The Knowing

by Sharon Cameron

  Unless they’re trying. Or they already know.

  I hurry after Jill and Samara, down black, winding stairs that are worn and slick, sometimes choked with fallen stone. There’s water running down there, and I think I understand what Samara meant by smelling it. Some kind of spice or perfume is in the air, a scent like water, soil, and something else I don’t have a name for. The sound of gushing gets louder, weirdly colored light flickering against the last two or three winding steps, and when I scramble over the final set of fallen rocks, I don’t see what I thought I would at all.

  We’re in a cave, a river rushing fast to our right, and every nook, every angle of the ceiling and walls is completely covered with some kind of flower. Green and purple and the occasional red, each one of them lifting a set of long feelers, waving them in the air as if they were underwater. And the flowers are glowing. Bright, luminescent, the feelers making the light seem to move and dance. It’s kind of beautiful, and peculiar. Like celebration decorations gone crazy wrong.

  I use the glasses to check the room above us, but I can’t see through this rock. At all. Only the empty spaces, like the passage and the opening up the stairway. I reset the perimeter alarm anyway. Samara is already moving down the passage, looking back to see where we are, but Jillian is still standing at the bottom of the steps. And I know that expression. Even in the flickering light of alien glow flowers.

  “Jill,” I say. “Come talk to me.”

  She doesn’t at first. And then a green flower reaches out a feeler, just brushing her cheek. She jumps like the thing bit her, closes her eyes, and I can almost see her longing for the sanitizer. But she does take a few steps toward me, arms crossed, putting some distance between us and Samara. I bring her up to speed in a whisper, short and quick, watch her face go from mad to a different kind of mad.

  “I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it … ” She glances at Samara, who’s tying that book back over her shoulder, the flowers brushing at her arms. “Why would Commander Faye send us? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  I shrug. “Until they get the scans figured out I guess the ship is blind, and we’re the ones who made contact. So we’re elected.”

  “But they saw your visuals, Beckett! We had locals that were hostile, and nobody even knows what the situation is in this city, except that it’s obviously not good where she’s concerned.” She jerks her head at Samara. “And so they send in two kids from the anthropology sector that haven’t even trained in contact? And you think that makes sense?”

  No, it doesn’t make sense. But I want this. I want it so much it hurts. And I know Jill doesn’t. She’s more archaeology than anthropology. More comfortable with the dead than the living, learning history instead of living it. She was thinking she’d camp with me, fly back to the team in a cloud of glory, spend the next few years hunting nice, safe, uncomplicated artifacts in those half-fallen buildings, and see her name written in the history files. But this is messy, and dangerous, and nothing like we planned.

  “You know there’s something wrong with her,” Jill whispers. “It’s like a trance or something … ”

  “I was thinking maybe a trauma disorder. Did you see her palms, and the bruises?” I glance at Samara again, a long, lean shadow against the light. She’s either smelling the flowers, or letting them tickle her face.

  “I think she has psychiatric issues.”

  “We don’t know a thing about her culture. For all we know, this could be normal. And she must be mostly okay. She seems to know her medicine.”

  “She’s too young to be a doctor, Beckett! And what is she doing, taking us with her? Who does she even think we are?”

  “She said we were from outside.”

  “Well, there’s an understatement.”

  I laugh once. A breath of humor. Jill smiles a little, and then she’s not smiling anymore.

  “You were going to leave me back there,” she says. “If the orders hadn’t come. Weren’t you?”

  The one thing about Jill is she’s never, ever stupid. Exactly the opposite. I don’t want to look at her face. “I would have made sure you got back safe.”

  Jill bites her lip again.

  “What she’s offering is once in a lifetime,” I tell her. “Everything I left Earth for. You can’t blame me for wanting to take that chance.”

  Actually, I think she can blame me. And she’s probably going to blame me for a lot before this is over, because when you get down to it, I don’t think Jill and I want the same things. But there’s no point in talking about it. Not now. We have our orders—maintain contact, get the coordinates of the city—and we don’t know what we’re about to walk into.

