by Jason Gurley
The notebook is nearly full. Noor leaves the book open on the bed so that the ink will dry, and peers through the window in his cabin. From here, he cannot see the comet, nor any stars, nor any planets.
Beyond Matroos the sky is as black as the ink in his well.
If a man has ever been so far removed from his own kind, Noor does not know who that man was. Noor is alone, more alone than he had expected or even anticipated he might be.
Noor feels a prickling of the dark hairs on his arms, and closes his eyes.
Dankie, Uitvinder, he whispers. Dankie, dankie. Dankbaar.
Outside, miles away, the comet continues its journey.
• • •
The black is my home, Noor thinks. My home is the black.
This is his mantra as he falls asleep each night. In the morning, he gives thanks to Uitvinder for another precious day. He sings as he stirs his breakfast cereal, hums gently as he performs his mid-morning salutations. His mind sometimes wanders, retreading many memories long cold, and he disciplines himself in the art of steering his thoughts to the present. Always the present. Always this moment, with Uitvinder.
Blessings, Uitvinder, he often whispers. Seeninge.
He makes up songs, and sings them, almost always to the same tune.
Though I may wander
Though I may drift
Though my useful days have passed
My shepherd guides me
My shepherd guides me
My shepherd guides me
Kindly to his door
Over the course of these thirteen years, Noor has become quite a good painter. He uses the same ink that he writes in his journal with, though he thins it with water so that it will last longer. He has sustained his ink supply for this long. He fears the day when he uses it up. The walls of his craft are hidden behind his paintings. He barely remembers what the walls look like.
Noor is ninety-three years old. His dark hair has never paled, or grown thin. Once a week he carefully draws a blade across his scalp and face, keeping his visage clean-shaven for the pleasure of Uitvinder. He longs for no tools which he does not possess, for if he needed something, Uitvinder would provide it.
Uitvinder, the Great Inventor.
Uitvinder prefers absolute focus. Noor removes from his sight anything that distracts him. He reads no books, carries no screenview. He has draped heavy curtains across the Matroos's bridge, and does not enter. The last time he set foot upon the bridge was six or seven years ago, when he dropped an inkwell and it rolled beneath the curtain. He was alarmed by the dancing screens and blips of light, and rushed around the bridge, deactivating every screen and shutting down every function within his power.
Noor has not spoken to another soul in all of these thirteen years. He doesn't miss the voices of other men and women. He doesn't miss their scent, their passions, their preoccupations.
Well, there is one whom he misses.
But Noor does not allow himself to think of her.
Uitvinder prefers a clear mind. A clear mind requires enormous effort, and Noor strives daily to disable his senses, to dismantle his thoughts. He believes that in another thirteen years, he may become quite good at this, but he has only recently felt any sensation of progress in this effort.
Seven days after Koerier vanishes from sight, Noor experiences a setback.
• • •
Noor slaps at his arm. He's still mostly asleep, but the sensation of tiny, prickling feet gets through the fog. He swats again at the fly, then sinks back into sleep.
Then he feels the fly on his face.
He swats himself across the nose, and sits up, startled.
There's nothing there. Where is the fly?
It takes a moment for the last fog of sleep to dissipate.
There are no flies aboard.
There are no insects aboard at all.
What touched him?
He is still contemplating this when he notices a flicker of orange light outside his compartment.
Noor narrows his eyes and pulls the curtain back from his bedroll.
Yes, there it is again.
Noor sniffs at the air. If there's a fire, where is the smoke?
I should be more concerned, he thinks.
He rolls out of bed and pads naked across the compartment, and stands in the doorway.
The orange flicker comes again, but this time he recognizes it, and it stops him cold.
The orange light is not flame, but a scanning beam, and it's moving through his ship like a blade, analyzing every compartment. It passes through the curtain that hides the bridge. It scours the mess hall, the living compartments. It passes through the bathroom facilities and the storage blocks.
It is thin, almost transparent, and it passes through the Matroos like water rising sideways.
Noor has nowhere to hide.
It enters his compartment and passes over him. It feels like the touch of an insect's wings.
He follows it as it recedes, retracing its path through the ship. It's like being in the presence of an alien, a quiet one that says nothing, simply looks at everything.
Hello, Noor says.
The orange curtain doesn't respond.
I wish to know your business, Noor says.
No response.
Noor follows the light to the bridge, where it passes through the heavy curtain he has hung. He pulls the curtain back and steps onto the dark, cold deck. The light reaches the nose of the ship and disappears, and Noor stops. The computers, which he deactivated years ago, are blinking and chirruping. He is surrounded by soft, pulsing activity. It is foreign to him, as alien as the orange light, or as the comet spearing through the black.
The primary screenview scrambles to life, and Noor turns his attention to it. The bright light hurts his eyes, and he blinks rapidly, trying to clear the afterimage.
A person's face appears on the screen. The person is a man, with skin pale and soft and thick. His hair has receded, and he wears a round cap to disguise this. His eyes are a striking green, like emeralds pressed into a mass of dough. To Noor, he looks like a mollusk whose shell has been plucked away.
