by Tricia Dower
In rows of locked arms, the sea of us flooded the streets leading to Parliament. At its last session before summer recess, New Columbia would vote on legalizing a long-standing practice: restricting us to government jobs that paid in credits instead of cash, credits we could use only for Village housing and in government stores. When the bill was proposed, we sent petitions and delegations to Parliament members. The Elder Council wrote letters to neighbouring republic Prairie Shield, asking it to intervene. Its silence on the matter led the more impatient of us to propose sit-ins and roadblocks, though we’d never tried them before, never stood up for ourselves even once. The Council’s pitiful concession was a peaceful march. Snows couldn’t vote. How would our mere presence persuade even a single politician to act on our behalf?
An honour guard of various ages led the way, hoisting placards that read Bill 82: You Know It’s Wrong and Snow Rights Are Human Rights. Although our route had been well-publicized, a few microcars collected behind us, beeping their toy-like horns, expecting us to give way. I flipped them a mental finger. Snows weren’t entitled to fuel rations, weren’t supposed to travel beyond the electric shuttle range.
“Get out and walk, you bastards!” Gruzumi shouted.
A few cowards called out for him to shut up, to not make trouble.
In answer, I began chanting, “Bastards, bastards.” Others joined in, and the chant morphed into “Faster, faster.” It rolled across the crowd, gathering intensity and pulling us forward as if we were kites on the verge of lifting. The sky was a deep blue and the sun so brilliant it whitewashed the ground and painted our shadows in giant dark spikes. Oh to lie naked with Gruzumi under a billion suns! I felt giddy from all that light and sky; buoyant from having Right on our side.
A few “snow flakes” – what some Rainbows called those sympathetic to our cause – joined the march. Hostile others stood along the route holding their own placards: What more do you want? Send the bloodless giants back. In another age, we might have been as sacred as white tigers or stags. The white butterflies as prized as the swallowtails, coppers, and blues.
Half a dozen police flanked our march in air scooters that whined as they hovered and gargled when they flew back and forth. Hundreds more, on foot and in riot gear, waited at the Parliament buildings. They formed a living fence across the entrance: silent, black sentries with praying mantis heads. Others were posted across the street in front of the nine-metre high seawall that held back the steadily encroaching ocean.
Gruzumi’s low, deep moan gave voice to my fears. We often saw police in such numbers on the library’s holovision, but the images came from faraway lands where refugees from drought or violent storms amassed at border crossings, desperate for food and shelter. “How lucky we are,” Ada would say for my benefit when we watched those images together, her mouth puckered like a doll’s. “Handed so much without a struggle.”
The unexpected sight of that many police made the crowd buckle. People called out, “What should we do?” Some turned in retreat. But the bullhorns urged us to proceed with the plan to occupy the Parliament grounds. Most of us did, spreading over the grass like a stain, keeping a wary distance from the police. Another people’s song rose up from our throng: Keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’, marching up to freedom land. I could see the words enter Gruzumi’s back and strengthen his resolve. We added our voices to the chorus that grew so sonorous I imagined it reaching the mainland. Then a rhythmic rumbling began, like winter rain pounding every gutter on every roof in the city.
“Sit, sit!” voices around us shouted. “They won’t hurt us if we sit down!” The crowd began collapsing in surges like stricken tents. Once all of us were down on the grass, I could see that the rumbling came from the police who marched towards us, steadily, slowly, beating their shields with batons. They made no announcements, no request to disperse, just rained down on their shields. The noise rose up through the earth and into my legs and hips. I wrapped my arms around Gruzumi and closed my eyes, willing the sound to stop. It did, and Snows at the front started screaming.
Gruzumi stood and pulled me up beside him. The police were swinging their batons, connecting with heads and backs. People had their hands up but still the police hit them as they waded through the crowd. We were far enough back to escape, and many around us rose and headed for the street, yelling for others to get out of their way, stepping on the hands of those still sitting as though stupefied.
“Stop!” Gruzumi shouted, waving his arms. “We outnumber them. If we run towards them, we can beat them back.” Yes, but how many had heard?
