“One hundred and eighty-five days.”
“Really.”
Beckett’s eyes are open, his brows down. “Jill … ”
“So how many dislocated joints have you set before now?” she asks.
“None,” I reply. “Before his.”
“Oh!” she says, eyes wide. “I’m surprised, then, that you’d risk someone’s ability to walk, when you’ve never even practiced.”
I look her in the eye. “I heard the procedures and I have seen the drawings. That is training.”
“Without practicing.”
I’m not sure what I’m being accused of. But I am definitely being accused.
Then Beckett says, “What’s that?”
“What?” says Jillian, instantly distracted.
But he’s already swimming through the dark, away from the shore, the light held high, slowly revealing the cavern wall. Or what I thought was the wall, but it isn’t rock, or at least not that we can see. The wall is a tangle of roots, thick and twisting, reaching down from a ceiling that must be very close to the surface. Some of the roots have grown almost horizontal, seeking a clear path to water, others wending their way down to brush the surface. Drinking.
I swim into the range of Beckett’s light and touch the hanging wood, run a hand along the smooth skin, pull down and feel it bend. Fern. And I smile. At a memory. A good one, this time.
“Outside,” I say, “I’ve seen the children playing on fern roots, when they reach out like this for the water.”
“What do they do?” Beckett asks.
“Bounce on them, before they jump in.”
Now there’s nothing but mischief in the grin, and he’s already found an opening in the root tangle the right size to tuck in the jar. “Oh, Beckett,” Jillian sighs. But he’s pulling himself out of the water, up the jumble of roots until he finds one growing outward from the rest, about a third of the way up. He gets his hands on the root and hangs from it.
“Like this?” he calls. His body is stretched, long and sculpted, the root bending dangerously with his weight. He’s trying to pull on it, to make it bounce.
“No,” I say. “You should … ”
But there’s no need to finish the sentence. His wet hands slide off the end, and the splash when Beckett hits the pool seems disrespectful in the quiet. He comes back up, smiling and spluttering.
“So, not like that,” he says, hair in his eyes.
I shake my head. “I’ll show you.”
I get a foot up on the root tangle and climb dripping from the pool, my hair heavy, hanging well past my waist now that it’s wet, blood thrilling in my veins. Like the first time I went Outside. I’ve always wanted to do this. I see the root I have in mind, pale gray in the dark, about five meters up, and much bigger than the one Beckett fell from.
It’s harder to get to than I thought. The wood bends and slips beneath my wet feet, but I finally get a knee up, and then I’m standing on top of it, hanging on to the surrounding tangle. I can just make out Beckett’s head in the shadowy water, Jillian’s bright yellow one much easier to spot. I’m going to have to let go, bounce on the end of this root while keeping my balance, like Nita’s little brothers do Outside, and allow the upward momentum to fling me into the air.
“Samara, are you sure this is a good idea?” Beckett calls.
I’m not sure this is a good idea at all. It’s higher, and darker, and more exposed up here than I thought, and it occurs to me that if Earth can make clothes that cling to a body, then so can the people of Canaan. We just have to get them wet. But this is not as high as the cliffs I jumped to escape my city, and danger has always driven my memories away. It’s as close as I’ve ever come to Forgetting.
I edge out onto the root, shuffling sideways, one hand still clinging to the tangle. I feel the wood beneath my feet bend, wanting to spring. I curl my toes, my fingers let go, and I scoot out a little more. Then the root stills and I am balanced, arms out, like I’m ready to let Adam make me fly. I feel the beat in my chest, speeding, the air heavy, the sound of distant water in the caves. One wrong move, one centimeter too far this way or that, and I will fall. It feels like my life.
I watch Nita’s little brothers bending their knees in my memory. The way they rode the movement of the branch. I bounce once, twice, and the root sends me high into the air, both fast and slow, the world turning from the blue-and-black ceiling of the cavern to the shine of the water in the glow of Beckett’s jar.
