The Knowing

by Sharon Cameron

  Meaning that we of the Underneath are not as we should be. I watch Grandpapa’s forehead fold up like cloth.

  “But this wasn’t the same. This was like the mason had never picked up the tools. My life was Forgotten. Nita’s grandmama, she had to tell me my name, tell me hers. I had to pretend I knew my own mother. And we never told, because there have been others. Even a supervisor, once. And they whisked him belowground fast enough. But the Outsiders, now they just disappear. And then we see the smoke, coming out from Underneath … ”

  Three moons are rising, shining white light through the windowpanes. How could a supervisor, one of the Knowing, Forget his own name? And how could I not Know about it? I couldn’t Forget a face if I tried. If one of us had gone missing, I would Know. Grandpapa puts a hand on my head.

  “But you, little girl,” he says. “You Know. You remember. And you could do something about it … ”

  … and I go soaring, up through my mind, and my eyes snap open, blinking at the bodies moving through the Forum. At Thorne Councilman, our Head of Council, now standing next to my father on the steps to the platform. The one who will be Judging me, standing where I will be Judged, his black-eyed gaze making a straight path to mine. Fear stabs inside my chest. There’s a jerk inside my mind, and I plunge, down …

  … into the Forum of twelve years ago, full of the Knowing in their finery. It’s dark. Silent. Judgment. And Ava Administrator has just been condemned. My father holds my hand, a rare gesture, and I watch a blank sort of shock steal over the serenity of Ava’s face. Thorne Councilman reads her transgressions: funneling the best of the goods to her own level, numbers that do not rectify, an improper relationship.

  And then Thorne condemns Ava’s bloodline, all three of her children, because her oldest, a rebellious thirteen-year-old, has been refusing to cache. My father’s hand slips up to my face, covering my eyes so I will not remember the sight, but I can hear the children cry, and Ava’s soft protest of “No.” And a louder “No.” And then, “No!”

  … and I rise through my mind, and this time when I open my eyes both Thorne Councilman and my father are staring at me from across the Forum. As are others. Because I have just shouted the word “No,” the echo still bouncing back and forth between columns. And then someone screams, and it’s not me. I look up.

  A body is falling, down through the dark of the Forum, legs and arms outstretched, hair fluttering in the wind. And while my eyes track the descent of a long silver dress, all I can think is that I want to be like Grandpapa Cyrus.

  I want to be cursed like the people of Canaan.

  I want to Forget.

  I am Beckett Rodriguez, and I am flying through the stars.

  The ship is big, but I think it feels smaller than it’s supposed to. We spent a year on the fake Centauri III, in the middle of a California desert without ever seeing the sun. They say this ship is the same size, but I’m not sure I believe them. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown. Or maybe it’s because this time I know that there’s no sand, no sun, no air, and no Earth out there. Nothing outside the hull of this ship that could keep me alive. I don’t like to think about the void.

  We’ll be on the Centauri III for thirty-one more months if everything goes okay. If the ship doesn’t stop working. If we don’t run out of food. Or air. If we don’t get bored and kill each other before we get to Canaan.

  I’ll be eighteen before I stand beneath a sun again. And when I do, it will be a sun in a sky that isn’t mine.

  FROM THE LOG BOOK OF BECKETT RODRIGUEZ

  Day 1, Year 1

  The Lost Canaan Project

  Two and half years I’ve been dreaming about this sun, and now I’m going to die under it.

  “Beckett! Come on!”

  Jillian yells down at me from the top of the cliff like I’m fooling around, making us late for a training session. At least I know she’s not dead. I pull myself up the rope, arms on fire, sweat slicking my hands inside their gloves. It took some time to get used to the gravity on this planet. For my feet to stop feeling like the weight bars in the exercise cube back on the ship. I don’t think I’m done getting used to it. Or the heat. It’s a long drop to the bottom of the cliff.

  “Everything okay?” says a voice in my ear. It’s my father, Sean Rodriguez, eminent doctor of human anthropology, a man who right now is not having to scale this wall of rock. He’s only watching me scale it. Through my glasses. He can see what I see, hear what I hear. I wonder if he can hear me sweat.