The person speaks, and Noor jumps. It is the first human voice he has heard in many, many years.
Directive seven six seven six nine, the man says. His voice is thin and stretched, as if layers of it have been sanded away by the distance it must have traveled to reach Noor.
Directive seven six seven six nine, the man repeats. This transmission is intended for Operative Noor Dalat. Interception of this transmission is prohibited by Council law. The offense for interception is death. If you are not Operative Noor Dalat, abandon reception of this message.
Noor cocks his head like a bird and listens.
Authenticate, the man says.
Noor stares at him.
Authenticate.
Authenticate.
The word swims up at him, strangely familiar yet distant. There is a response for this, he knows, but he can't remember it. He rolls the word around in his brain.
Authenticate.
Authenticate.
Au-then-ti-cate.
Authenticate? Noor says tentatively.
The shipboard computer chugs to life, and Noor is startled when a voice fills the air around him. This new voice is cool and calm and female, and he has never heard it before.
Matroos, fisher-class alpha zero zero delta bravo alpha seven six, the voice says. Authentication nine alpha nine beta nine tango whiskey alpha zero seven four five tango alpha alpha.
Noor is overwhelmed. The transcendental state he has cultivated for years is broken, and his mind swirls with memories and call signs and battle agendas and tactical directives.
Authenticated, the doughy man says. Message follows.
The man disappears from the screen, and for a moment the bridge is quiet. Noor backs toward the curtain, and feels for it with his fingers. He grips the edge of it, pulls it back, and steps past it.
The cur
tain falls over the bridge again, and Noor stands in the corridor, suddenly aware that he is breathing hard, and his skin is beaded with cool sweat. His face is wet, and he presses his fingers against his cheeks. He was crying, he realizes.
He feels as if he has just been torn from a dream.
Meili
Your name, sir?
My --
Your name. Please.
I don't -- I don't have one.
Sir, I can't allow you into the room without a badge, and your badge requires a name. What is your name?
It's Richard.
Richard? Richard what?
Wait. Not Richard.
Sir. There's a line.
Not Richard, no. Not Richard.
Sir, your name, please. Give me your name.
He had invented it on the spot.
Noor Dalat.
Gibberish.
It didn't mean anything to him. Nine letters. Two words he'd never heard before.
Noor Dalat.
The woman at the recruiting gate had asked him to spell it, repeat it, spell it again. When she'd written his name on the badge, she handed it back with an unfriendly glare.
Noor Dalat.
He held the badge and studied it carefully. The name felt wrong. It felt untrue. It felt inhospitable, cold.
Just like the atmosphere in the room he was about to enter, he was sure.
Just like government-sponsored life in the lower ward of the Citadel.
He pinned the badge to his chest, and followed the surge of men and women into the room.
• • •
The auditorium was located on the university level of the Citadel, an enormous homage to the great Earth campuses of old. For miles and miles, there was nothing but sculpted quads carpeted with authentic grass and oak trees transplanted from the arboretum and agricultural level. It was beautiful, and nearly stopped Noor's heart the first time he had seen it.
He, like every resident of the Citadel for the past three centuries, was ignorant of Earth which was. Watching old recordings of the planet had been a mystifying experience. Skies were foreign to him. Trees looked vaguely disgusting, though he couldn't explain why. Water ran freely across the porous surface. Freely!
Earth as it once had been looked messy and disorganized. He had been fascinated by it, and spent his free moments in the great libraries, watching movies that were four hundred years old. Human beings had once soared through a great blue echo in little hammered-together air machines. They had poured great effort, years and years of sweat and exertion, into stacking habitable blocks higher and higher. They had voluntarily hurled themselves from great heights, and flung themselves into vast seas, and had hunted and consumed other strange living things.
Earth which was terrified and excited him.
The Citadel, by comparison, was a magnificent orb of smoky metal, lit from within and sending tiny forks of light out into the darkness. The great station was nearly a large as the moon itself, and and repelled light so that it was nearly invisible even in direct sunlight. It was segmented like an insect, sliced into several hundred enormous cross-sections, each of which was many miles across and around. Most levels were gilded and bright and architected by the geniuses of years gone by. But there were some that emulated Earth as it once was, with artificial skies and soil and forests and rivers. Noor grew up in the lower wards, however, and had never been privileged to travel to the organic levels.
Like the rest of the recruits he walked with, he had been lured here by the promise of betterment. The screenviews in the lower wards trumpeted the operative program as a boost for people like Noor. A few steps higher on the class ladder. Thousands of people applied to the program, and today, thousands of them would be sent home.
But a few would not be.
Operatives were Onyx-class.
There was almost nothing a Machine-class boy wouldn't do to receive an Onyx card.