And there is nothing pulling at my mind. I feel air, and lightness, and freedom. Like Forgetting should be. Until I hit the water with a smack.
And that feels like it stings.
We had a little time back in Austin after training finished on the fake Centauri III, and after a day or so I went down to the school compound, to the quad after classes were over, thinking to surprise Jason and Kiran, Nasta, Amanda. Whoever might be there from the friends I knew before. I was grades ahead of them, but once classes were over, it didn’t seem to matter. We went places, did things. Talked every day. Amanda cried when I left. I wondered a few times if she’d missed me.
The chatter in the quad used to drown out the music and the visuals, but it wasn’t as full that day. So it was easy to scan through the crowd. I don’t know what I was expecting from them. Excitement? Curiosity? I mean, I was incredibly cool, right? My family was chosen for the Canaan Project. I’d been living in isolation on a pretend cruiser for a year. In four weeks, I’d be hurtling through space.
And then I saw them, Jason, Kiran, and Nasta, sitting together at a table, talking like we always did. But they didn’t see me. They didn’t even recognize me. I looked up Amanda later, in the military files, and found her marked “Lethe’s.” A third of that compound was marked “Lethe’s” when I researched. But that day I sat back, just a meter away, and observed. Like we’d been trained. Like they were from another culture.
They were another culture. To me. Talking about places and names I didn’t know. And it felt strange to be so far outside. Like I was less. It hurt. And I thought right then that I will remember this. If I ever meet a lost colonist of Canaan, I will never, ever make them feel less.
FROM THE LOG BOOK OF BECKETT RODRIGUEZ
Day 11, Year 2
The Lost Canaan Project
She looks small up there, the pale cloth of her clothes clinging tight to her body, almost glowing in the shadows, framed by more hair on one head than I’ve ever seen. I think she’s going to fall, but she doesn’t. Or not exactly. She rides the bounce of the branch and goes flying, and is pretty graceful about it, until her back hits the water with a smack. I wince, and I’m ready to laugh, until Jill snickers. Which is nothing like my laugh was going to be. I turn in the water.
“What is your problem?”
I see her eyes narrow, but I’m not over being mad at her. Not even close. What was she trying to do back there, asking all those questions about Samara’s training? Like she was trying to prove something. I’ve never seen her act like this. Jill is serious, driven, goal-oriented, but she’s always been … nice. Hasn’t she? Then again, how many people have we been around? The crew, my parents, Vesta, who’s pretty sure her daughter lit the moon. What I’ve never seen, I realize, is Jill not getting what Jill wants. It may be a new experience for her.
She may have to get used to it.
Samara breaks the surface, and I ask, “How was that?”
“Exactly like you’d think,” she replies. And she’s smiling. A real one. Almost laughing.
That’s it. I’m going up. I swim for the root tangle, get onto the slick wood and climb, aiming for the root Samara used. It feels flimsy when I get there, insubstantial, with a long, dark fall that has stretched even longer somehow now that I’m looking down. I’m not sure how Samara even stood up here.
“You have to push down and ride the bounce,” Samara calls out. “And don’t go in on your back!”
I grin down at her. “Understood.”
This is way scarier than I thought it would be. Especially in the shadows and the dark. But I want it. I want everything this planet has to offer. I take a breath, push down on the root, and the thing flings me like I wouldn’t have believed. I soar like a bird, for maybe three seconds, and I don’t go in on my back. I go in flat on my chest.
I come up, skin on fire, and Samara says, “How was that?”
“Exactly like you’d think,” I say, and she really is laughing now. So am I.
We do it three more times, and by the last one, Samara manages an actual dive. I do not. Not even close. But every time I came up from the clear water, some new part of me stinging, I got to look at what lives beneath that smooth facade on Samara’s face. I’d have done it another eighty times if my body could take it.
I asked Jill if she wanted to try, but she only shook her head, that line between her eyes, mouth shut tight. Except for the last time Samara was making her climb, when Jill swam close to me and said, almost sweet, “Beckett, you don’t think you could be having an issue with objectivity, do you?”