“Beat them back, beat them back,” I shouted over and over. The idea caught hold with others who tried to help turn the tide of retreating bodies, but we were too few. We grabbed hands and threaded our way upstream. I took the lead, lowering my head and stiffening my body to force us through. As we got nearer the screaming, it intensified. Then, a crackling and the smell of burnt toast.
“Sela, no!” Gruzumi said. He saw the dancing blue lightning before I did and tried to pull me back. It was as if foot-long knives ripped me apart. I fell on my face and went into convulsions. My jaw shook so hard I was sure my teeth would shatter. Struck, too, Gruzumi fell beside me. I felt his spasms through the ground. Even as the knife-like pain gave way to a fire burning inside me, I was aware of him and thankful we would die together.
By the time we pulled ourselves up on trembling arms and knees, the sun had painted the sky with purple and yellow streaks. Moaning bodies lay nearby. A stench assaulted my nose. I lowered my head and looked between my legs. Like a helpless infant, I had soiled myself.
“Can’t take you anywhere,” Gruzumi said. I tried to laugh for his sake. We rolled onto our backs and wept up into the bruised sky. When our tears were spent and we could speak again, we promised ourselves to each other for as long as forever would last.
“What have you done to us?” Ada said, when I returned to the Village. Emotion exposed the blood vessels under her cheeks. “Did they take down your code?”
Stamped on a metal tag around my neck was D-121782: building D, unit 12, resident 1782 in the Good Neighbour Village.
“No,” I said, hurrying past her to our small washroom.
She pursued me. “What’s that stink? What did you sit in? You’ve ruined that outfit.”
I switched on the hydro, cupped my hands and scooped water into my mouth, trying to flush away the chemical taste at the back of my throat. That and my shameful smell made me want to retch.
“I’m disappointed in you,” she shouted through the bathroom door.
Ada had been living my future since I entered university. “When we’re teaching,” she’d say, “we’ll buy a sewing machine.” Teachers received more purchasing credits than most. She made all our clothes, fusing a discarded skirt to a sweater, a sleeveless shell to a pair of pants, hand stitching them – every item an original, each with a story to tell. She dreamed of selling her designs to Rainbows. Adawalinda’s Revivals, she would call them. I wanted her to be more than a beggar. But I wanted her to dream for us all.
I stripped and squatted over the toilet to clean myself. Gruzumi had gone off to prepare his parents. How to tell Ada he and I couldn’t bear to be apart now, each afraid the other would disappear. Snows didn’t get married as Rainbows did. We just decided to stay together. If I had my own room, Gruzumi could have moved in with us, but he wouldn’t have fit into Ada’s world of two.
“We’re like orphaned sisters,” she would say as we mopped up after storms or foraged in the dark during the rolling blackouts. Her father and brothers had perished during the Great Migration, leaving only her and Aaka Elin, whose body rejected the island diet for good when I was twelve. Ada had never lived with a man as an adult, not even the one who fathered me in 11 AGM when she was seventeen. Rumour held he was a tourist she met while telling fortunes down at the harbour, but she w
ouldn’t talk about him and there was little Rainbow in me except for a few freckles – not unusual for a Snow – and a patch of pink skin on my right hip. I often wondered if the part of me that didn’t understand her came from my father.
“Why are you punishing me?” she said as I packed my clothes and Aaka Elin’s sealskin pouch in which I kept dried herbs. “I believed in you before he did.”
I tried not to hear her words or see her tears as I left for Gruzumi’s apartment in the next building. Tried not to think of her talking in her sleep with nobody to hear.
Gruzumi’s parents were behind one closed door when I arrived, his grandmother and sister behind another. “To give us time, alone,” he said in a hushed voice as unfamiliar as his night clothes: wide-legged white pants and flowing white shirt.
The common room was dark except for one corner, lit from an ancient time. Floating candles encircled two embroidered cushions on opposite sides of a tray holding stone cups that had survived the Great Migration. The past cast an aura around the room, masking its shabby present.