  I look over Jill’s head and see Samara standing in the greenish-purple light of a glowing flower, her hair curling everywhere, as much like an image from the historic culture files as it’s possible to look. It’s hard not to stare at her. Because she is history. Only she is also real, right now, and she is taking me to her city.

  And she could answer all of my questions.

  I had five scars on my arms the day I discovered that my mother had a hole in the wall behind her mirror.

  Mother sent me to get the box of picture tiles. I’d only been inside Mother’s chamber once, when I was a baby. And so I looked quickly at the face paints, the row of elegant clothes, at one black wall hung with items that were odd and interesting: spoons; tools I didn’t Know; a knife, long and thin. All with the letters “NWSE” stamped in the metal. Like Mother’s necklace. I let myself smile in the mirror. I am allowed in Mother’s room, I thought. I can be asked to bring the picture tiles. I think Mother must love me now.

  And then I saw that her mirror was crooked. It hadn’t been like that when I was a baby. And there was a spot of tarnish on the silver frame. A finger mark. I reached out my own finger, pushed in the direction that the frame was crooked, and the mirror slid up and to one side. There was a hole in the rock. And inside the hole were two books. Secret books. Mother must miss the Archives, I thought. Like me.

  One was plain, with pages written by different people. The other had a title pasted onto the cover: “The Notebook of Janis Atan.” They were both very old. I looked at every page, just like Uncle Towlend taught me, turning quickly and carefully, so I could read them later, in my memory. But one sentence got read with my real eyes. “The elimination of all technology was shortsighted. The technology of Earth will lift the best of us to the pinnacle of our evolution.” I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it sounded like an idea that would get your hand swatted in the learning room.

  And then I was afraid. Father said not to look at books. Maybe these books were hidden because they’re bad. If Mother Knows I’ve looked, she’ll Know I’m bad, too. Again.

  I put them back, exactly as they were. Left the mirror perfectly crooked. Ran from the room with the tile box. And while I was playing in the receiving room, making pictures with the tiles, I asked Father, “Can technology be used for good things? Or only bad?”

  It was my mother who answered. “You’re asking the wrong question, Samara. Because there is no good or bad. Only better.”

  I Knew after that day that sometimes my mother didn’t tell me the truth. You don’t hide books in a wall because they’re better. And she had spent my lifetime showing me that I was not better in any way at all.

  FROM THE HIDDEN BOOK OF SAMARA ARCHIVA

  IN THE CITY OF NEW CANAAN

  The two aliens follow me down the cavern, river spraying on our right, wafting flowers on our left. They’re coming to the city. Both of them. And I don’t even understand it. I can’t see Jillian’s expression, but whatever Beckett said to her, it must have been good. Hope blooms inside me like a poisonous flower. Pretty, but dangerous.

  I need to be careful. Because that was much too easy.

  Beckett lied to me, or at least he let Jillian do it for him. And what was he looking at through those magnifiers while she did? For a moment, it seemed like he was reading.
Words I couldn’t see …

  I sift through my memories, fast. Beckett spotting me in the shadows, looking at his own bones. That fire. And he seemed to know exactly what was on the other side of a wall. My stomach twists, turns over, a tingle of fear trickling through my insides. I think those magnifiers are technology. And that Beckett is hiding that fact from me, too. What else can he do that is beyond my Knowing?

  I think I’ll need to be more than careful, if I’m going to get us all back to the city. I wonder if I’m even capable of it. How do you outwit what you do not understand?

  But I do Know, now, that this is the way to my city. Because while Beckett was busy seeing through walls, I went back inside my mind and looked at the map, this time at the page before it. A thin piece of linen, woven so fine it was translucent, laying perfectly over the map, marked with red lines that added a new network of scrawling pathways. The caves. And there, in bold, double ink, was the underground river, running between the old city and the new. The river I’m walking beside right now. The Torrens. The river that took Nita away from me.

