I had been raised to be virtuous. I would be punished as NVA for what I would have done simply because someone had to be punished.
* * *
“Stupid girl,” one of my fathers said, the youngest one and the least patient. Other fathers treated us the way most men treated women, merely with condescension. The sister he spoke to dropped her head in shame. He rarely came to visit, and the sight of his short, square-shouldered silhouette in the doorway to our wing never brought us joy.
“Mars? You don’t know about Mars? After all we did for that planet, they revolted. We helped them and they gave back nothing. You don’t know that? I’ll send you a history lesson. You—all you stupid girls have to read it. You’ll be tested.”
I was sitting next to her. After he left, I murmured, “If no one ever bothered to tell us, it’s not your fault.”
“That’s right,” another sister said. Most of the rest looked away, too cowed to offer sympathy and annoyed at getting extra studies.
But once I read the history, I rejoiced. During the Reorganization after the Great Loss, Mars had objected to the terms, and though the colony could barely subsist alone, it cut off relations with Earth. And there the matter stood. Technically, the planets were at war, but in practice, nothing could be done.
The Reorganization had included NVA’s punishment. Mars did not punish NVA. If I could get to Mars, I would be free.
* * *
Women and girls as well as a few men crowded the little merchants’ gallery, the only market of its kind in our mountain-enclosed town. The glowing beams in the peaked roof lit the twelve shops offering trinkets and luxuries that mothers, daughters, and servants could buy with their allowances. I had come with a sister.
“Should we sample some perfume?” she said. “Maybe we could buy some rose cologne. It’s always cheap.”
“Maybe we could,” I said, then in a shop window I saw a tiny flash of color, orange-red like rust. “But let’s look there first.”
We slid between the people to stare at a jewelry store display.
“That ring is interesting,” I said, “the one with the round orange stone.” Round and orange like Mars.
“It’s used.”
“Then maybe I can afford it. I want to try it on.”
The shopkeeper greeted us with the graciousness of a natural saleswoman and fetched the ring from the display, talking all the while.
“This is coral. It’s such a beautiful color, isn’t it? They told me the ring was scavenged from the Americas. Licensed scavengers, of course, don’t you worry. Try it on. Coral’s very old in its use for jewelry. And this design around it to look like a rope is very traditional. Genuine silver, of course. The black tarnish is natural and helps show off the silversmithing. It’s worn, but you can still see the design. It’s so pretty. Do you like it?”
As she continued her patter, I slid the ring onto my middle finger, a stone as wide as my fingernail that looked like the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, for it meant hope.
Used jewelry was inexpensive, but I would have paid anything, and I wore it out of the shop.
* * *
For four centuries, the Institute of English Studies in London had occupied a nineteen-story white building with narrow windows
that overlooked the grand diked city. It abutted a squat library whose climate-controlled rooms contained a wealth of old paper books and antique-coded memories incompatible with current general public record technologies.
I entered at a respectful distance behind two professors I knew. One had taught me “Information Nodes, Redistributions, and Their Uses,” and considered himself liberal for accepting female students as equals. “And your skills will be helpful as an assistant to researchers, Karola,” he had said.
I had my own research and a three-part thesis based on my theories of meta-history. I wanted information at least one hundred years old. It needed to originate from informed sources, and they would be defined as sources that appeared in nodes, especially nodes that connected to other nodes. And they would be in Classic English, not Sino-Arabic Creole, so the debate would have been sheltered from popular opinion and politics. The Great Loss had ended a half century earlier, and NVA would have been recently exhumed and her DNA extracted. By then the shock would have dissipated and the consequences would have emerged.
As I searched, I became familiar with the little computer booths and their exotic equipment and databases, and with the long aisles of steel vaults that held shelves of delicate paper. The librarians proudly helped me explore the library’s ignored treasures.
The thesis took some fine-tuning because the debate I wanted had taken place before her grave had finally been located and desecrated, because the information in her grave changed everything.
I spent a full month refining my Classic English skills, and during that time I found frequent references to an analysis by a historian named Li Ming. It had been erased from Chinese-language records but had been cited in Classic English works that escaped the less educated hands of censors. From those citations, I reassembled his argument:
“We must praise the Heavens for the Great Loss. The progress of mankind had brought us to the stage of barbarism as the result of excessive population. People lost the correct relationships among individuals and societies, and among institutions and nations as they fought to survive. Soon warfare threatened to engulf the world and destroy it.
“Among these miseries was pollution, which caused disease. The Heavens saved us from war by means of disease, which blessed not one generation but hundreds. Where there was overcrowding, now there is space. Where there was competition, now there is cooperation. Where there was pollution, now there is a clean world. Where there was poverty, now there is wealth.
“Thus the Heavens benefited the world with illness. A great flood was drained before it could wash away the very rivers that had created it.”
Nancsi’s grave had been discovered and opened not long after Li had made his analysis, and a testament had been buried with her: “Only disease can prevent war, a fate worse than pestilence, for the coming war will kill us all. I chose to save humanity through kinder means. I weep for the loss and rejoice that some will survive.”
Could that be me? Had I saved the world?
* * *
“Try to locate to this.”
