The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

  “We should look at the rest of these books first,” I say. “Just so we know what they are.”

  Gray eyes the long bookshelf, then says, “I’ll take the other end.”

  I slide the First Book into my pack. This feels impossible, and it makes me angry. Janis hides behind the Forgetting like a coward. Doing what she wants when it won’t be remembered. But I can remember, too. There has to be a way to change this. To stop it. All of it.

  I squat down in front of the shelves, glance over the spines. They’re different sizes, different colors, different amounts of wear. No code or order. I take one off the shelf and look at it. The front says Roland, Weaver. I feel guilty, but I look through it. Notes on the size of the flax harvest and how much cloth we’re likely to get out of it, descriptions of Council meetings. The book beside it on the shelf is also Roland, and beside that is Johann, Teacher, also Council.

  So all of them seem to belong to Council, like I’d thought. And suddenly I’m having that itch of curiosity again. Anson is on the Council. He would have books in here, too, under the name Anson or Raynor, I’m not sure which. Maybe both. And now I’m having to physically resist rifling through this entire shelf to search for them. Maybe I’ll pull one off accidentally. No one could blame me for looking then.

  “Nadia.” Gray is near the far end of the shelf, cross-legged on the colored stone. He beckons me over. “This is a grower, Mia. She’s describing her job for herself, for the Forgetting, but look. It says here we used to vote. Once a year. Everyone who’d finished their apprenticeship could say who they thought should be on the Council.” I reach over and touch the open page in Gray’s lap. It’s starting to yellow.

  “Can you tell which Forgetting she’s talking about?”

  He shakes his head. Dates tend to get so mixed up in Canaan, the city basically works in twelve-year increments. Another thing the Council could fix, if they would only think to. It’s just so easy to accept that this is the way life has always been, when you can’t remember how anything has ever been before.

  “Nadia,” Gray says again. His voice has changed. He looks up at me, and I look down, to where his finger sits on a name in ink: Anna.

  Today they found Anna, Raynor’s daughter, in the oil plants in the west quadrant field. The doctor said she died of poison, and that she must have done it deliberately, that it would have been impossible to consume so much by accident. She was fifteen. Renata is devastated. I can’t understand it.

  And that’s all. I read it again and I am numb. I’ve never known anyone to deliberately hurt themselves. Except for my mother. And now my sister.

  “Nadia,” Gray says.

  It might be the third time he’s said it. I need to walk. I want to run. I get to my feet, move across the shadowy blue-and-white floor, lean for a moment against half of a stone column, sticking out from the wall as if a massive fern trunk had been embedded inside it. The coolness soaks through my leggings. I had another sister. She ate poison, and I can’t even recall her face. Of all the memories swirling in my head, images I’d do anything to purge, this is the one that has to be gone. Why would she do it? Why is any of this happening?

  I run my hand over the stone, like I always do. Crisp. Unworn. Unsurprising. We have to hurry. To figure out how to get out of the Archives. To go to the white room. To be back by the first bell of the resting so Mother can check my bed. So she won’t see one of her children missing. Mother. For the first time I wonder if it might be kinder to let her keep on forgetting.

  I put my hands on my knees, fighting the shaking, though not because of fear this time, or panic. What I’m feeling is fury. At this sister my old book said I loved, who destroyed my mother, and probably Anson, too, if he could remember. At Janis, who could help us and doesn’t, who makes us Lost, maybe even kills us. At the Forgetting I don’t know how to stop. At the thing that is sticking hard into my back. I straighten up and look behind me, and when I turn I find Gray standing a few feet away, watching. He’s returned the books to the shelves, a thumb hooked in his strap.

  “Gray,” I say. “There’s a door latch in this column.”

  He comes and stands next to me, looks at the door latch. And then, like in the alley at the festival, he puts a hand on the back of my neck, just below my pinned braids. I put my forehead on his chest, let him hold me in place for one, two, three, four breaths. Longer. He lets me go when I’m ready. Calmer. I breathe one more time, and when he gives me a nod, I push down on the latch.

