He cried when he took my book. I remember.
“And you ran, and the streets were a mess and I couldn’t find you and I had to get all your books to Gretchen so she could hide them before we both forgot. My real book, it had everything inside, just like it happened … ”
But she didn’t get mine hidden. The one with the bracelet inside. Gretchen must have found it after the Forgetting, registered it, and shelved it, like an archivist does. And there it sat.
“But none of you were hidden at all, were you? And look at how she kept an eye on me. Putting me on the Council. And I’m sure she was reading my books … ” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m so sorry. I thought I was saving you, and I wasn’t. I didn’t.”
Like father, like daughter.
I step out the door of the Archives into air that is soft, warm with the rising sun, into a quiet street strewn with debris, a group of twenty or so people behind me. We’ve waited nearly four days to open these doors, just in case the spores needed longer to die. But the people in the Archives are restless, worried about friends and family who were left outside, and we’ve exhausted the supplies Janis had laid out for her chosen one hundred and fifty. There are three hundred and seventeen of us who escaped the Forgetting, and with the newly formed team of Liliya and Rose, the hidden room has been functioning like a well-run city. It’s been surprising to see how well the two of them have gotten along.
Rose also taught me how to give a better injection. No one inside has forgotten the past twelve years, but for some, the remembering from before those years has been hard. Harder than forgetting was, maybe. The Council members inside the Archives made the decision to give anyone over fifteen years the choice to remember. Or not. Most made the choice to remember, but Lydia the Weaver chose not to, as did my mother, along with a smattering of others who had all their books archived. Who saw no need to risk who they’d become.
I’ve made trip after trip to the underground room, cleaning and filling needles with a wet piece of blanket over my face, Janis’s robe over Reese. Some have been happy after their injection, ecstatic to find out who they were, who they are, to find family that had been forgotten. Some have been less so, others needing time for thought. I don’t know what memories Rachel the Supervisor had, but she slipped out the door to the cave during the resting and we haven’t seen her since. I think maybe she threw herself into the river.
I breathe the fresh air of Copernicus Street, air that is not the sterile emptiness of the cave, or the sweet, foul scent of the underground room, or the stagnancy from the close contact of too many bodies. I will always miss the dark days and the light of the moons, but right now the sun feels almost cleansing on my face. We fan out, heading our different ways, going out in teams to identify the dead, do an inventory of the stores, and find those who have forgotten. To ask them if they want to remember. Figure out what to do with them if they don’t.
I am with Gray and Delia, an arrangement that has Liliya’s fingerprints all over it. Disappearing for three weeks with the son Delia now knows she gave birth to has not endeared me to her, no matter how many times Gray has explained. I think it’s actually the healing wounds on his back she can’t get past. She needs someone to blame. I’ve slept beside Gray every resting we’ve been in the Archives, Delia always planting herself about a meter away. After the third resting Gray had shouted, “Mum! Enough! It’s written down and done,” to the amusement of half the room. She’s been sulking ever since. But Liliya is certain, as only Liliya can be, that this is just a temporary obstacle to my happiness, and that she will be the one to remove it.
We step into the first house on Copernicus. It’s empty of the dead, of anyone who’s forgotten, anyone who remembers, and any stores. In the next house we find the same, and in the next we find Rhaman the Fuelmaker, not in his own house, but close. He has his book, chooses to remember, and is off to the Archives to find his Lost girl before he even stops sweating. Delia makes the notes. In the next empty house, Gray catches my eye behind his mother’s back, eyes straying up to the roof garden. We slip out the door one at a time, while Delia records the meager contents of the cupboards, and I’m in his arms as soon as my feet hit the grass, careful not to touch his back. We haven’t been alone once since he remembered me.
He takes his time with me in the way he’s very, very good at, and this is different from any other time I’ve been kissed by the glassblower’s son, because even though we’re hiding from his mother on a roof, this isn’t a stolen moment. The Forgetting is not going to come and take it away.
