The Knowing

by Sharon Cameron

  I don’t think the Council can stop me now. They will not.

  Because what I am seeing is a city.

  I put my hand on the white stone, hot from weeks of soaking in the sun. I can’t believe I’m touching it. Something slams inside of me. Again. And again. I think it’s my own heart, trying to fight its way out of my chest. Canaan. The lost city.

  Whatever Jillian is thinking, she doesn’t tell me. She hasn’t even moved. She just stares at the vine-covered wall towering over us, then turns two Earth-sky eyes on me. “Do you have communication?”

  I adjust the lenses on my face, then the earpiece, and shake my head. I’m not sure what to do about that. Actually, I know exactly what to do about that. I should take Jill and turn around right now, climb back up that mountain to where we had communication last. But the stones of Canaan are beneath my hand and I can’t go back now. Not yet.

  “Let’s walk the perimeter,” I say. “See if we can find the way in.”

  Jill agrees. Or at least she doesn’t argue, though a second look makes me think she might be doing some arguing soon. The wall moves by at a gentle curve, the blocks smooth and well fitted where the roots haven’t broken them. I can feel that this stone has been printed, not quarried, and that’s as it should be. 3-D printing was part of the Canaan Project’s original city planning, to build without detriment to the environment before forgoing tech altogether. I could recite the strategic development files on this verbatim if I wanted to. I don’t think Jill wants me to. But a perimeter wall, that was not to plan. Were they keeping something out? Or the people in?

  And why didn’t our scans find this? An enormous wall of human-printed stone is exactly what they were designed to see. Not to mention the topographical and geoanalytical surveys made while we were still on the Centauri III, the ones that came up so thoroughly empty. All the unease from our absent signal comes back now and doubled. If our scans missed this, what else did they miss? An overgrown wall doesn’t mean the city is deserted, and we weren’t trained for initial contact. Not really.

  Correction. We were forbidden it.

  Maybe Jill is thinking the same thing because she reaches out and grabs my hand. “First sign of life and we go back, Beck,” she whispers.

  I nod. Of course that’s what we’ll do. Maybe. And then I see why she said it. There’s an opening in the wall.

  We approach carefully, quietly, observing like we’ve been trained. There are more trees now. Huge and all the same kind, thick with heavy buds that look like they’re ready to bloom, roots twining together across the gap in the wall. Branches have pushed straight through massive gates made of a metal I can’t name, slow growth lifting one right out of its hinges. I duck beneath the limbs, buds brushing my hair, Jill still hanging on to my hand, and then we are inside Canaan.

  Only it’s not a city of people. It’s a city of trees. White stone showing here and there in the dim of a sun lost beyond a thick canopy, buildings crumbling between massive trunks. But it’s the silence that really makes me think this place is empty, a full kind of quiet that is wind and leaves and nothing human at all. But you can feel that they’ve been here, the humans. Once. And now they’re gone. It’s eerie.

  The ground is uneven, easy to trip over, and I realize it’s because we’re on a street, now dirt covered, roots pushing up the stones from below. On one side is an enormous pile of rubble, practically a mountain, a few stunted trees growing in pockets of dirt on the sides and top. But to my right there’s a smaller building. A house. No, a row of houses, now that I’m looking farther, lining both sides of the street. The nearest one looks at me, a two-story front wall stained but still intact, a pitch-dark doorway, and a hole for a window like an empty eye.

  I’ve stopped walking. I’m like my mom in the university vaults right now, like Roger with his bugs. I can’t look fast enough. And Sean Rodriguez is going to be so mad I saw all this before he did. And that makes me grin. I shake away the bad feeling I had at the gates, steer Jill toward the open doorway of the house, and stick my head inside, careful not to brush what might be fragile walls.

  A second story and maybe even a third has fallen in, though only on one side. On the other there’s an undamaged ceiling, a shelf on one wall print-molded from the stone. I want to know if a lamp sat on that shelf. I want to know what happened to the person who lit the lamp. I let go of Jill and step through the door, careful where I plant my feet, squat down and look at the overgrown rubble without touching it. Some of it is decorative, more ornate than I would have guessed, carved vines, curving moldings. Arches? That wasn’t part of the city planning, either.