I didn’t answer her. I didn’t even look at her. Because Jill knows how to aim where it hurts. She knows I care about this, and that I want to do it right. She knows that objective observation is a basic of the job.
Be that way, then, Jill.
I get the jar and swim to the shore on my back, holding it on my stomach, lighting a path through the blackness. Samara is relaxed, present, cutting through the water and getting ahead of me. I don’t know what’s going on or what we’re walking into or who might try to kill who tomorrow, but for the moment, I’m just glad to be here, off the Centauri III. Doing something real.
When I wade out with the light, Samara is already squeezing the water from her mass of hair, Jill snatching up her own light and pack, heading off to change behind a boulder a safe distance away. Samara turns as soon as Jill is gone.
“Can I see your ankle?” she whispers.
I glance at the boulder, Jill’s light shining behind it, sit where I am and stretch out my leg. The air is so much colder now that I’m wet. I’m shivering when she kneels down in front of me, running both hands feather-light over each side of my ankle. I watch her pause over the pinpricks and tiny bruises where Jill used the gel, where the infusion went in, only just touching them with a finger.
Her face is serious, concentrated, wet hair thrown behind her shoulders, that shirt clinging to everything it touches. And when she puts those eyes on me, I feel the weight of it, like I did before, and this time something twists inside my chest. An agreeable sort of pain.
Okay. I might be having an issue with objectivity.
“Does it hurt?” she whispers.
Yes. But aloud I only say, “A little. But I’ve walked a long way.”
“Are you certain? You’re not in pain?”
I think Samara might have noticed I’m having a little trouble with my breathing.
Jill comes around the boulder, zipping up her jumpsuit, and Samara drops her hands like my skin is hot. Jill must have changed like lightning, when I was expecting her to be back there at least five extra minutes, sanitizing. Or maybe I’ve been sitting here longer than I thought. Samara’s serene expression is right back in place.
“How’s the ankle?” Jill asks. She’s smiling, back to sweet and cheerful.
Oh no.
“It seems to have set well, Samara. For your first try.”
I close my eyes.
“I’m still interested in your training,” Jill goes on, laying out her wet clothes on a rock. “I thought about being a physician once … ”
It’s the first I’ve heard of it.
“… but it was the blood, you know, and that sort of thing that worried me. So until Beckett, you hadn’t done any practical applications of your skills?”
Samara pauses before she answers that one. But her voice is cool when she says, “It’s true that knowing can be different from doing. If I had done the procedure before, I would have known how hard to pull, and would have set the bone the first time.”
There’s another pause, and then Samara comes back with a question of her own.
“But how could training be practiced? You would need to wait a long time for someone to be sick, or hurt. And how could surgery be practiced before it needed to be done?”
Jill pounces. “You’re saying you can do surgery? Even though you’ve never done it?” She looks at me, triumphant, like she’s caught Samara at something. “So in New Canaan, after a few weeks of being told and looking at pictures, whatever you’ve learned after that makes you a physician? Is that right?”
And then I get why Jill is doing this. She wants me to see Samara as ignorant, or a liar. A local. Less than we are because the values of her culture are different. If Jillian thinks this is going to get her what she wants, she’s wrong. And the news for Jillian is that she wasn’t going to get what she wanted before I ever laid eyes on Samara. Jill’s smile is big.
“Is that right, Samara?”
“How else would it be?” Samara replies.
“Well, I’m sure different places have different levels of medicine. Some are more advanced, so some might need longer. Years even, to train … ” She blinks her big eyes at me once. “Other places are just going to be a little more pretech, that’s all.”
Samara shakes her head. “But only those with memory would ever train to be a physician. Isn’t it the same where—”
Her voice stops abruptly, and the silence hangs. “Where” what? Where we come from? Earth? Is that what she was going to say?
Then Jill asks sweetly, “What do you mean, ‘those with memory’?”