“My mother made us tea,” he said.
“Sprouted bread and jam, too,” I said, so he’d know I noticed even though my gaze rarely left him. “Don’t think I can sit. Feels like I’m bleeding, but there aren’t any wounds.”
“No,” he said, “no evidence, no proof. Who will believe us?”
The wood floor groaned under his bare feet as he crossed it for more cushions. He made me a bed, helped me lie on one side. I watched him wince as he carefully kneeled, watched his calloused hands pour tea into the cups. His hair looked almost yellow in the candlelight. Should I have been serving him? A swallow of panic. I’d joined his family with barely a thought as to what my role would be. I raised myself onto an elbow and drank. Willow bark tea, sweetened with honey, the slightly bitter aftertaste promising to take my pain away.
“I thought I’d be left without you, shouldn’t have put you in danger,” he said. His shadow on the wall reached over to touch my cheek.
“We could have pushed them back if we’d planned it,” I said.
“Not against shields of lightning. Next time it will be bullets.”
The thought of a next time thrilled me. We had chosen the shields over retreat.
Later, in his room – mine too, now – we could only gently touch, our muscles as fragile as worn thread, but his body became my safe haven and I slept without dreaming.
I woke to Sunday morning light slipping through slatted blinds and the reverberating drone of a sky car flying low, rattling the windows.
“Mercenaries,” Gruzumi said, from the edge of the bed, where he sat peering through the slats. My eyes stroked the fine, white hair on his shoulder. My Arctic wolf.
“The police must have brought them in,” his father, Adero, said after we lowered our still sore bodies to the large, square mat in the main room. I was unaccustomed to eating on the floor. Ada and I used a small table and chairs rescued from the landfill.
Gruzumi’s mother, Katsi, brought us bowls of soup of dried fish and spring greens. Afraid I’d spill the soup between the floor and my mouth, I waited until I saw Gruzumi’s aaka, Pilipaza, and fifteen-year-old sister, Asalie, hold their bowls and spoons close to their mouths. No one seemed to expect anything of me at the moment. They were intent on the words Adero spoke with a hint of the old language: the sibilant sounds like drawn out zeds, my name an exotic “Zelanna.”
“The police chief came on the radio. Said we threw rocks at his troops. Troops! We’re at war now?”
“He’s lying,” Gruzumi said.
“Did he say they beat and shocked us?” I asked.
Pilipaza sniffed. “Of course not.” At seventy, the bony-faced Pilipaza was one of the oldest Snows. Her status as Elder Council member earned Gruzumi’s family a three-bedroom apartment. Her flat, unfriendly voice had always intimidated me even though her body was so bent, I could have toppled her with a finger. The next time we had fish soup, I’d add nettle greens for her thin bones.
“Thank you for the bread and jam last night,” I whispered to Katsi who had sat on my left, “but I couldn’t swallow anything except the tea.” She smiled and gave my arm a quick, gentle squeeze. She was older than my mother with unapologetic lines radiating from the corners of her eyes. After several miscarriages, she’d had Gruzumi when she was twenty-nine and Asalie four years later.
“We need people to speak the truth,” Adero said, the triangle of beard below his full lips moving up and down. He wore a tusk-shaped shell through his nose – only at home, to embarrass his children, he told me once. He kept fit maintaining the Village rainwater tanks, clambering onto roofs to clear leaves from gutters and check for drowned creatures: “four-legged, two-legged, winged ones,” he said so many times Gruzumi would roll his eyes. A line from a child’s verse, but I wondered if he’d ever actually found a two-legged one in the tank.
“What we need sooner is a new tag with the correct building and apartment code for Selanna,” Pilipaza said, turning her full gaze on me for the first time. To all, she said, as if in proclamation, “Not a rock was thrown.”
“Why are you so sure?” Katsi said. “We left before Sela and Zumi.”
“Yeah, why did they zap you?” Asalie said, squinting at Gruzumi and me. She looked empty-headed with her faddishly sheared hair. I’d be teaching others like her before long.