  The door opens easily, without noise, a curved piece of column swinging outward. Inside there are stairs going down, not white stone but rough-cut and gray, straight into darkness. I smell earth, and damp rock, like when we opened the door in the mountain.

  “Cave,” I whisper.

  I take the first step downward, going slow, hanging on to the rough rocks that bulge out from the walls. Gray shuts the door behind us, and because he’s Gray, I don’t even ask if he’s checked for a latch. For a minute I think I’m in complete darkness, but then as my eyes adjust, I catch the glow of dim light below. The steps are man-made and curving slightly, and the more steps I take and the more they curve, the more light I see. I hear the rush of water, and then the passage widens and we are walking down a slope of bare rock instead of stairs.

  Something brushes across my face and we step out into a cavern, not of gray rock but of purple and blue, green and white, a wild array of colors illuminated by glowworm lights hanging every now and again from brackets driven into the rock. Then I realize it isn’t the rock that’s colorful. The cavern walls are covered in plants, waving in the moving air, and when I look back I see they’re nearly covering the passage I just came out of. An underground river rushes loud beneath us, the rock and dirt below our feet sloping down to its level, and I think the water must be a bit warm because the air is humid, dripping.

  Gray goes ahead of me, like he did the first time we went over the wall, but he’s slower here, thankfully, because of the slippery rock. I follow him down, along the trail of lights, the rock matted with blowing tendrils. Gray’s shoulder brushes one and the tendrils pulse, reaching out, a ripple effect that goes all the way up the wall, like a drop of water in a still bath, only vertical. We both stare at the wall, back a little away from it. There’s not a breeze down here at all; the plants are moving on their own, waving their tendrils, pulling food, moisture, I don’t know what out of the air. It’s more than unsettling. It’s creepy. Gray waits for me, brushing blue dust from the shoulder of his black shirt, that small smile on his face.

  “We’re following this?” He nods at the continuing lights, making a path into the ongoing dark. As if he had to ask. “Let’s be careful, then, and quiet. If there are lights, someone must use this way regularly.”

  He takes my hand in his and we go soft and quick beside the underground river. The plants on the rock walls grow thinner, until there’s just one or two left, scattered like the last flowers of sunlight. Then the path splits, one set of lights following the river, another branching off to our left. Gray looks to me, and I look to the ceiling. I think we’ve been following almost a straight line through the city, but it’s hard to tell.

  “Left,” I whisper.

  We leave the water behind and the way becomes more rugged, with more tumbled rock to scramble around. But the lights go on, and eventually I can see a different kind of light. Diffused silver. The passage ends and all at once we are on a cliff, a little valley below us. The rain has slowed, the clouds thinned to show the luminescence of the moons. I look up and back, and there is the white stone of Canaan, rising high above, my mountain a black, glittering shape to our left.

  We didn’t have to go over the walls. We just went under them.

  Gray shakes his head. Laughs.

  “What?” I say.

  “All that sneaking around. I made a key out of glass, drugged Deming; we nearly got caught. When all we had to do was follow the walls the way Janis showed us when she left the pool. It’s
not even locked. She thinks there’s no threat out here.”

  I let this fact settle in my head. We don’t have to get past Gretchen. We can get into that room in the Archives anytime we like. “Where do you think the river passage goes?”

  “The Council House,” Gray says immediately. “You can write that down, I think. It’s the right direction.” He looks around our cave opening, gets his bearings, tilts his head at the mountain. “Coming?”

  I follow him up a narrow path, tracing the curve of the city wall above us until we reach the level of the grasslands and hike up the slope. Into the canyon and around to the hidden door, and when the lights blaze to life in the white room, I kick off my sandals and sit in the spinning chair, silent. Thinking. I want to know what happened to Anna. I want to know why Gray was Lost, why my name is on that list. I say, “Let’s look up Zuri Adeyemi.”