  “Fine,” I grunt.

  “Does Jillian see anything up there?”

  If Jill had found a lost city, I’m thinking she would’ve said so. Dad’s next words are amused.

  “Use the safety harness and rest if you need to.”

  He knows I won’t. We have equipment on the ship that makes all of this unnecessary, but the rules of protocol say no visible technology. Even the basics. And anyway, Jill climbed it. Jill, of course, weighs next to nothing no matter what the gravity is. I pull for all I’m worth.

  Another five meters and I get a boot on a rock and push myself over the top. I roll away from the edge and lie there, panting while my muscles scream. I hear Dad chuckle. Jill peers down at me, blond hair sticking out in a spiky halo. She looks like she’s falling from the purple sky.

  “Made it, huh?”

  “I think you impressed her,” Dad says through the earpiece.

  I wince. Jill can’t hear him, not unless she’s really close. Lately she likes to be really close, and lately my father likes to tease me about this. And only lately has it occurred to me that Jillian might have been brought on this mission for reasons other than her triple-digit intelligence and equally brilliant archaeologist parent. We could be on this planet for years, and out of one hundred and fifty team members, there’s no one else here under the age of thirty. I wonder if my parents know she was chosen for me. If they had any say in it. If Jillian did.

  I really am stupid to have never thought of this before.

  Jill, who I’m guessing has not been as dense as me in this area, holds out a hand. I take it, and let her haul me up.

  “Here,” she says, “you’ve got dirt on the lenses.” She snatches the glasses off my face and gives them a scrub on the back of her jumpsuit while she kisses me. The idea of Jill plotting to have my babies means I enjoy this less than I should.

  “Exhaustion looks good on you,” she whispers, before sliding the glasses back on my face.

  It might be easy to make exhaustion look good when you’re the only eligible human in a galaxy.

  “Beck,” my father is saying. I adjust the earpiece. He’s amused again, which is embarrassing. He’s also in a hurry. “We only have forty-eight hours before the sun sets, so stop fooling around and let me see where you are.”

  I unlatch the harness rope and safety, straighten the lenses, and gaze around us, making a slow sweep of the clearing while Jillian goes back to documenting the finer details for our map. “Vegetation,” I tell him, confirming what can be seen on his screen at the base camp. “No visual on any life-forms … ”

  We’re in a forest, as far as I can tell. The plants are all one kind, but in different sizes, new growth on finger-thick stalks all the way to massive trunks three and four meters around, weirdly pliable. Leaves flutter, pale yellow and as thin as a layer of skin, the tips darkening to deep purples and blues. But what I can’t describe to my father is the sense of space, a ceiling of sky too far away to touch, a vast, empty openness that until four days ago, I hadn’t known since I was sixteen. Wind moves through my sweaty hair, laced with a sharp, fresh smell that I think is life. I close my eyes, breathing air that hasn’t been breathed. And then I hear a short, clipped noise. A sound that is Jill holding in a scream. I spin around.

  She’s exactly where I left her, eyes squeezed shut, cartographer in one stiff hand, and something like a beetle, hard-shelled, yellow as the leaves and as big as my fist, is crawling up the back of her leg. A long, pointed n
eedle of a tongue darts out, probing, testing as it goes.

  Correction, I think. I have a visual.

  “Don’t move,” I tell her. I don’t think she was going to. Our jumpsuits are thin but weapons grade. Metal can’t pierce them and neither can this thing. Or I don’t think it can. The only life we’ve encountered so far on this planet is vegetation and what I choose to think of as insect, and so far none of it has been dangerous. It’s why Jill and I were allowed a scouting trip. But how can we really know what these things are, or what they’ll do? Carnivorous insects is one of the more gory theories about what happened to the lost colonists of Canaan. I pick up a piece of the long, peeling tree skin.

  “Careful,” says my father.