A blond middle-aged man pushed a button on a small box, and I closed my eyes. I saw and heard the ordinary background noise of my own feed, tailored over the years. Messages, reminders, items of possible interest, half-completed projects, storage, news, the locations of family and friends, weather, several conversations …
“Be patient,” he said. “First you have your own frequency. Everyone has their own. Now try to lose your own signal. Everyone can do that, and it’s bloody annoying. But don’t do it by accident, do it intentionally.”
This was my third try. On the first two, I had gotten nowhere, but this bitter man in an old-fashioned plaid coat had been patient.
“Every time I’ve lost it,” I said, “it’s been when I was switching off and on.”
“Then do that. Everyone is different. If that works for you, do it.”
What I sought to learn would have been illegal if any lawmaker had believed it possible, if they knew enough about the centuries-old science of one of the universe’s most basic forms of energy, the electromagnetic spectrum. You could adjust radio-wave frequencies with a radio transmitter-receiver, obviously, so those were banned for private ownership, but you could never do it with your mind and your own chip.
No one was supposed to be able to do that, at least. No one in Greenland could, but London had always festered with rebellious subcultures. The blond man, an original Brit who made sure you knew he was, considered himself subversive: he strove to undermine the world union and assert ancient independence by eliminating controls over the population and reestablishing freedom. That’s what he said, anyway. I had met him through a friend of a friend who belonged to a group dedicated to maintaining “pure” English.
I switched off and focused on my surroundings. I was sitting on a hard, orange chair in a sub-subbasement next to the water-recycling unit. A series of translucent white tanks lined one wall with only enough space around each tank for repair access. Light fibers above them created complex shadows. The dusty tank next to me gurgled softly, and the damp air smelled of the must of bacteria eating the building’s waste.
Within that distraction, I switched off and then tried to reconnect to my feed, failed, and tried again. Instead, as if from far away, I heard a whistle being broadcast almost exactly on my own frequency. I tried to draw it closer but it was like trying to remember something I never really knew, something I had to learn anew rather than remember, until finally I heard it in full.
“I’ve got the tone.”
He switched another button on his transmitter box.
“Now I hear music.”
“Now follow it.” He slowly turned a dial.
I tried to follow, dragging my memory and attention like an anchor toward the music. I reached it and realized I was sweating and panting and swaying to its rhythm.
“Ah, you’re good. No one ever gets it that fast. Really. Rest a minute, then we’ll try again.”
After some deep breaths, I nodded. He turned the dial again.
Again I tried to move toward the sound. It was a little easier. But my head was pounding.
* * *
Each time I practiced, my head ached, but less than the last time. And each time, week after week, I tried to master another technical detail.
Music let me tune in to other people’s feeds as well as my own because I used their reaction to music as a means to locate the feed. Feeds were broadcast from relatively few antennae, something everyone had been taught but few understood consciously. The recipients’ actions, such as moving to music, offered clues to determine exactly which feed from which antenna they were receiving, but there might be other clues to identify their feed. I wanted to see how far I could go.
With a hood pulled forward to hide my face, I followed a language professor with a lazy teaching style and a weak vocabulary. I didn’t know where he was headed, but like most people he doubtless relied on his feed rather than really knowing where he was. He paused to check the way at every cross street—yes, he was using his feed. I began searching for it.
Before he reached the next corner, patiently waiting since even petty offenses like jaywalking were monitored and prohibited, I had found the antenna and feed for his visual overlay. The right direction to reach his destination would be marked green, and the wrong way would be red. I concentrated and reversed the colors the same way that if you stare at something, then close your eyes, you see it in reverse. I sent that as a preferred feed—or at least I tried to do that. Everyone could send and receive on their own frequency, and with the training I’d received, I could send on other frequencies as well. For geolocation he might receive messages from several sources, but one would have consolidated the others and become the preferred message. The process wasn’t secret, but only technicians needed to know how the wavelengths reinforced each other. I had learned it, or so I hoped.
He reached the corner and turned left instead of continuing forward as
he should have. He had seen what I wanted him to see, not what he should have seen.
I sat down on a bench to rest as sweat dripped between my breasts. I no longer got blinding headaches, instead merely bad ones, and I felt as if I had sprinted three hundred meters. More than that, I felt triumphant. Hopeful.
This subversive skill might somehow help me escape, if I ever got the chance.
* * *
In the aisles of the Institute of English Studies library, a librarian stopped me. She was old, businesslike, and seemed to notice everything. Her gray hair was pulled back and tied, and she wore plain, simple clothing, as if she could afford nothing more, and perhaps she couldn’t if she had been abandoned by her family to the wages of a mere academic assistant.
“Do you know about Pax?” she said. “That colony, the one that sent a few messages back to Earth in the 2280s? They’re going to send a task force to see if they can find it.”
“Now, after so long?”
“Bureaucracies move slowly. Anyway, they’ll need a linguist, and with your history background, you’d be good. If you want to go, that is. It’s a long trip and you’d lose everyone you know. But things might be different when you get back.” She didn’t need to say what those things were, especially for women, or that few interstellar explorations needed linguists.
That might have been enough, but if I left, I could also escape NVA. I answered with less emotion than I felt. “I might want to go.”
She used a feed to show me the task force proposal, and it hung in front of my eyes and glowed with my own excitement. The colony lay fifty-eight light-years from Earth, and that far away, someone could live free and independent.
“Let me think about it.” I could go to Mars or to this place called Pax. Either would do.
“Of course. If you decide yes, I’ll get a professor to give you a good recommendation. A lot of professors owe me.”