I squinted back. “Nobody threw any rocks.”
“The march was a mistake,” Pilipaza said.
“It could have been better organized,” I said, forgetting her role in it.
“When you’re on Council, you can criticize. It was too well organized. We got a permit too easily, delivered ourselves into their hands. You just think about that.”
All eyes turned to me. “When I’m old enough for the Elder Council, I hope it does more than issue ID tags, assign apartments, and beg the government to fix rotting wood and broken glass.” You just think about that, I wanted to add.
Gruzumi made a show of kissing my hand and the others laughed, even Pilipaza.
“What’s so funny?”
“You don’t back down,” Gruzumi said.
The rumble of heavy vehicles drew us from breakfast to the wide front window. Quick-moving Asalie claimed the vantage point. Long, brown cargo trucks with fat wheels parked along the seawall across the street. Mercenaries from the republic of Mid-Norte spilled out. They levelled their rifles at Snows seated on the sidewalk in the traditional talking circles we called hoops. We’d seen the mercenaries before, but only in parades. In exchange for potable water, they were on call to protect us against invasion. Whatever they said made the Snows stand, drop their heads like supplicants and hurry into their buildings. The previous day’s humiliation burned through me like a fever. I wanted blue lightning to spurt from my fingertips, cut through the glass, and knock the soldiers to the ground.
“I remember the day we were herded into these buildings,” Pilipaza said, her voice more numb than flat. “No more cooking fires. No more boats. We accepted everything.”
“Isn’t that your mother, Sela?” Asalie said.
I squeezed in beside her, pressed my forehead against the glass, and peered down. Pointing up in our direction was Ada. Although the soldier next to her was tall, he had to look up at her face. Had she been in a hoop? She detested that custom, claiming it tried to keep a doomed past alive. To her, nothing worth mentioning had happened before today unless it had happened to the Rainbows.
“She’s turning us in,” Asalie said.
“What for?” Katsi said.
“For marching.”
“She’d have to turn in half the Village, then. She probably wants Sela.”
The soldier must have asked for Ada’s ID because she pulled out her tag. If she didn’t always wear that dark blue jumpsuit on her
Sunday morning scavenges through refuse bins, I’d have sworn she had deliberately dressed like the mercenaries. The soldier waved over another who consulted a palmtop and shook his head. He gestured towards my mother’s building. Ada stomped a foot and waved her arms about. A ridiculous sight that stabbed me with pride.
“I better go down,” I said.
“I will,” Adero said, putting a restraining hand on my arm. “Your tag. They might not let you back in here.”
By the time Adero made it outside, Ada was sitting on the sidewalk, arms obstinately folded. Three mercenaries stood over her, conferring. When Adero approached, they stepped back quickly. One levelled his gun. Adero put his hands up. Another pulled the tag out from under Adero’s shirt.
“It’s that travesty in his nose,” Gruzumi said. “They probably think it’s wired.”
Only Asalie laughed. No one mentioned the disk in Gruzumi’s ear.
When Adero returned, his face was tight. “They wouldn’t let me talk to her. We must apply to the police for permits, now, to assemble outside and to enter any building we don’t live or work in. They have a machine with our codes in it.”
“A palmtop,” I said. “Embarrassingly old technology, my fellow students like to say, but it’s more than we have.”
“We talk to each other, not machines,” Adero said, as if our deprivation was by choice.
Rainbows found the way we talked to each other unsightly: out in the open, in hoops. But sitting on the ground showed our respect for Aaka Earth and our responsibility to each other. The sight of Ada on the ground took me to task. I had brushed her aside like a cobweb.
“They can’t keep us from the gardens,” Pilipaza said. “I’m going to weed the asparagus. Others on the Council may have the same idea.”
It was the law for all, even the Rainbows, to grow food for the government to harvest and sell back to us. Except for Parliament’s ceremonial lawns, each patch of grass, every swimming pool, and all but a few parking lots had been converted into communal gardens or habitat refugia. The earth around the Village had been parcelled into plots, each apartment responsible for one.