  I approach Jill slowly. Her breath is coming fast. I place the tree skin on the back of her leg, directly in the crawling beetle’s path, watch as it pauses, flashes its yellow tongue. It moves onto the waiting bark. I lift bark and beetle, and set them carefully in the leaf litter. The beetle probes, tests, takes a few awkward steps, and settles onto a fallen bloom. And then Jill’s boot comes down once, twice, crushing it. I straighten and step back. The noise makes me sick.

  “Beck!” Dad’s voice is sharp in my ear. “That stone by Jillian’s foot,” he says. “Let’s get a close-up on that.”

  I don’t look at Jill, or at the dead beetle’s twitching legs. I just reach past her for the rock. I turn it over in my hand, holding it up so Dad can see. The stone is blue gray, metallic with a sparkle, sheared off almost square on one side.

  “Are those tool marks?” he asks.

  “No.”

  I know I sound mad, and I am mad. Just not at him. It was only a beetle, if that’s the right thing to call it. One of millions, probably. And killing it was stupid. Pointless. Jill turns away from me and the conversation she can hear only one side of, grabs the sanitizer spray from her pack, and douses herself with it.

  “No,” I say again. “The break is natural. Not man-made.”

  My father’s sigh blows static across my ear. He wants that colony. Bad. Dad is good at what he does. His work documenting the nomadic tribes of old Russia already has his name in the history files. But finding Canaan is his passion. Ever since he was a kid, he’s been hanging out with the equally obsessed, forming groups, swapping theories, and sending signals into space. Solving the mystery of the lost colony would be the pinnacle of his career. Of his lifetime. Of ten careers and ten lifetimes. The reason my parents risked their lives and mine to fly across a galaxy.

  I want it just as much as they do. And not the echoes of it. I want a living city. To see what the lost colonists have become. But Earth hasn’t picked up a signal from Canaan in more than five hundred years. The only other expedition, in the Centauri II, went dark just after landing almost two centuries ago, and now the scans of the Centauri III have come up completely, thoroughly, and depressingly empty.

  If I can’t know what they’ve become, then the next best thing is to know what became of them.

  I toss the rock back onto the forest floor and go to release the spike we shot over the cliff to anchor our climbing ropes. There’s a sweetness in the air as I pack our gear, heavy, like the alive smell on the wind, only stronger. I think it’s coming from the crushed beetle. History is my specialty. I leave the bugs to Roger, back at base camp, who stepped straight off the Centauri into some sort of entomological nirvana. But even I know that smell means the beetle was after sap, not blood. When I look up at Jill, she’s got the cartographer again, and she’s grinning.

  “Done,” she says. She’s fast on that thing, and she knows it. “And we’re going this way.”

  I follow her through the dense growth, slow, careful, observant, and with little noise. Like we’ve been trained for two and a half years. Unlike the astrophysicists, here for the planet’s coming comet, and the geoanalysts exploring for mining, the anthropology team’s strategy is low impact: small scouting parties and a protocol of minimal, mostly invisible, basic tech. Just in case.

  The Canaan Project was the most infamous social experiment of all time: a group of people sent to a new planet to regress rather than advance, to live pretech—without any technology—creating a society capable of existing in harmony with its world rather than against it. We’re here to observe what they’ve made, not to interfere or change it, and we don’t know what they remember. People are frightened by what they don’t understand, and frightened people, Dad says, are the ones you have to be scared of. Jill and I have orders to avoid interaction at all costs, to leave any initiation phase to the experts. If there’s anyone left, that is. And we already know there isn’t. The team wouldn’t have let us out on our own for two seconds if there was.

  I keep my head turning in broad sweeps so Dad can see all the forest that I do, and so I don’t stare at Jill pushing ahead of me through the foliage and heat. Her hair is plastered to her head, curves obvious even beneath the heavy pack and the jumpsuit, and the last thing I need is to force Sean Rodriguez to watch me watching her, and to hear about nothing else in my earpiece for the next two hours.

  And then, because it’s just my day for revelations in this area, I wonder if the lost city was the only reason my parents decided to take me from Earth. The whole crew of the Centauri III has had every test that anyone can think of, and our blood is clean. No contaminated DNA. A zero percent chance of catching or passing on the Lethe’s mutation. Maybe my parents weren’t just pursuing their dreams. Maybe they were protecting their bloodline. Maybe that was half the plan all along.