  Jillian makes a soft cooing sound. She’s on her knees, holding up a shard of pottery in the uneven, dappled light. It’s about the size of her finger, still coated in a thick green glaze.

  “Bowl,” she whispers, “handmade, about twenty centimeters, but of a clay I’ve never seen … ”

  Considering we’re on another planet, I’m not that surprised. Jill reverently sets the shard back where she found it, too well taught to remove any sort of artifact before it’s been documented. She looks around the ruins. “Decay, do you think?”

  I nod. I’d already decided that. I can’t see any obvious signs of breakage that would mean violence, flood, or any other kind of natural disaster, no charring from fire. No bones. At least not here. Everything I’m seeing smacks of slow death, a slide into disuse, the ecosystem eventually moving in to take back its own. And that would be half the theories about what happened to the lost colony of Canaan gone within the first five minutes of setting foot in the city.

  A cautious step back through the door, and I tilt my head to look at the front wall, at a set of exterior steps climbing to nowhere on the other side of the window. It could still be disease that killed them off, like what’s been happening on Earth. Though I doubt the people of Canaan did it to themselves, not like we did, and the initial explorations of the planet showed no incompatible biology. Not that anyone could convince Jill of that. She’s been sanitizing twice a day since we landed. Or maybe the answer is simpler, and they didn’t have enough children. Maybe they just died out. Like we are.

  I think how it would feel to be the last one. The only soul left in a rotting city. The final member of my race on an alien world. The thought makes me cold inside. But there’s something else here, too. Something wrong, and not just with the signal and the scans. It’s a wrongness I can feel deep in my gut. If I hadn’t been raised by scientists, I’d say this city was haunted. Which is stupid.

  I don’t want to know what happened here. I need to know, like I need food and water and occasional sleep.

  “Hey,” Jill says. “Remember me?” I look down and find Jill, a huge smile on her face, running her arms around my waist. She seems to have been trying to get my attention. “I was asking what kind of housing you think they’ll give us.”

  “What?”

  “Our housing!”

  Not only have I never given this one thought, I’m a little thrown by her use of “us” and “our.” She means the whole team, right? Where will they put the housing complex for the team? Not a house for … us. Jill smacks my chest.

  “I’m talking about Earth, Beck! When we get back! Don’t you get it? We found it first. You and me. The lost colony! The investors are going to give us anything we want. Los Angeles, New Canada, we could go anywhere!” She gives my chest another whack. “Our careers are made!”

  I smile, because I don’t know what else to do, and I can see from Jill’s face that my expression is a little weak. “Let’s get a quick look at what we can before we go,” I say, turning a circle, like I’m taking in the view. Jill drops her arms. “We need to get back into communication, let them know what we’ve found. Your mom is probably telling off half the ship by now.”

  “She’ll forget to be mad once she hears about the city.” Jill’s eyes go big and bright. “Our names will be in the history files!”

  She kisses me once on the
cheek, goes bouncing off to the next ruined house to check for pottery. She really is pretty, and I don’t know what she thinks she’s talking about. The investors aren’t going to be giving us anything. Not unless they put it on a ship. There’s years of work to be done just within the radius of my vision. A lifetime of it. Digging, interpreting, documenting. Solving the mysteries. That will be our life. My life. Here. Not on Earth.

  I wonder if it will be enough. I think it will. But I’m not sure Jill is exactly in agreement with that. But she is right about one thing. Bringing the team this news is going to be fun, and might even smooth over a sin or two, like moving forward without supervision. Even the I’ve-never-smiled-and-never-could-have-been-a-child Admiral Commander Juniper Faye ought to be pleased, and she’s about as scary as they come.

  No. Joanna Cho-Rodriguez is as scary as they come, and nothing is ever going to shut Mom up about moving forward on a scouting mission without supervision. This also makes me cold inside.

  I start taking detailed mental notes, imagining the questions Dad will ask, so I can tell everything to the—and then I stop. Like I’ve been smacked again. Which I deserve to be. No one should have let me off Earth, much less the Centauri III. I stare at the control board in the corner of the lenses, watch as it brings up the functions list, and with the tiny, deliberate movement of my gaze, choose the settings that will enable visual documentation. I’ve never even used the visual recording function of the glasses. What I’m seeing is always being archived by signal at the base camp. But now, when we get back, I can do more than tell them. I can show them.