  I stop. I’m standing in the glowing purples and greens of the cave passage, but half of my mind has fallen into the dark of my terrace balcony, where one by one, I am putting out the lamps. I struggle, fight, claw to stay where I am. In the cave. With the aliens. But the memory pulls again, and I fall …

  … and Nita is lying half over the stone-carved railing of my balcony, her blue lips matching her lifeless eyes, her forehead still warm when I kiss it. A small push, and she goes over, tumbling to the wild surge of water below. And I cannot cry. I can only feel the scream …

  I shoot back into the present, and there is the scream, still inside me, and the sickening wave of horror and revulsion. Grief. Loss. And the rage. All of it burning like the day I killed her. Hot tears roll down my cheeks, and I am nearly doubled in my effort not to yell. I can feel Jillian and Beckett, waiting in silence somewhere behind me. And then I straighten my back, wipe my face, and move my feet forward again. I hear the aliens follow.

  There’s fatigue beneath my pain, a deep ache in my bones. The Knowing can go for a long time without food or rest, but we are not unlimited, and I haven’t slept or fully cached in days. I don’t think I can afford to sleep. I can’t trust them.

  I also can’t afford to lose control.

  I move faster. The wafting flowers are starting to thin, the light dimming, and every two or three meters I see an old glass jar, dirty and opaque, hanging in a metal sconce riveted to the wall of rock. The way must have been lit once. And then there’s a new passage, smaller, with rougher walls, branching off to darkness on our left.

  There’s murmuring behind me, and then Jillian says, “Beckett thinks there could be people down that passage.”

  I glance at him, and he shrugs a shoulder. If Beckett says he sees people, they’re probably there. Craddock said the entrances to the underground were being watched. But not that last entrance. I don’t think they Know about that one. “Close?” I ask Beckett.

  “No.”

  I move my gaze back to Jill. “We’re not going that way.”

  “Will they come in here, looking for you?” Beckett asks.

  “They will not expect me to Know this way.” Which isn’t really an answer.

  “But … ” Jillian begins.

  “We need to gather light,” I say, lifting one of the old glass jars from its sconce. I reach between a set of feelers and pluck a fuzzy, bright glowworm from between the flowers. When I gently close my fist, it looks like I’m holding one of the moons.

  “So the walls aren’t … glowing by themselves?” Jillian asks.

  I raise a brow, and then I say, “We should not talk.”

  She doesn’t say anything else, and neither does Beckett. They just rinse their jars in the river water, like I show them, and I’m not too tired to enjoy Jillian’s squeamishness while she collects her light. Half-full and the jars become squirming lanterns, bright and undimming.

  Beckett kneels again on the stone of the riverbank when he’s done with his jar and takes off the magnifiers. It makes him look so much more … human. Then he does something completely alien, pulls a little fastener at the top of his baggy clothes, and makes the cloth split like it was cut with a knife. He sticks his whole head in the water, washing away the dirt and blood, and when he lifts it out again, I can just see that beneath the outer clothes he’s wearing some kind of tight, white tunic. And yes, he’s hiding the body of a harvest worker under there.

  Beckett shakes his head, spraying droplets into the light, and in some miraculous way, sews the cloth of his clothes back together. And I feel guilty. Alien or no, I should have looked at that gash on his head. I glance at Jillian, who was also looking at Beckett, and who is now looking at me. Looking at Beckett.

  And my memory flashes. To Sonia in an unguarded moment, the way she looked at Jane Chemist when Jane noticed the pretty face of Sonia’s boy from Outside. I Know that expression on Jill’s face. And it changes the way I was thinking about the two of them completely.

  “What are they called?” Beckett asks.

  I start. I think I was just staring at the walls. The magnifiers are back on, blue and purple light reflecting on the glass. And then he smiles, and that is as familiar to me as the clinging plants.

  “Wafting flowers,” I say. “They clean the air.” I turn away. “We should hurry.” I said the Council wouldn’t expect me to Know this path, and I don’t think they’re looking for me to come back to the city. But that doesn’t mean they won’t travel this way once the sun is down. I push our pace.