Surrounded by able-bodied young men and women, Noor had reconsidered. He was slight of body, unusual in appearance. He was withdrawn and resisted cooperation. As a schoolboy, he had been remaindered to special classes, where he and a motley crew of other students had been plugged into personal learning machines, separated from the classrooms where teachers still crafted the minds of more ordinary children.
The strangers around him were laughing and talking to each other, making friends. They were gregarious and liked to smile. They had attractive faces, nice hair. Their arms were muscled, their legs shapely.
Noor, skinny and dark, had been lost in the crowd.
• • •
Sixty-four thousand hopefuls showed up that day.
The auditorium was more like an arena, with a central stage surrounded on all sides by seating. Noor was seated far from the stage -- so far that when the recruiting officers took the stage, he couldn't even see them. Their images were displayed on a collection of large screenviews high above the stage, facing outward for the crowd.
Welcome, a woman in a dark blue uniform said.
Her voice had echoed through the arena like a shout in a canyon.
You are here today, she continued, because you're interested in a life-changing career as a Citadel operative. What does that mean? What does it mean to be an operative of Citadel Meili?
Noor looked around, wondering if the question was rhetorical. Nobody spoke or raised their hand. The arena was startlingly quiet.
Life has value, the woman said. We can all agree on that. Each human life has value. We left Earth which was to save those lives. To preserve that value. And what we discovered -- what our ancestors knew, but were afraid to say -- is that every life has a different value.
She paused, perhaps waiting for response, but the sixty-four thousand attendees were silent as ghosts.
Each life has a different value. Some lives are worth a great deal, and must be protected at all costs. Some lives are less valuable, and may be considered, in some situations, expendable. Acceptable loss is a common consideration in those circumstances. What is an acceptable loss? Is the life of a Machine-class citizen worth less than that of an Onyx-class citizen?
Silence.
No, of course not, the woman continued. Every citizen serves a purpose, and class alone does not dictate the value of that citizen's life. But is a mother of four more valuable than, say, a young man who lives alone? Boldly, I declare that it is. Is the life of a celebrated citizen worth more than that of an unrecognized one? That's a fuzzier distinction, but the needle swings to yes, unless proven otherwise.
Noor was surprised by the lack of protest from his peers.
Let's go one step further, the woman went on. Are the lives of the Citadel council more valuable than, for example, the collected lives of everyone in this arena?
Noor drew back into his seat, and felt the people around him tense up as well.
The screenview above the stage framed the woman's confident, unyielding stare. She seemed to almost dare the crowd to respond to her. Finally, she opened her mouth and said, I submit that the life of even one of our esteemed councilmen is more valuable than every human life in this room. Including my own.
Noor felt a shiver run down his spine.
Around him, nobody moved. He couldn't believe it.
Nervously, Noor stood up. The woman beside him widened her eyes. He whispered an apology as he stepped past her, and apologized again to the young man whose feet he accidentally stepped on. He felt as though a spotlight had descended on him, and he wondered if anybody else in the arena had decided to walk out.
One life worth more than sixty thousand! he thought.
He made it to the end of the long row, face flushed, enduring the accusing and scared stares of his fellow attendees. Finally free of the long gauntlet of feet and chairs, he began climbing the stairs to an exit.
And he realized then that not only were none of the attendees speaking, but neither was the woman.
Then she spoke.
You, she said. Stop there.
/>
As her words echoed and echoed through the silent, accusing arena, Noor felt his feet turn to lead.
• • •
He had found himself in a much smaller room, accompanied now by six other attendees. Each of them appeared nervous, and Noor wondered if they could read his own fears on his face. They waited in silence, left alone in this space, not looking at one another.
At last Noor spoke up.
My name is Noor, he said.
The other men and women looked at him, and one woman exhaled in relief.
I'm Ylla, she said.
Hello, Noor said.
Do you know why we're here? another young man burst out.
Noor shook his head. Do you know each other?
The young man said, No. I was brought here by a guard.
How about the rest of you? Noor asked.
Ylla said, Also a guard.
The others concurred.
Are we -- did we commit treason? asked the worried young man.
Is it treason to leave a place? Noor asked. I have not committed treason.
Ylla said, I am not a traitor.
Did you leave as well? Noor asked.
Ylla nodded.
And the rest of you? Noor asked.
Nods all around.
Why did you leave? he asked.
Ylla glanced at the other strangers, then back at Noor. I left because I believe we are all equal.
The worried young man agreed. Me, too.
Me, too, Noor said. So we're all of this opinion?
More nods.
We've been brought here because we're dissenters, then, Noor concluded. Of those thousands of people, there are but seven of us who disagreed.
At least seven of us who publicly disagreed, Ylla said.
Anybody who did not publicly disagree, Noor pointed out, cannot be counted among us. They are not true dissenters.
This sounds more like treason every minute, the worried young man said.
What's your name? Noor asked.
Jeffrey, the man said. I'm Jeffrey.
The door to the room opened, then, and a contingent of uniformed personnel walked in, led by the woman who had been speaking. Ylla scooted closer to Noor, and the seven recruits fell into a rough line.