by Eden Wolfe
Uma felt a layer of perspiration along the edge of her hairline. She had always thought this Queen to be so pragmatic. She had witnessed the Queen’s ability to see through the noise of traitors to the truth of their black hearts.
But there was something else in the Queen’s eyes now.
Her eyes are on fire. There is something behind them that is out of alignment with the risk we’ve presented. Something isn’t… right.
“Speak, Uma. You act as though I want to listen to your concerns. I’ve made my position clear, and the Settlement Day arrangements are waiting on me.”
Uma stepped forward, “They’re everywhere, Ariane.” She had to get through the Queen, had to make her see just how dangerous this time was. “The Sisters are here and mingling amongst us like regular citizens and they could, right at this very moment, be transmitting the disease as far and wide as they are embedded.”
The Queen sighed. “You’re too alarmist, Uma. This disease is local. Only in very close quarters can it spread, like the way the Sisters live like rats piled on top of each other, ten to a hut. No wonder it spread within them, but we need not fear this. Our immune systems have been designed to sustain such an attack.”
Uma frowned.
There’s no way she can know this much about it, even we don’t know…
“Don’t look at me like that, Uma. You know I have some abilities that you don’t. You may be superior on many scientific levels, but I see the bigger picture. That’s why it’s me who decides our strategy and approach. If we relied on you for that, we’d have deviant incubates running around in the streets, killing others and themselves, need I remind you of that? And imagine the water supply if these bacteria really do progress the way Daphna says. Daphna, for all her faults, is visibly the stronger scientist. All I had to do was look at her to see it. What have you done to investigate this water supply?”
“My Queen, I truly fear you’re not hearing me,” Uma tucked the insult aside, she had to get the Queen to focus on their current situation, not distractions that Daphna threw in the way.
“I hear you perfectly well. You don’t know enough of this illness among the Sisters. Do your research. Come back to me when you have some conclusive observations. Make a plan to address the water issue before it approaches the Geb purification plant. In the meantime, I have to galvanize a country for the settlers before they take out their wrath upon the ungrateful population we’ve become. This will be the greatest homage to the settlers we’ve ever made. And you are preventing me from seeking absolution before I implore the settlers to forgive us all. Can’t you see how that must be my priority? Out.”
Uma knew her mouth was agape, but she couldn’t find the courage to speak another word. She walked out in a trance, a growing sense of doom taking root inside her.
28
Ariane
The early morning sun was already burning hot through her window. Ariane couldn’t bear the heat. The sun rose too early for her liking.
She loved the blessed night. Quiet night. Darkness, stillness, welcome aloneness. In the day she was surrounded and yet always alone. But the nighttime was meant for loneliness. Her soul felt well in the black of night. There was no shame in feeling alone in the moonlight. The moon itself was a constant friend.
But this day brought new hope.
Settlement day.
Come, my people, come hear the words of the settlers as I implore them to gift us with the world we desire. Come, women of Geb, come visitors from the Outer Counties, come Cork Town deviants. Today is the day you are welcome in my home. Welcome in this home that the settlers created for us. The settlers, my family.
Family. Indeed, she felt connected much more closely to those of fourteen generations earlier, those who had to fight their way to the New World. Yes, they were more her people, her ancestors, her blood, than her mother ever had been.
Mother. She cast her genetic material into a box, no more than that. Mother. We ought to retire the word. There is no place for ‘Mother’ in this Lower Earth. They are not even Willing Mothers; they are willing vessels carrying the material we demand of them. Oh, how I grow tired of this farce of genetic connection.
The only genetic connection that matters in the whole of this world is mine with the settlers.
The voices within her grumbled words of mothers and motherhood but Ariane could keep them at bay. No words from the Queens of before about motherhood today. Not today. Today was the day for the settlers.
Ariane strode to the wardrobe, reaching far in behind the robes and gowns of velvet, her arm reached until it hit the back, rough burlap woven of standard-issue against her fingertips. She smiled. This day would begin as every Settlement Day for her had begun since she first realized the importance of the tradition. The standard-issue dress had a hood attached, sufficient to cover her hair. And with her head down, she could be any working-class woman of Geb, or even an upscale deviant. She threw on the dress and pulled out some simple sandals that she had procured for the occasion. Her reflection was an excellent liar.
Yes, women of Geb. I come to mingle among you, to hear of your failures, your exploits, your sins.
She ran out of the fortress, ran along the northern perimeter of the city, ran until she nearly reached the Cork Town entry. She didn’t go that far; to cross into Cork Town would risk her being identified by the Guard. Some of them had seen her in disguise before. This was not the day to be found out, even if the Guard would keep their mouth shut. She tried to walk as the regular women walked, letting her shoulders bounce with the common rise and fall instead of her normal glide. It took focus and concentration; she had to consciously hit her feet against the ground.
How do they walk like this every day of their lives feeling their full weight into the pressure of the ground? How uncomfortable. How heavy.
