The Annual Migration of Clouds

by Premee Mohamed

  “What about the Coy Scouts?” I say, trying not to sound too eager; I have other plans, after all. Though I used to dream of joining them, our fearless scavengers, freebooters, guards, travellers. The only people who regularly leave the city, go up and down the river. I think a few of them even have bikes, which is practically half of the appeal. You’d sell your soul for a bike. “Are they —”

  “Taking people this year? Maybe.” Her eyes are dark, sly. “But I heard you got you some good news keepin’ you away from them hoodlums anyway. You ain’t gonna dig in the dirt much longer, I hear.”

  “From who? I didn’t tell anybody!”

  She laughs, a few others drift over to us, the human instinct, herd instinct, flocking together to touch wings in the cold, still air. “People talk.”

  “It’s only been a couple hours. What people? Henryk? I’ll whup him with a rose cane.”

  “Congratulations!” Someone slaps me on the back, and I allow the excitement and pleasure to flush over me again as people repeat it, and yet there are those — I mark them — who meet the eyes of my mother. And with the same expression, too: not We’ll stop you but How could you.

  “She hasn’t accepted,” Mom says.

  “I haven’t made up my mind,” I try to clarify.

  “How could you resist? Sounds like fun,” Larsen says. “No responsibilities. No work. Nobody to worry about.”

  “I’m not going to have fun! I mean . . . if I go.”

  She shrugs, which is almost more hurtful than if she’d said something. If I go, she will be one of those who never forgives me; and if I don’t, she’ll never forget that I wanted to. You don’t understand, I want to shout. This doesn’t just happen. This doesn’t happen to anybody, and it happened to me. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?

  The silence stretches out till it’s painful; I let Mom take my elbow and pull me free from the crowd.

  “Not that way,” says McKinnon as we wander west towards the quad. A big man, all shoulder and chest, as wide and flat as a door when he approaches face-on. A red scrap of cloth dangles from his jacket pocket. Here is someone who will kill, it says. But his voice is mild. “They’re puttin’ up a platform. A little bit of trouble this morning.”

  That’s right: Henryk told me. I forgot already. Horrible. “Are they gonna hang him?” I ask, and Mom gasps.

  “Well that’s still bein’ decided right now, Reid.”

  “Hang who?” Mom cries, horrified. “Just what is going on?”

  McKinnon still seems sympathetic, but his face goes hard. Nobody really, no, nobody, he demurs. Just a drifter, floating up from the south, the desert places. No one here knows him, no one has claimed him. Kids missing last year. Some found, in various states of distress. Some not. Some in an unknowable limbo of no body and no return. And the man’s confessed . . .

  “What did he confess to?”

  “Well, all sorts of nasty things, Mrs. Graham.”

  “Don’t you patronize me, Charles. How did you get that confession? Who took it?”

  “Mom, don’t.” I thread my arm through hers, try to drag her off; short as she is, she shakes me off and squares up to McKinnon, frowning up at him. He doesn’t step back. Takes more than that to scare a Red Flag.

  “You —”

  “Stay out of the quad, Mrs. Graham,” he says. “We’ll let folks know when it’s open again.” His voice has not changed at all. We will be removed if we try to interfere. Maybe even if we just want to watch. People do, sometimes.

  “Come on.” This time she lets me pull her away, and we put our backs to the place where a platform is being put up. If their captive is not to be hanged then I don’t want to know what they will do with him. And I hope I am too far away to hear the screams.

  This too I would leave behind.

  4.

  Back home, Mom pointedly heads to her side of the lab and pulls the divider over. After a moment comes the soft, bristly hiss of spinning, a sound I have heard all my life, as familiar as a heartbeat and even less noticeable. I stand in the doorway and do snap calculations in my head about the coming spring. Good at math. Have to be quick about it before I lose my nerve.

  Okay. Incoming, outgoing. Basic accounting. Quick.