  Gray hesitates. He knows I’m not all right. He probably isn’t completely all right, either. But he goes to the light wall, hovers his hand, pulls up the list of people, and touches “Zuri Adeyemi.” And there is Rose.

  I go stand with Gray, in front of the enormous image of Rose’s face. She was so young it seems impossible, like Jin. And Gray was right. She was a doctor, both before and after coming to Canaan. Gray touches “vlog” and then Rose is sitting right here in the white room. We start with Year 1 and watch her age year by year, five minutes at a time. Her voice was not soft then. She was a force. But it’s Year Ten that’s eye-opening, like it was for Erin Atan. Rose, called Zuri, is Head of Council, and her face is grim.

  “It has come to the attention of the Council that when New World Space Exploration created and invested in the Canaan Project, they gave not one directive for this program, but two. The first directive was to build a human civilization capable of living in harmony with itself and its environment. We were to learn, build, and populate without damaging a virgin planet. This is what we agreed to. This has been our dream, and we have spent our blood, sweat, and tears to do it. But there was a second directive from New World Space Exploration, known only to a few, and directly opposed to the first. Some of us were sent to Canaan to explore its resources, to create ways to exploit them and open Canaan for trade. And they have found their resource. Metallic hydrogen is the deep bone of this planet, and to our knowledge has been found nowhere else in the universe.

  “Those with this second directive have tried to send an arranged signal back to Earth, to call the ships and begin mining and exporting Canaan’s metallic hydrogen. However, the destructive mining of the moons and other planets within Earth’s own solar system is a disaster that must not be repeated on Canaan. This is our home now. The people have voted, and while I am Head of Council, Earth will not be signaled. We have asked those given this second directive by NWSE to adhere to their original agreements, to help us move forward by living on this planet and leaving it as it is.”

  We pause, and then Gray leaves Rose where she is, searching quickly for the word “mining.” He finds it under “Earth Curriculum,” and I see images of mountains stripped bare of their plants, flattened into wastelands of powdered rock, water silted and undrinkable. I can’t imagine letting that happen to my mountain. And I can’t understand why anyone would want it to, until Gray touches the word “profit,” and then the word “money.” Money, we see, is like a symbol, a representation of something you want. Sometimes it’s just a number on a paper, but the more of it you have, the higher your numbers, then the more things you can have that you want. Metallic hydrogen, it seems, is one of the things that will bring people a lot of money, and a lot of what they want. It seems like everyone on Earth is trying to have more, even if they don’t need it. I don’t understand this, either.

  “I do,” Gray says, surprising me. “It gives you something to go after, to stretch yourself for. What can you do in Canaan but be good at your trade or be on the Council? There’s nothing out there to go and get.”

  I watch him hovering his hand, finding the next image of Rose on the light wall, and wonder if this is one of the real reasons Gray wanted to go over the wall.

  He touches the next image, and we both lean forward. This vlog is different. Rose—I can’t think of her as Zuri—is again in the white room, but this is obviously unplanned. She’s panting, her hair down, dust streaking her face.

  “A record,” she says, “if we do not live. Canaan is at war, between those who wish to mine this planet and those who wish to preserve it. We’ve sealed the bunker with the tech; they cannot get to the signal … ”

  The bunker, I think. That’s what we’re standing in now. With “tech.” Is that what they call the machines?

  “They’ve taken the granary, threatening to starve the city unless we open the bunker. We’ll starve anyway if we can’t get the crops in the field. They’re taking Canaan street by—”

  There’s a deafening noise from the light square on the wall, a deep, sudden boom. Gray flinches beside me, and the image of Rose goes misty, then black, before coming back again. She’s steadying herself, I think, with the chair I was just sitting in. Other people are in the room, running and shouting behind her, one man with a bloody head. Rose is shouting, too, the sound distorted, then she turns to look directly at us.