“Let’s go over the wall,” Gray says in my ear. “This resting. Jump the waterfall with me.”
He needs to let his back heal. But after that, I don’t know why we shouldn’t. There’s nothing to stop us. But then I stiffen, pull away from his arms. He follows me to the garden bed, where the tall, dry stalks of the oil plants are starting to flush orange with the sun, where a bare foot is sticking out from beneath the leaves. It’s a child’s foot, very still, and when I part the stalks a little boy blinks, sits up, tries to scramble away. It’s Eshan and Imogene’s younger brother, one of the twins, I don’t know which.
“Wait,” I tell him, “wait. Don’t go. Are you hungry? Thirsty? Would you like to come with me and get something to eat?” His eyes are large, so confused, and a little glazed. He considers, then reaches out his arms. I scoop him up and his hands go around my neck. He has a very dirty book tied to his waist.
“Gray, find water,” I say, and he’s off as I carry the boy down to the storeroom, find some dark days bread, a little stale. I make him drink the water Gray brings slowly, let him eat bits of bread while I clean him.
“Who is it?” Delia asks. I don’t know when she came in behind me.
“James, Inkmaker’s son,” I tell her, after a quick look at his book. I’m sure he’s too small to read it. “Your name is James, okay? We’re going to take you to your house.”
He has one hand filled with bread, the other on my neck, gripping tight while I wipe his face. He keeps on clinging, head on my shoulder as I carry him with Delia and Gray across the city, back to Hawking Street.
I’m relieved to see my house, door still closed and windows intact. Most of the streets are littered with paper and stores and broken glass. Hawking, however, seems to have been somewhat organized, swept, and I can smell food cooking inside the Inkmaker’s house.
When Hedda answers the door, I explain who we are, explain about James. Hedda looks surprised.
“Well, if that’s James, who is this, then?”
I step inside, Delia and Gray behind me, and there is Jemma and Pratim’s son, playing on the floor with the other twin.
“This is Joshua, from next door,” I tell her. Hedda nods in sudden understanding.
“They were looking for a boy, but I told them this one was ours. He was in our house.” She’s a little defensive. She doesn’t try to take James; she doesn’t remember him and he doesn’t remember her. But she does look through his book.
James doesn’t want to let me go, so we sit on the floor for a little while with the other children, until we can get things sorted, Gray on the bench beside us. Delia talks to Hedda, explaining to her about Remembering, and then Eshan comes down the stairs. He stops at the bottom.
“Who’s this?” he asks, nodding at James. He comes to squat down beside us, puts a hand on James’s head. He smiles at him, and James smiles slightly back.
“Eshan, I know you don’t remember us, but we remember you. I’m Nadia, and this is Gray.”
His mouth forms a kind of “ah” shape, though he makes no sound. He’s read his book, I see. I watch him look at Gray, at me. There’s knowledge, but no recognition.
“Glad you’re okay,” Gray says. “We were worried when you didn’t make it to the Archives. Is Imogene here?”
“Upstairs. My sister and I … we decided not to go to the Archives, actually. That’s what the book says. We came here instead.”
Gray and I exchange a glance. They chose to forget. I look up as Imogene comes down the stairs, then stare as the last person I expected to see in Hedda’s house steps down behind her. Jonathan of the Council.
“Oh,” says Jonathan. “Are there more of us?”
He comes across the room with a spring in his step, bends down, ruffling James’s hair. James smiles at him and, to my astonishment, lifts his arms. Jonathan takes him and sits on the floor beside us, pleased, picks up a toy block from the floor for James to play with. The other twin, Jeffrey, tries to take it away. I see Eshan filling in Imogene on who we are.
“So you know them?” Jonathan asks casually. “Do you happen to know me?”
“You’re Jonathan,” Gray says, and Jonathan bursts into a grin. “Hey, did you hear that?” he calls to Hedda. “I was right! I’m Jonathan!” Then he looks closer at me. “You’re the girl in the house, in the underground room. You told me my name.”