Samara looks at Jill like she’s the one that’s pretech. “I mean people with memory. The people who cannot forget.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You … ” Samara’s expression doesn’t exactly change, but I can see by the stillness of her body that she’s shocked. Her gaze darts to Jill, and then to me. “You don’t understand memory? You don’t have … Knowing?”
I lean forward, arms on my knees. “Tell me what it is.”
“Yes, tell us, Samara.”
Jill’s voice has a victorious tone, but Samara doesn’t even look at her. She talks to me, brows down. “Knowing means … that when information, or an experience, or a feeling enters your mind, it can never lessen or leave. The memory is forever. You don’t have this?”
I’m trying to wrap my head around it. “So a person with memory can never forget?”
Samara searches my face. What is she trying to find there?
Jill huffs. “So you’re saying that you have ‘memory,’ and that means you’ve never forgotten anything? Not once in your life?”
Samara doesn’t answer again, but I can see her shoulders hunch, drawing into herself. And I’m thinking, fast. About those signs in Canaan, “Without Memories, They Are Nothing” and “Remember Our Truth.” The way Samara seems to go away into her mind. Into her memories.
I lean forward. “How many of you can do this?” I see Jill’s mouth open from the corner of my eye.
“All of us in the city,” she whispers.
“What kinds of things do you remember? What you’ve seen? What you’ve heard?”
“It is every experience.”
I see Jill throw up her hands. I don’t care what she thinks right now. This is incredible. And it’s going to help me understand Canaan. Samara. Everything. “Have you always been able to remember?”
She stares at the ground without answering.
“How do you make it happen? Or does it not happen for some? Samara, is that why you asked if we had forgotten? Because some people don’t have it? Or because they lose it? Did the people of Old Canaan lose it? How far back does it go? How far back can you remember? Or wait … ” I see Samara opening the door in that column, telling me she remembered. “Is that how you knew there was a safe way through the caves? Is that how you know which way to go now?”
Samara’s eyes snap up to mine. “But you don’t need my memory to find a safe way through the caves, do you?”
I sit back like I’ve been smacked. Where did that come from? She knows Jill can’t find out I told her about the glasses. Jill’s brows are already up, her face one big accusation, and there’s no guessing needed with Samara’s expression right now. The facade is down and she is boiling mad.
I don’t know what I’ve done. I’ve been patient to the point of sainthood, holding in my own questions, answering hers. Breaking protocol, letting her set the rules, all to gain her trust. And the one time I give in and ask what any sane person might after being told there are people whose brains never forget, she threatens me with Jill. Who is jealous, and feeling vindictive about it. Who’s just getting the idea that maybe I’m not willing to play her game. If Jill found out I’d deliberately broken protocol to an outrageous extent—like I have—would she tell the Commander? She might. And Samara is mad. At me. And Jill is acting like a child. I’m sick of both of them.
I get up, grab the glasses and my pack and the dry jumpsuit, and go behind the boulder that seems to be the unofficial dressing room. And by the time I’ve changed my clothes, in true Beckett style, I’ve also changed my temper.
This girl is in trouble. She is traumatized, from a culture I know almost nothing about. Who knows what sensitivities I was just trampling all over? I broke protocol to follow my own instincts, and that is my risk, a risk she couldn’t know anything about, a risk that Jill couldn’t help but be upset by. And it’s not Jill’s fault, either, for that matter, if I’ve outgrown her. How could she have seen that coming? And if she doesn’t know I’m moving on, then that has to be my fault, too, for not actually saying so.
What would Dad have done, in my shoes? His job, probably, professionally, and managed to expand the breadth of human knowledge while he was at it. What would Mom have done? Maybe something a little closer to what I’m doing.
But I have a feeling she would’ve done it better.
I zip the suit, put the glasses on, and just when I get the earpiece back in place I catch something. A hint of static. I freeze. Listen. Wait. But there’s nothing. It doesn’t come again.
The Knowing Page 14