  I get a wide, sweeping shot of the surroundings: Jill on the ground, staring at a bit of a broken pot, the row of ruined houses, back to the metal gates with the tree growing through one side, down at the white paving stones pushing up through the dirt. Then I start walking, over a small, shallow watercourse, still flowing in a formed aqueduct of stone, scanning the sides of the mountain of collapsed rubble.

  If this was just one building, it was massive before it came down. The project had planned to build a Council Hall, for governing, and I wonder if …

  I lift my head. Something changed in the quiet, something subtle, like an extra layer in the breeze. Jill is where I left her, oblivious, and the fullness of the silence comes back. It was probably only wind through stone, but we should go. Soon.

  When I turn back to the rubble mound, the glasses focus on a huge chunk of white stone, jutting out from the pile four or five meters up, tree roots twined around it. I glance at the zoom icon and look closer. Flat, half-buried, and … Yes. There is writing.

  I take off up the side of the rubble mountain, holding on to the trunks of trees, going from broken stone to broken stone, nearly falling before the glasses adjust back to normal vision. My chest is pounding. I don’t know what I think the writing is going to say. But it has to be a clue. A piece of the puzzle. Something Canaan wants to tell me about the perfect white city built by humans in another galaxy.

  “Beck!” Jill calls. “What are you doing?”

  Climbing something I shouldn’t be, obviously. I find a footing just below the carved writing, brushing away the dirt and leaves and clinging plants, digging out the words letter by letter. The carving is clear, the words in English, and I am reading a sign that hasn’t been seen since the last colonist died in Canaan.

  “Remember Our Truth.”

  I feel a smile break slow from my face. I don’t know the truth of Canaan yet. But I’m really, really sure I want to remember it.

  My head comes up. There’s a noise again, but different this time, soft on the wind, like a cry. And now that I am up high, closer to the canopy, I can see that the whole city is actually sloping downward, the treetops becoming more and more visible the farther I let the glasses zoom. In the distance, a flock of the little lace-winged insects are rising like a cloud from the treetops. Disturbed.

  And then the stone under my foot shifts, loosens, rocking to one side. I look down, hear a rumble, Jillian’s scream, and before I can move or even think, the whole world drops away from beneath my feet.

  I put a hand on the hot white walls of the Cursed City, and the relief is like the first deep breath after a long swim. Like leaving a bad memory. I don’t even bother to look over my shoulder. There’s only a day of light left, and the Council won’t dare enter a city that could make them Forget. They can’t stop me. No one can.

  I hoist my pack and climb, fast, and I wonder if I’m already Forgetting, because I hardly notice my aches and pains or the fact that I’m tired. The suncrickets have seen me, though, chanting chick, chick while I shinny up a low, thick vine, louder and louder, dustmoths rising as I step onto a tree limb, up the trunk, and plant my sandals on top of the white stone wall.

  But I don’t see a city. Not even a ruined one. I see a lake, like the Darkwater, where we boat beneath the mountain, only this water glimmers with the sunlight. Trees grow thick along a faraway shore, roots twisting down into the water. Where I stand, the lake laps the wall stones. No buildings, no streets. Just a wilderness inside walls.

  I don’t Know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. If there’s no city, then maybe there’s no Forgetting, either. Maybe I’ve come here for nothing. And the rage inside me flares. Blazes. I am so angry. That Adam is dead. That Nita is dead. That I can’t fix it. That I’m standing here, in the middle of nowhere, alone with memories I will never, ever escape in a world I cannot change. And so I shout. With everything I’ve got. Like the Knowing are never allowed. One word that sums up my life.

  “Why?”

  The word comes back to me like another question, bouncing over water and trees and stone. I decide I like yelling, and am thinking about doing it again, but when the last echo of my word comes back to me, it carries something else. A distant, desperate, and very human scream.