It’s true, I did. But I have no idea how he ended up here, and I don’t have a chance to ask. Hedda looks grave, comes to stand in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips, and I see what Delia has done. Of course she has. I’ve seen the scars on Hedda’s ruined back, too. But something in me sickens, wishing with every part of me that Delia had said nothing. Right now, I think Jonathan of the Council is who he would’ve been if there had never been a Janis. Who he could become. Why should even this second chance be taken from him?
“Jonathan,” Hedda says, “this lady here says that we can all remember if we want to, and that when we do, there are going to be things that make us … not like you quite so much.”
Jonathan bounces James in his lap, his brows coming together.
“Actually,” I say to the room, “I promised that Jonathan would never have to remember again. He made me swear to that, and I stand by it.” I turn to him. “You threw your book away because you wanted it that way. And you were right to do it. I’ll never be the one to make you remember.” I might actually fight anyone who tries.
Jonathan frowns, thinking about this. “But there will be others who remember?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “That’s going to be true.”
I see Hedda reaching around to find the ridges on her back, and my heart breaks for Jonathan.
“Well, Imogene and I are not going to remember,” Eshan says. “We decided it before, and I think we’ll stick to that.” I smile at Imogene. A new start. That’s what she’d said to me a lifetime ago at the Archives.
“Fine,” says Hedda. “None of us will, then. We’ll read our books if we have them, and we’ll just start over from here. Let the past be gone.”
And I watch Jonathan of the Council smile, playing with James on the floor.
I thought of that phrase the rest of the day, even as Gray and I returned a confused and crying Joshua to Pratim and Jemma, helped people remember both the good and the bad, or not, as they chose, discovered and burned the dead. Let the past be gone, I thought. It felt true when we took Mother home to Hawking Street, even when she went to the potatoes to look for the knife. It seemed true as we dug out every forgetting tree, planted the gardens, re-formed the Council, had Canaan’s first vote since before the Forgettings, and knocked down the wall where Jin showed us, where the gates had been, careful to reuse every piece of the stone. But the past is never really gone, I’ve realized. It only lies in wait for you, remembered or forgotten.
It comes for me most often in my nightmares, when I wake up screaming and sweating during the resting. I am always tied, unable to stop whatever happens next, which usually involves Gray, or my father, or the sister I don’t remember. Genivee comforts me when she’s there, but more than half the time she’s with Lydia and Anson now, enjoying being the older sister, as she should, enjoying not having to care for our mother. As she should. Lydia is helping her write a new kind of book, without any truth in it at all. Or, at least, only the kind you can find for yourself. Mother has adjusted slowly to Genivee’s empty bed, but not to me. I think she’ll always associate my face with my father’s, my name with her sister’s, and the half-remembered pain that goes with it all.
I see the past in the people who still wear their books, just in case, in the bruises that appear every now and again on Jonathan’s face, in my time at the Archives, helping Aunt Gretchen separate the books of the living and the dead. We use the books of the living with permission, the books of the dead without reservation, trying to connect families together, identify the people who were Lost. Create a history. Sometimes Gretchen goes to Anson’s with us, which helps ease the awkwardness. Liliya and I have memories that Genivee doesn’t, and no matter how much we try, or how good the intentions, twelve missed years can’t be overlooked.
For Rose, though, it’s easy to think time hasn’t gone by at all. Right after I injected Gray and Anson in the hidden room of the Archives, I’d found her staring at my needles. “I don’t need to remember,” she’d whispered. “I decided that a long time ago.”
“But I think we need you to remember, Rose,” I’d told her. “To know who you are. You were a doctor before you forgot. And probably with a lot more skill than you’re remembering right now.”
And with that Rose had sat down beside me, picked up one of the Remembering-filled tubes, pulled up the cloth of her undyed smock, and popped the needle into the side of her thigh, sharp and quick.
“I would have done it like that,” she’d said. And it was then I met the woman from the images in the white room. A woman not unlike Liliya, which made perfect sense when Anson the Planter walked past our spot behind the bookshelves and greeted Rose as “Grandmama.”