  “They’ve blown up the side of the mountain, trying to get in the bunker. One side of the cavern has fallen in. The entrance is blocked.”

  The rockfall.

  “We have three”—someone shouts at Rose—“no, four dead. There is only one way in or out now, and Sergei Dorokov has just changed the code … ”

  “Wait,” I say. “How do you go back?”

  Gray moves his finger along the bar that appears below Rose’s image. Time runs backward, and she says the words again: “… and Sergei Dorokov has just changed the code … ”

  “Stop!” I say. Gray does, and I walk closer to the wall, peer at the image. Rose is frozen in the act of turning to look at a man crossing the room behind her. Gray spreads his fingers and it’s like using a magnifier, or leaning forward in a chair. The image focuses to only one thing: the man’s wrist, where I can just make out the links of a metal bracelet. I pick up the metal bracelet from the perfect, curving white table, hold it tight in my hand.

  Gray makes the image return to its size, but it ends abruptly, then starts a new one. Rose is back. She looks very tired. She has blood smeared on her shirt. I think she’s been tending injuries.

  She whispers, “Something is happening to the city. We turned the cameras to the comet, but when we turned them back … ” She spins whatever is capturing her image toward the three large light squares high up on the wall, the ones that right now look as if they have tiny flies crawling across them. In Rose’s time, those squares show images of Canaan, moving images, like what we’re watching now, a light square within a light square. I see Meridian Street beneath that horrible bright sky, the water clock and the amphitheater surrounded by free-burning fires. I think the granary is in flames. And there are people fighting. One person swings what I think is a board and hits another in the head, dropping him like a heavy sack.

  “They’re all either running or fighting,” Rose whispers. “There are no sides. Children are just wandering … It’s like everyone out there has lost their mind. I sent Ross out to forage and he hasn’t come back. I don’t know what to do … ”

  “It’s the Forgetting,” I say. Gray is peering at the screen, trying to see what Rose did, but she’s spinning our point of vision back to herself.

  “We can’t last long in here. We’re out of food.” She winces visibly at something she sees in the city. “I think,” she whispers, “that we can officially declare the Canaan Project a failure.”

  Gray stops the image. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “That the city is forgetting, and Rose isn’t. And we both know she forgot. Everyone in this room must have. But not while they were in it.” He looks around us. “What’s different about
this room?”

  I turn, look at the white walls, the spotless table, the impossible images of light. Absolutely everything is different about this room. But then I know, and the answer came easy. I’d already thought of it before. “The air,” I say. “It’s blown in, filtered. There’s no dirt in here, no dust. Whatever is keeping out the dirt is also keeping out the Forgetting.”

  “So when they went outside … ”

  “It happened. And this room was gone. At least in their minds.”

  “Except for the code, scratched into the bracelet on that man’s wrist.”

  I hover my hand, go back to the list of people, and find Dorokov, Sergei. I can see bits of my mother in him, not exact, but there. I touch the image, distorting it like I’ve put my finger on a reflection in the water. This must be my grandfather, it’s hard to say how far back, a chosen one from Earth. An astronomer and a teacher, from a place called Russia. A place he forgot. Or did he? Me, my mother, Liliya—the whole family seems to have a habit of not forgetting. Or not completely.

  I think of that page in the First Book, written by Erin Atan, who seems to have been on a different side of this war from Rose. Dead people in the streets, she’d written. From the Forgetting, or the fighting that came before it? Or maybe both.

  “Tell me what you saw,” Gray says. He’s looking at the three lit squares, high on the wall, where Rose watched the city forgetting.

  I close my eyes. I know what he wants, and I don’t want to tell him.

  “Nadia,” he says, very quiet. “I need to know what we’re facing.”

  Whether the Forgetting is from the comet or if it’s in the air, either way, we can’t stop it. And Gray is right. He needs to know what happens, because he has to live through it. He can forget me all he wants, but he has to live. I leave my eyes closed, and for once I don’t push the images away.