  I jump, startled, eyes darting over the lake and trees. But there’s nothing to see. The sound fades, the breeze blows, dustmoths settle, and the suncrickets take up their song. Like the scream never existed. But it did. My pulse races.

  I drop my pack off my shoulder, pull out my book, and unwind the scarf Nita used to bind my hair. Holding my balance on top of the wall, I work the scarf through the book’s inner stitching, tying the ends together to make a loop that hangs over one shoulder, resting at my hip. This book is the truth. Everything I would need to understand about Samara Archiva. In case I Forget.

  And then I turn, and start working my way along the top of the wall, using the spreading limbs for balance, all the way around the curve and to the shoreline of the water, thinking about that scream. How could there be people here? Maybe I’m not the first to survive jumping the cliffs. Maybe we’re not the only ones on this planet. Maybe these people can explain the Forgetting to me. Or maybe they’ve already Forgotten.

  The limbs grow thick on both sides of the wall now, and I’m walking mostly on trees instead of stones, like traveling through a forest, only ten meters in the air. Branches snap, scratching at my face, leaves obscuring my vision. I’ve never seen anything like these trees, but what do I Know about things that grow in the sun? They’re fat with buds. I think that means they bloom. This place might be beautiful when the light comes again. A good place for Forgetting. Or it could be that this isn’t Canaan at all, and the Cursed City is only a story.

  Maybe lies can be written, as well as remembered.

  And then I see something white, far off and to my right, peeking through the foliage. Stone. The white wall of a building, and buildings are in cities. I take a deep breath, choose a branch, and climb down it, hanging for a moment before I drop to the ground, pack on my back and book bouncing against my thigh.

  It’s darker here beneath the buds and leaves. Hot and damp, almost misty. Even the mud squelching between my toes is warm. I’m sweating in an instant, and not just from the heat. I’ve been careful not to dwell on my isolation until now. Having memory can make a negative emotion reflect over and over, like a
feeling caught between two mirrors. But here, in this place, it’s impossible not to sense the solitude.

  When I Forget, will I remember that I am alone?

  Or am I not alone?

  The wall I saw through the trees is an ancient building, stained and overgrown, a huge, white circle held up by columns carved with flowers and what I think are plants of the fields, living vines twisting down from the roof and around the carvings. A doorway yawns beyond them, and in the swath of light I can see a room I almost recognize. Broken stone benches, rotted cabinets, the sound and smell of water trickling. This is a bathhouse, like the ones beneath my city, built on a hot spring, which would explain the mist and the mud. And it is empty. So very empty.

  Grandpapa Cyrus told me a story once, about how a piece of a person can go on living even after they’ve been burned. An invisible piece, floating unseen, doing either good deeds or bad, though usually bad, he’d said, because it was the bad ones that tended to not die properly. This was supposed to be a story from Earth, so I knew it wasn’t true. But that scream, and this place, this feeling of people that were and now are not, makes me step back.

  A branch cracks somewhere behind me, and I turn, startled, but there’s nothing there. Just trees, thick with hanging buds and the thinnest veil of mist. I decide not to run, but I do hurry, thumbs under the straps of my pack, through a natural gap in the trees, sloping upward, deeper into what must have been Canaan. And then I realize I’m not following a natural gap. I’m on a road.

  I pass more white stone, piles that might have been buildings once, and then the road narrows, the trees encroaching. I take another step, pushing aside the branches. But there’s no ground beneath my feet. I scramble, gripping a handful of wood and leaves, only just keeping my balance. I let out a breath. I’ve nearly stepped off a cliff.

  Or not a cliff. I’ve nearly stepped into a hole. Deep and maybe twenty meters across, semicircular, hidden by the foliage until you’re nearly in it. The sides of the hole are terraced, like stair steps, or the tiniest of mountain fields, a waterfall running from the rim and into a channel, dividing the hole neatly in half. And at the bottom, where the ground flattens, straddling the flow of the stream, stands half a stone tower. A spike snapped off in a pile of rubble. The land falls away beyond the tower, and when I look back the way I’ve come I can see the tops of trees, the blank space that is the lake, the hazy air beyond the wall. What was this place? Whatever it was, it’s just as abandoned as the rest of the Cursed City.