  I only know I’m not walking when Dad says, “Stop staring, Beck.” Even Jillian has noticed, looking back at me from partway up a steep slope, one eyebrow arched in question, a hint of sly at the corner of her mouth. I swear inside my head, where Sean Rodriguez can’t hear, wave Jill forward, and start climbing after her, ignoring my father’s chuckle.

  What if I don’t want their plans? Has anyone ever thought of that? I think of the way Mom’s face goes a little smug every time I mention Jill’s name. But what if I’m just not interested? What then? How do you get rid of a girl when she’s the only option on an entire planet? Or should I even want to? Maybe I’m the one who’s being stupid, ditching the one available female in thirty-nine trillion kilometers just because my parents didn’t ask my opinion about it when I was fourteen. I can guess what I would have said about the options at fourteen. It would have been something like, “Cool.”

  “Beck!”

  I think it’s the third or fourth time Dad has said my name.

  “You’re killing me, you know that? Could you please not waste the last two years of training and give me a visual instead of staring at your hands?”

  This isn’t fair, since I’m having to use my hands to climb. But I slow down and do a sweep of the surroundings anyway. Stats roll across one corner of my vision, air temperature (34 Celsius, 94 Fahrenheit), heat sources (sun, and somewhere deep in this mountain, a thermal spring), radioactivity (nonexistent), power sources (nonexistent), the distance from base camp (14.1 kilometers). But I’m looking for things our scans would miss: cleared paths that have grown over, a piece of worked wood or stone, a planted field too small to identify from the air. Or a sign would be nice. “This Way to Canaan.”

  “Beckett!” This is Mom now, coming through the earpiece. “Are you hydrating?”

  Really, Mom?

  “Yuàn dé yī rén xīn, bái shǒu bù xiāng lí.”

  Fourteen kilometers away and she thinks I’m going to forget Chinese.

  “And monitor your body temperature!”

  “Ài, Mom.”

  I really think we should just all stop talking.

  “About two and a half more hours,” Dad says.

  And this is where Jill and I had planned to start sweet-talking my father into letting us camp instead of hiking back to base. If we camp, we had reasoned, we could strike out even farther after we rest, use the sun while it’s here, cover more ground. And after all, Jill had w
hispered, her breath in my ear, the glasses can’t be on my face every second, can they?

  But I don’t say anything, not yet. The climb is hard. Even Jillian is winded. Rich, loose soil slides beneath my boots, and another mountain peak is coming into view, towering up on our right. And then static buzzes sharp in the earpiece, a stab of hissing noise.

  “Dad?”

  “What is it?”

  “Is Jillian okay?” This voice is Vesta, Jill’s mother, close by or on one of the nearby screens.

  “We’re fine,” I say. “Just a glitch.”

  “Beck, go … ”

  The buzzing jabs my ear, and then the connection is back again.

  “… show us what Jillian is looking at,” he finishes. I crawl around a boulder and stand beside her, boots on the edge of a sharp drop into a shallow canyon. A stream is falling several meters down into a pool on one side, sunbeams shooting across the spray, making the droplets shine like crystals. It’s spectacular, but wild. Nothing human.

  “Let’s go down,” Jill says. Her voice is hushed, excited. She’s thinking this would be a good place to camp. Maybe swim. I know her face well enough to understand as if she’d said the words. I wonder if she knows me well enough to get that I’m mad at her.

  I follow her down, hanging on to the trees as we slide through the leaves, dirt sticking to my sweaty skin. Something says chick, chick as we pass, more of them taking up the song. The roar of the waterfall is amplified by the surrounding rock, so that when we reach the bottom, the noise is deafening. I do another sweep for Dad’s benefit, but really it’s for mine. It’s beautiful here. Pristine. A whole empty planet of pristine.

  We climb over tumbled rocks, Jill in the lead, heading toward the pool. She drops her pack beside it, then looks back, face pink with sun and heat, waiting for the glasses to analyze the water. For me to tell her if it’s poison, or acid, or full of those dangerous, sap-sucking beetles.