  The flowers thin and disappear, the river gushing dark outside the circle of our blue-white lights, and we pass more empty sconces, the beginnings of a stairway cut into stone, now choked with fallen rock. Water drips, running down the walls, and when I go back in my memory and compare the steps, I’m certain we’re beneath the lake that must have been the lower end of the city.

  Beckett catches up, walking just behind me. I think he wants to talk. Ask me questions. I walk a little faster. And now my mind skips to him standing in the hidden room, the technology off his face, arms over his head in the hazy beam of light. And in a blink that’s gone and I’m wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by Mother’s arms, and there is the Beckett of my dream, with the different eyes and shorter hair.

  And then Nita is sitting cross-legged on the end of my bed, telling me about a weaver that kissed her, and how she prefers a metalworker instead. And I’m clutching my cup of tea, hugging the pillow that would one day take her life close beneath my chin, drinking in her words like spoiled honeymead, sweet with the bitter. Because if I ever loved, I thought, it would only be once …

  I jerk myself into the present, let out a tiny puff of breath. I am in the caves, holding a jar of light, leading two aliens in a row of silence. But the memories are there, lurking, and the boundaries inside my head are dissolving like mist. I need to cache. Order my mind. Sleep.

  I can’t. Adam used to tell me to run when memories came. Occupy my mind. That’s what he did with his rope swing. I walk faster, keeping Jillian at a trot, climbing over and around boulders that are irregular, and yet somehow monotonous. The way beside the Torrens begins to climb, narrowing, the river squeezed into a smaller, deeper channel of white water and froth. Glimpses of spray get caught in the range of my light, and the water noise funnels into a single, constant roar. The pack weighs heavy on my back, the jar cool in my hand. I blink. Blink again, and I am drifting down, soft …

  … into darkness and heat. I am underwater, held tight, and there is noise, muffled sounds that reverberate through and around my body, a deep thrum and whoosh, rhythmic, like water. And I Know where I am. I am unborn, and while the feeling is one of safety, of being embraced, my adult mind Knows that I cannot move. That I am pressed in on all sides, trapped, breathing liquid …

  I gasp, lungs burning, and when I open my eyes I’m on the ground and Beckett has his hand on my nec
k, peering deep into my face with the magnifiers. I scramble backward over the rocks, out of his grip.

  “Wait … ” he says.

  I stop, breath still coming short, stone digging sharp into my newly healed hands. Beckett stays very still, squatted down among the broken rocks. I can see Jillian over his shoulder, a void of darkness beyond her.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. “But you weren’t breathing there for a second.”

  “Is she sick?” Jillian asks.

  I close my eyes. I haven’t slipped into a memory of before my birth in years. Not since childhood. That should have been well and truly cached, and can only mean that I am beyond tired. I am exhausted.

  “I think she should tell us what’s wrong with her,” Jillian says. “And while she’s at it, she can explain why her own people want to kill her.”

  I open my eyes, gaze at Jillian.

  “Not now, Jill,” Beckett says over his shoulder.

  “Well, it’s a fair question, isn’t it? I mean, won’t these people just be trying to kill us again as soon as we get to this city?”

  Her eyes are so blue, like Nita’s. And yet not like Nita’s at all. I wonder what Jillian would do if she knew I murdered my best friend.

  Beckett says, “When was the last time you ate, Samara? Or slept?”

  I slept once behind a thicket of oil plants on the edge of the plain, and I’ve eaten two breadfruits since then. But I’m more worried about my mind than my body.

  “Come on,” Beckett says, holding out a hand. He pulls me to my feet, like he did in the ruined street. “The cavern ends over there. Just a little more, and we’ll find a place to set up camp.”

  I don’t understand the word, but it doesn’t matter. I’m almost completely out of control. Beckett drops my hand and bends down to get my jar of light, miraculously unbroken on the rocky floor.

  “He grabbed it right before you fell,” Jillian says. “Wasn’t that lucky? Beckett was watching so close, he was able to catch it before you even got near the ground.”