A group of women gathered on the far side of the street. Ariane checked that the hood was pulled over her face and she magnified her hearing in that direction.
“It makes me nervous, that’s all.”
“Understandable, but it’s not like this is your first time.”
“You have attended the congregation before, right?”
“Of course I have. It’s just that the idea that the settlers use this day to look into our hearts… Well, what are they going to see in my heart?” The woman grabbed at the lava rock around her neck and lowered her chin.
“Oh, hush now, Doris, what could you have possibly done that the settlers would take any interest in? You produce fortification powder. You’re already more productive than some of us,” the woman looked in the direction of another woman standing behind her.”
“What? Why look at me?”
The woman raised her eyebrows, “Those kids in your classes are lucky they don’t know just how many lessons you skip over.”
“It’s not my fault, they’re thick! They don’t take it in! How can I possibly be teaching them linguistics when they hardly know the difference between a pencil and a paintbrush? It’s exasperating.”
“You just have no patience. You never should have gone into that career track. You should’ve stuck where you were.”
“In the mines? Are you crazy? You know what happens to the women who are down there? They don’t come back the same.”
“If that’s what you were designed for, then that’s what you were designed for.”
“My mother came from the stock of teachers.”
“Your mother taught in the mines, you thick piece of - ”
“Stop!” The first woman stepped between the other two, “They’re probably listening,” she whispered, nodding her head upwards. “If not the settlers, then the guards. Don’t argue. Not today.”
Ariane was pleased. Their reverence for the settlers was appropriate. She made a mental note of the woman who should be working in the mines. She would reference her later in her speech. It would reinforce the settlers’ omnipresence.
She walked into alleyway Q2. She knew there was
a girl’s home there, where borderline deviants were housed until such time that they could be confirmed as common code or else re-homed in Cork Town. She had visited the place often before she had become Queen. She was fascinated at how they still struggled to identify which sequences carried such errors that they could not even recognize it at first. Errors that were hidden deep in their sequence, errors that didn’t surface for years. Polar opposite of the incubates, whose deviance was on show from the moment it sparked, even if their problems were social and not genetic.
A deviant is a deviant, however they come to it. And a deviant has no place among the women of Geb.
The women of Geb.
Her mind held the thought. How she loved the juxtaposition.
Geb, so he had called it, that king, that man who had dared to make women subservient. It wasn’t written in their history books; it didn’t have to be. Not for Ariane. The voices whispered of it ever since her first days, Geb. To live in Geb, the city bearing his name. The affront. A descendent of the settlers, but not a settler himself. An explorer, so he called himself. A discoverer. But he was no better than the men of the old world. He had not suffered as the settlers had. He had only tried to rekindle the old ways.
And look at them now.
The old ways had died with the men.
Without really noticing, Ariane had woven her way to the fourteenth street. Life passed around her, Ariane started to tune back in to the present day. Voices of children, gleeful and excited. Voices of housemothers calling for calm. Women speaking in serious tones of their sins and tribulations. Ariane stayed in her thoughts of old King Geb until a voice softer than silk reached her.
“Hush, hush, all is well, child. You have to believe me, you have to.”
The child’s words grew in volume from a low murmur to an off-kilter sob.
“Please, please, Arin, you’ve got to be quiet now. We’re in the big city and they don’t want to hear the likes of us, especially on Settlement Day.”
“I don’t want to be here!” the child screamed and then cried.
“Shhh, Arin, just try to rest. Can’t you adjust the blanket, Anna? Now is not the time to draw attention to ourselves.”
Just a couple of women speaking, one perhaps a Willing Mother. But there was something in the sound of the child’s cry. Ariane listened closer as the sobs continued. It was as though the cry came in two different notes, like two voices in song but from the same lungs.
A deviant?
She turned back the way she came, back to the main thoroughfare, which had begun to fill with all those who were heading to the center for the Settlement Day congregation. Although there were thousands of feet and voices, Ariane scanned the crowd to locate the child.
Two voices in a single body, too unusual. Too much, even for a deviant. Or is it?
She heard it again, unmistakable. She followed it in the crowd, walking closer to its origin, pulling the hood closer around her face. She didn’t have long now. Soon she would have to make her way back to her chambers. She had to be in pristine condition for this of all days. This day when the settlers shone through her eyes and the people of Lower Earth would raise their hands in glorious adoration.
But first, she had to see the deviant child.
She caught sight of it, wrapped in the arms of a woman of normal childbearing age.
Ariane gave them a wide berth, pushing her way through the others. She feigned enthusiasm for the Settlement Day event, so as not to draw further attention to herself.
What are you, child? What is it running within your little body? Let me see you.
The bodies and the thoroughfare slowed to a halt. Ariane could hear the Guard ahead directing people into the alleyways so as to access the main square from different entries. Ariane did not let the child and the woman out of her sight. She moved closer to them, inching sideways, the voice of the woman reaching her ears even through the din of the growing crowd.