Gray and I walk with her now out the new opening in the wall, up the natural way through the ferns that I realize must be the old road. Up the slope, down the gorge, and around the pool to the hidden door. Rose has been working nonstop since remembering, training our doctors to heal internal malfunctions, to make and use the medicines that had been re-created in Canaan before the Forgetting—anything from not having headaches to not having children. Helping Jin teach everyone about Earth. She’s also been going through Janis’s notes, using Gray’s memories and the equipment in the laboratory to wring the cure from the purple plant samples I’ve collected for her. Her days are so full I thought she’d be tired, that we’d need to help her through the rough terrain up the mountain, but she doesn’t need us. She is my father’s father’s mother, a doctor born on Earth, and her name is Zuri. I still think of her as Rose.
“How old are you?” I ask as she makes the little door rise, showing the squares with the glowing numbers. The lights are not near as bright now that the sun is up. Her wrinkles deepen all over.
“My dear,” she says, which sounds very “Earth” to me, “I am one hundred and forty-eight.”
“Is that normal?” I ask.
“It’s completely ridiculous,” she replies.
“How old was Janis?”
“She was born on the Centauri, so she must have been, oh, a hundred and twenty-four. And yes, before you ask, that’s also not normal and completely ridiculous.”
I give her the code, and then Gray helps her step over the rocks and into the mountain. I watch a mix of emotions play over my great-grandmother’s face as she walks into the cavern with its collapsed wall, picks up the clothes with “NWSE” sewn on the front, sits down at the curving white table, showing us how to make letters of light appear on the table, to write any word we want to, to tell the machines what to do.
She shows us how there is a special generator, taking energy from the waterfall outside, explains that as long as it’s maintained, the lights and “tech” should never stop. She explains what a camera is, how it captures time, and how Earth’s sun rises and sets once each resting and waking, every single day. This seems blindingly fast, and when I tell her I don’t see how Earth can get a harvest in a day, she laughs. She shows us pictures of metallic hydrogen, what the original chosen of Canaan made our tables and doors fro
m.
“Your front door,” she says, “could fuel a planet for a year.”
But she doesn’t laugh when she gets into another part of the machine, looking at the words appearing in the light square, what she calls a “screen.” There’s a symbol there, and a green dot, pulsing.
“Well, now. Who did that?” she says, leaning back into the chair. “I suppose we’ll never know.”
Gray bends forward, scrutinizing. “What is it?”
“That,” she says, “is the signal. And it’s on.”
“It’s already sent?” Gray comes to stand beside me.
“Yes, it’s sent. And it’s been sending for”—she adjusts the screen—“about one hundred and eight years.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“Well, neither do I.”
“Is there an answer to the signal?” Gray asks. “Can they answer back?”
Rose looks. “No answer. Either it’s not working, or … ”
Earth isn’t answering, I think. I wonder if Earth is even still there.
Rose shakes her head. “Part of me wants to say what an incredible failure all this was. On the other hand, here we are. Rebuilding. And a whole planet none of us have even seen.”
I meet Gray’s gaze, and I think it’s right then, without saying anything, that we are decided.
“How long would it take them to get here?” Gray asks. “If they came?”
“Now? I’m not sure. It depends on how the technology has changed. But back then? About four and a half years.”
Thirty-nine trillion kilometers, I think.
“We’ll have to put this to a vote, you know,” Rose says.
She sounds unhappy about it. I don’t blame her. The last time Canaan had a vote like that it had ended in bloodshed.
But when the city was given the choice, it was peaceful, and almost unanimous. Rose went back to the mountain and turned off the signal.
It takes us the rest of the sunlight and the dark days to get ready. Nash needed Gray’s help getting windows replaced and sealed before the dark and the rain. And to train someone new, which turned out to be Jonathan. Nash is as forgiving as Hedda, it turns out. Delia takes longer, but she’ll get there. Maybe.
The Forgetting Page 32
