The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

  “And the carving?”

  “Maybe it came out that way. Who knows? Maybe that’s why it’s so perfect. Not sure how they got it in and out, though … ”

  “The other end of the cavern has collapsed. Exploded, maybe.” I show him my blackened fingertips. “The door beside the pool seems to be the only way in or out, but maybe it wasn’t that way before … ”

  My voice trails away. Gray has a little sheen of white dust over his hair; his expression is intense, excited by what he has learned. I look back toward the white room. I never imagined that so much knowledge could have been lost. How could we have lost this? How could the Forgetting have taken so much away? I’m already marching back across the cavern, angry. Despite the latrine and the mattress and the clothes, the white room just doesn’t seem like a living space. It’s a workspace, like Gretchen’s, to do … something. Something I’m going to figure out.

  I go through the door, down the little hall, let the second door whoosh and the lights and the squares all jump back into life. I feel the air that smells like nothing. Maybe that’s why it stays so clean. I’m dry enough now to tie on my book, so I do that while the door whooshes and Gray comes in behind me. I’m done being careful. I walk over and sit in one of the chairs.

  I nearly fall on the floor. The chair is moving, and at first I’m afraid it’s moving by itself, like everything else, but then I realize the chair is on wheels on a very smooth floor. I’m halfway across the room, spinning in a circle before I know what hit me. I let myself slow to a stop. Gray is watching me, brows up. I put down my feet and spin myself on purpose. It’s a little like swimming, or sliding, but not really like either.

  Gray grins, gets in the other chair, and does the same thing, propelling himself fast across the floor, catching himself just before he crashes against the wall. He looks back at me. “Now this,” he says, “is an incredible machine. Who could ever just sit on it?”

  I laugh. The chair is stuffed with something soft, with the perfect place to lean back a head. I spin with one foot and cross my legs, close my eyes, feel the circles slow and wind down.

  “And I thought we should go to the Dark Days Festival,” Gray says.

  No, sneaking over the wall, jumping a waterfall, finding a hidden door, and playing around inside a mountain full of machines we don’t understand was clearly a much better plan, Glassblower’s son.

  “Are you sorry?” he asks.

  “About what?”

  “You kissed me.”

  I open my eyes. Gray is still in his chair, facing me, his brows back down, smile gone. “You kissed me, too,” I say.

  “You kissed me first.”

  “Well, you made me want to.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “Are you?” I counter.

  He pulls my chair to him, puts a hand on my neck, his forehead on mine, and shakes his head just a little.

  “Then neither am I.”

  He kisses me once, and there something’s very intense about it. He’s still, like when he was floating in the mist of the pool. “I don’t want you to be sorry,” he says, so soft it’s barely words.

  “Well, I don’t want you to walk with Veronika anymore.”

  He leans back. “You want to talk about Veronika? Right now?”

  “No. I never want to talk about her again.”

  I get a hint of his smirk. “But it’s all part of my extremely clever plan to keep you a secret,” he says. His mouth is back on my neck.

  “Get a new plan,” I whisper.

  He laughs. And I wish I knew why he thought I might be sorry.

  “What bell do you think it is?” I ask. He keeps his mouth where it is and points upward. I follow the angle of his finger to a dial on the wall, above the window to the resting room, a dial that is just like the one on our water clock. Of course it is. Why shouldn’t it be? The dial says it’s only half past the eighth bell. We have time. Unless Gray makes me forget what I’m doing. I kiss his cheek and his mouth, then sit back and shove him, sending his chair flying toward the other wall.

  He leans back and sighs. “Was that necessary?”

  I think it probably was. I’ve already turned and scooted to the huge square of light on the wall, the one with the word “Welcome.” So if this is a machine, like Gray said, then it must do something, be for something. I cross my legs in the large, soft chair, run my hand over the black edge of the light square, like a window frame. Maybe it has a bump. Maybe it will open, like the little door over the numbers in the cliff face. Gray’s chair rolls up beside mine.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t touch that.”

  “It says ‘Welcome,’ ” I say.

  He doesn’t argue. I brush my fingers along the edge, and when they get near the blue light, suddenly little symbols appear, like wisps of colored fog. When I take my hand away, they’re gone again. I look at Gray in triumph. He tries it as well, holds his hand poised over the light that has no warmth, and I try to understand the symbols. Circle, triangle, square, and more, all with a design inside.

  I point at one, meaning to ask Gray if he thinks the design could be letters, when there’s a sudden, trilling, false note of music. I sit back, craning my neck upward. The word “Welcome” has dissolved, like powdered sap in water, and the entire square has gone green, the circle symbol large in the center, with the letters “NWSE” entwined inside it. Words appear like blinking. I don’t even know what all of them mean. “System,” “Repair,” “Utility,” “Core,” “Control” …

  Gray is out of his chair to see what’s behind the square. By his puzzled expression, I assume there’s nothing but wall. I hover my hand and touch a triangle this time, and the same thing happens. The symbol rushes to the center and grows large, letters entwined, this time in yellow, words like “Language,” “Security,” “Camera” …

  “Look at this one.” The foggy shape resembles an open book. I touch it, the shape leaps upward, and this time the words that appear are “Archive—The Canaan Project.” We both stare at the name of our city. Below it, one by one, appear “History,” “People,” “Statistics,” “Curriculum,” “Vlog,” and “New World Space Exploration.” The significance of that last one hits me.