  Like most folks, we sign the majority of our annual harvest to the Dining Hall; on top of which, we keep hens (Sheffield, Edo, and Ratt) because we’ve got the room, everybody loves eggs, and you can eat or trade them. Our major income, though, is the plastic yarn, which gets those extras and necessities that must be bartered for particularly when you do not have food to trade. Few people have the know-how to make good yarn, and it’s in constant demand.

  That’s the deal. I get bags from the landfill folks, and Mom and I shred, twist, heat, and spin. Between the two of us, we must account for half the clothing just on campus. If I go, I take that too. Whatever she managed to send out, not enough would come in.

  What can I do? She’s slowing down on the spinning, her hands hurt, especially when it’s cold. That’s not going to change. The only change is that I’ve spent years slowly taking up the slack. Can she look after the chickens on her own? Will someone take them from her? These are our friends, our neighbours, but you never know, you just never do. We would not need the Flags if everybody was perfect. How will she live? If I go, I’m removing more than myself as a daughter and a companion; I’m stealing her livelihood. And if her Cad goes wrong . . . if I . . . if . . .

  I can’t go.

  It can’t be When I go. No. If I go. If I leave her like this.

  Think, think.

  It is not freedom I crave. Both freedom and the desire for freedom are dangerous, as our long-deceased previous chickens Dewey and Tuckshop could have told you; sometimes you desire something you should not, and then you get eaten by a coyote. Serves you right, we said.

  As a kid when I would whine for something, Mom would tell me, Maybe you should want something else. So freedom isn’t the word; I am free here, I can do anything I want, any time I want; I would be less free, if anything, at the university, probably. It’s a different thing that I crave. Similar but not the same.

  A small bird crash-lands on the windowsill: sparrow or chickadee, barely bigger than a crabapple. They watch you because they like movement but they are also attracted by the glass reflections of the mirrortalk going back and forth across the river. Nads and Hen and I climbed up once to look at them; the polished discs on the three main towers were huge, though from here, they are no bigger than my thumbnail. They set them up years ago as the electricity started to fail, a clever solution for transmitting news and warnings when a runner couldn’t make it across the bridges in time. Now I follow the stuttering stream of golden sparkles, absently, mind divided in half.

  Endless chatter of predicted weather, wildfire status, random trivia, bird sightings, barter for various things (a trove of mason jars found in a cellar; two roosters; three buck rabbits in piebald, black, and white; sorted lots of books and bricks and compost and glass), everything interspersed with gossip, admonitions, proverbs, anxiety.

  Like your mom, Hen said when we learned to read the flashes. Worry, worry, worry. Do this, do that, do what you’re told.

  Yeah, but you always do do what you’re told.

  But so do you. You’re just cranky about it while you do it.

  No I’m not.

  Now I tell myself firmly, in my best teacher voice: I’m not abandoning her. It just looks like that. People will help her till I come back. Say that again, think it again, so it’s real: Till I come back. I swear, I swear I will. I will learn what can be learned to help us, and I will bring it back.

  Nobody’s ever come back but I would come back.

  I hold out my hands, surreptitiously, though no one is watching me, and hook my pinkies together. There. A swear. And it cannot be broken, except if one breaks the bone. You
are witness, I tell the sparrow, if anyone asks. I look up again at the flashes: Bonus question! What was the capital city of Morocco?

  Some trivia nerd on the mirrors today, anyway. I gather my allotment notes and slip next door to Yash and Maliah’s office. Yash answers my knock: “Hellooooo?”

  “What’s the capital city of Morocco?”

  “Casablanca. Did you come to ask that, little brat? Are you hungry?” She emerges from the back, untying her apron, and takes my face briskly in both hands to kiss my forehead.

  “No. It’s Rabat, actually. Everyone used to think it was Casablanca because that’s the bigger city.”

  “And the movie, too.”

  “Go on, rub it in.”