“It’s okay now. I know you’re scared. So many people. But don’t you worry. Mama is here. Mama’s got you. She’s never leaving you. Mama loves you. You know that.”
Ariane felt emotion squeezing her throat closed.
So tender. What tenderness is this? Kinship is pragmatic. Her love is disproportionate.
“I’ve got you, child. Mama’s got you. Mama loves you. Mama is never leaving you.”
Mama is never leaving you.
Ariane found herself under the spell of the mother’s gentle hum. She closed her eyes and felt the woman’s rocking as though she were the one enclosed in her arms. In Mama’s arms. The safety, the security, the warmth. Her safe alcove. The child’s safe alcove she claimed as her own from across the distance, but close enough to feel the heat of their two bodies in her mind.
Sweet den of mother’s love. My cold glass box. I claim you, woman. Who are you? Do you love me as you love the child you hold?
The woman looked up, meeting Ariane’s eyes.
Did I say it aloud? Does she hear my heart’s wish?
The woman’s eyes were crooked. A deviant.
A deviant with a heart that is purer than a Queen’s.
Ariane froze.
Teach me, deviant woman. Teach me what my own so-called sacred Queen mother could not.
Their eyes held until a guard’s voice cracked across them. “You over there, the one with the child, everyone to the left of you, head to the Northeast entrance. All the rest of you, move southwest. Move now. Move solemn and quiet. The Queen expects it of you. She expects you to arrive in full reverence. Prepare for this day, the day we honor the settlers’ arrival on our shores.”
Another guard came over a loudspeaker. “Do not challenge order. Do not challenge our instruction. Move with calm and control to the entry to which you have been assigned.”
Ariane didn’t wait a second longer. She ran through the crowd knowing they wouldn’t see her, but would only feel the air as she passed. She ran, no more visible than a gust of wind. Around south, then west, up the cliff, around behind, along the forest edge to the place where the fortress met the cliff behind it. She knew the way in. She knew it too well.
She dressed in slow motion. It was as though she couldn’t control her hands, couldn’t command them to move fast enough, and didn’t even have the will to desire it.
Mother’s love. So that is what it feels like.
The emotion was awash within her. Waves of it, electric and radiant, coated her from head to heart to hip to sole. If only she had known sooner, if only she had understood the power of such kinship. If only she could have convinced her mother to do the same.
If only.
The steel in her heart cut into her breath. No mother’s love for her, not for a glass-born Queen. Not for a genetic duplicate, triplicate, ongoing copy of those who came before. How can one love another when the other is herself? A genetic riddle. The self within a self across a mirror across a generation.
Is this what the settlers intended for me?
Is this what the settlers imagined when they demanded nothing less than genetic perfection from Central Tower?
And if my sequence is perfect, then why do I hate it so much? Settlers…
Her heart tried to stop the thought but it had already crashed the gate.
…How has this world become so different from what you wanted?
She couldn’t take the thought back. It was a thought on which the voices had been fighting her. How they had tried to hold it down, to kill the idea, to smother it like a mad mother on a crying infant.
But now it was out.
The world is not as it should be. The Queens of Before allowed it to become this. And now it is my responsibility to take us back to the beginning. How have we roamed so far from our purpose?
Mary’s voice echoed out across the screens, “Soon, people of Lower Earth, soon she shall appear. Find a place, wherever you are, have access to a screen. If you have not yet arrived in the main square, remain in place. The time has come. Our Q
ueen, descendent of the settlers, descended from all those of natural design, the perfected version of all the settlers wanted us to be, Queen Ariane! And soon she shall be with us, today of all days, to become one with those who came before. Seek, seek and find in the Queen’s words all that was intended for us. Now hush, people of Lower Earth. Hush until she appears on the balcony. She will come when the time is right. And you must show your respect through your silence.”
How do I tell them? How do I tell them in a way that they can hear it? How can I tell them so that they will understand just how wrong we are?
Everything else faded into the background, Central Tower, the water supply, the Sisters and their illness, traitors and Backroom Men, all of them faded against the light of a mother’s love, a light that shone into the depths, illuminating that which they had become.
The light of love, light that has cast truth into all our imperfections.
Settlers, help me, quiet the voices, hush those Queens of Before who run in my blood so that I may speak truth into the world before me.
She prayed it with her eyes lifted seeing into the heavens beyond the rafters. She closed her eyes and calmed her heart in rhythm with the breath of the crowd outside. They were silent. Waiting for her.
She would tell them everything.
Emotion boiled within her, tears rolled down her cheek. She stepped onto the balcony into the vision of the millions waiting for her.
She closed her eyes and prepared to speak, words that she knew were the gift of the settlers. She grabbed the lava rock around her neck.
“My people,” she began. “Everything is about to change.”
29
Leadon
Leadon set aside her feelings for the capital. Her feelings were irrelevant. Central Tower rose high before them and all that mattered now was that they deliver the message to the Queen. She looked over her left shoulder where Gillian was slumped on the horse’s back.