  “NWSE,” I say beneath my breath.

  “I see it,” Gray replies.

  “What kind of space? Like a workspace?”

  Gray stands, and this time he hovers his hand over the whole lit square, to see if anything else might show itself. When it doesn’t, he touches the word “Exploration.”

  A list of numbers appears, the number 1 brighter than the others. Then sound blasts into the silent room, and I cover my ears. Images roll across the screen, not drawings or designs but real things, a moon in a sky, some kind of moving white container spouting blasts of furnace fire, and people, so many people walking what I think are streets except they are nothing like the streets of Canaan. Metal buildings that stretch to the sky, carts that are enclosed, not pulled, zooming at unattainable speeds, hundreds at a time. Bizarre clothes, strange hair colors, one little girl holding a creature like an insect but huge, at least half her size, and covered with hair.

  Then a man’s face fills the square of light, five times bigger than any man’s face should be, and he is smiling, his hair clipped so short it must have been done with a razor. It’s not real, I have to tell myself. He’s not here. But he looks real, and he’s looking right at me.

  He says, “The New World Space Exploration Corporation announces the Canaan Project, a historic joint venture to colonize the first known habitable planet in our galaxy … ” The picture changes to another burst of fire, and another white container is now flying among stars. A flying machine?

  “Seventy-five men and seventy-five women,” he says, “the best of our world’s best, will leave Earth and embark on a first-of-its-kind journey to expand the boundaries of human exploration.” The square on the wall shows the flying machine hurtling through stars, approaching a green-and-yellow sphe
re, three smaller ones circling it. “39,413,958,467,871 kilometers,” the man says, “4.17 light-years, 1.28 parsecs from Earth.” The music is swelling, the green-and-yellow planet coming closer. “We will travel the galaxy. We will experience what has never been. We will build a new civilization. Because we dare.”

  The sound and the images stop. Gray is still standing. I’m not sure he’s moved a muscle. He reaches out and touches the last image, and we watch the whole thing unfold again. It’s easier to listen to the words this time, when I’m not as shocked by the sights. The man is saying that Canaan is the civilization they set out to build: a one-kilometer circle of stone 39,413,958,467,871 kilometers away from a place called Earth. The same numbers as the code I used to get inside this room.

  Gray lifts his hands behind his head, still staring at the light square. Other than that, we don’t move or speak. I’m not sure what there is to say. Everything? Or nothing. I thought the people who built Canaan might have come from across the mountains. They came across the stars. And then they forgot about it. The list of numbers reappears, and after a long time, Gray reaches out and touches “2.”

  We watch a similar grouping of images, like a story being told, this one about the vision for Canaan, with voices from people we cannot see. “This is our directive,” a man says with confidence. “To build and to populate the first civilization created to exist in harmony with itself and its environment.”

  “To live without bloodshed, without money, without industry, without waste … ” a woman’s voice says.

  “Self-sufficient and with respect for the land,” another continues.

  “A new world,” says the next one, “where humans live in partnership by the work of their own hands. With peace, with justice … ”

  “With minimal technology,” says the voice of a child.

  “We will live off the grid, because there will be no grid.”

  “We will advance the knowledge of the human race. We will create the perfect society.”

  “Because we dare,” they all say together.

  I don’t know what money is, or industry, or technology, or a grid. But I know I’ve seen bloodshed.

  The next story is longer, showing the selection process for the people chosen to come to Canaan. Architects, engineers, mechanics, chemists, agricultural experts, doctors, physicists, psychologists … I don’t know what half of these things are, either, and many of these people, I see, did not even speak the same words. Everyone had to learn to talk and write the same, in a way called English. I’d never even considered that one human could speak differently from another. And they had to pass tests, not just in their particular trade or skill, but for stress, resourcefulness, empathy, and health, and even for hidden malfunctions in their families.

  Then the one hundred and fifty chosen members all trained as something called an “artisan.” We watch a man who refers to himself as a “nutritionist” being given his first lesson on a potter’s wheel. He’s not very good at it, and he laughs, and the men and women gathered to watch his progress laugh with him. They’re wearing the same sort of clothes I saw in the resting room behind us, though I can’t see how they’ve managed to close up the fronts.

  “Wait!” I say. “Gray, can you make it stay right there?” We’ve learned that if you hover your hand over the story being shown, it will allow you to manipulate the story itself. Gray touches the symbol that makes the images pause. It’s like stopping time.

  “Look,” I say. “On the right, toward the back. Is that Jin?”

  Gray stands back a moment, then steps forward and looks closer. “I think it is.”

  Jin looks so young. But his smile, and something about the way he’s holding his hands, is exactly the same. Jin was born thirty-nine trillion kilometers from where we sit. And I don’t think he knows it. I hate the Forgetting.