  “Ach.” She dismisses me with one of her complicated gestures, sending the paintings overhead fluttering. Yash and Maliah are the oldest people living on campus — maybe the oldest in the city, even the country, who knows — so they were among the last to see movies, the last to have electricity. Imagine, Yash sometimes says now, wasting it on that! But we couldn’t have known. “Overrated. You seen the still pictures, you seen half the movie.”

  “But the singing scene. Where they sing to piss off the Nazis. And everybody is supposed to cry.”

  “We taught you that song in school, which you seem to have conveniently forgotten, and you did not shed even one tear. Pah! And they say we have memory problems.”

  “Who says that?” I say. “I’ll slice ’em into ribbons and put ’em in the stew.”

  “No threats allowed. Ten minutes in time-out.”

  “Ten minutes! You tyrant. You Tiberius.”

  Laughter glistens behind her eyes, surrounded in rayed wrinkles so sharp they seem painted on against her bronze skin. Old joke. They used to teach grades one through six, so we could not, for years, avoid each other — I’d go to school, and there they’d be; and then after classes, chores with them at my side; and then home, all together, in lockstep, bitching at each other year after year. Now, mostly, they paint, and make paint, and gravely accept art from little kids, and sell or trade everybody’s paintings in a kind of two-woman cultural marketplace.

  It strikes me now, looking at them with the morning’s changed eyes, that perhaps I am in the wrong place. Maliah spends most of her time in bed, though when she’s awake she’s as sharp as a tack. Lucky, that. Still strong. And no Cad. But even without it, how much can they do? It is not how strong they are or how much work they can do, but time, time. Time that cannot be generated, only stolen from one another. Time I cannot ask them to give my mother to make up for my absence.

  Yash studies my face as I study hers. “What’s the matter, brat? You didn’t come over here to hassle us with trivia. And empty-handed, tch.”

  “Nothing’s the matter! I just . . . today feels like it’s been a hundred years long. You know? This morning, I got . . . I got an acceptance letter. From Howse University. And —”

  “Oh, Ree! You’re not joking? Unbelievable!” She sweeps me into her arms, and her shrieking brings Maliah sleepy and headscratching from her room, her thin face lightly baffled rather than worried. “My God, you vile little rodent, do you know the —”

  “Odds? Henryk said the same thing.”

  “Henny is a bell that always plays the same note no matter where you hit him.” She turns me loose with a kind of wrist-snap that sends me twirling onto a floor cushion. “He’ll die without you here.”

  “Oh my God. No he won’t. But while I’m here, Yash, I —”

  “Congratulations, my darling. But how does such a thing happen?” Maliah asks softly; she leans down, yawns, scratches me affectionately behind both ears like a dog. “I had thought, because we hear nothing . . . ”

  “No one can run forever on their own kind,” Yash says. “People need new blood. They’ve been recruiting students from cities for, oh — ten or fifteen years now. Isn’t it, Reid?”

  “Mrs. Cross didn’t say.”

  “But she had you fill out the form —”

  “Yeah. Form, essay, cheek swab. It was ten percent of our final grade. So some kids didn’t bother. But I needed that ten percent something fierce.”

  “Because you fight with the bigger children, you climb trees, you don’t study.”

  “Yash. I’m not six years old anymore.”

  “Bah. Lies. You got older, you didn’t grow up. What did you write about, hmm?” Teacherly smile. She sits on a stool and looks down at me on my cushion, and for a moment I am six years old again, craning my neck at her as she speaks. The booming voice of wisdom, the hair already silvered, silvered for decades, the long graceful hands with their long nails painted with the skins of saskatoons. (Oh God. I won’t be here for berries either . . .)

  I take a deep breath. This is not exactly correct, but: “Reproductive rights.”

  “That’s my girl. Pick a challenge.”

  We fall silent; their faces are kind, expectant, waiting for me to brag about it. Not sure I can. Part of me (I think now) did not truly believe Mrs. Cross would send the applications — that making them was just another ruse meant to buff some of the rough edges off our lives, manufacture a little hope, or at least distraction. A synthesized dream, when all the homegrown ones were tired and dusty.

  And yet despite all the ways I tried to talk myself out of it, someone, somewhere, in a shiny and sanitized dome, read mine, and thought, Yes, we’ll put her on the list.

  How could that have happened?

  What I had meant to say was not reproductive rights exactly, because it is very simple now, but the erosion of rights then that led to the now, clearly and neatly, like footprints in mud. They denied it all those years ago, but now, with decades of hindsight, we can see that there were no deviations from the path. What I had really meant to say was the depopulation of Earth.

  First one then two then three, then a hundred countries at once, then two hundred, placed draconian abortion bans. Most had already eliminated sex ed from schools, and then (proudly, with parades) all types of contraception. Underground rings ran for a while, swiftly stamped out. Babies everywhere, you’d think, baby central, millions of babies, baby surplus. They began offering bonuses, tax breaks. But all those babies never showed up. Only the angry graphs and tables showing the projections, potential babies, quantum babies swirling like cherubs on a painted ceiling and nothing below it.

  And then came this heritable symbiont out of (it seemed) Europe, out of (it seemed) nowhere really, something with no clear provenance, no signature, no stamp, no seal, that scribbled its name across the skin and kept you out of harm’s way.

  And people protested. They protested the bans and they protested the Cad and they mobbed anyone with tattoos of leaves or ferns or cephalopods. No one realized that the infection was cryptic, then dormant, then heritable from either parent. And so it spread, named and considered an epidemic at first — a flash in the pan, like Ebola or Zika or Covid, that would eventually burn out — and then, near the end, more or less endemic.

  The only way to stop it would have been to stop having children. But no one knew that, to begin with. They thought it could be detected, fought, cured. And for many people, their own Cad did not manifest till they were quite a bit older and had had kids already, and those kids were themselves having kids. If you managed to get past the wonky sperm and the dodgy eggs and the pollution and the malnutrition, you still might have children that died screaming in front of you. Blaming you, as they died. And all you could do as a parent was give them to a doctor and walk away for the requisite amount of time that something brief and merciful could be done.

  For generations we have waited for it to become normal. And it has not. We are still horrified. And there is nothing we can do about it. (I think: The reason it shows up late is that the Cad cannot bear to lose its host. But does it know that it’s doing that? I didn’t put that in my essay. Semi-sapie
nt. Semi.)

  And now, since we have rejected the laws of our ancestors: You can get an abortion. No problem. If you choose to do it yourself, no one will stop you. If you choose to get help, well, our “surgeons” will do their best. In the essay, I put surgeons in quotes because they’re no longer required to hold qualifications — not like in Yash and Maliah’s day.

  Now, we have herbs, carefully cultivated in small batches on the roof of the hospital, that don’t always do the job, and don’t always leave a survivor. Now we have knives and hooks. Now, through broken windows we can hear and easily distinguish the sounds of an amputation, a surgery, an emptying womb, an interrogation; the utilitarian screams and moans of someone in labour can be differentiated with ease from someone whose Cad has gone off.

  Mine is the first generation, I think, with these audiomantic abilities. Of which I am not proud.

  I wonder what they would think about that in the domes.

  Indeed, although I hadn’t written about it, I had wondered whether the domes had rejected the old laws too. I hoped they had done better if they had. Nice and clean. Pills. Or safe, careful operations, with disinfectants, real antibiotics after. It was once assumed that if you had an abortion, or a baby, you would live.

  “If I go, I’d have to go soon. I won’t be able to help with the spring planting.” I gesture with my clipboard, onto which I have carefully transcribed the morning’s notes. “Or the spinning. Nothing I’m signed up for. I don’t know if I would be able to come back for harvest, if there’s a break, anything like that. If . . . ”

  “No if,” Yash says firmly. “You’re going. Of course you’re going.”

  “But . . . ”