  “Wait,” I say again. I get up from my spinning chair and hover my hand to make the symbols come back. I touch the book, and when the words pop into existence, this time I choose “People.” A list of names materializes. Everyone seems to have two, or even three, none of them having to do with a skill, all of them alphabetized by the last name first, which is odd. I touch one at random. Barkhurst, Amelia. Instantly a woman’s face flashes onto the light square, and it tells me Amelia Barkhurst was born in a place called the United States, that she was a materials engineer on Earth and a weaver on Canaan, who she married, the children she had after they arrived. It doesn’t say when or if she died. She doesn’t look familiar.

  “Look for Jin,” Gray says. “Or no, we can’t. That wouldn’t have been his name before the Forgetting. We’d have to go through them all … ”

  I go back to the list and choose another at random. Gara, Ketan. Born in India, astrophysicist, with a note that his particular specialty would be the study of Canaan’s twelve-year comet. The word “comet” is in a color, which I’ve learned means it can be touched. I do, and it shows me images of Canaan. I can see that from the fern trees, from the rocks, though these images are not clear like the others. These are a little distorted, like seeing through squinted eyes. There’s the sky streaked for sunrising, but then it goes bright, too bright for the person’s vision we’re seeing through, sparkling like the metal in our doors and tables. Like glass. A broken-glass sky.

  I step back. “Gray, that’s what the sky looked like. Right before the Forgetting.” I sit down. Deep inside my head, I am slipping, falling in the streets.

  “What is it?” Gray asks. “Was there any noise?”

  No. The sparkling sky had been bright and silent. Caused by something called a comet. Something that comes every twelve years.

  “Is it like a storm?” he asks.

  I don’t answer this question, either. I just don’t know. I stare at the image. I don’t want to think that something like this could cause the Forgetting. Something we have no way of stopping.

  Gray moves the image away, goes back to Gara, Ketan, and then back to the list. “What about Rose?” he says.

  I stand. He’s right. If Jin was one of the original people chosen for the project, then Rose should be, too. She’s just as old, or she seems that way. Would it make her not Lost if we could tell her who she was? I start to scan the list, ready to touch them all, but one name near the top catches my eye. Surprises me. I touch it.

  And there is Janis’s face smiling out at us. She’s very young, just a girl, but her looks are unmistakable. Striking, the eyes deep set, hair dark instead of white. The information says Janis Atan was not born on Earth, but on the Centauri, the flying machine they called a “ship,” carrying the chosen members to Canaan. Her parents were both chemists. Suddenly I want very much to know how old Janis is.

  I turn to say this to Gray, but he’s staring at the illuminated face, still, his expression almost blank, and it reminds me of two things: the way he’d stopped mid-sentence when he saw me with Janis at the festival, and the way he’d looked at me at the waterfall, the first time, when it came to him how I knew about his burns.

  “Explain to me,” Gray says, “how Janis still has her name?”

  I look back at the smiling face on the wall. “She must have kept a book … ”

  Gray throws a hand out toward the light wall. “Why would a little girl keep a book before the first Forgetting, Nadia? All these stories, these things we’ve been looking at. The people who came here”—he emphasizes the next words—“they didn’t know they were going to forget. They didn’t know it was coming. They weren’t prepared. And just who do you think that was at the pool earlier?”

  I think about the shadow figure, hurrying away along the fern edge and down the grassy slope to the city. It could have been Janis in her black robes. But I can’t be sure. Gray has his hands behind his head. He isn’t moving, but it’s a kind of stillness that makes me think he’s going to explode.

  “It was Janis,” he says, “and you were right, dead right. Everything you said in Rose’s room, about who must have written t
he First Book of the Forgetting, who could have figured it all out so quickly, who would have talked that way. You were right to try and steal the First Book, because Janis wrote it. She came to that pool today because she knows that door is there. And she knows that door is there for the same reason she still knows her name.”

  He looks at me then. “It’s because Janis is like you. Because Janis never forgot.”

  Father always said to write the truth, but to write the truth we have to know it. And knowing the truth is what makes me alone.

  NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER

  BOOK 14, PAGE 22, 3 SEASONS UNTIL THE FORGETTING

  I don’t understand,” I say, which is the understatement of my life. Gray is a fast thinker, but this time I think he’s making a leap. “If Janis never forgot, why wouldn’t we know about it? Why wouldn’t we know about all this? What could be the reason for it?”

  Gray doesn’t answer any of my questions. He’s staring at the smiling face on the wall like he’s being tied to the plaque on the water clock, and that little sprig of doubt I’d plucked before we opened the door springs back up from my insides like it’s the first day of sunrising. Gray says, “If I asked you to do something for me right now, would you do it?”

  I don’t know how to answer that. He looks at me hard.

  “If I asked, would you do everything I said without asking me why for half a bell? Trust me for half a bell more? That’s all I’m asking. And then I’m going to answer all of your questions.”

  I almost tell him that I stayed on the slope and waited for him, didn’t I? That he owes me seventy-four answers anyway; but my doubt has roots now, choking the humor. I don’t want to feel this. I want things to be the way they were before. Gray comes and lifts the string of my necklace, rubs a thumb once across the blue glass. Then he unhooks the metal bracelet and puts it in my hand.